We've always believed that the most valuable thing we can offer our founders isn't just capital. It's access to the right conversations at the right time. On May 6th, we brought our portfolio CEOs together at the Thompson Houston for a full day built around one premise: the founders who will define the next decade are already making the decisions that will separate them from everyone else, and we wanted to make sure our companies were in that group. The AI moment isn't hypothetical anymore, capital markets have recalibrated, and the rules of company building are genuinely shifting. So we designed a day around the conversations that actually matter right now.
The collaborations started before the retreat itself. BDO hosted our founders for a social outing at InTown Golf Club. A relaxed setting for our CEOs and the Mercury team to enjoy each other before we kicked off. At the same time, Gunderson Dettmer opened a room for complimentary legal office hours, giving founders direct access to legal counsel. By the time everyone arrived at the Thompson that evening, the room was already warm.
Mercury Managing Partner, Blair Garrou opened the day with a candid read of where capital is genuinely flowing, where the headwinds are still real, and why the AI moment isn't something founders can afford to treat as background noise. The rules of company building are being rewritten, and the founders who will define the next decade are the ones who move accordingly.
One of the day's most practically useful conversations introduced a framework for where any given business sits right now relative to AI on what we call the AI Spectrum. The distinctions between an AI Native company, an AI Enhanced company, and one in AI Transition aren't just semantic. They determine your competitive exposure, your talent priorities, and where your time should go. Heath Butler led that conversation alongside Canisius Rozario of Collide and Deepina Kapila of Intercom, two operators who have lived this categorization problem firsthand. What came out of it wasn't a tidy answer, but something more valuable: a way to identify yourself honestly and prioritize what matters.
That thread carried directly into one of the harder conversations of the day around talent. AI has changed who you need to hire to build your product, and how fast you need to move to find them. Aileen Allen moderated a session with Erik Huddleston of Aprimo and Phil Sitter of RepeatMD that confronted the hiring and culture questions most founders are dancing around: what high performance actually looks like in this environment, how you build a team that fails fast and learns faster, and how you sustain hypergrowth without losing the operational discipline that makes it sustainable in the first place.
Then came the session that probably generated the most hallway conversation afterward. Blair and Omair Tariq, Founder and CEO of Cart.com, pulled back the curtain on something most investors and founders only discuss in private: what boardroom dynamics actually look like when they get hard. Using Cart.com as an unflinching case study, they walked through how to navigate a difficult board, how to turn your board into a genuine strategic asset, and what to do when things go sideways. The central lesson was that the most important board decision you'll ever make is who you let into the room.
The afternoon moved into capital and liquidity - two subjects that feel increasingly urgent as the fundraising environment continues to shift. Samantha Lewis and Alexandra Lundin of Insight Partners gave founders a clear-eyed look at how investors are actually pricing businesses today: what metrics matter, what narratives land, and where the bar has moved since the last time they raised. And in the final session of the day, Aziz Gilani sat down with Joe Warshawsky of JP Morgan and Ramesh Venugopal of Riverwood Capital to demystify something founders often defer thinking about until it's too late: exit readiness. The companies that transact on their own terms don't get lucky. They get deliberate operationally, financially, and strategically, long before a deal is ever on the table.
The day closed with dinner, but not the kind where you sit next to whoever grabbed the seat first. We organized salon-style dinners around three themes: Fintech & Agentic Commerce, Vertical AI, and Near-Term M&A. Founders could go deep with the peers most relevant to where they actually are. Some of the most honest conversations of the entire day happened over those tables, and that's exactly the point.
None of this happens without the people and partners who made it possible. We're grateful to BDO, Gunderson Dettmer, JP Morgan, and Insperity — whose ongoing support of our portfolio companies, from people operations to back-office infrastructure, reflects the same belief we hold: that the best thing you can do for a founder is remove friction from the things that aren't their core business, so they can focus on the things that are.
We believe that being a good investor means being genuinely useful. Not just at the moment of a term sheet, but through every hard conversation that comes after it. The CEO Retreat is one of the ways we try to prove that. We can’t wait to see you at the next one!
