NVIDIA

The "open vs. closed" debate is a distraction. For the next generation of AI-native startups, the real moat comes with an agentic flywheel and owned expertise. While proprietary APIs offer a quick start, open-weight models and open-source tooling (from orchestration frameworks to local inference engines) let founders own their last mile of performance and UX. This shift recasts AI from a rented utility into a proprietary platform that backs a product experience.

In this roundtable, we dive into how founders are harnessing the open ecosystem to build agents that are faster, cheaper, and more deeply integrated than what’s possible via a generic API. In breakout groups, we’ll explore how local compute, open weights (like Nemotron and Qwen), and modular agent frameworks allow startups to compound value.

We’ll tackle the hard questions that founders face:
- Sovereignty: Why the "right to repair" your model is the ultimate defensive moat.
- The Latency War: How open stacks enable real-time agentic reasoning for industrial and enterprise use cases.
- Hybrid Realities: Orchestrating a stack that blends the brute force of closed models with the precision of fine-tuned open weights.

Enterprise AI is no longer a question of if. It's a question of how.

Most enterprises aren't starting from scratch - they're navigating the gap between legacy systems that still run the business and AI-native products promising to transform it. Bridging that gap is harder than anyone talks about, and where most organizations are actually getting stuck.

NVIDIA and General Catalyst are bringing together perspectives from across the stack - from the infrastructure powering enterprise AI, to the capital backing the companies building it, to the engineers in the field working through it with customers every day - for an unfiltered conversation about where enterprises actually are, and what it takes to move forward.

Speakers
Quentin Clark, Managing Director, General Catalyst
Katie Ahwal, Sr. Director, Hyperscale and AI Native Sales, NVIDIA
Arjun Mishra, Engineering Lead, Cognition

Format
4:00 - 4:30 PM - Drinks and mingling
4:30 - 5:30 PM - Fireside chat and Q&A
5:30 - 6:00 PM - Closing reception

Space is limited. Register here to secure your spot.