PODCAST · technology
TwoSetAI: Decoding AI Builders
by Angelina Yang
Behind every AI company is a founder who almost quit, made a bet no one believed in, or figured something out that changed everything. TwoSetAI tells those stories through long-form interviews with the people building the future. Hosted by Angelina Yang. angelinayang.substack.com
Episodes
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Why His Creative Kids Didn't Want This Book | Joseph Enochs of Enterprise Vision Technologies
Got a real industry problem? Post it on Painpoints, the problem board Angelina and Joseph announce at the end of this episode. From applied machine learning and COVID tracking in Los Angeles to an O'Reilly book on generative video: Joseph Enochs is Chief AI Officer at Enterprise Vision…
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How Fast AI Learned Math | Phillip Kerger of UC Berkeley
From optimization theory and quantum algorithms to a classroom where a chatbot can do the homework: Phillip Kerger has a close view of what AI can and cannot do. He is a professor in UC Berkeley's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research department and a former NASA quantum researcher. His...
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MrBeast's 10% Rule, Applied to Podcasts | Rox Codes of Flightcast
From A/B testing YouTube thumbnails to building podcast infrastructure, Rox Codes has built his career on one habit: test it and find out. His first company, ThumbnailTest, got him a job at MrBeast and an early beta customer in Steven Bartlett of The Diary of a CEO, who paid him $20 over PayPal....
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The One Question to Ask About Your Company's AI Agents | Hector Hernandez of Speakeasy
From a couple of people trying AI to an enterprise license for every employee: that jump is where Hector Hernandez works. He is the co-founder and COO of Speakeasy, whose team builds the guardrail layer that decides what AI agents are allowed to touch. Speakeasy is mostly focused on large...
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The AI Bubble Has an Upside | Rachel Chalmers of Generationship
From a graduate student in Ireland who picked a copy of Wired off the floor during the 1994 World Cup and decided to go to San Francisco and write about computers, to a founding employee at 451 Research who covered over 1,000 venture-backed companies, Rachel Chalmers has built a career on pattern...
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You Don't Need AI Friends | Xuan Zhao of Flourish Science
From social psychology research at Brown, Chicago Booth and Stanford to running an AI wellbeing company, Xuan Zhao has spent her career on one question: how do you get the science of living well into people's daily lives? She is the CEO and co-founder of Flourish Science, the company behind the...
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When Your AI Starts Acting as You | Sam Kececi of The Sentience Company
From a kid in New Jersey who thought he wanted to be a neurosurgeon, to a computer science and economics student at Columbia, to CTO of a company called Macro, Sam Kececi has kept returning to two interests: computers and the human mind. He is now the founder and CEO of The Sentience Company…
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What Engineers Do Now That AI Writes Most of the Code | Murali Swaminathan of Freshworks
From the pre-internet era to client-server, SaaS and now AI: Murali Swaminathan has built software through each of those shifts. An engineer by education, he moved from India to the US about 30 years ago and has lived in the Bay Area since. He is now the CTO of Freshworks, where the job is...
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Why Heavy Industry Is Two or Three Years Behind on AI | Ali Parandeh, Author of Building Generative AI Services with FastAPI
From head of engineering to founder: that is the change since Ali Parandeh was last on TwoSetAI. At the time of this conversation he runs Build Your AI, which is aimed at heavy industries such as construction, automotive, energy, aerospace and infrastructure. He is a chartered mechanical and...
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Why We May Not Need Translation Much Longer | Olga Beregovaya of Smartling
From building parsers and lexicons for rule-based translation engines to deploying LLMs at scale: Olga Beregovaya is VP of AI at Smartling. She has two degrees in linguistics ("actually two and a half") and says she has never translated anything as a translator. What she studied was how the…
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Why More Features Make Your AI Product Harder to Remember | Rob Kaminski of Fletch
Rob Kaminski grew up in Cleveland, started out as a biomedical engineer, and took what he calls a very meandering path through product and sales into product marketing. Today he is the co-founder of Fletch, a product marketing consultancy he runs with his business partner Anthony Pierri that does...
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Why AI Is Coming for Pickleball and 25-Year-Old Software | Birju Kadakia of Rec Technologies
Birju Kadakia grew up in the Chicago suburbs using the local tennis courts and the rec center without knowing he was a community recreation user. He studied engineering at Illinois, was a really early employee at Uber, where he helped launch product teams including Uber Eats, and then led product...
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The 5 Pricing Models Every AI Agent Company Should Know | Jenée Hall, Former CRO
From leading sales and pricing at SaaS companies in health tech, architecture and agriculture to running her own consulting practice: Jenée Hall is a former chief revenue officer, and founders keep bringing her the same worry, Angelina included. They think they are leaving money on the table....
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What Is Left for Engineers When AI Writes the Code | Ofer Mendelevitch, Author of Hands-On RAG for Production
From naive Bayes on CPUs to GPT-1 and GPT-2 around 2019 to a book on production RAG: Ofer Mendelevitch says he has seen a lot of cycles. He is a co-author of O'Reilly's Hands-On RAG for Production and an independent AI advisor. He started the book a little more than a year and a half ago, drawing...
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How Close Personal AI Employees Actually Are | Ali Parandeh, Author of Building Generative AI Services with FastAPI
From a head of engineering to a company of one: Ali Parandeh was on TwoSetAI before, talking about vibe coding and building production AI systems. Since then he has left his job and started his own company, Build Your AI. He is the author of the O'Reilly book Building Generative AI Services with...
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A CTO's Honest Read on the Year AI Surpasses Human Intelligence | Gil Feig of Merge
From two startups that kept building the same integrations to the company that sells them: Gil Feig is the co-founder and CTO of Merge. He and his co-founder Shensi met the problem from different sides, one in cybersecurity connecting to ticketing systems, the other in recruiting tech connecting…
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What Your AI Agents Really Are When You Strip Away the Hype | Nicole Königstein, Author of AI Agents: The Definitive Guide
From coding algorithms on paper in her computer science exams in Switzerland to writing the O'Reilly books on transformers and AI agents: Nicole Königstein is an author, researcher and consultant whose PhD research is on self-improving AI agents. She calls herself a systems thinker, and says what...
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The 5 Tailwinds Every AI Builder Should Ride | Mercedes Bent of Premise Ventures
From starting college in computer science and working in VR a decade ago to six years of investing at Lightspeed and now a venture firm of her own: Mercedes Bent is a partner at Premise Ventures, the firm she started with a co-founder. She describes it as generalist, investing in everything from...
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What an AI Hallucination Really Is, and How to Control It | Wiley Jones of Doss
Wiley Jones comes to enterprise software from electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and control systems. He is the CEO of Doss, which had just raised $55 million when this was recorded. Doss builds what it calls ARP for physical operations companies, many of them in the mid-market:...
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What an AI Billing Company Will Not Let AI Do | Deepak Bapat of Tabs
From a high-frequency trading company to early-stage startups in New York to building AI for finance: Deepak Bapat is the CTO and co-founder of Tabs. As he explains it, Tabs starts by reading a company's contracts and then works on two tracks: making invoicing, billing and payment efficient with…
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The Open-Source Platform Behind OpenAI's Voice Mode | Tom Shapland of LiveKit
From a sensor he developed in grad school and turned into his first company, to a voice agent startup that failed, to a company he calls a rocket ship: Tom Shapland works on LiveKit Inference at LiveKit, which Angelina introduces as the open-source platform behind OpenAI's voice mode, powering...
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He Built AI for GitHub Copilot. Now He Says We're All Doomed | John Berryman, Author of Prompt Engineering for LLMs
From an early engineer on GitHub Copilot to a consultant for whom every month or two is a completely new world: John Berryman is the author of Prompt Engineering for LLMs and the founder of Arcturus Labs. He left GitHub in May of 2024. Staying inside one company on one fixed project, he says…
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From a 4-Day MVP to 80,000 GitHub Stars | Magnus Müller of Browser Use
From a couch in a Zurich co-working space to a hacker house in San Francisco, Magnus Müller has kept the microwave. He is the co-founder and CEO of Browser Use, the open source tool that lets AI agents use the web, not only search it. He and his co-founder had each just shut down a startup when...
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What a Context Graph Really Is | Daniel Davis of TrustGraph
Daniel Davis is the co-creator of TrustGraph, which Angelina introduces as the open-source context backend for AI agents. He says he found knowledge graphs very hard to learn, and that what he knows came from his co-creator Mark Adams, who wrote him a guide that builds a knowledge graph out of...
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Managing 100 AI Agents vs. 100 People: What's the Difference? | Simon Shaolei Du of Apodex
From a computer science faculty post at the University of Washington to chief scientist at Apodex: Simon Shaolei Du moved from academia to industry to build what he calls a heavy duty solver. Angelina introduces him as one of the most decorated young theorists in machine learning, with honors…
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What Perplexity's Ad Shutdown Tells Us About AI Monetization | Nic Baird of Koah Labs
From competitive sailing to the ad business for AI apps: Nic Baird went to school at Yale, won a few national championships in sailing and expected to go professional. He says he stumbled his way into startup land instead. He is now the co-founder and CEO of Koah Labs, which he describes as a…
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Examples Beat Instructions: How Prompt Optimization Works | Mike Taylor, Author of Prompt Engineering for Generative AI
From a growth marketing agency he grew to 50 people to the O'Reilly books engineers read: Mike Taylor is the author of Prompt Engineering for Generative AI, a columnist at Every and, at the time of this conversation, the CEO of Ask Rally, which builds AI focus groups out of synthetic personas. He...
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What They Don't Tell You About Selling Your AI Startup | Jay Hack of ClickUp
From side projects on the GPT-3 API to leading AI at a work platform: Jay Hack is Head of AI at ClickUp and the founder of Codegen, which Angelina introduces as one of the first coding agent companies. He says he has worked on versions of code generation for over a decade, that it kicked into…
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Why AI Is Making Hiring Harder, Not Easier | John Kim of Paraform
From a year or more without revenue to a company of 100 plus people: that is the stretch John Kim describes here. At the time of this conversation he is the co-founder and CEO of Paraform, which Angelina introduces as the recruiting marketplace that companies like Palantir, Cursor and Rippling…
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What Happens When AI Agents Talk to Your Customers | Alex Beller of Postscript
Postscript is seven and a half years old, and Alex Beller says the company is reinventing itself all over again. He started Postscript with two co-founders, Adam and Colin, and at the time of this conversation all three still run it together. He describes it at three levels: it helps businesses...
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We Killed RAG, MCP, and Agentic Loops | Paul Iusztin, Author of LLM Engineer's Handbook
From Romania, where he did not want to apply for the few positions on offer, to founding AI engineer at a San Francisco startup: Paul Iusztin is the author of the LLM Engineer's Handbook and writes Decoding AI, a newsletter that Angelina says reaches more than 40,000 engineers. He got there…
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Rearchitecting How Science Works, Starting With Materials | Jorge Colindres of Radical AI
From venture capital investor to co-founder of a company that makes physical materials: Jorge Colindres was investing in software and machine learning companies when he grew frustrated with what they were building. He read, by his count, north of 200 research papers to find out whether the...
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The 3 AI Rights No One Told Creators About | Trip Adler of Created by Humans
From a document site that drew cease and desist letters within days to a company built to get authors paid by AI: Trip Adler is the co-founder and CEO of Created by Humans, which he describes as the company that is sticking up for human creativity. Its aim, in his words, is to solve copyright in...
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Writing Is Thinking: The Case for Writing Without AI | Jasmin Alić of Link Up
A former rapper, a university professor, a TEDx speaker and a LinkedIn coach: Jasmin Alić, who goes by Jay, was running the Link Up community at the time of this conversation and coaching founders on brand and business. By his own count he has coached more than a thousand people, around 300 of…
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1.1 Million Robots Are Already at Work. Where Are They? | Jan Liphardt of OpenMind
From a physics professorship to software for humanoids: Jan Liphardt started out as a physics professor at UC Berkeley, moved into healthcare and computing on sensitive data, and at the time of this conversation is a professor of bioengineering at Stanford and the founder and CEO of OpenMind, the...
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The Branding Mistake That Keeps Creators Stuck | Adam Biddlecombe of Mindstream
From six years trying to be a rock star to a newsletter that HubSpot acquired: Adam Biddlecombe started Mindstream, a daily AI newsletter, with his childhood friend Matt Village in June 2023. By his account they began with a blank sheet of paper in an office at the end of his garden, two meters…
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What Engineers Do When Handed God in a Box | Steve Ruiz of tldraw
From pens and paint to the canvas other companies build on: Steve Ruiz has a fine art background and, at the time of this conversation, is the founder of tldraw, an engine for building canvas apps such as whiteboards and design tools. tldraw grew out of an open source project he meant to finish…
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Banned by OpenAI - Dara Ladjevardian (CEO of Delphi)
Dara Ladjevardian had no mentors when he started his first company. So he built a digital version of his grandfather — one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Iran. That experiment became Delphi, now powering digital minds for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jay Shetty, and thousands of high-inbound...
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Why He Chooses Humans Over AI | Joris Corthout of Prismax
From visuals for nightclubs and fashion shows to real-time 3D worlds on festival stages: Joris Corthout is the CEO of Prismax, which he says he founded exactly 20 years before this conversation as a graphic studio for the entertainment industry. Angelina introduces Prismax as the team behind the...
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From Nearly Shutting Down to $40M ARR in 5 Months | Alexander Berger of Bolt.new
From the first non-engineer at a developer tool company to chief operating officer: Alexander Berger joined in 2020 as employee number seven, when the company was called StackBlitz and sold a code editing environment that ran in the browser. He came in as its first enterprise sales rep, closed a...
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How Browser Agents Find What Google Search Can't | Devi Parikh of Yutori
About 20 years in AI, from computer vision research to generative models: Devi Parikh was faculty at Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech, then spent about eight years at Meta, the first five at FAIR and then a couple of years in its GenAI organization, where she was a senior director leading the...
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The AI That Takes Down 5,000 Fakes a Day | Jesse Xu of Podqi
From a patent law class at Penn to automated takedowns: Jesse Xu is the CTO and co-founder of Podqi, an AI brand protection platform he started with two best friends, Trevor and Ivan. At the time of this conversation the team is 11 people, working in person in the Bay Area. The three knew they...
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Thousands of Dashboards, None With the Answer | Alex Reichenbach of Structify
From teaching robots to see to building what he calls the AI data team for every enterprise: Alex Reichenbach did computer vision research, worked briefly at a Yale lab, then at the robotics company Matician, and is one of the founders of Structify, where he is CEO. At the time of this…
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What It Takes to Train One AI Model | Raghav Selvan of the University of Copenhagen
From medical images to the footprint of the models themselves: Raghav Selvan trained in signal processing, did his PhD at the University of Copenhagen on machine learning methods for three-dimensional medical images, and has since focused on the sustainability of AI, starting from what it costs…
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The Vibe Coding Security Risk Nobody's Talking About | Ali Parandeh, Author of Building Generative AI Services with FastAPI
From mechanical engineering to generative AI: at the time of this conversation, Ali Parandeh is head of engineering at an AI and data science consultancy based in London and the author of Building Generative AI Services with FastAPI. He is a chartered engineer with the UK Engineering Council who...
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Why "Well Enough" Is Not Good Enough for AI Data | Ahmed Rashad of Perle.ai
From an offshore oil rig to 20 years in software: Ahmed Rashad started his career as an offshore oil driller, taught himself to code to solve a problem he had on the rig, and has been in software since. He is the founder and CEO of Perle.ai, which he describes as a data platform for specialized...
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What YouTube's Engagement Metrics Missed | Jing Wang of DeepVista
From a PhD in reinforcement learning to Google's ads systems, then Google Brain, then startups: Jing Wang has spent his career on the systems that decide what people see. At Google Brain, by his account, he led the work of applying reinforcement learning research to YouTube's home…
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The Retrieval Loss Problem: Why Your AI Memory System Fails at Scale | Shawkat Kabbara of Papr
From machine learning at Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, including voice experiences on Siri, to a memory layer for AI agents: Shawkat Kabbara is the CEO of Papr at the time of this conversation. Papr builds what he calls predictive memory. His starting point is that an agent needs to remember the...
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Solving Context Loss, the Problem Every Startup Has | Kisson Lin, then CEO of Tanka
From strategy roles at Meta and TikTok to building AI memory, first for individuals and then for teams: Kisson Lin was the CEO of Tanka at the time of this conversation, and before that a co-founder of Mindverse AI, which she says built an AI agent platform and long-term memory for individuals.…
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How OpenArt Got 7 Million Users So Fast | Coco Mao of OpenArt
From seven years at Google to a 10-person company with millions of users: Coco Mao is the co-founder and CEO of OpenArt, which she describes as a platform for visual storytelling that turns an idea into a visual story. At Google she worked on Google Photos, then built a short video platform…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Behind every AI company is a founder who almost quit, made a bet no one believed in, or figured something out that changed everything. TwoSetAI tells those stories through long-form interviews with the people building the future. Hosted by Angelina Yang.
angelinayang.substack.com
HOSTED BY
Angelina Yang
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How many episodes does TwoSetAI: Decoding AI Builders have?
TwoSetAI: Decoding AI Builders currently has 57 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is TwoSetAI: Decoding AI Builders about?
Behind every AI company is a founder who almost quit, made a bet no one believed in, or figured something out that changed everything. TwoSetAI tells those stories through long-form interviews with the people building the future. Hosted by Angelina Yang. angelinayang.substack.com
How often does TwoSetAI: Decoding AI Builders release new episodes?
TwoSetAI: Decoding AI Builders has 57 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Who hosts TwoSetAI: Decoding AI Builders?
TwoSetAI: Decoding AI Builders is created and hosted by Angelina Yang.
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