Boston Tech Week with Rose Johnson on Building AI Boston
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What is Tech Week and why did it start as a post‑COVID experiment?
Welcome to Building AI Boston. Our guest today is Rose Johnson. She's a marketing partner at Andreessen Horowitz and today we will be discussing the upcoming Boston Tech Week.
Rose, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
So Rose, I understand that Boston Tech Week there's a process, there's a rationale behind what you're doing. Can you just take us to the origins of why you're doing this and and what it means to you from your perspective? Yeah,
absolutely. Uh happy to give you the the full scoop on the origin story of of how Tech Week week began because that will get us into Boston Tech Week, which we're very excited about expanding to. So Tech Week first began in 2022. It was started by my colleagues Katya Mary and Andrew Chen, who are here at the at the firm at A16C. And it started as a way to meet more people, IRL. After COVID. And so it was sort of the back end of the pandemic. As a firm, we were hoping to meet more founders outside of Silicon Valley. And so there was a lot of buzz and excitement around LA. And that became a, you know, the first city that we launched in. And uh it was really an experiment. So it started, I think the Canada launch with about 50 events.
Uh we ended up running the week with a couple of hundred events. And really didn't know what to expect, but it ended up being a real success. And I think it sort of proved the model that people like this decentralized conference format. And so we leaned in on it and we brought it back the following year. Yeah. We expanded to three cities rather than just LA. So we've been doing New York and SF as well as LA for the past couple of years. And we thought, where best to expand to next, then the fourth or third biggest city in terms of VC funding, depending on how you cut the data, uh, and that's obviously Boston. And so we're really excited um to launch the first new city for for quite a few years now.
Why was Boston chosen as the next city for Tech Week?
And the response has been amazing so far. Yeah, Boston lost
its mind when we found out about this. I can tell you that. That's one way of finding it. Yeah, the buzz was so incredible. People were so excited. I can't even tell you. And you probably know that now because you've see how many events we've got planned. I mean, but it's it's great and and we're so happy to have you coming to Boston.
Yeah. It's been it you know, we I've talked about this a little. We set an internal goal of can we crack five hundred events and we really we really didn't know because we don't have a huge network. that at least the tech week team hadn't had a huge network there. Um but we went out, we did a few trips, we we met some amazing people. And I think because of the strength of the network of Boston, kind of word spread really, really quickly. And um and then uh we've obviously seen a a great response based on that.
So by my estimate, this is me purely from afar. I think there's something like over six hundred. So you've not only cracked five hundred, you've We've we're we're overachievers in this part of the whiz. Yeah.
And I I think the thing that's great about it is it's gone beyond just the sort of hallmark industries of Boston. So it's not just biotech, although there are some amazing biotech events, it's also deep tech. There are hackathons all the way into the weekend. It it truly is spanning the entire well, it's a short week because we're doing it on Memorial Day week, but it's spanning the entire week. Uh and there really is so much variety of large, small events and everything in between.
Yeah, it's great. And people are getting super creative. I don't know if you've seen, but some people are are even creating like tools to help navigate. the week, like in Claude, which is so amazing. Have you seen that? Well the
funnest thing I saw was our friend Karen Kelly who's been a former babe guest. We say babe, we've got you babe. It's it's not a nod to femtech necessarily, but a lot of our former guests are spectacular women in AI. But I saw Karen Kelly actually has a way to de-stress through Boston Tech Week. So you can drop by.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Tech Week and why did it start as a post‑COVID experiment?
0:07–2:04
2
Why was Boston chosen as the next city for Tech Week?
2:04–5:07
3
How did the team exceed the 500‑event goal and what does 600+ events look like?
5:07–8:53
4
What does the “platform, not organizer” model mean for hosts and attendees?
8:53–13:26
5
How can founders, students, and newcomers navigate 600+ events with an abundance mindset?
13:26–17:20
6
What are Boston’s unique industry strengths and how do they compare to other Tech Week cities?
17:20–20:05
7
How do New York and Boston Tech Weeks collaborate and what can attendees expect from both weeks?
20:05–24:11
8
What future cities might Tech Week expand to and how can hosts give feedback to improve the format?
24:11–28:16