The Tech Trek

Harry Gestetner built a creator economy platform in college, sold it, and walked away. Then he did the one thing nobody expected. He jumped back in and started building hardware. In this episode, the founder and CEO of Orion (a sleep tech company making smart mattress covers) sits down to talk about what really happens after an exit, why most founders can't stay away from building, and what ch...

Behnam Bastani, CEO and cofounder of OpenInfer, breaks down why the last two years of AI feel explosive, and why the next wave is not chat, it is action at the edge. We get into always on inference, what actually forces compute to move closer to the data, and the missing layer that makes edge AI scale: the Android like infrastructure that lets devices collaborate instead of living in silos. Key ta...

Building data capability from zero is not a tooling problem, it is a trust and prioritization problem. In this episode, Laura Guerin, Head of Data and Data Science at Bevi, breaks down how she goes from blank slate to real business impact, without getting trapped in endless plumbing or endless meetings. Laura shares how she runs an early listening tour, prototypes value before asking for bigger in...

Riya Grover, CEO and co founder of Sequence, breaks down what “good CEO” actually looks like when the job is messy, fast, and high stakes. This is a practical conversation about building excellence through people, clarity, and direction, not through heroics or micromanagement. Riya runs a revenue automation platform for finance teams, helping companies automate order to cash, billing, invoicing, a...

Arnie Katz has been running product and engineering under one roof since before most companies even considered combining the roles. As CPTO at GoFundMe, he oversees the teams behind a platform processing over 2.5 donations every second, with more than $40 billion in help facilitated worldwide. Arnie breaks down why the CPTO title keeps gaining traction, how he thinks about the role like a portfoli...

Anjali Jameson, Chief Product Officer at Arbiter, says the hard part is not gathering data. It is getting action across patients, providers, and payers without breaking what already works. “Automating something that’s broken is not going to necessarily give us better outcomes.” Arbiter is a care orchestration platform built for patients, providers, and payers together, not a single point solution....

Most data teams do not have a tooling problem. They have a customer service problem. Mo Villagran, Associate Director of Insights, Analytics, and Data at Cambrex, argues that stakeholder expectation management is the difference between being a trusted advisor and being an order taker. "In a simple word, it's really just customer service." In this episode, Mo breaks down how to manage stakeholder e...

Ashok Krishnamurthi, Managing Partner at Great Point Ventures, says the biggest mistake in venture capital is confusing prediction with judgment. Early stage investing is not about perfect stories, it is about first principles and picking the founder who can execute when the story breaks. This episode is for startup founders and investors who want a cleaner filter for what matters. “You have to le...

Aditya Agarwal did not plan to work in robotics. He got rejected from his first-choice major, joined a student club to keep his parents off his back, and stumbled into one of the fastest-growing fields in tech. Now he is Head of Robotics at Medra, a company building physical AI scientists that let researchers run experiments remotely at speeds a traditional lab cannot touch. "Even the compani...

Ronak Desai, Co-founder and CPTO at Payment Labs, breaks down a surprisingly hard problem that sits at the intersection of fintech, sports, and compliance. If you have ever assumed paying winners is just a simple payout flow, this episode will change that view fast. Payment Labs helps tournament organizers, league operators, and modern sports businesses handle payouts plus tax compliance and suppo...

Healey Cypher, CEO of BoomPop and COO at Atomic, breaks down what separates founders who win from founders who stall. You will hear a clear way to judge whether an idea is truly worth building, plus the trust mechanics that get investors, customers, and teammates to actually follow you. This conversation is a practical map for tech builders who want to pick smarter problems, execute faster, and ea...

Ty Wang, cofounder and CEO of Angle Health, breaks down what it means to give back through public service, then shows how that same mindset drives his mission to modernize healthcare for small and midsize businesses. We get into why legacy health plans feel opaque and painful, what an AI native health plan actually changes behind the scenes, and how better data and workflows can create real cost s...

Gabe Ravacci, CTO and co-founder at Internet Backyard, breaks down what the “computer economy” really looks like when you zoom in on data centers, billing, invoicing, and the financial plumbing nobody wants to touch. He shares how a rejected YC application, a finance stint, and a handful of hard lessons pushed him from hardware curiosity to building fintech infrastructure for compute. If you care...

Data leaders are being asked to ship real AI outcomes while the foundations are still messy. In this conversation, Dave Shuman, Chief Data Officer at Precisely, breaks down what actually determines whether AI adoption sticks, from hiring “comb shaped” talent to building trusted data products that make AI outputs believable and usable. If you are building in data, AI, or analytics, this episode is...

Cloud bills are climbing, AI pipelines are exploding, and storage is quietly becoming the bottleneck nobody wants to own. Ugur Tigli, CTO at MinIO, breaks down what actually changes when AI workloads hit your infrastructure, and how teams can keep performance high without letting costs spiral. In this conversation, we get practical about object storage, S3 as the modern standard, what open source...

This is an early conversation I am bringing back because it feels even more relevant now, the intersection of AI and art is turning into a real cultural shift. I sit down with Marnie Benney, independent curator at the intersection of contemporary art and technology, and co-founder of AIartists.org, a major community for artists working with AI. We talk about what AI art actually is beyond the head...

Most teams are approaching AI from the wrong direction, either chasing the tech with no clear problem or spinning up endless pilots that never earn their keep. In this episode, Amir Bormand sits down with Steve Wunker, Managing Director at New Markets Advisors and co author of AI and the Octopus Organization, to break down what actually works in enterprise AI. You will hear why the real challenge...

Manufacturing is getting faster, messier, and more expensive when quality slips. Daniel First, Founder and CEO at Axion, joins Amir to break down how AI is changing the way manufacturers detect issues in the field, trace root causes across messy data, and shorten the time from “customers are hurting” to “we fixed it.” Episode Summary Daniel First, Founder and CEO at Axion, explains why modern manu...

Synthetic data is moving from a niche concept to a practical tool for shipping AI in the real world. In this episode, Amit Shivpuja, Director of Data Product and AI Enablement at Walmart, breaks down where synthetic data actually helps, where it can quietly hurt you, and how to think about it like a data leader, not a demo builder. We dig into what blocks AI from reaching production, how regulated...

Tom Pethtel, VP of Engineering at Flock Safety, breaks down the real learning curve of moving from builder to manager, and how to keep your technical edge while scaling your impact through people. You will hear how Tom’s path from rural Ohio to leading high stakes engineering teams shaped his approach to leadership, hiring, and staying close to the customer. Key Takeaways ​ Promotions usually come...

Phil Freo, VP of Product and Engineering at Close, has lived the rare arc from founding engineer to executive leader. In this conversation, he breaks down why he stayed nearly 12 years, and what it takes to build a team that people actually want to grow with. We get into retention that is earned, not hoped for, the culture choices that compound over time, and the practical systems that make remote...

Pete Hunt, CEO of Dagster Labs, joins Amir Bormand to break down why modern data teams are moving past task based orchestration, and what it really takes to run reliable pipelines at scale. If you have ever wrestled with Apache Airflow pain, multi team deployments, or unclear data lineage, this conversation will give you a clearer mental model and a practical way to think about the next generation...

Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest, breaks down how long duration capital changes the way you evaluate companies, founders, and moats. We talk about what most growth investors miss, why product strength still matters, and how to separate real AI businesses from thin wrappers in a noisy market. Premji Invest is a captive, evergreen fund built to grow an endowment that supports major...

Software engineering is changing fast, but not in the way most hot takes claim. Robert Brennan, Co founder and CEO at OpenHands, breaks down what happens when you outsource the typing to the LLM and let software agents handle the repetitive grind, without giving up the judgment that keeps a codebase healthy. This is a practical conversation about agentic development, the real productivity gains te...

Deborah Hanus, Co-founder and CEO at Sparrow, joins Amir to unpack the founder journey from academia to building a scaled company. They dig into why leave management is still a messy, high stakes problem, and how Sparrow is turning it into a clean, guided experience for both HR and employees. Sparrow helps companies provide employee leave across the United States and Canada, and Deborah shares wha...