Scott Woody is Co-Founder and CEO of Metronome, the leading usage-based billing platform empowering SaaS companies to model flexible pricing strategies, iterate rapidly without engineering bottlenecks, and turn billing into a growth engine amid 2026's shift from seats to consumption models. With prior stints as CTO at Metronome since 2019 and Director of Engineering at Dropbox where he scaled core infrastructure for 12 million+ users, Scott brings hands-on builder credentials from co-founding Foundry Hiring—an ultra-simple ATS that handled full-stack from marketing to code. A Stanford grad whose computational biology research spanned protein folding simulations, DNA mutations, and motor protein assays, he bridges academic modeling rigor with enterprise software at scale, having engineered Dropbox's evolution from startup to public giant before tackling SaaS monetization's biggest pain point.Topics

• Why usage-based billing is becoming core infrastructure, not a finance feature
• How a scientific modeling background shaped a SaaS infrastructure founder
• Lessons from Dropbox-scale systems applied to early-stage startups

#UsageBasedBilling #SaaSGrowth #PricingInfrastructure #FounderInsights #BuildInPublic

Venture Livestream with Grace Gong

Ray Wu is a seasoned venture capitalist with over 20 years of investing experience across a wide range of industries and geographies. Before joining Alumni Ventures, Ray Wu was a partner and adviser at several global venture funds focusing on AI, Web3, FinTech and SaaS investment opportunities across the U.S. and Asia Pacific. Earlier, he spent more than 10 years in the corporate venture space: He was the managing director of HP’s new business ventures, responsible for startup technology evaluation, new business incubation, VC relationships, and minority investments, and earlier at Cisco Systems, holding several senior positions leading investment, M&A, internal incubation, and global consulting. Previously, Ray Wu was a managing partner of a leading Internet consulting firm working with Fortune 1000 companies across North America. He earned a dual MBA degree from the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University.Topics -

• Evaluating technical defensibility in fast-moving frontier markets
• How corporate venture experience sharpens long-term AI investment judgment
• Corporate VC exits decoded: How Ray Wu drove Allegro to Cisco, Digital Fountain to Qualcomm

#VC #AI #SaaS #Startups #TechInvesting

Tobias Citron serves as Partner at Primary Venture Partners, leading cybersecurity investments and incubating pre-seed startups in AI infra, data tools, and developer platforms like Etched AI, Cake AI, Stanza, and SparkAI (acquired by John Deere), building NYC's seed ecosystem since 2021. A Princeton public policy alum and Wharton MBA, he cut his teeth as founding GM at Prehype's Radicle venture studio, Deloitte strategy consulting, Citi investment banking, and Rough Draft Ventures fellow, driving NYC Founders Fellowship and global deal flow for Primary's builder-first model.Topic -

• Refragmentation of Cybersecurity in the AI Era
• The Anthropic Breach and the Splintering of Cyber Stacks
• Early Signals That Predict Breakout Dev Platforms

#VentureCapital #DeveloperTools #DataInfrastructure #StartupEcosystem #NYCTech

Amir Haleem founded Nova Labs (formerly Helium) in 2013, pioneering the world's largest decentralized wireless network that powers IoT sensors and Helium Mobile—a blockchain-based phone service now integrated with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Google Fi, rewarding node operators with crypto for coverage. Ex-CTO of gaming startup Diversion and original Battlefield 1942 engineer at DICE, the esports champion co-founded esreality.com before pivoting from social gaming with Napster's Shawn Fanning to solve IoT data costs via people-powered hotspots spanning millions of devices globally.Topics -

• Why People-Powered Infrastructure Scales Faster
• Decentralized 5G Wars: Beating Carriers with Crypto Hotspots
• Why IoT Connectivity Was the Trojan Horse

#DecentralizedWireless #CryptoInfrastructure #5G #Blockchain #IoT

Aaron Cannon is the co-founder and CEO of Outset, where he’s leading the development of the world’s first agent-led research platform powered by AI-moderated interviews. He brings over a decade of experience in product strategy and leadership from roles at Tesla, Triplebyte, and Deloitte, with a passion for building tools that bridge design, business, and user research. Aaron studied economics and entrepreneurial leadership at Tufts University and continues to mentor young innovators.Topics -

• AI-Moderated Interviews: Unlocking Deeper Insights at Enterprise Scale
• Replacing Human Moderators Forever through Agentic AI Interviews
• Facilitating 500,000+ Hours of Interviews Across 10,000+ Research Studies

#OutsetAI #AgenticAI #AIResearch #AIInterviews #AIModeration #ResearchTech

Kylan Gibbs is the co-founder & CEO of Inworld AI, the core infrastructure for real-time, multimodal AI applications at global consumer scale.Inworld is a product-focused research lab delivering sub-500ms, high-QPS AI experiences via specialized models and streaming architectures that most teams can’t build in-house.Under Kylan’s leadership, Inworld has launched products including Inworld TTS (ranked #1 on major third-party benchmarks for latency, quality, and cost) and Inworld Runtime, a C++-optimized real-time orchestration and observability platform.Prior to Inworld, Kylan focused on product development at DeepMind (Google) and Bain & Company. Backed by Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, S32, Microsoft M12, CRV, Bitkraft, and others, he is now focused on defining the next AI stack and enabling AI-native products that were previously impossible.Topics:

• Why the next wave of AI must be real-time: latency, QPS, and unit economics at consumer scale

• Inside the real-time AI stack: specialized models, streaming infrastructure, and production-ready orchestration

• Beyond credits: building a durable consumer AI ecosystem through infrastructure and acceleration

Anand Chandrasekaran is the Managing Partner of Celesta. Prior to joining Celesta, Anand Chandrasekaran co-founded and was President of Crescendo, an AI-first contact center business, co-created and backed by General Catalyst (GC). He is a former Partner and Venture Advisor at GC. Earlier in his career he was CPO and a product leader for two decades at Five9, Meta (Messenger), Bharti Airtel, Snapdeal (FreeCharge), and Founder of Aeroprise (acquired by BMC Software). He was recognized as the #1 seed investor focused on the India – U.S. corridor by the HURUN India Report three years in a row from 2022-2024. Anand holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. from PSG College of Technology, India. In 2010, Anand was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In 2017 and 2018, he was named to Fortune's 40 under 40 India list.Topics:

• Why the best AI investors think like product leaders
• How to build truly cross-border teams
• How enterprises decide when AI is “production-ready”

#AI #VentureCapital #EnterpriseAI #ProductLedGrowth #OperatorToInvestor #IndiaUSTech #SeedStage #StartupInvesting #B2BTech #SmartVenture