Welcome Taylor Soper as AI House Director

As we approach AI House’s one-year anniversary, we’ve thrown 161 events, attracting close to 20,000 attendees, and built an engaged community of AI founders and more than 100 leading Resident Experts. Most importantly, in a city known for big tech giants, AI House has carved out a corner of Seattle that is founder-centric in the best ways — where your past roles, titles and FTEs under management pale in comparison to your ideas and impact today. 

A key part of this vision and culture is gathering the right people, the founders, practitioners, and researchers who are figuring things out in real-time, and asking them the right questions. No one is better suited to dive into this world than Taylor Soper.

I'm excited to share that Taylor is joining AI2 Incubator as the new director of AI House. Taylor is leaving his role as editor of GeekWire, where he spent more than 13 years covering the people, companies, and ideas that define Pacific Northwest tech, to help us take AI House to the next level.

If you're a founder or tech leader in Seattle, you probably already know Taylor. He's covered Microsoft and Amazon at the highest levels, broken funding scoops and acquisition news before anyone else, and more recently, Taylor was behind some of GeekWire's most important reporting on the AI boom reshaping Seattle, from OpenAI's growing footprint in Bellevue to the wave of AI startups emerging across the region. He and his camera have also been a fixture at every major tech event in this city. 

Taylor brings a unique combination of skills that fits our thesis for today’s AI era: over a decade of deep relationships across Seattle tech, an intense and insatiable curiosity, and (honed through years of journalism) a talent for asking the right questions and digging past hand-wavy answers to find out what's actually happening on the ground.

That skill matters more now than ever. In this age of AI, as models and applications accelerate at a pace none of us have seen before, what was relevant or true even six months ago may no longer apply today. The frameworks for building a startup, how you think about product, go-to-market, hiring, engineering, are changing beyond recognition.

What also excites me is the nature of this transition for Taylor. He’s already been the ultimate insider-observer of Seattle tech via Geekwire’s leading position (enormous respect to John Cook and Todd Bishop for what they’ve built). Now he's stepping in to actively contribute to and shape the Seattle AI startup community. His commitment to this city's tech identity, its history, its gaps and its opportunities, and his understanding of what makes us uniquely Seattle is exactly what AI House needs.

Taylor will work closely with me, our incredible Events and Community Manager Audrey Yun, and the whole AI2 Incubator team. Our goal is to organize a physical space and community that shares these learnings not just with AI2 Incubator founders, but with all of Seattle’s founders. We believe that when people relentlessly pursue new approaches and find what’s successful, we all learn and accelerate together.

Welcome to AI House, Taylor. We're excited for this journey!