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The Rodeo season is officially here, but here is what I’m excited about…

March 10th: The Panel Houston's SaaS Scene Needs Right Now

Real talk — most tech panels are just four people saying "AI is transformative" for an hour while the audience checks Slack.

This one's different.

SaaStock Local Houston is running "Is AI Killing SaaS?" on March 10 at Invincible (801 Travis St, 6PM), and the speaker lineup is kind of absurd. Let me break down why:

Karen Gutierrez — CIO, HCA Healthcare 22 years in HealthTech. Board member at Latinas in Tech. Advisor at the Texas Medical Center Innovation HealthTech Accelerator. This is someone who's been making enterprise technology decisions at one of the largest healthcare companies on the planet — not tweeting about it. When she talks about what AI is actually changing in SaaS buying behavior, she's pulling from real procurement decisions that affect thousands of clinicians. That's the perspective you can't get from a podcast.

Vivek Dixit — Investor, Entrepreneur, C-Suite Leader 25+ years of global tech leadership. CTO, CIO, SVP of Products — he's held the roles at Oracle, Gartner, and Cognizant. Sits on multiple boards. Works directly with startup founders. The thing that makes Vivek dangerous on a panel like this? He's seen it from every angle — building large-scale systems AND guiding investment thesis. So when the question is "Is AI killing SaaS?" — he's the guy who can tell you what's actually happening to software economics AND what the money is doing about it.

Mark Scott — Founder & CTO, Sozala.ai Co-founded multiple venture-backed startups. Helped raise over $15M from angel through Series A+. Built and scaled SaaS platforms for enterprise clients across North America, Europe, and Asia. Led products from concept to production serving thousands of users in logistics, supply chain, and financial services. Now at Sozala.ai, he's leading real-world Agentic SDLC adoption — reshaping how software products are designed, built, and delivered. This isn't theory. This is someone who's been in the code AND the cap table.

David Williamson — SVP Engineering, Quorum Software 17 years at Quorum. Let that sink in. From consultant to SVP of Engineering — leading multiple product engineering teams, scaling globally (including building new teams in India), driving SRE and DevOps initiatives, and running acquisition integrations. He founded their annual global hackathon. When you hear "scaling SaaS platforms, teams, and execution" — David's not reading that off a slide. He's lived every painful, unglamorous moment of making enterprise SaaS actually work at scale.

Why this panel matters:

You've got a healthcare CIO, a multi-board investor-operator, a serial CTO who's shipping agentic AI right now, and an engineering leader who's been scaling the same platform for nearly two decades.

That's not a panel. That's a war room.

Free drinks. Networking before and after. And the kind of conversation that usually only happens behind closed doors.

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See you there.

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Cheers,
- oleg 👊

P.S. Know a Texas company doing something insane? hit reply.
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