Community-Led 💬 What's on the Minds of Early Adopters #30
Innovation-First Culture, Hero or Villain and E2B hosting millions of sandboxes
Welcome to Community-Led. Each week we connect founders to dozens of early adopters and technology executives in fast growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. This newsletter surfaces the most interesting insights and conversations across the >2,000 members of the Decibel early adopter community. Let’s dive in!
The AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco hosted 3,000+ AI engineers and executives and highlights included keynotes by Sarah Guo — The State of Startups & AI 2025, Asha Sharma — Spark to System: Building the Open Agentic Web, Anje Barth - Building AI Agents at Scale. Swyx shares a great recap here.
While the community and content were fabulous, equally as compelling to me was the realization that the AI Engineer World’s Fair had become a strategic tool to be leveraged by engineering leaders looking to inspire, educate and achieve an accelerated AI-First culture amongst their teams and organization.
Kevin Scott, CTO/CIO of the PGA of America, shared that he has turned the AIEWF into his engineering team’s annual offsite.
“It infuses the innovation-first culture into our team in a way that is difficult to otherwise teach. Ideas are germinating in the hallways.”
Pre-trip planning included team discussions around priorities for the upcoming year followed by divvying up of the AIEWF keynotes, workshops and side events to maximize coverage. Evenings are spent hackathon style, holed up in a team suite to apply fresh learnings and share inspirations. This is the third year Kevin has brought his team and plans to continue this annual cadence.
Delivering on the innovation-first culture of AIEWF there was no shortage launches including Veris AI launching their end‑to‑end platform for continuously training tasks‑specific agents in simulation. Congrats! 🎉
The Watercooler: What we’re hearing in the Community
Decibel Community Events
Friends Deploying Agents - over lunch - at the AI Engineer World’s Fair
"Friends Deploying Agents - over lunch!" brought together a fabulous community of folks from companies such as Character.AI, Meta, Google, Speak, Temporal Technologies, Citadel, Cisco and Contextual AI! We discussed/debated agent definitions, challenges, traction and celebrated Veris AI's launch. It was a great kickoff to the AI Engineer World's Fair.
Singapore ATxSummit 2025
Just back from our first ATxSummit where Artificial intelligence took center stage in every discussion—will it be the hero that lives up to its potential, or the villain that many fear?
It was inspiring to hear stories from across Asia where AI has achieved measurable success in nearly every industry, and was a powerful reminder that entrepreneurship and innovation often transcend our political borders. We are grateful to our friends and partners at the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) for inviting us to participate. We enjoyed the energy and optimism of the event, and look forward to returning to Singapore again soon!
Next stop: Black Hat
As if Singapore was not hot enough(!), we are heading in Las Vegas for Black Hat, DefCon and our Man vs Machine competition! Look forward to seeing the Decibel Security Family in August!
An Inside Look at Innovation - E2B
Made for agentic and AI use cases, E2B is an open-source runtime for executing AI-generated code in secure cloud sandboxes. Making it easy for developers to add code interpreting to their AI apps with an SDK built on top of our agentic runtime, E2B is building a secure open-source runtime that will power the next billion AI agents.
Currently running millions of sandboxes every month and recently featured on Latent Space with Alessio, customers (with case studies!) include Perplexity, Groq, Hugging Face, Manus and Lindy. Check them out here!
Decibel Friends and Family Update
🎉 Congratulations…
Alvina Antar first Chief Digital Officer at F5
Rinki Sethi joins Upwind Security as Chief Security and Strategy Officer
Ben Dewar-Powell departs Tide as CISO
Ajit Gaddam moves from Wells Fargo to HealthEquity
John Howie from Bayer to Zimmer Biomet as CISO
🔥 Cube named to DBTA’s 100 Companies That Matter Most in Data for 2025!
🏆 Dropzone AI, Pangea, runZero and Sublime Security named to Rising in Cyber 2025 by Notable Capital!
🚨 Sublime Security has been named to the 2025 InfraRed 100 by Redpoint!
See you next time.
Thanks for reading. This is a community that you’re always welcome to contribute to. If you have any feedback or know a story that’s perfect for this newsletter, please reach out. Email me at Stacey@Decibel.vc.
Stacey