Pilot Wave

Marianne Viray started on Model UN as a teenager in Lisbon, arguing for Mongolia, and went on to work for Senator John McCain on campaign finance reform. She now runs Disagree Better, a nonpartisan nonprofit that trains and promotes leaders who can argue hard without attacking character. She joins Afsheen Afshar to explain why that skill matters for democracy, for companies and for the Thanksgiving table.

How far off are Americans about what the other side actually believes? What happened when Republican and Democratic governors talked immigration behind closed doors? And did John McCain’s decency cost him in 2008? Whether the room is a statehouse, a boardroom or a family dinner, how we disagree decides what actually gets done.

In this episode:

Connect with Pilot Wave:

X: https://x.com/pilotwaveai 

Guest/s:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marianne-viray-ab4610204

https://disagreebetter.us

Afsheen Afshar

https://x.com/snaff 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/afsheen-afshar-9a924b

BUBA Bureka sells out most days and has the line on Bleecker Street to prove it. The back office running it was built by someone who had never written a line of code. Fritz Oleshansky barely worked in restaurants before opening the shop, and he joins Cooper to walk through how he built the whole operating layer, inventory, prep, SOPs and catering, by asking AI chatbots questions and eventually letting Claude Code do the building.

The through line is what happens once the bottleneck stops being AI's intelligence and starts being the operator's imagination. Fritz taught himself to build software one chat prompt at a time, graduated to Claude Code, then Fable, and used it to mine years of staff text threads for tribal knowledge, wire the POS to a weather API to predict bake quantities, and build a system that texts the whole staff the moment a recipe or allergen changes. None of it, he insists, replaces the job of a restaurateur. Freed from spreadsheets, he spends more time doing the one thing software can't, which is making people feel welcome.

In this episode:

Connect with BUBA Bureka:

Connect with Pilot Wave:

Guest:

Host:

Mark Spindel ran a AAA balance sheet at the World Bank, built and wound down a billion-dollar macro fund, and co-wrote the political history of the Federal Reserve. He joins Afsheen Afshar to trace a line from Salomon Brothers in the 1980s to the Fed's position today, and to what both mean for allocators trying to price AI.

The through line is empirics and its limits. Salomon had more PhDs than any firm on the Street and still committed too much capital. Spindel's read is that the models held and the behavior did not. He applies the same test to this cycle. Hyperscaler and AI-related borrowing is approaching the scale of bank debt. Capex is enormous. Productivity has not yet arrived in the official statistics, and his explanation is the one Pilot Wave underwrites: technology does not deploy itself. Workflows get redesigned and workforces get retrained, or the gain stays theoretical.

In this episode:

Connect with Pilot Wave:

X: https://x.com/pilotwaveai 

Guest/s:

Mark Spindel

https://x.com/PotomacRC 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-spindel-4aa69a135 

Host/s:

Afsheen Afshar

https://x.com/snaff 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/afsheen-afshar-9a924b

Most AI investing stories are theoretical. This one has receipts. In this episode, Afsheen Afshar sits down with John MacKinnon, President of Connect Atlantic Utility Services (CAUS), a Nova Scotia-based high voltage transmission and distribution contractor that grew into one of Atlantic Canada's most sought-after infrastructure businesses under Pilot Wave ownership. Together they walk through the entire arc of a majority buyout that produced a cash-flowing infrastructure business, an AI spinout built for less than one percent of revenue, and ultimately a realized return.

John doesn't sugarcoat it. He was skeptical at the start, the ERP rollout nearly confirmed every doubt, and the decision to build Detect from scratch after every platform on the market came up short felt like a serious gamble. What changed his mind wasn't the pitch. It was watching the flywheel actually spin: Connect's cash flow funding the technology, the technology compounding the value of the business, and the data eventually making the exit decision obvious.

If you're an investor trying to understand what the AI rollup model looks like when it actually works, or an operator wondering whether any of this translates to the real world, this is the episode to hear.

What We Got Into:

Resources Mentioned:

Detect: https://detectinspections.com/ 

Connect with Connect Atlantic Utility Services:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-mackinnon-a3267b13 

Connect with Pilot Wave:

X: https://x.com/pilotwaveai 

Host/s:

Afsheen Afshar

https://x.com/snaff 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/afsheen-afshar-9a924b 

Welcome to PilotWave -- the podcast at the intersection of AI and the real economy. We talk to the researchers, builders, acquirers, and investors pushing this industry forward. In this pilot episode, we turn the mic inward. Founder and Managing Partner Afsheen Afshar, Senior Partner Arik Oganesian, and Director Calvin Cooper introduce the firm and the thesis behind it.

Seven years in, PilotWave has learned that buying industrial businesses and transforming them with AI demands something most firms can't fake -- a rare hybrid of private equity discipline, venture-style risk tolerance, deep technical expertise, and enough EQ to work with sellers who've never thought about an AI strategy. The three dig into the origin story, the hard lessons, and what the OpenClaw moment reveals about where autonomous AI is actually headed.

What We Got Into:

Connect with PilotWave:

X: https://x.com/pilotwaveai 

Hosts:

Afsheen Afshar

https://x.com/snaff 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/afsheen-afshar-9a924b 

Arik Oganesian

https://www.linkedin.com/in/arik-oganesian 

Calvin Cooper

https://x.com/cooper_nyc_ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/coopernyc