Caltech Together: Silicon Valley
“Entrepreneurship in the Age of AI” By Robert Eng and Rex Liu Moderated by Kenny Jiang
Few areas of modern life remain untouched by AI. Careers and entrepreneurship are no exception. While companies are reducing their headcount and flattening their organization, upending traditional job functions and career tracks, powerful AI tools are supercharging individuals to build and scale businesses at an unprecedented speed.
We will explore how AI is changing the game of entrepreneurship, including what new product opportunities are uniquely enabled by AI; how AI is changing the way you build products, sell to customers, and manage teams; and how AI is increasing productivity, accelerating growth, and improving capital efficiency.
If you’re pursuing an entrepreneurial path or aspiring to join a startup, or if you want to provide mentorship and support for the Caltech entrepreneur community, join this fireside chat.
Meet Our Panelists and Moderator
Robert Eng (BS ’18) is a co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Pylon, an agentic support platform for B2B companies. Pylon has raised $51M from A16Z, Bain Capital Ventures, General Catalyst, and YC. Thousands of companies have moved off Zendesk and Intercom to run their support on Pylon. Before Pylon, he was a software engineer at Affinity and IKASI.
Rex Liu (BS ’27) is a co-founder of General Analysis. They focus on measuring and improving frontier models’ capabilities on critical cyberdefense tasks. General Analysis has raised $10M from Altos Ventures, Menlo Ventures, 645 Ventures, and YC. In addition to working with frontier labs, the company serves enterprise customers, such as Zendesk and FICO, on agentic security. Before founding General Analysis, Rex interned at Google DeepMind.
Kenny Jiang (BS ’97) graduated from Caltech with a BS in Engineering and Applied Science, and subsequently earned an MS in Computer Science from Stanford and an MBA from UC Berkeley. He previously worked as a product manager at Meta Platforms, where he led new products in business agents, payments and ads; an engineering manager at Oracle; and an equity research analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where his team was ranked #1 in the software sector by the Institutional Investors three years in a row. Kenny was the first analyst on Wall Street to evangelize investment opportunities in Big Data in 2010. Currently, Kenny is building his own investment firm.
Our Alumni Volunteers
The following alumni work together to serve you: Avni Gandhi, Dave Adler, Eilleen Zhang, Jane Frommer, Ralph Pursifull, Reeya Chenanda, Susan Huynh, and Peter Tong.