The Tech Trek

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675

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Jun 2026

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About the show

The Tech Trek is a podcast about building and leading technology companies. Each episode features founders, CTOs, engineering leaders, and operators sharing how they make decisions around product, engineering, AI, data, teams, hiring, and growth.

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60 recent

June 16, 2026Episode 67619 min

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 service, Apple, Twitter, and eventually building Koah, an AI monetization company helping AI app builders create sponsored experiences.The conversation is less about the glamour of startups and more about what founder work actually demands: making decisions without complete information, learning from Big Tech without copying it, and staying focused when AI moves faster than your team can absorb.Practical Takeaways• Big Tech can teach you strong operating patterns, but startups force you to build your own style.• Founder decisions rarely come with complete data. Moving creates the next data point.• In AI startups, speed can become a distraction if every new tool or feature changes the plan.• Clear vision helps teams make decisions without waiting on the founder.• Knowing when to share an idea matters as much as having the idea.Timestamped Highlights00:38, Mike explains Koah and why AI products need new monetization models.02:25, Mike shares how his father’s Korean Air Force service brought him to the United States as a child.05:01, Mandatory military service, pausing college, and learning to code around strong engineers.07:29, The long term goal of working at Apple and the unexpected feeling after getting there.10:57, Why Mike chose to build from scratch instead of staying on the Big Tech path.14:05, What Big Tech did and did not prepare him for as a founder.17:03, The founder lesson of making decisions before the full picture is clear.19:35, Why AI startups move so fast and how shiny object syndrome drains energy, time, and attention.One Line That Stuck“Just make the decision, produce data points that way through actions, and make a better decision tomorrow.”Subscribe to The Tech Trek for more conversations on how modern technical teams are building, hiring, operating, and adapting around AI, data, platform, product, and engineering execution.

June 11, 2026Episode 67529 min

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, and why organizations need repeatable, governed, auditable workflows before AI becomes part of core operations.Shaun also brings a design lens to the conversation, connecting AI adoption to user experience, voice interfaces, and the next wave of AI in the physical world.Practical Takeaways• Sovereign AI means having control over your data, outcomes, upside, and risk.• Shadow AI creates short term productivity, but can also create silos, governance gaps, and data exposure.• Organizations need repeatable, governed, auditable AI workflows, especially in regulated environments.• Model independence matters because model costs, performance, and capabilities keep changing.• Design will come back into focus as AI systems become more powerful and more embedded in work.Timestamped Highlights00:40, What Capitol AI does and why decision ready artifacts matter01:50, Shaun defines sovereign AI in plain language02:36, The intelligence paradox, more data, less control04:15, Why shadow AI can become a governance and accuracy problem10:29, Zero data retention, model independence, and evaluation criteria17:53, Why AI user experience may be entering a new design cycle25:56, Where AI may create major impact in the physical worldOne Line That Stuck“Companies and governments have more data than ever, but they are losing control over the outcomes.”Practical Takeaways For TeamsIf AI is moving into real business processes, start by asking what needs to be controlled. Data rights, model choice, accuracy standards, workflow governance, and auditability all matter more once AI is producing work that affects customers, citizens, or critical operations.Follow The Tech Trek for more conversations on how technical teams are building, operating, and adapting around AI, data, product, and engineering execution.

June 9, 2026Episode 67428 min

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 up, payer coordination, and interoperability are often where healthcare breaks down, and why solving those operational problems may matter more than chasing the flashiest use cases.Edmund brings a healthcare first view to AI. His argument is simple: healthcare is not slow because people are ignoring technology. It is slow because the real workflows are complex, regulated, high context, and hard to capture cleanly in software.What You’ll Take Away• Why healthcare experience matters when choosing which AI problems are actually worth solving• Why diagnosis is not always the best starting point for healthcare AI• How scheduling becomes much more complex when patients, payers, clinics, staff, protocols, and follow up all have to line up• Why AI can help clinics save time while moving human staff toward higher value patient interactions• Why interoperability is still hard, even with standards like FHIR gaining momentumTimestamped Highlights00:29, What Unity AI does and why healthcare operations is the focus01:11, Why healthcare AI needs people who understand the domain, not just the technology02:26, The danger of solving the hardest or flashiest problem instead of the most pragmatic one05:15, Why AI may finally help healthcare handle personalization and operational complexity at scale07:47, Why scheduling a healthcare visit is nothing like scheduling a delivery or restaurant order10:42, How operational AI can save time and reduce downstream chaos in clinics24:33, Why healthcare data is much harder to structure than financial dataOne Line That Stuck“Software is like children. Making it is all fun and games. Maintaining it is a whole other question.”Practical Takeaways• Start with the workflow that actually blocks progress, not the one that sounds most impressive• In healthcare, operational context is often the product• AI should create more room for humans to handle the interactions that require judgment, care, and clinical responsibility• More software is not always the answer, especially in regulated environments where maintenance, compliance, and security matterSubscribe to The Tech Trek for more conversations with founders, operators, and technical leaders building through AI, data, product, platform, and engineering execution.

June 4, 2026Episode 67326 min

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 producing useful production work, but judgment still matters.• Tool choice may be less important than standardizing the expected output.• Messy repos can make AI generated work harder to trust, so cleanup and patterns matter.• The future engineer may look more like a product engineer with strong systems thinking.• Teams may move from debating features to rapidly building multiple versions and testing what works.Timestamped Highlights00:37What Tabs does and why contracts create hard revenue workflow problems for B2B finance teams.02:16Deepak compares pre AI engineering work with the current shift toward AI assisted development.05:09How the Tabs engineering team uses Claude Code, Cursor, and other coding tools in real work.08:13Why inconsistent codebases create more risk when teams add coding agents14:00The idea that teams can build the same feature multiple ways in one afternoon.20:53Deepak’s view on whether the future team needs separate PMs and engineers, or more product engineers.23:38A future where software can become more bespoke to each customer because AI changes the cost model.One Line That Stuck“You can build on three different work trees the same feature in three different ways and see which one you like, and you can do it all in an afternoon.”Practical Moves From The Conversation• Keep humans close to the review process, especially when the last five percent still requires taste and judgment.• Clean up inconsistent code patterns before letting agents operate broadly across the repo.• Hire for adaptability, systems thinking, and problem solving, not just past tool familiarity.• Use AI to explore more product options faster, but do not remove the need to ask whether the feature should exist.Subscribe or follow The Tech Trek for more conversations on how technical teams are building, hiring, and operating as AI changes the work.

June 2, 2026Episode 67229 min

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 moves from model serving into agentic workflows. They discuss Yugabyte’s evolution, the limits of today’s data infrastructure, and why memory, knowledge, and shared context may become central to how agentic systems actually work.Practical takeaways• Agentic workloads push databases beyond simple relational access because agents may need relational, vector, graph, NoSQL, scale, and multi tenant support in the same workflow.• A query can be optimized inside each data store and still be slow, expensive, or wasteful when the work spans multiple systems.• Context sounds simple to humans, but it becomes messy when it includes private memory, shared project knowledge, conversation history, team collaboration, and agent actions.• Human handoffs can erase much of the speed promised by agents when teams have to copy outputs, re explain reasoning, and manually reconcile conflicts.• Yugabyte is working on Meko as a data infrastructure layer for agents, with a focus on memory, knowledge, context quality, and shared learnings.Timestamped highlights00:43What Yugabyte does and why critical data needs to survive infrastructure change04:08How databases evolved from mainframes to internet apps, mobile, cloud native systems, and now AI09:42Why agentic workloads create new demands across relational, vector, graph, NoSQL, and multi tenant data12:29Why the current agentic data stack is still in the messy middle15:24Why context becomes hard when agents, people, teams, and permissions collide21:50How agent collaboration can fall back to human speed24:34How eeko aims to capture memory, knowledge, learnings, and reasoning across agent workflowsOne Line That Stuck“We have killed the velocity of agentic development and brought it back to human speed.”Practical signals for teams building with agents• Do not treat context as one generic blob.• Decide what should stay private, what should be shared, and what should become reusable project knowledge.• Watch for hidden cost when agents query across separate systems.• Pay attention to agent collaboration, not just single agent output.• Build for memory and knowledge flow before team size makes the gaps harder to fix.Follow The Tech Trek for more conversations with technical leaders building modern teams, products, and infrastructure around AI, data, and engineering execution.

May 29, 2026Episode 67137 min

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 operating in financial services, where trust, accuracy, and human judgment still matter. EnFi uses AI agents to work through complex financial data rooms, extract knowledge, and support faster analysis in commercial lending.In this episode, Scott breaks down how EnFi moved from simple coding assistance to a broader development harness, why Slack became a central interface for agents, how product and business leaders can now participate earlier in feature creation, and why engineering interviews need to change when AI is part of the actual job.Practical Takeaways• Start with specific productivity goals before trying to rebuild the whole development process.• Agentic tools work better when they connect to the team’s real workflow, shared context, and software lifecycle data.• Faster code generation changes the cost model, but it also creates new problems around review, testing, prioritization, and decision fatigue.• Product, sales, and executive teams may be able to prototype ideas faster, but engineering still has to make the work production ready.• Hiring needs to test how people solve problems with AI, not whether they can perform the old interview format without help.Timestamped Highlights00:38, What EnFi is building around financial data, AI agents, and commercial lending02:13, Why software teams may need to forget part of their old development process04:45, How EnFi started with productivity gains before building a broader development harness09:53, Why merge requests went up, and why that alone is not the same as better outcomes10:30, How Slack became the entry point for an agentic development harness14:10, What happens to agile ceremonies when teams can create discovery builds much faster25:08, Scott’s view on whether AI reduces engineering headcount or changes the work engineers do31:00, How EnFi is changing technical interviews for an AI assisted engineering environmentOne Line That Stuck“We do not care if you use AI to solve the problems, we just want to know you can solve the problem.”Practical Takeaways For Technical TeamsPut agents close to where work already happens.Keep humans in the loop for review, testing, and production judgment.Treat AI generated code as cheaper to create, not free to maintain.Build stronger test harnesses instead of slowing everything down with excessive process.Update interviews to reflect how engineering work is actually getting done.Subscribe to The Tech Trek for more conversations with technical leaders building, hiring, and operating through the next stage of AI, data, product, and engineering execution.

May 27, 2026Episode 67023 min

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 just as much as model capability.The conversation covers the trust gap in AI, how data teams are shifting from dashboard production to conversational data access, when to buy versus build, and why AI proof of concepts need to be judged by business value, operational efficiency, and customer impact.Practical Takeaways• Regulated industries cannot treat AI as a black box. Decisions need traceability, consistency, and often a human review layer.• Data quality has to be addressed from the start. AI can amplify bad data as easily as it can create value.• Data teams are moving beyond dashboard factories toward conversational data access and generative interfaces.• Most companies can likely use existing AI tools for many needs, but sensitive IP and core business logic may require internal capabilities.• AI cost will become a bigger production question as companies move from experimentation to scaled deployment.Timestamped Highlights00:47, Acrisure’s shift from insurance brokerage toward fintech and financial tools.01:44, Why regulated industries face a trust gap with AI and need explainable decisions.04:41, How data teams are evolving from dashboards to conversational data enablement.08:28, The build versus buy question and where internal AI tools may still make sense.10:52, Why AI experimentation can get expensive before companies know what works.16:15, How to evaluate AI proof of concepts based on customer value, efficiency, and business impact.18:14, Why data governance and data quality need to be treated as day one requirements.One Line That Stuck“In an industry like this, a 5 percent deviation is not just a simple glitch. It is actually a legal liability.”Subscribe to The Tech Trek for more conversations with technical leaders building, operating, and adapting modern teams around AI, data, platform, product, and engineering execution.

May 22, 2026Episode 66933 min

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 success, and go to market work.This conversation gets past the shallow version of “AI makes coding faster.” Leonid makes a clear distinction between coding and software engineering, and explains why the best teams are using AI to shift cognitive load, not remove judgment.Practical takeaways• AI does not erase software engineering. It changes where engineering judgment shows up.• Strong engineers still produce better AI generated work because they know what to ask, what to test, and what tradeoffs matter.• Hiring processes need to reflect how engineers actually work now, including how they use AI to build, explain, and defend technical decisions.• Productivity should not only be measured by speed. Leonid talks about throughput, maturity of delivery, and whether teams can produce more without lowering quality.• AI adoption becomes more powerful when it moves beyond engineering into product, customer success, revenue operations, and talent.Key moments00:32What Torq means by agentic security operations and why different tasks need different AI approaches.01:49Why building AI native products with AI native methods creates a useful feedback loop for engineering teams.05:28How AI shifts cognitive load so engineers can spend more attention on user experience, architecture, and product value.10:34The difference between software engineering and coding, and why that distinction matters more now.15:13How Torq has changed technical interviews to evaluate AI assisted engineering instead of pretending AI does not exist.21:51How one R&D group measured meaningful delivery gains after adopting AI more deeply.24:25Why AI adoption is moving into product, customer success, revenue operations, and talent teams.One Line That Stuck“Software engineering as a discipline is not going away. It just changes a phase a bit.”Practical moves to stealFor hiring, Leonid suggests giving candidates more complex take home work because AI is now part of the real engineering workflow. The evaluation then shifts to the candidate’s ability to explain the architecture, defend decisions, describe how AI was used, and show how they tested and constrained the output.That is a much better signal than asking someone to work as if the tools do not exist.Subscribe or follow The Tech Trek for more conversations with technical leaders building, hiring, and operating through the next shift in software, data, AI, and engineering execution.

May 18, 2026Episode 66825 min

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 multiple agents, work continues overnight, and the real constraint is no longer typing code, but judgment, ownership, and process design.Scott shares how Kilo uses Kilo to build its own product, why AI only creates speed when companies rethink their workflows, and how teams can build trust in agent generated code without creating a new layer of busywork.Practical Takeaways• AI does not automatically make teams faster. If approvals, meetings, and handoffs stay the same, the bottlenecks simply move.• Engineers using coding agents still own the outcome. AI can assist with the work, but accountability for quality does not disappear.• The strongest teams will find a middle ground between blindly accepting AI output and reviewing every line as if nothing changed.• Agentic engineering may feel novel now, but Scott believes it will eventually just be called engineering.• Always on agents are already useful for monitoring, triage, and preparing recommended fixes, even if full autonomy is still selective.Episode Highlights00:38 Scott explains what Kilo is building across AI coding, open source infrastructure, and always on agents.01:16 How Kilo uses its own tools internally, and why developers are shifting from working with one agent to managing many at once.05:34 Why companies often fail to see AI speed gains when they layer new tools onto old processes.08:51 The trust curve with coding agents, from early experimentation to accountability, review, and better judgment.12:39 Why Scott sees agentic coding as a transition phase, not a permanent category.15:32 Two habits he thinks matter most right now, staying curious and trying a wide range of models and tools.18:03 What always on agents can already do today, and how that could expand over the next year.One Line That Stuck“Bringing in AI does not remove accountability from whoever creates the PR.”Pro Tips• Start small with AI assisted workflows, then expand into single agents, multiple agents, and automated review as trust grows.• Match review depth to risk. A mission critical system deserves more scrutiny than a simple cosmetic change.• Use automated review to guide human reviewers toward the areas that deserve the most attention.• Keep experimenting. A tool that fails on Monday may be materially better by Wednesday.Stay ConnectedSubscribe to The Tech Trek for more conversations on how modern technical teams are building, operating, and adapting around AI, data, platform, product, and engineering execution.

May 15, 2026Episode 66724 min

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 disappear from the process. He breaks down why tax is such a strong fit for language models, where AI can reduce manual review, how Keeper decides when a case needs human escalation, and why the best products may feel less like autonomous agents and more like systems that make experts sharper.Key Takeaways• AI is most valuable when it removes repetitive work while preserving human judgment where risk is highest.• High trust products need clear escalation logic, especially when edge cases drive most of the anxiety.• Tax is a strong fit for AI because much of the work involves language, rules, validation, and workflow routing.• The smartest AI adoption often starts with bounded operational tasks before moving into more domain specific decisions.• Consumer trust in AI can change quickly, but messaging still matters when the product sits inside sensitive workflows.Highlights00:34 Where Keeper fits for people who have outgrown DIY tax software but do not need a traditional personal accountant.02:27 Why tax may be one of the more practical use cases for AI, even in a high stakes environment.07:15 The accounting talent shortage, what automation may replace, and how roles could shift.10:55 How Keeper uses AI before professional review to flag possible issues and optimization opportunities.13:51 Why the company moved from keeping AI in the background to talking about it more directly.17:58 How Keeper separates the routine parts of a tax return from the parts that need expert attention.21:05 The path from simple customer support automation to more advanced tax focused AI workflows.One Line That Stuck“Across tens of thousands of returns and clients, you can kind of get to the point where you err on the side of safety.”Follow The Tech Trek for more conversations with founders, operators, and technical leaders building through the next wave of AI, data, and engineering change.