In-Person Event
How to Build an AI-Native Company From Day One | AI-Native Series #1
See how AI-native teams build in Boston, and what to take back into your own company.
AI made selling look cheaper. It cannot make a lead say yes.
Building the product used to be the expensive part. It is now the cheapest thing a founder does. Getting customers is the part nobody has automated, and it still takes humans.
This is the opening session of the AI-Native Company Builder Series, a recurring Boston conversation on what building actually looks like now. Fireside chat and open audience Q&A with Erika Bartucca, co-founder of Via AI, and Paul Rios, who has built go-to-market at Lovable and at HubSpot.
All of it on go-to-market: where the first ten customers come from when nobody has heard of you, when to start charging and what it costs to wait, how far a founder gets selling on their own, and what changes about selling when the product ships weekly instead of quarterly.
Come with the specific thing you are stuck on. That is what the Q&A is for.
Part of the Boston AI Week calendar.
Tuesday, October 6, 6:00 PM ET at One Lincoln. In person, seats are limited.
What You'll Learn:
- What changes in the first 90 days when AI is a founding assumption rather than an add-on;
- How small a founding team can stay, and where that stops working;
- Which parts of company building to hand to agents, and which to keep yourself;
- How AI-native teams run a build, test and customer loop in days instead of months;
- What Paul Rios would do differently if he started his company today.
Featured Speaker:
- Erika Bartucca - Co-Founder at Via AI - Erika started her career at Goldman Sachs and Bain, then jumped into startups, working in operations across product, engineering, finance, and GTM at ezCater and Hunt Club. After that she ran my own practice as a fractional COO, helping early-stage teams build the systems behind growth. Now Erika is the co-founder of Via AI, where they help B2B sales teams see which target accounts they can already reach through warm introductions. She also co-host an operator-focused AI x GTM workshop series in Boston on the real problems teams are working through, from signals-based prospecting to agentic workflows.
- Paul Rios - GTM Engine Builder - Paul Rios spent over a decade at HubSpot, where he built the company's Latin America and Brazil business from zero and ran it as Brazil Country Manager and Director of Sales. He is also an angel investor and an LP in several venture funds, and has mentored B2B founders on go to market through Stage 2 Capital. Paul holds engineering degrees from Columbia and Georgia Tech, an MBA from MIT Sloan, and is based in the Boston area.
Who Should Attend:
- Career changers with deep industry experience who want to build with it instead of for someone else;
- First-time and solo founders with an idea but no team, no technical co-founder and no obvious first step;
- Professionals watching AI reshape their industry who want to be on the building side of it;
- Founders already building who want to see how far a small team goes before hiring anyone.
Additional Resources:
For more information about the investors, accelerators, incubators, and tech events available in Boston, see our list of Startup Resources. Want to start building before the session? Try our AI Skills for founders. Ready to go further? Read the FI program overview.
About Founder Institute:
The Founder Institute is the World's Largest AI-Native Company Builder, giving idea-stage, first-time founders, and employees making the leap to entrepreneurship the tools, global network, and proven methodology to build an AI-powered startup from zero to funding. Since 2009, our structured programs have helped over 9,000 founders across 100 countries raise more than $2BN in funding. Based in Silicon Valley and with chapters across 6 continents, our mission is to empower talented and motivated people everywhere to build impactful, AI-powered companies.
Speakers
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