Inside The Silicon Mind
Claim This Podcastby Firas Sozan
Podcast Overview
<p>Inside the Silicon Mind, hosted by Firas Sozan, takes you behind the scenes with the Founders, CEOs, and Venture Capitalists building the future of technology.</p> <p>Every week, Firas sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules of technology - from the zero-to-one startup journey to scaling billion-dollar companies like Snowflake, Microsoft, and Google.</p> <p>Discover how the best teams in Silicon Valley are actually built, what top VCs look for before writing a check, and the make-or-break decisions that separate companies that win from those that don't.</p> <p>Whether you're a founder raising your next round, an engineer deciding where to build your career, or an investor looking for an edge, this is the show that pulls back the curtain on what's really happening inside the Silicon Valley machine.</p> <p>New episodes every Tuesday at 8AM PT.</p>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
8/29/2025
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Recent Episodes
July 28, 2026
MIT AI Expert: AI Is Writing Code Nobody Understands
What happens to observability when the person staring at the dashboard can no longer understand the code an AI just wrote? Anish Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Traversal and a Columbia professor with an MIT PhD, spent two and a half years building an agentic AI SRE platform for enterprises that generate roughly a petabyte of telemetry a day, and in this conversation he dismantles the twenty year old assumption that a human is watching the dashboard and exposes why that model collapses at industrial scale. You will see why dashboards are really just enshrined queries built to explain the past instead of predicting novel failures, and why causal AI matters when one broken service spreads like an epidemic and every alert becomes a fake needle in a haystack 🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology. Chapters:0:00 - Intro1:18 - Why Dashboards Are Breaking3:47 - Building Traversal AI SRE4:37 - Research Roots in Causal AI7:29 - Why Startups Beat Academia Now8:44 - What Happens to SREs11:12 - The End of the War Room13:16 - Are Dashboards Obsolete14:47 - The Rise of the SR Researcher17:35 - Why Incumbents Cannot Win20:16 - Talent Density as the Moat25:18 - Book Recommendation Book Recommendation:Mostly Harmless Econometrics About Anish Agarwal:Anish is the CEO and co-founder of Traversal, an agentic AI SRE platform that helps enterprises troubleshoot and self-heal complex systems at a scale where telemetry can reach a petabyte of data a day. A professor at Columbia University with a PhD from MIT, he built the company alongside co-founders whose research spans causal AI and reinforcement learning, translating that academic depth into a product that rethinks observability from the ground up for a world where AI writes the code. He is passionate about removing the most painful parts of the site reliability engineer's job so that engineers can get back to architecting resilient systems rather than firefighting incidents. Follow Anish Agarwal on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/anish-agarwal-io/ About the showInside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI. Hosted by Firas Sozan.Powered by Harrison Clarke. 🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on: AI and the future of software Venture capital and company building Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careers YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMind Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsm Spotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsm Follow the host on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/ Website links: https://www.harrisonclarke.com/ https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/ https://thepmfplaybook.com/ #AI #InsideTheSiliconMind #Observability #SRE #CausalAI
July 21, 2026
The Truth About Agentic AI No One Tells You
What if the terms everyone is obsessing over in AI are the exact reason your startup is missing the big picture? In this episode of Inside the Silicon Mind, Farshid Sabet pulls back the curtain on building AI companies the right way, drawing on a career spanning SanDisk, Micron, Movidius, and Aptina before founding Corvic in the B2B enterprise space. He dismantles the hype cycles that have distracted founders since 2022, from building your own models to chasing specific GPUs to fixating on prompting, RAG, context, and now agentics. You will learn how to tell a genuine productivity gain from noise, why autonomous agents matter without deserving every buzzword thrown at them, and how to keep your eyes on business fundamentals while the market chases trends. 🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology. Chapters:0:00 - Intro1:10 - The Biggest Learning Moment2:07 - Hype Cycles in AI3:07 - The Agentic AI Shift4:50 - The Real Big Picture6:17 - The Hardest Nos to Make9:58 - Where Discipline Comes From11:51 - Hiring the Right Team14:19 - The Biggest Scaling Mistake15:51 - A Book Every Founder Needs17:39 - Wrap Up Book recommendation:The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz About Farshid Sabet:Farshid Sabet is the founder of Corvic, an AI company focused on the B2B enterprise space, where he helps large organizations across healthcare, banking, retail, and industrial sectors put AI to work. His career spans hardware, software, and AI at companies including SanDisk, Micron, Aptina, and Movidius, where he worked alongside industry leaders like Sanjay Mehrotra and Dr. Eli Harari. He builds with a bias toward business fundamentals over hype, prioritizing scalable products and the discipline to say no when short term wins threaten long term goals. Follow Farshid Sabet on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/farshid-sabet-298526/ Watch the episode on YouTube:https://youtu.be/7lVmRN1rL8I About the showInside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules, from deep-tech startups to the security challenges created by AI. Hosted by Firas Sozan.Powered by Harrison Clarke. 🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives on: AI and the future of software Venture capital and company building Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careers YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMindApple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsmSpotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsm Follow the host on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/ Website links:https://www.harrisonclarke.com/https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/https://thepmfplaybook.com/ #AI #AgenticAI #StartupFounders #EnterpriseAI #InsideTheSiliconMind
July 14, 2026
Ex-Google Insider Reveals The Future Of AI in 2026…
Ex-Google Insider Reveals The Future Of AI in 2026… What happens to a trillion-dollar AI industry when the intelligence it sells becomes something you can own outright, running on your laptop, impossible to throttle, degrade, or switch off? In this episode of Inside the Silicon Mind, Firas Sozan sits down with Jack O’Brien, ex-Googler and founder of Subconscious, to dismantle the assumption that frontier labs will monopolize intelligence, revealing why 95% of economically valuable AI work can already be done by small open source models and why the “PhD in your pocket” arrives years ahead of schedule. Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology. Chapters: 0:00 - The PhD in Your Pocket Thesis 1:41 - Passing the Frontier Threshold 3:40 - Replacing the Chatbot Subscription 5:07 - The 95% Rule of Small Models 7:59 - Compressing the Expertise Premium 10:24 - The Qwen Inflection Point 12:49 - Valuation Reality Check 14:23 - The Application Layer Land Grab 17:15 - Ranking the Big Three 19:10 - Amazon as Switzerland, Apple's Endgame 21:25 - Inside Subconscious: Agentic Workloads 25:20 - Latent Memory Compression 26:21 - Closing Thoughts & Book Recommendation Book recommendation:The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu About Jack O’Brien: Jack O’Brien is the founder of Subconscious, an AI company retraining open source language models to run long-horizon agentic workloads at a fraction of frontier cost. A former Googler who spent years on the search team, he brings deep expertise in machine learning infrastructure, model post-training, and efficient inference. At Subconscious, he focuses on compressing frontier-level intelligence down to models small enough to run on laptops and workstations, enabling businesses and individuals to own their own intelligence rather than rent it through subscriptions. His thesis that 95% of economically valuable AI work can already be handled by small open models sits at the center of his work building the owned-intelligence era. Follow Jack O’Brien on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejackobrien/ About the show Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep-tech startups to the security challenges created by AI. Hosted by Firas Sozan. Powered by Harrison Clarke. Subscribe for more deep dives on: • AI and the future of software • Venture capital and company building • Developer tools, infrastructure, and engineering careers YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTheSiliconMind Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/apple-itsm Spotify: https://bit.ly/spotify-itsm Follow the host on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/firassozan/ Website links: https://www.harrisonclarke.com/ https://www.harrisonclarkeventures.com/ https://thepmfplaybook.com/ #AI #OpenSource #FutureOfAI #LocalAI #InsideTheSiliconMind
51 total episodes available
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- What is Inside The Silicon Mind?
<p>Inside the Silicon Mind, hosted by Firas Sozan, takes you behind the scenes with the Founders, CEOs, and Venture Capitalists building the future of technology.</p> <p>Every week, Firas sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules of technology - from the zero-to-one startup journey to scaling billion-dollar companies like Snowflake, Microsoft, and Google.</p> <p>Discover how the best teams in Silicon Valley are actually built, what top VCs look for before writing a check, and the make-or-break decisions that separate companies that win from those that don't.</p> <p>Whether you're a founder raising your next round, an engineer deciding where to build your career, or an investor looking for an edge, this is the show that pulls back the curtain on what's really happening inside the Silicon Valley machine.</p> <p>New episodes every Tuesday at 8AM PT.</p> - How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates daily.
- Where can I listen to this podcast?
This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
- Does this podcast accept guests?
Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.
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