Coffee & Career Transitions NYC: Tech & Startups Edition

Welcome to Claude & Coffee NYC—a curated after-work gathering for founders, creators, operators, marketers, developers, and AI enthusiasts. Join us from 5:00 PM for an evening of coworking, networking, and great conversations with people building the future with AI. Bring your laptop, work on your projects, exchange ideas, and connect with an inspiring community in a relaxed setting. ☕ What to Expect 💻 Bring your laptop and work on your projects 🤝 Meet founders, creators, builders, and AI enthusiasts 💡 Exchange ideas and get feedback 🚀 Build meaningful connections in the AI community Meet Claude & Coffee Claude & Coffee brings together people building with AI through curated coworking sessions and small gatherings designed for real conversation over big crowds. We are part of Anthropic's official Claude Community for New York. Find everything we host at claudecommunitynyc.com. Your Hosts Brandon Slicklein is the Claude Community Ambassador for New York City and co-founder of AuraPath AI. AI & Builder workshops across the city, and his product and engineering work spans fintech, legal, private equity, and edtech, where Claude runs through everything he builds. Say hi when you arrive! Connect with Brandon: Location | Georgie's Cafe A Hong Kong-ish cafe and bar in the Lower East Side, named after our owner’s father who immigrated from Hong Kong to the Lower East Side as a kid. We’re here to serve up delicious coffee and milk tea, fresh baos, and reimagined street snacks.

Every cell in your body runs a hyper-complex logistical network. Tens of thousands of tiny membrane-enveloped packages—called vesicles—ferry critical cargo like insulin, hormones, and neurotransmitters to precise destinations. If this delivery system delays by even a millisecond, or drops its cargo in the wrong place, the result is devastating human disease: diabetes, neurological disorders, and immune system failures. Understanding how cells manage this trafficking didn’t just rewrite biology textbooks—it won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine. But fundamental science is only half the journey. The real magic happens when world-changing research successfully leaves the academic lab to hit the commercial market. Few people have bridged this gap like Professor James Rothman, Ph.D. Originally trained in physics at Yale before pivoting to biochemistry at Harvard, Professor Rothman looks at biology through the lens of fundamental mechanics. Today, he is the Sterling Professor of Cell Biology and the Director and Founder of the Yale Nanobiology Institute, where researchers merge the physical sciences with engineering to study living systems at the nanoscale. Beyond academia, Professor Rothman is a veteran biotech founder, life science industry executive, and venture advisor. From founding ARIAD Pharmaceuticals to guiding deep-tech bio platforms like Prellis Biologics and advising firms like Celesta Capital and Arsenal, his career represents the ultimate "bench-to-boardroom" trajectory. In this exclusive fireside chat with SOSV Managing Partner Sean O’Sullivan, Professor Rothman will explore: The Cellular Supply Chain: What his Nobel-winning discovery of SNARE proteins teaches us about the ultimate "machinery" of life—and how understanding these pathways allows us to block viral entry and combat infectious diseases. The Nanobiology Era: Why human health tech is shifting away from incremental chemistry toward engineering and programming life at the molecular scale. The Transl

GTM Cocktail Hour, hosted by Andrew Yeung, viktor.com & The Shortlist Join us for an evening made for the top GTM professionals in NYC. On September 8th, we're bringing together a carefully curated group of the top account executives, customer success managers, growth professionals, and GTM leaders in one room. Whether you are scaling a sales motion, building out a CS function, or figuring out growth at your current stage, this is the room for you. Open bar and food are on us ;) Details 📅 September 8, 2026 ⏰ 6:30pm to 9:00pm 📍 Private exclusive venue in NYC Spots are limited. Apply below! About our Hosts & Sponsors: 🎩 Andrew Yeung is the founder of Fibe (a portfolio of events companies including Andrew's Mixers, The Junto Series, and Lumos House). He is also a Partner at Next Wave NYC, a pre-seed/seed found backed by Flybridge Capital. Andrew's hosted 200+ events for 50,000+ tech founders and professionals in 8 cities that were featured in Bloomberg, Business Insider, Fast Company, and Fortune Magazine. Business Insider dubbed him the "Gatsby of Silicon Alley." 💼 The Shortlist is a monthly founder showcase where the CEOs of the fastest-growing startups in New York City take the stage to hire from a curated room of the best engineers, operators, and builders in the city. Every attendee is hand-selected. Last cycle, we accepted fewer than 10% of applicants. Founders come to make key hires, talent comes to meet the breakout companies before everyone else does, and hundreds of introductions get made each night. Now in its 8th edition, the Shortlist has become the room where top talent and top startups actually find each other. 🚀 Viktor, the AI employee in Slack and MS Teams, hit $15M ARR within 10 weeks of launch and has since been one of the fastest-growing startups in history - 60,000 companies have hired him to do real work: research, reports, campaigns, code. Behind us: a $75M Series A led by Accel and angels including the founders of Slack, Lovable, ElevenLabs, V

What happens when the skills, knowledge, and judgment that once lived in people and institutions move into machines? Aishwarya Khanduja presents her essay The Fragility of Borrowed Intelligence - on the two fragilities that follow from overdependence on AI: 1) economic fragility, as systems lose the deep human expertise that keeps them robust, and 2) epistemic fragility, as each of us loses the capacity for independent thought and tolerance for ambiguity. Followed by a guided group discussion on what human capacities require deliberate protection as we enter the AI age. Read the essay: aishwaryadoingthings.com/the-fragility-of-borrowed-intelligence Aishwarya is the founder of Analogue, an R&D institution funding unconventional inquiry: analoguegroup.org This event is hosted by Tusk & Quill, a publication and events platform exploring what it means to live well in America today.

Join Credal for an panel with the engineering leaders building at the frontier of enterprise AI in production on September 9th at the OpenAI office in NYC. What does a company look like when AI stops being an experiment and starts changing how the company itself operates? What breaks when AI usage goes from a handful of experiments to thousands of agents and workflows? What infrastructure do you end up building yourself? How do you evaluate systems whose behavior isn't deterministic? How do cost, security, permissions, and observability change? And what are these teams building today that the rest of the enterprise will need tomorrow? Credal is bringing together three of the leaders behind this work for an intimate panel conversation: Veeral Patel, Head of Applied AI at Ramp Veeral is a founder Ramp engineer who now leads Core Product and Applied AI team at Ramp. Veeral has been one of the voices behind Ramp's increasingly public approach to AI infrastructure, co-authoring its deep dive into building a unified pipeline for AI token spend, writing about the “Token Casino” and the economics of AI inside the enterprise, and most recently helping bring Ramp Router from internal infrastructure into a product of its own. His work sits at a question almost every company adopting AI will eventually face: when AI usage explodes, how do you know which of it is actually creating value? Allison Candido, CTO at Flatiron Health Allison is an early Flatiron engineer who joined the company in 2014 and now leads its engineering organization as CTO. Allison is overseeing Flatiron's shift towards AI-powered, agentic workflows capable of operating across millions of patient record, allowing researchers to ask questions about rare mutations, therapies, and treatment patterns that previously couldn't be answered from smaller sampled cohorts. Allison is navigating what it takes to deploy AI into one of the hardest environments of all: healthcare, where models have to operate against compl