This was a great conversation with Monica Marquez, the co-founder of FlipWork. Monica spent more than two and a half decades in corporate America before leaving to launch her own companies, and FlipWork is her fourth. She and her co-founder saw early that AI was changing work faster than people are wired to change, so they built FlipWork to help people and teams gain what they call the agentic human advantage.

We talk about the myth of the AI easy button, the identity bottleneck that shows up when effort no longer equals success, and how the FlipFactor diagnostic measures agentic velocity and enterprise symbiosis. Monica walks through the four AI archetypes, why middle managers are often the ones holding the brakes, and how growing up in a small West Texas town shaped her mission to democratize access. We also get into Office Space, Eddie Van Halen, winners who sweep the sheds, and what FlipWork has planned for 2026.

Big thanks to Monica for a fun, warm, and super insightful conversation!

Check out FlipWork at https://www.flipwork.ai and take the FlipFactor AI readiness diagnostic at https://flipfactor.ai and subscribe to Monica's Ay Ay Ay, AI newsletter at https://www.themonicamarquez.com/newsletter and make sure to connect with Monica on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/themonicamarquez/

Watch the full video episode on YouTube at https://youtu.be/-_HMc3qU6bg

Chapters 00:00 Intro and welcome to Monica Marquez 01:27 Monica's path and why FlipWork exists 04:06 The myth of the AI easy button 05:47 FlipFactor and measuring agentic velocity 09:25 Speed running the HR problems of AI agents 11:50 Treat your agents like a new team member 13:51 The identity bottleneck and effort versus impact 15:39 What we celebrate at work 18:08 Turning artificial intelligence into authentic intelligence 20:16 Office Space and the real depth of AI adoption 22:18 The four FlipFactor archetypes 24:40 Middle management and speed running old lessons 26:40 Excel, CPAs, and learning by doing with Flippy 29:03 Getting to the so that you can and AI in the loop 31:20 Picking AI tools and why Eric uses Codex 35:29 Vendor lock in and your consciousness font 38:00 Someone who uses AI will replace you 41:34 Behavioral economics and how we measure people 44:35 Advice, constraints, and lived experience 47:21 Growing up in West Texas and democratizing access 49:44 Winners sweep the sheds 52:51 The aha moments that make it all worth it 55:26 Respect for the work we don't want to do 1:00:13 You are not the only one who feels behind 1:01:32 FlipWork in 2026 and the Ay Ay Ay, AI newsletter 1:04:33 Where to find Monica 1:05:53 The curse of knowledge and wrap up

This podcast is made possible by GTM Delta and TechForward.

Podcast site https://discopossepodcast.com Like my sounds? Here's my audio source https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/23r6je/

This was a great conversation with Ghazenfer Mansoor, the founder and CEO of Technology Rivers. Technology Rivers builds healthcare software for health tech companies and physician entrepreneurs, and the team has shipped more than 50 healthcare applications, half of them HIPAA compliant. Ghazenfer grew up in Pakistan, worked on mobile platforms back in the early 2000s, built a recruitment SaaS startup, and started Technology Rivers in 2015 with a simple goal of building the right product the first time.

We talk about why so many software projects fail, why people who can clearly explain a problem will do best with AI, and the difference between speed and velocity. Ghazenfer shares the lesson from a feature packed product nobody wanted to use, how his team gets a budget to experiment with AI tools, why there is no close enough with HIPAA, and why he gives away his best checklists for free. We also dig into his new book Beyond the Download, all about building mobile apps people love, use, and share every day.

Big thanks to Ghazenfer for a thoughtful, practical, and super insightful conversation!

Check out Technology Rivers at https://technologyrivers.com and Ghazenfer's site at https://ghazenfer.com and grab his book Beyond the Download at https://ghazenfer.com/beyond-the-download/ and his podcast Lessons from the Leap at https://ghazenfer.com/lessons-from-the-leap/ and make sure to connect with Ghazenfer on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gmansoor

Watch the full video episode on YouTube at https://youtu.be/gydEgQ2jcsI

Chapters 00:00 Intro and welcome to Ghazenfer Mansoor 01:13 Technology Rivers and HIPAA compliant health tech 02:12 From Pakistan to early mobile startups 04:18 The state of software in the agentic AI era 05:40 Why software projects fail and why AI projects fail too 09:57 Slow down to speed up and systems thinking 13:11 The rock solid product nobody used 17:36 Humility, constraints, and thinking before coding 20:07 Loosely coupled systems, APIs, and MCPs 23:06 Speed versus velocity 24:36 Blockbuster, Toys R Us, and choosing to compete 26:05 Hiring for problem solvers and an AI tools budget 29:06 A culture of experimentation and big RFPs 30:30 AI guesses and why small wins add up 37:17 Involving engineers from day one 38:28 Keeping the end goal in view with a clarity framework 43:39 There is no close enough with HIPAA 45:44 Process, productivity, and staying a learner 49:53 Beyond the Download and building apps people use 54:04 Lessons from the Leap 54:26 Why give away your secrets and the Geek Squad story 58:22 Firing clients and finding your niche 1:01:44 What excites Ghazenfer about AI in 2026 1:05:06 Where to find Ghazenfer and wrap up

This podcast is made possible by GTM Delta and TechForward.

Podcast site https://discopossepodcast.com Like my sounds? Here's my audio source https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/23r6je/

This was a great conversation with Karissa Breen, better known as KB. KB is the founder of KBI.Media, a cybersecurity investigative journalist, and the host of KBKast. She went from tech and banking roles into cyber, built a podcast that grew into an independent media company, and is now leading KBI.Media's expansion into the United States.

We talk about why people still connect with real hosts while AI fills the internet with average content, how to get past the same five questions every guest gets asked, and why trade media and podcasts matter more as buyers move to AI search and GEO. KB also shares a story about an interview that rattled a PR team, how she stays fresh as a creator, and why so many companies never use the great content they already paid for.

Big thanks to KB for a fun, honest, and super insightful conversation!

Check out KBI.Media at https://kbi.media and the KBKast podcast at https://kbi.media/kbkast/ and make sure to connect with KB on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/karissabreen

Watch the full video episode on YouTube at https://youtu.be/weVyGo_wmNs

Chapters

00:00 Intro and welcome to Karissa Breen

01:14 From banking and cyber consulting to founding KBI.Media

04:01 Seeing the US market with an outside view

08:27 Serving your audience and avoiding main character syndrome

10:18 Tall poppy syndrome and always reinventing

11:37 Never above it, never below it

13:49 TBPN, OpenAI, and why audiences follow hosts

16:16 Why NotebookLM won't replace podcasters

20:59 Why AI content ends up average

22:48 AI content fatigue and the pendulum swing

24:54 Getting past the same five questions

28:16 Audience obsessed media and reading every word

30:41 Great UX is invisible and media is an orchestra

33:32 Ungated content and a changing media industry

35:49 GEO is the new SEO

39:24 Search doesn't stop at the first query

41:50 Why trade media matters more than ever

43:13 Forbes vanity versus what buyers actually read

47:07 When a good question rattles the PR team

49:22 Natural speech beats PR speak

53:33 What KBI.Media does

55:41 How KB stays fresh as a creator

57:52 Be a student to be a teacher

1:00:24 Why companies leave free media assets on the table

1:06:28 AI shorts versus real storytelling

1:08:51 Built on curiosity and fundamentals

1:09:34 Where to find KB and wrap up

This podcast is made possible by GTM Delta and TechForward.

Podcast site https://discopossepodcast.com

Like my sounds? Here's my audio source https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/23r6je/

This was a great conversation with Alex Bunardzic. Alex has built platforms and teams for decades, and has been at the forefront of driving agile, iterative software development with a systems thinking mindset.

We talk about how AI agents are changing software development, and everything from the end of "code fetishism" to new risks of nondeterministic agents that can fake outputs. We cover practical practices like test-driven development, failure-first engineering, draft-flag deployment, and the need for architectural invariants.

Alex introduces a new AI guild focused on ethics, technical excellence, and innovation, and describes a platform (AI Harness) to enforce safety and immutability while enabling productive agentic workflows.

Big thanks to Alex for a fun and very inspiring conversation!

Check out the AI Craftspeople Guild here: https://aicraftspeopleguild.github.io/ and make sure to connect with Alex at his website https://alexbunardzic.com

This podcast is made possible by GTM Delta and TechForward.

In this episode, Ari Weil of Akamai discusses why AI at the edge matters now, how Akamai is deploying distributed GPUs and edge compute to enable real-time inference, and what developers and businesses should consider when building agentic systems.

We cover practical examples, security and trust concerns, the shifting landscape from cloud to edge, and how Akamai’s network and developer tools make experimentation and production at scale faster and safer.

Big thanks to Ari for joining for a great conversation!

This podcast is made possible by GTM Delta and TechForward.

A fun deep dive interview with Jon Reeve, CPO and co-founder of Control Theory, about the evolution from monitoring to observability and how AI and sentiment analysis are changing how teams find issues in logs. They discuss Gonzo (an open-source terminal tool), Dstl8 (the always-on SaaS), edge analysis that distills logs in real time without storing everything, and meeting developers where they work.

The episode covers use cases across ops, developers, and customer-facing teams, the commercial trade-offs of storing versus analyzing logs, privacy concerns like PII discovery, and the practical adoption of AI for SREs as human augmentation rather than replacement.

This podcast is made possible by an amazing listener community and GTM Delta.

This episode explores why infrastructure automation remains a live problem in 2025, focusing on bare-metal operations, Kubernetes, and the rise of AI workloads. Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Founder of Rackn, discuss RackN’s approach with Digital Rebar, the importance of repeatable processes, and why heterogeneity in data centers is valuable.

Topics include immutable infrastructure, rack-scale automation, the limits of abstractions and CRDs, and how organizations can bridge the skills and process gaps to run high-performance, compliant on-prem and AI infrastructure at scale.

Thank you to Rob for a great conversation and we hope to see lots of folks at KubeCon to keep the discussion going!

This podcast is made possible by the support of GTM Delta and TechForward.io

We interviewed Paweł Kowalczyk, CTO of Halo Radius, about designing and operating highly scalable software, the shift from product teams to consulting, and the importance of long-term partnerships and knowledge transfer.

They also dig into the realities of AI adoption, why data infrastructure and the right metrics matter, how to choose tools and architectures, and how to build maintainable platforms that deliver measurable business value.

Check out their work at https://haloradius.com and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/halo-radius/

This podcast is made possible by GTM Delta.