This Week In Startups is made possible by: PAYPAL OPEN Today’s show: China’s Alibaba just dropped a 2.4 trillion parameter open weight model that the company claims only trails Anthropic’s flagship…
In recent months, the open vs closed, and US vs China discussions on model ownership and sovereign/local AI have heated up to a fever pitch. So it is very very good news that Poolside AI are finally…
Frontier AI is colliding with real-world infrastructure. Eiso Kant (Co-CEO & Co-Founder, Poolside) joins the MAD Podcast to unpack Project Horizon— a multi-gigawatt West Texas build—and why frontier…
Software development and software engineering could be the first major economically valuable capability that closes the gap between humans and AI, says Eiso Kant, the CTO of frontier AI company…
(01:17) - Google’s AI Breakthrough in Cancer (22:44) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (30:37) - Protein Powders Exposed (35:41) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:36:03) - Dante Vaisbort, a University of Chicago…
How do we get from today's AI copilots to true human-level intelligence? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Eiso Kant, Co-Founder of Poolside, to explore why reinforcement…
When poolside co-founder and CTO Eiso Kant stepped on stage at RAAIS 2025, he didn’t deliver the kind of slick, pre-baked keynote you might expect from the co-founder of one of the most ambitious AI…
How do you build a foundation model that can write code at a human level? Eiso Kant (CTO & co-founder, Poolside) reveals the technical architecture, distributed team strategies, and reinforcement…
Is the prevailing approach to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) missing a crucial step – deep, focused specialization? For the first time since co-founding Poolside, CEO Jason Warner & CTO Eiso…
Amid the buzz of the AWS Summit in London, I sat down with Eiso Kant, the CTO and Co-Founder of Poolside, to explore how his team is reshaping the future of software development through AI. This…
Eiso Kant, CTO of poolside AI, discusses the company's approach to building frontier AI foundation models, particularly focused on software development. Their unique strategy is reinforcement…
As artificial intelligence reshapes industries and global competition intensifies, particularly with advancements from China, staying ahead requires more than just keeping up with the latest…
Eiso Kant is the Co-Founder and CTO of Poolside.ai, building next-generation AI for software engineering. Just last week, Poolside announced their $500M Series B valuing the company at $3BN. Prior to…
Today, we’re thrilled to be joined by Eiso Kant, CTO + Co-Founder of Poolside, the buzzy new AI tool for software development. Eiso and Matt talk about Poolside’s foundational model, the critical…
Jason and Eiso explore the implications of Mark Zuckerberg's plan to flatten Meta's management layers and examine the current ratio of engineers to managers, questioning if this balance is truly…
Eiso and Jason discuss how engineering leaders can fall into the trap of midwit thinking (the infamous bell curve meme) where they have a surface level understanding of complex topics and use…
Former Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath shares his lessons on engineering leadership, such as aligning goals, handling difficult situations, and optimizing team metrics. Jason, Eiso and Sri talk about…
Jason and Eiso share their love-hate relationship with OKRs and discuss the pedantic nature of setting objectives and how they ultimately help to align and empower organizations. They talk about…
Jason and Eiso explore the intersection between finance and engineering leadership and discuss the importance of position sizing in engineering orgs. From promotions to product initiatives and…
Jason and Eiso get real about censorship culture in the tech industry. From free speech to the rights of employees and the role of companies in society. They chat about privilege in tech, whether we…
Jason and Eiso deep dive into corporate politics, hierarchies, and the sociopaths that often sit at the top as they analyze the behaviors of famous C-Level leaders, such as Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer,…
Phil Calçado is the Global CTO at PicPay, one the largest engineering orgs in Latin America. He joins the podcast to re-tell his war stories as an engineering leader at SoundCloud, Digital Ocean,…
Happy 2023! or is it?… Jason and Eiso talk about the economic recession and share their predictions for the year ahead. They chat about what happened in 2022 that set the stage for 2023, what the…
Allison McMillan, VP of Engineering at Quota Path, joins us to talk about the transformation engineering leaders go through when they become parents and the lessons we can take parenting to our…
Alexandra is a Senior Engineering Manager at Fellow.app and the author of Remote Engineering Management: Managing an Engineering Team in a Remote-First World. She joins us to discuss creating an…
Bethany Foote is the Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Outschool and has had a hell of a journey as a software engineer. She joins us to talk about how diversity makes companies better, share the…
Shannon Vettes is a transversal Product and Engineering Leader and self-proclaimed "process nerd" with a knack for reorgs (as long as you reaally need them!) and for making engineering leaders' lives…
Adrienne Lowe shares her journey as an empathetic leader and how her goal to give people energy (rather than take it away) paved her way through a success engineering leadership career. Deep dive…
Jason & Eiso talk about Velocity in Software Engineering, what it means, how to measure it, why data and metrics won’t magically solve all your problems, and what engineering leaders can do for their…
Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of Jenkins, pulls back the curtain on building tech companies in Japan. He shares his lessons from Cloudbees and how building two very different engineering…
Join Chad Fowler, Jason Warner, and Eiso Kant in a heartfelt existential episode on what it means to be an engineering leader that will have you question if the manager path is the right one for you.…
Cesar Lugo, Software Engineer and founding member of the Engineering Intelligence team at Typeform, joins us to talk about the power of engineering metrics and how data can help influence how…
Jason and Eiso ad lib on a variety of topics. From consensus-driver cultures, the trouble with software engineering endorsements and capacity planning best practices. Warning: Eiso recorded this…
Craig Kerstiens joins us for a chat on decalcifying engineering teams, why you need to get your teams to ship more, and finding A-Players. Craig runs product and engineering at Crunchy Data and has…
Meri Williams, one of the most inspiring engineering leaders in the world, joins us for a discussion on managers vs. leaders, coaching vs. mentoring, how leaders can advise team members from…
Jason and Eiso explore what motivates engineering leaders. They chat about how engineering value creation differs from other functions, what role ego plays as a motivating factor, engineering…
Charity Majors, co-founder, and CTO of honeycomb.io, joins us to talk about everything that's wrong with engineering cycles, how throwing money at the problem by hiring more people is making it…
Dana Lawson, SVP of Engineering at Netlify and the human incarnation of sunshine, joins us on the podcast to share her lessons on hiring engineers and the interview process. We also spoke about the…
Andrew Conner, Co-Founder and Engineering Leader at Levels, joins us to share his journey of leading an engineering team at a company with a strong hardware component. We spoke about building remote…
Katie Wilde, the VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs, joins us to spill the tea on Holacracy and decentralized management systems. Find out why these organizational structures don’t work for…
Co-Founder and CEO of Moov Financial, Wade Arnold, has had a hell of a journey as a software engineering leader. He joins us on the podcast to chat about building companies, attracting great software…
We welcome Jonathan Nolen, Senior VP of Engineering and Product at LaunchDarkly, to talk about his 100+ people Product Delivery team - a term coined by the company, where Engineering, Product, and…
Eiso and Jason step up to the mic to make their wild guess on how the state of software engineering will evolve, given what we know now. The tech industry will look a lot different in 20 and 30…
In an episode dedicated to what we think the next generation of engineering leaders should avoid, Jason and Eiso talk about the books every engineering leader reads, the over-glorification of 80’s…
Senior Director of Engineering at Datadog, Nuno Antunes, joins us to talk about a highly requested topic: Transitioning from Software Engineer to Engineering Leader. From striking the right balance…
Dagger Co-Founder, and Docker’s former VP of Engineering, Sam Alba, joins us for a retrospective on company culture and how early-stage teams should develop it as their companies evolve. As Dagger…
Erik Bernhardsson joins us on the podcast to chat about building engineering teams and the delicate balance between innovation and productivity as organizations grow. Erik has been scaling…
Community creator and engineering leader at Apple, Michael Lopp (aka rands), joins Jason and Eiso to chat about the power of storytelling for engineering and the state of content for engineering…
On our 10th episode of Developing Leadership, Eiso and Jason present a conversation dedicated to CEOs and everything they need to know about their engineering organization and leadership. From tech…
On this episode of Developing Leadership, Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale and previously VP of Engineering at GitHub, joins us to talk about building high-performance teams. We chatted about leading…
Jason and Eiso wrap up their three-part series on Engineering Leadership roles by taking a deep dive into engineering managers and tech leads. Learn how to hire your first engineering manager,…
Jason and Eiso continue their deep dive on different engineering leadership roles, sharing their thoughts on CTOs, VPs, and Managers, how to hire for these roles, and adopting organizational…
In this episode of Developing Leadership, we kick off our deep-dive series on different Engineering Leadership roles. Jason and Eiso discuss how CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and Engineering Managers…
Former GM of Snyk, Anton Drukh, recently became a mentor for VPs of Engineering and joined us on this week's episode to discuss his experiences leading a team split between two very different…
Neo4j just raised the biggest round in database history and their CEO, Emil Eifrem, joins us on the podcast to tell us about his experience transitioning from a day one CEO to running a company with…
Jason and Eiso share the frameworks that have helped them navigate big and small decisions through the years and look back at how key decision-making moments shaped how they operate as leaders today.…
How do we make sure that we are deliberate about the culture of our organization and not find ourselves pushing for outcomes without care of how we achieve them? Jason and Eiso go through the…
In the first episode of Developing Leadership, Eiso Kant and Jason Warner talk about how the roles and perceptions of engineers and engineering leaders have changed over the decades. From the…