The Future of AI

Lutz Finger is a Silicon Valley technologist and Cornell faculty member with 20+ years of experience building AI-driven products and platforms at Google, LinkedIn, and Snap. He is a serial entrepreneur (R2Decide, acquired in 2025; Fisheye Analytics, acquired in 2013) and currently leads AI strategy at XGEN AI, developing next-generation generative retail solutions.

Finger is also a frequent Forbes contributor on AI and the future of commerce. He is a Venture Partner at Cherry Ventures, serves on multiple advisory boards, and has advised and invested in data-centric companies across the United States and Europe. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and an M.S. in Quantum Physics from TU Berlin.

Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s $1.25 billion infrastructure practice. Dr. Casado first joined the firm in 2016 and currently serves on the boards of ActionIQ, Ambient.ai, Astranis, Braintrust, Coactive, Convex, Cursor, dbt Labs, Distributional, Fivetran, Ideogram, Imply, Kong, Material Security, Metronome, Netlify, Pindrop Security, Preset, Tackle, Tecton, Truffle, and World Labs. He previously served on the boards of DeepMap.ai (acquired by NVIDIA), Isovalent (acquired by Cisco), Orbit (acquired by Postman), Parsec Gaming (acquired by Unity), Tabular (acquired by Databricks), and Yubico (IPO $YUBICO).  

Dr. Casado was the cofounder and chief technology officer at Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. While at VMware, he was a fellow and served as a senior vice president and general manager of the networking and security business unit, which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate business by the time he left VMware in 2016.

Dr. Casado started his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before moving over to work with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity. These experiences inspired Dr. Casado’s work at Stanford, where he helped pioneer the software-defined networking (SDN) movement. While at Stanford, he also co-founded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006.

For his work, Dr. Casado was awarded both the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award and the NEC C&C award, and he’s an inductee of the Lawrence Livermore Lab Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame. Dr. Casado holds both a Ph.D. and Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.