We didn\u2019t plan to build a bootcamp, just a small catch-up with 15\u201320 founders in the Bay Area, comparing notes on what was actually working in AI in 2026. No agenda. No speakers. Just people who were building through the same uncertainty, being honest with each other over food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That catch-up had 60\u201370 founders. It got a format, a name, two days of sessions, and feedback that came back with zero detractors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We still can\u2019t fully explain how it happened that fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But we know why it worked. And that\u2019s what we want to share before we do it again this time in Hyderabad, on July 3\u20134.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we started talking to founders in the run-up to the Bay Area, we kept hearing variations of the same story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The product works. Customers are using it. Someone important has said \u201cthis is going to be big.\u201d <\/strong>Revenue is real, maybe not a lot of it, but real. There\u2019s genuine pull.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then, in the same breath: I don\u2019t know why I win deals. I can\u2019t replicate the last customer without doing everything myself. Nothing is compounding. I feel like I\u2019m one or two decisions away from clarity but I don\u2019t know which decisions.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This wasn\u2019t a startup problem. It wasn\u2019t an AI problem. It was a specific, identifiable gap that almost every founder in the room was living inside and almost nobody was naming it directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You have customers. You just don\u2019t have company yet.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That gap between first revenue and repeatable, scalable models is where most AI founders are sitting right now. And it turns out it\u2019s a surprisingly lonely place, because on the outside everything looks like it\u2019s working. You can\u2019t complain about it on a podcast. You can\u2019t post about it on LinkedIn. You have to keep performing momentum while quietly carrying the weight of not knowing what comes next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The thing we didn\u2019t fully anticipate about the Bay Area was how much relief founders felt just from being in a room where someone finally said this out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our original instinct was to build something that looked like a traditional founder event. Polished speakers. Clean agenda. Sessions that people could screenshot and share. We scrapped most of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not because the speakers weren\u2019t good, they were exceptional. But because the most valuable thing we could build wasn\u2019t a stage. It was a room where the bar for honesty was high enough that founders would say what\u2019s actually happening in their company, not the fundraising-ready version of it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That required a few specific choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That last part matters more than it sounds. There\u2019s a specific kind of clarity that comes from having to say something out loud to people who\u2019ll remember it. It converts \u201cI think I should probably\u2026\u201d into \u201cI am going to.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The sessions were strong. Ashwin\u2019s opening on moats by segment set the intellectual tone for everything that followed it gave the room a shared language for the hard question underneath most of the GTM and product conversations: what do you actually have that holds when the frontier moves again?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But what made Bay Area work wasn\u2019t the sessions. It was the conversations around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The questions that kept surfacing weren\u2019t abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the thing about a room where the bar for honesty is high. The quality of the question changes. You stop asking the question you\u2019re comfortable asking and start asking the one you actually need answered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We live and work in India. Most of us are building from India, for a global market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the honest truth is that the AI founder conversation in India has been happening at two extremes: either very early-stage ideation (\u201cwe\u2019re exploring what\u2019s possible with AI\u201d) or very late-stage (\u201chere\u2019s our Series B thesis\u201d). The messy middle founders with real traction who are figuring out how to build a scalable company around it have been underserved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The format is the same as in the Bay Area. The intent is the same. But the problems will be different in interesting ways. The GTM motion for an India-based founder going upmarket into enterprise India is different from the motion for going into the US. The distribution levers are different. The hiring market is different. The funding environment is different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those differences are features, not bugs. They make the peer learning in the room richer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n July 3 \u2013 4. Two days. The same format that produced zero detractors in the Bay Area. Carried into a city that we think is ready for exactly this conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing we learned from the Bay Area: the quality of the room is determined by the quality of the selection. Not exclusivity for its own sake, genuine curation for fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This bootcamp is built for founders who have something real and are stuck in the gap. Not exploring. Not ideating. Building with customers, with revenue, with real decisions to make about what comes next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re in the $100K \u2013 $2M ARR range, or pre-revenue but moving with clear market evidence, and you\u2019re wrestling with any of: why you win deals and how to win them again, what your GTM motion actually is versus what you think it is, how to sell outcomes instead of features, whether to go upmarket or go deeper, what your moat is as models improve this room was built for your current chapter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AIBoomi isn\u2019t a conference company. It\u2019s not trying to become one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What we\u2019re trying to build is something harder and more specific: a community of AI founders in India who are genuinely helping each other get better at building companies, not just building products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bootcamp is one expression of that. The Bay Area edition was the first test of whether the format worked. Hyderabad is the second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If it goes the way we think it will, you\u2019ll leave on July 4th with something specific you\u2019re doing differently on July 5th. Not inspired. Not motivated. Decided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the only metric we\u2019re actually optimizing for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We didn\u2019t plan to build a bootcamp, just a small catch-up with 15\u201320 founders in the Bay Area, comparing notes on what was actually working in AI in 2026. No agenda. No speakers. Just people who were building through the same uncertainty, being honest with each other over food. That catch-up had 60\u201370 founders. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3161,"template":"","categories":[],"tags":[],"primary_tag":[74],"secondary_tag":[],"class_list":["post-2537","blogs","type-blogs","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","primary_tag-india-us-market"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat actually happened in Bay Area<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Why Hyderabad, and why now<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Who this is built for<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A note on what we\u2019re trying to build<\/h3>\n\n\n\n