1st10 Podcast

When a chatbot says something harmful, who do you hold responsible? Who gets to set their boundaries, and who answers when those choices go wrong?

On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, Boris Epstein speaks with Suzanne Nossel, former CEO of PEN America and a member of Meta's Oversight Board, about speech, safety, and the power behind platform rules. Suzanne Nossel sits on Meta's Oversight Board, where she rules on what can stay online. Boris and Suzanne's conversation examines a key question around AI that is dominating discourse today: Now that machines do the talking, who should set the limits for AI?

They discuss, among other things:

How the Oversight Board weighs expression against other rights, 

What power the Oversight Board lacks that makes the board weaker than it looks

Why any labels meant to clarify AI-made content could backfire heavily and make matters worse

Why the legal shield that protected social platforms may not apply to AI companies

Why a founder's AI choices can reach into customer trust, liability, and public acceptance.

What Dario Amodei must do to ensure Anthropic's new embedded evaluators have real teeth. 

As CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel spent years ruling on what people are allowed to post. Now she faces a harder version of the same question: when the speaker is software and has no human author who can lay claim to its words, who gets held responsible for what it... says?

Chapters:

00:00 Preview Of The Episode

00:41 Introducing Suzanne Nossel

01:50 A Career That Resists a Label

05:39 The Tweet That Started a Fight

07:39 When The Agents Surprised Everyone

12:37 The Trust Problem Around Ai

15:23 The "AI Labeling" Problem

20:36 Social Media's Messy Report Card

25:19 A Second Opinion for Anthropic

27:20 One Lesson for Every AI Startup

31:26 What If the Labs Get It Wrong?

34:42 What If the Labs Get It RIGHT?!

39:59 What Her Law Students See

44:44 Is Anyone Getting It Right?

46:09 A Bold Bet on 2027

47:05 How to Reach Suzanne Nossel

Quotes:

• "I don't have a lot of faith that there's going to be a robust regulatory regime put into place anytime soon." - Suzanne Nossel (12:10)

• "When you unleash these powerful technologies, the results really are unpredictable, and there will be things that you never anticipated." - Suzanne Nossel (27:30)

• "No human being decided that that was going to be the bot's response. What the human beings did was configure a bot that, I think unbeknownst to them, would and did yield that response." - Suzanne Nossel (30:39)

• "What was completely missing were any user rights or any hard constraints on the model. [...] To me, it read like a parent's letter to their baby child." - Suzanne Nossel (45:41)

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Links:

Suzanne Nossel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanne-nossel-0118011b/

Suzanne’s Profiles:

• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Nossel

• Oversight Board: https://www.oversightboard.com/people/nossel-suzanne/

• PEN America: https://pen.org/profile/suzanne-nossel/

• Global Affairs: https://globalaffairs.org/research/experts/suzanne-nossel

• Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/author/suzanne-nossel/

Music by Roman Senyk from Pixabay

Producer: Shrikant Joshi

Philip's three-word warning drove this channel's most commented video. People are still arguing about it. Now he is back. 

On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, host Boris Epstein sits down with Philip Su and asks him about his prediction about winter coming for developers that got 900k views (and counting!) over the past year. And ONE day before Philip starts as Engineering Manager at Anthropic Labs, we ask him to score his own call. 

This time around, Philip revisits it with more nuance: junior hiring is under real pressure, but AI is also making ambitious engineers more capable than ever. He explains why the youngest engineers are already feeling the cold while everyone else is not, why AI is splitting developer pay into two very different tiers, and why cheap code demands more discipline, not less. 

Tune in to hear Boris and Philip talk about:

• The score Philip gives his own prediction and the one group he says is already in the AI Winter.

• The skills that entry-level engineers now need. (HINT: They used to belong to two other jobs!)

• The change in a manager's job when every contributor has a small 'team' working beside them.

• The safeguard that teams lose when code costs almost nothing to write and the discipline that has to replace it.

• A new plane-boarding habit that explains why AI won't give engineers their evenings back.

• A small law in New Jersey is Philip's model for how AI politics *might* go wrong.

Philip does not offer a safe prediction this time around. Instead, he offers a clearer question: when the environment churns, will you protect the old map or learn to move before everyone else does?

Chapters:

00:00 Preview of the Episode

01:42 So, Did Winter Come? Who for?

06:54 Philip Scores His Own Prediction 

08:28 When CS Paid Less Than Median Wage

12:11 Code Is No Longer The Bottleneck?

16:50 A different way to think about AI risk

20:06 Why Philip Is Still Optimistic

23:01 Philip'S Next Chapter: Anthropic Labs

27:48 Managing People or Agents? (Or Both?)

33:05 The New Job Description Of A Great Developer

38:21 Non-AI Career Advice From Philip

45:22 Ai As A Political Question

48:58 Shovels, Spoons, and New Jersey?!

53:05 Philip Su for... Political Office?!

53:39 How to Contact Philip Su

Quotes:

• "People in software industries who are entering industry now have a fifth fewer jobs than they used to." - Philip Su (03:09)

• "I do think we will once again enter an era where you should only go into computer science because you really love the work." - Philip Su (08:28)

• "With AI, what you realize is that there is never downtime for you." - Philip Su (14:23)

• "A team without discipline simply produces more things that they toss more out of because they don't feel bad tossing it out." - Philip Su (31:52)

• "The type of person who can't have their cheese moved is going to suffer a lot." - Philip Su (42:21)

Connect:

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Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 

Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast 

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Twitter www.x.com/1st10engineers

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Links:

Philip Su on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/suphilip/

Philip's Substack: https://molochinations.substack.com

Producer: ⁠Shrikant Joshi⁠ (https://42quirks.com)

Fact-checks:

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, AI and employment projections - https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/artificial-intelligence-information-technology-and-employment-2024-34.htm

• No Widespread Displacement, but the AI Employment Gap for Young Workers Has Widened to 19% - Stanford Digital Economy Lab - https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/canariesaug26/

• Employment Situation News Release - 2026 M09 Results - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.htm#ces_table1.f.p

The hardest part of leaving Big Tech is the certainty and stability of Big Tech. Kobi Hudson spent his entire adult life at Waymo, and he still left to join a startup.

On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, Boris Epstein sits down with Kobi Hudson, Founding Engineer at Coval.ai and asks him the question that every experienced software engineer has on his mind: When does leaving Big Tech makes sense for a great engineer? And when it does not? 

Boris and Kobi discuss what changes when an engineer moves from a large, highly resourced organization to a clean-slate startup, including:

• The one thing about his Waymo job that kept changing until he started looking elsewhere.

• How a founder, a lunch, and about a month of conversations made a leap from a stable job feel survivable.

• The tool switch that broke 17 years of coding habits and how it symbolizes life outside Big Tech.

• The liberating feeling afforded by a clean slate that frees you from the burden of carrying years of tech-debt.

• Theglaring bugs that startups are willing to leave alone because ONE question that decides which bugs get fixed.

• The amazing developments currently happening at the bleeding-edge of Voice AI - systems that can listen, think, speak, interrupt, and use tools in more natural ways.

AND

• Why a tomato from your own garden is a perfect metaphor for local AI models.

Kobi swapped his Big tech job of proving autonomous systems were safe for a startup job built around proving AI conversations trustworthy. His career move, when you think about it, is a test of the same engineering instinct: you must know what is true before you let the system loose.

Chapters

00:00 Preview of the episode

00:30 What is Kobi Hudson All About?

04:03 Designing mobility for the world

08:02 Culture Shock, Courtesy California

11:37 What Made Leaving Less Scary

15:16 What Kobi Inherited As a Founding Engineer

19:30 Knowing The Founder Certainly Helps 

22:13 The Culture Shock Kobi Didn't Expect

25:20 A Test for Anyone on the Fence

27:33 Bleeding Edge of Voice AI

32:49 Coval Is (And Will Continue) Hiring

34:33 Kobi's Tomato Theory for AI

36:39 Kobi's Predictions For The Future

Quotes:

• "I wanted to be part of growing a team, and I wanted to be part of shaping the culture." - Kobi Hudson (13:33)

• "When I switched, I started using Cursor. And so basically it felt like going from zero to 100." - Kobi Hudson (22:47)

• "I think the biggest takeaway is you've got to be comfortable with being uncomfortable." - Kobi Hudson (25:33)

• "When you grow a tomato in your garden and the tomato is not necessarily better than the tomato at the store, but it's your tomato. So it tastes a little bit better." - Kobi Hudson (36:00)

  
  

Follow:

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Links:

Kobi Hudson 

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kobi-hudson-998055ab

GitHub: https://github.com/kobicovaldev

Coval: 

Website: https://www.coval.ai/about-us

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/covaldev

[Other Links]

Announcement of the Hiscock Memorial Award for “Growing Algae in Space: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014_mt_space_grant.pdf

Music by Roman Senyk from Pixabay

Producer: Shrikant Joshi (https://42quirks.com)

What happens when an AI agent gets permission to rewrite the code that runs it?

On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, host Boris Epstein sits down with Alex Krentsel, a senior researcher at Google Research and a systems PhD student at UC Berkeley to dig into why efficiency, and not accuracy, may be the real unlock for self-improving agents. Alex is building Exo, an open-source agent harness that watches itself work and changes its own policy to get better and cheaper at a task. 

Together, Boris and Alex talk about:

• The multi-billion dollar reason today's LLM providers secretly have zero incentive to make their agent loops efficient.

• The statistical reality behind why agents still fall apart on long-horizon corporate workflows.

• The unexpected childhood obsession that provided Alex with a foundational blueprint for understanding distributed agentic systems.

• Alex's unpopular opinion about which part of the classic ML curriculum is now "far over-weighted."

• The truth behind why a widely popular tech-career shortcut from the 2010s has officially ceased to exist today.

Alex spent his early days engineering high-traffic UI at YouTube. These days, he works at the intersection of systems research, agentic AI, and the changing role of software engineers. The conversation ultimately comes back to a simple question, that owes its existence to Alex's childhood fascination with... ants. 

"How do simple components, following the right rules, become systems that are greater than the sum of their parts?"

Tune in for an unfiltered look at what it truly takes to build software on the frontier of AI!

Chapters

00:00 Preview of the episode

01:54 Meet Alex Krentsel

03:16 The Architectural Shift Beyond LLM Scaling

06:48 Inside Exo: AI Agents That Improve Themselves

10:27 Why Exo Is Open Source

13:08 How Smart Are AI Agents, Really?

16:03 Explosive Adoption of AI Coding Agents

18:06 What Will Software Engineers Do Now?

21:34 Machine Learning v/s Systems Thinking

23:36 What Should Startups Look for in Engineers?

27:31 A Peek Inside Google Research

31:34 Do All Roads Lead to AI?

34:23 Anthills, Agent Swarms, and "Civilizations"

37:17 Alex Is Optimistic About AI

40:33 The Mood Among CS PhDs (at Berkeley)

43:45 Contact Details and First Contact Message

44:19 A Prediction for the Future

Quotes

• "Claude Code and Codex have zero incentive to be efficient for you, because you're paying for the token use. The more expensive it is to do the task, the more they get paid." - Alex Krentsel (08:27)

• "Our jobs are no longer to do the rote work of programming a UI. A lot of what we're doing now is reasoning about specification." - Alex Krentsel (18:48)

• "I really think that the systems skillset ... is going to be the valuable skillset going forward." - Alex Krentsel (21:07)

• "Part of the challenge is also deciding what to build, now that it's become really easy to actually do the building." - Alex Krentsel (23:08)

Spotify https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast 

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Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast 

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Links:

Alex Krentsel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-krentsel/

Alex’s Website: https://www.krentsel.com

Recent paper co-authored by Alex and Ion Stioca: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12039. It presents how we are thinking about the gaps in agentic systems (or agent-created systems). 

Bach, Partita II, Allemande, performed by Alex Krentsel: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxF6tpL2do

Bach - Violin Partita no. 2 in D minor BWV 1004 - Sato: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44Wz92zQe04

Bach - Chaconne from Violin partita no. 2 in D minor BWV 1004:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y4lcQ7BTLw

Music by Roman Senyk from Pixabay

Producer: Shrikant Joshi (https://42quirks.com)

What comes after ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini?

A founder who sold an AI company to Microsoft for $160 million just told us that LLMs are heading toward a dead end. And he's betting his next company on what comes after.

On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, Sam Pasupalak, Co-Founder & CEO of Skyfall AI, sits down with host Boris Epstein to discuss what a post-LLM world looks like. Sam believes LLMs will become the low-level execution layer underneath something much more powerful: Enterprise World Models. 

In this conversation, Sam explains:

• The two research breakthroughs that made ChatGPT inevitable

• A simple analogy that exposes why LLMs are fundamentally limited

• What world models are and how they differ technologically from LLMs

• What a business simulation video game revealed about LLMs than no benchmark could

• Why Sam thinks humans should eventually be freed from operational work

• How Skyfall plans to acquire and autonomously operate businesses

• Why an AI CEO is much harder to build than an AI software engineer

and

• Why Sam is hiring hungry researchers for Skyfall and not established AI stars

The thing that WILL stick with you is how calmly Sam walks you through what it actually looks like to hand the keys of a real business to an algorithm. Like, someone who's already seen the next wave forming and is just waiting for the rest of the industry to catch up.

Chapters

00:00 Preview of the episode

01:00 Introductions

03:23 Building AI Before AI Was Cool

06:37 Did Sam Predict Today's AI Boom?

10:01 Was AI Just Another Bubble?

13:46 Are We at Peak LLM?

17:53 "Smart Soccer Analyst"

21:32 What Is an Enterprise World Model?

26:06 The Beginning of the End for LLMs

28:48 Skyfall's Bet: The Autonomous Enterprise

34:33 Putting Money Where (World) Models Are

38:45 What Happens to the Human CEO?

41:40 Hiring for Hunger, not Hype

44:58 Bold Prediction: AI in Politics by 2050?

47:14 The Future of Autonomous Enterprises

Quotes

• "When I sold my company to Microsoft, I was like, 'I'm never gonna do a technology-first company again.' I promised myself that." - Sam Pasupalak (10:54)

• "LLMs are like a very smart soccer analyst - goes through all the videos about soccer on the internet, reads about everything about soccer on the internet, but has never ever played a game of soccer in real life." - Sam Pasupalak (17:53)

• "The Scaling Laws moment for world modeling is coming up in the next 12 to 18 months." - Sam Pasupalak (26:41)

• "Let's say you throw trillions of dollars, increase the context window as much as possible, it will not matter. It doesn't matter." - Sam Pasupalak (28:38)

• "We ran the best LLMs, and we found that LLMs just can never run a theme park. It's impossible." - Sam Pasupalak (36:48)

• "If you want to build a completely autonomous enterprise, you have to buy the enterprise. You have to run all the algorithms across all the systems within the enterprise." - Sam Pasupalak (37:33)

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Links

Sam Pasupalak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-pasupalak-57b4a220a

Skyfall AI: https://www.skyfall.ai/ (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skyfallai)

Sam’s OpenReview Page: https://openreview.net/profile?id=~Sam_Pasupalak1

Maluuba, on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maluuba

Music by Roman Senyk from Pixabay

Producer: Shrikant Joshi (https://42quirks.com)

The easy part of voice AI takes 10 minutes. The hard part is everything that follows.

Voice AI can handle a basic appointment in 10 minutes - but handling tens of millions of calls without failing is the one Brooke Hopkins left Waymo to solve. On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, host Boris Epstein sits down with Brooke Hopkins, ex-Waymo tech lead and founder/CEO of Coval, which recently announced their $28M Series A round. Brooke pointed out the surprising parallels between teaching self-driving cars to navigate real roads and teaching voice agents to handle real conversations at scale. 

During their conversation, Brooke and Boris talked about:

• The hidden architectural flaw causing most voice agents to fail in production.

• The critical maturity milestone conversational AI is facing right now.

• A lesson from driverless cars that changes how teams should judge an agent before launch.

• The reshaping of the workflow that once made sequential engineering feel natural.

• The surprising reason that Coval's veteran Head of Design stopped relying on Figma.

Along the way, she shares how Coval's engineers build software with parallel AI agents, why her Head of Design abandoned Figma for code, and what $28 million in fresh funding means for the next phase of voice AI.

00:00 Preview of the Episode

00:38 Introducing Brooke Hopkins

01:34 Brooke's Journey From Abu Dhabi To SF

04:44 What Google Assistant And Waymo Had In Common

06:00 3 Layers -- 1 Pattern

08:34 Watching Waymo Grow Up In Public

11:07 Voice AI's "2016 Problem" 

14:58 What "Critical" Really Means For Voice Agents

17:52 Voice Unlocks More Than A Phone Call

21:27 How Coval'S Engineers Build Software

25:00 Measuring Engineering Judgment

29:01 $28M Series A! What's Next?!

31:01 A Bold Prediction For 2027

• "Anyone can build a voice agent that handles appointments basically in 10 minutes. But to get it to be able to handle tens of millions of calls, the last 20% of edge cases - that is really the crux and the hard part of this product." - Brooke Hopkins (07:12)

• "I would definitely say we're in the 2016 era of self-driving where it feels like you've made this massive progress. [...] But really it's this last 10%, last 5% that's that long tail of issues." - Brooke Hopkins (11:23)

• "Voice AI is the most natural interface to AI. Or conversation in general is the most natural interface to AI." - Brooke Hopkins (17:52)

• "When I started the company, I was delightfully naive. And I think that's a great way to start." - Brooke Hopkins (25:37)

Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast 

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Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast 

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Website: www.1st10.com

Podcast: www.1st10.com/podcast 

Twitter www.x.com/1st10engineers

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/1st10/

YouTube: www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast 

Brooke Hopkins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bnhop/

Coval AI: https://www.coval.ai

Music by Roman Senyk from Pixabay

Producer: Shrikant Joshi (42quirks.com)

An Amazon VP who helped build Prime Video from a team of six is now telling people inside the FAANGs to seriously consider leaving... On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, Boris Epstein sits down with Ethan Evans, former VP at Amazon, to talk about the conventional wisdom around AI, management, and career growth and how it may all be backwards. Ethan spent over 15 years at Amazon - rising from engineering manager to VP, launching Prime Video, the Amazon AppStore, and Prime Gaming. He retired in 2020 to coach the next generation of leaders through his "Level Up" community. Tune in to hear them discuss:The Illusion of Efficiency: The assumption that AI-driven productivity means fewer managers has run headfirst into a very different realityThe New Fiefdom Bottleneck: AI has accelerated individual productivity but ONE bottleneck is choking the market agility of AI tools.The "Reverse Centaur" Danger: Artificial intelligence is leaving top-tier ICs feeling overworked rather than liberated. Riding the Wrong Tide: A blunt, numbers-based question Ethan uses to tell people whether it's time to leave their companyThe Coming Cleansing: One of AI's longest-standing believers still thinks "Winter is coming..."Ethan spent fifteen years riding a wave that lifted an entire generation of Amazon careers along with his own. Now he's doing the math, out loud, for anyone still waiting for the water to rise again. Whether you're an engineer, founder, hiring manager or executive navigating the AI era, Ethan's sharp insights are definitely the candid look you need into where technology careers (and the companies behind them) may be heading next.Chapters00:00 Preview: A Prediction That Challenges AI00:51 Introducing Ethan Evans04:04 A Blind Job Offer That 'Unboxed' Amazon08:12 Amazon's 700 VPs (Who Are Actually CEOs)10:08 "Terminal Status" Versus The "Climbers"13:28 Amazon vs Startups - Hack vs Hustle18:18 Amazon Has Always Been "Relentless"23:50 Is AI Killing The Management Career?27:57 The 24/7 Assembly Line In The New Age31:39 FAANG Employee? Play This Chapter NOW!34:52 Teams of 90 People - Teams of 90 Agents39:29 Is This an AI Bubble?43:13 Who Will Win the AI Revolution?45:23 A Simple Math to Help Plan Your Exit49:21 "Winter Is Definitely Coming BUT..."50:55 Connect With Ethan EvansQuotes:"If one worker now does the work of ten... great! But you have to organize 10 times as much work!" - Ethan Evans (26:22)"The current belief, at least for many mid-to-senior level ICs, is AI has made them more productive, but also more overworked." - Ethan Evans (29:15)"I'm relatively negative on the same large corporations that, frankly, made me successful and wealthy. I'm rooting for those companies because I own their stock, but I'm actually like in this podcast talking myself into some selling!" - Ethan Evans (32:41)"Many of the big companies are in trouble. They are in the IBM position and it's going to be very hard to be nimble into the future." - Ethan Evans (41:22)"Waves sweep deadwood into shore. It's what they do! And I'm not saying be deadwood. I am saying at least be a surfer or a swimmer." - Ethan Evans (48:43)Follow:Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e8ec9af-f38c-4cd9-8c68-1c1dd4516b 27/1st10-podcastApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/f951319c/podcast/rss YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Links:Ethan Evans on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanevansvp/Website: https://www.ethanevans.com/Newsletter: https://levelupwithethanevans.substack.comYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EthanEvansVPEthan Evans AI Announcement Post: https://levelupwithethanevans.substack.com/p/announcing-ethan-evans-aiMusic by Roman Senyk from PixabayProducer: Shrikant Joshi

What do you do when the guy who helped launch GPT-4 (and now leads Google Gemini) tells you that competing with trillion-dollar AI labs is actually the EASY part?!On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, Boris Epstein sits down with Logan Kilpatrick, a leader who has been stationed at the absolute epicenter of the Generative AI revolution. Logan Kilpatrick has helped shape the AI tools that millions of developers use every day. And he thinks most founders are thinking about competition completely wrong. Now leading Gemini AI Studio, the Gemini API, and Kaggle as part of Google DeepMind, Logan breaks down why the ground shifting beneath our feet creates unprecedented opportunities for early-stage founders. Tune in to hear them talk about:The Big Lab Paradox: Why competing against elite AI frontier labs is much easier than it appears.The Understanding Boundary: The critical cognitive boundary you shouldn't let AI coding assistants cross.Accidental Research: Everyday software tinkering could be accidental cutting-edge research exploration.An Underdog Story: Logan's "mind-bending" decision to choose Google at the height of OpenAI's momentumPrompting vs Understanding: The difference that will separate good engineers from the great ones.Abundance to Exits: Why AI-powered software creation will unlock a 1000x explosion of new markets and massive startup exits.AI labs may be building the future - but Logan Kilpatrick genuinely believes the biggest winners will be the founders who build on top of them!Chapters00:00 Preview Of The Episode00:48 Introducing Logan Kilpatrick01:52 AI & The 4-Day Work Week Hypothesis 04:09 Why Is Staying On The Frontier SO Hard?*06:22 The Habit That Keeps Logan Ahead of AI09:19 From Apple to OpenAI, via PathAI14:45 Being Inside The Room When ChatGPT Exploded17:04 How to Pick the Right Startup 20:48 What DevRel @ OpenAI Really Looks Like23:10 Should Founders Fear OpenAI and Google?23:56 Competing With Trillion-Dollar AI Labs28:39 Why Logan Left OpenAI for the "Underdog" Google31:43 Inside Google DeepMind's AI Culture36:07 What A Successful Developer Looks Like Today38:38 Logan's Bold Prediction for 202640:12 What To Say When You Connect With LoganQuotes:"I have a hypothesis that actually if everyone was only working four days a week, we would probably have greater AI adoption in the world." - Logan Kilpatrick (02:17)"The delta between engineering work, product work, and research discovery is actually very blurry." - Logan Kilpatrick (04:23)"I'd be really excited to go build a coding startup right now." - Logan Kilpatrick (25:26)"You can outsource intelligence, but you can't outsource your understanding." - Logan Kilpatrick, quoting Andrej Karpathy (36:42)"It's not like, 'Software creating is solved and thus there's no opportunity anymore!' It's actually like, 'Software creating is solved and thus there's a 1000x more opportunity than it was before!'" - Logan Kilpatrick (39:18)Follow:Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e8ec9af-f38c-4cd9-8c68-1c1dd4516b 27/1st10-podcastApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/f951319c/podcast/rss YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Links:Logan Kilpatrick on:- LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/logankilpatrick/- Twitter/X: https://x.com/officiallogank- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Kilpatrick- GitHub: https://github.com/logankilpatrickMusic by Roman Senyk from PixabayProducer: Shrikant Joshi

The long-trodden path to wealth-creation (through job-security) is completely broken. So, the next generation of elite founders is taking control of their own trajectories in a different way!On this episode of the *1st10 Podcast*, Boris Epstein sits down with Alkis Toutziaridis and Shashi Salavath, the prodigy co-founders of Tacit Intelligence, a stealth AI startup backed by Entrepreneurs First, Berkeley Skydeck, and the OpenAI Startup Accelerator. Tune in to hear them talk about:Alkis' opinion on critical difference between "doing a startup" and "starting a company".Shashi's theory for how he decides which work is worth doing which has nothing to do with salary or prestige.A refreshingly unique (and surprisingly mature) way to think about using AI in your codebase from two young builders.Their mutually-agreed take on why founders should never be in a hurry to hire a salesperson.A framework for thinking about startup valuations or "the Collapse of Terminal Value" as Alkis calls it!A mutually-shared deep optimism about what AI unlocks for human creativity and job creation.From winning national Economics Olympiads and publishing clinical AI research as teenagers, to dropping out of school to build in the relentless San Francisco startup ecosystem, Alkis and Shashi share what it truly takes to pursue outlier greatness.Chapters00:00 Preview: Three Lines That Set the Tone00:48 Introductions and ice-breakers04:03 Alkis and Shashi's Origin Stories 09:26 Of Battery Drain and Michael Jordan14:19 Managing Family Fear and Financial Realities17:32 Joining an Accelerator vs. Going It Alone22:09 The Accelerator Timeline29:16 "Collapse of Terminal Value"32:56 What Is Tacit Intelligence?36:23 When Do They Start Hiring?39:14 On Being AI-Pilled 41:23 Bold Predictions for 2026 43:51 How to Get in Touch with Alkis & ShashiQuotes:"You drain your battery every single day when you're doing a startup!" - Shashi Salavath (09:59)"TL;DR, the reason I'm doing it is for the pursuit of greatness." - Shashi Salavath (10:44)"A very, very small subset of people have the confidence and the delusion - the early-stage delusion - to take the risk to start a company." - Alkis Toutziaridis (13:26)"If we're Mr. Robot, huddled in a corner, hoodies on, just like coding 24/7... there is a mental aspect that needs to be serviced to make this successful." - Shashi Salavath (21:05)"If you're a founder and you can't sell your own product - or you don't learn what's your go-to-market motion and structure - then who's going to do it?" - Alkis Toutziaridis (37:15)"We don't outsource any of our thinking to AI. None of it. We outsource 0% of our thinking to AI." - Shashi Salavath (39:46)Follow:Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e8ec9af-f38c-4cd9-8c68-1c1dd4516b 27/1st10-podcastApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/f951319c/podcast/rss YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Links:Alkis Toutziaridis on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alkistoutzi/Shashi salavath on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/shashi-salavath/Tacit Intelligence: https://www.tacitintelligence.ai/Music by Roman Senyk from PixabayProducer: Shrikant Joshi

Boris Epstein built the tech-recruiting firm Binc over 19 years and got acquired by Robinhood in 2021. Then, he walked away from all of it...On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, host and founder of 1st10, Boris Epstein, shares the origin story of 1st10 and why he decided to get into the hardest version of Tech Recruiting viz., recruiting for early-stage startups. Tune in to hear Boris share super-valuable insights from the world of early-stage recruiting such as:Why most recruiting firms are optimizing for the wrong thing entirelyWhy the ceiling on the quality of your team is set well before your first engineering hire.Why founders consistently lose top candidates at the offer stage.Why it's a HUGE mistake to rely on the most popular industry compensation databases.What makes early-stage hiring SO "ridiculously hard".What *actually* makes a founder attractive to top engineering talentAlong the way, Boris shares a VERY uncomfortable truth about startups and founders that reveals why the ultimate ceiling of any startup is a very specific skill possessed by its leadership - tune in to find out!Chapters00:00 Episode Preview 00:42 Starting a Recruiting Firm After the Dot-Com Bust02:04 Dropping Recruiting SWAT Teams into Pinterest & Airbnb04:53 The Decision To Walk Away...07:09 The 1st10 Origin Story10:01 How 1st10 Decides Who They Work With11:53 Embedded & Retained Recruiting16:21 5 Startups From The 1st10 Portfolio22:53 "Talent Magnet" Founders And Their Blueprint25:56 3 Recruiting Mistakes Made by Startup Founders32:10 Why IS Early-Stage Hiring "Ridiculously Hard"? 36:32 3 Values That Define How 1st10 Operates39:56 The Truth of Truths For ALL Startup Founders41:28 A 30-Year Vision for the Next Tech Renaissance43:41 Contact Details & ConclusionQuotes:"I watched Stripe go from these two founders building this early team, to now where they're one of the most-storied technology companies in Silicon Valley worth $50 or $100 billion right now. And it all started from the ambition of the founder, the recruiting ability of the founder, and the talent-dense team that they built." - Boris Epstein (09:00)"We've made the decision to work with a fewer number of startups at a deeper level than working with a broader number of startups at a more superficial level. I believe one of the problems with recruiting is that they optimize for the latter." - Boris Epstein (11:53)"You have to be THE ONE for these candidates to want to join you! Not the 'one of many', not 'the ones building in this space'... You have to be THE ONE!" - Boris Epstein (30:19)"The startup's ceiling - from a talent perspective - is the recruiting abilities of the founder." - Boris Epstein (38:04)"Not AI, not technology, not executive assistance, not even third party recruiters - NOTHING will replace the founder's need to invest at that level. And the founders who invest at that level are the ones who build the standout teams." - Boris Epstein (40:42)Follow:Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e8ec9af-f38c-4cd9-8c68-1c1dd4516b 27/1st10-podcastApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/f951319c/podcast/rss YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Links:Boris Epstein on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/borisepstein/Contact Form: - Founders: https://www.1st10.com/wt-founders- Engineers: https://www.1st10.com/wt-engineersEpisodes Referenced:Alice Zhang - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcejiN-6JOAAshley Pelzel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hyOIi8h95cShashank Chiranewala - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwDaut7XGHcMusic by Roman Senyk from PixabayProducer: Shrikant Joshi