Executive Dinner: Why Isn’t AI Helping SaaS Teams Ship Faster?

A private dinner for SaaS leaders and the investors behind them.

Most SaaS companies have already put AI tools in the hands of their product and engineering teams, and boards expected faster results from the same spend. For most, the roadmap hasn’t moved, and years of product debt are starting to show up as churn. Operators see a release cadence that looks the same as it did two years ago. Investors see AI spend that hasn’t paid off. Same problem, two seats.

The companies seeing real results have something in common: they changed how the team works, not just what it works with.

Join us for an intimate, invitation-only dinner with fellow SaaS executives and investors. Veteran SaaS product leader Guillaume Vives will open with how his team shortened the cycle from customer request to production release from quarters to weeks, and scaled feature throughput 4x with the same headcount.

The conversation will cover

How do you get the whole team working the way your best AI user does, not just the one or two who figured it out on their own?

If AI is writing the code, who are your builders — and what do product managers, designers, and engineers actually do now?

How can a board tell real progress from AI activity, starting with how fast a customer request reaches production?

Who should attend

SaaS leadership: CEOs, CTOs, CPOs, and heads of engineering at investor-backed SaaS companies

Investors: PE operating partners and investment professionals backing SaaS portfolios

Agenda

5:30 PM: Arrivals and networking

6:00 PM: A short presentation from our hosts

Then: Dinner and conversation

The Hosts

Guillaume Vives, Chief Product Officer

Guillaume Vives has spent 25 years building and leading product organizations in enterprise SaaS. He led product at Zuora from $8M ARR through IPO, served as Chief Product Officer at BlueJeans through its $550M acquisition by Verizon, ran a 250-person product and engineering organization at RMS delivering the platform behind Moody’s $2B acquisition, and most recently rebuilt the product organizations at 360Learning. He holds an MS in Operations Research from MIT and an engineering degree from École Centrale de Paris, and teaches on INSEAD’s MBA program.

Rahul Raina, Vice President of Business Development, Celestial Systems

Rahul Raina has spent more than 15 years at Celestial Systems helping Fortune 100, mid-market, and growth-stage organizations build and run mission-critical applications in the cloud. He works with leadership teams on moving AI from promising pilots into production, embedded in the applications and workflows they already run, and has helped lead Celestial’s own transformation into an AI-native services company. Previously, he served as President of Antrix Technologies, running a dedicated offshore software development centre through its acquisition by NICE in 2021.

The Venue

We’re hosting the evening in a private dining room at one of our favorite restaurants, close to downtown and Stanford, with easy access from Highway 101 and the 280 Freeway. Expect a seated dinner paired with wine, in a quiet room away from the main floor.