Jerry Zhang: Your AI Agents Are Silently Failing. Here's How to Fix That. | Ep 1316
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What is Lemma and why does it matter for AI agents?
Welcome to Corizont Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in Emergent Tech, working on something innovative, maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corizant.com forward slash brand. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Jerry Zhang. Lemma is a production monitoring and observability platform for AI agents. Founded by Jerry Zhang and Cole Gowen, who met as freshmen in USC's Startup Incubator, Lemma helps engineering teams uncover hidden semantic failures, diagnose root causes across thousands of traces, and deploy automated fixes, enabling AI agents to continuously improve from real-world usage. Instead of silently degrading. To learn more, visit www.uselemma.ai.
Well, good afternoon, Jerry. Welcome to the show. Hey Brian, how are you doing? Thanks for having me. Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. You're hailing out of San Francisco, the Bay Area. I'm in Kansas City. Two-hour difference, but I know it takes a lot of work to get the calendars to sync and time zones. So I really appreciate you. And Jerry, if you don't mind, I'm going to jump right into your first question. You and Cole. Met as freshman at USC Startup Incubator and then went out to work on AI systems at separate AI native startups. Cole was building agents at health in healthcare at tandem. And then you were working on chip design agents at Chipstack before you guys reunited back together and and found Le Lemma.
How did you get to know each other and start this workout as co-founders?
How did Jerry Zhang and Cole Gowen’s college friendship lead to Lemma?
Yeah, we'll love to answer that question. First of all, Brian, thank you so much for having me on the podcast today. I can clearly tell you did your research and then looked into exactly what how me and Cole met. It's just like you mentioned, both me and Cole were co-founders. Originally we've been best friends since freshman year, right? So one of the first times we actually met each other was in the dorms, just casually hanging out and stuff like that. And then one of the first places where we first started getting close was this on campus incubator called SCP. And then later we worked in Lava as well and a bunch of these different college clubs where we were super interested in entrepreneurship and just building a bunch of really cool projects together.
And one of the first projects that we actually worked on was this company called Clinic Code, which was like an AI healthcare company that was doing a lot of the medical coding and building automations and things like that. So both me and Cole were really passionate about sort of building our own things, taking things from zero to one. And that's one of the first instances where we realized that we actually worked really well together. Right. I think what makes me and Cole really special about being co-founders is the fact that I'm personally really passionate about talking to people, getting to know a bunch of different people. But on the other side, like Cole is so deeply technical and an expert in what he does and a lot of the research and the more technical side of things that we really make a great co-founder.
pick, right? So I think it was really that first experience working together on a real company, especially solving a problem that we were really passionate about in healthcare, that made us realize that we were so passionate about working together and working on startups and building something together. Then as we were working on the project, it kind of began to lose steam because we were doing school and then also the startup that we were working on at the same time. And then we were also just freshmen at college, right? So we wanted to gain a little bit more experience before we kind of like worked on our next endeavor or focused on anything else. So we each went off to like sort of build our own expertise in some different area.
But then we somehow ended up coming back and converging. So I was working as a software engineer at this company called Chipstack, where we were doing AI agents for chip design that ended up getting acquired by Cadence.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Lemma and why does it matter for AI agents?
0:08–1:48
2
How did Jerry Zhang and Cole Gowen’s college friendship lead to Lemma?
1:48–4:08
3
What specific internship pain turned into the first Lemma prototype?
4:08–5:57
4
Why is closing the detection‑to‑fix loop critical for engineers?
5:57–7:44
5
How does Lemma surface silent failures that traditional monitoring misses?
7:44–9:58
6
What did early customers dislike about Lemma’s first version and how was it fixed?
9:58–12:11
7
How can AI agents become self‑improving rather than silently degrading?
12:11–14:23
8
What does a world of continuously learning agents look like in five years?
14:23–16:22
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Digital Executive
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