Every episode of Signal & Stories about careers.
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 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.
Episode 3 ·
Max's last day at Google after 12 years and ten roles. Why being a top contributor won't save your career, and the high-agency playbook for owning your trajectory.
Episode 1 ·
The first episode: how to engineer luck in AI, why chasing top labs is a trap for new grads, and the framework Max and Boris used to land roles at Google and frontier startups.