The Reboot Chronicles with Dean DeBiase

Every major transaction now depends on a single question: is this person who they say they are? Hiring, mortgages, apartment rentals, insurance claims, and government benefits all rely on accurate identity, background, income, and employment information. AI has made that question far harder to answer. Synthetic personas, forged documents, and deepfake interviews can now be produced with free tools, and fraud has never been cheaper to commit at scale. In a roughly 45 billion dollar verification market, trust has become a real time requirement. Checkr, founded more than a decade ago to modernize an old school background check industry, has built an AI-powered verification platform that processes more than 50 million checks a year for roughly 150,000 customers, drawing on thousands of data sources to deliver results in minutes rather than weeks.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Daniel Yanisse, co-founder and CEO of Checkr, to unpack the rise of AI-driven fraud and what it means for every business that needs to verify a person. Daniel shares the story of the fraudulent candidate Checkr caught and then deliberately hired, why remote hiring scams have become a growing security threat for US companies, and how Checkr expanded from background checks for gig platforms into lending, mortgage, rentals, insurance, and government verification. He also opens up about the two major reboots that reshaped the company, from a 30 percent monthly revenue drop during COVID to the overconfidence that taught him to listen more closely to customers.

Industrial companies are sitting on decades of data they cannot use. Since the postwar industrial boom, refineries, plants, and factory floors around the world have been built up with layer after layer of electromechanical, digital, and IT systems, each generating information in its own format and its own silo. For the people running those operations, getting timely, contextualized data and a single version of the truth remains one of the hardest problems in business. As AI moves from experimentation to execution, that gap has become a boardroom issue. Cognite is one of the companies closing it, and the market has taken notice. Schneider Electric has announced its intent to acquire Cognite for three billion dollars, Forrester has quantified a 465 percent ROI for Cognite customers with a six month payback, and the company ranks number 15 on CNBC's 2026 Disruptor 50 list. CEO Girish Rishi has set an ambitious target to match: delivering 100 billion dollars in value to customers by 2035.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Girish Rishi, CEO of Cognite, to unpack why the factory floor is the last great frontier for digital transformation, how Cognite turned industrial data integration from a services problem into a software platform, and why industrial AI is becoming the backbone of global energy, manufacturing, and asset intensive operations. Girish shares how the Schneider Electric deal came together while Cognite was raising its Series C with an eye toward going public, how the company's consumption based model ties AI spending directly to customer value, and the career defining moment when he was handed responsibility for an 850 person business across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at just 31 years old.

Enterprise AI has reached an uncomfortable middle stage. According to R Systems' own research and client conversations, roughly 65 percent of companies are experimenting with AI in some form, but only about 18 percent have actually put it into production with use cases tied to clear ROI. The tools are no longer the bottleneck. Every company can access the same models, the same platforms, and the same subscriptions. What separates the leaders from the laggards is execution: choosing the right problems, moving with speed, and having people who know how to turn powerful technology into measurable business outcomes. For CEOs who have moved from doubt and denial to "I must have a piece of it," the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to get it out of the lab and into the business.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Nitesh Bansal, CEO of R Systems, the 30 year old, Blackstone backed, publicly listed digital engineering company helping Fortune 500s and governments shift from AI experiments to outcomes. Nitesh breaks down why most AI strategies stall, how the "AI velocity trap" undermines good ideas, how R Systems built an AI native stack of more than 150 reusable agents to compress delivery from months to days, and what it takes to make AI enterprise ready. He also opens up about his own reboot, from running a billion dollar P&L inside a much larger organization to leading a founder built company through a new era of growth.

The next frontier of warfare is not being fought by soldiers on a battlefield. It is being fought by autonomous systems that detect, decide, and deliver precision strikes across air, land, sea, space, and cyber, faster than any human can process. AV is one of the companies building that future. A two billion dollar public autonomous systems company, AV has secured a half billion dollar counter UAS award for its Locust laser weapon system, 137 million dollars in autonomous aircraft programs across the Army and Navy, and a growing portfolio of programs spanning loitering munitions, electronic warfare, cyber, space, and intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. Its Locust laser weapon system went 20 for 20 against advanced threats on the USS George Bush aircraft carrier and has achieved 100 percent success rates at White Sands. A new facility in Salt Lake City is being built to produce Switchblade loitering munitions at a scale capable of generating two billion dollars in revenue from that facility alone. And AV's partnership with NASA produced the first helicopter ever to fly on Mars. Dr. Rob Smith, AV's chief operating officer, is the leader bringing the operational discipline, manufacturing scale, and strategic rigor required to turn that innovation into a company targeting three and a half to four billion dollars in revenue by 2030.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Dr. Rob Smith, COO of AV, to unpack how the defense procurement model is shifting from long cycle cost plus contracts to 30 day delivery expectations, why AV sits in a unique sweet spot between trusted defense prime and high velocity disruptor, what it takes to build autonomous systems that work 100 percent of the time in the most demanding environments on earth, how AI is reshaping battlefield decision making, and what happened when Rob Smith got a job at Lockheed he had no business getting on paper and used it as the defining leadership reboot of his career.

Rene Saul knows what it feels like to be the customer he is now serving. Before founding Kapital, he was an SMB himself, doing agricultural loans for producers exporting to the United States and factoring with large American enterprises, experiencing firsthand the friction, the opacity, and the lack of access to liquidity that defines business banking in Latin America. That experience became the thesis for Kapital, a company that started with a simple idea: what if you could onboard a business with nothing more than a tax ID, understand everything about it from electronic invoicing data, and give it access to liquidity and financial visibility in a single platform? Today Kapital is Latin America's first AI native fintech unicorn, serving more than 350,000 customers across Mexico, Colombia, the United States, and beyond. It has a 700 million dollar revenue run rate, generated more than 55 million dollars in net profit in the first half of 2026, grown its loan portfolio and payments by 300 percent, and reached more than 4 billion dollars in deposits. A 125 million dollar Series C extension announced during this episode doubled the company's valuation to over 1 billion dollars. An IPO is on the horizon.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Rene Saul, CEO of Kapital, to unpack how Latin America's largest B2B fintech was built on a thesis most investors initially rejected, why being a regulated entity from day one turned out to be the right call, how Kapital's AI native platform knows its customers better than they know themselves, what cross border payments between Mexico and the United States actually look like when done right, and why the enemy of rebooting yourself is always the ego.

For the first time in American history, the United States is simultaneously deterring two major nuclear powers. Russia and China are no longer parallel threats operating in separate theaters. They are actively collaborating, with China bankrolling Russia's war in Ukraine, North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russian forces, and Iran selling oil almost exclusively to Beijing. The bipolar world of the Cold War, where the United States faced one adversarial superpower, has given way to something more complex and more dangerous. And the business leaders, investors, and board members navigating global strategy in this environment are doing so without a playbook. Rebeccah Heinrichs, Senior Fellow and Director of the Keystone Defense Initiative at the Hudson Institute, is one of the most trusted voices helping decision makers understand what this shift means, what it demands, and what is actually at stake. Having served on the Bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission, the US Strategic Command Advisory Group, and the National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness, she brings a rare combination of technical depth and communicative clarity to some of the most consequential questions of our time.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Rebeccah Heinrichs, Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute, to unpack what C-suite leaders and board members need to understand about the new geopolitical order, why China represents the defining strategic challenge of the coming decade, how the defense industrial base is being rebooted by private capital and emerging technology companies, what friendly shoring and reshoring mean for global supply chain strategy, and why the ability to communicate complex ideas to broad audiences may be the most important skill in national security today.

Brunswick Corporation has been rebooting itself since 1845. The company that started in woodworking went on to build pool tables, bowling equipment, fitness machines, coolers, and bicycles before making one of the most disciplined strategic pivots in modern manufacturing history: selling off everything that was not marine and doubling down on building the world's most complete marine ecosystem. Today, Brunswick is a roughly 6 billion dollar global powerhouse with more than 60 industry-leading brands across 26 countries and approximately 14,000 employees. Its outboard engine business has grown from low thirties market share to nearly 50 percent in the United States. Its parts and accessories business now represents 60 percent of earnings and revenue, a recurring annuity model that insulates the company from the volatility of new boat sales cycles. And its Freedom Boat Club, acquired for 60 million dollars in 2019, is worth conservatively half a billion dollars today. At the center of this transformation is Ryan Gwillim, who holds one of the rarest roles in corporate America: Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer simultaneously.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Ryan Gwillim, CFO and CSO of Brunswick, to unpack how the world's oldest and largest marine company transformed itself from a conglomerate into a focused ecosystem platform, what the ACES strategy means for the future of boating, how Freedom Boat Club is redefining who gets to be on the water, why Brunswick is bringing manufacturing in-house as tariff pressure mounts, and what it took personally for a lawyer turned investor relations executive to end up steering the financial and strategic future of a 180 year old company.

Most companies deploying AI are making the same mistake. They are using it to do what they already do, faster and cheaper, and then wondering why the return on investment does not materialize. Dave Wright calls this the iteration trap, and breaking out of it is the central argument of his new book, Infinite, co-written with ServiceNow futurist Brian Solas. As chief innovation officer at ServiceNow, Wright has watched the company grow from 300 employees to 30,000, worked alongside every CEO the company has ever had, and spent decades building the actual systems that run inside thousands of the world's largest corporations. His perspective on AI is not theoretical. It is grounded in what happens when organizations stop asking how to automate what they already do and start asking what they want to become. The difference between those two questions, Wright argues, is the difference between AI as an incremental efficiency tool and AI as a genuine operating model for business reinvention.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Dave Wright, chief innovation officer at ServiceNow, to unpack why most AI strategies are failing before they start, how IKEA turned a customer service automation project into a billion euro revenue stream, what a hybrid workforce of humans and agents actually looks like in practice, why every company needs a chief workflow officer, and what it means to lead innovation inside one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in the world. Wright also shares what he has learned from working under four very different CEOs and why the chief innovation officer might be both the best and worst job in any company.

Inside every AI data center, behind every GPU cluster, underneath every rack of compute and storage, there is a connection problem. For decades that problem was solved with copper. Copper cables connected computer storage to switching, and the system worked well enough. Then AI arrived and the speeds required to move data across those connections exceeded what copper physics can handle. The answer is fiber optics and the lasers that power them. That is the business of Lumentum, and it is why Nvidia wrote a two billion dollar check to make sure the supply was locked up. Under CEO Michael Hurlston, Lumentum has rebooted itself from a telecom-era optical components company into one of the most strategically critical infrastructure players in the AI economy. Revenue is on track to more than double from 1.5 billion dollars last year to over 3 billion this year. The stock has surged more than 1,500 percent. And the company is investing three years ahead of demand, building a new indium phosphide fabrication facility in Greensboro, North Carolina, to supply the laser chips that data centers will need as the conversion from copper to fiber optics accelerates.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Michael Hurlston, CEO of Lumentum, to unpack why lasers and fiber optics are the invisible infrastructure layer the AI economy cannot function without, how the company is managing the challenge of scaling from thousands of units per quarter to potentially hundreds of millions, why Lumentum is making a pure play bet on the data center opportunity while de-emphasizing other markets, and what it takes to lead a public company through rocket ship growth. Hurlston also shares the personal reboot story behind his career, including the catastrophic startup failure that ultimately sent him to Broadcom and set the foundation for everything that followed.

Every medical device implanted in a patient, every cell phone produced at launch scale, every vaccine vial filled at twelve hundred units per minute exists because of industrial automation. It is the invisible infrastructure behind modern manufacturing, and it is one of the fastest growing sectors in the global economy. Darragh de Stonndún has spent his entire career at the center of it. After leaving Ireland in 1998 in pursuit of the automation innovation happening in America, he spent decades building and leading automation businesses across the US, Germany, Ireland, and the UK. In August 2024, he co-founded AIR, an automated industrial robotics platform that has already acquired six best-in-class automation companies across three countries, grown to more than 500 employees, and is producing hundreds of millions in revenue. The timing could not be better. Reshoring, semiconductor expansion, and the race to automate manufacturing across life sciences, logistics, and consumer electronics are pushing the sector toward a hundred billion dollar market. AIR is building the platform designed to serve that market, and de Stondún is building it the same way he has always built machines: with precision, discipline, and an obsessive focus on getting every part of the system right.

On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Darragh de Stonndún, CEO of AIR, to unpack how he is building a unified automation powerhouse rather than a collection of acquired companies, why automation is no longer optional for manufacturers competing in a reshored America, how AI is reshaping what is possible in industrial robotics, what humans in the loop actually means on a factory floor, and why the biggest challenge in building AIR is not technology but separating signal from noise in a market moving faster than ever.