Building Your Startup in the Age of AI

This session is presented by All Things AI in partnership with The American Underground at the American Tobacco Campus as part of Raleigh Durham Startup Week.

Mark Hinkle has been in and around startups for most of his career. Cloud.com — acquired by Citrix for $300 million. TriggerMesh — co-founded it, backed by Index Ventures and Cisco. A handful of others that never made the headlines, and honestly, most don't. That's the nature of the game. You raise capital, you hire people, you try to get leverage, and then you race against the clock until you either win or you don't.

That model is changing. Fast.

Sam Altman has said that someday we'll see a single-person billion-dollar company. That may be further out than the hype cycle suggests — but what's happening right now is this: a 10-person company with hundreds, maybe thousands, of AI agents working around the clock is not science fiction. It's a capital strategy.
The question isn't whether AI changes how startups are built. It already has. The question is what founders do with that leverage, and how they get started.

In this session, Mark will walk through what he's learned — the hard way and the smart way — about where AI actually delivers for early-stage companies. What use cases are ready today. How to think about capital needs differently when you can delegate execution to agents instead of headcount. And how to move faster without losing the thing that makes a startup worth building in the first place.

The opportunity in front of founders right now is the highest level of leverage in 30 years of technology cycles. This session is about how to use it.