Festival Conversations:
Join us for an inaugural gathering designed for people who believe the future is not something we inherit, but something we actively choose. Festival explores the real story of AI, not the technology's progress, but the human change that progress causes. It's a set of conversations we're proud to present: builders, researchers, executives, and journalists, paired to explore the layers shaping the opportunities ahead. From the raw materials beneath AI to the systems that govern its use, every conversation is grounded in hope, experience, and conviction — celebrating humanity in the age of AI.
KEN STANLEY
in conversation with Scott Sage
Ken Stanley is one of the most original thinkers in AI: the creator of the Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) and novelty search algorithms, widely recognized as foundational contributions to evolutionary computation and open-ended AI, and author of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. His work challenges the idea that goals drive innovation. Paired with Scott Sage — a longtime investor in foundational technologies and co-founder of Crane — this opening sets the tone: if we’re thinking about AI the wrong way, what needs to change?
VINCE BEISER & SEOHO JUNG
Vince Beiser has spent years reporting on the hidden physical world behind modern technology — from sand mining to battery metals — in books like The World in a Grain and Power Metal. Seoho Jung is building at the frontier of nanomaterials as CEO of Chiral. Together, they bring AI back down to earth: what it’s made of, what we’re running out of—and how those constraints reshape who builds, who benefits, and what comes next for the world and work.
ALISON McCAULEY & SIOBHAN McFEENEY
Alison McCauley, author of How to Think with AI and a leading voice on AI adoption and human-centered transformation, has spent years studying how people and organizations adapt to technological change. Siobhán McFeeney, SVP of Technology at Target, has spent decades building and scaling systems inside one of the world’s largest retailers, where technology must perform in the complexity of the real world. Together, they explore the intersection of AI, enterprise transformation, and human behavior — and what it really takes for people and organizations to thrive in the age of AI.
DON CLARK & JAMES DACOMBE
Don Clark has covered semiconductors and computing for decades at the The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, a seasoned journalist who has seen each wave of compute rise and plateau. James Dacombe, Founder and CEO of two companies, CoMind and Olix, represents the next wave—a young entrepreneur building what comes after, exploring photonic approaches to AI compute. This is a conversation about the end of assumptions: what happens when silicon is no longer enough?
CHAD SANDERSON & BARR MOSES
Chad Sanderson, CEO of Gable and author of Data Contracts, is known for advancing the idea that data should be treated like a product, with ownership, accountability, and trust built in. Barr Moses, CEO of Monte Carlo, helped pioneer the data reliability category. Together, they explore one of the most overlooked layers in AI and enterprise systems: if the data breaks, everything breaks.
DENNIS BAUER & RISHABH MEHROTRA
Dennis Bauer, President of Gigs, has helped transform telecom infrastructure into programmable utility, abstracting enormous technical complexity into simple, scalable services developers and companies can actually use. Rishabh Mehrotra, CEO of Pavo AI, is building systems-first intelligence for the enterprise: self-evolving knowledge systems, agent societies, and world models that learn from experience to optimize business outcomes. Together, they explore one of the defining questions of the AI era: how does intelligence move from breakthrough capability into infrastructure people trust, adopt, and depend on every day?
JOSEPH MENN & ANU ENGINEER
Anu Engineer, founder of Skydda, has operated at the highest levels of cyber defense, seeing firsthand where security breaks, why systems fail, and how organizations respond under pressure. Joseph Menn, longtime cybersecurity journalist at Reuters, Washington Post and author of Cult of the Dead Cow, has spent decades chronicling the evolution of hackers, cyber conflict, and the vulnerabilities shaping the modern world. Together, they explore the asymmetry at the heart of security: attackers only need to win once. Defenders must be right every time.
LUDWIG SCHONACK & KRISHNA VISVANATHAN
Ludwig Schönack, founder of Gridfield, is focused on one of the defining constraints of the AI era: infrastructure. Rather than building sprawling, centralized data centers, Gridfield takes a distributed approach, deploying modular, inference-optimized 40MW Cubes across Europe, purpose-built for the latency and throughput demands of real-time AI. Krishna Visvanathan, co-founder and partner at Crane Venture Partners, has spent decades helping founders navigate major technology shifts and global market transitions. Together, they explore the growing reality that the future of AI may be determined less by models, and more by who controls the infrastructure required to power them.
Festival at a Glance
8:30 AM Arrival, coffee, and connection 9:15 AM Festival begins Welcome from Crane’s co-founders + In Conversation Part I 10:45 AM Break 11:00 AM In Conversation Part II 12:30 PM Lunch 1:30 PM In Conversation Part III 3:00 PM Break 3:15 PM In Conversation Part IV 4:30 PM Festival Reflections 5:00 – 6:00 PM Free time to reflect, recharge, and explore Cavallo Point 6:00 – 8:00 PM Cocktails, food, and conversation on the terrace