By the time the first founder walks into the room, the story is already months old. The conversations have happened. The calls have been made. The doubts have come and gone.
Looking back now, I wanted to write about that part of the journey.
A bootcamp begins long before Day One
It started in February.
The Hyderabad socials were underway when Avinash and Keerthi looked at the energy and potential in the city and decided we had to do something bigger. Not another playbook roundtable, not another networking breakfast, not another demo room. Something that would bring founders together to work through the questions they were all navigating.
March, as always, belonged to Annual. It wasn’t until mid-April that we began assembling the program, marketing, and logistics teams for AIBoomi Bootcamp ’26 | Hyderabad.
In my four and a half years at SaaSBoomi and AIBoomi, this was the first time I was leading a mid-scale event. I was incredibly excited that we were bringing the bootcamp to Hyderabad. I was equally nervous because we were following a successful Bay Area edition, and that naturally raised the bar.
From the outside, events often look effortless. I’ve learnt they rarely are.
Choosing the right things
Putting together a bootcamp like this is really an exercise in curation.
We found ourselves constantly thinking about five things: the venue, the program, the content, the speakers, and the founders who would eventually be in the room. Every one of those decisions mattered because every one of them shaped the experience.
The biggest learning for me was around content.
For more than seven years, our community has believed one simple idea: founders learn best from founders. Hyderabad reinforced that belief all over again. I’m deeply grateful to Chaitanya, Sudheer, Rahul, Praneet, and everyone involved in shaping sessions that stayed practical, honest, and deeply relevant to the founders in the room.
But great content only works when it reaches the right audience.
That responsibility sat with our marketing team. Neha Gupta, Vijay, and Nithin spent weeks making sure our message reached founders who would genuinely benefit from the bootcamp. It was patient, consistent work, and it showed in the quality of conversations that eventually unfolded.
Hundreds of small things
The attendee experience and the speaker experience were just as important.
Sai Vishwak, Prerna, and Nithin quietly held together every moving piece behind the scenes to ensure attendees felt taken care of from the moment they arrived. Sehar and Supreet worked just as closely with our speakers, making sure they had everything they needed to focus on what mattered most: sharing generously.
Looking back, it’s these hundreds of small things that make the difference. Most people never notice them, and that’s exactly how it should be.
The room we set out to build
Months of planning, conversations, spreadsheets, calls, and late nights eventually became this:
- 75 founders
- 85 attendees
- 5 workshops
- 2 masterclasses
- 1 keynote
- 1 unconference
The numbers tell one part of the story.
The feedback told us the rest.
A few days after the bootcamp, founders gave the experience an NPS of 96.2, with 96% saying they built meaningful founder connections and 81% telling us the experience exceeded their expectations.
For me, though, the most encouraging part wasn’t the score.
It was what people chose to write.
They spoke about practical, no-fluff sessions. Speakers who shared openly. Conversations that continued long after the workshops ended. They remembered ideas like “Depth is the only moat AI can’t copy” and “Velocity is the new moat.”
That felt like validation that the room had become what we had set out to build.
Behind every one of those numbers and testimonials are conversations, decisions, and countless hours of work from people who rarely stand in front of the camera.
A heartfelt thank you to Sudheer Koneru, Srikrishnan Ganesan, Amarpreet, Akshat, Vivek, Vijay, Kiran, Senthil, Pritish, and every other speaker who made time for this community. Thank you for showing up with honesty, generosity, and a genuine willingness to help fellow founders.
Another important part of this journey was the support we received from our partners.
A heartfelt thank you to HighLevel, our Title Sponsor, and Aivar, our Supporting Partner, for believing in what we were trying to build.
Today, more than a million businesses around the world rely on HighLevel’s AI-powered platform to grow and run their businesses. It’s inspiring to see a company building at that scale also choose to invest in founder communities like ours.
Aivar is helping enterprises operationalise AI through production-ready agentic systems, and we’re grateful to have them backing a room focused on helping founders build real AI companies.
Partnerships like these go far beyond logos on a backdrop. They help create spaces where founders can step away from the day-to-day, learn from one another, and leave with sharper thinking than they arrived with. We’re grateful to both teams for believing in that vision and helping us bring this room to life.
The people I’ll remember
And finally, the people I leaned on the most.
Georgie and Varun somehow managed to solve problems before they became problems. Sradha patiently brought the website together. Sehar looked after every speaker from start to finish. Ashiya anchored registrations and feedback. Keshav and Jay constantly helped me to learn AI instead of just talking about it. And Keerthi and Avinash trusted me with a responsibility that taught me far more than I expected.
People often say an event is only as good as the people in the room.
After this bootcamp, I believe something else too.
Every good room is built by people you may never notice while you’re in it.
I’m incredibly grateful I got to build this one with mine.
