Boston Tech Week with Rose Johnson on Building AI Boston

Description

Traditional conferences put everyone in one venue and hand them a ticket. Tech Week flips it: hundreds of events across a city, hosted by whoever wants to host, all on a single calendar. Rose Johnson thinks this format gives the power back to creators, and Boston is about to find out what that looks like. Rose is a marketing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads Tech Week, a16z's decentralized conference series that started in LA in 2022 and has expanded to four cities. Boston is the newest. They set an internal goal of 500 events for the debut. They blew past 600. We recorded ahead of Boston Tech Week (May 26 to 31), which runs back-to-back with New York Tech Week so attendees can do both. This is a conversation about why Boston was the next city, what a "platform not organizer" model actually looks like, and what to expect when 600 plus events take over a town that's never done this before. We dig into: The origin story of Tech Week, from a post-COVID LA experiment in 2022 to a four-city circuit Why the decentralized format works, and why "power back to the creators" is the whole point Boston's response, well past the internal 500-event target, with deep tech and biotech sharing the calendar with hackathons for marketers What it means to treat Tech Week as a platform rather than a conference, with hosts setting the format and a16z staying out of the way The "renaissance, not revolution" framing, and why collaboration between cities matters more than rivalry How each city develops its specialization, from LA's entertainment AI and defense clusters to whatever Boston ends up becoming known for Practical advice for founders, students, and curious newcomers on how to navigate 600 plus events with a mindset of abundance Rose has been on the Tech Week team since the beginning and has watched it go from one LA experiment to a four-city circuit that companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Axios now return to year after year. But this conversation stays grounded in Boston specifically: the calendar, the hosts, t