This month we’re chatting with Lindon Gao, as he takes us through his startup journey with Caper! Along with our fireside chat, there will be a moderated Q&A, refreshments, and tons of tactical insight. (You must bring a valid ID to enter)

Lindon Gao is the Co-founder and CEO of Caper, a startup that is creating a frictionless consumer shopping experience by building smart shopping carts that are powered by deep learning and computer vision to enable cashierless checkout. Essentially, Caper is the cart-based point-of-sale system that aims to rival AmazonGo. Shoppers can simply place items into their Caper cart (which have built-in sensors/cameras that identify the items and tally a virtual basket) and once finished, they can conveniently pay on the cart and leave the store. The technology is currently deployed in a number of NY supermarkets and is piloting with 3 of the largest grocery companies in the world. To date, Caper has raised $3M in seed funding led by First Round Capital. Besides being a Y Combinator advisor and a part of the YC (W16) batch himself, Lindon has previously worked as an investment banker specializing in the retail and consumer M&A

In our chat with Lindon we’ll be deep diving into:

• What he took away from Y Combinator (besides capital ;)

• How he made a pivot from his previous startup and founded Caper

• The importance of user testing + finding Product-Market Fit

• How has design thinking shaped the user-experience and user-interface of Caper

• Data. Data. Data. How Caper could leverage data to help both brands and merchants

• How Caper’s technology is taking on AmazonGo

• The future of AI in retail

Show Flow:

6:00 - 6:15: Networking and Refreshments

6:15 - 6:45: Fireside chat with Lindon Gao

6:45 - 7:15: Moderated Q&A

7:15 - 7:30: Closing and Networking