Pinecone was pleased to be back at Tech Week by a16z this June. If you’re not already familiar, Tech Week is “tech’s largest decentralized conference,” with city-wide takeovers in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. As a proud a16z portfolio company, Pinecone was right in the middle of the action.

As Pinecone’s Head of Community, I’ve had the privilege of watching Tech Week grow bigger and better each round. This year, NY alone saw over 1,000 events and drew more than 40,000 founders, builders, investors, and operators.

What We Hosted

Based on what we learned from last year, we decided to show up in multiple ways this time around. Our onsite crew included Cory Waddingham, Tej Chilukuri, and Liam Morrison.

Breakfast with Edo Liberty

We kicked things off Monday with a private breakfast hosted by Pinecone founder and CEO Edo Liberty. Known for his perspective on the past, present, and future of vector search, Edo led a candid discussion with leaders from top AI startups—over bagels, naturally, at Sadelle’s.

Pinecone for Startups: SoHo Meetup

On Tuesday, we held a standing-room-only meetup in SoHo featuring AWS’s Nate Repensky and Pinecone’s own Tej Chilukuri. Tej shared the thinking behind Pinecone’s product direction, why Pinecone “just works,” and introduced our newly launched Pinecone for Startups program.

We opened a second room and still had to turn folks away at the door—a clear signal that the interest in building with Pinecone is growing fast. We're already working on securing larger venues for the future.

Across the week, we spent time with developers, founders, and product teams—learning about their use cases, answering questions, and hearing how they’re thinking about what’s next in AI. Some key themes emerged:

→ The Shift from RAG to Agents

Agentic AI was on everyone’s mind. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is still relevant, the community's attention has clearly shifted toward autonomous agents. These systems promise more independence and intelligence—but still rely on fast, accurate, and up-to-date retrieval.

Our final word: Agents rely on retrieval.

→ Growing Momentum Around Pinecone

Whether at our own events or partner meetups like Microsoft for Startups, we were both proud and humbled to see so much excitement around Pinecone. The feedback we got—on product direction, use cases, and community support—will help guide what we do next.

What’s Next

• June 30 (NYC): We’re teaming up with AWS for a hands-on Pinecone 101 workshop. If you’re curious about how to build with Pinecone, this is a great place to start.
• Talent Spotting: If you’ve built something cool with Pinecone—a tool, a tutorial, a video—reach out to community@pinecone.io. We’re always looking to spotlight great work.
• Tech Week on the West Coast (Autumn): We’re bringing the momentum west with events in SF and LA. Keep an eye out for announcements soon.

Thanks to everyone who came out to connect. If we missed you this time, we hope to see you at the next one.