Build From the Dock: How Open Source Built the AI Revolution

Venture Dock — Palo AltoThursday, July 165:00 – 7:30 PM (main conversation kicks off at 5:30) A special Thursday edition of Build From Dock We don't usually do Thursdays, but we're making an exception this week. Travis Oliphant, the guy who created NumPy and SciPy, started Anaconda and NumFOCUS, and now chairs Quansight and runs OpenTeams, is coming through to talk about how open source quietly became the backbone of the entire AI industry. Why this matters Everyone's talking about how fast AI is moving right now, but the tools underneath it, the math libraries, the compute frameworks, the stuff nobody thinks about, took decades to build, mostly by volunteers and small teams working in the open. Travis was there for a lot of that. If you use TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, or basically any modern ML tool, you're standing on code he wrote or communities he started. We'll get into things like: This is for you if you're building AI products, leading an eng team, raising money, investing in this space, or just want to actually understand what's under the hood before everyone starts talking about the next thing. About Travis Oliphant Travis is one of those rare people whose work you've almost certainly used without knowing it. He created NumPy and SciPy, the foundational Python libraries that basically every data science, ML, and AI workflow is built on top of, TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, and countless enterprise AI tools all trace back to the ecosystem he started. Before any of that, he was a professor at Brigham Young University, doing research in probability, signal processing, computational math, and inverse problems. Since then he's spent over two decades founding and running organizations that shaped how open source and AI actually get built: Millions of developers, researchers, and companies, from scrappy startups to the Fortune 500, rely on tools he built every single day, whether or not they realize it. He'll be sharing lessons from 25+ years at the center of open-source and AI development, and what he thinks founders need to understand about the technology (and the communities) underneath today's AI boom. Agenda 5:00 – 5:30 — Coffee & networking5:30 – 6:30 — Fireside chat with Travis6:30 – 7:00 — Audience Q&A7:00 – 7:30 — Founder networking Who should come AI founders, technical founders/CTOs, engineers, ML folks, data scientists, researchers, VCs, Stanford students, really anyone who cares about where AI and open source are headed. Want more of this? Build From the Dock is just one piece of Venture Dock, a community of founders and operators who actually show up for each other. Venture Dock exists to give founders the tools to build, and build better. As a member, you get: If that sounds like your kind of thing, apply for membership here: 👉 https://venturedock.fillout.com/t/gHcUcf7Tz8us?utm_source=luma