What is Cerebral Valley?
Eric Newcomer is on a fast track to hosting Generative A.I. Venture Capital orientated events and Cerebral Valley A.I. Summit is already a success.
Hey Everyone,
I’m getting more active in covering the intersection of startups and venture capital funding rounds. I’ve been writing more on this Newsletter lately:
Which brings us to what is Cerebral Valley? Cerebral Valley, is an AI conference started by
(and his friend at Volley) where a Newsletter journalist spawned a successful A.I. IRL event, at basically the best time in history. So we know Newcomer has good timing. The first event itself spawned a $1.3 billion deal, and now they are doing it all over again as Eric explains in this Newsletter.The event appears geared especially for A.I. startup founders and the Venture Capital community with an exclusive list of speakers. If you’re interested, I’d recommend that you apply today. Tickets cost $1,599. For founders they’re significantly discounted at $299.
The first event was in March, 2023 and the second installment of the event is in the middle of November.
The event was made possible by corporate Sponsors and tremendous speakers and you can see some of the footage from the March event on Eric’s YouTube.
Cerebral Valley encapsulates so much of the optimism of the Generative A.I. movement from the startup founder and investor perspective. It was even mentioned in Sequoia’s recent note on Generative A.I.’s evolution. Actually that’s likely another Cerebral Valley, but you get the idea. A.I. is still hot, and it’s a window and launching pad of opportunities that can make or break lives and careers.
Eric captures the zeitgeist of the times when he said of 2023:
“It feels like we’ve had so many years worth of developments in artificial intelligence all crammed into one year.” - Eric Newcomer
Having a place in Silicon Valley as a journalist in Venture Capital seems to be a privilege when you can attract this pedigree of speakers. Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman, Vinod Khosla and many more are speaking.
AI founders that have raised huge rounds recently, like Writer CEO May Habib and Imbue CEO Kanjun Qiu will be on stage.
Kanjun at Imbue have big dreams themselves:
The Imbue folk also interview personalities and founders in A.I. in their own right at their Thursday Nights in AI sessions, where Ali Rohde seems to be very involved.
So Cerebral Valley is an event also about the community of founders, angel investors, advistors, innovators and Venture Capitalists around Silicon Valley itself at large.
Where and When?
CVAI2 (Cerebral Valley AI Summit version 2.0) will take place on November 15 at the SFJAZZ Center in Hayes Valley, San Francisco.
Price of Entry
Tickets cost $1,599. For founders they’re significantly discounted at $299.
Impacts on Real A.I. Deals, M&A, etc…
You might have read in Fortune that Ali Ghodsi and Naveen Rao first met at Cerebral Valley. A few months later, Ghodsi’s Databricks acquired Rao’s MosaicML for a cool $1.3 billion.
Eric Newcomer has a very successful Newsletter, he charges $19 a month and is the 5th most successful (in terms of paid subs) in the Technology category which means he likely breaks original scoops, deep dives and real news related to Venture Capital and A.I. that’s really valuable to a lot of people.
Newcommer’s Evolution in Media and VC
Compared to his first year on Substack, pretty crazy what Eric Newcomer has built. He doesn’t even need a big following on social media, on X or LinkedIn. During the pandemic he went all in on independent journalism, according to this tweet of October 26th, 2020.
Substack Newsletters
The first wave of Tech newsletters on Substack are expanding their teams, building events and aren’t just profitable enough for one person, but profitabile enough to make some pretty big bets already in a relatively short period.
An exclusive meeting of the top founders and investors in AI at the heart of Cerebral Valley.
Eric works in tandem with the team at Volley who have helped him make this a reality.
CVAI2
Eric Newcomer is after leaving Bloomberg for his own Substack, one of the top VC reporters out there, and he plans to bring together 300 to 350 of the leading founders and investors in AI for the one-day conference.
Journalists on Substack often create value in different ways, from Podcasts to originals scoops to helpful summaries in their niche. But an in real life Event is a huge undertaking. Cerebral Valley has been a stunning event, with hopefully many iterations each year going forward.
At a time when Generative A.I. startups are a platform for new kinds of innovation and at a threshold of being its own crazy general purpose technology offshoot, it’s really good to have events like these, especially after Covid-19 kept us indoors, digital and remote for so long.
‘Cerebral Valley’ is a Metaphor for a New Push for Innovation
“Cerebral Valley” has become a metaphor for Silicon Valley’s concentration in A.I. innovation more or less since August, 2022 when Stability A.I. launched Stable Diffusion. It was August, 22nd, 2022 - and that’s the moment I knew this would be big. Of course ChatGPT followed and the rest is history. But it’s not, this is just the beginning.
Cerebral Valley does appear to be very Silicon Valley orientated and it’s not clear to me how exclusive (I read “by invite only” a few times) this event is. Attendees are therefore carefully picked with only a limited number of seats available. I think this means you just have to know people attending the event and actually work in VC or be a A.I. founder that’s serious. The secret of the event seems to be to connect A.I. founders with potential investors, mentors, advisors and as a networking event.
Eric says, if you’re interested in attending the 2nd Cerebral Valley AI Summit on Wednesday, Nov. 15, in Hayes Valley, then you need to fill out the form on the summit website.
So why wait another year to host another artificial intelligence conference? The Cerebral Valley A.I. Summit’s second edition is just a few weeks away. I’m sure the team has learned a lot from holding the first event back in March.
Eric says he planned the first conference with Volley co-founders Max Child and James Wilsterman. He says they now have a “swankier space, more cool speakers, and the know-how from our first conference.”
Hearing the maker of Quora Poe speak on A.I. was interesting:
Thanks for reading!