Founder Stories
Founders and engineering leaders on building AI and SaaS companies: what they built, what broke, and what they would do differently.
All 14 Agentic SaaS Talks episodes about Founder Stories.
Founder Stories episodes
Episode 38: 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. For product managers it doubles as a working example of AI for product management: customer feedback turned into specs that coding agents can act on.
Episode 33: Open Source Licensing and Survival in the Age of AI, with Joshua Drake
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.
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. For vendors taking private AI into regulated customers, it shows what near air-gapped, no-egress environments demand.
![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
Michael Cooper, Markus Kaiser and Ermin Dzinic talk with Denis Zatsepin, CTO of HoneySales, about how the company went from a manual sales service to SaaS and then to a multi-agent product on AWS. The agents build ideal customer profiles, a job that a sales consultant would otherwise do by hand, because customers with a wrong ICP got little from the rest of the pipeline. Denis built the first prototype with the Strands Agents SDK as one container on Fargate behind a load balancer, and had a working application in two to three weeks. An orchestrator agent proved slow and opaque to users, so the team moved to direct chats with specialist agents that sync through a shared workflow tool. Founders and engineering leaders get a concrete account of what a pivot to agents changes in architecture and user experience.
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 Rox's AI Agent Swarm for Sales Teams, with the 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
Michael Cooper, Kamal Gupta, Bill Tarr and Markus Kaiser talk with Confluent's Head of Global Partnerships about taking a SaaS company from first customers to scale. The guest recalls Confluent's early white-glove onboarding, when founders joined support calls, and notes that its cloud product is now over half of a billion-dollar run rate. The panel argues that unique customer installs create technical debt and can turn a SaaS company into a consultancy, that startups should keep a single version of the application plane, and that a control plane is more than a script. Kamal explains why Terraform and blue-green rollouts break down with many tenants, and the group debates building versus buying undifferentiated infrastructure. Founders past their first few customers can use it to decide what to automate first.