Episode 7: The Spine AI Story with Ashwin Raman
A special Notes from a Founder edition featuring Ashwin Raman, Co-founder and CTO of Spine AI, the world's first iterative deep research platform, built for speed, scale, and substance. Ashwin shares his journey building AI research tools from the ground up.
Special Guests
Ashwin Raman
Co-founder and CTO of Spine AI, building the world's first iterative deep research platform.
Timestamps
00:00Intro: Building AI Research Tools from the Ground Up05:12Data Sovereignty: Does AI Need to Stay in Canada or Europe?11:04Public Product Launch: What Worked and What Surprised Us16:38Vision vs. Feedback: When to Stick, When to Pivot22:06How Many Users Are Enough? And Which Feedback to Trust28:10AI Coding & Developer Productivity: What's Changed in a Year33:30Hallucinations in Research AI: How to Avoid Made-Up Answers39:44Centralized vs. Distributed Data in AI Workflows46:10Top Use Cases: Medical, Sales Intelligence, and Private Credit53:25Final Advice for AI FoundersRelated Episodes

Episode 38: EP 26: The Last Mile of AI-SDLC: When Agents Build What Customers Want
Productmind co-founders Steen Brahe and Alessio Nobile take on the last mile of the AI software development lifecycle: getting from a real customer conversation to shipped code without losing the original intent. They demo how a customer call becomes a feature request, then a living specification, then agent-ready tasks running against an existing codebase, with full lineage preserved from feedback to release. The panel also digs into how AI is redrawing product and engineering roles, what governance of human-agent collaboration looks like in the enterprise, and how the founders cleared 20+ bugs with parallel agents while building Productmind with Productmind.

Episode 33: Open Source Survival in the Age of AI: Joshua Drake on Licensing, Governance & Monetization
Joshua Drake, President and CTO of Command Prompt with nearly 30 years in the PostgreSQL community, lays out the risks AI creates for open source: extraction without attribution, model collapse, AI-generated security holes, and legal exposure from derivative work. He argues that proof of human contribution, signed origins, and governance with humans in the loop matter more than ever, and shows how commercial open source companies can adopt AI without losing community trust.
![Building the Business Behind Open Source AI @ AWS San Francisco [Live]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wVRZe8xhymQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
Episode 30: Building the Business Behind Open Source AI @ AWS San Francisco [Live]
A live panel recorded at AWS San Francisco bringing together open-source AI founders and builders from Zep AI, DataRobot, Command Prompt, Scalar Labs, StreamNative, and Omnistrate. The group moves past technical specs to share strategic and personal reflections on how open source AI teams deploy, scale, and monetize.
