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.
How do you make the most formative years of a human life curious and screen-free?
Ivan Kanevskyi set out to answer that with something more than another AI product. The pursuit of that question brought him to Harvard Graduate School of Education and MIT, and led to the creation of SamSam: a plush AI companion designed to do something TikTok and tablets never will. It leverages the relationship children have with their favorite toys and makes it useful, whether by patiently answering hundreds of curious questions, telling a bedtime story, or learning a language together.
He built and ran pilots across several countries, navigating very different cultural relationships to privacy and child safety along the way, from more individualistic markets to regions where the sentiment around an AI companion in the home looks completely different.
The conversation will also get into the parts of this space that don't have easy answers yet. Ivan will walk through how SamSam threads a genuinely hard needle: creating a companion warm and educational enough to hold a child's attention without becoming a wedge between children and the adults in their lives.
Trust and child safety are the entire product in this category, not a feature, and Ivan will discuss how SamSam designs for them from the ground up. Come hear how one founder is building for trust first, in a space where earning it is the whole game.
Most organizations talk about innovation. Few can actually measure it.
In this 90-minute interactive workshop, Lighthouse-DIG's Jordi Albo-Canals guides participants through a real-time exploration of innovation diversity — within themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Using a structured, data-driven framework, attendees map their own innovation profiles across key dimensions: culture, talent, processes, network, infrastructure, and success metrics.
This isn't a lecture. Participants contribute live inputs, see how their profiles compare across the group, and walk away with concrete strategies to strengthen innovation at both the individual and organizational level.
Designed for founders, innovators, and ecosystem builders — the kind of room Venture Café and CIC reliably produce.
If a founder can't pick up their phone right now and text five investors - "Hey, I'm thinking about opening a round. Can we grab coffee to talk about it?" - they need Capital Fluency.
Most first-time founders try to meet investors during their raise. They’re refining their pitch and learning about term sheets. At the same time, they’re asking the super connectors to make intros. By that point, their fundraising process is doomed to be transactional, because we know fundraising runs on relationships, built and nurtured over time.
Capital Fluency teaches founders to build these relationships before they need them with three workshops that cover investor psychology, getting the first meeting, and nurturing a capital network.
Session 1: Investor Psychology
- How investors at different stages think and what they're looking for
- The differences between angels and institutional investors
- What makes a company interesting to the venture market
Session 2: Getting the first meeting
- The etiquette of asking for warm intros
- How to research and qualify investors
- How to run the first meeting without pitching or selling
Session 3: Nurturing the network
- Best practices for staying in touch over months and years
- How communication shifts as a founder moves closer to opening a round
Capital Fluency helps first-time founders build a capital network like serial entrepreneurs.
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.
How do you make the most formative years of a human life curious and screen-free?
Ivan Kanevskyi set out to answer that with something more than another AI product. The pursuit of that question brought him to Harvard Graduate School of Education and MIT, and led to the creation of SamSam: a plush AI companion designed to do something TikTok and tablets never will. It leverages the relationship children have with their favorite toys and makes it useful, whether by patiently answering hundreds of curious questions, telling a bedtime story, or learning a language together.
He built and ran pilots across several countries, navigating very different cultural relationships to privacy and child safety along the way, from more individualistic markets to regions where the sentiment around an AI companion in the home looks completely different.
The conversation will also get into the parts of this space that don't have easy answers yet. Ivan will walk through how SamSam threads a genuinely hard needle: creating a companion warm and educational enough to hold a child's attention without becoming a wedge between children and the adults in their lives.
Trust and child safety are the entire product in this category, not a feature, and Ivan will discuss how SamSam designs for them from the ground up. Come hear how one founder is building for trust first, in a space where earning it is the whole game.
Most organizations talk about innovation. Few can actually measure it.
In this 90-minute interactive workshop, Lighthouse-DIG's Jordi Albo-Canals guides participants through a real-time exploration of innovation diversity — within themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Using a structured, data-driven framework, attendees map their own innovation profiles across key dimensions: culture, talent, processes, network, infrastructure, and success metrics.
This isn't a lecture. Participants contribute live inputs, see how their profiles compare across the group, and walk away with concrete strategies to strengthen innovation at both the individual and organizational level.
Designed for founders, innovators, and ecosystem builders — the kind of room Venture Café and CIC reliably produce.
If a founder can't pick up their phone right now and text five investors - "Hey, I'm thinking about opening a round. Can we grab coffee to talk about it?" - they need Capital Fluency.
Most first-time founders try to meet investors during their raise. They’re refining their pitch and learning about term sheets. At the same time, they’re asking the super connectors to make intros. By that point, their fundraising process is doomed to be transactional, because we know fundraising runs on relationships, built and nurtured over time.
Capital Fluency teaches founders to build these relationships before they need them with three workshops that cover investor psychology, getting the first meeting, and nurturing a capital network.
Session 1: Investor Psychology
- How investors at different stages think and what they're looking for
- The differences between angels and institutional investors
- What makes a company interesting to the venture market
Session 2: Getting the first meeting
- The etiquette of asking for warm intros
- How to research and qualify investors
- How to run the first meeting without pitching or selling
Session 3: Nurturing the network
- Best practices for staying in touch over months and years
- How communication shifts as a founder moves closer to opening a round
Capital Fluency helps first-time founders build a capital network like serial entrepreneurs.