AWS Summit LA Networking Lunch | Yard House LA Live

Hosted by John Kim, CEO of Payloop Sponsored by Struck Capital

Wednesday, June 10, 2026 | 12:30 PM Yard House LA Live - 800 W Olympic Blvd, Los Angeles A 3-minute walk from the LA Convention Center

A small peer lunch for people building AI products in production. No agenda, no panel, no pitch - just 10-12 senior people in one room having the conversations you can't have on the show floor.

Founders, CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Heads of AI / Data / Platform, principal engineers running real production AI workloads. The thread connecting everyone is operating AI in front of real users today - past the proof-of-concept phase, past the easy demos.

The AWS Summit floor is great for product announcements and partner conversations. It's not great for the conversation peers actually want to have with each other - the one about what's not working, what your team is actually struggling with, and what you're seeing inside your own org that you can't say in a panel.

This is a closed, off-the-record-by-default table for that conversation. The kind of thing you'd normally only get at a private dinner with people you already know.

There's no formal agenda. Recent versions of this conversation have ended up on:

• The honest gap between agentic demos and agentic production
• Multi-model strategy, build-vs-buy, when consolidation makes sense
• Eval, governance, and trust at scale - what's holding up under scrutiny
• The unit-economic side of AI - what your CFO is starting to ask about

But the value is the people more than the topics. Whatever the table wants to dig into is where we go.

John Kim is Co-Founder and CEO of Payloop - AI FinOps and margin intelligence for multi-tenant AI products; helping AI-first companies, externally and internally, save up to 70% on AI costs with no model changes. 3x acquired founder (Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow). Previously Co-Founder of Threekit, the visual commerce platform. Active angel investor and advisor across the B2B SaaS ecosystem. Penn State alum.

Struck Capital is a Santa Monica-based early-stage venture capital firm investing in foundational technology - SaaS, AI infrastructure, developer tools, marketplaces. Portfolio includes Grab, Apollo, Salt AI, and Mythical Games, with 100+ investments and 4 unicorns to date. Founder-first ethos with deep operational support. Struck is joining the lunch to back the kind of conversation we don't get to have on the convention floor and to support the LA tech community.

Just lunch. We sit down at 12:30, plan on running about 90 minutes so anyone heading back to the convention floor is back by 2:30. Yard House has a private dining area - exact room confirmed when the count is set.

Reply with "yes" and any dietary preferences. I'll send the calendar invite + a heads-up on who else will be at the table 48 hours before. You can also register on Eventbrite.

John Kim Co-Founder and CEO, Payloop

Sponsored by Struck Capital | Santa Monica, CA

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