Product Bakery - How Founders Build and Sell with AI

What if the best AI automation builders right now aren't developers at all? In this episode, I sit down with Lena Schaefer, a non-engineer ops leader. We pull apart how she builds AI automation and agents inside startups. No code. She left corporate in 2022 to become the first finance hire at Levity. Now she runs operations across Europe and the US.

What you'll see:

- The Socratic ladder she runs to turn vague pain into a defined, buildable automation

- Why the missing owner is the real bug, not the missing tool

- The decision rule for automation vs a narrow agent vs a plain spreadsheet

- Guardrails that stop runaway token burn: least-privilege access and a three-try cap

- Her lean prompting stack: caveman language, voice input, and no screenshots

🤖 ABOUT LENA SCHAEFER:

Website: https://lenaschaefer.me/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_content=JunJTQuHWAs

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lena-sc/

GitHub: https://github.com/Berlena

🥐 JOIN THE BUILDERS COMMUNITY

https://www.product-bakery.com/community?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_content=spotify

#automation #startuplife #processes

Chapters:

00:00 The contract nobody renewed

00:56 From bank auditor to AI ops builder

03:26 Her first ChatGPT automation, and why it backfired

08:01 How to find the process worth automating1

4:38 Automation, AI agent or spreadsheet?

20:20 Why she stopped using Zapier and Make

21:53 Stop burning tokens: the 3-try rule

30:23 Caveman prompts and 3 rules against ops chaos

✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩

🌍 Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.product-bakery.com/

👨‍💻 LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Product Bakery⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📸 Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@productbakery⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

🐦 X/Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠productbakery20

I sat down with Michael Kantor, president of HOL (Hashgraph Online). Before HOL, he was a senior full-stack engineer and then an engineering lead at Finder. He founded a company called KiloStripe. He also sits on the Hiero Technical Steering Committee at the Linux Foundation, where HOL contributes open standards. So when he talks about AI agents going rogue, it comes from building the infrastructure himself, not from a slide deck.

I brought him one question. What happens when your agents stop being tools you use and start doing work on their own? And how do you keep them from wrecking things? What came out was a blunt tour of the risks nobody warns you about. Michael and his team built HOL Guard because they had so much anxiety letting Codex build their own infrastructure. This one is for anyone handing Claude Code or Codex to their team and quietly hoping nothing breaks.

What you'll see:

• The importance of AI and Cybersecurity in 2026
• Why HOL Guard sits between the agent and every tool call, so a poisoned model physically can't delete your S3 bucket
• The number that started it all, Codex reading environment secrets 2 to 3 times an hour over an 8-hour job
• Why people flip AI into YOLO mode, and how per-command policy beats approving every single action
• The café WiFi attack, and why the real risk is the wire between you and OpenAI, not your laptop
• What Michael refuses to do with agents: automate email, generate blog posts, trust someone else's sandbox

🤖 ABOUT MICHAEL KANTOR:

Website: https://hol.org/go/guard/christian?dest=%2Fguard&link_id=798e5135-9786-4a8b-bf79-602986ed6ee1&utm_source=christian&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=defaultLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kantorcodes/X/Twitter: https://x.com/Kantorcodes

🥐 JOIN THE BUILDERS COMMUNITY

https://www.product-bakery.com/community#aiagents #holguard #buildinpublic

Chapters:

0:00 What if agents actually work for us

1:53 Who is Michael Kantor

2:45 What agents get right and wrong

7:56 The danger of unknown AI models

13:00 The genie is out of the bottle

16:44 HOL Guard for the other 99 percent

22:12 How agents identify each other

29:03 Running your own agent team

35:35 HOL Guard live demo

40:51 The mistakes people keep making

✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩

👨‍💻 LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Product Bakery⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📸 Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@productbakery⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

🐦 Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠productbakery20⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

🌍 Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.product-bakery.com/⁠

I sat down with Simon Klinkert. He built the banking backend at Trade Republic. Now he is building a new US bank in stealth. He hasn't written a line of code by hand since ChatGPT V3. So I asked him how a non-technical builder like me gets better at vibe coding.

What you'll see:

• Treat AI like a junior engineer, not a genie
• Why the bottleneck moved from writing code to reviewing it
• The review swarm: 2 to 5 agents checking architecture, duplication, security, and compliance
• How Conductor runs 10 isolated agents at once without collisions
• The four practices I'm stealing: testable goals, a weekly maintenance agent, deterministic CI checks, daily user acceptance testing

🤖 ABOUT SIMON KLINKERT:

• Website: https://simonklinkert.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-klinkert/
• GitHub: https://github.com/sklinkert

🥐 JOIN THE BUILDERS COMMUNITY

https://www.product-bakery.com/community

Chapters:

0:00 Is your AI app any good?

1:53 Treat AI like a junior

5:56 Code review is the bottleneck

7:55 Review agents and security

11:02 Why context matters

13:35 What Conductor actually does

20:20 Moving development to the cloud

27:42 Auditing a startup setup

29:12 The cultural shift needed

30:52 Where LLMs go next

35:47 Scheduling weekly review agents

37:47 User acceptance testing setup

✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩

👨‍💻 LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Product Bakery⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📸 Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@productbakery⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

🐦 Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠productbakery20⁠⁠⁠⁠

🌍 Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.product-bakery.com/

This is the official end of the product bakery. Thanks to everyone who followed us for 4 years!

Tune in one last time!

If you want to stay in touch let's connect on LinkedIn:

Christian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianstrunk/

https://www.christianstrunk.com/

https://www.solopreneur-coaching.com/

Alex:

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

-SUMMER BREAK UNTIL MID OF AUGUST-

Is innovation dead? Do companies even innovate or just re-use and refine existing innovation?

This week, we discuss the necessity of innovation and what companies and teams can do to move forward.

✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩

In this episode, Alex coaches Christian on how to create a holistic design and brand system that can be applied consistently across multiple channels.

✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩

Spoiler: This episode might be disturbing and might change your point of view on how product people and organizations should work...

✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩

We discussed the current situation in the hiring and job market, addressing why hiring processes often drag on and the challenges encountered by both parties.

This is particularly hard when either a candidate or a company realizes, late in the hiring process, that there isn't a good fit.

✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩

Check out our latest episode where we break down what makes product marketing truly effective.

We tackle the question of when marketing crosses the line into overselling, pointing out that it happens when your message doesn't match your product's real value.

Tune in for practical tips on keeping your marketing on track with what your product brings to the table.

Don't miss out!

Copy Writing Article:

https://frankkernprivate.clickfunnels.com/how-to-create-free-articles-reports-and-blog-posts-that-sell

✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩

Even though we started talking about Jira and project management we've ended up on a crucial topic:

✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩