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Inside The Silicon Mind
Inside The Silicon Mind episodes
- What Happens If One of the World's 4 Biggest Databases FAILS? | Dominic Preuss
The world runs on four databases, and if one of them broke, big parts of the internet and the global economy would break with it. MySQL is one of them. It carried Facebook, YouTube, Uber, Shopify, and GitHub to scale, and since 2010 it has been owned by Oracle. I sat down with Dominic Preuss, an ex-Google Cloud director and former AWS general manager who now runs VillageSQL, a startup betting that MySQL can become a platform for innovation again. He breaks down why founders should pick the database they already know, how MySQL went from a Swedish startup to Sun Microsystems to Oracle, and why Oracle is now opening its development to AWS and Google. Then he explains why permissionless innovation let Postgres take the spotlight, why he went after the gap on the MySQL side while everyone else chased Postgres, and why data gravity makes your first database one of the hardest decisions to undo.
Chapters
🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.
Chapters:- 00:00:00 Intro
- 00:00:47 Why Databases Matter
- 00:04:57 Picking a Database
- 00:08:05 How MySQL Won
- 00:13:07 Governance & Innovation
- 00:14:58 VillageSQL
- 00:21:05 Data Gravity
- 00:23:24 Book Recommendation
Book Recommendation:
What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
About Dominic Preuss
Dominic Preuss is the co-founder and CEO of VillageSQL, a New York company building an open source, drop-in replacement for MySQL with an extension framework that lets anyone add new functions, data types, and indexes without waiting for permission. He spent about a decade working on databases at Google Cloud, where he was a director of product management and helped launch Cloud SQL, Bigtable, and Spanner, and at AWS, where he was a general manager. He started VillageSQL in 2025 with Steve Schirripa, a former Google distinguished engineer who worked on Bigtable and Colossus. In February 2026, the company raised a twenty-five million dollar Series A led by FirstMark, with GV, Spark Capital, and Homebrew participating, bringing total funding to thirty-five million dollars. VillageSQL also helped launch the OurSQL Foundation, an independent nonprofit for the MySQL community, alongside Percona and PlanetScale. He argues that MySQL never lacked users, only a way to innovate, and that open governance and extensions can give it the same momentum Postgres has had.
Follow Dominic Preuss on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deesix/
About the show
Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.
Hosted by Firas Sozan.
🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on:
AI and the future of software
Venture capital and company building
Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careers
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMind
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsm
Spotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsm
Follow the host on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/
Website links:
https://www.harrisonclarke.com/
https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/
https://thepmfplaybook.com/25 min - Ex-Apple Insider: You're Not Ready For What AI is Doing Now
AI can pass exams, write software, and generate video, yet most of us are working the same long hours we always have. It still doesn't know what happened in your meeting an hour ago, which spreadsheet you update every Friday, or how you file your expense reports. I sat down with Jeffrey Lai, co-founder and CEO of IrisGo, who spent thirteen years working on Siri at Apple and is now building an AI operating system that watches how you work and learns to do it for you. He breaks down why AI fails not because it isn't smart but because it doesn't know your habits, why every prompt is really you explaining what the AI missed, and why the next programming language will be demonstration instead of prompting. Then he looks back on why the vision behind Siri was right fifteen years ago when the technology wasn't, what a request as simple as "play Hello" reveals about context, and why, a decade from now, operating software by hand will feel as dated as dialing a phone number.
🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.
Chapters:
Chapters- 00:00:00 Intro
- 00:00:44 Intelligence Isn't Enough
- 00:04:06 From Prompts to Demonstration
- 00:08:56 Apps Are Islands
- 00:10:38 Siri: Right Vision, Too Early
- 00:14:19 Lessons From Apple
- 00:16:55 Computing in 10 Years
- 00:19:34 Book Recommendation
Book Recommendation:
The Last Lecture by Randy PauschAbout Jeffrey Lai
Jeffrey Lai is the co-founder and CEO of IrisGo, a company building an AI operating system for Windows and Mac that learns a workflow from a single demonstration and then runs it for you across your apps. Before founding IrisGo in 2025, he spent thirteen years at Apple, where he was one of the founding engineers who brought Siri to Mandarin and Cantonese, served as Siri Language Engineering Manager, and worked on contextual intelligence and on-device machine learning. IrisGo processes much of its data on the device and sends complex tasks to the cloud only with the user's permission. Its assistant, Iris, is Siri spelled backward. The company raised a two point eight million dollar seed round led by Andrew Ng's AI Fund, where Lai has served as a Founder in Residence. Nvidia and Google have also backed the company, and Acer has signed on to preinstall Iris on new laptops. He is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. He argues that the bottleneck in AI has shifted from intelligence to context.
Follow Jeffrey Lai on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreylai1/
About the show
Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.Hosted by Firas Sozan.
🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on:
AI and the future of software
Venture capital and company building
Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careersYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMind
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsm
Spotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsmFollow the host on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/Website links:
https://www.harrisonclarke.com/
https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/
https://thepmfplaybook.com/21 min - Ex-Yahoo Insider: Robots Were Supposed to Take Factory Jobs. What Happened?
At some factories, when one operator goes on vacation, an entire section of the plant shuts down until they come back, because nobody else knows how to run it. Customers tell Devin Bhushan the average operator on their floor is fifty-seven or fifty-eight years old. I sat down with Devin Bhushan, founder and CEO of Squint, who is racing to capture decades of tribal knowledge before a generation of experts retires and takes it with them. He breaks down how Squint watches a video of an expert at work and writes the guide on its own, why the real insight on a factory floor isn't in the sensor data but in what people know to do when something breaks, and why a potato chip is harder to automate than a computer chip. Then he shares what his mentor Tim Tully taught him about staying uncomfortable, why his early team ran like five raccoons in a trench coat, and why owning the outcome instead of the process is pushing Squint to charge customers for results.
🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.
Chapters:
0:00 - Intro0:39 - A Race Against Time To Capture Expertise1:34 - The Hidden Art Inside Every Factory2:32 - What Squint Actually Does4:12 - Knowledge That Lives In People's Heads5:04 - Who Squint Works With5:35 - The Moment The First Customer Said "We Need This"6:58 - How Squint Captures Tribal Knowledge9:43 - From Yahoo To Splunk To The Factory Floor13:28 - What Tim Tully Taught Him About Discomfort15:17 - Five Raccoons In A Trench Coat18:13 - Own The Outcome, Not The Process21:58 - The Factory Ten Years From Now24:14 - Judgment And Taste On The Factory Floor25:36 - Book RecommendationBook Recommendation:
The Goal by Eliyahu M. GoldrattAbout Devin Bhushan
Devin Bhushan is the founder and CEO of Squint, a San Francisco company building an industrial intelligence platform that captures the tribal knowledge of expert operators, turns video of their work into step-by-step instructions, and runs AI agents alongside workers on the factory floor. Before founding Squint in 2021, he was a software engineer at Yahoo, where he built consumer and fantasy sports products, and then led the mobile augmented reality team at Splunk, bringing data analytics to industrial workers. Squint is used by large manufacturers and energy companies including PepsiCo, Continental, and Michelin. In August 2025 the company raised a forty million dollar Series B at a two hundred sixty-five million dollar valuation, led by The Westly Group and TCV with returning investors Sequoia Capital and Menlo Ventures, bringing total funding to more than fifty-nine million dollars. He believes the factories of the future won't be lights out, and that the company holding the context will be the one orchestrating human hands and robot hands together.
Follow Devin Bhushan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devinbhushan/
About the show
Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.Hosted by Firas Sozan.
🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on:
AI and the future of software
Venture capital and company buildingDeveloper tools, infrastructure, and engineering careersYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMind
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsmSpotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsmFollow the host on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/Website links:
https://www.harrisonclarke.com/https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/https://thepmfplaybook.com/28 min - The Founder Using AI to Build Real Hardware
For more than sixty years, engineers have tried to automate circuit board design, and the best tool they've built is one the industry openly hates. The motherboard inside your laptop still takes a person months to draw by hand. I sat down with Sergiy Nesterenko, founder and CEO of Quilter and a former SpaceX radiation effects engineer, who is building AI that designs circuit boards on its own by starting from physics instead of from past attempts. He breaks down why hard problems that are simple to state refuse to let smart people go, why founders should fall in love with the customer before the solution, and why everyone outside his industry assumes this problem was solved decades ago. Then he takes us inside SpaceX's culture of shocking competence, what Elon looked like as a leader up close, and why thinking by analogy will only ever get you as far as the people who failed before you.
🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.Chapters:
0:00 - Intro0:30 - Fear Of Failing Vs The Joy Of Building1:43 - Why Hard Problems Choose You3:04 - Obsess Over The Customer, Not The Idea4:13 - How To Fall In Love With Your Customer5:25 - The Circuit Board Problem7:10 - The Hidden Boards In Everything8:09 - The Problem Nobody Has Solved In Sixty Years9:32 - Inside SpaceX's Shocking Competence11:13 - How SpaceX Filters For Intensity13:01 - What Makes A Great Engineering Culture14:32 - Elon As A Leader16:05 - First Principles Vs Thinking By Analogy17:47 - Catching Rockets With Chopsticks19:33 - Setting The Right Limits On A Hard Problem21:31 - Book RecommendationBook Recommendation:
Build by Tony FadellAbout Sergiy Nesterenko
Sergiy Nesterenko is the founder and CEO of Quilter, a Los Angeles company building physics-driven AI that designs printed circuit boards on its own, turning weeks of manual layout work into hours. Before founding Quilter in 2019, he spent five years at SpaceX as a senior radiation effects engineer, making sure the electronics on Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon could survive the radiation of space. Quilter trains its AI with reinforcement learning on the physics of electronics, including electromagnetics, thermodynamics, and signal propagation, rather than on human designs. The company raised a Series A led by Benchmark, followed by a twenty-five million dollar Series B in 2025 led by Index Ventures, bringing total funding to forty million dollars from investors including Benchmark, Index Ventures, Coatue, Root Ventures, Lip-Bu Tan, and Tony Fadell. He holds a triple major in chemistry, physics, and mathematics from UC Berkeley. He argues that the only way to crack a problem that has beaten engineers for sixty years is to stop building on their attempts and start from physics.Follow Sergiy Nesterenko on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/
About the show
Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.Hosted by Firas Sozan.🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on:
- AI and the future of software- Venture capital and company building- Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careersYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMind
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsmSpotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsmFollow the host on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/Website links:
https://www.harrisonclarke.com/https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/https://thepmfplaybook.com/24 min - YC Founder: It Took Me 10 Years to Realize What I'll Tell You in 25 Minutes
For eight years, his company sold document review. The product that finally worked came from a one-page internal tool built for his own team, one that customers saw at a conference and immediately asked to buy. I sat down with Nischal Nadhamuni, co-founder and CTO of Within (formerly Klarity), who spent nearly a decade and several pivots searching for product market fit before turning that tool into a company brain that maps how work actually gets done. He breaks down why surviving ten years comes down almost entirely to mindset, why early teams need missionaries instead of people chasing growth metrics, how a simple video-to-documentation tool exposed one of the biggest problems in enterprise, and why product market fit now has to evolve faster than ever. Then he explains why a CEO's own AI fluency sets the ceiling for the whole company, and why moving people from anxiety to abundance matters more than any tool rollout.
🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.Chapters:
0:00 - Intro0:53 - The Long Road To Product Market Fit2:53 - Why Survival Is All Mindset4:37 - The Team That Stayed6:44 - Hiring Missionaries, Not Growth Chasers9:02 - The Internal Tool Customers Wanted To Buy13:11 - Building A Company Brain15:05 - Product Market Fit Is A Moving Target17:35 - The Power And Risk Of Dogfooding18:40 - Advice For AI-First CEOs20:19 - From AI Anxiety To Abundance22:12 - Book RecommendationBook Recommendations:Americana by Bhu SrinivasanThe Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan HaidtAbout Nischal NadhamuniNischal Nadhamuni is co-founder and CTO of Within, the San Francisco enterprise AI company formerly known as Klarity, which builds a company brain that maps how work actually gets done so organizations can decide where people and AI agents fit. He founded the company in 2017 with Andrew Antos, whom he met at MIT, and went through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch. The company spent its early years automating document review, first for legal teams and then for finance and accounting, before an internal process documentation tool became the core of its current platform. Customers include OpenAI, DoorDash, ServiceNow, Salesforce, JLL and McKesson. The company raised an eighteen million dollar Series A led by Tola Capital, followed by a seventy million dollar Series B in 2024 led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, with Scale Venture Partners, Tola Capital, Picus Capital, Invus and Y Combinator participating. Before founding the company, he worked on AI applications at Airware, Flipkart and Massachusetts General Hospital, where his team's machine learning work on detecting cancer-causing genes was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. He holds a computer science degree from MIT and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in AI. He argues that the hardest part of enterprise AI isn't the model, it's understanding how people actually work.Follow Nischal Nadhamuni on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishchaln/About the show
Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.Hosted by Firas Sozan.🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on:
- AI and the future of software- Venture capital and company building- Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careersYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMind
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsmSpotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsmFollow the host on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/Website links:
https://www.harrisonclarke.com/https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/https://thepmfplaybook.com/26 min - Physical AI: Building Intelligence for the Real World
Eighty-five percent of the world economy runs on physical things, and almost none of today's AI was built to understand them. I sat down with Ivan Poupyrev, co-founder and CEO of Archetype AI, who spent nearly a decade at Google shipping radar and sensor products, worked at Disney and Sony before that, and left to build Newton, a single foundation model for the physical world. He pulls back the curtain on why the next wave of AI will run on sensor data, not language.
He breaks down why a car or a turbine can't tell you what's wrong in words and only speaks in measurements, why the fastest wins won't come from robots but from the computers already sitting inside every crane, car and power line, why one general model can replace the patchwork of single-use tools industry pays for today, and why big tech stays late to new markets until they're earning a hundred million dollars a day. Then he gets into why AI raises the stakes on every hire instead of lowering them.🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.Chapters:
0:00 - Intro1:34 - The Next Trillion Dollar Company2:28 - What Physical AI Actually Means4:11 - The Language Of Sensors5:41 - Where Physical AI Hits First8:53 - One Model For The Physical World11:08 - How To Know If You're Too Early14:12 - The Shrinking Physical Workforce15:52 - Why Startups Beat Big Tech19:29 - Building The Founding Team24:09 - Why AI Makes Every Hire Critical25:44 - Book RecommendationBook Recommendation:
What Is Real? by Adam BeckerAbout Ivan Poupyrev
Ivan Poupyrev is co-founder and CEO of Archetype AI, the Palo Alto physical AI company behind Newton, a foundation model that reads real-time sensor data and turns it into insight and action for industries like manufacturing, energy, logistics and transportation. Before founding Archetype AI in 2023 with four of his former Google colleagues, he spent about nine years at Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group, where his team built radar and other complex sensors and shipped them in consumer products, including Project Soli and Project Jacquard. Earlier in his career he worked at Disney Research and Sony. Archetype AI raised a thirteen million dollar seed round led by Venrock, followed by a thirty-five million dollar Series A led by IAG Capital Partners and Hitachi Ventures, with Bezos Expeditions, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Samsung participating. He argues that the real economy lives in the physical world, and that the AI that learns to understand it will matter more than the AI that understands words.Follow Ivan Poupyrev on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-poupyrev/About the showInside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.Hosted by Firas Sozan.🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on:- AI and the future of software- Venture capital and company building- Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careersYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMind
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsmSpotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsmFollow the host on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/Website links:
https://www.harrisonclarke.com/https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/https://thepmfplaybook.com31 min - Starting Over in Silicon Valley: Reinvention in the Age of AI
The hardest part of starting over isn't learning something new. It's unlearning everything that made you successful. I sat down with Julia Seregina, an engineer turned tech and industrial executive who ran teams from London to Singapore to Abu Dhabi, then walked away from the big salary to become a first-time founder after thirty in a field where she had no authority at all. Now building in stealth at the edge of AI and science, she pulls back the curtain on what it actually takes to reinvent yourself once you're already an expert. She breaks down why no one has managed to recreate Silicon Valley, why she has to melt old thought patterns before she can think like a founder again, why macro thinking is becoming a more valuable skill than shipping fast, and the three-month test she recommends before anyone quits a career to start a new one. Then she gets into the one thing that has stayed true across every industry and country she has built in.
🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.Chapters:
0:00 - Intro1:18 - Why No One Has Recreated Silicon Valley4:44 - Why Other Places Punish Failure6:57 - What You Lose When You Leave The Bay9:21 - Speed Versus Thinking10:48 - Founder Challenges AI Created12:06 - Building AI For Science In Stealth13:28 - Starting Over As A Newcomer16:05 - Unlearning Old Patterns17:22 - Never Too Late, Just Harder17:59 - What Stays The Same Across Industries19:22 - What Reinvention Taught Her20:40 - The First Step If You Feel Trapped24:04 - Book RecommendationBook Recommendation:
A Brief History of Intelligence by Max BennettAbout Julia Seregina
Julia Seregina is a founder building in stealth in AI for science, working on tools that help biology and life sciences researchers do better work and on AI that reasons like a scientist over long time horizons rather than simply automating steps. She began her career as an engineer and rose quickly into executive roles at technology and industrial companies, working across London, Italy, Poland, Central Asia, Singapore, Southeast Asia, Abu Dhabi and Berlin. She then left corporate life to found companies in AI for healthcare and life sciences, a field she had no formal training in. She has been part of the South Park Commons community and splits her time between the Bay Area and Abu Dhabi. She argues that reinvention starts with unlearning, that conviction and great talent matter more than chasing whatever trend is hot, and that the smartest way to test a new chapter is to build on the side, time-box it, and see whether your conviction grows with every conversation.Follow Julia Seregina on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-seregina-4a7a30142/About the show
Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.Hosted by Firas Sozan.🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on:- AI and the future of software- Venture capital and company building- Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careersYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMindApple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsmSpotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsmFollow the host on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/Website links:https://www.harrisonclarke.com/https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/https://thepmfplaybook.com/26 min - From Founder to CEO: Why Scaling a Company Starts with Reinventing Yourself
The thing that got you your first twenty customers is the exact thing that will break your company at two hundred. I sat down with the founder and CEO of Concentric AI, who started the company three months before the world shut down, raised a forty five million dollar Series B and acquired two companies at once to keep pace with AI, and he pulls back the curtain on what it actually costs a founder to become a CEO. He breaks down the three versions of himself he has had to become, the stress versus frustration framework a VC gave him that now decides which environments suit which people, why context switching quietly destroys a founder's judgment, and why deliberate hiring beats headcount because three hires never give you three people's productivity. Then he gets into the part that keeps him up at night, staying relevant to a market that can wipe out an entire category overnight.
🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.Chapters:0:00 - Intro0:46 - Advice At One Million ARR4:30 - The Cost Of Context Switching7:59 - Becoming Three Different CEOs13:16 - What Worked At Zero To One15:42 - When A Founder Becomes A CEO18:40 - Stress Versus Frustration22:48 - Hiring Without Adding Frustration24:49 - Keeping Your Finger On PMF28:00 - The Problem That Never Goes Away32:06 - Culture Is Doing Not Saying35:56 - Book RecommendationsBook Recommendations:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanTeam of Rivals by Doris Kearns GoodwinAbout Karthik Krishnan
Karthik Krishnan is founder and CEO of Concentric AI, the data security platform that uses AI to find, classify and protect sensitive data across cloud and on premises environments. He spent decades in product before starting the company, including roles at Intel, Juniper Networks, PGP Corporation and Embrane, and was part of the founding team at security analytics company Niara, which was acquired by HPE, where he then served as vice president of product management. At Concentric AI he has raised a forty five million dollar Series B led by Top Tier Capital Partners and HarbourVest Partners, acquired Swift Security and Acante in a single move to bring GenAI governance and AI data curation into the platform, and built the company into a business selling directly to enterprise CISOs. He is one of the clearest voices on the founder to CEO transition, arguing that the job is to stay intellectually honest about whether you are still the right person to lead, to protect your company from frustration for as long as possible, and to keep your head outside the building where the market actually decides your fate.Follow Karthik Krishnan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kkrishnan/About the show
Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.Hosted by Firas Sozan.🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on:- AI and the future of software- Venture capital and company building- Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careersYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMindApple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsmSpotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsmFollow the host on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/
Website links:https://www.harrisonclarke.com/https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/https://thepmfplaybook.com41 min - $1B SaaS CEO: The New Era of Startups Has Just Begun
What if the SaaS apocalypse everyone spent two years predicting was just a discounted entry point? I sat down with the CEO of Clari + Salesloft, a thousand person company built from the merger of two category leaders, now serving over 5,000 customers on roughly $450 million in combined ARR, and he pulls back the curtain on why the AI native land grab is already unravelling. He explains why he gets pitched at least one struggling AI go to market startup every single day, why adoption and retention stall them long before the next funding round, and why the survivors will be the ones that own an entire workflow rather than a single task. He also dismantles the buy versus build story, exposes why most acquisitions quietly kill the culture they paid for, and lays out the three things he tracks to run a business at this scale.
🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.Chapters:
0:00 - Intro1:06 - Is SaaS Actually Dead3:44 - Signs Buyers Now Want Real ROI5:33 - What Separates AI Winners From Losers6:21 - Will AI Replace Humans8:00 - The Buy Versus Build Trap10:16 - The Coming AI Consolidation Wave12:52 - Why Most Acquisitions Fail15:53 - Advice For Founders Planning An Exit17:29 - Bringing Clari And Salesloft Together21:18 - Will It Make The Boat Go Faster22:57 - The Three Things He TracksBook Recommendations:
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? by Ben Hunt-Davis and Harriet BeveridgeAbout Steve Cox:
Steve Cox is Chief Executive Officer of Clari + Salesloft, the Revenue AI company formed when Clari and Salesloft completed their merger on 3 December 2025, where he was appointed CEO and joined two weeks after close. He brings more than 25 years of SaaS leadership with deep expertise in scaling businesses and M&A driven transformation, most recently as CEO of Employ, parent company of JazzHR, Lever, Jobvite and NXTThing RPO, and before that as COO of Community Brands and in executive roles at Vertafore, Chess and TSG. He started his career as a hands on technologist before moving into operations and leadership, and now oversees a combined organisation of roughly a thousand people, a doubled R&D investment, and a platform ingesting more than 10 billion revenue interactions and 1 trillion data signals to power what the company calls the Predictive Revenue System. He is one of the clearest voices on what actually happens after the AI hype curve, arguing that point solutions cannot survive without end to end workflow coverage, that historical data is the only real moat for model accuracy, and that in a few years nobody will say AI company at all because they will just be software companies again.Follow Steve Cox on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-cox-588a2024/About the show
Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.Hosted by Firas Sozan.🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on:
- AI and the future of software- Venture capital and company building- Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careersYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMind
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsmSpotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsmFollow the host on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/Website links:
https://www.harrisonclarke.com/https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/https://thepmfplaybook.com/26 min - $1.2B AI Founder: Software Engineering is About to Change Forever (and nobody even realizes)
If your product is a wrapper on top of an LLM, is your company already over? I sat down with the cofounder and CTO of Rox, the revenue agent platform backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst and Google Ventures and used by teams at OpenAI, Ramp, Confluent, MongoDB and NVIDIA, and he does not hedge on where any of this is heading.
He breaks down the death of the traditional engineering org and the rise of the product engineer, why Rox runs with zero product managers, why he hires for slope rather than intercept, and how a knowledge graph built across CRM, support and product usage data turns messy enterprise systems into agents that run outbound end to end. Then he calls the market as he sees it, a barbell where companies without a real moat are facing serious valuation compression while the big labs and the deep infrastructure players take the spoils.Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.Chapters:
0:00 - Intro0:42 - Rebuilding Rox With Ten Engineers2:37 - Why Rox Has No Product Managers4:04 - Slope Versus Intercept9:40 - Skills AI Has Not Replaced11:49 - Why Revenue Agents Beat Coding Agents13:50 - The Problem Rox Solves16:22 - Building The Knowledge Graph18:29 - Running Rox On Rox20:33 - What Founders Should Build Next23:20 - Are We In An AI Bubble28:58 - Book RecommendationBook Recommendations:
Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif BabinAbout Shriram Sridharan
Shriram Sridharan is cofounder and CTO of Rox, the AI revenue agent platform built for Fortune 2000 revenue teams and backed by Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst and Google Ventures. He was a founding engineer on Amazon Aurora and an early engineer at Confluent, where he built systems behind a business that scaled from zero to billions in revenue, before starting Rox with CEO Ishan Mukherjee. At Rox he owns the platform layer, the knowledge graph that pulls CRM, support, product usage, transcripts and email into a single place, and the turnkey agents that sit on top of it to automate inbound, outbound, deal management and renewals for customers including OpenAI, Ramp, Confluent, MongoDB and NVIDIA. He is one of the sharpest voices on what AI actually does to an engineering organisation, arguing that product management is collapsing into the engineer, that hiring should reward slope over intercept, and that the last skills to be automated are taste, judgment and the ability to trust what an agent just shipped.Follow Shriram Sridharan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shriramsridharan/About the show
Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.Hosted by Firas Sozan.Subscribe for more deep dives on:- AI and the future of software
- Venture capital and company building
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMind
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsmSpotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsmFollow the host on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/Website links:https://www.harrisonclarke.com/https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/https://thepmfplaybook.com/32 min
About Inside The Silicon Mind
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Inside the Silicon Mind, hosted by Firas Sozan covers the technology changing our world and what it takes to build something with it.
Explore what AI makes possible, why some ideas take off and how a promising product becomes a business. Get a closer look at the decisions behind the companies, including what happens when things don’t go to plan.
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