What does a 4.7-star rating actually mean? Nothing, says David Leibner, founder of Stupid Good AI. In this episode, David and Paulina break down why star ratings are broken, how his platform built an AI foodie concierge that learns users at an atomic level, the internal AI agent team ("Team 11") that rebuilt his recommendation engine, and why he believes ChatGPT and Gemini will eventually become his paying customers instead of his competitors.

Fractional CTO Paulo André joins Paulina to make the case that we're in an AI bubble — and that coding was never the real bottleneck in software delivery. They dig into why AI is making engineering teams busier without making businesses faster, the "rookie mistake" Paulo made by over-building his own AI-powered cycling app, and why token costs, guardrails, and the 80/20 principle matter more than ever in the coding agent era.

Victor Tuson Palau, 3x unicorn CTO and former CPTO at Bitpanda, joins Paulina to explain why nearly every successful startup runs on a monolith, why shipping more features doesn't always mean more revenue, and why it took a regulator to force financial companies to guarantee their systems actually work. They also dig into why scaling a fintech is a different beast entirely from scaling a typical SaaS company, from fragmented payment rails across Europe to the chaos of proving your address in different countries.

In this episode, George Fahmy, founder of Stakpak, breaks down why AI guardrails built on machine learning can always be tricked, why least-privilege access breaks down once agents start spawning their own sub-agents, and the real story of an AI agent hex-dumping files to sneak secrets past a security filter.

Google's DORA team just found something counterintuitive: 90% of developers now use AI daily, and most feel more productive. But at the team level, deployment instability is increasing.

In this episode, Nathen Harvey, Head of DORA at Google Cloud, joins Paulina to unpack why AI amplifies both the best and worst parts of your engineering systems. They cover the hidden "verification tax" of AI-generated code, why only 4% of developers say they trust AI's output "a great deal," the J-curve every team hits before AI adoption actually pays off, and why cutting junior engineers today could mean no senior engineers in ten years.

Most companies think their vendor contracts are under control. They're not.

Steen Steensen Blicher, CEO and co-founder of VendorTel, breaks down the silent financial leak hiding in plain sight. 2 to 5% of total supplier spend lost every year because nobody connects contract terms to real transaction data.

In this episode: why a signed contract is not the same as earned money, how AI unlocks vendor management without replacing the human decisions that matter, and the one 30-minute audit every procurement team should run this week.

How much of the AI boom is real?

Paul Bates, co-founder and Director at Uptiq, spent over two decades in tech and he's cutting through the hype. In this episode we get into why 70-90% of "AI" projects are really just automation, how companies are slashing cloud costs by 90% through app modernization, and why private AI models are becoming the enterprise default.

We also talk about scaling a tech services business, data sovereignty, the hidden costs nobody plans for, and why trust is the only thing that actually closes deals in consulting.

Practical, honest, and zero fluff.

In this episode, Anemari Fiser (former Tech Lead, Product Director, and author of the O'Reilly book Level Up as a Tech Lead) shares what it really takes to succeed in tech leadership.

From burnout at ThoughtWorks to building her own coaching business, Anemari reveals why most problems in tech are people problems, not technical ones, and why soft skills and feedback are the true game-changers for Tech Leads.

Whether you're aspiring to become a Tech Lead or looking to level up in your current role, this conversation is packed with practical insights on leadership, team culture, and career growth.

Adam Malik is a trade show veteran and digital transformation consultant with over two decades of experience launching major tech events and leading digital change inside media businesses. He has managed buyouts, built and sold companies, and spent the last two years running a live experiment: a one-person media business built almost entirely with AI-assisted workflows. He is the founder of Digitizing Events, where he documents what works when small businesses try to use AI, away from the hype.

Get real about AI security, community building, and why the transformation is never done with Hannah Foxwell, DevOps veteran, AI educator, and founder of AI for the Rest of Us. From securing AI agents to building inclusive tech spaces, Hannah brings a sharp, grounded perspective on what's actually happening in the industry right now.