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, where his team built a purpose trained LogLM that reads nothing but logs and flags advanced attacks with very low false positives.

Across our conversation he dismantles the theater of cyber, the idea that hundreds of billions in annual security spending is actually buying us safety, and he opens up about the deepfake that came through his own inbound before compliance caught it. You will hear why the signature based model the industry was built on now runs on what he calls negative time, how attackers armed with distilled models hunt novel vulnerabilities before anyone has built a detection, and why bolting a reasoning model onto defense produces high cost and poor accuracy at real world volume. He exposes the innovator's dilemma that pushes vendors toward steak dinners and F1 sponsorships instead of system level thinking, makes the case for open source tools like his AI SOC project Vigil, and lays out the risk every founder building on a single LLM faces if that model gets switched off. He also gets candid about running ninety hour weeks, tying his focus to one customer outcome at a time, and why he believes reading matters more now than ever.

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Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 1:00 - The Theater of Cyber Spending 2:07 - A Deepfake Hit Our Business 3:04 - Why Defenders Have Negative Time 5:01 - Cyber Wasn't Ready for This 8:38 - What RSA Vendors Get Wrong 10:49 - Already Losing Before AI 12:01 - Why LLMs Can't Detect Attacks 16:46 - Inside DeepTempo 20:05 - Building in a Golden Age 21:52 - What If the Models Switch Off 25:46 - Book Recommendation 29:38 - Wrap Up

Book Recommendations: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

About Evan Powell Evan Powell is the CEO and founder of DeepTempo, the company building an AI native detection intelligence layer for cybersecurity powered by LogLM, a foundation model pre trained purely on logs to identify attacker intent without relying on signatures. A serial deep tech entrepreneur who previously built StackStorm and other Linux Foundation and CNCF projects, he also launched the open source AI SOC Vigil and the open source SOCBench benchmark. His approach has been proven with reference partners spanning telco, banking, national government, and critical infrastructure, and he is now bringing the technology to MSSPs and thousands of practitioners through a system level, uncomfortably transparent, outcome tied model.

Follow Evan Powell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epowell

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 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 back of a baby blue Lincoln behind a Sinclair gas station to the founder and CEO seat of Hypori, a company he built from a failing business he bought for one million dollars into a venture worth over three hundred million. He dismantles the myth that the American dream is dead, tracing how the Army rebuilt his moral compass, how a judge who gave him thirty days to produce an enlistment contract changed his life, and how he founded Intelligent Waves in 2006 on a spreadsheet in Baghdad. You will learn how he spotted the twelve patents inside a company being liquidated, hired six of its original developers, and turned a denied space communications problem into a zero trust, zero data at rest platform that pulls four gigs of bandwidth over a phone by streaming a full operating system from the cloud for under fifteen dollars a month. Jared also breaks down why passion is the one thing AI can never replicate, why money is a side effect and not the goal, and how becoming a sponge for mentorship and owning every outcome built the discipline behind everything he has done.

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Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 1:00 - Is the American Dream Dead 2:09 - From Homeless Teenager 7:47 - The Values That Set Him Apart 8:43 - The Choice to Join the Army 12:49 - Starting Intelligent Waves in Baghdad 14:45 - Buying a Failing Company 16:18 - The Privacy Epiphany 20:12 - The Billion Dollar Vision 24:06 - Advice to Founders 29:37 - Book Recommendations 32:08 - Wrap Up

Book recommendation: Founder vs Investor for anyone weighing whether to take outside money, and Build by Tony Fadell for how to lead, focus a team, and create something unique.

About Jared Shepard: Jared Shepard is the President and CEO of Hypori, the virtual mobility company delivering secure edge access through a zero trust, zero data at rest architecture, and the largest BYOD vendor in the Department of War. A U.S. Army veteran who served as Lead Technical Planner for III Corps and deployed across Iraq and Afghanistan, he founded Intelligent Waves in 2006 to support the Joint IED Defeat Organization and later spun Hypori out as its own company in 2021. He is also the founder and chairman of Warriors Ethos, a veteran focused nonprofit dedicated to the career transition of wounded service members, veterans, and their families. He builds with a conviction that impact comes first and money follows, carrying the lessons of his hardest years into every company he leads.

Follow Jared Shepard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shepardj

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 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.

🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.

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

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

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 generation to thrive, not just survive, in a world where everything can be automated in less than twenty years?

In this episode:

Why emotional intelligence (EQ) and feelings are not the permanent human moats we think they are, as frontier models begin developing their own functional emotion centers.

The shift from the social media era to the attention media era, where the ultimate currency is the human relationship and the ability to command attention.

How to introduce children to AI capabilities early within controlled, fun environments to prevent them from becoming overwhelmed or left behind by technology.

Why the most critical skill for the next twenty years is not what you learn, but your fundamental learning rate and your speed of adapting to changes.

Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders, CEOs, and VCs rewriting the rules of technology.

Chapters:

0:00 - The Illusion of Predicting the AI Future

1:46 - Co-Parenting with AI: Planning Birthdays and Playing D&D with Agents

5:14 - The Doomer vs. Optimist Debate: Will Our Species Thrive?

8:54 - The Myth of the EQ Moat: Replicating Human Emotion with Data

11:04 - The Real-World Bottleneck: Clumsy Robots vs. Digital Automation

12:23 - Life in 20 Years: Total Automation and the Crisis of Identity

14:50 - The Attention Economy: Why We Still Value Human Effort

17:03 - Training the Super-Humans: The Economy of Human Feedback Data

19:16 - The Ultimate Moat: High Adaptation Rates over Fixed Skills

21:34 - Sci-Fi and Startup Survival: Adaptability Lessons from Andy Weir

27:08 - Closing Thoughts & Guest Book Recommendations

Book recommendation: Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

About Victor:

Victor is an AI-focused Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and engineering leader with extensive experience building advanced software architectures and navigating rapid technological disruptions. Immersed deeply in the frontier developments of machine learning, data engineering, and automation, Victor applies a rigorous, systematic approach to technology both in the enterprise sandbox and at home. As a parent and technical operator, he focuses on how rapid adaptation, tool usage, and systemic problem-solving will redefine human capability over the next two decades.

Follow Victor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoraugusteo/

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 #FutureOfWork #ParentingAndAI #AttentionEconomy #InsideTheSiliconMind