Sign up for Walnut Coffee Chat

Hi Walnut friends,

I bet most of you have gotten advice from your university’s career development center, or had a mentor walk you through how to do a coffee chat.

For me, coffee chats turned out to be much more than career advice. When I look back, almost every turning point in my career started the same way: two people, two cups of coffee, and an hour of honest conversation.

When I switched majors in my sophomore year, the first thing I did was to ask a senior from my new program for coffee. She had finished her Data Science degree 2 years earlier. In one conversation, she mapped out which courses to take, what research to get into, and how to land internships. It saved me a year of guessing.

I graduated in spring 2023, into a rough job market for tech industry, and as an international student it felt even rougher. So I kept doing coffee chats, this time with people about 2-3 years into their careers. They told me what interviews really looked like, flagged roles worth applying for, and referred me in.

Later in 2023, I moved from LA to the Bay Area without knowing anyone, so I did 60 coffee chats with a social media post. Those people became my first circle of friends here.

In 2025, I was leaving my job and torn between joining a VC firm or staying on the startup path. Once again, I talked it through with founders and investors across the ecosystem until the answer became clear. I stayed on the startup path and co-founded Walnut AI with David, someone I had first met over one of those coffee chats back in 2023.

See? True connections are built before you need them. When the moment comes, they’re already there, picking up your call. That’s something a last-minute LinkedIn post, sent out to whoever happens to see it, can never give you.

What Agents Meet taught us

We built Agents Meet to help you find people really worth meeting at crowded events, so you could save the time and don’t need to randomly talk with people to see if you have synergy.

It works. But we kept seeing the same thing happen after the match. You find the right person, then lose them in the crowd. Or you get 5 to 10 minutes to make an introduction and swap contacts. It’s not enough to actually get to know someone.

Although our original design was to introduce you two and let you find time to chat and connect properly, I know that’s hard to make happen with such an intense event schedule.

So we want to try something slower and further.

Sign up for Walnut Coffee Chat

How Walnut Coffee Chat works

1. Sign up for a session at one of our partnered Joe & The Juice stores in SF or Palo Alto, stating what kind of people you want to meet and what help you could provide to others.

2. Walnut AI agents put you in a group of 4, matched with people worth knowing for you, and they will also get something out of meeting you.

3. Come at your group’s time slot. Your drink is covered with your ticket.

4. No agenda, no pitch. Just 4 people at one table, with icebreaker cards to help get the conversation going.

Why four, not two? One-on-one chats are often lopsided. One side wants the meeting more than the other, and the other side possibly keeps pushing it back for something more urgent, or rushes through it when it finally happens. With 4 people matched together, there is at least one person at the table you want to meet, and at least one who wants to meet you. So the conversation can keep moving, and it will be meaningful and beneficial to everyone.

Besides, these chats are ticketed on purpose. A free Luma invite is easy to accept and just as easy to forget, while purchasing a ticket could make people think seriously, and much more possibly show up.

Of course, your ticket includes one drink of your choice from Joe & The Juice’s coffee & tea menu. So if you sign up at the early-bird price, it’s close to buying yourself a cup of coffee or tea. The first sessions run at one San Francisco store and one Palo Alto store, with groups arriving in time slots across the day.

Early-bird pricing ends this Sunday, November 15 Midnight!

Sign up for Walnut Coffee Chat

Where this goes

If the feedback is good, we’ll make this a regular thing. We also want to grow it to more cafes and more cities. More people in the pool means better matches for everyone at the table.

Imagine one afternoon a month where you sit down with 3 new people who is highly related with what your focus now over coffee for two hours. By the end of the year, that means 30+ people you’ve had a real deep conversation with.

That’s worth far more than 300 new LinkedIn connections whose names you can’t remember.

So who should come? If you have something urgent on your plate, like getting advice from founders who’ve been there, or looking for a new job, just come. If you simply want to invest in your future network, the way I did when I first landed in the Bay Area knowing no one, come even more. The magic usually happens when nothing is planned.

Coffee chats changed the course of my career more than once. I’d love for them to do the same for you.

See you at the table ❤️

Nicole

Cofounder at Walnut AI

Sign up for Walnut Coffee Chat

There were 475 people at CoRL 2026 saying publicly that they want to meet. This guide puts all of them in one place.

We read every public post we could find from CoRL week on X and LinkedIn, looking for those actively want to connect with others. We kept only people who said, in their own words, that they’re open to a DM, a coffee or a hello. They range from first-year PhD students to founders and VPs of top AI startups and big tech companies.

The guide has four parts:

1. Who is investing: 6 investors in Austin this week.

2. Who is hiring: 44 companies are hiring, and you could find out who to ask and where to find them here.

3. Who wants to meet: A list of people actively asking for DMs or coffee chat, and we curate the list grouped by role.

4. Come say hi: Many people welcome visitors at their poster, talk or booth, and you could get more information before really meeting them offline.

Missing someone, or want your entry changed? Reply to our post and we’ll update the guide.

Who is investing

Six investors posted that they’re in Austin and open to meeting founders and researchers, and two of them are hosting their own events.

• Isha Mehrotra: Investor at Uncork Capital. She wants to talk about World models, sim2real, HW–SW co-design, dexterous manipulation. Reach her via DM, and her Physical AI x Data mixer, which is on Wed 11/11, 6 - 7:30 PM.

• Vivek Sodera: Founder of Supercharge VC (pre-seed), Superhuman. He Wants to talk about deployment, data, sim, models, safety and manufacturing. Reach him via DM.

• Amulya Vishwanath: Founder of Techable VC. She wants to talk with Robotics founders, investors and operators. Reach her via her side event on Saturday.

• Taejoon Park: VP, Head of Investments at LG Technology Ventures. He wants to talk about Robotics broadly. Reach him via DM on LinkedIn.

• Siddharth Gupta: Managing Director at Samsung Ventures. He wants to talk with Robotics researchers and founders. Reach him via DM on LinkedIn.

• Wilson Lin: Investor at DCG. He wants to talk about Robot learning, data, simulation, safety, research-to-product. Reach him via DM on LinkedIn.

Who is hiring

44 teams and labs said they’re hiring this week. Big tech and autonomy teams are mostly at booths, and startups prefer DMs.

Big tech, autonomy and research labs

• Amazon (FAR & Robotics): Full-time researchers and PhD interns, whole-body control and loco-manipulation, full-time and interns. Ask Yunsheng Tian, Shamel Fahmi, Ifrah Idrees at Booth 606.

• Apple: Robotics research scientists, ML and AI engineers, research engineers, postdocs, full-time and interns. Ask Somrita Banerjee, Nagarakshith Makam Sreenivasulu, Chen Chen, Matthias Mueller, Siyuan Hu at Booth 806.

• Tesla: Policy, world models, pre-training, on-robot inference. Ask Shashank Sangar at Booth 1006.

• General Motors: Research and technology careers in robotics and AV. Ask Randy Visser, Alex Garza, Katherine Johnson at Booth 406.

• Nuro: ML research, behavior, perception. Ask Kai-Chieh Hsu, Vincent Bui via DM.

• Waymo: PhD research intern, summer 2027. Ask Letian Chen via DM.

• Zipline: Hiring across the board. Ask Rohit Sant at Booth 706.

• Toyota Research Institute: World Foundation Models research interns, summer 2027. Ask Swati Gupta at Booth 506 (recruiting team on site).

• Honda Research Institute USA: Winter/spring 2027 interns focusing on learning-based motion planning, end-to-end AD. Ask Avinash Singh via DM.

• Intuitive Surgical: Full-time research scientists/engineers and research interns (motion AI). Ask Govinda Payyavula via DM.

Robotics and physical AI companies

• Apptronik: Multiple roles. Ask Matt B., Nate Kurtz, Aileen Aguilar Edwards, Skye Windsor, Kathryn Marinaro at Booth 800.

• Skild AI: Open roles. Ask Poorvi Hebbar via DM.

• Applied Intuition: Full-time and intern roles. Ask Prithwish Dan via DM.

• Rhoda AI: Open roles. Ask Changan Chen via Coffee Chat on Tue/Wed.

• Eka Robotics: RL, sim2real, manipulation. Ask Pratik Kunapuli, Pulkit Agrawal and submit application form.

• Humanoid: VLA/RL. Ask Jarad Cannon in person.

• 1X: model and data, data infrastructure and more. Ask Libing Zeng via DM.

• Walden Robotics: Open roles. Ask Ashneel S. at Booth 104.

• FieldAI: 100+ open roles, 20 at the FieldAI Research Institute. Ask Patrick H. via DM.

• Bedrock Robotics: Hiring across the board. Ask Joshua Manela, Kevin Peterson via DM.

• Holiday Robotics: Internships and full-time. Ask Hojoon Lee at Booth 504 and hiring session on Tue 5:15 PM.

• Booster Robotics: Open roles. Ask Rico at Booth 101.

• Xynova: Overseas sales, technical support, engineers. Ask their team via walk-in session in Room 209.

• Sharpa: On-site recruitment session and at Booth 400.

• Dream Labs: Open roles, including interns. Ask Jeremy Collins via DM.

• Machenta: Open roles. Ask Ed Johns in Exhibition area.

• Ixian Robotics: ML, software, hardware in SF. Ask Jacob Zietek via DM or email.

• Verne Robotics: Scientists and engineers. Ask Neil Nie via DM for coffee.

• Orbifold AI: Research and engineering. Ask Stephanie Shi via DM.

• Gritt AI: Construction robotics roles. Ask Vishal Dugar via DM.

• Artificial Analysis: Robotics team. Ask Peiyi Chen via DM.

• OrphLux: GTM, BD, project management, solution engineering. Ask Selina B. via DM.

• AIM Intelligence: Robot engineers (physical AI safety). Ask Dasol Choi via DM.

• Persona AI: Humanoid roles. Ask Andrew Almasi via DM for coffee.

• RAI Institute: May hire interns soon. Ask Thomas Weng via DM.

• Prometheus: Open roles. Ask Oier Mees.

Academic labs

• TU Darmstadt: 2 postdocs: learning for control; structured learning and world models. Ask Georgia Chalvatzaki in person.

• Mila / Université de Montréal: Postdocs and students. Ask Glen Berseth via DM.

• Georgia Tech: 1 PhD + 1 postdoc, fall 2027. Ask Harish Ravichandar in person.

• Georgia Tech: PhD students and postdocs: humanoid loco-manipulation, deformable and dexterous manipulation. Ask Lu Gan.

• UT Dallas (TERAS Lab): PhD and Master’s students. Ask Neel P. Bhatt.

• Northeastern: Interns, PhD students, postdocs. Ask Taskin Padir in person.

• University of New Hampshire: PhD students: failure modes and safety of imitation learning. Ask Momotaz Begum in person or via message.

Who wants to meet

324 people asked for DMs, coffee or a meetup in their own posts. Below are a few featured names from academia and top companies. The full list with links to their posts is in this curated sheet. You could check the full list here.

Academia

• Marco Pavone: Associate Professor at Stanford, where he directs the Autonomous Systems Lab, and Director of Autonomous Systems and Physical AI Research at NVIDIA. He is known for Trajectron++ trajectory forecasting, and he is a PECASE recipient who previously worked as a roboticist at NASA JPL.

• Jeannette Bohg: Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford and director of the Interactive Perception and Robot Learning Lab, the lab behind TidyBot and TidyBot++. She has won the 2019 ICRA Best Paper Award, the IEEE RAS Early Career Award, the RSS Early Career Award and a 2023 Sloan Fellowship.

• Pulkit Agrawal: Associate Professor at MIT EECS, director of the Improbable AI Lab at CSAIL, and co-founder of Eka Robotics. Eka recently raised a $150M Series A for force-aware Vision-Force-Action models and is hiring. He received the 2024 IEEE Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation.

• Danfei Xu: Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech, where he directs the Robot Learning and Reasoning Lab, and a research lead at NVIDIA GEAR. He is senior author of EgoMimic, built with Meta’s Project Aria glasses, which found that an extra hour of human hand data beats an extra hour of robot data.

• Georgia Chalvatzaki: Program Chair of CoRL 2026 and head of the PEARL Lab at TU Darmstadt. She holds an ERC Starting Grant and a DFG Emmy Noether grant, is an ELLIS Scholar, and won the Alfried Krupp Prize. She is hiring 2 postdocs.

• Siddharth Karamcheti: Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech and Autonomy Research Lead at Walden Robotics. He is co-first author of OpenVLA, a 7B open-source VLA trained on 970K real-world robot demos. He was previously at Hugging Face, Toyota Research Institute and Facebook AI Research.

• Jiafei Duan: NUS Presidential Young Professor leading the MAGIC Lab, who co-led the open-source robotics foundation models MolmoAct and MolmoAct2 at UW and Ai2. At CoRL 2026, the work has a Spotlight for MolmoAct2 and an Oral for MolmoBot, which shows embodied reasoning on a $6K robot.

Check Full List

Founders & Execs from Big Tech and Top AI Startups

• Changan Chen: Rhoda AI($450M Series A), World Models.

• Jarad Cannon: Humanoid($152M Series A), Humanoids, VLA/Foundation Models, RL

• Maoqing Yao: AGIBOT (Co-founder & President)

• Soha Pouya: NVIDIA(Sr. Director, Robotics), Humanoids, Sim/Sim2Real

• Amit Goel: NVIDIA (Head of Robotics Ecosystem), Sim/Sim2Real, Evaluation

• Nima Gard: Director of AI at Path Robotics($100M Series D), RL, VLA/Foundation Models, Deployment

• Kevin Peterson: CTO at Bedrock Robotics ($600M Series C), Deployment

• Jacob Zietek: Ixian Robotics (a16z, Accel), Deployment

• Jason Ma: Cofounder at Dyna Robotics($120M Series A), VLA/Foundation Models, Continual/Self-improving

Check Full List

This list only covers people who posted publicly on X or LinkedIn. If you’re at CoRL and want to be added, or want your entry changed, reply to our post.

Walnut AI is devoted to helping you find the right people in any setting and nurturing those relationships so no connection goes cold.

Follow us for more connect guide at future conferences ❤️

Hi there 👋

There’s no shortage of great events in the Bay Area this fall, and we know your calendar is full. After looking closely at the speaker lineups, the strength of the community behind them, and the track record of past editions, we wanted to highlight two that we think are especially worth your time. We’re proud to partner with both, and we’ve secured an exclusive discount for the Walnut community.

🧠 SGLang Summit

Time: Nov. 12 - 13, 2026

Location: Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA

One of this year’s top gatherings for AI infrastructure and research, with speakers from OpenAI, Perplexity, Intel, and Thinking Machines on one stage.

On the main stage: OpenAI’s Lilian Weng, Thinking Machines Lab CTO Soumith Chintala, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, plus founders from River AI, humans&, Harmonic, and Recursive. Main stage talks feature RSI, AI Hardware, AI agents, open models, neolabs, and more.

In the breakouts: Topics include reinforcement learning, evals, cloud infrastructure, robotics, world models and more. There are also hands-on workshops, a GPU expo, and community networking with 30+ partners.

Two days, 2000+ attendees, 100+ speakers, 30+ sessions.

Developers, students, and researchers can get 40% off with Developer & Edu passes. Early bird ends on October 20, so don’t miss it today!

Besides, Walnut community members can get extra 20% off with code COMM20-37F9FED

RSVP for SGLang Summit

🚀 DECODE Conference

Time: Nov. 14, 2026

Location: Brower Center, Berkeley, CA

A rare chance to get 1:1 time with execs from OpenAI, NVIDIA, NEA, Cisco, and Atlassian, people who are usually very hard to reach.

If your startup is stuck on something, bring it here. DECODE is built around tactical 1:1 advice from people who have scaled companies before.

Featured speakers:

• Jeetu Patel, President & Chief Product Officer at Cisco

• Lila Tretikov, Partner at NEA, former Deputy CTO at Microsoft

• Anu Bharadwaj, Partner at ICONIQ, former President at Atlassian

• Tashfeen Suleman, Director of Engineering at NVIDIA and former YC founder

• Vaibhav Aggarwal, Head of Growth Engineering at OpenAI

Past attendees have raised pre-seed through Series A rounds from investors they met at DECODE, including a16z, Sequoia, Y Combinator and more. Others found advisors, mentors, and teammates there.

Join DECODE conference today, and Walnut community members can get 30% off with code WALNUT

RSVP for DECODE Conference

If you’re going to either event, reply and let us know. We’d love to say hi in person, and we’ll help you get the most out of the room.

Walnut AI team ❤️

Hi there 👋

Before looking into our feature update, I am curious how many meetings last week you took and how many meetings you really needed to take. For most founders I talk to, the honest answer is “less than half”. The other half came with no context, the wrong person, or a demo calendar link that let anyone in.

That’s the problem we’ve been heads-down on. Today we’re opening up a new feature in Walnut AI: Meeting Agent.

Meeting Agent: your agent works before you show up

This feature is built around one idea: not every person is worth your time meeting with them. Your AI agent should do the work before you show up. It comes in three modes, depending on how much filtering you need.

⚡ Express Meeting

In most cases, you have already decided to have a meeting with someone, maybe someone referred by a friend, maybe have talked with him or her for 5 minutes at the event before and think you should grab a coffee. Anyway, if you need a link to book meetings with someone quickly, express meeting is the fastest setup: create it, share it, and people can book. Perfect for the “let’s grab 15 minutes” moments.

📋 Advanced Information Collection

Sometimes, your calendar link will be shared in different groups with the goal of hiring, seeking partnerships or demo booking. Decide what you want to know before anyone lands on your calendar is important. The agent can help collect their company, what they want to discuss, a deck, a resume or anything else. You walk into every meeting already prepared, instead of spending the first ten minutes on “so, tell me what you do.”

🤖 AI Vetting

This is the one I’m most proud of. Tell your agent who you want to meet, and it screens requests against your standards and answers people’s questions on your behalf. Only the right conversations will make it to your calendar. This is pretty great for fundraising, hiring, or anyone with more inbound than hours.

🎟️ Want to Try? Book 15 Minutes’ Demo with Me

This feature is still in beta testing, and we only want to invite a small group of people who really need it to first try it and help us improve the feature. Here is the process: Book a walkthrough with me here(I really want to use Walnut to book the meeting, but it cannot be shared directly now. I will change it very soon), and I will show you how to use the product, help you set up your first meeting link, and give you:

• An invitation code to get in

• 3 months of Premium for free

I would appreciate if you could share with me all the feedbacks, like what’s confusing, what’s missing, what new features you would like to add. This version will be shaped by the first people who use it ❤️

Book a Meeting with Nicole

📍 Come to Hang Out with Walnut: Builder Odyssey

Walnut AI is excited to become the community partner for Builder Odyssey, hosted by SEAMATE and Linkloud in San Francisco this Sunday.

500+ AI founders, builders, creators, and investors are expected for an afternoon following AI from infrastructure to production. Speakers come from Gen, TinyFish, NewsBreak, Cresta, fal and more, across three tracks:

• AI Infrastructure: how tokens get produced, routed, and priced in the agent era

• Multimodal AI: what the next big video and multimodal product looks like

• AI’s Last Mile: can the Forward Deployed Engineer model actually scale?

If you are building something, there’s also a Founder Open Mic to demo your product to a group of high quality founders and investors. Sign up now to join the Open Mic!

I’ll also be there to demo our new feature. Come to say hi!

Register on Luma

💭 Nicole’s Note

The more founders I talked to, the clearer it got: people don’t need another place to network. Instead, they need fewer but better connections and conversations.

That’s why we designed this feature. Meetings, happening every day, are the moments where networking turns into something real, and also where the most time gets wasted. If your agent can protect that moment, everything else gets easier.

See you next time,

Nicole

Hi there 👋

SF Tech Week starts tomorrow, and this year there are near 2000 events. That’s more than anyone could read about, let alone attend. Last year I spent hours scrolling event pages and still missed the room I should have been in.

So we built three small tools for this week. Each one does a single job.

1. Show up: your Tech Week itinerary card

Pick the events you’re going to, and you get a card that says “Meet me at SF Tech Week.” It lists your week day by day, and you can post it on X, LinkedIn, or your story.

It’s the easiest way to say “I’ll be there, come say hi,” and it turns a crowded week into a set of planned run-ins. Anyone who sees your card can scan the QR code to set up a meeting with you.

Make Your Card

2. Find events: read all 1878 events in 3 minutes

Tell it what you care about this week, like meeting seed investors, hiring engineers, or learning about robotics, and rank your priorities. In about a minute it reads every Tech Week event and gives each one a fit score. Each score comes with a short explanation of why that event is worth your time. All of the speaker information is considered into it.

This used to take several hours of tab-hopping. Now it takes one minute, and the result is a shortlist built around your goals instead of whatever is trending.

It’s built on Jev, the new popular model, and this tool is one of the first places you can see it in action. We will gradually launch more professional networking tools in this Jevit marketplace, to help you navigate your professional growth.

Limited time: get 50% off with code PAYG50.

Jevit to find your event

3. Let your Agent help you find right people to meet

Being at the right events doesn’t help much if you spend them talking to the wrong people. Agents Meet fixes that. You share your name, LinkedIn, your goal for the week, and your superpower. Your AI digital twin then meets everyone else who signed up for this and finds the people you should actually talk to.

Matches go out on Monday. After that, it’s up to you to reach out and grab a coffee between sessions.

We’ve already run Agents Meet at 20+ events with 7000+ matches conducted. SF will be the biggest one yet.

Join Agents Meet

🗺️ Partner with Walnut AI

Agents Meet now is a regular way that we help events keep engaging with their attendees. If you want to use it for your event or conference, feel free to reach out to us via media@walnut.ai, and we will help bring this new networking intelligence experience to your event. All tokens consumption is on us.

💭 Watt’s Note

Conferences have an odd problem. More events should mean more opportunity, but past a certain point they just create more noise. At near 2000 events, most people stop choosing and either follow their friends or follow the hype.

I don’t think the answer is to attend more. I think it’s to choose better, then show up and make it easy for the right people to find you. Those are the three steps these tools cover: choose with the event matcher, connect with Agents Meet, and show up with the itinerary card.

If you see me at any of the events on my card, please come say hi. I’d love to hear what you’re building.

Try all three before tomorrow morning, and send me your itinerary card. I’ll reshare my favorites!

See you this week,

Watt

Cofounder of Walnut AI

October is stacking up nicely, and we’d love to see you. Whether you want to get on stage, put a live product in front of a room, talk shop with founders and investors at a pace where you can actually finish a sentence, or bring us in to help fill your own event. The following is how to find us.

1. Assembling 2026 | AI Summit

Friday, Oct 2 · 10 am – 6 pm · San Francisco

One focused day, three tracks:

• Founders: moats, unit economics, and building for agent users

• Builders: real architecture and infra calls while the ground is still moving

• Creators: two hands-on workshops on judgment, process, and what to learn next

What you’ll actually walk away with: founders who’ve been through it sharing the tactics behind the numbers, live product demos, and lunch on us. Speakers are being announced soon.

General Tickets are free for founders, builders, students, researchers, and community friends. If you want VIP access, Walnut community members get an exclusive 20% off discount with code WALNUT20.

👉 Sign up here

Building something you want in front of a room? Founder demo slots are still open. You will have 5–7 minutes with a live product.

👉 Apply to demo here

2. Slow Run, Fast Talk: VC & Founders Mixer

Mon–Fri, Oct 5–9 · 8:00 am - 9:30 am · #SFTechWeek

A daily Zone 2 run for founders and investors, slow enough to hold a real conversation the whole way.

It’s the opposite of the loud 7pm mixer with 90 seconds per person: 45 minutes side by side, then coffee at 8:45. No decks, nobody left behind. RSVP once, show up whenever you can, and meet different people each morning.

👉 Sign up here

3. Consumer AI Showcase: Live Demos & The Retention Playbook

Tuesday, Oct 6 · 10 am – 2 pm · #SFTechWeek

Getting someone to try your AI product is easy. Getting them back on day 30 is where most consumer AI companies quietly break.

We built this morning around that gap: a panel with people who’ve shipped consumer AI at scale: what their retention curves actually looked like, and what finally moved the number, followed by six founders demoing live products. No slides, just the thing running. Plenty of time to meet the 100+ curated consumer AI founders, builders, and operators in the room.

👉 Sign up here

👉 Apply to demo here (Applications close Oct 2.)

Our previous pitch event:

4. Host something during TechCrunch? Let’s do it together. 🤝

If you’re running something in October during TechCrunch, we can help on two fronts:

• Marketing. We’ll put your event in front of our community of founders, builders, investors, and operators, across this newsletter, our channels, and community calendars we manage on Luma.

• Agents Meet. Our AI matchmaking layer for events: attendees get matched to the people they should actually meet before they walk in, with intros handled ahead of time. We’ve run it at 20+ events and conducted 20K+ matches across 5000+ people. This greatly increase attendees’ show up rate and engagement.

You keep your event, your brand, your agenda. We just make the room more live.

Reach out to Walnut Team about your event

Four different rooms, one thing in common: enough time to actually talk to someone, and make real connections.

I cannot wait to see you in October.

The Walnut Team ❤️

Hey everyone,

Over the past few months, I’ve pitched Walnut AI more than 10 times, at demo days, investor meetings, on stages in front of strangers. And every single time, something happened that a cold email or a quiet DM never could: someone in the room actually engaged. A follow-up question. A card exchanged. A “let’s talk after this.” Those 10+ pitches turned into 1 investment check, 100+ curated seed users, 20+ pieces of real feedback, and 4 partnerships.

That’s the thing about public pitching. It’s not just a practice. It’s visibility. It’s the fastest way to get in front of the right people and find out, in real time, whether what you’re building actually resonates.

So we wanted to build that room for other founders too.

• Title: AI Startup Pitch Night with Early Stage Investors

• Time: August 5th, 5:00–8:30 PM

• Location: AWS Builder Loft in SF

👉 Sign up here: https://luma.com/ai-startup-pitch

What to Expect

8 early-stage founders will be selected to pitch live in front of a panel of early-stage investors. The judge panel includes investors from Antler, Fusion Fund, and Llama Ventures, with more to be confirmed. This isn’t a polished, pre-recorded demo, instead it’s real-time pitching and real-time investor feedback, in front of a room that’s there to watch, learn, and connect.

Who’s in the room

Beyond the 8 finalists, expect 150+ founders, builders, and investors in attendance. It’s a rare chance to build real relationships: swap notes with founders solving similar problems, get face time with investors actively looking at the space, and meet collaborators, hires, or your next customer before the night is over.

15+ founders have already applied to pitch, and 10+ investors have confirmed to be in the room. This is filling up fast, so if you want to apply, don’t wait.

Agents Meet Will be Applied: Skip the Small Talk, Find the Right People

Big rooms are only as valuable as the people you actually get to talk to, and with so many attendees in one place, that’s easier said than done. That’s why we’re bringing Agents Meet to this event too: you just tell your Digital Twin who you’re hoping to connect with (a co-founder, an investor, a specific kind of customer or a candidate), and it does the matching for you before you even walk in the door. No scanning name tags, no guessing who’s worth your 10 minute, and just a curated list of people worth meeting, waiting in your inbox.

We’ve run this kind of event before at many conferences and past attendees have walked away with co-founder matches, investor conversations, and new customers. This pitch night is the next, and we want to invite you to join.

👉 Sign up here: https://luma.com/ai-startup-pitch

Another Event We Will Partner

If you’ll be in Singapore the beginning of August, Antler is hosting a side event on “Going Global: Structural Foundations,” for founders expanding internationally. We are partnering on this event too, so your Digital Twin will match you with the right people before you even walk in.

This event is free, but approval-required, and open only to AGI Playground ticket holders. If you want to attend, register for AGI Playground first, then sign up for the side event with the same email.

That’s what we’ve got coming up — an SF pitch night for founders ready to get in front of investors, and a Singapore side event for anyone chasing AGI Playground 2026. Two very different rooms, same idea: the right conversation, at the right time, can change everything.

Hope to see some of you at one or both 🫶

Wishing you all a great weekend!

Best,

Nicole & The Walnut AI Team ❤️

Hi there 👋

Have you ever had such an experience? Tons of business cards have died in your bag or boxes over the years: great conversation, real intent to follow up, and then... nothing, because the card is buried under a receipt from three weeks ago.

Walnut Card is built to fix that. And this newsletter also covers a couple of other things we’ve been quietly building to make it easier for founders, builders, and investors to find each other.

🚀 What’s New: Walnut Card (v1.0.0)

You can now turn a stack of paper business cards into searchable, usable contacts in seconds. Point your camera at a card, and Walnut Card pulls the name, title, company, and contact info automatically without typing or guessing.

A few things I’m especially proud of:

• Batch mode: scan a whole stack from a conference in batch instead of one card at a time

• Smart profile matching: if the person has a LinkedIn or Walnut profile, we connect the dots so you get the full picture, not just what’s printed on the card

• Export anywhere: one click to CSV, so it drops right into whatever CRM your team already uses

It’s free to start, then pay-as-you-go after that — no subscriptions. This is the first standalone product out of Walnut AI, and honestly the simplest expression of what we’re trying to do: let your AI handle the unglamorous parts of networking so you can focus on the actual relationship.

👉 Check here for more details: walnut.cards

🗺️ Pitch Your Project to Top Investors

Mark your calendar: we’re hosting an AI startup pitch competition on August 5th at the AWS Builder Loft in SF. If you’re building something and want a stage (and some real feedback from judges who’ve been on both sides of the table), this one’s for you.

Here’s what’s on the line so far:

• 🏆 1st place walks away with an interview slot with Antler.

• 💰 Credit prizes for the top 3 teams, with details being finalized and announced soon.

• 🎤 A stage in front of investors, builders, and potential customers, plus networking with peer founders and investors.

👉 Spots are limited, check the details and sign up for it today: luma.com/ai-startup-pitch

📅 Two Curated Calendars: Never Miss a Hackathon or Pitch Event in San Francisco

We built two curated Luma calendars so you stop finding out about the good ones a week too late — one for hackathons, one for pitch events. Follow them once and every upcoming event worth knowing about shows up automatically.

Whether you’re looking for a hackathon to build at, a stage to pitch on, or just want to scout what other founders are working on right now, this is the fastest way to find it.

👉 SF Hackathon Collection

👉 SF Pitch and Demo Event Collection

🌰 Invitation to Founders & Builders Hub

With our WhatsApp group achieves over 600 members, we’ve decided to open up a Slack community for founders, builders, and investors. This is a place where we will share updates about Walnut AI, allow all the members to ask for warm intros, share what you’re working on, and find your people between events instead of just at them.

Who it’s for:

• Founders looking for cofounders, feedback, or intros

• Builders who want to swap notes on what they’re shipping

• Investors who want early visibility into what founders in this network are working on

👉 Fill out this short form and we’ll get you an invite soon: Invitation to Walnut Hub

💭 Nicole’s Note

Every product we’ve shipped so far has been about the agent: matching, scheduling, vetting. But building Walnut Card reminded me that a lot of networking still starts in a really analog place: a handshake, a card, a conversation you don’t want to lose.

The same thinking is behind why we’re finally building a community space instead of just running events. We keep hearing from founders that the best part of Agents Meet isn’t the AI matching, instead it’s about meeting people they wouldn’t have found otherwise, and then losing touch a month later because there’s nowhere to keep the thread going. We want to fix that too.

See you next week,

Nicole

👉 【Take the Founder DNA Quiz】: https://walnut.ai/quiz/founder-archetype

Hi there 👋

It’s Friday.

This week you shipped something. Had a hard conversation. Made a decision with incomplete information. Kept going anyway.

That’s what founders do.

Before you close the laptop and head into the weekend, we built something for you. Not a product update. Not a pitch. Just a question we think every founder deserves an answer to:

Not what are you building. But what kind of founder are you?

🧬 Introducing the Founder DNA Quiz

Think MBTI — but for founders.

We mapped founder identity across 4 dimensions:

• How you create value — are you a Hacker, Hipster, or Hustler?

• How the world sees you — Loud or Stealth?

• Where your credibility comes from — Elite or Indie?

• Why you really started — Impact, Freedom, or Wealth?

36 archetypes in total.

Answer a few questions, paste your LinkedIn URL, and the AI reads your actual professional story, and tells you exactly which one you are. Complete with your strengths, your blind spots, and the co-founder type you probably need.

👉【Take the quiz】: https://walnut.ai/quiz/founder-archetype

🃏 From our community this week

We’ve been watching results come in since we launched, and honestly, it’s been the most entertaining Friday we’ve had in a while.

One founder got Keynote Crusader — “You’ve given the keynote. Written the op-ed. Shaped the narrative. Your newsletter has more subscribers than most startups have users.”

His immediate response? “30 under 30 written all over it.” 😂

I got Revenue Hermit — “Your office is wherever the wifi works. Your boss is no one. You accidentally built the life that venture capitalists pitch on stage but never actually live.”

Building a professional networking platform. Identified as a hermit. Totally fine. Everything is fine. 🙂

Another fun fact is that I see most of people belong to hustlers while the results show half of all the attendees should be hackers.

Hackers always test quietly, never show up.

Why we built this

Most founders can tell you exactly what they’re building.

Far fewer can tell you who they are as a founder. The instincts they default to under pressure, the way they naturally build credibility, the real reason they walked away from a stable career to do this.

We’ve run Agents Meet events at GTC, CES, and a16z Tech Week. We’ve watched thousands of founders introduce themselves. And the most interesting conversations were never about the product. They were about the person behind it.

This quiz is our attempt to surface that. In 3 minutes, on a Friday afternoon.

Your turn

👉【Take the Founder DNA Quiz】: https://walnut.ai/quiz/founder-archetype

Then hit reply and tell me what you got. I read every response.

Happy Friday. You’ve earned this one. 🫶

Nicole

Cofounder @Walnut AI

Hi there 👋

GTC week is loud. Thousands of people, hundreds of sessions, and a calendar that’s impossible to manage. In theory, you’re surrounded by the most interesting people in AI. In practice, you spend most of the week running between panels and awkwardly exchanging LinkedIn QR codes with people you’ll never actually talk to again.

That’s what Agents Meet was built to fix.

👉 Register now for Agents Meet at GTC

🌰 Why We Started Agents Meet

When we were building Walnut AI, we kept running into the same problem: conferences are full of potential — the right co-founder, the right investor, the right customer — but finding them is almost entirely luck. You either stumble into the right conversation, or you don’t.

Agents Meet started as a simple bet: what if your AI agent did the work before you walked in the door?

We ran the first Agents Meet at a16z Tech Week in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, then at CES 2026. Each time, the format was the same — let Walnut AI’s matchmaking engine analyze everyone’s background, goals, and superpowers, then send curated introductions before the event. Skip the small talk. Walk in already knowing who you need to find.

The feedback was consistent: the pre-matched intros led to the conversations people actually remembered.

🤝 What Happens at Agents Meet GTC

This time, we’re bringing it to NVIDIA GTC 2026 in San Jose — one of the most important AI infrastructure events of the year.

Here’s how it works:

• You register and tell us about your background, what you’re working on, and who you’re trying to meet — investor, co-founder, customer, collaborator.

• Walnut AI’s matchmaking engine analyzes the full attendee pool and identifies your top 5 most relevant connections.

• Matches land in your inbox on March 18 at 9AM.

• You meet at your own pace, at your preferred spot or at our offline meetup cafe. No awkward assigned seating. No speed networking buzzers.

We already have nearly 300 people registered — founders, operators, researchers, and investors, all opting in to actually meet each other.

Don’t leave your networking to chance.

👉 Register now for Agents Meet at GTC

Registration closes March 17 at 6PM and requires approval — if you’re going to GTC, don’t wait.

📅 Everything Happening Around GTC 2026

GTC isn’t just the main conference — the real action happens in the side events, dinners, and meetups scattered across San Jose all week. We’ve been tracking them so you don’t have to.

We curated the full list of GTC 2026 side events in one place — happy hours, builder dinners, invite-only roundtables, and more.

👉 Browse the GTC 2026 Event Hub to unlock all the side events

Bookmark it. We’ll keep updating it through the week.

Follow us on LinkedIn and X — and stay tuned for the next Agents Meet city.

See you in San Jose,

Team Walnut AI 🌰

Hi there 👋

GDC has a funny way of turning SF into a giant hallway — everywhere you go, someone’s demoing something. Whether you’re building in AI or just adjacent to it, this week’s calendar is unusually stacked. Here’s what I’d keep on my radar.

Walnut AI has hosted a curated networking event powered by our match making system, with which you could connect with your next partner 👇

📅 Events Worth Your Time

Grace Gong x Lightfield x Sequoia x SVB Dinner

• Date: Mon, March 9

• Location: San Francisco

• Highlight: An intimate dinner for Seed–Series B founders and select VCs. If you’re actively fundraising or want warm introductions in a small-room setting, this is the kind of evening worth clearing your calendar for.

Investor & YC Founders Pre-Demo Day Happy Hour

• Date: Thu, March 12

• Location: San Francisco

• Highlight: A low-key warmup before Demo Day madness — active local VCs, YC founders, and a venue worth the commute. Good signal-to-noise ratio for meeting investors before the formal circus begins.

Harvard & MIT AI Series: Robotics & Physical AI

• Date: Thu, March 12

• Location: San Francisco

• Highlight: Part 2 of 3 in this alumni series, focused on physical intelligence — robotics, sensing, and autonomy. Live demos included. Strong for founders building in or adjacent to the hardware/embodied AI space.

Infinite Worlds: AI, Generative 3D & Game Dev

• Date: Thu, March 12

• Location: San Francisco

• Highlight: Panel and hands-on demos from Tripo AI on how generative AI is reshaping 3D asset pipelines for game studios. Particularly relevant if you’re building tools for creators or game developers.

SPC Demo Night

• Date: Thu, March 12

• Location: San Francisco

• Highlight: Fast demos from South Park Commons members — new AI behaviors, mechanistic interpretability, steering. Always a good room for early technical work and honest feedback.

StartX Fireside with Sam Yam, Co-founder of Patreon

• Date: Thu, March 12

• Location: Palo Alto

• Highlight: Exclusive to StartX founders and alumni. Sam Yam talks serial entrepreneurship and building creator-led businesses — worth the trip down to the Peninsula if you’re in the network.

UGC Mixer @ GDC 26

• Date: Thu, March 12

• Location: Mayes Oyster House, SF

• Highlight: Roblox, UEFN, Minecraft, Horizon Worlds — if you’re building for virtual worlds or the creator economy, this is your crowd.

AI Agents SF #11 — AI Assistants

• Date: Fri, March 13

• Location: Digital Jungle SF, 972 Mission St

• Highlight: Focus on OpenClaw and the state of self-optimizing agents in 2026, including a talk on running a company with 100% agentic workflows. A strong close to the week.

💼 Jobs on WalnutJobs

Curated picks from WalnutJobs this week:

1. Product Manager, Google: https://x.com/gabor/status/2028630794793824561

2. Research Scientist, Google DeepMind: https://x.com/scychan_brains/status/2029258459833876929

3. Research Scientist, Google DeepMind: https://x.com/songyoupeng/status/2029237273490084032

4. Research Scientist, Anthropic: https://x.com/logangraham/status/2028956007565787467

5. Research Engineer, Anthropic: https://x.com/xiaoyiz_uw/status/2029319374365220923

6. Research Intern, Meta: https://x.com/hu_hsu/status/2030055918105411910

7. Research Intern, Apple: https://x.com/zhaisf/status/2030002462552424907

8. AI Researcher, Mercor(Raised $480M): https://x.com/BrendanFoody/status/2030712801812168754

9. AI Engineer, LangChain(Raised $160M): https://x.com/bracesproul/status/2030422552087285801

10. Product, Lila Science(Raised $550M): https://x.com/benkompa/status/2030416686369608063

11. Content Writer, fal.ai(Raised $580M): https://x.com/katiekirsch/status/2030754729479823579

12. R&D, Turing(Raised $225M): https://x.com/jonsidd/status/2030721509879402987

13. Developer Advocate, Mistral AI: https://x.com/sophiamyang/status/2028887174536466769

14. Engineer, Raindrop AI(Raised $15M): https://x.com/benhylak/status/2029024539850752393

15. Designer, Discord: https://x.com/hyumankind/status/2029403760846618840

16. Agent DX Researcher, Modal(Series-B $87M Raised): https://x.com/michaelwaskom/status/2029255355436294337

17. Head of Community, Lovable: https://x.com/cecistalls/status/2029948540630487502

👉 Browse 2000+ AI related roles at WalnutJobs

See you next week,

Watt

Stay connected: LinkedIn · X · App Store · Google Play

Hi there 👋

Here’s something that’s been on my mind: most apps greet you with a feed. Scroll, scroll, scroll. But for a professional networking tool, that felt wrong. When you open Walnut AI, I want you to feel like someone already did the homework — figured out who you should meet, what events matter, and what’s holding your profile back.

That’s exactly what the new Homepage does.

🚀 What’s New: A Smarter Homepage

We rebuilt the Homepage from scratch around one idea: every time you open the app, there should be something actionable waiting for you.

Profile Performance. You now get a real-time dashboard showing how your professional brand is doing — completion score, visitor stats, and specific suggestions on what to improve next. Think of it as a personal brand coach that’s always on.

Weekly Connections. Every Monday, your AI agent delivers 3 curated people worth meeting. Not random suggestions — your Digital Twin has already done the screening. See someone interesting? Start a conversation right from the card.

Daily Events. Every morning, 3 hand-picked events show up on your Homepage — local meetups, conferences, and networking sessions that actually match your interests. No more scrolling through hundreds of listings.

🗺️ Coming Up Next: Agents Meet for GTC 2026

If you tried our Agents Meet at CES, you know the drill — your AI Digital Twin pre-screens thousands of attendees and matches you with the most relevant people before you even arrive. We’re bringing that same playbook to NVIDIA GTC.

More details dropping soon. Stay tuned.

💭 Watt’s Note

My name is Watt, cofounder of Walnut AI. Starting from this episode, every time one of our founding teams will share some thoughts about what we are currently working on. Hope to make friends with any of you who read it.

I’ve been thinking about what “retention” really means for a product like ours. The easy answer is push notifications and reminders. And yes, we built those. But the real answer is: give people a reason to come back.

Every Monday you get new people to meet. Every morning you get new events to attend. Every visit you see how your professional brand is growing. That’s not retention hacking — that’s genuine value on a schedule.

We’re still early. But this is the version of Walnut AI that I always wanted to build.

Want to try the new Homepage? Download Walnut AI with invite code cheese to get started. Already a user? Update the app and let me know what you think.

See you next week.

Watt

Stay connected: LinkedIn · X · App Store · Google Play

Hi there,

Welcome to Eat A Walnut 002! We are thrilled to have you here as we dive into another week of the fastest-moving developments in tech and AI. In this edition, we’re cutting through the noise to share exactly what’s happening in the industry right now, alongside a curated list of high-quality events happening across the SF Bay Area. Plus, for those looking to level up their careers, we’ve hand-picked a few standout positions currently open in the AI space.

Let’s get into it!

What Happened in AI This Week

1. Gemini’s substantial growth

Google’s AI chatbot Gemini has surpassed 750 million MAUs according to the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings. Compared with the reported 650 million MAUs last quarter, there is a substantial growth in a short period.

In comparison, Meta AI has reported nearly 500 million MAUs. However, while Gemini is gaining traction, it still trails behind its biggest rival, ChatGPT, which is estimated to have around 810 million MAUs in late 2025.

2. SpaceX acquired xAI

In a major consolidation of his business interests, Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced on Monday the acquisition of his AI startup, xAI. While financial terms remain under wraps, the merger addresses mounting questions regarding AI development costs and officially propels SpaceX into the trillion-dollar bracket—solidifying its status as the world’s most valuable private company.

3. From OpenClaw to RentAHuman

The most popular topic recently is the “Lobster” Ecosystem. The emerging agentic landscape is forming a closed-loop ecosystem: OpenClaw acts as the "brain" - a local autonomous agent with full system control, Moltbook provides the "social layer" where these agents interact and post independently, and RentAHuman serves as the "physical layer", allowing these digital entities to hire real people to complete real-world tasks. This boom marks a shift from AI as a tool to AI as a self-sufficient workforce that can organize online and "outsource" to the physical world.

High Quality Events You Shouldn’t Miss

There are over 10K events across the world now. People gather together to discuss about technology, startups and the future of AI. Even only in San Francisco, there are average 100+ events every week. So we just curate 5 top events for you to participate, helping you find real values.

👉 All the events are curated via Walnut AI’s smart event searching tool: https://walnut.ai/events (Using invitation code “cheese”, 10K events have been collected across the world)

1. Agentic AI Summit

• Time: Friday, Feb 6 | 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM

• Location: Palo Alto, CA

• Highlight: A high-level summit featuring stalwarts from Salesforce, Netflix, Cisco, and PayPal. Focuses on practical strategies for using agentic AI to drive engineering success and product growth.

• Signup Link: https://luma.com/aiproducts

2. Continual Learning Hackathon

• Time: Friday, Feb 6 | 9:30 AM – 7:30 PM

• Location: San Francisco, CA

• Highlight: A one-day sprint to build AI agents and research tools. Features $50k+ in prizes and integrations from Google DeepMind, Intercom, and You.com

• Signup Link: https://luma.com/intercomai

3. WorkOS AI Night w/ The Pragmatic Engineer

• Time: Monday, Feb 9 | 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM

• Location: WorkOS HQ, 660 Market St, San Francisco, CA

• Highlight: A fireside chat and networking night featuring Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) and Michael Grinich (WorkOS). Includes lightning demos from engineers at OpenAI, Perplexity, and Linear, plus pizza and drinks.

• Signup Link: https://luma.com/workos-pragmatic

4. Selling in the Age of AI: Fireside Chat with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and Tech GTM Expert Rich Liu

• Time: Tuesday, Feb 10 | 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM

• Location: San Francisco, CA

• Highlight: A high-level discussion on how AI is transforming Go-To-Market strategies. Featuring Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity) and Rich Liu (experienced GTM leader from Navan, MuleSoft/Salesforce and Meta), focusing on how sales and marketing teams can leverage AI to drive growth and efficiency.

• Signup Link: https://luma.com/vnige8yh

5. 359 Capital x Stripe Founders & Investors Supper Club

• Time: Tuesday, Feb 10 | 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM

• Location: San Francisco, CA

• Highlight: An intimate, curated dinner for founders and investors hosted by 359 Capital and Stripe. The evening focuses on high-level networking and discussions regarding the current fundraising climate and scaling fintech and AI ventures.

• Signup Link: https://luma.com/ygioiks3

👉 All the events are curated via Walnut AI’s smart event searching tool: https://walnut.ai/events (Using invitation code “cheese”, 10K events have been collected across the world)

Popular Tech Jobs

The hiring landscape has shifted. Startups are increasingly bypassing traditional job boards to hire directly through their networks. To help you navigate this "hidden job market," we’ve launched the Walnut Jobs account. Below, we’ve curated this week’s high-signal tech opportunities discovered across the platform.

1. Vercel, Design Engineer: https://x.com/JohnPhamous/status/2017396507318882519

2. Brex, Startups Ambassador: https://x.com/shaig/status/2017759694861795795

3. xAI, Designer: https://x.com/mjboswell/status/2018009311155503269

4. Human Archive (YC W26), Machine Learning Engineer(Intern): https://x.com/babugi28/status/2017724072252338627

5. Github, Designer: https://x.com/adrianmg/status/2017380007748973020

6. Google Deepmind, Semiconductor Expert: https://x.com/simonbatzner/status/2017297858911998034

7. Google Deepmind, Lab Automation Engineer: https://x.com/simonbatzner/status/2017297858911998034

8. Microsoft, Researcher(AI and Society): https://x.com/hannawallach/status/2017016209011515691

9. Meta FAIR, Research Scientist(Intern): https://x.com/MariaLomeli_/status/2017205973509701947

10. Notion, Social Media Support Specialist: https://x.com/ishverduzco/status/2016678843353096204

11. Spotify, Research Scientist(Intern): https://x.com/_zhuyuchen/status/2015806018102477074

Stay Connected with Us

If you think our newsletter is helpful to you, feel free to follow us and get more valuable information and recommendations!

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/iwalnut-ai

• X: https://x.com/walnutai_

Hi there,

A digital profile shouldn’t just sit there. It should work for you.

Most platforms give you a static page and call it an “identity.” We believe an identity is only half of the equation. To truly succeed in a digital-first world, you need Identity + Intelligence to supercharge your professional networking.

Today, I’m excited to introduce Walnut AI V0.4.6, a major leap forward in moving beyond the “static profile”.

This update gives you a sophisticated engine designed to showcase your brilliance and capture the data that matters. You are more than a collection of past positions. Your new profile is built to communicate your innate talent and future intent—integrating professional experience, unique superpowers, and cross-platform insights into one cohesive narrative, powered by your own personal AI podcast.

📇 Part 1: The Multi-Dimensional Identity

You are more than a collection of history positions. Your new profile is designed to communicate your innate talent and your intent:

• Professional Experience: Move beyond the resume. Curate a high-signal timeline of your career milestones that emphasizes impact over mere titles.

• Superpowers & Goals: Define the “Category of One” skills that make you irreplaceable and broadcast your objectives so the right opportunities find you.

• Integrated Insights: We’ve made it easier for visitors to see the full scope of your work. Walnut AI now syncs with LinkedIn, X, Substack, GitHub, and Medium to pull your latest posts and updates into a single, curated view. No more jumping between tabs—your entire professional narrative is now in one place.

• Personal AI Podcast (Premium): For our Premium users, we’ve launched personal podcasts powered by AI. Our AI doesn’t just read your bio; it crafts a narrative. It generates a professional audio episode that tells your story, explains your goals, and highlights your superpowers. It’s a high-impact way for visitors to hear your brand while they browse.

📩 Part 2: 3 Ways to Share Your Story

Your identity now fits every context. Share your profile with the world to meet more business opportunities. Whether it’s the Brief Card for a quick intro, the Detailed Profile for a deep dive, or the Business Card for instant networking, you always put your best foot forward.

🧠 Part 3: High-Octane Visitor Intelligence

This is where Identity meets Intelligence. Your profile is now backed by a powerful Visitor Analytics Dashboard that turns silent views into actionable data.

• Identify the “Who”: Stop wondering who is looking. Get detailed visitor information, including names, roles, companies and industries.

• Behavioral Statistics: Understand which parts of your profile are resonating. See real-time trends that show exactly how your personal brand is performing.

• Intelligence-Led Networking: Use these insights to follow up with precision. When you know who’s interested, you know who to reach out to.

The professional world moves fast—don't let your profile get left behind. Update to Walnut AI V0.4.6 today with limited invitation code cheese to unlock your Intelligence engine and start networking with intent. We can’t wait to hear what your AI podcast has to say.

Stay Connected with Us

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/iwalnut-ai

X: https://x.com/walnutai_

Download from App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/walnut-ai-networking-agent/id6741802675

Download from Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.walnut.walnutx

Best,

The Walnut AI team

On December 19, Walnut AI and Seamate co-hosted “Seamate Crazy Thursday: 2025 Founder Retro & Mixer,” an event designed to bridge the gap between early-stage ideas and global scale.

The highlight of the evening was a keynote by Liming Zhang, Co-founder of 51Talk (NYSE: COE), an MBA Mentor at NYU Stern, and a Coach at Stanford University’s CIEA. Drawing from over two decades of experience, Liming shared the raw, unvarnished truth about building a company that survives market crashes and policy shifts to reach an NYSE IPO.

Entrepreneurship is rarely the polished, linear success story we see in headlines. Even for those who eventually lead a company to a multi-billion dollar exit, the journey often begins in a state of total confusion. Many founders start out lost, pitching a vision to investors and partners that they themselves are still trying to understand. The following insights serve as a masterclass in scale, resilience, and the internal battles every leader must win to survive.

Tip 1: Stay in Day 1

The phrase “Stay Day 1” is easy to say but incredibly difficult to live. The greatest trap for any startup is the Funding Trap. When you secure major rounds from top-tier firms like Sequoia or DCM, it is easy to become arrogant and stop acting like a lean startup. Success creates a dangerous comfort zone, and the “Day 1” mindset is an intentional battle against that natural human tendency toward pride. To truly scale, you must force yourself to stay hungry and humble even when investors are lining up at your door.

Tip 2: Corporate Culture

Startups cannot compete with tech giants on high salaries or fancy offices. The only thing a startup truly owns is its mission. Because you lack the perks of a big corporation, you must attract people who identify with the value you bring to society. However, culture is not a list of values on a wall; it is a living narrative. You must propagate your mission constantly in every meeting and every trip until you believe it from the bottom of your heart.

A powerful example from 51Talk’s history is the story of a terminally ill teacher in the Philippines who insisted on teaching because she did not want her students to “miss her” once she was gone. When your every employee believes in the mission that deeply, the founding team has no excuse to work any less.

Tip 3: Resilience

An egg drops and breaks—that’s fragile. A paper ball drops and doesn’t break—that’s just “durable”. Only a ping-pong ball drops and bounces back higher. That’s resilience. In business, this means turning a crisis into an opportunity for growth.

Strategy 1 - Maintain a Massive Cash Reserve: Financial discipline is survival. While others were investing surplus cash into real estate during the boom years, 51Talk held onto a reserve of over $230M. This allowed the company to survive “black swan” events that killed nearly all of their competitors.

Strategy 2 - The Dunkirk Evacuation: Many companies die because they only know how to attack. When the market shifts, you must know how to retreat without collapsing. If a retreat is handled poorly, it becomes a total collapse where you lose your best talent and assets.

Strategy 3 - Overseas Explore as Plan B: You must explore new markets and alternative plans while your company is at its most vibrant stage. Liming’s team began exploring overseas market expansion a year before major domestic policy shifts happened; you cannot wait until the disaster is already at your door to start looking for an exit.

Tip 4: Focus on Your Core Competency

It is tempting to pivot your product just because a competitor looks more “premium.” At one point, the board pressured 51Talk to abandon their Filipino teacher model for a North American one to match rivals. However, the data told a different story. North American teachers suffered from time-zone fatigue and taught far less frequently. Filipino teachers taught 15 lessons a month compared to the competition’s six. In online education, high frequency is the real driver of learning quality. By sticking to the logic that worked for their specific model rather than chasing prestige, they maintained a 75 percent gross margin and built a more effective platform.

Tip 5: Self Development

An enterprise can only grow as fast as its leader grows. As a company scales from 0 to an IPO, the bottleneck is rarely the market or the technology; it is the founder’s self-reflection and personal evolution. If you do not push yourself to grow, your company will stall. To evaluate your leadership, you must ask yourself two soul-searching questions: Do your employees truly want to stay with you, and do they actually want to become the type of leader you are? If the answer to either is no, your personal growth is the missing link in your company’s scale.

As we look toward a future dominated by AI and global competition, these pillars remain more relevant than ever. Whether you are navigating low-moat industries where speed is your only weapon or managing the high API costs of a new AI venture, remember that talent density must always exceed business complexity. If you can move faster than the market without creating internal friction, your DNA will naturally grow to meet the needs of the business. Scale is not just about a growing user base; it is about the resilient, mission-driven foundation you build today.

Walnut Smart Event Search

While things are winding down for the Christmas break, the post-New Year rush is fast approaching! CES is just around the corner, and the calendar is already packed with high-value side events. Use Walnut Smart Event Search to explore over 50 CES events and networking opportunities!

👉 Check here: https://walnut.ai/events (invitation code: test02)

Yesterday’s panel brought together the most effective minds in modern growth, and the consensus was clear: the prevailing myths of instant virality and singular-channel reliance are dead. True, scalable growth is a result of strategic engineering, founder-led authenticity, and an unyielding focus on user behavior.

Here are the key takeaways—your playbook for building the next stage of growth:

1. Engineering a Multi-Stage Growth Flywheel

• The Viral Social Media Post to SEO Pipeline: Tianwei demonstrated this flawlessly. Her initial strategy was to use the X posts to rapidly validate the MVP. Once validation was achieved, the focus immediately shifted to SEO. She stressed the necessity of a meticulous, line-by-line adherence to Google’s guidelines, which ultimately secured 1.5M monthly organic search volume within only 1 year—the foundation for long-term, low-cost customer acquisition.

• Seeding the Market with Scarcity: Aimee executed a sophisticated pre-launch maneuver. Instead of waiting for a public beta, she onboarded many KOLs to test the MVP. This wasn’t merely for product feedback; it was a deliberate strategy to create market FOMO and social proof before the public launch, ensuring high-intent demand upon release.

• Founders as the Ultimate Content Engine: Ying delivered a compelling counterpoint to data-only marketing. While data optimizes, authentic storytelling converts. She argued that founders must be the face of their initial growth—building in public via platforms like TikTok and Instagram—to forge a human connection that cold, performance-based advertising can never replicate.

2. The Mechanics: Virality as a Product of Volume and Value

Virality is not a stroke of luck. Instead, it is a measurable, volume-based process requiring a fundamental understanding of product value and platform mechanics.

• Success in high-velocity content is a numbers game. To achieve 30 million views, you must be prepared to post thousands of videos.

• The content that goes truly viral adheres to the formula: Virality = Utility + Emotion. A product’s core utility (problem-solving) is the baseline, but the emotional component (making the user feel something—amusement, surprise, or profound insight) is the catalyst for exponential sharing.

• Success hinges on deep respect for the platform’s “critique rules.” Neglecting a platform’s established norms (e.g., the critical 3-second hook on TikTok) will result in content being suppressed by the algorithm, regardless of its quality.

3. The Brutal Truth of Product-Market Fit

How do you distinguish between product-market fit and mere user tolerance? The ultimate signals are behavioral and financial.

• Retention as the Foundation: Retention metrics vary by sector, but they serve as the uncompromising reality check. For categories with high utility (Ed-Tech, Tools), the floor for success is 80-90% retention. For high-churn, high-volume segments like entertainment, 40% is the green light for expansion.

• The Sound of Success: Silence from your user base is the ultimate danger sign—it indicates churn has already occurred. Active, vocal complaints on channels like Discord or dedicated forums are a positive signal. It means users need the product and are invested enough to demand its improvement.

• The Ultimate Wallet Vote: While positive feedback is encouraging, the only definitive signal for PMF is a credit card swipe. Even a discounted or introductory payment represents a commitment that validates the product’s perceived worth more than any survey or “nice job” email.

4. The Data Trap: Watching the Hands, Not the Mouth

Customers are often poor reporters of their own future behavior. Growth leaders must prioritize observed behavior over stated intentions.

• Behavioral Data Trumps Surveys: Ignore what users say they will do in surveys. The only reliable data is behavioral data: Did they click the feature? Did they return the next day? Prioritize the analysis of on-platform actions.

• The Live Observation Test: Instead of lengthy interviews, the most valuable method is the live test. Hand the user a prototype and watch them navigate it without guidance. Their genuine struggles and workflow are more insightful in five minutes than hours of verbal feedback.

• Filtering the Noise: Rigorous feedback filtering is essential. If the input is not coming from your Ideal Customer Profile or a proven power user, it should be categorized as noise and disregarded.

5. Co-Founder Dynamics: The Pilot Project Principle

The founding relationship is the most critical hiring decision. It cannot be made over superficial interactions.

• The Crucible of a Pilot Project: It is strongly advised against co-founder selection based on coffee chats or resumes. The only reliable test is to work together on a pilot project. This allows you to observe temperaments, crisis management skills, and execution styles under genuine pressure.

• Find Your Tribe: Founders looking for partners should look beyond LinkedIn cold outreach. Attend niche hackathons and community events where interests and values are pre-aligned. This shared context is a better predictor of long-term compatibility.

• Founders Own the Initial Framework: Before hiring an expensive growth team, founders must first figure out the core growth framework themselves. You are the first growth marketer. Hiring too early only outsources a problem you don’t yet understand.

Ready to put these insights into action? Don’t miss the complete, 60-minute discussion, and connect with the Walnut AI community for continuous growth strategies.

Watch the Full Panel:

About Walnut AI

Walnut AI is a human-centered AI company dedicated to empowering professionals to thrive in an increasingly complex landscape. We leverage advanced multi-agent AI agents to create and facilitate valuable connections and business opportunities, transforming how you network and grow your career.

We are currently in a closed beta phase, and have launched the following features:

• Smart Event Search: Use AI to filter through 6,000+ global tech events to instantly identify the networking opportunities.

• AI-Powered Business Card Scanner: Effortlessly upload and instantly recognize business cards in seconds, ensuring no valuable contact is ever lost.

• Dynamic Professional Identity: Generate a polished, AI-optimized personal profile that effectively communicates your expertise and value.

Try the Beta Today: Download the Walnut AI app now on the Apple App Store and Google Play using the limited invitation code: test02.

Follow Walnut AI for More: Stay ahead with executive insights

• Official Website: https://walnut.ai

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/iwalnut-ai

• X (Twitter): https://x.com/walnutai_

• Walnut AI Community: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JfPoQH7hf5bKtDGRkF4Yjj

  Subscribe now

Are you an AI founder or executive wasting precious time searching for relevant industry connections? Stop guessing where to network. Success requires high-value connections and strategic learning. We built Smart Event Search to eliminate the manual labor and bring the right opportunities to you, instantly.

Smart Event Search aggregates 3,000+ events across multiple platforms. We give you the power of AI to find exactly what you need.

👉 Try it here: https://walnut.ai/events (invitation code: test02)

Walnut Salon Event

Speaking of the right events, join us for the most relevant panel for your AI business right now. If your product is struggling with user conversion, hitting revenue roadblocks, or suffering from diminishing returns on old tactics, this free event is your essential next step.

Join us for an exclusive panel featuring top founders and executives who have successfully navigated the challenges you face—from achieving $1M ARR in a year to scaling user bases to 1 Billion.

👉 Sign up here: https://luma.com/j4rwr0tt

What You Will Get:

This isn’t just theory—it’s a deep dive into the practical strategies that build profitable AI companies. Attendees will walk away with an actionable blueprint, including:

• PMF Confidence: Gain crucial insights on how to avoid common pitfalls during PMF exploration, ensuring you build the right product for the right audience from day one.

• Top-of-Funnel Mastery: Discover the exact methods used to scale user acquisition, including how to leverage SEO and organic strategies to drive your MAU to 1 million and beyond.

• Conversion Optimization: Learn precise tactics to significantly increase your product’s conversion rate, turning curious users into paying customers.

• Product-Led Growth Strategy: Uncover advanced PLG frameworks essential for achieving 10x growth, maximizing product loops, and driving revenue efficiently.

• Team Building for Scale: Get expert guidance on structuring and hiring effective growth and sales teams tailored specifically for the different stages of startup development, from 0-to-1 through hyper-scale.

Event Details

• When: Dec. 10 (Wednesday) 5:30 – 8:30 PM (PST)

• Where: AWS Builder Loft SF(Please bring a physical ID)

• Cost: Free

Spaces are limited. Stop struggling with guesswork and secure the playbook for your next massive growth leap.

👉 Sign up here to secure your FREE spot: https://luma.com/j4rwr0tt

👉 Sign up here: https://luma.com/j4rwr0tt

Are you frustrated by building a “perfect” product only to see 10 users try and leave?Do you have strong user growth, but revenue is barely moving?Are you stuck at a growth plateau where your previous tactics no longer work?

​If these questions hit home, you need more than just hope—you need a proven playbook.

​Join this exclusive panel with top founders and executives from YC, StartX, Meta, Tiktok! Uncover the hard-won strategies to master your GTM and ignite profitable, sustainable growth for your AI application. Stop struggling with vanity metrics and start building a breakthrough business.

Speakers:

• ​Tianwei Yue: Cofounder and CEO of Mathos Al(YC W24; StartX), Forbes 30U30, CMU Alumni. Grew Mathos Al to 1.5M MAU and $1M ARR within a year.

• Jiajing Dai: Meta AI Product Manager, previously leading LinkedIn user acquisition, premium analytics growth, Tesla GTM in China. Grew LinkedIn user base from 800M to 1B, premium analytics from $700M to $1.5B, drove the first profitable quarter at Tesla. Part-time content creator, grew my channel “JJ never sleeps” from 0 to 200K followers.

• Amiee Yang: AGTM Agency Founder, ex-Lovart Cofounder. Specialize in 0-1 GTM for AI consumer products. Helped AI startups achieve early traction through organic growth, paid media, influencer marketing, and community building in the global market.

• Yinan Gu: Executive Coach for Founders & Global Leaders; Ex-startup Founder and CEO, closed $65M+ in tech sales; raised $1.5M on Shark Tank China; and led go-to-market from scratch across the U.S. and Asia

​Moderated by Wendi Yin: Serial founder, ex-TikTok Strategy, Tencent Games

👉 Sign up here: https://luma.com/j4rwr0tt

What You Will Get

This isn’t just theory—it’s a deep dive into the practical strategies that build profitable AI companies. Attendees will walk away with an actionable blueprint, including:

• PMF Confidence: Gain crucial insights on how to avoid common pitfalls during PMF exploration, ensuring you build the right product for the right audience from day one.

• Top-of-Funnel Mastery: Discover the exact methods used to scale user acquisition, including how to leverage SEO and organic strategies to drive your MAU to 1 million and beyond.

• Conversion Optimization: Learn precise tactics to significantly increase your product’s conversion rate, turning curious users into paying customers.

• Product-Led Growth Strategy: Uncover advanced PLG frameworks essential for achieving 10x growth, maximizing product loops, and driving revenue efficiently.

• Team Building for Scale: Get expert guidance on structuring and hiring effective growth and sales teams tailored specifically for the different stages of startup development, from 0-to-1 through hyper-scale.

Event Details

• When: Dec. 10(Wednesday) 5:30 - 8:30 PM

• Where: AWS Builder Loft SF

• Cost: Free

• Agenda:

  • 5:30 – 6:15 PM: Check-in & Networking with Pizzas and Beverages

  • 6:15 – 7:30 PM: Panel Discussion and Q&A

  • 7:30 – 8:30 PM: Networking

This is a rare opportunity to get direct, actionable guidance from the founders and executives who have successfully navigated the same challenges you face—from achieving rapid $1M ARR growth to scaling user bases to the billions. Don’t let your potential stall at the plateau. Spaces are limited for this free event at the AWS Builder Loft SF. Stop struggling with guesswork and secure the playbook for your next massive growth leap.

We are looking forward to connecting with you!

👉 Sign up here: https://luma.com/j4rwr0tt

Happy weekend! Are you planning your event schedule for next week and lining up people you’d like to meet?

Thank you for your patience and interest in Walnut AI. We are a team committed to developing reliable, AI-powered solutions that empower professionals. We are excited to invite a small, dedicated group of users to be the first to experience our core suite of productivity features—the foundation upon which we are building something much bigger for your future.

Try Walnut AI

Here is a look at the three features you will gain access to in the beta:

1. Smart Event Search

Stop wasting time searching. Start attending the right events. We aggregate 7000+ events across multiple platforms, and you can then use the powerful AI search feature to look up events based on topic, industry, location, or even complex criteria like “networking opportunities for data scientists in San Francisco next week.” Walnut agent will also give you the specific reasons!

2. The All-in-One Bio with Personal Podcast

We want to give you a comprehensive, unique professional identity that makes a lasting impression. Easily build your detailed personal profile covering your experience and interests. Then, use the built-in Podcast feature to create a short, introductory podcast right on your bio page, allowing you to share your story instantly with new contacts.

3. Business Card Scanner for Quick Connection Management

Note: You can only scan business cards on iOS and Android, PC is used for view.

To seamlessly manage your network without the headache of manual entry or keeping paper business cards. Use your phone to scan a business card, and the information will be instantly digitized in 1 second and stored in your Walnut AI Connection, where you can then easily organize, tag, and follow up with new contacts.

🌰 How to use Walnut AI?

Step 1: Go to https://walnut.ai/events

Step 2: Click login button

Step 3: Choose one signup method and enter invitation code test02

Step 4: After finishing signup process, you could set up your profile, smartly search events and manage connections with Walnut AI.

Unlock Your Smart Event Search

Walnut AI is also available on iOS App Store and Android Google Play. Feel free to check more on our mobile version.

🎁 Your Exclusive Beta Access & Premium Gift

For this round of beta test, we are providing 100 spots with the invitation code test02

Besides, as a sincere thank you for joining us early, you could claim a FREE month of our Premium tier(50 spots) in the Discord Community, completely free of charge. No credit card is required.

Check the announcements channel in the Discord, and the coupon code will be displayed in this channel.

Please note that you should use this coupon code to upgrade premium on Website version when checking out. Then, no matter which platform you are using, you will unlock the Walnut premium features.

Claim Your Free Premium Coupon

We look forward to welcoming you and seeing how Walnut AI can enhance your professional life.

Sincerely,

Watt

Hi Walnut friends,

Tech Week in San Francisco and Los Angeles wrapped up yesterday, bringing together over 2,000 cutting-edge events and thousands of industry professionals—from founders and investors to technical experts and startup enthusiasts. It was a whirlwind of knowledge, panels, and innovations, offering everyone an unmatched glimpse into the future of tech and AI.

We met many incredible people who shared how inspired and even overwhelmed they felt by the wealth of insights and connections. This is exactly why we created Agents Meet.

Agents Meet is Walnut AI’s signature event series where we create a digital twin for every participant—reflecting their experiences, goals, and unique strengths. These AI-driven agents then engage in insightful conversations, uncovering shared backgrounds and interests to recommend your top 5 most meaningful connections.

Because in today’s AI era, we believe one genuine connection trumps ten random business cards ❤️

Thank you to everyone who joined us in San Francisco and Los Angeles—or both! You are what made these meetups special.

San Francisco

We had over 500 signups and 150+ attendees at Joe & The Juice, a cozy spot perfect for relaxed conversations and new friendships. One attendee, traveling all the way from Europe, remarked on the vibrant startup ecosystem fueling the city—a sentiment we wholeheartedly share.

Our fresh new swag got wonderful feedback(Huge kudos to our designer Cara✨). And have you noticed? Walnut AI has a new color palette! I still have some tote bags—find me at an event and they’re yours!

Plus, I’ll always remember the humorous, interesting, and smart faces you signed—it truly makes me feel like we’re much closer than just acquaintances.

Los Angeles

LA gave us a different vibe, with its focus on consumer tech and innovation. From connecting with creators and many consumer tech startup founders, the energy here is unmistakably vibrant. By the beach in Santa Monica, creativity flows freely.

Big thanks to a16z for hosting this amazing Tech Week that kept us at the forefront of AI trends and insights.

Stay tuned—there are more Agents Meet events coming, including at TechCrunch Disrupt. The Tech Week story doesn’t end here. Neither does Walnut AI’s journey.

Looking forward to connecting with you all soon!

Connect with us:

Linkedin

X(Twitter)

Walnut AI Community

Official Website