Reflections from the Baukunst Creative Technologist Conference, 2026

At our first annual gathering in 2022, we said: "we're a collective of creative technologists!" — speaking the words with the excitement of being at the start of something still barely formed. Four years on, we have funded 34 companies, hosted research residencies and art openings, and count some 250 entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, storytellers, and artists as our people. Once a year we get to see friends, colleagues, and members of the Baukunst Collective in one place.

This year we returned once more to the Headlands Center for the Arts, which has really started to feel like home. Having done events at The Long Now, a warehouse in Boston, and the renowned Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, it feels like the Headlands Center is where we belong. A building refurbished by artist David Ireland in the midst of National Park Service land, it's a special place where we can engage intellectually, creatively and physically. Thinking collaboratively in the warm atmosphere of the Rodeo Room; closing the day with my feet in the sand; looking out at the Pacific Ocean while watching the birds dance to saxophone phrases washed by surf. These experiences make Baukunst sensorial and tactile in a way that I love.

It also was a perfect place to explore our theme, the Super/Human. We've witnessed AI get more and more "super" over the last year, with conversations among the collective overwhelmingly featuring agents, robots, AI-native engineering, and recursive self-improvement. Watching these super-beings come into existence is miraculous, but it makes us also reflect on the miraculous features of human life as well. Many of us are parents and have the privilege of watching our own children developing into super-beings.

At Baukunst, we try to hold these tensions together, the pragmatic and spiritual, "art" and "building." To me it feels like at this time it's more necessary than ever to learn how to hold this tension well, to learn how to cultivate our most human capacities to their fullest possible expression. This is as true in the family and in education as it is within work, where we are all learning how to do that together. So with this year, we sought to explore how we become most superlatively human: by expanding our senses, raising our ambition, cultivating our reason, and transcending what we thought we were capable of.

Baukunst companies are well on their way. Dig, who builds impossibly small and affordable geothermal drilling technology, has just completed their pilot install. Rapid vision test kiosk Eyebot has incredible traction as they roll out across Walmart and Sam's Club. We've also recently invested in a number of creator economy companies, and are seeing the potential for a great ecosystem of connections between YouPop, Cherub, and Bindery, all businesses that seek to empower influencers and tastemakers.

In particular, I loved Dustin Grace's talk. Dustin is the founder of Estes Energy, which builds super lightweight, energy-dense battery systems. His talk walked through every engineering challenge a magnesium battery pack presents, and the creative solutions they've tackled for each one. The Baukunst ethos around design-minded founders came through, each "hard" being a new design challenge. Estes is choosing to do something incredibly difficult because it's a worthy pursuit, and I greatly admire that. And it's working. Estes has recently signed contracts with a leading global rail OEM to develop battery systems for battery-electric passenger trains, including a program serving the Bay Area.

Nichole Rouillac shared some lessons about designing for joy from her industrial design studio's family-focused work. Greg Bresnitz explored the archetypes of his Entrepreneur's Tarot and did readings for Collective members during breaks. We had talks that were as funny as they were informative. Dan Fink delivered a lightning-speed masterclass on cheese while showing how he's seedstrapped to tens of millions in revenue. Baukunst GP Axel Bichara's talk, "5,000 Years of Engineering Tool Business Models," ran from the pyramids in Egypt to our investment in Motif and demonstrated his incredible breadth of knowledge in the CAD field. And our LPs Jessie Guo and Chris Douvos led a rousing, hilarious fireside. The Collective is a font of wisdom and good energy.

Another highlight is the Apple lineage flowing through our community, which showed itself this year. At our opening party Steve Wozniak appeared to share stories about how playfulness and personal curiosity can lead to world-changing inventions. At the conference itself, Apple employee #16 Wendell Sander joined Tyler in a fireside chat and showed off his exact clone of the Apple I, the first computer with real-time display of keyboard input. We are lucky to have many former Apple folks as LPs and mentors. It feels special to create opportunities for them to shape the next generation of entrepreneurs.

I loved seeing so many of our founders connecting with Alex and Azusa Murakami, artists we met through the SFMOMA community and invited to be part of this year's conference. People were truly blown away by their practice, and I watched it crack open more than a few minds. It's one thing to see a talk that inspires you, it's another to then get to kick it and make tote bags with their artist-designed tools, and to play on the beach with their children. It's one of the reasons I love the CTC. It's not an event to see and be seen. It's a space where people expand one another and do so in community.

The breakouts created more space for that to happen. "Building AI-Native Engineering Teams" felt like a place for technical cofounders to be fully honest about their craft. Everyone was inspired by Catherine Cuello-Fuente and Emily Boschwitz's dialogue on how to build an "Unpromptable Brand." Even I was surprised at who attended the Deep Listening session and how much they loved it.

The Baukunst community is maturing into itself even as we add new founders and members into the fold. People know each other, and know what to expect: conversations that raise our ambitions and make us feel understood in our challenges, connections that empower us, transformative experience of grounding and connection, musical reverence, the balance of the pragmatic and spiritual. It's beautiful to see founders get to explore all parts of themselves with us, and to feel that we are deepening into all of our capacities as a team and as a group.

Onward, Kate McAndrew