#272 Andrew Blum: Inside The Most Important AI Event Of The Year (HumanX)

AGNTCY - Unlock agents at scale with an open Internet of Agents. Visit https://agntcy.org/ and add your support. What if the most important AI conference in the world wasn't built by academics or hype merchants, but by operators who actually understand what businesses need? In this episode, Craig sits down with Andrew Blum, Co-Founder and COO of HumanX, the breakout AI conference that has quickly become the go-to gathering for enterprise leaders, AI builders, and government policymakers. Andrew shares the inside story of how HumanX went from an idea born in a VC incubator to hosting 3,300+ attendees, 350 speakers, and leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Snowflake, and more, all within 18 months. You'll hear how HumanX is different from other conferences, why face-to-face connection matters more than ever, and how HumanX is creating the bridge between AI innovation and real-world business transformation. This is a behind-the-scenes look you won't want to miss. Like and subscribe for more! Stay Updated: Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss Eye on A. I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Government regulation will play a role, whether you want it to or not. And so he kind of offered two scenarios. It was like you can either have government not regulate you and then something horrible happens, 2008. And then government steps in and they're going to overregulate because we're all going to remember what happened and we're going to say, hey, like, you need to step in, like, this is messed up. At the end of the day, our business is about meeting people face to face and it's about people, not technology, and that's why we call it HumanX.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Build the future of multi-agent software with AGNTCY. The AGNTCY is an open-source collective building the Internet of Agents. It's a collaborative layer where agents can discover, connect, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Join Crew AI, LangChain, Llama Index, BrowserBase, Cisco, and dozens more. The AGNTCY is dropping code, specs, and services, no strings attached. Build with other engineers who care about high-quality, multi-agent software. Visit AGNTCY.org and add your support. That's A-G-N-T-C-Y dot O-R-G.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. I'm Andrew. I'm the co-founder and COO of HumanX. And I previously was working at a venture capital firm called Primary Ventures.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  So my background is really, you know, out of undergrad. I joined a startup that got acquired, worked there for a bit before leaving to actually start my own company. Ran a company for a year and a half and then left to join a venture fund to help them build out their incubation program where we would ideate. New ideas, hire entrepreneurs and residents to pursue those ideas and then support them after they were incubated with sales, with marketing, everything that you need as an early company to get going. And through that process, uh, we were doing a lot of work on AI. And post chat GPT launch, we were thinking through, you know, what new products could we build for C levels?

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Now that everyone is focused on L L M's and generative AI. And what we found was that there's a lot of products that were already out there.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  There wasn't necessarily a need for a new product. Uh, at least one that we found in our short research period. I'm sure there are tons of companies here that would disagree with me, which I love. But what we found was that there needed to be better curation of what was currently out there. It's really hard to know what's real and what isn't. It's really hard to know where you stand as it relates to your industry or your competitors. You know, whether it's you're running a, a marketing team and you need to know, am I using the most advanced AI software and technology to level up my own team? Or whether you're running an entire company and you need to, uh, you know, figure out how to integrate AI into your product offering. And so, um, there's so many dimensions to it. That felt like there weren't, they weren't being served by the current conferences that were out there.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  They were either very academic or they were very focused on, um, really just thought leadership. And so we thought, you know, there needs to be a conference out there for these business leaders who are uh, actually operating in the space every day, but don't actually know, um, you know, don't actually know what the products are being built, what's going on. L L M's are the first product really where, um, it's a hammer in search of a nail. You know, these, these products, um, they can do a ton of things really well. They can do other things not so well. It's super hard to know. And then every new model release brings with it, uh, advancements and also drawbacks. And so if you have a full-time job that's doing anything else, you can't, you can't keep up.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Um, I think we all know that. And so I think that's why people find it so valuable to bring all of these different parts of the ecosystem together. Um, you know, I think the excitement and the energy here is something that we've felt for a year and a half and why we decided to build this, but it certainly exceeds our expectations in terms of just how great it's been and how happy and energized everyone is to be here. So we're super grateful and we're excited to be with you all.

• 4:40Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, your background was in tech, in venture and the startup before was all of that in tech? Was any of it in AI?

• 4:50Speaker 00

  It was all in tech and it wasn't AI at all, actually. So previously I was working in the coworking space. It was like a hardware software business, my last startup. The first company I joined was insurance tech, so I've been all over the map. Not AI in particular, but I think sitting, being at a venture firm where, when Gen AI, you know, was brought to the front of the public imagination was, I think, that moment where we really felt, okay, this is, this is the time where everyone's focusing on this and we're seeing the enterprise value materialize immediately. It's not like crypto or blockchain where we're still trying to figure out what the use case is. Even in these cases where we're trying to figure out, you know, exactly what the nail is when we have this hammer.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  There are tons of nails and we just have to pick one and figure out what it's good at and make it work. As opposed to something, and I don't want to just pick on blockchain and crypto, but as opposed to something like that where, you know, you're saying, well, you could do a bunch of things, but who knows? Here, we're seeing tangible results where you can be more efficient with your sales and make more sales. You can save costs on your operation side. You can, you know, cut back your like accounting firms spend because maybe you use less hours of the accountant. So there are so many things that are being done right now. And I think staying at the forefront is just so important and that's why people came here. That's why they're so excited to hear, you know, what all of our incredible speakers have to say. We got a big, we got a big crew over here. Those are my two co-founders, Stefan and John.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I can give you kind of the story and the background of how this all came to be. So, so John is a longtime conference entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur of many, many stripes, not just conference. So I'll kind of start with his background because I think it's the most relevant. So he actually sold the tech company to Google way back when. And it became the basis for Google Wallet, right as fintech was getting started. And he started going to conferences in the fintech space in this like nascent industry that didn't really exist. And what they found was that actually most of the conferences he went to, either as a speaker or as a sponsor, were pretty low ROI. And being an entrepreneur and someone who can kind of just hit the ground running and figure out what's not working. He said, well, I think I can do it better.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  And then he started a conference called Money 2020 that went on to become the largest fintech conference in the world. They have now conferences in the US and Europe and Asia, and they're a very well-respected brand. And so then he developed this playbook and he repeated it with Shop Talk, an e-commerce conference, and then repeated it with a conference called Health and Vive and the healthcare innovation space. And so Primary, my old firm that I worked at, they had invested in health and in Shop Talk. So they knew a little bit about the model. They were interested in kind of investing in another business like it. And it was really that coalescing of having this model

• 7:43Speaker 00

  and then also going out and seeing kind of the need in the market for understanding this technology, where it plays in, and just getting the right people in a room together, which, believe it or not, is hard to do. And it's funny because it's an AI conference, but like at the end of the day, our business is about meeting people face to face. And it's about people, not technology, and that's why we call it Human X.

• 8:03Craig S. Smith?

  You got together with him and then the other.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then Stefan, my CEO, so where he comes into all this. So Stefan is a longtime tech exec. He was the CEO, the head of Bing for a while. You know, worked at Microsoft under Satya, under Gates. He was at Microsoft for a long time, so from Gates to Satya. And so, you know, he is friends with John. They have a venture capital fund together. They've known each other and been business partners for a few years now. And so John was working at his last conference, Health. So he couldn't be the CEO of this business. He's our chairman and he's been. Incredibly helpful. We couldn't do it without him, but he couldn't be the day to day CEO. And so he said, actually, I have a friend who, you know, is currently unemployed.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  If you call, you know, running a venture fund on the side and being unemployed, but unemployed. And nonetheless, was looking for another kind of route. And so, you know, we met up, we went to John's other conferences, we went to health, we went to Money 2020. Just to see the scale and kind of the production value, as you can tell, it's quite different than other conferences. And I should say for all of these, he sold all of the other ones at this point. So, you know, I can't really speak to what they look like today, but I know when he started them and when they're running them, they looked a lot like this. And so, and so he said, I have this friend who, you know, who's unemployed and would be interested in doing this. And so we kind of got together, we listened to what John had to say about how to do this.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  You know, we talked it over, then Stefan and I kind of scoured the US looking for other AI conferences. We went to a whole bunch and we just found like, you know what, they weren't targeting this audience. They weren't executive level, they weren't for business leaders and they weren't doing it the way that John would do it. And making it this really experiential thing with dogs and massages and martinis. And, and so we said, we can do it better.

• 9:51Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, I go to a lot of conferences. And as I say, I tend to go to the research conferences, but I get invited to conferences all over the world.

• 10:03Craig S. Smith?

  How, you know, I'm busy, I can't get to all the conferences that I'm invited to. People are busy and there's whether or not they're fit the market that you see, they're still drawing people. How do you get people to come and you have a really strong lineup of speakers?

• 10:28Speaker 00

  You know, it's one of those snowball effects where. Once you have, you know, some of your top five speakers, like, once you say, okay, the CEO of Snowflake is coming, you know, once you say the co-founder of Hugging Face is coming, or the CEO of Mistral, or the Chief Product Officer of OpenAI, Chief Product Officer of Anthropic, Vinod Khosla, I can go on and on, you know, it makes it a much easier sell, of course, to the other people, because they say, one, I want to see myself next to them,

• 10:51Craig S. Smith?

  and two, I want to meet them, and like, hey, they're building something really interesting,

• 10:54Speaker 00

  and, you know, we had the Chief Data Officer of McDonald's here, like, they're like, hey, maybe we could do something, you know, and collaborate with OpenAI, for example. So, I think, once you get the first few, then you're golden, and it's a lot easier.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  You know, for us, getting those first few were really, in part, due to the incredible network of Stefan and John. They've been working in tech for decades, Stefan in particular, and so it was just, you know, really easy to get, you know, calling up his friends, whether it was Gina of Mighty Networks, or Shaun White of Inflection, and say, hey, can you do me a solid, and, you know, believe in us, that we're going to tell you we're going to bring 3,300 people to this thing, and it's going to be incredible, and we're going to have the top speakers in AI, but, obviously, when we started, we didn't, and so they believed in us, which was required, someone had to. And then, you know, it's kind of that snowball, well then, okay, we'll get the co-founder of Databricks, too, and this guy wants to come, and that guy wants to come, and so,

• 11:52Speaker 00

  and so, yeah, that's kind of how you do it, but, yeah, it took a lot of work, and we have an entire speaker team that, you know, all day, every day, spends their waking hours, like, booking people, and getting the right folks in the room, and putting together these incredible panels and discussions, so, you know, we couldn't do it without them.

• 12:10Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, I got to ask, who were the first two guys that you nailed down as the magnet for the others?

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Oh my god, that's a great question. I'm going to have to look back at my notes. So, I can tell you some early people who believed in us when we didn't have a lot of other folks. So, we had Gina, obviously, who I mentioned already, and Shaun. We had someone named Michael Miskowitz, who is a...

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Head of data science at Yext. Um, really great guy. Um, you know, it was a lot of cold emailing at that point, cold LinkedIn messaging. He took a meeting with us. He was like, yeah, I'm down. Great. Um, so that was, that was really great. And then, uh, Ben Ni from Google, he's like the, the head of applied AI, I believe. Um, super, super nice guy. Um, and you know, we pitched him on our vision and he said, sure, I'll come. Um, and, uh, yeah, it was really special to be able to meet those people in person and say, like, you know, I, this looks great and we know it looks great, but we couldn't have done it without kind of your early belief in us. So.

• 13:14Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. What was the lead time? When did you start?

• 13:17Speaker 00

  We started a year and a half ago, so we raised a round, um, to put this on our VC back business. We raised around and then we, uh, you know, just went and, uh, started recruiting on all fronts. Speakers, sponsors, attendees, and, um, yeah, here we are.

• 13:30Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And so somebody like, uh, uh, CEO of Mistral.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:36Craig S. Smith?

  Uh, you know, he's not an easy guy to get. Was it that, that, I mean, after you get the first few, then you start reaching out to the, you know, friends, so to speak, and then you start going after these top guys. Um, is that, not that the friends are not top people, I mean, but you know, the, the, the bigger company names.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:57Craig S. Smith?

  Uh, is that just again through the network or?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Build the future of multi-agent software with AGNTCY. The agency is an open source collective building the internet of agents. It's a collaborative layer where agents can discover, connect and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Join Crew AI, Langchain, Llama Index, Browserbase, Cisco and dozens more. The agency is dropping code, specs and services, no strings attached.

• 14:55Craig S. Smith?

  Build with other engineers who care about high-quality, multi-agent software. Visit agntcy.org and add your support. That's A-G-N-T-C-Y dot O-R-G.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Um, no, uh, the, the big people are just like, you know, um, we have a very, very persistent speaker team. And so, uh, you know, I, there's one, one, something, one person I could think of in particular, who would go and say, um, you know, hey, we have this great lineup. Do you want to come? No reply. One week later, hey, we added these two people to lineup. Do you want to come? They're like, no, we can't. Okay, another week, hey, we have two more people. You want to come? No. Uh, and so he just keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Um, but, uh, you know, it's just that like startup energy of being persistent and just go in, go in after what you want, um, and trying to keep getting better and better.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  And hopefully that attracts what you're looking for. Um, and I think in a lot of cases it did, so we're, we're super grateful to be here.

• 16:01Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, so you're venture backed and, and the business model is you're sponsorship driven, right?

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 16:08Craig S. Smith?

  There's no gate or, you know, I mean, people aren't paying to come to the conference, or are they?

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, they're paying.

• 16:15Craig S. Smith?

  Okay.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, so our, our business model is-

• 16:17Craig S. Smith?

  Media isn't paying, so I didn't pay.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  No, no, no, we don't want you to pay. Uh, you're, you're doing hard work over here. Um, but yes, no, people are, uh, people are paying to attend the conference. Um, so yeah, ticket sales, uh, ticket sales are, are revenue stream and then, um, sponsorships. So that's, that's what we do.

• 16:36Craig S. Smith?

  Uh, yeah, because I'm impressed, um, with the, with the, the spectrum of, of sponsors that you have here.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  That was my job, so thank you.

• 16:46Craig S. Smith?

  Oh, is that right?

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:47Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, is that just cold calling or, or are there agencies that you go to, to, to put that together?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Oh, it was a whole bunch of work, um, and it was not an agency. No, it was, it was a really, really ambitious, scrappy team. Um, it was myself and two other full-time people just pounding the pavement. Um, you know, it's finding the right contacts, finding the right companies, figuring out what the angle is to get them here and why they'd be relevant. And, um, I mean, it's so gratifying. We were just, I was walking in with a sponsor who, um, who, who stopped me and he was like, hey, we've had like so many amazing conversations. Like our sponsorship is worth five times the ROI that, that we paid and like, you know, we're just like really happy to be here and we're super grateful that you included us. Um, and you know, this isn't like a nothing company. They raised a couple hundred million bucks. They've, you know, they know what they're doing. Um, but it's really great to hear like, you know, we believe that we can bring the right people together to like make deals happen, to make sales,

• 17:39Speaker 00

  to make investments happen in people's companies. Um, and so when I hear stories of that happening, that just warms my heart.

• 17:45Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And what, where does it go from here? I mean, presumably you're into planning next year.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Bigger and better, bigger and better. Um, we're heading to San Francisco next year, so we're going to be at the Moscone Center.

• 17:57Craig S. Smith?

  Oh, great.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  April 7th to 9th.

• 18:00Craig S. Smith?

  Next year.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're going to double. So whatever you think this is, it's nothing compared to next year.

• 18:06Craig S. Smith?

  And at what point, I mean, if you're venture backed, uh, I know that, you know, you're, you're a private company. You don't need to tell me. But at what point do you, uh, you break even and start making money? I mean, in the business plan?

• 18:22Speaker 00

  It's a great question. Um, you know, come back to me after I, uh, take a look at the bill from the hotel. Um, you know, but, uh, it's a good question. Probably like, you know, hopefully next year, uh, we'll be breaking even. Um, we might be breaking even now, you know, I actually just, we have to reconcile. Um, so we're in the middle of this right now. We've got no idea of what we're doing. But, um, the model is like, hopefully we can break even, um, you know, in the next 12 months. And so, uh, we don't anticipate raising another round.

• 18:50Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:51Craig S. Smith?

  And what happens after this? Because you, you. Collect a lot of assets, you know, videos and transcripts and all this stuff. This is the age of AI.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  It is.

• 19:05Craig S. Smith?

  This is an AI conference. Do you do something with all that data that comes out of the conference?

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Oh, man, we do a lot. I'm gonna forget. I mean, it's not my job, so I don't, I'm not as tuned in, but we do a lot. And I think I hear some of those dogs barking, which is great. One of the, one of the best things about the conference in my opinion is having the dog park and being able to like, you know, you got a five minute break, go and pet a Great Dane. Dog you would never like interact with, you know, out on the street. It was, it's perfect. But, um, yeah, I mean, so the pictures and videos, we're gonna update all of our materials. Um, you know, a lot of our pictures were just like taken offline and like photoshopped with the HumanX logo. So now we have real pictures. We can actually show people what it's gonna be like to

• 19:50Speaker 00

  attend our event in San Francisco. Um, so that's really the main thing is like being able to update our website, all of our marketing materials, obviously our socials and LinkedIn's and all that. Um, in addition to that, we're going to be, um,

• 20:06Speaker 00

  what else are we doing? That's a good question. I mean, we, we have a lot like.

• 20:09Craig S. Smith?

  Are there any revenue streams that come out after the fact of that material? Or is it primarily marketing?

• 20:17Speaker 00

  There should be, but I don't know if you can think of a way to get me some revenue from it. I'm all ears. Um, we, we have a partnership with Getty Images, so, uh, you can find HumanX photos on Getty. So if you like search HumanX, for example, journalists will pull that and, um, you know, other, other folks. So like you can find the pictures from Kamala on Sunday and others, which is really great. Um, hopefully some Wyclef pictures from the party tonight. Um, but yeah, other than that, no, it's really just marketing and trying to get people, give people a sense of like the scale and the, the, uh, you know, kind of like the energy and the effort and the enthusiasm that we put into the event and that I feel like you get back out when you see these pictures.

• 20:54Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. I didn't, I miss Kamala Harris. I was still on a plane, but how difficult was it to get her?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  It was pretty difficult. I mean, she was, it was the first paid speaking gig. Um, After she lost the election, so you know, we were super grateful to have her. I think she gave a wonderful speech. She is a politician who I think, you know, regardless of your political views, she was the second most important person in the country for four years. And she was the AI czar and was responsible for a lot of the AI policy. And so, you know, at HumanX, we believe that it's really important to have this dialogue between industry and government. Because at the end of the day, like, government's gonna set the rules of the road, whether you like it or not. And I think, so we also had Representative Obernolte here as well. And you know, what he had to say, which I thought was really fascinating, was that regardless of,

• 21:47Speaker 00

  of like, like government regulation will play a role, regardless of, of kind of like, whether you want it to or not. And so, he kind of offered two scenarios. It was like, you can either have government not regulate you, and then something horrible happens, 2008, something, you know, catastrophic. Hopefully not that bad, but like, something bad happens, and then government steps in, and they're gonna over-regulate. Because we all have a very, you know, short memory, we're gonna remember, or very long memory, rather. We're all gonna remember what happened, and we're gonna say, hey, like, you need to step in, like, this is, this is messed up. Or you can have government add some regulations earlier, and then hopefully, events like that don't happen, and so you can prevent something like that.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  And then maybe you can get to a place where actually you have more tempered and regu- and more regulated. Regulation is, is, is a little redundant, but like, you know, a little bit more tempered regulation at the end of the day. And so I think that's what everyone's looking for, is like, they need to know that there are rules of the road, and that they're not gonna get just pushed off the side of a highway because, hey, I wanna do something, so I'm gonna like, create this law, and it's gonna totally make all these companies now worthless.

• 22:57Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, I know you're busy, I can't imagine all the details you have to deal with. But are you able to sort of have an overview of what's going on in AI through this conference? Or is that asking too much?

• 23:15Speaker 00

  I, I did hear some talks from backstage, and I was introducing people, so, you know, I heard about like, AI21 Labs introducing their new, their new model, which I think is fantastic, and super, super interesting. Some new white papers that came out, like, I know Visa introduced one last night at a reception, which looked really phenomenal. So I know there's a lot going on. Um, I can't say that I've kept up with all of it, so I'm gonna need to go do my homework after this. But no, I mean, it's, there's been so much news broken at this event. Um, and it's, that's, I'm, I'm really grateful for that, but it's, uh, it's too much for me to keep up with. So I'm gonna have to go do some homework. Yeah, yeah. And how many sponsors, how many exhibitors?

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Um, I don't know the exact number of exhibitors, but we have 153 sponsors. Okay. Uh, 3,300 attendees. Yep. 350 speakers, 200 media and press. Yep. Um, so you know, we're, we're super, super proud of what we built and we hope you enjoy it.