CTOs at Scale (South Bay): Agentic Experiments

The noise around AI is getting louder while the signal keeps hiding in plain sight. Boards want agents. Decks promise leverage. Roadmaps swell with experiments that never quite earn the right to stay. This is the pressure point of the startup ecosystem right now. Not whether AI works, but who knows how to wield it without letting systems decay under their own ambition. Tooling is everywhere. Judgment is rare. That imbalance is where real risk lives.

Gather.dev is responding to that moment by convening its people in San Francisco on February 10 for CTOs at Scale and Startup CTOs: Agentic Experiments. Two rooms, one city, one day, distinct phases of the same engineering story. Founding and Startup CTOs moving through autonomy, scale, and accountability from different vantage points, all confronting the same underlying question of when experimentation becomes responsibility. Peter Bell, Founder, CTO, and Head of AI at Gather.dev, has built this community around operator truth, not performative thought leadership. The real value is not the format. It is the candor.

CircleCI hosting in the Financial District is not a backdrop. It is context. This is a company shaped by the realities of delivery, where automation only matters if it improves reliability under pressure. Howdy.com stepping in as a partner reinforces another quiet truth inside the startup ecosystem. Talent strategy and system design are inseparable. You cannot automate culture. You either design for humans or you pay for it later.

The gravity of the room comes from the people shaping the dialogue. Rob Zuber brings the pattern recognition of a 3-time founder and 5-time CTO who has watched organizations scale without surrendering engineering standards. Charity Majors shows up with the Honeycomb instinct for asking better questions of systems instead of trusting surface-level metrics. Sowmya Subramanian carries the operational memory of Google and the product accountability of Quizlet, where scale serves outcomes, not optics. These are not abstract perspectives. They are lived constraints.

Agentic experiments are not about replacing engineers or chasing novelty cycles. They are about deciding where autonomy compounds and where it corrodes. Gather.dev keeps pulling senior builders into this conversation because the startup ecosystem still mistakes motion for progress. Agentic Experiments is not a spectacle. It is a calibration point, the kind that quietly reshapes architecture decisions, hiring plans, and leadership posture long after the room clears and the real work resumes.