The Index Podcast

Hosted by Index Studios

Technology Entrepreneurship EducationInterviews guests

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208

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Oct 2026

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About the show

The Index podcast goes beyond the code to get at the real stories behind some of today's most interesting emerging tech companies, the founders, the strategy, the stuff that actually happens behind the scenes. Every week, host Alex Kehaya sits down with entrepreneurs, builders, and investors who are shaping where the internet is headed. Alex is CEO of ABK Labs and Corbits, a platform that helps companies put AI agents into production without losing sleep over it. Corbits handles the hard parts: knowing who or what is actually acting, keeping permissions locked down, managing credentials, and keeping a clear record of what happened. Run it on Corbits' cloud or your own, with whatever model you want. We've got some news: two new co-hosts are joining the show! First up, Anne Ahola Ward from CircleClick. CNN dubbed her "The Mother of Startups," and it's a title she's earned. Anne is a technical SEO with a reputation for growing startups by any means necessary, and she's become a trusted voice in tech with well over 100 TV appearances. She’s someone who can break down what's actually happening under the hood rather than just talking around it. Then there's Steve Schoonebeek from Triton One. Steve leads BD there, and he spends most of his time talking to builders about what it really takes to move fast, reliable data at scale- no small feat. He's seen a lot of infrastructure get built (and rebuilt), and he's bringing his sage industry perspective to the table. So now you've got Alex, Anne, and Steve all bringing different angles to the table. Same goal as always: real conversations with the founders actually building startups that matter.

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60 recent

October 27, 2026Episode 5732 min

Ken Berenger: Why Water Infrastructure Is Moving On-Chain

Water infrastructure is quietly becoming one of the most interesting new real world asset classes in finance. In this episode of The Index Podcast, Ken Berenger, CEO of Water On Demand and Gridwater, breaks down how he built a real world asset platform that turns restaurant grease traps into a fully tokenizable, investable asset class, and why he believes water infrastructure is headed on-chain next. From a $20 billion pitch to European family offices to a new tax law that just made water more attractive than real estate or energy, this conversation covers how Water On Demand is building the real world asset infrastructure behind the next wave of tokenization. This is what happens when a stock broker from the '90s and a room full of crypto builders realize they built the exact same thing. 🚀 In this episode, we cover: 💧 How Ken built Water On Demand to turn water treatment into an investable asset class 🍟 Gridwater: the grease trap and FOG treatment business that became the pilot case for the whole model 🏛️ How a new tax law suddenly made water treatment more advantaged than real estate or energy 💰 Ken's story of pitching $20 billion in family office money in London, and the question that changed everything 🔗 Why Ken believes water infrastructure is headed on-chain within 24 months 🖥️ The AI boom's hidden water problem: why data centers need millions of gallons for cooling 🧩 How tokenizing micro-shares of infrastructure could open up asset investing to everyone 🔗 Follow & learn more: 🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast 🔗 Ken Berenger (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-berenger-6a487a10/ 🧑‍💻 Ken Berenger (X): https://x.com/KenBerenger 🌐 Water On Demand (Website): https://waterondemand.com 🌐 Gridwater (Website): https://gridwater.com 🐦 Water On Demand (X): https://x.com/waterondemand Show Links The Index X Channel YouTube

October 27, 2026Episode 5625 min

He Built an AI That Beats Insurance Companies at Their Own Game | Dean Margolis x Red Sky Health

Health insurers use AI to deny thousands of claims a minute. Dean Margolis built the AI that fights back, and it doesn't get paid unless the hospital does. Inside this episode: a serial founder with 3 exits and an IPO, a product literally named after "denial," and a business model Gartner is already calling the future of software. 🩺 What we cover: 💸 The clerical error hiding inside half of all denied claims, and how AI catches it instantly 🥊 Insurers auto deny thousands of claims at once. Red Sky auto fixes them at the same scale 🔍 The 4 denial types costing hospitals millions: coding errors, eligibility gaps, missing pre auths, and "not medically necessary" 🔒 Why one compliance mistake could send a CEO to prison, and why Anthropic or OpenAI legally can't touch this data 🧠 Agentic AI, machine learning, and old school table lookups working together, not one silver bullet 💼 3 startups sold to public companies, 1 IPO, and why Dean says his own ideas are usually terrible 🌍 Zero office, a team across 10 states and 3 continents, and just 4 engineers because Claude and Cursor write the code 📊 The 20% outcomes based fee model Gartner is calling the death of traditional SaaS 🚀 First hospital network signed, $5M raised, and a Series A already lining up 🔗 Links: Watch more episodes of The Index: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast Dean Margolis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dean-margolis-48935 Red Sky Health website: https://www.redskyhealth.com/ Red Sky Health LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/redskyhealth Show Links The Index X Channel YouTube

October 26, 2026Episode 5527 min

Eddie Zhang (Arcus) on Tokenizing Wall Street: Zero-Fee Stocks, Robinhood Chain & 3x Leveraged ETFs

Arcus is bringing Wall Street on-chain. In this episode of The Index Podcast, Eddie Zhang, Founder & CEO of Arcus, the decentralized exchange built by dYdX in partnership with Robinhood, breaks down how tokenized US stocks and perpetuals are going 24/7 on Robinhood Chain. This is what it looks like when the entire US stock market becomes as accessible as a stablecoin. 🚀 In this episode, we cover: 🏦 How Arcus brings 95+ tokenized US stocks on-chain with zero fees, 24/7 🤝 Why dYdX partnered with Robinhood to build Arcus on Robinhood Chain 🌍 The story behind giving people outside the US direct access to American equities 🧾 Inside Arcus' securitize-on-demand model for scaling to 10,000+ stock tokens 📈 A first look at 3x leveraged ETF tokens on SPY, HOOD, and Bitcoin 💰 Arcus by the numbers: over $500 million in stock and perpetual trading in month one 🔮 Eddie's take on AI compute, on-chain routers, and what's next for finance Chapters: 0:00 Intro & sponsor message 1:10 Meet Eddie Zhang, Founder and CEO of Arcus 1:52 What gets Eddie out of bed: opening access to wealth creation 3:54 How Arcus is different from what came before 6:51 The story behind unlocking global access to US stocks 10:48 Inside Arcus' securitize-on-demand smart contract 12:08 Why Arcus partnered with dYdX and Robinhood 15:28 Arcus by the numbers: $500M+ in the first month 19:30 AI tokens, on-chain routers, and the future of finance 20:51 First look: 3x leveraged ETF stock tokens 23:53 Why Robinhood launched its own chain now 26:22 What's next: the Arcus mobile app 🔗 Follow & learn more: 🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast 🧑‍💻 Eddie Zhang (X): https://x.com/epic_edge_ 🌐 Arcus (Website): https://arcus.xyz 🐦 Arcus (X): https://x.com/arcus_xyz Show Links The Index X Channel YouTube

October 26, 2026Episode 5433 min

Sebastian Rodriguez (Billions Network) on AI Deepfakes, 2.5M Humans & Agents That Pay for Pizza

AI deepfakes are already impersonating real people, including the host of this very podcast. In this episode, Sebastian Rodriguez, Chief Product Officer at Billions Network, breaks down how Billions is building the identity layer that tells humans, AI agents, and bots apart before the internet drowns in fake content. This is what it takes to prove you're real in a world where anyone can be faked. 🚀 In this episode, we cover: 🕵️ Why an AI deepfake has been impersonating this podcast's host to run scams 🔐 How Billions Network verifies humans and AI agents, 2.5M+ users and counting 🏦 Why HSBC and TikTok already trust Billions for identity verification 🌐 WebBotAuth: the new standard for signing every request on the internet 🤖 Inside X402: letting AI agents pay for pizza, beer, and free trials without getting abused 🧠 What identity even means for an AI agent that has no body 📉 A gray-beard take on the AI bubble: what pops and what doesn't 🔗 Follow & learn more: 🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast 🔗 Sebastian Rodriguez (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianrodriguezbcn/ 🌐 Billions Network (Website): https://billions.network 🐦 Billions Network (X): https://x.com/billions_ntwk Show Links The Index X Channel YouTube

October 23, 2026Episode 5343 min

🎙️ Avi Patel (Kled AI) & Andrea Muttoni (The DATA Foundation): Who Actually OWNS Your Data in the AI Age?

The AI labs are IPO-ing this year and they're all asking the same question behind closed doors: "Where did this training data actually come from, and can you prove it?" Avi Patel (Founder & CEO, Kled AI) and Andrea Muttoni (CEO, The DATA Foundation, formerly Story Protocol) built the receipts layer that answers that question, and they're pulling back the curtain on the messy, multi-billion dollar world of AI training data. In this episode, we get into: 🧾 Trace: The Data Foundation's flagship product that puts a verifiable, immutable, on-chain "receipt" on every piece of data a lab licenses. Full audit trail, consent, TOS, KYC, and all. 💸 How Kled actually pays people: sovereign data contribution that trickles real money back to the individual who uploaded it 🚨 The "trust me bro" data marketplace problem: why Avi calls out the copycat data brokers faking their supply chain, and the viral moment that exposed it 🛡️ Fraud at scale: why Kled had to ban an entire country from the app, and how automated fraud detection makes crowdsourced data usable for AI labs ⚖️ Regulation is coming fast: the EU, California, and the global push for AI training transparency 🤖 Beyond big labs: hedge funds, governments, and enterprises as the next wave of data buyers (yes, even pothole tracking for city governments) 🧠 Agentic data is the next frontier: why "the why" behind an AI's output, not just "the what," is becoming the most valuable data of all 🔗 Links: The Index Podcast → https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast Kled AI → https://www.kled.ai/ Kled AI on X → https://x.com/useKled Avi Patel on X → https://x.com/avipat_?lang=en Avi Patel on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/avi-patel-bb2816225/ The DATA Foundation → https://www.story.foundation/ The DATA Foundation on X → https://x.com/datafdn Andrea Muttoni on X → https://x.com/devrelius Andrea Muttoni on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/muttoni Show Links The Index X Channel YouTube

October 23, 2026Episode 5234 min

Tim Lee (Titan Exchange) on Solana's Meta-DEX Wars, Zero-Fee Swaps & Beating Binance VIP9

Everyone talks about Jupiter, but what happens when the aggregators start competing with each other? In this episode, Tim Lee, CMO of Titan Exchange, breaks down how Titan built Solana's first meta-DEX aggregator, why its on-chain router DART is putting up numbers that beat Binance's top VIP tier, and what's coming next with Titan Pro. This is the inside look at how execution, routing, and pure basis-point obsession are reshaping trading on Solana. 🚀 In this episode, we cover: 🥇 How Titan launched Solana's first meta-DEX aggregator and why 2025 was the perfect moment ⚡ Argos, the routing engine outperforming competitors on ~80% of trades 🔗 DART: Titan's on-chain router putting up negative slippage and beating Binance VIP9 by 4x 💸 Why Titan runs zero-fee swaps and how the business actually makes money 🖥️ First look at Titan Pro, the Binance-style trading terminal coming to Solana 🐂 Tim's take on Ansem, celebrity meme coins, and the future of airdrops 📊 Why Solana is quietly becoming the #2 spot "exchange" in crypto, behind only Binance 🔗 Follow & learn more: 🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast 🧑‍💻 Tim Lee (X): https://x.com/timahhl 🌐 Titan Exchange (Website): https://titan.exchange Show Links The Index X Channel YouTube

October 22, 2026Episode 5129 min

How to Earn Yield 24/7 on Solana: Brad "Bradydonut" (HawkFi) on Agentic Liquidity Providing

Solana just turned every asset into something tradable. Now HawkFi is turning every tradable asset into yield, and it's doing it with AI agents that work while you sleep. In this episode of The Index Podcast, host Steve sits down with Brad ("Bradydonut"), Co-Founder of HawkFi, the agent terminal letting retail deploy 24/7 liquidity and market-making agents in under 10 seconds, no screen time required. They dig into how HawkFi rebalances positions up to 120 times an hour, why that kind of speed is only possible on Solana, and the freshly stealth-launched "MEV Boost" feature that lets everyday users arb the arb bots back. 🔑 What we cover: 🌊 From HawkSight to HawkFi: why the team pivoted fully into liquidity providing 🤖 What actually happens in the 10 seconds it takes to spin up an agent ⚡ Liquidity providing vs. market making, and which is the safer entry point for DeFi newcomers 🔁 MEV Boost: turning the tables on MEV bots and boosting your own P&L 🛡️ Self-custody, redundancy, and how HawkFi handles failed transactions 📈 Why Solana's speed and low fees make this kind of high-frequency automation impossible anywhere else 🌍 HawkFi's roadmap to becoming the "agentic layer" for all tradable assets, from meme coins to stocks to RWAs 💡 The one thing builders and investors need to understand about where automated on-chain liquidity is heading 🔗 Links: The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast HawkFi website: https://www.hawkfi.ag/ HawkFi Agent Terminal: https://www.hawkfi.ag/agents HawkFi on X: https://x.com/hawkfi_ Brad "Bradydonut" on X: https://x.com/bradydonut Show Links The Index X Channel YouTube

October 21, 2026Episode 5042 min

🚀 Solana's Hedge Fund Secret: Derek Lee (Neutral Trade) on Bringing Institutional Quant Strategies to Everyday Wallets

Ever wondered how a $100 deposit on Solana can plug you into the same market neutral strategies that Wall Street quants use to print steady returns? Derek Lee, Co-Founder & CEO of Neutral Trade, sits down with us to break down how his team went from a Colosseum hackathon to managing capital across nine live quant strategies, backed by Solana Labs, Ergonia, Black Pine, Skyland Ventures and more. If you've ever gotten burned by an unsustainable APY, this episode is your masterclass in telling real yield from a ticking time bomb. 🔑 What we cover: 💼 From Goldman Sachs and a top tier hedge fund to building on Solana from scratch 🧠 What "market neutral" actually means (and why neutral doesn't mean risk free) ⚡ Why Solana beats Ethereum for consumer facing DeFi: speed, cost and Phantom's retail reach 🤖 Neutral Autopilot: the one click vault that auto-rebalances across strategies 🔒 Post-FTX security: MPC wallets, no hot keys and a 3-of-4 multisig on fund movement 📉 The Drift hack fallout: real talk on counterparty risk and why they moved to a custodied vault model 💰 How they vet quant firms from Citadel and Goldman before letting them touch user capital 🌐 What's next: builder codes, tokenized strategies, leverage and multi-chain expansion 🔗 Links: The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast Neutral Trade website: https://www.neutral.trade/ Neutral Trade on X: https://x.com/TradeNeutral Neutral Trade on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neutraltrade Show Links The Index X Channel YouTube

August 30, 2026Episode 4934 min

Ethan Buchman (Cosmos Co-Founder) on Cycles: The Clearing Protocol Reinventing How the World Settles Debt | The Index Podcast

What if the biggest unlock in crypto isn't moving money faster — it's not having to move it at all? Ethan Buchman, co-founder of Cosmos, CEO of Informal Systems, and founder of Cycles, sits down with Alex Kehaya to explain why 16th-century bankers may have understood finance better than we do today — and how he's bringing their playbook on-chain. From medieval merchant credit networks to a decentralized clearing protocol built for modern crypto market makers, this conversation goes deep into the history of money, why platforms are "dead" in this cycle, and what real product-market fit looks like in 2026. In this episode: 🏛️ A crash course in medieval banking — how Renaissance-era bankers cleared massive trade volumes using almost no money at all ⚖️ What "balancing the trade graph" means and why it's the missing piece of modern crypto finance 🔗 How Cycles nets out debts on-chain, automatically, without moving funds between parties 🏦 Why Cycles is migrating from Cosmos/Neutron to Arc (Circle's new chain) and what that partnership means 💸 Cycles' real-world use case: crypto market makers, OTC desks, and liquidity providers settling millions daily with zero clearinghouse 📉 Ethan's honest take on the current market, the "infrastructure hangover" in crypto, and why builders need to focus on real users now 🚀 Cycles Pay is live in the App Store today — private, on-chain payments and invoicing 🔗 Links mentioned: Cycles: https://cycles.money/ Cycles on X: https://x.com/cyclesmoney Ethan Buchman on X: https://x.com/buchmanster Ethan Buchman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethan-buchman-10b34944/ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast Show Links The Index X Channel YouTube

August 29, 2026Episode 4827 min

Matt Van Horn (Lyft) on AI Psychosis & Coding Agents That Never Sleep | The Index Podcast

He almost got scammed by a fake "producer" minutes before this interview even started. Then he told us why he wakes up at 5am hearing phantom AI music. Matt Van Horn, Lyft co-founder and now Founder & CEO of Lyft, has built an army of coding agents that ship dozens of open source PRs a day, and on this episode of The Index he breaks down exactly how. What we cover: 🕵️ The wild near-scam that almost derailed this episode, plus the one phrase that reliably outs North Korean hackers on a call 🤖 "AI psychosis": why Matt wakes up in the middle of the night just to check if his agents succeeded overnight ⛷️ How he built the viral "Last 30 Days" skill in a single 8 hour session, on a ski mountain, using Claude Code 📈 Going from zero coding background to a top 10 human contributor on major open source repos 🚫 Getting banned from open source projects for shipping too many AI generated PRs 🧠 "Compound engineering," and why Matt calls it the best designed AI skill he's ever seen 🔮 His take on open vs. closed models, and why every company needs to think about owning its own intelligence stack 🥷 The private, self-learning system behind his autonomous open source engine (the one he refuses to release) The Index is part of the builder ecosystem spanning Solana, Web3, and AI, spotlighting the founders shaping what's next. If you care about where crypto, AI agents, and startups collide, this is your show. Connect with Matt Van Horn: X: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattvanhorn/ Lyft: Website: https://www.lyft.com/ X: https://x.com/Lyft The Index Podcast: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast Show Links The Index X Channel YouTube

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