Podcast
InProd
Hosted by Laura Hamilton · EN
InProd (fka Partner Path) is a podcast exploring the venture and startup ecosystem through the lens of trailblazing founders and operators building the next wave of AI companies. We feature candid conversations with early-stage leaders, offering practical insights on product execution, GTM, and the messy middle of scaling teams and navigating growth.
20episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
E68: Automating the Modern GTM Engine with Buğra Gündüz (HockeyStack)
Mar 2600:36:24Tap to summarizeThis week, we’re joined by Buğra Gündüz, Co-Founder and CEO of HockeyStack, an AI-native GTM platform that unifies data and deploys agents to execute across sales and marketing.Buğra breaks down why the future of GTM is shifting from dashboards and attribution toward systems that can actually take action. As companies accumulate more fragmented data and increasingly complex workflows, visibility alone is no longer enough. Teams need infrastructure that understands their pipeline, identifies what matters, and automates execution across the revenue org.We discuss how HockeyStack went from a single product to a multi-layer platform spanning data, intelligence, and workflow agents, why owning the underlying data layer is critical before introducing AI, and what it takes to convince organizations to move off legacy GTM stacks. Buğra also shares lessons from scaling from $1M to $11M ARR, how they approached early distribution, and why the real moat in GTM may come down to data gravity and workflow dependency rather than features.Episode chapters:1:55 - Dropping Out of College3:27 - Acquiring Early Users6:50 - Building a Single Source of Customer Truth9:20 - Product Marketing Strategy14:35 - Enterprise Deals and Security17:07 - Building a Generalized Platform20:18 - Choosing the Right LLM22:28 - The Future of the Sales Org26:21 - Hiring at HockeyStack29:10 - Building Company Culture32:50 - Learning Through Trial and Error34:44 - Quick Fire Round This episode is brought to you by Grata, the leading deal sourcing platform for private equity. Grata’s AI powered search, investment grade data, and intuitive workflows help you find and win the right deals faster. Visit grata.com to book a demo.This episode is also sponsored by Overlap, the AI powered app that uses LLMs to surface the best moments from any podcast. Overlap reads full transcripts, finds the most relevant clips, and stitches them into a personalized stream of insights. Tap into podcasts as a real information source with Overlap 2.0, now available on the App Store.
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E67: Monitoring the Probabilistic Stack with Alexis Gauba (Raindrop)
Feb 2600:34:56Tap to summarizeThis week, we’re joined by Alexis Gauba, Co-Founder of Raindrop, an AI native observability platform built for agents in production.Alexis breaks down why operating agents is fundamentally different from monitoring traditional software. As systems shift from deterministic code to probabilistic behavior, dashboards alone are not enough. Teams need to detect unknown issues, track signals like forgetting, and understand long agent trajectories across millions of AI events.We discuss why agent observability has become essential over the past year, what makes agent infrastructure distinct from prior platform shifts, and when internal tooling stops scaling. Alexis also explains Raindrop’s approach to production monitoring, combining explicit signals with automated detection to help teams not just find issues, but fix them.Episode chapters:2:05 - Founding Raindrop3:54 - Building with Close Friends5:44 - What Raindrop Actually Does7:45 - The Reliability Challenge of Agents9:55 - Monitoring Agents at Scale14:45 - Experiencing the Pain Firsthand18:00 - The Rise of Agent Infrastructure22:17 - Internal AI Use Cases24:07 - Hiring for Initiative and Ownership28:30 - The Power of Multitasking32:06 - Quick Fire Round This episode is brought to you by Grata, the leading deal sourcing platform for private equity. Grata’s AI powered search, investment grade data, and intuitive workflows help you find and win the right deals faster. Visit grata.com to book a demo.This episode is also sponsored by Overlap, the AI powered app that uses LLMs to surface the best moments from any podcast. Overlap reads full transcripts, finds the most relevant clips, and stitches them into a personalized stream of insights. Tap into podcasts as a real information source with Overlap 2.0, now available on the App Store.
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E66: From Alerts to Action with Anish Agarwal (Traversal)
Feb 1200:36:35Tap to summarizeThis week, we’re joined by Anish Agarwal, CEO of Traversal, an AI-native site reliability platform helping teams detect, diagnose, and remediate incidents before they spiral into prolonged downtime.Anish shares how Traversal is tackling the full lifecycle of reliability work: identifying what caused an incident, determining which signals actually mattered during alert triage, and helping teams plan how their infrastructure should evolve over time. As modern systems grow more complex, spanning microservices, serverless, and multi-cloud environments, the surface area for failure continues to expand, especially as AI-generated code accelerates change faster than humans can reasonably keep up.We talk about why observability has produced some of the largest outcomes in software, why the traditional dashboard-first model is breaking down, and why the next generation of tooling needs agents that can search, reason over, and act on observability data, not just display it. Anish also breaks down where “self-healing systems” are real today, where expectations need to be reset, and why many AI-SRE products risk building faster horses instead of rethinking the experience entirely.Episode chapters:1:50 — Anish’s background and early building2:30 — The origins of SRE and why it emerged8:40 — Research-driven thinking in product and engineering10:07 — Building for large enterprise environments13:00 — AI-driven code and the growing infrastructure surface area16:11 — Preparing infrastructure for an AI-native future20:10 — Fear, trust, and operating critical systems23:05 — From detection to automated action24:20 — How the SRE role is changing26:05 — Hiring and building the right team29:08 — Raising capital from Sequoia and KP32:38 — Reflections and lessons learned35:50 — Quick-fire round This episode is brought to you by Grata, the leading deal sourcing platform for private equity. Grata’s AI powered search, investment grade data, and intuitive workflows help you find and win the right deals faster. Visit grata.com to book a demo.This episode is also sponsored by Overlap, the AI powered app that uses LLMs to surface the best moments from any podcast. Overlap reads full transcripts, finds the most relevant clips, and stitches them into a personalized stream of insights. Tap into podcasts as a real information source with Overlap 2.0, now available on the App Store.
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E65: Infrastructure for AI-First Teams with Ivan Burazin (Daytona)
Jan 1400:32:36Tap to summarizeThis week, we’re joined by Ivan Burazin, co-founder of Daytona - a company rethinking developer environments for an AI-native world.We talk about how Daytona creates real value for developers, why the most advanced agent companies are emerging bottom up, and the idea that agents should be treated as first class users with reliable access to compute. Ivan also shares some of Daytona’s most demanding use cases including AI scientists in chemistry and pharma running agents inside massive sandboxes with hundreds of CPUs.We also cover what reliability looks like when customers define success as whether the system works at all, how Daytona maintains sub 90 millisecond latency while spinning up millions of environments per day, and how they support always on usage with no fixed schedule. Finally, we dig into go to market lessons from putting engineers on the front lines early to why Daytona prioritizes in person engagement and intentional events as the most authentic way to build trust with developers.Episode chapters:1:43 – Market timing and why now3:18 – Building for developers and dev tools4:55 – Global developer communities7:55 – Computers as infrastructure for agents10:32 – Product-led growth12:17 – Enterprise use cases and adoption16:25 – Managing cost, performance, and latency19:20 – Hiring for resiliency at scale20:40 – Internal AI use cases at Daytona24:25 – Creating a bottom-up go-to-market motion27:42 – Hiring and scaling developer relations29:55 – Partnerships and ecosystem strategy31:00 – Quick-fire round This episode is brought to you by Grata, the leading deal sourcing platform for private equity. Grata’s AI powered search, investment grade data, and intuitive workflows help you find and win the right deals faster. Visit grata.com to book a demo.This episode is also sponsored by Overlap, the AI powered app that uses LLMs to surface the best moments from any podcast. Overlap reads full transcripts, finds the most relevant clips, and stitches them into a personalized stream of insights. Tap into podcasts as a real information source with Overlap 2.0, now available on the App Store.
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E64: Reinventing How Teams Find Talent with Ishan Gupta (Juicebox)
Dec 300:29:23Tap to summarizeThis week, we’re joined by Ishan Gupta, co-founder of Juicebox — a company redefining how recruiting works in an AI-native world.Ishan shares how they pivoted from earlier ideas to focus on the highest value part of hiring: identifying the right people and getting them into process. With Juicebox, you describe what you want in natural language and the platform searches more than 800 million professional profiles, surfaces the best matches, and engages candidates through recruiting agents.Their breakout feature, Autopilot, uses LLMs to semantically evaluate and stack rank candidates based on nuanced criteria, which quickly drove organic growth and strong PMF. We talk about why their data makes the product so sticky, how they see recruiting evolving over the next five years, what led them to raise their Series A, and the culture they are building around moving fast and being intellectually honest.Ishan also shares what they are building next with their memory layer, which will make it clear what the AI is learning over time and how it improves future searches.Episode chapters:1:44 - Competitive programming4:35 - Choosing the company name5:55 - YC and the pivot8:00 - How Juicebox differs from traditional recruiting9:51 - The killer feature14:30 - What makes the product sticky17:15 - Is recruiting a zero sum game19:10 - The macro view of hiring22:05 - Raising a later Series A24:10 - Product expansion26:45 - Quick fire round This episode is brought to you by Grata, the leading deal sourcing platform for private equity. Grata’s AI powered search, investment grade data, and intuitive workflows help you find and win the right deals faster. Visit grata.com to book a demo.This episode is also sponsored by Overlap, the AI powered app that uses LLMs to surface the best moments from any podcast. Overlap reads full transcripts, finds the most relevant clips, and stitches them into a personalized stream of insights. Tap into podcasts as a real information source with Overlap 2.0, now available on the App Store.
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E63: Building the Agent Marketplace Layer with Henry and Ani (Smithery)
Nov 400:34:28Tap to summarizeThis week’s guests are Henry and Ani, co-founders of Smithery. Smithery is building the marketplace and runtime for MCP, making it easier for developers to distribute, discover, and monetize tools in the emerging agent ecosystem. Smithery provides a platform to connect your repo, integrate with CI/CD, and handle hosting for servers seamlessly. MCP shines when agents become more general, but it only scales if demand grows for more connections between tools and systems. Drawing from their experiences at Browserbase, Whatnot, and prior AI startups, Ani and Henry saw the need for standardization across the agent stack and set out to build the distribution and trust layer for MCP. We cover what early traction they’re seeing from developers, how they’re approaching payments and identity to reduce configuration friction, and what the broader shift toward open, composable AI infrastructure means for the future of agents. Episode chapters: 1:51 — Getting into AI 5:30 — The Origin of Smithery 7:40 — Building the Supply Side 9:10 — Why Smithery Is the Easiest Way to Discover MCPs 13:30 — Agent Authentication and Identity 17:08 — The Most Popular MCPs 19:50 — MCP and the Principle of Separation of Concerns 22:50 — How AI Is Being Used Today 25:57 — Defining Success as Founders 31:45 — Quire Fire RoundThis episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.Fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.
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E62: Reinventing Consumer AI Through Generative Video with Dean Leitersdorf (Decart)
Oct 1600:42:12Tap to summarizeThis week’s guest is Dean Leitersdorf, CEO of Decart. Decart is a vertically integrated AI research lab building some of the world’s most advanced audio and video models, including Mirage, a real-time generative video system where users can transform themselves or their environments instantly.We dive into Dean’s path from finishing his PhD in computer science at 21 to founding Decart with the ambition of creating a true “before-and-after” company in AI. We cover how Decart evolved from GPU optimization to leading-edge video models, why Mirage has attracted massive adoption in advertising and ecommerce, and what it means to build entirely new consumer experiences on the internet. We also discuss the broader enterprise interest in real-time video, how Decart balances continuous consumer iteration with lab-first research, and why Dean believes this is one of the few moments in history where founders can truly build trillion-dollar businesses.Episode Chapters: 2:10 — From Israel to Palo Alto4:22 — What Dean is running toward6:15 — Building for the future of AI9:40 — How people use Decart14:05 — Building a model from scratch19:08 — Who adopts these models first24:05 — Decart’s focus areas27:06 — Attracting world-class talent30:00 — Choosing to integrate or partner34:04 — Thinking about consumer impact39:38 — Quick fire roundThis episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.Fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.
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E61: AI for Financial Services with Samir and Kunal (Farsight)
Sep 2300:43:32Tap to summarizeThis week’s guests are Samir and Kunal from Farsight. Farsight is transforming how financial firms operate by automating the most time-consuming parts of dealmaking, from drafting pitch decks to generating investment insights, in seconds instead of weeks.We dive into Samir’s journey from Wall Street to building Farsight, and why AI is reshaping the workflows at the heart of finance. We cover how power users are creating entire pitchbooks in minutes, how firms leveraging Farsight are winning more deals and sharpening pricing strategies, and why owning the full workflow is the key to lasting advantage. We also discuss their approach to high-sensitivity use cases, where models are deployed directly into customer environments and tuned for bespoke needs.Episode Chapters:2:02 - CS at MIT5:30 - The catalyzing factor10:36 - Agents to automate financial services13:20 - Your new PE analyst16:30 - Owning the workflow19:25 - Selling to banks 21:45 - Build vs buy25:20 - Foundation models & frameworks31:27 - Becoming a manager34:10 - Fundraising advice36:40 - Augmenting junior analysts41:00 - How AI teaches us to work 42:25 - Quick fire roundAs always, feel free to contact us at partnerpathpodcast@gmail.com. We would love to hear ideas for content, guests, and overall feedback.This episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.Fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.
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E60: Why Voice is the Next Platform Shift with Jordan Dearsley (Vapi)
Sep 300:35:10Tap to summarizeThis week’s guest is Jordan Dearsley, CEO of Vapi. Vapi enables enterprises to deploy humanlike voice agents in minutes. Whether you are building a new voice product or managing millions of calls, Vapi’s infrastructure and flexible APIs make it simple and reliable.We explore why Waterloo continues to produce world-class engineers and founders, Jordan’s journey from building calendar apps and AI therapy tools to leading Vapi, and why enterprises are turning to voice AI to save engineering time and resources. We also cover the toughest technical challenges including latency, tool calls, determinism, and multi state environments, and why generative voice systems require constant tuning and forward deployed models rather than one size fits all solutions.Episode Chapters:2:10 - The MIT of Canada4:03 - Pivoting 10+ times6:00 - Why voice AI11:07 - A faster path to production12:05 - Voice challenges from enterprises15:05 - Why stay horizontal17:20 - Actively moving away from being an AI BPO19:45 - Forward deployed engineers21:40 - From scoping to production22:40 - Recruiting as an early stage startup26:05 - ElevenLabs leading the model pack29:00 - Distribution & enterprise integrations32:35 - Quick fire round As always, feel free to contact us at partnerpathpodcast@gmail.com. We would love to hear ideas for content, guests, and overall feedback.This episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.Fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.
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E59: Simulation as Strategy with Brooke Hopkins (Coval)
Aug 1300:37:13Tap to summarizeThis week’s guest is Brooke Hopkins, Founder of Coval, a company building automated testing infrastructure for AI agents starting with voice and chat assistants. We unpack her journey from studying in Abu Dhabi to leading simulation infrastructure at Waymo, where she helped ensure autonomous vehicles could operate safely at scale. Brooke shares how that experience shaped Coval’s approach to agent evaluation, why voice is the hardest modality to test, and what it means to simulate human-to-agent interactions in a way that actually reflects user intent.Episode Chapters:1:54 - Abu Dhabi for college4:06 - Searching for engineering challenges5:08 - Joining Waymo9:00 - Scaling simulations10:17 - Balancing cost, latency, and signal14:40 - Starting with voice18:16 - Building evals23:44 - Persona surprises26:50 - MCP 27:15 - AI operating system for conversational workflows32:28 - Voice to voice 35:55 - Quick fire roundAs always, feel free to contact us at partnerpathpodcast@gmail.com. We would love to hear ideas for content, guests, and overall feedback.This episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.Fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.
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