Every episode of Signal & Stories about startups.
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 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 2 ·
Nicolay Gerold on building Amp — the "Porsche of coding agents" — and the still-unsolved problem of when an agent is safe to push straight to production.