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 root cause behind most chronic conditions, drawing on a career that took him from Amazon to founder and investor. He dismantles the founder myth that speed always wins, making the case that patience means slowing down enough to decide on data, research, and customer signals rather than gut feel, then letting the decision stick long enough to read the KPIs.

You will learn where impulse still earns its place in hiring and culture, why failing to fire fast is a disservice to everyone who took a risk on your company, and how AI belongs inside a healthcare product only where there is a real problem for it to solve.

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Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 0:58 - Why Patience Beats Speed 2:53 - Balancing Patience With Momentum 5:03 - Decisions You Regret Most 7:26 - Turning Regret Into Drive 8:07 - When to Trust Your Impulse 9:54 - Hire Slow Fire Fast 12:07 - Letting People Self Select Out 13:07 - Does AI Terrify or Excite You 14:37 - Protecting Healthcare Data 16:03 - What Heald Actually Does 19:15 - Metabolic Health Explained 20:42 - Sleep HRV and Blood Glucose 23:28 - Intermittent Fasting Is Personal 24:36 - Book Recommendation

Book Recommendation: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

About Sandeep Sandeep is the founder of Heald, a company built to address metabolic health, the root cause behind most chronic conditions from obesity and hypertension to cardiac disease and cancer. Heald combines technology with human care teams across four factors most of the industry ignores: nutrition, fitness, sleep, and stress, pulling data from wearables, glucose monitors, and smart scales while keeping humans accountable to patients. Before founding Heald he spent time at Amazon, where the leadership principle that leaders are right a lot shaped how he balances instinct with evidence. He builds with a bias toward data over impulse, patience over speed, and using AI where there is an actual problem to solve rather than as a solution in search of one. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/misrasandeep/ 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/

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 - Intro 1:18 - Why Dashboards Are Breaking 3:47 - Building Traversal AI SRE 4:37 - Research Roots in Causal AI 7:29 - Why Startups Beat Academia Now 8:44 - What Happens to SREs 11:12 - The End of the War Room 13:16 - Are Dashboards Obsolete 14:47 - The Rise of the SR Researcher 17:35 - Why Incumbents Cannot Win 20:16 - Talent Density as the Moat 25:18 - 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 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 #InsideTheSiliconMind #Observability #SRE #CausalAI

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 - Intro 1:10 - The Biggest Learning Moment 2:07 - Hype Cycles in AI 3:07 - The Agentic AI Shift 4:50 - The Real Big Picture 6:17 - The Hardest Nos to Make 9:58 - Where Discipline Comes From 11:51 - Hiring the Right Team 14:19 - The Biggest Scaling Mistake 15:51 - A Book Every Founder Needs 17:39 - 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 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 #AgenticAI #StartupFounders #EnterpriseAI #InsideTheSiliconMind