A two-day recap from Grok ’26
If you’ve never heard of Grok, that’s partly by design.
The conference started in 2011, and is managed by Chris Merritt and Matt Cook, the co-founders of Atlas Local, Greenville’s independent coworking space on Draper Street. It was named after a word coined by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, meaning to understand something intuitively and completely. That’s the whole idea. Grok is built around the belief that the best ideas come out of rooms where everyone has a voice, not just people on stage.
It ran every year through the early 2010s, took a hit during the pandemic years, came back in 2023, and this year sold out 165 spots at the ONE Building in downtown Greenville. It is, without question, one of the most underrated events in the Southeast tech and creative community.
This was my first time attending. Here’s what happened.
Day One
Peter Barth opened the conference. If you’re in the Greenville tech scene, you know the name. He founded The Iron Yard, a startup accelerator and code school that was eventually acquired and became a national operation. He’s since worked with WeWork and Flatiron School, and sits as a Fellow at the Aspen Institute.
The core argument in his presentation is that new graduates who understand both the technical work and how businesses actually operate are the ones who are standing out now. Cross-functional training is no longer a nice-to-have. Engineers learning supply chain logistics, data teams building clean analytics pipelines – companies doing that are moving faster. The ones waiting on the corporate world and universities to figure it out are going to be outpaced, because those are too slow and too insulated to adapt as quickly as needed. Smaller companies building cross-functional teams now are the ones worth watching.
Diana Mounter keynoted after lunch. She was Head of Design at GitHub and led design through the launch of GitHub Copilot, one of the most significant product releases in recent tech history. Her talk centered on the role of design in an AI-driven development environment. She argues it’s judgment, not execution.
Bryan Barger and Matt Lehman closed the day out together. Two independent creative studios, two very different disciplines, one conversation about going big and bold with branding. Taking the swings that scared them got them where they are.
Day Two
José María Barrera opened day two with one of the more intriguing discussions I’ve heard lately. He’s a software engineer and application architect based in New York, with a background that spans neuroscience labs, real-time trading floors, AI research, and symbolic systems. His talk pointed out that every map distorts the thing it’s trying to represent. A Mercator projection, for example, makes Greenland look larger than Africa. The distortion is built into the geometry and the center point you choose to anchor the map around.
Word embeddings, the foundation of how today’s AI models understand language and meaning, have the same problem. There’s a hidden center to every model, chosen by whoever trained it, and the further meaning drifts from that center, the more distorted it gets. Five or six large language models now define what meaning looks like for most of the world, and the criteria they used to build those models are not public. He called it our new Mercator chart, only this time it’s not a map of the globe, it’s a map of meaning itself. Jose argues to address the issue society has to require transparency and build systems that integrate multiple points of view rather than collapsing everything into one.
Kelli Anderson keynoted in the afternoon. She’s an artist, author, and educator whose work has been exhibited at MoMA and whose books, including This Book is a Camera and This Book is a Planetarium, have sold over 100,000 copies. She builds physical objects out of paper that function as working cameras, radio receivers, planetariums. Her entire practice is built around one question – why do low tech things still move people in a world of advanced technology? She says there’s something in the deliberately limited, the thing that makes you ask how it works rather than just assuming technology handles it, that people respond to in a way polished, high-tech doesn’t always match.
Between each keynote, attendees break into smaller groups for “10/20s.” These are short attendee-led sessions, 10 or 20 minutes, about any topic, with or without a PowerPoint. Some people pitch ideas. Some share something they’ve been thinking about or working on. Some just ask the room a question. It’s an opportunity for attendees to actively participate in the conference.
Why You Should Go Next Year
What makes Grok different from most events is the ratio. The time spent with other attendees is not an afterthought between talks. It’s the point. Attendees include designers, developers, product people, marketers, founders, and coaches, almost all of them working on projects, not just out there positioning. The conversations that happen in the 10/20 sessions, over lunch and at the evening socials are are worth the ticket price alone and they sold out this year. Watch Atlas Local for 2027 announcements.
Cherish Benton is co-founder of i4Series and The OrangeByte, a technical build partner for businesses and agencies that need senior-level execution without the overhead, based in Greenville, SC.
