Shows / The Tech Trek
The Tech Trek
The Tech Trek is a podcast about how founders, operators, and technology leaders build and scale technology companies. Each episode explores the decisions behind building products, teams, and technical organizations, with conversations spanning engineering, AI, data, product, hiring, leadership, and growth. Guests share what they are building, what they are learning, and how they are navigating the challenges that come with turning technology into a successful company.
Episodes
The Tech TrekAI Agents, Deepfakes, and the Problem of Trust
A few seconds of audio can now be enough to clone a voice. But the bigger challenge is knowing who, or what, is on the other end of an interaction. That…
The Tech TrekBuilding AI Agents by Removing Features
The goal is not to do less. It is to give agents the flexibility to handle more of the work customers actually need. Henry Hopcroft, Chief Product Officer at…
The Tech TrekAI Productivity, Code Reviews, and Domain Expertise
Jayeeta Putatunda, AI Engineering Lead at Turing, joins The Tech Trek to explore what happens after AI generates the first draft. She explains how excessive…
The Tech TrekForward Deployed Engineering: Building AI That Businesses Can Use
AI teams can build solutions faster than many organizations can make decisions. That gap is changing how engineers work with the business and what companies…
The Tech TrekAI, Human Evidence, and Better Business Decisions
AI can generate answers in seconds. But what happens when the information needed to make a decision isn't available online? Sagar Kadakia, founder and CEO of…
The Tech TrekBuilding an AI First Company With a Lean Team
AI can help a small company move faster. But a leaner team also has fewer people to rely on when someone leaves. Kevin Bradt, founder and CEO of CasaPerks…
The Tech TrekTechnical Founders, AI Pivots, and the Value of Focus
The original idea may not be what makes a startup successful. As AI changes markets and creates new opportunities, the ability to learn and change direction…
The Tech TrekAI Observability: Measuring Quality, Risk, and ROI
An AI agent can be fast, available, and still get the answer wrong. That changes what engineering teams need to measure. Jeetendra Soneja, VP of Engineering…
The Tech TrekHow AI Is Changing Engineering Teams and Hiring
What happens to engineering teams when everyone can code? Bali Raghavan, cofounder and CTO at Hero Safety, joins Amir Bormand to discuss how AI is changing…
The Tech TrekVoice AI Agents: Testing, Trust, and Scale
Getting a voice agent to talk is one challenge. Knowing whether it can handle real conversations is another. Brooke Hopkins, founder of Coval, joins The Tech…
The Tech TrekAI Engineering, Small Teams, and Public Demo Days at Omni
What happens when AI changes more than coding speed? Chris Merrick, Co Founder and CTO at Omni, explains how his engineering team is adapting around AI…
The Tech TrekFrom Token Maxing to Outcome Maxing in AI Engineering
AI coding tools are helping engineers write code faster. But faster code does not automatically mean better business outcomes. Vitaly Gordon, cofounder and CEO…
The Tech TrekProblem Statements, Business Outcomes, and Better Technology Decisions
Technology teams are often asked to solve something before everyone agrees on what the actual problem is. Chad Carrington, CIO at Golden1 Credit Union, joins…
The Tech TrekPhysical AI and the Real Time Supply Chain
AI has learned from the digital world. Physical AI brings real world data into the picture. Doron Hazan, Director of Products and AI at Wiliot, joins The Tech…
The Tech TrekFrom Smart Dust to Edge AI: Building Intelligence Everywhere
Scott Hanson went straight from a PhD program at the University of Michigan to building a semiconductor company. Today, as Founder and CTO of Ambiq, he is…
The Tech TrekEarly Stage AI Investing: Moats, Expertise, and Founder Anti Patterns
Building an AI product is getting easier. Building an AI company that lasts is not. Itamar Novick, Founder and General Partner at Recursive Ventures, joins The…
The Tech TrekAI Agents, Engineering Workflows, and the Cost of Being Wrong
AI coding agents can produce software faster, but they do not replace the judgment needed to understand the system. Shaun Patterson, CTO at Titan, joins The…
The Tech TrekAI Agents, Identity, and the Security Gap
AI agents create a different security problem from traditional software. They can operate at software speed and scale while behaving in ways that are much less…
The Tech TrekCan AI Agents Help One Founder Run a Company?
AI agents are moving beyond helping with individual tasks. The bigger question is how much of a company they can actually run. Ben Cera, founder of Polsia…
The Tech TrekHow AI Is Changing Engineering Workflows and Software Teams
AI coding agents can help engineering teams ship more code. But the bigger change may be what engineers spend their time doing. Viren Baraiya, Co-Founder and…
The Tech TrekHow AI Agents Are Changing Who Can Build Software
AI is doing more than helping engineers write code faster. It is starting to change who can participate in software development, how teams divide work, and…
The Tech TrekHow to Build a Data Team Ready for AI
AI can make teams faster, but it can also expose every weakness in the data underneath it. Elizabeth Stanford, VP of Data at PandaDoc, joins The Tech Trek to…
The Tech TrekHow AI Startups Can Challenge the Enterprise Services Model
AI is not just changing software. It may also change the economics of the services businesses built around it. Anirudh Sriram, CTO at Tessera Labs, joins The…
The Tech TrekFrom Head of AI to CTO: How AI Is Changing Engineering and Product
AI changes more than the product roadmap. It changes how engineering teams build, how data flows through the company, and what a CTO needs to own. Andrew…
The Tech TrekWhere VCs See Opportunity in Regulated AI
AI is making software faster and cheaper to build. It is not making trust any easier to earn. Simon Wu, Partner at Cathay Innovation, joins The Tech Trek to…
The Tech TrekWhy AI Makes Work Faster but Teams Slower
AI can make individual tasks faster while leaving the organization with the same old coordination problems, or even making them worse. Sergei Sorokin, CEO and…
The Tech TrekAI Deepfakes and Hiring Fraud: Can You Trust Who You’re Interviewing?
AI is changing hiring in ways that go far beyond candidates using ChatGPT to answer interview questions. The harder problem is knowing whether the person on…
The Tech TrekAI Is Changing Software Engineering: Engineers Need to Solve Problems, Not Just Write Code
If AI can produce the code, what becomes more valuable for engineers? John Kuhn, CTO and cofounder of Integral, joins The Tech Trek to discuss how agentic…
The Tech TrekHow AI Is Changing Sports Analytics and Strategy
Sports organizations have more data than ever. The real advantage comes from knowing which problem to solve, which data matters, and whether people will trust…
The Tech TrekHow Do You Hire Engineers When AI Writes the Code?
AI is changing more than how engineers write code. It is changing what leaders hire for, how candidates are assessed, and which engineering skills may matter…
The Tech TrekAI Data Centers Are Outgrowing the Power Grid
AI infrastructure is expanding faster than the power systems required to support it. A data center can be built in two to three years, while a new power plant…
The Tech TrekHow Coding Agents Are Changing Machine Learning Engineering
Machine learning teams are moving faster, but the hard part has not disappeared. The work is shifting from writing and debugging every line of code toward…
The Tech TrekHow AI Is Reshaping Healthcare Revenue and Access
Healthcare providers can wait 60 to 75 days to get paid, while many hospitals spend 5% to 7% of revenue on the collection process. That makes revenue cycle…
The Tech TrekHow AI Agents Are Rewriting Enterprise Analytics
Most companies are not short on data. They are short on the time, cost, and coordination required to turn it into action. Ethan Ding, co founder and CEO of…
The Tech TrekScaling Enterprise AI Beyond the POC
Enterprise AI is easy to demonstrate. The real test begins when a promising POC meets production costs, security requirements, data movement, latency, and…
The Tech TrekHow Todoist Is Rethinking Engineering With AI
AI can generate code faster, but that does not make software delivery simple. It shifts the pressure to requirements, architecture, review, and technical…
The Tech TrekThe Future of Engineering May Have Fewer Handoffs
AI is not just changing how engineers write code. It is changing who gets close enough to shape the work. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Robert Stewart, CTO…
The Tech TrekThe Hard Part of Voice AI Is Not the Voice
Voice AI is moving from simple call routing into work that used to require trained human agents. The harder question is what happens when those conversations…
The Tech TrekWhy Healthcare AI Is So Hard to Ship
Joanne Chen, VP of Data and AI at SimplePractice, joins The Tech Trek to talk about what it takes to build AI data products in a regulated, sensitive domain…
The Tech TrekEngineers Are Becoming AI Orchestrators
Kevin Haggard, Vice President of Engineering at Barracuda, joins The Tech Trek to talk about how AI is showing up across cybersecurity products, engineering…
The Tech TrekYour Team Is Using AI Anyway
AI adoption is no longer just a policy conversation. For many organizations, the bigger question is how to move faster without creating avoidable risk. In this…
The Tech TrekWhat AI Agents Need Before Production
AI agents are easy to demo. They are much harder to trust, maintain, govern, and put into production. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Amir Bormand talks with…
The Tech TrekYahoo CTO on AI, Engineering Velocity, and Why the SDLC Has To Change
Yahoo is not just adding AI on top of existing products. It is using AI across product experiences, internal tools, engineering workflows, and modernization…
The Tech TrekWhy AI Founders Need to Say No Faster
Mike Choi wanted to work at Apple for years. Then he got there and had the moment many ambitious builders eventually hit. Is this the thing I was sprinting…
The Tech TrekWhy Sovereign AI Matters Now
AI is moving fast, but the bigger question for companies and governments may be control. Who owns the data, the workflow, the output, and the risk? In this…
The Tech TrekHealthcare AI Starts With Boring Problems
Most healthcare AI stories start with diagnosis. Edmund Jackson thinks that misses the real bottleneck. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Edmund Jackson, CEO…
The Tech TrekAI Coding Agents Are Changing Engineering Teams
Deepak Bapat, CTO and co founder at Tabs, joins The Tech Trek to talk about how his team is using tools like Claude Code and Cursor, where AI is helping, and…
The Tech TrekAgentic AI Has a Data Layer Problem
Agentic AI is not just a model problem. It is exposing gaps in how teams store, share, retrieve, and coordinate context across applications, agents, and…
The Tech TrekWhen Agentic Coding Changes The Team
Agentic coding is not just making engineers faster. It is changing how teams triage bugs, prototype features, involve product, and think about hiring. Scott…
The Tech TrekData Teams Are Moving Beyond Dashboards
AI adoption looks very different when mistakes can create legal, financial, and reputational risk. Vijay Gandra, Global CDO at Acrisure, joins The Tech Trek to…
The Tech TrekAI Is Changing Coding, Not Engineering
Leonid Belkind, co founder and CTO at Torq, joins The Tech Trek to talk about what changes when an engineering organization does more than experiment with AI…
The Tech TrekAI Is Changing How Engineers Actually Work
AI coding tools are not just changing how software gets written. They are changing how teams work, how engineers are evaluated, and where bottlenecks show up…
The Tech TrekAI Can Handle the Tax Code. What Still Needs a Human?
Tax is one of the hardest places to earn trust with AI. The work is complex, the stakes are personal, and being mostly right is not good enough. In this…
The Tech TrekHe Built a Public Company. Now He Is Starting Over
What happens after you build a public company, spend nearly three decades at the helm, and then find yourself starting over? Rob Locascio, CEO and founder of…
The Tech TrekWhy Fintech Products Get Stuck Before Launch
Snigdha Kumar, CEO and co founder at Bricco, joins The Tech Trek to talk about a part of fintech most people never see, state by state licensing. For any…
The Tech TrekCoding Isn’t the Hard Part Anymore
Adam Kirk, CTO and cofounder of Jump, joins The Tech Trek to talk about what it really takes to build AI native products for people who do not want to think…
The Tech TrekHow AI Is Changing the Way Engineering Teams Work
Krishna Sai, CTO at SolarWinds, joins The Tech Trek to talk about one of the biggest shifts happening inside IT and engineering teams: AI is moving people from…
The Tech TrekWhy AI Still Needs Human Judgment
Dan Wald, cofounder and chief AI officer at Sciemo, joins The Tech Trek for a sharp conversation about what AI can and cannot do inside real business…
The Tech TrekWhy AI Will Not Fix Broken Data Teams
Most data teams do not have an AI problem yet. They have an operating model problem. Mike Doll, VP of Data at Guitar Center, joins The Tech Trek to talk about…
The Tech TrekAI Is Changing Cybersecurity Faster Than Teams Can Keep Up
Cybersecurity is no longer just about keeping attackers out. It is about what happens when they get in. Andrew Rubin, CEO and founder of Illumio, joins The…