Vention NYC TechTable 6
Some rooms are polite. Some are powerful. This one was both, and it had receipts. You could feel it in the way Ali Sarkis, VP of Engineering at Ideon, eased into the moderator seat like he was wiring live code. Or the way Ken Simeon, Director of QA at RippleMatch, spoke not just as an engineer but as a steward of junior talent, defender of the overlooked, and unspoken conscience of a community sprinting toward the next AI frontier.
This was Vention’s sixth TechTable in New York. But it wasn’t dinner. It was a debug session for the entire software industry, with wine. Hosted in Manhattan and curated like a code review for the culture, TechTable 6 was less about who’s right and more about what’s real. The guest list said enough: CTOs, SVPs, AIleads, data engineers, heads of product, every title in the room held weight. But none of that postured. Instead, they passed the mic and pulled the curtain back on how AI isn’t just changing the stack, it’s rewiring the soul of how teams think, hire, and ship.
If you came looking for hype, you left with homework. Novig’s Kelechi Ukah laid it bare: the LLM wave isn’t a cheat code for juniors. It’s a lens that exposes who’s actually fluent in software. You could almost hear the resumes reshuffling as he dissected why some developers get better with AI, and why others get worse. The message wasn’t to fear the machine, but to own the interface. Fluency in English is now fluency in code. Senior engineers aren’t just shipping, they’re shaping product direction, writing specs, running data queries, and reading API contracts like contracts.
And if there was one shared truth in the room, it was this: AI isn’t replacing jobs, it’s replacing excuses. The bandwidth excuses. The alignment excuses. The “we’ll get to it next sprint” excuses. At Sakara Life, Ashley Hirabayashi’s team is squeezing every ounce of velocity out of AI to shrink standups, collapse silos, and let product leads moonlight as growth analysts. At Dataminr, Matt Hill broke down how traditional software engineers are now prompting models instead of writing scripts, blending domain expertise with AI workflows that used to require headcount.
That’s the quiet evolution here. The org chart isn’t just flattening, it’s forking. Companies are asking different questions. Should you reorganize your team, or just redirect prompts? Do you build a unified UI for two products, or teach an AI layer to interface with both? The consensus wasn’t neat. But the conviction was clear: if your company hasn’t rethought its hiring pipeline, its training playbook, or its infrastructure budget post-ChatGPT, you're already legacy.
The night opened with a nod to the past and an eye on the future. One Vention executive, who’s had the rare advantage of attending all six TechTables, reflected on the journey. What started as a simple idea has become something deeper: a live build of trust, candor, and continuous improvement. Every event has taught something new, about what today’s engineering leaders need, about what makes conversations click, and most importantly, about how to refine these dinners for maximum value going forward. It’s a commitment to learning, to growing, and to designing spaces where meaningful connections aren’t just made, they’re multiplied.
Because what matters most right now is what engineering leaders are actually talking about behind closed doors. Not press releases. Not LinkedIn threads. Not AI as theater, but AI as tool, test, and terrain. They’re talking about the collapse of traditional team boundaries. The sudden literacy PMs need in infrastructure. The hard truth that product excellence is now inseparable from data visibility. And the organizational reckoning that comes with fewer hires and higher expectations.
TechTable isn’t a panel. It’s a pulse check. It’s the backchannel, the group chat, the real talk over risotto. And the future of these dinners? It’s not about scale. It’s about signal. It’s about keeping them intimate, insightful, and indispensable. Because in a world sprinting toward the abstract, the engineering leaders who win will be the ones who stay grounded, in learning, in growing, and in each other.
Let’s connect and keep the momentum going across the tech ecosystem. Whether you’re a founder shaping the future, a leader driving change, a VC backing bold ideas, or an investor spotting the next big thing, together, we’re pushing boundaries. Proud to be building the future with you.
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