Boardwave VIP Dinner: Future AI Mega Trends: An evening with Marty Chavez

Host: Phill Robinson, Co-founder and CEO, Boardwave

Guest of Honour & Speaker: Marty Chavez

Sponsor: Sixth Street 

Future AI Mega Trends: An evening with Marty Chavez

Debate Title:

A pundit once said that there are only two moves in software: Bundling and unbundling. 

Will AI become a feature? Will the hyperscalers assimilate all software companies (“LLM: Please write the software for Salesforce”)?

In partnership with Sixth Street, this roundtable discussion delves into the transformative impact of AI within the software industry. Through the Internet & Cloud revolution, we saw a concentration of power in the hands of a small number of mega tech firms (Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple etc). Should we expect this theme to continue with further consolidation into a small number of large LLM or AI providers, with the hyperscalers effectively assimilating all software companies with an all-in-one suite of capabilities. Or will we see market fragmentation, with opportunity for everyone, where AI is a feature within each software product. Radically redrawing the competitive landscape globally?

Marty Chavez: Computer Scientist, Entrepreneur, and Investor

Marty Chavez, Ph.D. is widely renowned as a trailblazer and leader who turned the Wall Street trading business into a software business, revolutionizing the way that capital moves and works. He is a partner and vice chairman of Sixth Street Partners. Before joining Sixth Street, Marty served in a variety of senior roles at Goldman Sachs, including Chief Information Officer, where he oversaw the firm’s 9,000 engineers; Chief Financial Officer; and global co-head of the firm’s Securities (now Global Markets) Division. Marty was also a partner and member of the Goldman Sachs management committee.

By training, he is a computer scientist who is also a highly regarded investor in his own right, leveraging his background in machine learning to push the industry forward. Far from the stereotype of a banker, Marty is a disrupter at heart. He was among the most senior Latinos on Wall Street, as well as the most senior openly gay executive at Goldman Sachs. In 2016, a New York Times profile described Marty as “a departure in sensibility from the buttoned-down partners of Goldman lore.”

Adept in both Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Marty co-founded San Francisco start-up, Quorum Software Systems. Later, he was CEO of Kiodex, a New York risk management systems company that SunGard Data Systems acquired in 2004. Since retiring from Goldman Sachs, Marty serves as an advisor and board member to multiple startups and projects that are accelerating breakthroughs in their fields.

Marty serves on the Board of Directors of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). In addition, he chairs the Board of Directors of Recursion Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ:RXRX), a digital biology company industrializing drug discovery by harnessing the power of cloud-based machine learning models.  He advises numerous other companies, including Abacus.AI, an AI startup developing new approaches to deep learning; Cambrian Biopharma, a distributed drug discovery company developing medicines to extend healthy lifespans; Earli, which delivers new technologies for identifying and localizing early-stage cancers; and Ketch, which delivers responsive infrastructure for compliance and data security.

Marty serves on the Board of Directors of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Stanford Medicine Board of Fellows, and the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.