1st10 Podcast

Welcome to 1st10 Podcast, where we dive deep into the world of building early engineering teams. Join us as we sit down with engineers, founders, and investors to uncover the strategies, challenges, and successes behind assembling and nurturing the foundational teams that drive innovation. Whether you're a startup enthusiast, a tech leader, or an aspiring entrepreneur, our conversations provide valuable insights and practical advice on crafting the perfect engineering team from the ground up. Tune in to learn from the best and get inspired to build your own successful early-stage team.

1st10 Podcast is a technology podcast hosted by 1st10podcast, with 43 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

1st10podcast hosts 1st10 Podcast, a technology show with 43 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #46

  An AI That Rewires Its Own Code?! Inside Exo & The Next Era of Software Development with Alex Krentsel

  Sep 28, 202646 min

  What happens when an AI agent gets permission to rewrite the code that runs it? On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, host Boris Epstein sits down with Alex Krentsel, a senior researcher at Google Research and a systems PhD student at UC Berkeley to dig into why efficiency, and not accuracy, may be the real unlock for self-improving agents. Alex is building Exo, an open-source agent harness that watches itself work and changes its own policy to get better and cheaper at a task. Together, Boris and Alex talk about: The multi-billion dollar reason today's LLM providers secretly have zero incentive to make their agent loops efficient. The statistical reality behind why agents still fall apart on long-horizon corporate workflows. The unexpected childhood obsession that provided Alex with a foundational blueprint for understanding distributed agentic systems. Alex's unpopular opinion about which part of the classic ML curriculum is now "far over-weighted." The truth behind why a widely popular tech-career shortcut from the 2010s has officially ceased to exist today. Alex spent his early days engineering high-traffic UI at YouTube. These days, he works at the intersection of systems research, agentic AI, and the changing role of software engineers. The conversation ultimately comes back to a simple question, that owes its existence to Alex's childhood fascination with... ants. "How do simple components, following the right rules, become systems that are greater than the sum of their parts?" Tune in for an unfiltered look at what it truly takes to build software on the frontier of AI! Chapters 00:00 Preview of the episode 01:54 Meet Alex Krentsel 03:16 The Architectural Shift Beyond LLM Scaling 06:48 Inside Exo: AI Agents That Improve Themselves 10:27 Why Exo Is Open Source 13:08 How Smart Are AI Agents, Really? 16:03 Explosive Adoption of AI Coding Agents 18:06 What Will Software Engineers Do Now? 21:34 Machine Learning v/s Systems Thinking 23:36 What Should Startups Look for in Engineers? 27:31 A Peek Inside Google Research 31:34 Do All Roads Lead to AI? 34:23 Anthills, Agent Swarms, and "Civilizations" 37:17 Alex Is Optimistic About AI 40:33 The Mood Among CS PhDs (at Berkeley) 43:45 Contact Details and First Contact Message 44:19 A Prediction for the Future Quotes "Claude Code and Codex have zero incentive to be efficient for you, because you're paying for the token use. The more expensive it is to do the task, the more they get paid." - Alex Krentsel (08:27) "Our jobs are no longer to do the rote work of programming a UI. A lot of what we're doing now is reasoning about specification." - Alex Krentsel (18:48) "I really think that the systems skillset ... is going to be the valuable skillset going forward." - Alex Krentsel (21:07) "Part of the challenge is also deciding what to build, now that it's become really easy to actually do the building." - Alex Krentsel (23:08) Follow Spotify https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e8ec9af-f38c-4cd9-8c68-1c1dd4516b 27/1st10-podcast Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Links: Alex Krentsel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-krentsel/ Alex’s Website: https://www.krentsel.com Recent paper co-authored by Alex and Ion Stioca: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12039 . It presents how we are thinking about the gaps in agentic systems (or agent-created systems). Bach, Partita II, Allemande, performed by Alex Krentsel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxF6tpL2do Bach - Violin Partita no. 2 in D minor BWV 1004 - Sato: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44Wz92zQe04 Bach - Chaconne from Violin partita no. 2 in D minor BWV 1004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y4lcQ7BTLw Music by Roman Senyk from Pixabay Producer: Shrikant Joshi (https://42quirks.com)

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #45

  The Post-LLM Era Is Coming: World Models, AI CEOs, and the Autonomous Enterprise | Sam Pasupalak, Skyfall AI

  Sep 14, 202648 min

  What comes after ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini? A founder who sold an AI company to Microsoft for $160 million just told us that LLMs are heading toward a dead end. And he's betting his next company on what comes after. On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, Sam Pasupalak, Co-Founder & CEO of Skyfall AI, sits down with host Boris Epstein to discuss what a post-LLM world looks like. Sam believes LLMs will become the low-level execution layer underneath something much more powerful: Enterprise World Models. In this conversation, Sam explains: The two research breakthroughs that made ChatGPT inevitable A simple analogy that exposes why LLMs are fundamentally limited What world models are and how they differ technologically from LLMs What a business simulation video game revealed about LLMs than no benchmark could Why Sam thinks humans should eventually be freed from operational work How Skyfall plans to acquire and autonomously operate businesses Why an AI CEO is much harder to build than an AI software engineer and Why Sam is hiring hungry researchers for Skyfall and not established AI stars The thing that WILL stick with you is how calmly Sam walks you through what it actually looks like to hand the keys of a real business to an algorithm. Like, someone who's already seen the next wave forming and is just waiting for the rest of the industry to catch up. Chapters 00:00 Preview of the episode 01:00 Introductions 03:23 Building AI Before AI Was Cool 06:37 Did Sam Predict Today's AI Boom? 10:01 Was AI Just Another Bubble? 13:46 Are We at Peak LLM? 17:53 "Smart Soccer Analyst" 21:32 What Is an Enterprise World Model? 26:06 The Beginning of the End for LLMs 28:48 Skyfall's Bet: The Autonomous Enterprise 34:33 Putting Money Where (World) Models Are 38:45 What Happens to the Human CEO? 41:40 Hiring for Hunger, not Hype 44:58 Bold Prediction: AI in Politics by 2050? 47:14 The Future of Autonomous Enterprises Quotes "When I sold my company to Microsoft, I was like, 'I'm never gonna do a technology-first company again.' I promised myself that." - Sam Pasupalak (10:54) "LLMs are like a very smart soccer analyst - goes through all the videos about soccer on the internet, reads about everything about soccer on the internet, but has never ever played a game of soccer in real life." - Sam Pasupalak (17:53) "The Scaling Laws moment for world modeling is coming up in the next 12 to 18 months." - Sam Pasupalak (26:41) "Let's say you throw trillions of dollars, increase the context window as much as possible, it will not matter. It doesn't matter." - Sam Pasupalak (28:38) "We ran the best LLMs, and we found that LLMs just can never run a theme park. It's impossible." - Sam Pasupalak (36:48) "If you want to build a completely autonomous enterprise, you have to buy the enterprise. You have to run all the algorithms across all the systems within the enterprise." - Sam Pasupalak (37:33) Follow Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e8ec9af-f38c-4cd9-8c68-1c1dd4516b 27/1st10-podcast Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/f951319c/podcast/rss YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Website: www.1st10.com Podcast: www.1st10.com/podcast Twitter www.x.com/1st10engineers LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/1st10/ Links Sam Pasupalak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-pasupalak-57b4a220a Skyfall AI: https://www.skyfall.ai/ (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skyfallai ) Sam’s OpenReview Page: https://openreview.net/profile?id=~Sam_Pasupalak1 Maluuba, on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maluuba Music by Roman Senyk from Pixabay Producer: Shrikant Joshi (https://42quirks.com)

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #9

  AI Is Making Top Performers MORE Overworked, Not Less! | Ex-Amazon VP Ethan Evans

  Aug 11, 202652 minS4

  An Amazon VP who helped build Prime Video from a team of six is now telling people inside the FAANGs to seriously consider leaving... On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, Boris Epstein sits down with Ethan Evans, former VP at Amazon, to talk about the conventional wisdom around AI, management, and career growth and how it may all be backwards. Ethan spent over 15 years at Amazon - rising from engineering manager to VP, launching Prime Video, the Amazon AppStore, and Prime Gaming. He retired in 2020 to coach the next generation of leaders through his "Level Up" community. Tune in to hear them discuss:The Illusion of Efficiency: The assumption that AI-driven productivity means fewer managers has run headfirst into a very different realityThe New Fiefdom Bottleneck: AI has accelerated individual productivity but ONE bottleneck is choking the market agility of AI tools.The "Reverse Centaur" Danger: Artificial intelligence is leaving top-tier ICs feeling overworked rather than liberated. Riding the Wrong Tide: A blunt, numbers-based question Ethan uses to tell people whether it's time to leave their companyThe Coming Cleansing: One of AI's longest-standing believers still thinks "Winter is coming..."Ethan spent fifteen years riding a wave that lifted an entire generation of Amazon careers along with his own. Now he's doing the math, out loud, for anyone still waiting for the water to rise again. Whether you're an engineer, founder, hiring manager or executive navigating the AI era, Ethan's sharp insights are definitely the candid look you need into where technology careers (and the companies behind them) may be heading next.Chapters00:00 Preview: A Prediction That Challenges AI00:51 Introducing Ethan Evans04:04 A Blind Job Offer That 'Unboxed' Amazon08:12 Amazon's 700 VPs (Who Are Actually CEOs)10:08 "Terminal Status" Versus The "Climbers"13:28 Amazon vs Startups - Hack vs Hustle18:18 Amazon Has Always Been "Relentless"23:50 Is AI Killing The Management Career?27:57 The 24/7 Assembly Line In The New Age31:39 FAANG Employee? Play This Chapter NOW!34:52 Teams of 90 People - Teams of 90 Agents39:29 Is This an AI Bubble?43:13 Who Will Win the AI Revolution?45:23 A Simple Math to Help Plan Your Exit49:21 "Winter Is Definitely Coming BUT..."50:55 Connect With Ethan EvansQuotes:"If one worker now does the work of ten... great! But you have to organize 10 times as much work!" - Ethan Evans (26:22)"The current belief, at least for many mid-to-senior level ICs, is AI has made them more productive, but also more overworked." - Ethan Evans (29:15)"I'm relatively negative on the same large corporations that, frankly, made me successful and wealthy. I'm rooting for those companies because I own their stock, but I'm actually like in this podcast talking myself into some selling!" - Ethan Evans (32:41)"Many of the big companies are in trouble. They are in the IBM position and it's going to be very hard to be nimble into the future." - Ethan Evans (41:22)"Waves sweep deadwood into shore. It's what they do! And I'm not saying be deadwood. I am saying at least be a surfer or a swimmer." - Ethan Evans (48:43)Follow:Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e8ec9af-f38c-4cd9-8c68-1c1dd4516b 27/1st10-podcastApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/f951319c/podcast/rss YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Links:Ethan Evans on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanevansvp/Website: https://www.ethanevans.com/Newsletter: https://levelupwithethanevans.substack.comYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EthanEvansVPEthan Evans AI Announcement Post: https://levelupwithethanevans.substack.com/p/announcing-ethan-evans-aiMusic by Roman Senyk from PixabayProducer: Shrikant Joshi

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #8

  Inside OpenAI, Google Gemini & the Next AI Gold Rush With Google DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick

  Jul 28, 202642 minS4

  What do you do when the guy who helped launch GPT-4 (and now leads Google Gemini) tells you that competing with trillion-dollar AI labs is actually the EASY part?!On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, Boris Epstein sits down with Logan Kilpatrick, a leader who has been stationed at the absolute epicenter of the Generative AI revolution. Logan Kilpatrick has helped shape the AI tools that millions of developers use every day. And he thinks most founders are thinking about competition completely wrong. Now leading Gemini AI Studio, the Gemini API, and Kaggle as part of Google DeepMind, Logan breaks down why the ground shifting beneath our feet creates unprecedented opportunities for early-stage founders. Tune in to hear them talk about:The Big Lab Paradox: Why competing against elite AI frontier labs is much easier than it appears.The Understanding Boundary: The critical cognitive boundary you shouldn't let AI coding assistants cross.Accidental Research: Everyday software tinkering could be accidental cutting-edge research exploration.An Underdog Story: Logan's "mind-bending" decision to choose Google at the height of OpenAI's momentumPrompting vs Understanding: The difference that will separate good engineers from the great ones.Abundance to Exits: Why AI-powered software creation will unlock a 1000x explosion of new markets and massive startup exits.AI labs may be building the future - but Logan Kilpatrick genuinely believes the biggest winners will be the founders who build on top of them!Chapters00:00 Preview Of The Episode00:48 Introducing Logan Kilpatrick01:52 AI & The 4-Day Work Week Hypothesis 04:09 Why Is Staying On The Frontier SO Hard?*06:22 The Habit That Keeps Logan Ahead of AI09:19 From Apple to OpenAI, via PathAI14:45 Being Inside The Room When ChatGPT Exploded17:04 How to Pick the Right Startup 20:48 What DevRel @ OpenAI Really Looks Like23:10 Should Founders Fear OpenAI and Google?23:56 Competing With Trillion-Dollar AI Labs28:39 Why Logan Left OpenAI for the "Underdog" Google31:43 Inside Google DeepMind's AI Culture36:07 What A Successful Developer Looks Like Today38:38 Logan's Bold Prediction for 202640:12 What To Say When You Connect With LoganQuotes:"I have a hypothesis that actually if everyone was only working four days a week, we would probably have greater AI adoption in the world." - Logan Kilpatrick (02:17)"The delta between engineering work, product work, and research discovery is actually very blurry." - Logan Kilpatrick (04:23)"I'd be really excited to go build a coding startup right now." - Logan Kilpatrick (25:26)"You can outsource intelligence, but you can't outsource your understanding." - Logan Kilpatrick, quoting Andrej Karpathy (36:42)"It's not like, 'Software creating is solved and thus there's no opportunity anymore!' It's actually like, 'Software creating is solved and thus there's a 1000x more opportunity than it was before!'" - Logan Kilpatrick (39:18)Follow:Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e8ec9af-f38c-4cd9-8c68-1c1dd4516b 27/1st10-podcastApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/f951319c/podcast/rss YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Links:Logan Kilpatrick on:- LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/logankilpatrick/- Twitter/X: https://x.com/officiallogank- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Kilpatrick- GitHub: https://github.com/logankilpatrickMusic by Roman Senyk from PixabayProducer: Shrikant Joshi

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #7

  OpenAI Backed These Founders Before They Were Old Enough to Buy a Beer

  Jun 19, 202647 minS4

  The long-trodden path to wealth-creation (through job-security) is completely broken. So, the next generation of elite founders is taking control of their own trajectories in a different way!On this episode of the *1st10 Podcast*, Boris Epstein sits down with Alkis Toutziaridis and Shashi Salavath, the prodigy co-founders of Tacit Intelligence, a stealth AI startup backed by Entrepreneurs First, Berkeley Skydeck, and the OpenAI Startup Accelerator. Tune in to hear them talk about:Alkis' opinion on critical difference between "doing a startup" and "starting a company".Shashi's theory for how he decides which work is worth doing which has nothing to do with salary or prestige.A refreshingly unique (and surprisingly mature) way to think about using AI in your codebase from two young builders.Their mutually-agreed take on why founders should never be in a hurry to hire a salesperson.A framework for thinking about startup valuations or "the Collapse of Terminal Value" as Alkis calls it!A mutually-shared deep optimism about what AI unlocks for human creativity and job creation.From winning national Economics Olympiads and publishing clinical AI research as teenagers, to dropping out of school to build in the relentless San Francisco startup ecosystem, Alkis and Shashi share what it truly takes to pursue outlier greatness.Chapters00:00 Preview: Three Lines That Set the Tone00:48 Introductions and ice-breakers04:03 Alkis and Shashi's Origin Stories 09:26 Of Battery Drain and Michael Jordan14:19 Managing Family Fear and Financial Realities17:32 Joining an Accelerator vs. Going It Alone22:09 The Accelerator Timeline29:16 "Collapse of Terminal Value"32:56 What Is Tacit Intelligence?36:23 When Do They Start Hiring?39:14 On Being AI-Pilled 41:23 Bold Predictions for 2026 43:51 How to Get in Touch with Alkis & ShashiQuotes:"You drain your battery every single day when you're doing a startup!" - Shashi Salavath (09:59)"TL;DR, the reason I'm doing it is for the pursuit of greatness." - Shashi Salavath (10:44)"A very, very small subset of people have the confidence and the delusion - the early-stage delusion - to take the risk to start a company." - Alkis Toutziaridis (13:26)"If we're Mr. Robot, huddled in a corner, hoodies on, just like coding 24/7... there is a mental aspect that needs to be serviced to make this successful." - Shashi Salavath (21:05)"If you're a founder and you can't sell your own product - or you don't learn what's your go-to-market motion and structure - then who's going to do it?" - Alkis Toutziaridis (37:15)"We don't outsource any of our thinking to AI. None of it. We outsource 0% of our thinking to AI." - Shashi Salavath (39:46)Follow:Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e8ec9af-f38c-4cd9-8c68-1c1dd4516b 27/1st10-podcastApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/f951319c/podcast/rss YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Links:Alkis Toutziaridis on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alkistoutzi/Shashi salavath on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/shashi-salavath/Tacit Intelligence: https://www.tacitintelligence.ai/Music by Roman Senyk from PixabayProducer: Shrikant Joshi

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on 1st10 Podcast. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.