Lessons from Building AI Systems, Products, and Startups

In this session, Irina Calciu will share lessons from her work on AI agents at Pervaziv AI and from co-founding Graft. She will explore a central tension for technical founders: how to build strong foundations while learning and moving quickly. Her systems background shaped how she approaches reliability, product scope, and technical tradeoffs. Building a startup taught her when that mindset was valuable and when it created blind spots. She will also reflect on finding customer problems worth solving, testing assumptions, and building a team in a competitive and rapidly changing AI market.

Bio
Irina Calciu is an entrepreneur, systems researcher, and founding systems architect at Pervaziv AI, where she designs infrastructure that makes AI coding agents efficient and reliable. Previously, she co-founded Graft, an enterprise AI company. Before Graft, she was a senior researcher at VMware Research, working on distributed systems, disaggregated memory, and hardware-software infrastructure. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Brown University.