Uber’s CTO is speaking at StrictlyVC SF — here’s why that matters

StrictlyVC San Francisco is happening on April 30 at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center, and the speaker list just got a lot more interesting. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga is now on the bill.

I’ve been to a few of these StrictlyVC events over the years. They tend to draw a mix of VCs, founders, and the kind of engineers who actually build things. The addition of Neppalli Naga shifts the center of gravity toward the operational side of AI — which, frankly, is where the real action is.

Most AI conferences these days are drowning in hype. You get a parade of founders pitching their latest diffusion model or some VC explaining why their portfolio company is “fundamentally redefining intelligence.” It gets old fast. What’s rarer is hearing from someone who has to keep a platform with millions of daily rides running while simultaneously deploying AI across everything from pricing to fraud detection to autonomous vehicles.

Uber operates at a scale that most companies can only dream of. Neppalli Naga has been CTO since late 2023, taking over after the company reorganized its engineering leadership. Before that, he was VP of Engineering, overseeing the core platform. He’s not a flashy keynote speaker — and that’s exactly why this is worth paying attention to.

The session is framed around “operating at scale in the age of AI.” That could mean a lot of things, but I’m hoping he gets into the gritty details: how Uber manages model deployment across different latency requirements, how they handle data drift when demand spikes, or how they balance ML inference costs against ride pricing. These are the problems that actually matter for anyone building AI into a real product.

If you’re in the Bay Area and can make it, this is one of those rare events where you might actually learn something useful instead of just hearing another founder pitch their Series A. Tickets are still available, but the StrictlyVC events tend to sell out. April 30 at Sentro Filipino Cultural Center. Be there or be square — or at least be stuck watching the recording later.