InProd

This week, we’re joined by Buğra Gündüz, Co-Founder and CEO of HockeyStack, an AI-native GTM platform that unifies data and deploys agents to execute across sales and marketing.

Buğra breaks down why the future of GTM is shifting from dashboards and attribution toward systems that can actually take action. As companies accumulate more fragmented data and increasingly complex workflows, visibility alone is no longer enough. Teams need infrastructure that understands their pipeline, identifies what matters, and automates execution across the revenue org.

We discuss how HockeyStack went from a single product to a multi-layer platform spanning data, intelligence, and workflow agents, why owning the underlying data layer is critical before introducing AI, and what it takes to convince organizations to move off legacy GTM stacks. Buğra also shares lessons from scaling from $1M to $11M ARR, how they approached early distribution, and why the real moat in GTM may come down to data gravity and workflow dependency rather than features.

Episode chapters:

• 1:55 - Dropping Out of College
• 3:27 - Acquiring Early Users
• 6:50 - Building a Single Source of Customer Truth
• 9:20 - Product Marketing Strategy
• 14:35 - Enterprise Deals and Security
• 17:07 - Building a Generalized Platform
• 20:18 - Choosing the Right LLM
• 22:28 - The Future of the Sales Org
• 26:21 - Hiring at HockeyStack
• 29:10 - Building Company Culture
• 32:50 - Learning Through Trial and Error
• 34:44 - Quick Fire Round 

This episode is brought to you by Grata, the leading deal sourcing platform for private equity. Grata’s AI powered search, investment grade data, and intuitive workflows help you find and win the right deals faster. Visit grata.com to book a demo.

This episode is also sponsored by Overlap, the AI powered app that uses LLMs to surface the best moments from any podcast. Overlap reads full transcripts, finds the most relevant clips, and stitches them into a personalized stream of insights. Tap into podcasts as a real information source with Overlap 2.0, now available on the App Store.

This week, we’re joined by Alexis Gauba, Co-Founder of Raindrop, an AI native observability platform built for agents in production.

Alexis breaks down why operating agents is fundamentally different from monitoring traditional software. As systems shift from deterministic code to probabilistic behavior, dashboards alone are not enough. Teams need to detect unknown issues, track signals like forgetting, and understand long agent trajectories across millions of AI events.

We discuss why agent observability has become essential over the past year, what makes agent infrastructure distinct from prior platform shifts, and when internal tooling stops scaling. Alexis also explains Raindrop’s approach to production monitoring, combining explicit signals with automated detection to help teams not just find issues, but fix them.

Episode chapters:

• 2:05 - Founding Raindrop
• 3:54 - Building with Close Friends
• 5:44 - What Raindrop Actually Does
• 7:45 - The Reliability Challenge of Agents
• 9:55 - Monitoring Agents at Scale
• 14:45 - Experiencing the Pain Firsthand
• 18:00 - The Rise of Agent Infrastructure
• 22:17 - Internal AI Use Cases
• 24:07 - Hiring for Initiative and Ownership
• 28:30 - The Power of Multitasking
• 32:06 - Quick Fire Round 

This episode is brought to you by Grata, the leading deal sourcing platform for private equity. Grata’s AI powered search, investment grade data, and intuitive workflows help you find and win the right deals faster. Visit grata.com to book a demo.

This episode is also sponsored by Overlap, the AI powered app that uses LLMs to surface the best moments from any podcast. Overlap reads full transcripts, finds the most relevant clips, and stitches them into a personalized stream of insights. Tap into podcasts as a real information source with Overlap 2.0, now available on the App Store.

This week, we’re joined by Anish Agarwal, CEO of Traversal, an AI-native site reliability platform helping teams detect, diagnose, and remediate incidents before they spiral into prolonged downtime.

Anish shares how Traversal is tackling the full lifecycle of reliability work: identifying what caused an incident, determining which signals actually mattered during alert triage, and helping teams plan how their infrastructure should evolve over time. As modern systems grow more complex, spanning microservices, serverless, and multi-cloud environments, the surface area for failure continues to expand, especially as AI-generated code accelerates change faster than humans can reasonably keep up.

We talk about why observability has produced some of the largest outcomes in software, why the traditional dashboard-first model is breaking down, and why the next generation of tooling needs agents that can search, reason over, and act on observability data, not just display it. Anish also breaks down where “self-healing systems” are real today, where expectations need to be reset, and why many AI-SRE products risk building faster horses instead of rethinking the experience entirely.

Episode chapters:

• 1:50 — Anish’s background and early building
• 2:30 — The origins of SRE and why it emerged
• 8:40 — Research-driven thinking in product and engineering
• 10:07 — Building for large enterprise environments
• 13:00 — AI-driven code and the growing infrastructure surface area
• 16:11 — Preparing infrastructure for an AI-native future
• 20:10 — Fear, trust, and operating critical systems
• 23:05 — From detection to automated action
• 24:20 — How the SRE role is changing
• 26:05 — Hiring and building the right team
• 29:08 — Raising capital from Sequoia and KP
• 32:38 — Reflections and lessons learned
• 35:50 — Quick-fire round 

This episode is brought to you by Grata, the leading deal sourcing platform for private equity. Grata’s AI powered search, investment grade data, and intuitive workflows help you find and win the right deals faster. Visit grata.com to book a demo.

This episode is also sponsored by Overlap, the AI powered app that uses LLMs to surface the best moments from any podcast. Overlap reads full transcripts, finds the most relevant clips, and stitches them into a personalized stream of insights. Tap into podcasts as a real information source with Overlap 2.0, now available on the App Store.

This week, we’re joined by Ivan Burazin, co-founder of Daytona - a company rethinking developer environments for an AI-native world.

We talk about how Daytona creates real value for developers, why the most advanced agent companies are emerging bottom up, and the idea that agents should be treated as first class users with reliable access to compute. Ivan also shares some of Daytona’s most demanding use cases including AI scientists in chemistry and pharma running agents inside massive sandboxes with hundreds of CPUs.

We also cover what reliability looks like when customers define success as whether the system works at all, how Daytona maintains sub 90 millisecond latency while spinning up millions of environments per day, and how they support always on usage with no fixed schedule. Finally, we dig into go to market lessons from putting engineers on the front lines early to why Daytona prioritizes in person engagement and intentional events as the most authentic way to build trust with developers.

Episode chapters:

• 1:43 – Market timing and why now
• 3:18 – Building for developers and dev tools
• 4:55 – Global developer communities
• 7:55 – Computers as infrastructure for agents
• 10:32 – Product-led growth
• 12:17 – Enterprise use cases and adoption
• 16:25 – Managing cost, performance, and latency
• 19:20 – Hiring for resiliency at scale
• 20:40 – Internal AI use cases at Daytona
• 24:25 – Creating a bottom-up go-to-market motion
• 27:42 – Hiring and scaling developer relations
• 29:55 – Partnerships and ecosystem strategy
• 31:00 – Quick-fire round 

This episode is brought to you by Grata, the leading deal sourcing platform for private equity. Grata’s AI powered search, investment grade data, and intuitive workflows help you find and win the right deals faster. Visit grata.com to book a demo.

This episode is also sponsored by Overlap, the AI powered app that uses LLMs to surface the best moments from any podcast. Overlap reads full transcripts, finds the most relevant clips, and stitches them into a personalized stream of insights. Tap into podcasts as a real information source with Overlap 2.0, now available on the App Store.

This week, we’re joined by Ishan Gupta, co-founder of Juicebox — a company redefining how recruiting works in an AI-native world.

Ishan shares how they pivoted from earlier ideas to focus on the highest value part of hiring: identifying the right people and getting them into process. With Juicebox, you describe what you want in natural language and the platform searches more than 800 million professional profiles, surfaces the best matches, and engages candidates through recruiting agents.

Their breakout feature, Autopilot, uses LLMs to semantically evaluate and stack rank candidates based on nuanced criteria, which quickly drove organic growth and strong PMF. We talk about why their data makes the product so sticky, how they see recruiting evolving over the next five years, what led them to raise their Series A, and the culture they are building around moving fast and being intellectually honest.

Ishan also shares what they are building next with their memory layer, which will make it clear what the AI is learning over time and how it improves future searches.

Episode chapters:

1. 1:44 - Competitive programming
2. 4:35 - Choosing the company name
3. 5:55 - YC and the pivot
4. 8:00 - How Juicebox differs from traditional recruiting
5. 9:51 - The killer feature
6. 14:30 - What makes the product sticky
7. 17:15 - Is recruiting a zero sum game
8. 19:10 - The macro view of hiring
9. 22:05 - Raising a later Series A
10. 24:10 - Product expansion
11. 26:45 - Quick fire round 

This episode is brought to you by Grata, the leading deal sourcing platform for private equity. Grata’s AI powered search, investment grade data, and intuitive workflows help you find and win the right deals faster. Visit grata.com to book a demo.

This episode is also sponsored by Overlap, the AI powered app that uses LLMs to surface the best moments from any podcast. Overlap reads full transcripts, finds the most relevant clips, and stitches them into a personalized stream of insights. Tap into podcasts as a real information source with Overlap 2.0, now available on the App Store.

This week’s guests are Henry and Ani, co-founders of Smithery. Smithery is building the marketplace and runtime for MCP, making it easier for developers to distribute, discover, and monetize tools in the emerging agent ecosystem. 

 Smithery provides a platform to connect your repo, integrate with CI/CD, and handle hosting for servers seamlessly. MCP shines when agents become more general, but it only scales if demand grows for more connections between tools and systems. Drawing from their experiences at Browserbase, Whatnot, and prior AI startups, Ani and Henry saw the need for standardization across the agent stack and set out to build the distribution and trust layer for MCP. 

We cover what early traction they’re seeing from developers, how they’re approaching payments and identity to reduce configuration friction, and what the broader shift toward open, composable AI infrastructure means for the future of agents. 

Episode chapters:

1.  1:51 — Getting into AI
2.  5:30 — The Origin of Smithery
3.  7:40 — Building the Supply Side
4.  9:10 — Why Smithery Is the Easiest Way to Discover MCPs
5.  13:30 — Agent Authentication and Identity
6.  17:08 — The Most Popular MCPs
7.  19:50 — MCP and the Principle of Separation of Concerns
8.  22:50 — How AI Is Being Used Today
9.  25:57 — Defining Success as Founders 
10. 31:45 — Quire Fire Round

This episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.

Fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.

This week’s guest is Dean Leitersdorf, CEO of Decart. Decart is a vertically integrated AI research lab building some of the world’s most advanced audio and video models, including Mirage, a real-time generative video system where users can transform themselves or their environments instantly.

We dive into Dean’s path from finishing his PhD in computer science at 21 to founding Decart with the ambition of creating a true “before-and-after” company in AI. We cover how Decart evolved from GPU optimization to leading-edge video models, why Mirage has attracted massive adoption in advertising and ecommerce, and what it means to build entirely new consumer experiences on the internet. We also discuss the broader enterprise interest in real-time video, how Decart balances continuous consumer iteration with lab-first research, and why Dean believes this is one of the few moments in history where founders can truly build trillion-dollar businesses.

Episode Chapters: 

• 2:10 — From Israel to Palo Alto
• 4:22 — What Dean is running toward
• 6:15 — Building for the future of AI
• 9:40 — How people use Decart
• 14:05 — Building a model from scratch
• 19:08 — Who adopts these models first
• 24:05 — Decart’s focus areas
• 27:06 — Attracting world-class talent
• 30:00 — Choosing to integrate or partner
• 34:04 — Thinking about consumer impact
• 39:38 — Quick fire round

This episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.

Fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.

This week’s guests are Samir and Kunal from Farsight. Farsight is transforming how financial firms operate by automating the most time-consuming parts of dealmaking, from drafting pitch decks to generating investment insights, in seconds instead of weeks.

We dive into Samir’s journey from Wall Street to building Farsight, and why AI is reshaping the workflows at the heart of finance. We cover how power users are creating entire pitchbooks in minutes, how firms leveraging Farsight are winning more deals and sharpening pricing strategies, and why owning the full workflow is the key to lasting advantage. We also discuss their approach to high-sensitivity use cases, where models are deployed directly into customer environments and tuned for bespoke needs.

Episode Chapters:

1. 2:02 - CS at MIT
2. 5:30 - The catalyzing factor
3. 10:36 - Agents to automate financial services
4. 13:20 - Your new PE analyst
5. 16:30 - Owning the workflow
6. 19:25 - Selling to banks 
7. 21:45 - Build vs buy
8. 25:20 - Foundation models & frameworks
9. 31:27 - Becoming a manager
10. 34:10 - Fundraising advice
11. 36:40 - Augmenting junior analysts
12. 41:00 - How AI teaches us to work 
13. 42:25 - Quick fire round

As always, feel free to contact us at [email protected]. We would love to hear ideas for content, guests, and overall feedback.

This episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.

Fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.

This week’s guest is Jordan Dearsley, CEO of Vapi. Vapi enables enterprises to deploy humanlike voice agents in minutes. Whether you are building a new voice product or managing millions of calls, Vapi’s infrastructure and flexible APIs make it simple and reliable.

We explore why Waterloo continues to produce world-class engineers and founders, Jordan’s journey from building calendar apps and AI therapy tools to leading Vapi, and why enterprises are turning to voice AI to save engineering time and resources. We also cover the toughest technical challenges including latency, tool calls, determinism, and multi state environments, and why generative voice systems require constant tuning and forward deployed models rather than one size fits all solutions.

Episode Chapters:

1. 2:10 - The MIT of Canada
2. 4:03 - Pivoting 10+ times
3. 6:00 - Why voice AI
4. 11:07 - A faster path to production
5. 12:05 - Voice challenges from enterprises
6. 15:05 - Why stay horizontal
7. 17:20 - Actively moving away from being an AI BPO
8. 19:45 - Forward deployed engineers
9. 21:40 - From scoping to production
10. 22:40 - Recruiting as an early stage startup
11. 26:05 - ElevenLabs leading the model pack
12. 29:00 - Distribution & enterprise integrations
13. 32:35 - Quick fire round 

As always, feel free to contact us at [email protected]. We would love to hear ideas for content, guests, and overall feedback.

This episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.

Fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.

This week’s guest is Brooke Hopkins, Founder of Coval, a company building automated testing infrastructure for AI agents starting with voice and chat assistants. 

We unpack her journey from studying in Abu Dhabi to leading simulation infrastructure at Waymo, where she helped ensure autonomous vehicles could operate safely at scale. Brooke shares how that experience shaped Coval’s approach to agent evaluation, why voice is the hardest modality to test, and what it means to simulate human-to-agent interactions in a way that actually reflects user intent.

Episode Chapters:

1. 1:54 - Abu Dhabi for college
2. 4:06 - Searching for engineering challenges
3. 5:08 - Joining Waymo
4. 9:00 - Scaling simulations
5. 10:17 - Balancing cost, latency, and signal
6. 14:40 - Starting with voice
7. 18:16 - Building evals
8. 23:44 - Persona surprises
9. 26:50 - MCP 
10. 27:15 - AI operating system for conversational workflows
11. 32:28 - Voice to voice 
12. 35:55 - Quick fire round

As always, feel free to contact us at [email protected]. We would love to hear ideas for content, guests, and overall feedback.

This episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.

Fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.