Notes and Takeaways from Growth Elevated Conference 2026
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Notes on Personal Health and Longevity from Ashley Heather (Lumati)
Integrate younger generations into your life.
Have a longevity goal.
Get DNA testing and regular blood testing. Supplement what you don’t have.
Know your biological age vs chronological age. Everyone under 50 can have a choice on how long to live, assuming they don't die in an accident.
Manage your stress. Avoid excessive fight-or-flight (cortisol).
Top items for driving personal health/longevity:
Protect sleep
Build muscle consistently
Stack recovery (red light, cold plunge, etc.)
Eat clean, hydrate, and 7skip alcohol
Measure yourself and your environment, and work toward a goal
Notes on AI from Victor Cheng (SaaSCEO.com)
Are you stuck in SaaS thinking? Are you using the AI tools? AI is viable in every functional area.
The biggest AI constraint is no longer technical. It's psychological (fear/identity). AI is a leadership/change management issue.
Remember, the people who lead the charge get fired last.
You have to use AI personally at a moderate to advanced level. ChatGPT is a good gateway tool into the possibilities of AI.
A mental model for AI use cases is “Results as a Service,” which is measured by 1) the % of those served that achieve promised results and 2) the magnitude of the results achieved. If anything helps here, do it. It's the outcome, not the how. Common results include increasing sales, saving money, saving time, and reducing risk.
When you focus on “Results as a Service”, consider:
Do you promise a number?
Do you track whether you are successful?
Do you guarantee success?
With AI, you can reduce uncertainty and variables. Consider a penalty and a guarantee! Bet on yourself so they will.
AI creates a paradigm where there’s no user interface. Instead, there’s just outcome confirmation. Ideally, the user never needs to log in. They just buy results.
All current problems between SaaS and AI native will be moot in 3 years. What's AI and what's human will change every quarter. You have to reassess every few months.
Break tasks down. Ask AI to develop a project plan before you ask it do anything. Create and save new documentation as you go. Create codified knowledge. Persistent memory is the goal. Context is limited. You can break this into multiple agents, each with different context scopes and levels.
Train AI first. Then use it. Training a model makes a huge difference. When training, remember that the same things that make humans successful make AI successful. Document seemingly obvious things in the right format (I.e., a format they can use) as context/memory. Don't assume they know—provide an explicit explanation. Make unstructured data (e.g., vector databases?) accessible via connectors. You need enough datasets to help the AI learn. Provide positive/negative examples. The best datasets have numerous examples of good and bad outcomes (these are key for training). Your top 10 customers and the demos they received are your IP!
Document how things get done in your business. Use AI to help you here. Then make it accessible.
Scale.AI takes data out in the world and tags it so an AI model can understand it
The skills required to maximize AI include gathering and organizing data for context and instruction, maintaining data hygiene, subject-matter expertise (SME), process design and choreography, and quality control.
AI use cases across both products and operations can be plotted on a graph of autonomy (high vs. low) and scope (wide vs. narrow).
Autonomy stages go from assist to automate to planning to orchestrate (multi-step with a human supervisor at each step) to operate (multi-step without supervision; human exception handling) to optimize (multi-step with self-improvement; human is driving learning). The most underused AI use cases involve planning.
Scope stages range from task to workflow (managing a stream of tasks) to process (end-to-end) to operating cadence (performance management) to result (outcome).
There are four (4) key AI decisions for a given use case:
What results to focus on
How much scope to allow
The level of autonomy and human role
Timing
Notes from Maximizing Your Board of Directors (VC/Founder Panel)
Leverage your board for support/growth. Alignment starts with discussing where we are going and what we are doing to get there.
When you have the data on something, you can make better decisions and unlock new things. Analyze what you are doing and why you are doing it. What will make you happy?
You want to get comfortable bringing problems to your board where you think, “I am going to get fired for this,” and have the board say, “Okay, this is a problem. How are we going to fix it together?”
Speak with your board members outside of board meetings 1-4 times per month. Work together. Don't dictate.
Be clear about your expectations for your board members (e.g., a board member contract could state that each board member is expected to source 5 customers).
A couple of outside board members can make a huge difference (and data supports this). Independents can be less biased (e.g., they may want what's best for the company rather than the fund). Usually, independent private board members are compensated solely in equity, while private investor board members receive nothing.
A crisis can make you evaluate where to go next, and it can open up new opportunities you could never imagine. Having your back against the wall forces you to come up with something.
Domain knowledge and grit are the difference makers in entrepreneurship.
When raising, know your numbers and know your business. Write your business plan in detail. Go to your existing team/investors/partners first and ask them to introduce you. 15:1 pitch to invest ratio? You have to be able to return the VC’s fund. If everything goes our way, can it be a fund returner?