Marin AI: 2024 Now and Next
The Newsletter for AI in Marin and Sonoma
Hi everyone, and a warm welcome to our new members!
Here’s what’s inside:
2024 Now & Next
Events & Meetups
Member Offers
How to get more involved
Recommended reading
🌄 Now & Next
As we are basically halfway through the year, I thought I’d take a quick moment to review how far we’ve come and where we are going next.
2024 So Far
By the numbers:
Events Completed: 8
Total applicants: 831
Total RSVP’s Accepted: 437 (52% of applications)
Total Attendances: 173 (40% of RSVPs - this is high!)
Community Members (This list): 519 (Accepted attendees + Invited “watcher-subscribers”)
WhatsApp Group members: 24
All this with no sponsors or marketing spend - we are just getting started.
As we like to say in The Gen AI Collective:
“This is the worst it will ever be!”
The Future for the Marin & Sonoma AI Community
As we look ahead to the future and where we go from here, I’m reminded of some stats that Zach Kushel of Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures shared at his NEXT festival in May:
If Marin and Sonoma combined were their own 51st US state;
The hypothetical Marin + Sonoma state ranks in the Top 3 of U.S. states when analyzing quality startups on a per capita basis. (adjusts for amount raised and per capita)
On a county level: “While Marin + Sonoma may have a significantly lighter startup footprint than San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Seattle, when compared to almost any other community across the country, our level of startup formation and quality is robust and significantly greater.”
While MSIV’s analysis focuses on startups, and is far broader than tech, ours is different but complimentary.
By narrowing our community to tech (with a focus on AI) but broadening beyond startups - this community has the potential to be one of the greatest in the country.
Available data guesses that there could tens of thousands more tech workers hiding among our valleys, with strong growth projected as more talent migrates from SF to our greener and sunnier pastures.
Without the proliferation of events and mailing lists of SF, we are hard to see. But I know we are here - I feel it through the people I meet in every coffee shop, boutique, and kid’s park!
So my first focus for this community is to awaken this hidden community and try and get everyone talking. Then we’ll see where that takes us.
📅 Events and Meetups
🕰️ Last Event
Special thanks again to AvantSpace San Rafael for kindly hosting our Co-Working event on Tuesday, June 11th.
And thank you to everyone who attended and made it another great day. If you missed connecting with anyone, you can see everyone tagged on my LinkedIn post.
⚠️ Next Event
After 8 events in 6 months, I’m taking a break for July and will return with something new for August. If you are reading this email, you will be notified as they are announced.
Been forwarded this message? You can now subscribe directly from this email with this button:
🤑 Member Offers
🏠 1 Month Free at AvantSpace
We are super grateful to Josh and Mike at AvantSpace for donating their beautiful downtown San Rafael space as a regular home base for the North Bay AI community.
I’m pleased to pass on their offer of 1st Month Free for members of this community. Their prices are super reasonable and flexible considering how nice the place is, so please email Mike and mention Gen AI Collective Marin to learn more.
🤖 10% off AI Hardware & Edge Summit
The AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit (9-12th September, San Jose) is the ultimate destination for the entire AI/ML ecosystem with a collaborative mission to train, deploy, and scale ML systems that are fast, efficient, and affordable.
Whether it’s forging new partnerships, staying ahead of the ever-changing semi-conductor landscape, learning how to build, train, and deploy efficient systems, meeting peers, learning from AI luminaries, or simply gaining exposure to the world of AI infrastructure, you’ll find over 1,200 likeminded people at our event. Don’t miss exclusive luminary keynotes from Andrew Ng (Founder & CEO, Landing AI) and Mark Russinovich (Technical Fellow and CTO Azure, Microsoft).
Quote code: GENAICOLLECTIVE10 for 10% off your pass. Register your interest here to learn more!
🤝 Free Positioning and Differentiation Chat (with me)
I’ve created a great new offering of Lean Category Design Coaching that is proving popular.
If you’re not familiar, Category Design is a radical differentiation strategy that helps your product escape competition and positions it as the sole champion of a whole new category. While most category design advisors provide a service that takes 3+ months and costs >$100k, I’ve developed a super lightweight process that achieves this in mere weeks.
Based on my 8 years of category design practice across many sectors, my process is refined enough that you can follow it yourself with me working as a coach for maximum affordability, or I can do it for you as full service.
Curious to learn more? Book a free and no-strings chat with me and ask away
Get More Involved
💬 SF North Bay AI Whatsapp Group
Our WhatsApp group is coming together and the first batch of people that requested it have been added.
To keep the quality of conversation high and spam-free, I decided to start by only admitting people who have been accepted for and attended one of our events.
So if you wish to invite friends, please ask them to apply to an event first.
How You Can Help
💰 Seeking Sponsors and Partners
We missed out on a potentially amazing event for next week because I could not arrange a sponsor in time.
I am therefore now open to speaking with any companies or orgs that might be interested in partnering with this curated, rich, and wonderful community to help us take flight.
If you know of someone, please hit reply and let me know.
👫 Invite Your Smart Friends
The best thing about our events is the awesome people that attend them. (That’s you, by the way.)
And the best way we can gain more awesome members is if you all invite more great people that you know.
So if you know an interesting person who is working or interested in AI and is based in Marin or Sonoma, please forward this email and tell them to hit this Subscribe button:
📖 Recommended read: How to Reduce Uncertainty in Product and Startup Traction
If you work in AI, you are dealing with uncertain futures, which means you need to know how to make great decisions when you have no good information to lean on.
So I think you’ll like my latest article, which is a guest post for The Uncertainty Project.
Take a look and if you find it useful, please support me by being liberal with those like and share buttons, then subscribe for future Traction Design posts. 😉
OK that’s it for the spring!
Thanks for being with us so far, I hope to see you at an event soon.
Best regards. Chris.
—-
Chris Guest
Founder: Gen AI Collective Marin
The Traction Designer | Positioning for AI products