I’ve had a little bit of time to think about my experience at AIBoomi Annual ’26 and I thought it only fitting to write this down – both as someone who helped put it together, and as someone who ran halls and sessions on the ground.
But to tell that story properly, I have to go back a few months.
I take you back to December 2025 when I attended AIBoomi ONE and walked out with mixed feelings.
On paper, the promise was compelling, with founder-first candor, curated conversations, and high signal. And yes, there were moments that reflected this. But the overall experience felt closer to the familiar networking events, than something truly different that this AI wave of “uncertainty” demands.
There was plenty of energy and exchange, no doubt! But I found myself wishing for more depth. More of the raw, honest conversations that make gatherings like these stand out.
So I wrote an email to Avinash saying exactly that. Long, honest, slightly uncomfortable. I said what I felt and I did not soften it much. I did not expect anything to come of it. These emails usually don’t.
Avinash called me for coffee instead.
That one email became a volunteership. And that volunteership brought me to AIBoomi Annual ’26 as a co-lead for the GTM track under Suren! Which is how I ended up writing this.
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I want to start with something I did not expect to feel.
All through the time I was putting together the GTM track, I kept noticing the amount of effort people were putting in. Not just into my track. Into everything. The way sessions were being designed, the conversations being had over WhatsApp at odd hours, the sheer amount of invisible work that was happening beneath the surface. I think most people who attend Annual never really see this. And I say this without any judgement because I was that person not too long ago. You genuinely do not understand the pay-it-forward culture of this community until you are standing right in the middle of it.
From the day I got asked to build the bot for AIBoomi Annual, to day zero at the VC Bridge, to the three days on the ground, what I kept seeing were ordinary people. Founders with their own problems, their own companies, their own fires to put out. People who let go of all of that for three days and just showed up. Not for money. Not for visibility. Just to build something they believed in. That was the first moment I knew this community was worth being part of. Not the sessions, not the speakers. That.
Personally, this was a strange and wonderful experience. I went from having no association with SaaSBoomi whatsoever – even tech itself for that matter a year ago – to opening a track at the Annual. That does not happen by accident. It happened because someone took a chance on a person who was just curious and a little bit loud about it.
And then there was the community itself.
I have been honest with myself about why I built letsfindsanity. It was because I was looking for a group of founders who felt like they were going a little crazy and needed a space to say that out loud. AIBoomi gave me that. The conversations I had, the people I met, the 2am and 3am buddies I now have on the other end of a message – that is what I have been looking for. Not a networking event. Not a panel. A support group that does not call itself one. AIBoomi is that, even if it does not always know it.
I will admit I was a little lazy on day zero. But on day one and day two I was fully in. And I left with more than I came with, which is everything you want from a conference.
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One thing I noticed very clearly across the entire event is that there were two kinds of people in the room. The first kind came to learn, to be vulnerable, to find their people, to get advice, to give advice, to have the kind of conversation you cannot have on a LinkedIn post. The second kind came to sell. To convert. To push their product into every gap in the conversation. That is not a criticism of those people specifically. But in an AI-first world, the product is no longer the differentiator. Clarity is. And the people who came looking for clarity were a completely different kind of person from the people who came looking for customers.
The best conversations I had were all with volunteers. Every single one. And the non-volunteers who I found genuinely worth speaking to were all people who were asking how they could become volunteers. Which tells me something important: the pay-it-forward mindset is already the natural filter for the right people in the room. It is just not the formal gate yet.
I think it should be.
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Here is what I would love to see AIBoomi become.
The move to smaller, curated, agenda-specific events throughout the year makes complete sense to me. A demo day where founders present and get honest product feedback. A GTM deep dive for founders trying to figure out their first ten customers. A pricing session. A session on how to hire your first salesperson when you have never done sales. Each event with a specific job to do, a specific stage of founder it serves, and a specific outcome it is designed to create. No fluff. No general networking. Just a room of the right people working on a specific problem together.
But I do not think the annual should go away. I think it should evolve.
What if the annual became invite-only? Not invite-only in the sense of exclusivity for its own sake, but invite-only in the sense that everyone in the room has to come in with the pay-it-forward mindset. No passive attendees. No open registration. If you want to be in the room, you have to be willing to contribute to the room. That one change would solve the curation problem that every conference eventually runs into. The people who just want to sell will opt out. The people who want to extract without giving will opt out. And what you are left with is exactly the kind of community that made SaaSBoomi what it is in the first place.
Now on the track structure, I think what already exists is genuinely good. Foundation, growth, scale, with product and technology running transversal across all three. But I want to offer one reframe: each of these tracks is really a support group. And if we treat them that way, the design of each track changes.
Foundation stage founders are not looking for case studies. They are not looking for another person telling them what worked for them. They are looking for 2am buddies. Mentors who will look at their product not as potential investors but as honest friends. People who will tell them the hard thing. Their existence is a question mark and they know it, and what they need most is a room where that is okay to say out loud.
Growth and scale stage founders have a different existential problem. The question is not whether they will survive. The question is whether they are thinking about this right. How do they adapt? What are they doing that others should know about? What do they know now that they wish someone had told them earlier? Those founders should be in rooms where they are both the student and the teacher, not just one or the other.
If AIBoomi can build this structure, not just as a conference but as an ongoing operating layer for AI-native founders in India, I genuinely believe it can be the thing that the Indian AI ecosystem has been missing. Not a YC equivalent. Not a VC feeder. Something more honest than that. A community where founders figure out AI together, and where the act of figuring it out together is the whole point.
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If you are reading this and sitting on the fence about volunteering, here is what I want to say to you directly.
You do not need to have it all figured out. You do not need a track record or a big company or a polished story. You just need to be genuinely curious, willing to contribute, and honest enough to say what you actually think.
Sometimes that starts with writing an uncomfortable email.
I am just getting started with this one.
