About this session

Adam Guild dropped out of high school, became a Thiel Fellow, and built a $1B vertical SaaS company serving restaurant owners. But this isn't a founder origin story. It's about the decision that accelerated everything: going AI-native across the entire company, not just the product. Owner.com doesn't bolt AI onto existing workflows. AI is the workflow. Their software does the job a restaurant owner used to need an entire marketing agency for: online ordering, customer retention, campaign execution, all run by AI agents working alongside a lean team. On the GTM side, their sales org now runs 50% human, 50% AI agents, and they won't hire a revenue leader who can't demonstrate what they're actively doing with AI. In this session, Adam will cover: What "AI-native" actually means at Owner.com and why it's a company-wide operating philosophy, not a product feature How AI agents transformed their sales org: the real numbers on what a 50/50 human-agent team looks like approaching $100M ARR Building software that does the work, not just the dashboard, and why that distinction is the entire moat for vertical SaaS The hiring bar that changed everything: why every candidate at Owner is now evaluated on what they're doing with AI, not what they know about it What most vertical SaaS founders get wrong about AI adoption: adding copilots instead of rethinking the whole stack How he thinks about the next phase: his prediction that 2026 is the year investors stop paying for the promise of AI and start underwriting proof in the P&L