Inside The Silicon Mind
By Firas Sozan
Categories: Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship, Investing
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. 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. 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. 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. New episodes every Wednesday at 8AM PT.
65 episodes indexed on PodSearch.
Recent episodes
- Ex-Apple Insider: You're Not Ready For What AI is Doing Now
AI can pass exams, write software, and generate video, yet most of us are working the same long hours we always have. It still doesn't know what happened in your meeting an hour ago, which spreadsheet you update every Friday, or how you file your expense reports. I sat down with Jeffrey Lai…
- Ex-Yahoo Insider: Robots Were Supposed to Take Factory Jobs. What Happened?
At some factories, when one operator goes on vacation, an entire section of the plant shuts down until they come back, because nobody else knows how to run it. Customers tell Devin Bhushan the average operator on their floor is fifty-seven or fifty-eight years old. I sat down with Devin Bhushan…
- The Founder Using AI to Build Real Hardware
For more than sixty years, engineers have tried to automate circuit board design, and the best tool they've built is one the industry openly hates. The motherboard inside your laptop still takes a person months to draw by hand. I sat down with Sergiy Nesterenko, founder and CEO of Quilter and a…
- YC Founder: It Took Me 10 Years to Realize What I'll Tell You in 25 Minutes
For eight years, his company sold document review. The product that finally worked came from a one-page internal tool built for his own team, one that customers saw at a conference and immediately asked to buy. I sat down with Nischal Nadhamuni, co-founder and CTO of Within (formerly Klarity), who…
- Physical AI: Building Intelligence for the Real World
Eighty-five percent of the world economy runs on physical things, and almost none of today's AI was built to understand them. I sat down with Ivan Poupyrev, co-founder and CEO of Archetype AI, who spent nearly a decade at Google shipping radar and sensor products, worked at Disney and Sony before…
- Starting Over in Silicon Valley: Reinvention in the Age of AI
The hardest part of starting over isn't learning something new. It's unlearning everything that made you successful. I sat down with Julia Seregina, an engineer turned tech and industrial executive who ran teams from London to Singapore to Abu Dhabi, then walked away from the big salary to become…
- From Founder to CEO: Why Scaling a Company Starts with Reinventing Yourself
The thing that got you your first twenty customers is the exact thing that will break your company at two hundred. I sat down with the founder and CEO of Concentric AI, who started the company three months before the world shut down, raised a forty five million dollar Series B and acquired two…
- $1B SaaS CEO: The New Era of Startups Has Just Begun
What if the SaaS apocalypse everyone spent two years predicting was just a discounted entry point? I sat down with the CEO of Clari + Salesloft, a thousand person company built from the merger of two category leaders, now serving over 5,000 customers on roughly $450 million in combined ARR, and he…
- $1.2B AI Founder: Software Engineering is About to Change Forever (and nobody even realizes)
If your product is a wrapper on top of an LLM, is your company already over? I sat down with the cofounder and CTO of Rox, the revenue agent platform backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst and Google Ventures and used by teams at OpenAI, Ramp, Confluent, MongoDB and NVIDIA, and he does not hedge on…
- Intel Capital Insider: We're Entering The Most Dangerous Phase Of AI Yet
Why do the best investors almost always back the business operator over the brilliant technologist? I sat down with a venture investor who has been deploying capital since the early days of the internet and has invested through the internet, mobile and cloud waves and now AI, and he pulls back the…
- Ex-Meta Insider: AI Is About to Change Forever (and nobody even realizes)
Why does Nvidia stock drop every time a better open source model ships? Benny Chen thinks the market has this exactly backwards, and he has the track record to argue it. He spent years on ASICs and GPU model serving inside Meta before co-founding Fireworks AI in September 2022, raising from…
- Silicon Valley AI Founder: You’re Not Ready for the Next Phase of AI Hackers
Everyone keeps repeating that AI is making cyber defenders faster and more productive, but in this episode my guest Evan Powell argues the opposite is quietly true, that AI is handing the real advantage to the attackers. He has spent decades building deep tech companies and now runs Deep Tempo…
- How A 51 Year Old Dad Built A $300M Tech Company From Nothing!
What if the worst moment of your life, the one you are most ashamed of, turned out to be the exact thing that made everything after it possible? In this episode of Inside the Silicon Mind, Jared Shepard pulls back the curtain on a journey that runs from a homeless sixteen year old sleeping in the…
- Ex-Amazon Insider: AI Is About to Change Healthcare Forever
What if a clinical record sells for magnitudes more on the dark web than a social security number, and almost nobody outside healthcare is talking about it? In this episode of Inside the Silicon Mind, Sandeep pulls back the curtain on building Heald, a company attacking metabolic health as the…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Ex-Apple Insider: No One Knows What’s Coming With AI
Ex-Apple Insider: No One Knows What's Coming With AI What skills do you teach your children when the career path you spent your life building is on the verge of being entirely automated? If an eight-year-old can already see AI taking over coding, art, and storytelling, how do we prepare the next…
- $1B Founder: Claude Just Changed SaaS Forever
When code becomes virtually free to generate, where does value actually go? If any founder can spin up a functional software product in a weekend, what stops a trillion-dollar frontier engine from erasing your entire business with a single API update? In this episode of Inside the Silicon Mind, we…
- Ex-Google Insider: You're Not Ready For The Next Phase of AI
When we look at the explosive market for LLMs and coding assistants, it’s easy to think we are already on the doorstep of AGI. But what if the systems we call "advanced" are actually operating at the level of a preschooler when it comes to the visual world that enterprises actually care about? In…
- AI Expert: TV Is About to Change Forever
When you watch a movie for the second time, what if you could experience it entirely from the villain's perspective without the director ever having to film a single extra frame? In this episode of Inside the Silicon Mind, we sit down with Alberto, co-founder of Reactor, to explore a massive…
- The Hidden Cost of Using AI at Work
When you drop contracts, strategy docs, or source code into ChatGPT, who actually sees your prompts? In this episode of Inside the Silicon Mind, Firas sits down with Jonathan Mortensen, founder and CEO of Confident Security, to unpack the hidden cost of using AI at work: the fact that what you…
- The $1 Trillion Dollar Question in Venture Capital: What Will Still Matter in 10 Years?
When AI drives the cost of writing software close to zero, what will still matter in 10 years? Lenny Pruss - General Partner at Amplify, a venture firm managing over $2.5 billion - sits down with Firas to answer the question every founder, engineer, and VC is wrestling with: if anyone can ship…
- Anyone Can Now Code Software and it's Completely Free
Coding used to require years of training and a full engineering team. That era is over. In this episode, Eli Chen, Principal Technical Architect at AI Fund, explains how and why the cost and effort of coding is quickly dropping toward zero - and what that means for early-stage founders, engineers…
- Prevention Is Dead A $70M Founder's Playbook for Surviving AI Attacks
Prevention is dead. The companies still building walls are already losing - and a $70M cybersecurity founder is ready to prove it. In this episode of Inside the Silicon Mind, Firas sits down with Shachar Hirshberg, co-founder of Artemis - an AI-native cybersecurity platform helping enterprises…
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