Building Uber's AI Edge with Johannes Gehrke, AI Fellow • Surge & Peak XV

Join us for Surge Unfireside by Peak XV, where operators from the world's fastest-growing AI companies share their playbooks, tactics, mistakes, and lessons learned from the trenches. This is not a traditional fireside chat; you'll hear their insights and have the opportunity to brainstorm directly with them.

Why Attend?

Uber has made headlines for its rapid AI adoption, famously exhausting its entire 2026 Claude Code budget in just four months. Johannes Gehrke, Uber's AI Fellow, is at the forefront of shaping the company's AI infrastructure.

Featured Speaker: Johannes Gehrke

• Background: Former Cornell professor and Microsoft veteran, he contributed to the infrastructure behind Teams and Azure. Now, he leads Uber's technical architecture for AI.

Key Topics:

• Build vs. Buy: Insights on deciding when to develop custom AI infrastructure in-house versus using off-the-shelf tools, a common dilemma for founders with limited budgets.
• Scaling Under Pressure: Understanding what breaks first when infrastructure experiences rapid growth and what to prioritize before challenges arise.
• Moving Fast Without Breaking Things: Strategies for implementing infrastructure changes at scale without any customer-facing downtime.
• Effective AI Infrastructure Spending: Identifying which components of the AI stack (inference, post-training, tooling) are worth investing in early versus those that can be outsourced as you scale.
• Lessons from Failure: Reflections on past bets in his multi-decade infrastructure career that didn't pan out and what he would do differently today.

This session will conclude with an open discussion, allowing participants to ask their top AI infrastructure and scaling questions directly to Johannes.

🚨 Curation: This event is primarily for founders and technical leaders. We are keeping the group small for high-impact discussions. If you miss this one, we will add you to the mailing list and send links for upcoming events.