Episodes

Ethan Ding, co-founder and CEO of TextQL, joins ZeroPrime and AI Council Co-founder, Pete Soderling, to make an argument that most data leaders have been waiting years to hear: you don't have to clean everything, migrate everything, or centralize everything before AI can work on your data. Ethan's path from Bessemer to a hypergrowth stint at Tackle, let him see how much time teams spent moving the same business logic from one database to another, over and over. TextQL was born from a different ...

What's actually stopping enterprises from putting their AI to work? Bala Kasiviswanathan, who oversees Snowflake CoCo, Snowflake's AI coding agent, as VP of Developer and AI Experiences, says the real answer isn't access. It's fragmented context. Pete Soderling sits down with Bala to make the case that democratizing access to data was last decade's challenge. The next one is democratizing who gets to build — without creating enterprise chaos in the process. They unpack why governance and spee...

Linus Lee, Head of AI at Thrive Capital, sits down with Pete Soderling to talk context engineering, monolithic agents, and the failure mode most teams aren't measuring yet. Most teams building AI agents right now are reaching for bigger context windows. Linus thinks that's the wrong instinct. He runs AI at Thrive and ships an internal research agent called Puck that's processed billions of tokens in production — which means he's seen the failure modes most of us are still pretending don't exist...

For 50 years, the pattern has been the same: store the data in the database, keep the big files somewhere else, link them with a pointer. It's powered most production systems we've ever built. Chang She thinks AI is about to break it. In this episode, Pete Soderling sits down with Chang She ahead of AI Council SF 2026 to talk about why the old data stack wasn't built for what's coming, what agents are doing to database throughput, and why anyone with a serious background in performance "starts ...

On this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, Pete Soderling sits down with Vik Korrapati, Co-founder & CTO of Moondream — an open-source vision language model that lets any developer build vision AI apps through prompting, no PhD required. Vik shares what he's learned building Vision AI in the trenches: Why the benchmark everyone optimizes for is the wrong one How an unglamorous engineering philosophy beats flashy research breakthroughs Why his team rewrote the parts of the stack everyone else...

On this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, Pete Soderling sits down with Eno Reyes, Co-founder & CTO of Factory — a software development agent platform that has run missions lasting 14 days straight, with hundreds of agents executing continuously. In this conversation Pete covers: Can you scale AI coding agents without things quietly breaking? Is there an equivalent of a PR for specs? What does developer trust actually require? What will happen to the product manager role? How does the qua...

On this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, tune in to our conversation with Scott Breitenother, Co-founder & CEO of Kilo Code. Scott built Kilo Code — an open source AI coding agent platform — after watching the engineering job description quietly transform around him. His take: the engineers pulling ahead aren't writing better code. They're running better agent teams. In this conversation, Scott unpacks what that shift actually demands — why every developer at Kilo operates like a mini CEO, wh...

This week, we're bringing you an exclusive conversation with Eldad Farkash, Co-founder and CEO of Firebolt, who's been revolutionizing data architecture for over two decades. From co-founding Sisense as CTO for 14 years to building a next-generation data warehouse that's redefining industry standards, Eldad has mastered the art of making data work at scale. Discover his insights from Israel's thriving tech ecosystem, learn how he leveraged hard-won lessons from Sisense to accelerate Firebolt ...

In this episode we talk to Dwarak Rajagopal – VP of AI Engineering and AI Research at Snowflake. Hear from Dwarak as he traces his journey from optimizing AMD processors to building AI systems at Google and now revolutionizing enterprise AI at Snowflake – discussing the real-world challenges and opportunities for bringing AI to business applications. Dwarak offers compelling perspectives on why text-to-SQL shouldn’t be underestimated, how query logs can create unfair advantages, and why efficie...

In this episode we talk to Jake Moshenko – Co-Founder and CEO of AuthZed. Hear from Jake as he traces his journey from building flight simulators to creating cutting-edge authorization systems – not mincing words when discussing the security challenges in AI-driven applications. Jake offers new perspectives on the future of permissions and access control in a technical discussion that captures the evolution of authorization from legacy systems to today’s AI revolution. You won’t want to miss t...

This week I chat with Sudarshan Lakshminarasimhan, Founding Engineer and Performance Research Lead at e6data. With over two decades of experience at technical consulting firm Thoughtworks and a seat on their Technology Advisory Board, Sudarshan brings deep expertise in distributed systems and data platforms. In this episode, you'll hear us pontificate on the world before Agile, learn fascinating insights about building high-performance data engines, and consider the evolution of scalable data la...

In this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, we chat with Charity Majors, Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, who traded piano keys for keyboard commands on their journey from trained pianist to systems firefighter. Tune in to get Charity's unfiltered thoughts on why engineers should toggle between coding and management, their challenges to the "three pillars" monitoring model and insights on how AI introduces non-deterministic challenges to software engineering. This is NOT your typical tech-foun...

In this episode of Zero Prime, we sit down with Rob Woollen, co-founder and CTO of Sigma Computing, to explore the intersection of engineering and entrepreneurship. Rob shares his journey from writing Unix kernels at HP to architecting Salesforce's growth, before founding Sigma at Sutter Hill Ventures with the mission of democratizing data analytics. Drawing from his experience building enterprise platforms, he offers valuable insights on pivoting a technical vision into product-market fit and ...

In this new episode of the 0P podcast, we welcome back Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, to discuss the evolving landscape of software licensing in the cloud era. Spencer shares insights on how companies are innovating with new licensing models to bridge the gap between open source ideals and sustainable business growth. Drawing from his experience leading Cockroach Labs, a distributed database company, he offers a unique perspective on finding equilibrium between community...

In this episode, we introduce a new format for the podcast—a deep dive into a technical topic with an engineer-founder who is an expert on the subject. For our first Deep Dive, I sit down with Vijay Subramanian, the visionary behind Trace, to explore the evolution and future of metric layers in business metrics and cross-functional alignment. Vijay demystifies the concept of metrics layers, metric trees and semantic layers, explaining their components, functionality and crucial role in today’s ...

In this episode, I sit down with Paul Dix, the founder and CTO of InfluxData to explore his journey from a self-taught programmer to a leader in database systems. We discuss his role in building the NYC Machine Learning meetup, the creation of InfluxDB and the strategic move to make it open source. He shares insights into the decision to rewrite InfluxDB in 2020 and the power of community in tech development. We also touch on his transition from CEO to CTO and his advice for founders on making b...

In this episode, I sit down with Alex Mashrabov, the visionary CEO of Higgsfield AI. We journey through Alex's impressive career, beginning with his time at Yandex where he witnessed the early implementations of neural networks. We explore what ignited his entrepreneurial spirit and delve into the stark contrasts between the Russian and American educational landscapes. Our discussion then moves to Alex's experiences in building generative AI products, starting with AI Factory, which focused on ...

In this episode, I chat with Jordan Tigani, the dynamic engineer-founder of MotherDuck who previously led Google's BigQuery team and headed up product at SingleStore. Jordan shares the inspiring origin story of MotherDuck, which emerged from the overlooked analytics' long tail, focusing on serving small users in data analytics. Our conversation delves into thought-provoking topics such as the conundrum of big data, bridging the gap between unstructured AI data and traditional data structures, th...

In this episode, Pete speaks with Alvaro Morales, the co-founder and CEO of Orb, who shares his journey from being an engineer to becoming the founder of a flexible billing engine for modern software pricing. Alvaro traces his path from Lima, Peru to San Francisco, discussing the rise of startups in his home city as well as his early engineering experiences at Yahoo, Palantir and Asana. His early days founding Orb were not without challenges, especially when it came to signing up customers an...

In this enlightening episode, I have the privilege of hosting Craig McLuckie, a tech industry veteran who has made significant contributions to the cloud computing industry and is currently the Co-founder & CEO of stacklok. We begin by exploring his journey from Microsoft to Google, where he co-authored Kubernetes, a pivotal project that has shaped the industry. We also delve into his post-Google venture, Heptio, and the strategic planning that led to its success. Craig offers valuable advice on...

In this episode, I chat with Erik Bernhardsson, co-founder and CEO of Modal, about his journey from Spotify engineer to startup CTO to startup founder. Erik takes us back to his early days as a software engineer and shares how his transformative years at Spotify ignited his startup mindset. We discuss the challenges he faced during his transition from engineer to founder, including overcoming self-doubt and stepping into a leadership role. Erik also talks about his experience building open sourc...

In this episode, I chat with Barry McCardel, Co-Founder and CEO of Hex, as he traces his journey from leading college teams to establishing Hex, a data tool startup. Barry discusses building his team with former Palantir colleagues and Hex's emphasis on design from its inception. He shares insights on Hex's rapid feature development, scaling challenges and his vision for the future of data tooling. The episode concludes with Barry's thoughts on emerging trends in data, infrastructure and AI. Hi...

In this episode, we explore Guillermo Rauch's path from a teen hacker in Argentina to the founder of Vercel. We touch on his engineering roots, the role of open-source in his success and Vercel's creation to simplify deployments with Next.js. We compare Vercel's innovations to the evolution of electric cars, discuss the significance of speed in edge computing and peek into the future of building data-intensive applications with the help of AI. Guillermo, balancing roles as an engineer and CEO, ...

In this episode, Aaron Lee, Founder & CEO of Smith.ai joins me to discuss a variety of topics. First, we delve into the innovative strategies of tech giants like Google, and explore the future of AI in business. Then we journey back to the early days at Smith.ai, where AI was used to enhance productivity. Aaron shares a multitude of learnings from his time founding RedBeacon and then serving as CTO of Home Depot following its acquisition of RedBeacon. Next, we dig into the complexities of teachi...