AI Agent Arena: Ten Agents, Five Minutes Each, Live Demos Only
Igniter Silicon Valley presents AI Agent Arena on Thursday, October 22, 2026 at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto. Ten teams, five minutes each, live demos only — no slides. The audience votes on Best AI Agent, Most Innovative, the "Holy Sh*t" Demo, Most Commercially Valuable, Best Early-Stage Team and AI Agent of the Night. Tickets from $5.
August 28
Three AI Agents in Sixty Minutes: Parallel, Router, Dynamic
Twenty minutes of theory, sixty minutes of building. What a room of product managers, engineers and founders actually took home from the Igniter Silicon Valley no-code agentic AI bootcamp — the agent loop, five components, three architectures built live (parallel, router, dynamic), and the guardrails and triggers that decide whether any of it ships.
August 21
How to Learn Agentic AI: 50 Real Questions, Answered
Not another beginner's guide. 50 real questions practitioners asked before the Advanced Agentic AI Workshop — tokens, context windows, guardrails, evals, production deployment — each answered individually.
August 20
Your Head Start Has an Expiration Date
Notes from Yossi Feinberg's "AI and the Nature of the Firm" at the Stanford Ignite 20th reunion — the production function, the three chairs, migration cost as the size of your head start, and why every agentic system is secretly an org chart. Read through the eyes of an agentic AI founder.
August 13
The Cost of Trust
Every layer that makes AI reliable — grounding, evaluation, verification, human review — adds money, latency, and effort. How much reliability to buy is a budget decision, not a technical one.
August 6
Zero Hallucination Is a Lie
"Our AI never hallucinates" is a sales pitch, not an engineering claim. Stop chasing a perfect model you can't have — and start engineering error that's bounded, detectable, and recoverable.
August 6
From Mirage to Milestone
A pilot doesn't become a product by hoping. It graduates — through a set of deliberate gates that turn an impressive demo into a system you'd stake your name on. The AI Mirage playbook, assembled.
August 6
Risk-Tiering Your Use Cases
One AI policy for everything is the surest way to be both reckless and slow. The fix is a tier — a simple map from "brainstorm freely" to "zero error" that tells you exactly how much to worry.
August 6
AI Edge for Leaders, July 2026: The Confident Hallucination
The most dangerous AI failure isn't being wrong — it's being wrong so fluently that everyone stops checking. Issue 07 of AI Edge for Leaders: the confidence trap, the demo-to-deployment cliff, evals, grounding, humans at the commit point, and the rise of vertical AI agents.
July 30