Sabrina Halper sits down with Ali Ansari, the 25-year-old solo founder and CEO of Micro1, which just passed $1B in ARR. But it all began when Ali moved from Iran to the U.S. at age nine, going from flipping textbooks to building a company that supplies the human expertise used to train AI models.

We get into Micro1’s pivot from AI recruiting to training data, growing to $1B ARR in 2.5 years, whether experts are training their replacements, how to teach AI subjective judgment, why robotics is a data problem, the stakes of selling training data to China, and whether the AI economy can justify the infrastructure being built.

Ali Ansari: https://x.com/aliansarinik

Sabrina Halper: https://x.com/SabrinaHalper

SPONSORS

Presented by micro1: https://micro1.ai They're building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Intro

02:56 Growing up in Iran and moving to America

07:37 From eBay to textbook flipping

13:54 Building micro1 and the pivot to training data

19:39 Why internet data is the worst data

22:41 Are experts training their replacements?

29:27 Creativity, alignment, and subjective judgment

36:01 The robotics data bottleneck

45:11 Ordinary vs. Extraordinary Training Data

43:56 America selling data to China

53:56 $1B in 2.5 years

56:53 Can the AI economy deliver?

Yinon Costica co-founded Wiz, which Google acquired for $32 billion in the largest acquisition in its history. I sat down with him at Wiz HQ in Tel Aviv to talk about the race to secure a world increasingly run by AI.Wiz on

X: https://x.com/wiz_ioSabrina Halper on X: https://x.com/SabrinaHalper

PRESENTING SPONSOR

The Sabrina Halper Show is presented by micro1.micro1 is building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations.

Learn more: https://www.micro1.ai/

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Intro

01:15 Yinon Costica, co-founder of Wiz

02:00 IDF's Unit 8200, and meeting his co-founders

06:30 Leaving Microsoft to start again

08:30 The customer conversations that created Wiz

11:30 From $1M to $100M ARR in 18 months

14:15 How to scale without breaking

17:15 Wiz Atlas: automating vulnerability research

22:45 Can AI give defenders the advantage?

25:15 Cybersecurity's AI twilight zone

27:30 Should you give AI agents your credit card?

32:00 Trust, Big Tech, and the software supply chain

34:45 Open-weight models and security

36:30 Vulnerabilities found at DeepSeek

38:30 Preparing for AI-powered attacks

43:30 What Google unlocks for Wiz

44:30 How Wiz made the shift to AI

47:15 Cybersecurity's biggest unsolved problem

50:00 Securing agents with access to sensitive data

52:15 What AI hacking agents can already do

54:00 An internet built for agents

56:15 The human role in cybersecurity

58:30 Is it too early to pick AI's winners?

59:45 Why the future could be more secure

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