AI Agents Are the New Employees — Are We Ready? S3 E9

On this week’s episode of Silicon Valley Impact, we sit down with three leaders shaping the future of AI, security, and venture: Eugene Malobrodsky (General Partner, One Way Ventures), Anna Kovaleva (Omnissa), and Irina Tagintseva (AI Architect, Apple). Eugene Malobrodsky is a General Partner at One Way Ventures and a serial founder behind AnchorFree, the company behind Hotspot Shield with over 650M downloads. He later co-founded Pango, scaling consumer cybersecurity products globally and incubating Twingate, a zero-trust enterprise security company that has raised over $40M. Today, Eugene brings a founder-first lens to investing and has helped build One Way’s Pathfinder Collective—an advisory network that includes founders behind companies like Slack and LinkedIn. Anna Kovaleva is a product leader at Omnissa (formerly VMware’s End User Computing business, backed by KKR), where she builds AI agents and identity platforms used by Fortune 500 companies and millions of users worldwide. Her work sits at the intersection of agentic AI, identity, and Zero Trust security—exploring how autonomous systems operate safely at enterprise scale. A Stanford MBA and former BCG consultant, Anna brings 15+ years of experience across AI, enterprise SaaS, and marketplaces, with a strong focus on the future of AI agents as a new class of identity. Irina Tagintseva is an AI architect, enterprise systems leader, and cloud strategist with 14+ years of experience across infrastructure, DevSecOps, and AI platforms. At Apple, she has led the development of MLOps systems powering GenAI-driven sales, and previously drove global-scale automation initiatives at Gap. She began her career in business development at an AI startup later acquired by Google, working alongside Tristan Harris. Irina holds a degree from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. We cover: → The rise of agentic AI and what it means for enterprise systems → AI as identity: how agents will interact, operate, and be governed → The future of cybersecurity in a world of autonomous systems → Founder-led venture, immigrant-driven innovation, and building at global scale This and much more on Silicon Valley Impact — where business insight meets startup innovation. Follow us on and listen to all our episodes on: 🎙️Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/68L4RPfMizjxnKBsmcFb1J 🍎Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/silicon-valley-impact/id1776876823 📺 Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@siliconvalleyimpact Silicon Valley Venture, LLC, the parent company of Silicon Valley Impact, is a proud global venture partner to great companies, MoralesHR and STAK Ventures, and 1900 Broadway Tower - Oakland. Check out https://moraleshr.com/ and https://stakspace.com/ to gain access to the worlds largest full stack venture ecosystem. It's over 1.2 million square feet of Live, Work, Play, Go; everything innovators, investors, ecosystem influencers, institutional partners, and global talent needs to gain a global advantage, access, alignment, and accelerate your venture.   Event Partnerships: Join us in Long Beach, April 22-25th for the IIT 2026 Conference. Get your tickets register here: https://www.iit2026.org/register