Founder Stories
All 12 Agentic SaaS Talks episodes about Founder Stories.
Founder Stories episodes
Episode 31: Building BYOC for Fortune 500: The Real Story of Enterprise AI Deployment
Daniel Chalef, founder and CEO of Zep AI, walks through the brutal technical reality of deploying AI products into Fortune 500 environments — zero-trust architectures, Service Control Policies, no-egress VPCs, and broken image supply chains. He explains why pure SaaS AI products can't meet enterprise security bars and how Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployments actually get shipped into locked-down customer infrastructure.
![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.
Episode 28: Commercializing Open Source: Why Most Founders Get It Wrong
Recorded at the AWS re:Invent SaaS Summit, four open-source veterans from Percona, Couchbase, and Omnistrate break down what actually works when commercializing open source — and the expensive mistakes founders make. The panel covers open core vs. foundation models, avoiding MongoDB-style license backlash, and partnering with hyperscalers without getting 'Amazon'd'.
Episode 19: Leaning into Agentic: How HoneySales Pivoted to an AI-Driven Future
Episode 19 examines what it means to pivot a SaaS company into an agentic architecture. HoneySales provides a real-world example: a startup that shifted from traditional sales workflows to an AI-driven, multi-agent system operating on AWS. This episode helps founders and engineering leaders understand the technical, organizational, and customer-facing implications of transitioning to Agentic SaaS.
Episode 22: Taming AI Complexity with Head of Engineering at Anyscale
Jaikumar Ganesha (JK), Head of Engineering at Anyscale, breaks down modern AI infrastructure challenges and how Ray (the open-source compute framework) is powering production-grade AI at scale. Covers the 'AI complexity wall,' distributed training, and includes a live demo of building a multimodal AI app.
Episode 23: Revolutionizing AI SaaS: Control Plane Innovation and Modern Cloud Models with Anyscale
A conversation filmed at AWS offices in San Francisco about how Anyscale empowers teams to build, scale, and operate complex ML workflows. Covers control plane architecture, the evolution of SaaS, and advice for SaaS founders adapting to the agentic future.
Episode 14: Accelerating Dev Experience & SaaS Testing
Exploring the future of SaaS Anywhere — how testing, virtualization, and cloud abstraction continue to move up the stack. Our guest of honor is Eli Aleyner, now Head of Technology Alliances at Docker and co-founder of AtomicJar, the team behind Testcontainers. Eli's career spans Pivotal, VMware Tanzu, AtomicJar, and now Docker, giving him a front-row seat to how infrastructure has evolved from virtualization to containerization to developer testing.
Episode 12: Founders, Fraud, and the Future of AI with Joshua Mckenty
Joshua McKenty—legendary cloud architect, OpenStack co-founder, and now CEO of Polyguard—joins us for a no-fluff, high-impact conversation on innovating inside NASA, scaling SaaS from scratch (and from the edge), fighting synthetic identity fraud with AI, and why trust, privacy, and infrastructure are converging in 2025.
Episode 9: Inside the AI Agent Swarm with Rox CTO
We dive into how Rox is pioneering the world's first enterprise-ready AI Agent Swarm—built to transform how revenue teams operate. Join us as we speak with Shriram Sridharan, co-founder of Rox, about his journey from scaling cloud infrastructure at Confluent and Amazon Aurora to launching a new kind of SaaS platform powered by agent-based AI.
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.
Episode 5: From Idea to Launch: The AutoBlocks Journey with Adam Nolte
Adam Nolte, Co-Founder & CTO of AutoBlocks.ai — the OS for AI Product Teams — shares the real-world journey of building AutoBlocks from the ground up: how the idea was born, the challenges faced while building for AI product teams, key lessons from turning vision into a launched product, and insights on the future of AI tooling and infrastructure.
Episode 4: From Startup to Scale-up with Confluent
The Head of Global Partnerships at Confluent discusses the transition from startup to scale-up phase. You've landed your first customers—now what? Scaling your SaaS business means more than just adding infrastructure. It means building repeatable onboarding, managing support without burning out your team, and delivering consistent experiences across multiple clouds and SaaS Deployment Models.