PODCAST · technology
The Tech Trek
by Elevano
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
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Technical 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 becomes increasingly important. Tim Chen, Managing Partner at Essence Venture Capital, invests in highly technical founders building...
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AI 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, AI Platform at iHerb, joins The Tech Trek to discuss why AI observability goes beyond traditional software monitoring. Teams need to...
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How 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 team structures, engineering skills, and hiring. At Hero Safety, designers, product managers, and operations teams are using AI to build and...
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Voice 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 Trek to discuss how teams test, evaluate, and scale voice AI agents. Drawing on her experience leading evaluation infrastructure at Waymo,...
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AI 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, autonomy, product ownership, and a lighter operating model. Omni has about 25 engineers working in groups as small as one to three people....
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From 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 of Faros, joins The Tech Trek to talk about the gap between AI adoption and measurable results. The conversation looks at why engineering...
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Problem 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 Trek to talk about listening to business partners, defining the outcome first, and resisting the instinct to jump immediately to a...
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Physical 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 Trek to explain how physical AI connects AI systems with objects, environments, and supply chains. The challenge is not simply processing...
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From 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 working on the same core idea that inspired the company years ago: putting intelligence into the devices around us. What changed is what those...
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Early 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 Tech Trek to explain what he looks for when investing at the earliest stages of AI companies. The conversation covers how lower…
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AI 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 Tech Trek to discuss how agentic coding is changing problem solving, development workflows, project management, and technical hiring. Shaun...
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AI 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 predictable. Ev Kontsevoy, CEO and cofounder of Teleport, joins The Tech Trek to discuss what happens when companies deploy agents into...
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Can 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, joins The Tech Trek to discuss what happens when AI handles engineering, support, marketing, research, and other parts of company execution....
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How 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 CTO of Orkes, joins The Tech Trek to discuss how AI is changing workflow orchestration, engineering productivity, project delivery, and...
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How 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 where technical talent creates the most value. Shaosu Liu, Co Founder and CTO at Loop, explains how his team is using AI agents across the...
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How 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 talk about what it takes to prepare a growing company to actually execute on AI. That means more than giving engineers access to Claude or...
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How 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 Tech Trek to explain how his company is using AI to take on enterprise transformation work traditionally handled by large systems...
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From 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 Rabinovich, CTO and Head of AI at Upwork, joins The Tech Trek to talk about his move from leading AI into the broader CTO role. His view is...
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Where 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 discuss how AI is changing investment opportunities across healthcare, fintech, insurtech, legal services, and other regulated industries.…
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Why 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 co founder of Highlight, joins The Tech Trek to discuss why faster output does not automatically mean better work. Teams can generate...
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AI 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 screen is actually who they claim to be, whether their answers are their own, and what happens if someone with malicious intent gets access…
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AI 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 development is changing engineering work, product ownership, experimentation, and hiring. Integral helps companies de identify and anonymize...
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How 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 answer enough to change how they work. Rohan Nagi, VP of Strategy and Analytics at Sponsor United, explains how sports analytics is...
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How 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 most. Raymond Wang, CTO and cofounder at Ease Health, joins Amir to discuss how an engineering team using agentic coding tools thinks about...
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AI 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 or transmission line may take seven to nine years. That gap puts utilities at the center of the next phase of AI growth. Vik Chaudhry,...
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How 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 defining the right problem, setting requirements, reviewing outputs, and deciding what belongs in a durable platform. Niels Bantilan, Chief...
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How 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 management more than a back office issue. It affects margins, staffing, patient experience, and access to care. Akash Magoon, cofounder and…
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How 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 TextQL, joins The Tech Trek to explain how AI agents are changing enterprise analytics. The conversation moves beyond faster dashboards into…
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Scaling 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 internal adoption. Shimon Ben-David, CTO at WEKA, joins Amir to discuss the gap between experimenting with generative AI and operating it at...
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How 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 judgment. Goncalo Silva, CTO at Doist, explains how AI is changing the way teams behind Todoist and Twist build software. He shares why greater...
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The 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 at Arbital Health, joins Amir to talk about how AI is bringing actuarial subject matter experts closer to product and engineering teams,...
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The 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 involve lending, collections, servicing, compliance, and real customer risk. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Amir Bormand speaks with...
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Why 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 where privacy, consistency, monitoring, and customer trust have to be designed from the start. This conversation gets into why AI product...
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Engineers 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 workflows, team adoption, and software delivery culture. He shares how Barracuda is approaching AI with guardrails, why adoption varies…
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Your 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 episode of The Tech Trek, Amir Bormand sits down with Aimee Cardwell, CIO and CISO in residence at Transcend, to talk about responsible…
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What 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 Lucas Thelosen, CEO and cofounder at Gravity, about the agent economy, AI analytics, and what changes when analysts move from doing every...
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Yahoo 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 efforts. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Lee Zen, CTO at Yahoo, joins Amir Bormand to talk about modernizing at massive scale, moving from...
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Why 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 toward? In this episode of The Tech Trek, Mike Choi, co founder at Koah, shares his path from Korea to the United States, mandatory military...
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Why 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 episode, Amir talks with Shaun Modi, cofounder and CEO of Capitol AI, about sovereign AI, shadow AI, model dependency, government use cases,...
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Healthcare 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 and founder of Unity AI, joins Amir to talk about AI for healthcare operations. The conversation gets into why scheduling, staffing, follow...
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AI 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 why systems thinking may matter more than raw coding ability as engineering work shifts. Practical Takeaways • AI coding agents are already...
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Agentic 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 people. In this episode, Amir talks with Karthik Ranganathan, cofounder and co CEO at Yugabyte, about why databases are under new pressure as AI...
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When 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 Weller, CTO and founder at EnFi, joins The Tech Trek to talk about how his team is building around agentic software development while...
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Data 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 talk about AI transformation inside a regulated industry, where explainability, data quality, governance, cost, and team readiness matter...
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AI 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 tools. Torq builds agentic security operations, and Leonid shares how his team is using AI across engineering, product, hiring, customer...
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AI 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. Scott Breitenother, CEO and cofounder of Kilo, joins The Tech Trek to talk about what engineering looks like when developers are managing...
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AI 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 episode of The Tech Trek, David Kang, founder and CEO of Keeper, explains how his team is applying AI to tax workflows without pretending humans...
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He 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 Uare.ai, joins The Tech Trek to talk about that exact journey. Rob previously founded LivePerson, helped create web chat for customer...
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Why 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 financial company trying to launch in the United States, licensing can be slow, expensive, and operationally painful. Snigdha explains why that...
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Coding 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 like technologists. Jump serves financial advisors, a market where ease of use, trust, workflow fit, and domain context matter as much as…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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.
HOSTED BY
Elevano
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Tech Trek have?
The Tech Trek currently has 710 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Tech Trek about?
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...
How often does The Tech Trek release new episodes?
The Tech Trek releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 710 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to The Tech Trek?
You can listen to The Tech Trek on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Tech Trek?
The Tech Trek is created and hosted by Elevano.
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