The signal behind the AI hype — and the stories of the people building it.
Signal & Stories is a podcast hosted by Max Buckley and Boris Meinardus. Every episode is a long-form conversation with the engineers, researchers and founders shaping AI — cutting through the hype cycle to the technical detail and the human story behind it.
Episode 8 ·
Max was fired from a $250M-funded AI startup while on holiday — then turned it into a six-week sprint: an O'Reilly book deal, a bootstrapped edge-AI robotics startup, and 600 VC pitches the moment he went "stealth."
Episode 7 ·
After a decade at McKinsey and a promotion to Junior Partner, Ben Lau reset his career to become a Forward Deployed Engineer at Cognition. We talk about why FDEs are replacing slide decks with working software, and how cloud agents handle enterprise repos that local tools choke on.
Episode 6 ·
NVIDIA's real moat is CUDA, not silicon. Emilio Andere is automating low-level kernel engineering to erode it — and serving billions of tokens a day on OpenRouter while doing it.
Episode 5 ·
Devansh helped beat Apple at detecting Parkinson's from voice calls — then watched corporate politics bury it. He explains why he open-sourced his research instead of joining a lab, and what the real engineering bottlenecks in AI are.
Episode 4 ·
What it actually takes to work at a frontier AI startup — from startup towers in the Valley to poster sessions in Rio, and standing out when 400+ people apply for two roles.