The quiet tension right now is not about whether AI works. That argument is settled. The real friction inside the startup ecosystem is about control, trust, and taste. What happens when systems designed to accelerate builders begin making decisions faster than the people accountable for the outcome. Founders feel it when velocity turns into entropy. CTOs feel it when experimentation drifts too close to production. This is the stretch where curiosity either matures into discipline or compounds into technical debt that shows up when the stakes are highest.
That pressure is why Founding CTOs (SF): Agentic Experiments lands the way it does on Tuesday, February 10, 2026. Not as a conference. Not as content. As a studio. Invite only. 4:30 PM–5:45 PM. Financial District. Inside CircleCI at 201 Spear Street, a place where shipping is measured in pipelines, not opinions. This is a room built for venture fundable CTOs running teams under 10, where architecture decisions are not abstractions but fingerprints on the company’s future. In this corner of the startup ecosystem, speed without judgment is a liability.
The structure is deliberate. Arrival. Context. Breakouts. Shared insights. No stage. No panels. Just operators comparing notes on agentic experiments touching context management, pre-commit verification, CI/CD, and the oddly elegant logic of Ralph Wiggum loops. Yes, Wiggum, not Wiggins. A loop that keeps asking until the work is actually complete. It sounds like a joke until it becomes the backbone of how code ships. Then it becomes serious very quickly.
The weight of the room comes from who is curating it. Peter Bell, Founder and CTO of Gather.dev, co-hosting with the steadiness of someone who has spent a 10-year stretch building CTO communities before AI decided to grow teeth. Gather.dev has always separated titles from practice, and this studio continues that lineage. Howdy.com steps in as a supporting partner, carrying the operator DNA of Jacqueline Samira, CEO, and Frank Licea, CTO, a company born in 2018, sharpened by Y Combinator, and scaled with intention. CircleCI hosts not as a backdrop but as a signal. This is where modern software delivery actually lives inside the startup ecosystem.
What makes this moment matter is not that agents are arriving. It is that CTOs are finally getting honest about what they refuse to automate. Judgment. Accountability. Taste. This studio creates space to draw that line clearly, to experiment without pretending risk does not exist, and to learn from peers before the market forces the lesson.
