About Beyond the Noise: Signals, Stories, and Spicy Takes
Hosted by Matt Klein, creator of Envoy and co-founder of bitdrift, Beyond the Noise goes inside the minds of the engineers, founders, and technical leaders defining the next era of app-based computing. Forget the buzzwords — this is where the people shaping modern systems share how they really build, debug, and scale.
Beau Button: The Unemployable Founder Who Paid Players $13M and Built His Own AI Rig
Beau Button, the straight shooting co-founder who doesn't mince words (fair content warning for language on this one!) grew up in New Orleans tinkering with QuickBASIC on a neighbor's IBM PS/2. Years later, he would co-found Atlas Reality, the company behind Atlas Earth, and its spinoff company TesoroXP. In this episode of Beyond the Noise, Matt sits down with Beau to talk through his early interest in computers and to trace his career path from the Piggly Wiggly deli counter to his job at 16 building e-commerce sites in classic ASP, and eventually through founding Atlas Reality.
Beau walks through the rise and fall of Atlas Empires, the hard lessons about user acquisition costs and retention, and how those lessons shaped Atlas Earth, a location-based virtual real estate app that has paid out over $13 million in cash to its players. He also explains how the technology that turns real-world card spending into in-game currency became its own company, TesoroXP.
Then the conversation turns to AI. Beau explains why he’s addicted to coding agents, and why he’s also spending real money on a Mac Studio, a DGX Spark cluster, and RTX 6000 GPUs to build a local alternative. He shares his skepticism about whether the current economics of frontier models can last, his experience with open-weight models and harnesses, and why he thinks the next few years will bring the democratization of AI.
6 Oct 2026
David Crawshaw: From Tailscale to exe.dev, and Why AI Agents Need Their Own Computers
In this episode, Matt talks with David Crawshaw, co-founder and CTO of Tailscale and co-founder and CEO of exe.dev. David's love of computers started in northern Australia, where he taught himself to program by hacking on the Clipper-based medical record software his father wrote for the family's practice. From there, David followed his passion (a girl, not programming) to the US, where he spent 7 years at Google working on search infrastructure, Google+, the Go team, and a stint porting the gVisor network stack to Fuchsia. He talks through founding Tailscale, and how it began with a desire to take complicated things in computing and make them simpler, not with a specific product idea.
David explains how Tailscale came out of consulting for a small Canadian bank that needed two-factor auth for a legacy SMB-based system, how a weekend WireGuard prototype grew into a mesh network everyone said would never work, and why he eventually "hired himself out of a job."
The conversation then turns to exe.dev. David describes how an early coding agent led his team to a bigger problem: agents are far more useful when they get a real computer, and the sandboxes built for them are the wrong shape. They dig into running always-on VMs on local NVMe, why cloud network disks hurt IOPS, and how a TLS reverse proxy can give agents access to services without ever exposing the credentials.
Along the way, David and Matt cover learning to code before the internet, why apprenticeship still beats most formal training, the strongly held opinions about garbage collection, and why the best advice for founders is also the most annoying: talk to people.
22 Sept 2026
Randy Shoup: He Grew Up Inside Xerox PARC, Then Built eBay's First Real-Time Search Engine
Randy Shoup's path into software started before he was born. His father, Richard Shoup, was one of the earliest computer science PhDs in the country and part of the original crew at Xerox PARC, where he built Superpaint, the world's first digital paint program with a live video frame buffer. Randy grew up begging to spend weekends in that lab... then set out to become an international lawyer instead, until two years at Oracle and a law firm internship convinced him engineering was the better fit.
In this episode, Matt Klein sits down with Randy to walk through three decades of Silicon Valley: building a graphical query tool at Oracle before the web existed, joining email-security pioneer Tumbleweed through its IPO and the dot-com crash, architecting eBay's first real-time search engine, running App Engine at Google in the early days of cloud, and returning to eBay a decade later as Chief Architect to modernize a 5,000-person engineering org. They close on the AI boom: why Randy sees direct parallels to 1999, why Jevons paradox may mean more engineers, not fewer, and why the technical debt of this moment is being created at industrial scale.
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
8 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
9 ratings
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