Zero Prime Podcast

Ethan Ding, co-founder and CEO of TextQL, joins ZeroPrime and AI Council Co-founder, Pete Soderling, to make an argument that most data leaders have been waiting years to hear: you don't have to clean everything, migrate everything, or centralize everything before AI can work on your data. Ethan's path from Bessemer to a hypergrowth stint at Tackle, let him see how much time teams spent...

What's actually stopping enterprises from putting their AI to work? Bala Kasiviswanathan, who oversees Snowflake CoCo , Snowflake's AI coding agent, as VP of Developer and AI Experiences, says the real answer isn't access. It's fragmented context. Pete Soderling sits down with Bala to make the case that democratizing access to data was last decade's challenge. The next one...

Linus Lee, Head of AI at Thrive Capital, sits down with Pete Soderling to talk context engineering, monolithic agents, and the failure mode most teams aren't measuring yet. Most teams building AI agents right now are reaching for bigger context windows. Linus thinks that's the wrong instinct. He runs AI at Thrive and ships an internal research agent called Puck that's processed bill...

For 50 years, the pattern has been the same: store the data in the database, keep the big files somewhere else, link them with a pointer. It's powered most production systems we've ever built. Chang She thinks AI is about to break it. In this episode, Pete Soderling sits down with Chang She ahead of AI Council SF 2026 to talk about why the old data stack wasn't built for what's...

On this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, Pete Soderling sits down with Vik Korrapati, Co-founder & CTO of Moondream — an open-source vision language model that lets any developer build vision AI apps through prompting, no PhD required. Vik shares what he's learned building Vision AI in the trenches: Why the benchmark everyone optimizes for is the wrong one How an unglamorous engineering...

On this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, Pete Soderling sits down with Eno Reyes, Co-founder & CTO of Factory — a software development agent platform that has run missions lasting 14 days straight, with hundreds of agents executing continuously. In this conversation Pete covers: Can you scale AI coding agents without things quietly breaking? Is there an equivalent of a PR for specs? What doe...

On this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, tune in to our conversation with Scott Breitenother, Co-founder & CEO of Kilo Code. Scott built Kilo Code — an open source AI coding agent platform — after watching the engineering job description quietly transform around him. His take: the engineers pulling ahead aren't writing better code. They're running better agent teams. In this conver...

On this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, tune in to our conversation with Eldad Farkash, Co-founder and Chairman of Firebolt. With over two decades in data architecture, Eldad spent 14 years as CTO of Sisense before building Firebolt into a next-generation data warehouse. Get a glimpse into Eldad’s approach as a rare founder who's built not just one, but two unicorns from the ground up. Eld...

In this episode we talk to Dwarak Rajagopal – VP of AI Engineering and AI Research at Snowflake. Hear from Dwarak as he traces his journey from optimizing AMD processors to building AI systems at Google and now revolutionizing enterprise AI at Snowflake – discussing the real-world challenges and opportunities for bringing AI to business applications. Dwarak offers compelling perspectives on why te...

In this episode we talk to Jake Moshenko – Co-Founder and CEO of AuthZed. Hear from Jake as he traces his journey from building flight simulators to creating cutting-edge authorization systems – not mincing words when discussing the security challenges in AI-driven applications. Jake offers new perspectives on the future of permissions and access control in a technical discussion that captures the...

In this episode we talk to Sudarshan Lakshminaraseemhan – a founding engineer at e6data who cut his teeth during the formative years at global technology consultancy ThoughtWorks. Hear from Sudarshan as he dissects the evolution of software development from early waterfall processes to today's rapid iteration cycles – pulling no punches when discussing the cost crisis in data analytics. Sudar...

In this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, we chat with Charity Majors, Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, who traded piano keys for keyboard commands on their journey from classically trained pianist to a systems firefighter. Tune in to get Charity's unfiltered thoughts on why engineers should toggle between coding and management, challenging the "three pillars" monitoring model and...

In this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, engineer-turned-founder Rob Woollen gives a refreshingly honest take on the founder journey. Rob shares his path from Unix coder to BEA Systems architect to Salesforce CTO, and finally to pioneering data analytics at Sigma. Get Rob's reflections on turning deep tech into market wins and navigating the AI revolution from an engineer who's built i...

In this new episode of the 0P podcast, we welcome back Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, to discuss the evolving landscape of software licensing in the cloud era. Spencer shares insights on how companies are innovating with new licensing models to bridge the gap between open source ideals and sustainable business growth. Drawing from his experience leading Cockroach Labs, a di...

In this episode, we introduce a new format for the podcast—a deep dive into a technical topic with an engineer-founder who is an expert on the subject. For our first Deep Dive, I sit down with Vijay Subramanian, the visionary behind Trace , to explore the evolution and future of metric layers in business metrics and cross-functional alignment. Vijay demystifies the concept of metrics layers, metri...

In this episode, I sit down with Paul Dix, the founder and CTO of InfluxData to explore his journey from a self-taught programmer to a leader in database systems. We discuss his role in building the NYC Machine Learning meetup, the creation of InfluxDB and the strategic move to make it open source. He shares insights into the decision to rewrite InfluxDB in 2020 and the power of community in tech...

In this episode, I sit down with Alex Mashrabov, the visionary CEO of Higgsfield AI. We journey through Alex's impressive career, beginning with his time at Yandex where he witnessed the early implementations of neural networks. We explore what ignited his entrepreneurial spirit and delve into the stark contrasts between the Russian and American educational landscapes. Our discussion then mov...

In this episode, I chat with Jordan Tigani, the dynamic engineer-founder of MotherDuck who previously led Google's BigQuery team and headed up product at SingleStore.  Jordan shares the inspiring origin story of MotherDuck, which emerged from the overlooked analytics' long tail, focusing on serving small users in data analytics. Our conversation delves into thought-provoking topics such...

In this episode, Pete speaks with Alvaro Morales , the co-founder and CEO of Orb , who shares his journey from being an engineer to becoming the founder of a flexible billing engine for modern software pricing.  Alvaro traces his path from Lima, Peru to San Francisco, discussing the rise of startups in his home city as well as his early engineering experiences at Yahoo, Palantir and Asana.  His ea...

In this enlightening episode, I have the privilege of hosting Craig McLuckie , a tech industry veteran who has made significant contributions to the cloud computing industry and is currently the Co-founder & CEO of stacklok . We begin by exploring his journey from Microsoft to Google, where he co-authored Kubernetes, a pivotal project that has shaped the industry.  We also delve into his post-...

In this episode, I chat with Erik Bernhardsson , co-founder and CEO of Modal , about his journey from Spotify engineer to startup CTO to startup founder. Erik takes us back to his early days as a software engineer and shares how his transformative years at Spotify ignited his startup mindset. We discuss the challenges he faced during his transition from engineer to founder, including overcoming se...

In this episode, we chat with Barry McCardel, Co-Founder and CEO of Hex , as he shares how honing his leadership skills in college paved the way for his journey to becoming a founder. Barry discusses building his team with former Palantir colleagues and Hex's emphasis on design from its inception. He shares insights on Hex's rapid feature development, scaling challenges and his vision fo...

In this episode, we explore Guillermo Rauch's path from a teen hacker in Argentina to the founder of Vercel. We touch on his engineering roots, the role of open-source in his success and Vercel's creation to simplify deployments with Next.js. We compare Vercel's innovations to the evolution of electric cars, discuss the significance of speed in edge computing and peek into the futur...

In this episode, Aaron Lee, Founder & CEO of Smith.ai joins me to discuss a variety of topics. First, we delve into the innovative strategies of tech giants like Google, and explore the future of AI in business. Then we journey back to the early days at Smith.ai, where AI was used to enhance productivity. Aaron shares a multitude of learnings from his time founding RedBeacon and then serving a...

In this episode, we debut a new format where engineer-founders discuss key tech topics. Joined by Graham Thompson of Privacy Dynamics and Debo Ray of DevZero , we dive into modern software development. Topics include the role of developer productivity, challenges of new productivity tools and the problems that arise around data access. We also discuss the evolving role of database administrators,...