First Commit

Math might be the last programming language AI hasn't conquered. In this episode of First Commit, Eliya Elon and Laura Hamilton sit down with Carina Hong, founder and CEO of Axiom, the company building an AI mathematician — and, fresh off a $200M Series A at a $1.6B valuation led by Menlo Ventures, one of the most-watched bets on "verified AI." Hong leaves a Stanford PhD in March 20...

What does it take to build AI agents that enterprises will actually trust with their most critical workflows — and what happens when the company building those agents has no security clearance to see them deployed? In this episode of First Commit, Eliya Elon and Laura Hamilton sit down with Mayada Gonimah, co-founder and CTO of Thread AI. Mayada spent her career at the deepest end of enterprise in...

What does it actually take to validate a startup idea — and why should you make it harder on yourself? In this episode of First Commit, Eliya Elon sits down with Dor Fledel, co-founder and CEO of Spera Security. Built in just under 18 months, Spera — an identity security posture management company — was acquired by Okta for a reported ~$100M. Dor then led Okta's SecureAI, PAM, and ISPM produc...

What if your browser knew your entire workday — and could quietly handle the parts that drain your focus? In this episode of First Commit, Eliya Elon and Laura Hamilton sit down with Regina Lin, co-founder and CEO of ThirdLayer, the company building Dex — an AI workspace that lives inside Chrome and acts as a true knowledge worker for the browser.  Regina started building Dex as a college side pro...

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 for...

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...

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 demand...

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 prof...

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...

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 a...

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...

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...

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 age...

This week’s guest is Christopher Chedeau, better known as Vjeux , Front-End Engineer at Meta and the mind behind React Native, Prettier, Excalidraw, and more. We unpack his journey from modding Warcraft at 13 to shaping some of the most widely used developer tools in the world. Christopher shares his thoughts on why React took off, how side projects become developer staples, and what AI means for...

This week’s guest is Karan Vaidya, Co-Founder and CTO of Composio , a platform enabling AI agents to connect with hundreds of tools and take autonomous actions to streamline workflows.  We dive into his journey building “Devin” for integrations, why the rise of AI is creating demand for thousands of application connectors, how 90% of Composio’s use cases today are agent-driven, and the role early...

This week’s guest is Taranjeet Singh , Founder and CEO of Mem0 , a company building the self-improving memory layer for AI agents and LLMs. The conversation covers his path to founding Mem0, from applying to YC 7x and learning to "think bigger," to identifying a core pain point after launching a viral app in India. Taranjeet breaks down why memory is essential for agents, how Mem0 works...

This week, we’re chatting with Jonathan Baer , Co-Founder and CEO of Overlap . Overlap is building an AI-native video editing platform that helps podcasters and media teams turn long-form content into clips for social media. The product is designed to scale distribution with minimal manual input, making agents feel more like collaborators than tools. Jonathan shares how Overlap is harnessing video...

This week, we are chatting with Daniel Mason , Co-Founder and CEO of Anon . Anon is an integration platform that aims to become the go-to infrastructure layer for the AI-powered internet. Daniel shares his journey from joining a startup straight out of college to building Anon, highlighting why distribution is often the biggest unlock when building a company. We dive into the evolving and often co...

This week we sat down with James Flynn , an investor at Sequoia. James focuses on growth-stage investments for Sequoia and was previously an investor at General Atlantic.   During the episode, we cover James's journey to Sequoia, highlighting intellectual curiosity and his competitive spirit as key attributes in his path to the firm. The conversation features a number of fascinating perspecti...

This week, we have Rahul Sonwalkar , Founder and CEO of Julius , on the show. Julius is your AI Data Scientist, where users can quickly analyze, visualize, and transform data. Rahul covers his journey from traveling across the country to hackathons in college, the importance of not being afraid of failing as a founder, how Rahul seeks out mentors, the four key ways Julius delivers value, and how J...

This week, we have Trey Holterman , Co-Founder and CEO of Tennr , on the show. Tennr automates manual tasks in healthcare operations using a proprietary LLM and has raised over $61 million in VC funding from Lightspeed, a16z, Y Combinator, and others.  Trey covers his journey from captaining the Stanford rowing team to navigating improv comedy and building Tennr. We dive into how Tennr defines suc...

This week, we are chatting with Matan Lamdan , a cloud infra investor at CRV . Matan started his career as an officer in Unit 8200, the security unit of the IDF, before transitioning to investigative journalism. Now, Matan is a Principal on the infra team at CRV, where he primarily focuses on early-stage security investments.  During the episode, we discuss the screening process for the IDF and ho...

This week, we are chatting with Bihan Jiang, a product lead at Decagon . Decagon is reimagining customer service with AI agents. The company recently raised a $65M Series B and is trusted by companies such as Eventbrite, Substack, ClassPass, Rippling, Notion, and more.  We dive into her journey starting at Scale AI after Stanford, moving to the application side of AI, LLM capabilities powering Dec...

This week, we sat down with Vasek Mlejnsky , CEO and Co-Founder of E2B . E2B is a platform for developers to run AI agents in the cloud securely. We dive into the journey of starting a company with your best friend in the Czech Republic, building for AI agents before the hype, and why secure code execution is critical for scaling. Vasek also shares how E2B is becoming the go-to runtime for AI appl...

This week, we sat down with Everett Cook , CEO and Co-Founder of Rho . Rho is a financial operating platform for fast-growing businesses. We dive into ideating as a first time founder, discovering the cracks of business banking, building a product first organization, the trajectory of brick and mortar banks, how to structure customer service, and expanding past a BaaS solution.  Episode Chapters:...