Launching Bond AI

Today I'm announcing Bond AI, a unified community with a clear mission: connect the global AI community in person.

Bond consolidates what were previously separate communities: GenerativeAISF and GenerativeAINY, into a single platform for event discovery, organizer support, and sponsor matching across the AI ecosystem.

The origin story

In autumn 2022, I started a WhatsApp group to share AI events with a small group of friends. San Francisco was finally emerging from its COVID hibernation, and we were all eager to meet people, attend hackathons, and justify why we'd moved to the Mecca of AI in the first place.

Within three months, the WhatsApp group graduated to a shared Google Sheet. A few weeks later, the spreadsheet became a weekly email: poorly formatted, manually sent by me in batches of twenty to avoid the wrath of the Gmail spam gods. Until one day, Luma's co-founder reached out and invited me to join their newly launched Calendar feature.

Since then, the community has grown from a few hundred members to over 80,000, with the last twelve months alone representing a 10x increase. That growth signals an inflection point, and inflection points demand a new phase.

The curation problem

At any given moment, there are more than 200 AI events scheduled in the Bay Area alone. Platforms like Luma and Partiful have made hosting events trivially easy: anyone with an idea can spin up an event page in minutes. This is good for accessibility but creates a curation problem. When everything is an event, nothing is. Attendees can't tell which events are worth their time, which will have the right crowd, or what to expect when they show up.

Event organizers face the inverse challenge. It's never been easier to create an event, but it's never been harder to make one succeed. Finding venues, securing sponsors, generating non-AI slop event pages, recruiting quality speakers and judges for hackathons - these coordination problems don't get solved by better event software. They get solved by networks of people who know each other and trust each other's judgment.

Bond's thesis

As AI becomes increasingly prominent, digital life is going to get weird. Synthetic content, AI-generated interactions, and algorithmic curation will make it progressively harder to know what's real and who's genuine. I believe this will drive demand for in-person connection. People will crave spaces where they can verify that they're talking to real humans who care about the same things they do.

Bond is where event organizers learn from each other's best practices. Where hackathon organizers find sponsors looking to accelerate their go-to-market motion. Where founders meet engineers and researchers meet investors. Not through algorithmic matching, but through curated, high-quality gatherings with shared context and mutual trust.

The name is deliberate. Bonds are what form when people meet face to face, share ideas, and decide to work together. The platform exists to facilitate those bonds at scale.

What's next

Running this community solo got me pretty far, so the team is growing to support what's coming. We're expanding the event calendars beyond San Francisco and New York to Seattle and more global cities to follow. We're building tools for sponsors and organizers to find each other. And we're investing in human curation.

There's plenty more coming. But for now, if you're organizing AI events, looking to sponsor them, or simply trying to figure out which ones are worth attending, Bond is the place to start.