MCP Builders Summit Hosted by Featureform and Silicon Valley Bank

​Description

​Join us on Wednesday, July 30th, from 5 PM to 8 PM, for an evening of deep dive MCP demos, agent architecture talks, and investor insight at the SVB Experience Center, co-sponsored by Featureform and Silicon Valley Bank! MCP provides AI agents with a unified interface to discover tools, pass structured context, execute real actions across your stack, and persist state. Wire it in, and agents transition from prototype chatbots to systems that actually deliver results. At this meetup, we delve into real-world builds: long-lived memory, fast local development and testing loops for MCP servers, secure global delivery, and the infrastructure signals investors are watching as usage ramps up. We’ll also have drinks and bites available throughout the evening for everyone.

​🗓️ Agenda

• ​4:30 Doors open & Networking

• ​5:30 Opening Remarks (Simba Khadder, EnrichMCP)

• ​5:45 Lessons in Building Enterprise MCP Tools that Actually Work (Hans Ashlock, Cisco ThousandEyes)

• ​6:05 Browser Power: Building MCP Tools That Do Real Work (Lizzie Siegle, Cloudflare)

• ​6:20 Break

• ​6:30 Graphiti MCP: Knowledge Graphs as Local Agent Memory (Daniel Chalef, Zep AI)

• ​6:50 Build and Deploy MCP Agents with Open-Source Infrastructure (Pietro Zullo & Luigi Pederzani, mcp-use)

• ​7:10 VC Panel (Lightspeed Ventures, A16z, Ridge)

• ​7:30 Closing remarks

• ​7:35 to 8:00 Networking & Drinks

​Speakers

• ​Hans Ashlock, ThousandEyes
  Bio: Hans is an Engineering Architect at Cisco ThousandEyes, a SaaS application for monitoring network and application performance. He works in the emerging technologies group helping product and engineering teams adopt new technologies and adopt more innovative approaches to product development. He's spent the last few years deep in AI product development, most recently working on MCP. He holds 10+ patents, none of which make much sense to him.

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• ​Daniel Chalef, Zep AI.
  Bio: I’m Daniel Chalef, an engineer turned startup founder currently building Zep, where we're building the first context engineering platform, offering from agent memory, to Graph RAG, and context assembly. We're the team behind Graphiti, the popular knowledge graph framework. Our vision is a world where AI agents reliably handle personalized tasks, from the mundane to the monumental, always prioritizing privacy and compliance. Previously, I've led ML and data science teams, marketing, and corporate development at both early-stage startups and late-stage companies, building data-driven products at scale. When I’m not building Zep (which is seldom 🙂), you’ll likely find me cycling or hiking around the Bay Area with my dog.

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• ​Pietro Zullo, MCP-use
  Bio: Pietro is the author of mcp-use, the most popular open source library to connect any LLM to any MCP server in just 6 lines of code. He came from Zurich Switzerland, to San Francisco to attend YCombinator, where he is growing mcp-use as a framework to create and orchestrate multiple MCP servers to create powerful agents.

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• ​Luigi Pederzani, MCP-use
  Bio: Luigi Pederzani is the co‑founder and CTO of mcp‑use (YC S25), an open‑source toolkit that helps developers quickly build and deploy MCP‑powered AI agents. Earlier, he worked on the smart‑calendar app Morgen and led engineering projects at Accenture Switzerland. Luigi holds an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from Politecnico di Milano and once grew a tech YouTube channel to 150,000 subscribers. Now based in San Francisco, he focuses on making MCP development seamless for teams worldwide.

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• ​Lizzie Siegle, Cloudflare
  Bio: Lizzie Siegle is a Bay Area–based Developer Advocate at Cloudflare, where she helps engineers build with edge‑first JavaScript, Python, and AI tooling. Before joining Cloudflare, she spent more than six years as a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, creating demos, speaking at conferences, and mentoring hackathon teams worldwide. Outside of code, she’s an avid tennis player, runner, and Disney enthusiast who’s passionate about fostering inclusive developer communities.

​Investor Panel

• ​James Alcorn, Lightspeed Venture Partners
  Bio: James joined Lightspeed in 2024 to partner with founders in AI and infrastructure. Prior to Lightspeed, James was a partner at Zetta Venture Partners, where for 6 years he backed teams from inception, building AI-native applications and infrastructure, like Featureform, Weaviate, Argilla, and Cleric.

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• ​Akriti Dokania, Ridge Ventures
  Bio: Akriti is a Partner at Ridge Ventures, where her mix of computer‑science training, product‑management expertise, and hands‑on experience building a retail‑focused B2B startup helps her guide founders through every stage of company growth. She previously invested in deep‑tech companies—spanning AI, ML automation, and quantum computing—at Octopus Ventures, and earlier led product work on Windows Security, Microsoft Edge UX, and Amazon Alexa’s international expansion. Akriti earned a BS in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Michigan and an MBA from London Business School. Off the clock, she stays active with tennis, soccer, and just about any competitive sport.

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• ​Rajko Radovanovic, Andreessen Horowitz
  Bio: Rajko Radovanović is an investing partner on the infrastructure team at Andreessen Horowitz, where he partners with pioneering AI companies including Mistral AI, Cursor (Anysphere), World Labs, Black Forest Labs, Luma AI, and Udio. He also incubates and runs a16z's Open Source AI Grant Program, supporting impactful open-source AI projects pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence.

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• ​Moderator: Simba Khadder, Featureform
  Bio: Simba Khadder is the founder and CEO of Featureform, an open‑core virtual feature store that standardizes how machine‑learning teams define, manage, and share data features. At Featureform, he also created EnrichMCP, an open‑source Python framework that layers a semantic, MCP‑compatible API over a company’s data model so AI agents can safely query live production systems. Before launching Featureform, Simba built performance tools for Google Search and Cloud Datastore, then co‑founded Triton, a media‑personalization startup that served more than 100 million users, where he led the machine‑learning effort.

​Getting There

​Venue: SVB Experience Center, 532 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94104.

​Best After-8 PM Parking (pick these)

• ​Embarcadero Center 4 (open 24/7). Embarcadero 1, 2, and 3 also work if you leave by 9 PM. Embarcadero Center
  
  

• ​Sutter Stockton Garage (city garage, always open). SFMTA
  
  

• ​Union Square Garage (open daily 5 AM to 11 PM; after-hours entry on Geary with ticket). SFMTA
  
  

• ​Portsmouth Square Garage (open daily 5 AM to Midnight; evening flat rate after 5 PM, exit by Midnight). SFMTA
  
  

​Garages That Close Too Early (skip if staying for networking)

​One Bush Garage valet ends 8 PM weekdays. 525 Market closes 7 PM weekdays. Mills Building garage closes 7 PM weekdays. 225 Bush closes 6:30 PM weekdays. Farella Braun + Martel LLPapi.beta.parkme.comABM ParkingParkChirp

​Transit (easiest)

​Ride BART or Muni Metro to Montgomery Street Station and walk to the venue; the station site lists the Dublin/Pleasanton, Antioch, Berryessa/North San Jose, and Richmond line services, and a nearby office notes the walk is about two minutes. BARTFarella Braun + Martel LLP

​Rideshare / Taxi

​Set destination to SVB Experience Center, 532 Market St. If Market is backed up, ask for a drop at Sansome and Market and walk the short block.