The backbone of Venture Café – come meet the community and make connections with all different kinds of innovators. How will you make your serendipitous moment come true?
Start your night with this quick overview of Venture Café, what we do as a community, and how you can make the most of our weekly Thursday Gathering! Bring a friend, grab a drink, and plug in to the ecosystem - it's time to connect, learn, and share.
An interactive discussion using Luddism as a lens.
Today’s workforce is increasingly disengaged (Gallup) and dissatisfied with pay (NY Fed). While navigating unprecedented technological disruption, optimism about the job market is also falling sharply (Gallup). Tech industry veterans Lauren Mecca and Erica Favorito turn to the Venture Café community for lively discussion and debate about what might reverse these trends - using the historic workers’ rights movement Luddism as a lens.
"Luddite" gets used as a punchline in tech-forward circles, but Luddites weren't anti-machine; they were skilled workers fighting for a say in how new technology impacted their lives.
We’ll open with a brief framing exercise that puts this fight back in context: we’ll map three historical Luddite demands to three live AI-era equivalents. Then facilitate an open conversation about what worker bargaining power looks like now, when the technology at hand is not the power loom, but a hyper-intelligent machine capable of taking autonomous action.
We’re thrilled to be joining the Venture Café community to help you get ready for Startup Boston Week 2026!
Not sure what Startup Boston Week is, whether it’s a good fit for you or how to make the most of five days of programming? Stop by! This interactive session is your chance to meet the Startup Boston team, ask your questions and learn more about what to expect September 14–18.
Already planning to attend? We can help you build your personalized schedule, navigate 120+ sessions and events, use the attendee app, and find the sessions, people, and experiences that make the most sense for you.
Whether you’re Startup Boston curious or already counting down to #SBW2026, come say hi, ask us anything, and leave with a game plan for the week!
Every startup founder in the room has heard the "what" and "why" of agentic AI. This session answers the question that actually keeps them up at night: how do you build it so it doesn't fall apart at scale?
Kavya Hanisha spent years as a Senior Engineer inside Dell Technologies' AI division before becoming an AI Infrastructure Architect and Founder. She brings the infrastructure layer most agentic AI conversations skip entirely: the deployment bottlenecks that stall production, low-latency inference containerization via NVIDIA NIM microservices, and enterprise safety and policy enforcement using NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails. She’ll break down the real-world RAG pipeline decisions and MLOps architectures running across Dell and NVIDIA stacks that separate a fragile demo from a resilient, production-grade product customers can rely on.
Kavya holds a patent on automated systems analysis and brings seven years of core AI/ML systems experience to the stage. She is a Stanford WiDS 2026 Ambassador, an HBS Entrepreneurship alumna, and an active mentor to founders across Boston's startup community.
If your team is past the prototype and staring down the scaling problem, this session is built for that exact moment.
Key Takeaways:
- Production Multi-Agent Architecture: Patterns for orchestrating deterministic and non-deterministic agent workflows.
- High-Throughput Serving via NVIDIA NIM: Accelerating inference latency and scaling microservices across modern enterprise clusters.
- Enterprise Governance with NeMo Guardrails: Implementing programmable topical, safety, and execution boundaries for agentic tool use.
- From Lab to Datacenter: Overcoming real-world memory persistence, RAG latency, and observability bottlenecks in production.
The backbone of Venture Café – come meet the community and make connections with all different kinds of innovators. How will you make your serendipitous moment come true?
Start your night with this quick overview of Venture Café, what we do as a community, and how you can make the most of our weekly Thursday Gathering! Bring a friend, grab a drink, and plug in to the ecosystem - it's time to connect, learn, and share.
An interactive discussion using Luddism as a lens.
Today’s workforce is increasingly disengaged (Gallup) and dissatisfied with pay (NY Fed). While navigating unprecedented technological disruption, optimism about the job market is also falling sharply (Gallup). Tech industry veterans Lauren Mecca and Erica Favorito turn to the Venture Café community for lively discussion and debate about what might reverse these trends - using the historic workers’ rights movement Luddism as a lens.
"Luddite" gets used as a punchline in tech-forward circles, but Luddites weren't anti-machine; they were skilled workers fighting for a say in how new technology impacted their lives.
We’ll open with a brief framing exercise that puts this fight back in context: we’ll map three historical Luddite demands to three live AI-era equivalents. Then facilitate an open conversation about what worker bargaining power looks like now, when the technology at hand is not the power loom, but a hyper-intelligent machine capable of taking autonomous action.
We’re thrilled to be joining the Venture Café community to help you get ready for Startup Boston Week 2026!
Not sure what Startup Boston Week is, whether it’s a good fit for you or how to make the most of five days of programming? Stop by! This interactive session is your chance to meet the Startup Boston team, ask your questions and learn more about what to expect September 14–18.
Already planning to attend? We can help you build your personalized schedule, navigate 120+ sessions and events, use the attendee app, and find the sessions, people, and experiences that make the most sense for you.
Whether you’re Startup Boston curious or already counting down to #SBW2026, come say hi, ask us anything, and leave with a game plan for the week!
Every startup founder in the room has heard the "what" and "why" of agentic AI. This session answers the question that actually keeps them up at night: how do you build it so it doesn't fall apart at scale?
Kavya Hanisha spent years as a Senior Engineer inside Dell Technologies' AI division before becoming an AI Infrastructure Architect and Founder. She brings the infrastructure layer most agentic AI conversations skip entirely: the deployment bottlenecks that stall production, low-latency inference containerization via NVIDIA NIM microservices, and enterprise safety and policy enforcement using NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails. She’ll break down the real-world RAG pipeline decisions and MLOps architectures running across Dell and NVIDIA stacks that separate a fragile demo from a resilient, production-grade product customers can rely on.
Kavya holds a patent on automated systems analysis and brings seven years of core AI/ML systems experience to the stage. She is a Stanford WiDS 2026 Ambassador, an HBS Entrepreneurship alumna, and an active mentor to founders across Boston's startup community.
If your team is past the prototype and staring down the scaling problem, this session is built for that exact moment.
Key Takeaways:
- Production Multi-Agent Architecture: Patterns for orchestrating deterministic and non-deterministic agent workflows.
- High-Throughput Serving via NVIDIA NIM: Accelerating inference latency and scaling microservices across modern enterprise clusters.
- Enterprise Governance with NeMo Guardrails: Implementing programmable topical, safety, and execution boundaries for agentic tool use.
- From Lab to Datacenter: Overcoming real-world memory persistence, RAG latency, and observability bottlenecks in production.