The Infra Pod
Episodes
Building a successful infra product between all the AI apps and model providers (chat with Louis from OpenRouter)
09 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) interviewed Louis Vichy, co-founder of OpenRouter, about why he built OpenRouter to de-risk AI app development (end...
From 30 Seconds to 20ms: Solving Browser Speed for AI Agents (Chat with Catherine from Kernel)
23 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim Chen (Essence VC) and Ian Livingstone (Keycard) sat down with Catherine Jue, co-founder and CEO of Kernel,...
Coding agents need infra to apply code changes! (Chat with Tejas from Morph)
09 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) sat down with Tejas Bhakta (CEO of Morph) to chat about building infrastructure for the fastest file edit APIs for ...
Let's chat about vibe coding & Ralph! (Chat with Dexter at Humanlayer)
26 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim and Ian sit down with Dexter Horthy, CEO of Human Layer, to explore the evolution of AI coding agents and ...
Building a bug-free vibe coding world (Chat with Akshay from Antithesis)
12 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Infra Pod, hosts Ian Livingston (Keycard) and Tim Chen (Essence VC) interviewed the Field CTO Akshay Shah of Antithesis, diving...
Infra Pod 2025: Our Favorite Moments, Hottest Takes, and What’s Next
29 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Join Tim from Essence VC and Ian Livingston from Keycard for the year-end 2025 recap of Infra Pod! In this special episode, Tim and Ian reflect on the...
From Spark to Eventual: Reinventing Data for the AI Era (Chat with Sammy from Eventual)
15 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim from Essence VC and co-host Ian Livingston (Keycard) interviewed Sammy Sdu, CEO of Eventual, a multimodal ...
Render is defining what taste means in backend infra (Chat with Anurag from Render)
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim and Ian are joined by Anurag, CEO of Render, to discuss the journey of building a modern cloud platform fr...
Bazel and the Next Wave of AI Developer Infrastructure (Chat with Alex Eagle from Aspect Build)
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to Episode 53 of The Infra Pod! Hosts Tim from Essence and Ian from Keycard are joined by special guest Alex Eagle, CEO and co-founder of Aspe...
The AI Analyst is coming to change Data Teams (Chat with Lucas from Gravity)
06 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Infra Pod, hosts Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (CEO of Keycard) sat down with Lucas Thelosen, founder of Gravity and former head of ...
The next cloud to overtake AWS are AI sandboxes?! (Chat with Ivan from Daytona)
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Join host Tim Chen (Essence VC) and Ian Livingston (Keycard.sh) as they sat down with Ivan Burazin, CEO and co-founder of Daytona to explore the cutti...
Future of File Storage for AI (Chat with Hunter, CEO of Archill)
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ian (Keycard) and Tim Essence VC) engage in an insightful discussion with Hunter Leath, CEO of Archil. The episode delves into the motivations behind ...
Turning Gaming PCs to Serverless CI for AI! (Chat with Aditya from Blacksmith)
25 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) sat down with Aditya, CEO of Blacksmith, to explore the inception and innovative approach of Blacksmith in the CI/C...
Building the Future of AI with Long-term Memory (Chat with Charles from Letta)
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Infra Pod, Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard.sh) delve into the fascinating world of AI memory with Charles, the CEO and co-fou...
The bet on Postgres to be the backbone to run reliable services (Chat with Jeremy and Qian from DBOS)
28 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Infra Pod, Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) hosted DBOS building a reliable backend service, with guests including CEO Jeremy...
Next-Gen Data Processing with Incremental Query Engines (Chat with Gilad from Epsio)
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Join Tim from Essence VC and Ian from Keycard as they sit down with Gilad Kleinman (CEO of Epsio), to explore the next generation incremental query en...
Going from integrating SaaS to merging them through AI! Chat with Gil from Merge.dev
30 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Infra Pod, hosts Tim from Essence VC and Ian from Keycard, are joined by Gil, CTO and co-founder of Merge.dev. They discuss the...
How is AI changing the security in modern fintech? Chat with Branden (Head of Infosec) from Mercury
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Infra Pod, Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) are joined by Branden Wagner, Head of Information Security at Mercury. They delve...
Helping enterprises to adopt AI the real way - Chat with Hamel Hussain
03 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim host a conversation with Hamel Husain, an AI influencer and consultant who has worked with major tech companies like GitHub and Airbnb. Th...
Owning both software and hardware to run the best cloud for deployment - Chat with Jake from Railway
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Infra Pod, Tim and Ian sit down with Jake, CEO of Railway, to explore how Railway is reinventing cloud deployment. Jake shares ...
The Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) tide is coming! Chat with Jon from Nuon
05 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Tim from Essence and Ian dive deep into why Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is now getting hot with special guest Jon Morehouse, CEO of Nuon. The discussi...
AI needs a browser infra! Chat with Paul from Browserbase
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Infra Pod, Tim from Essence and Ian Livingston host Paul Klein, CEO of Browser Base, to discuss the intricacies and future of b...
Building a serverless full-text + vector search on S3! Chat with Simon from Turbopuffer
07 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Infra Pod, Ian and Tim chat with Simon, the CEO of Turbopuffer, about his journey from working at Shopify to building the fastest v...
Infra to talk to your AI in real-time (Chat with Russ from Livekit)
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this engaging episode of the Infra Pod, Tim and Ian dives deep into the world of real-time audio and video infrastructure with Russ D'sa, CEO o...
AI agents is on the rise with the crew! Chat with Joao (CEO of Crew AI)
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Infra Pod, hosts Tim Chen and Ian Livingston welcome Joao, CEO and founder of Crew AI. The discussion dives deep into the world...
What is Platform Engineering? Chat with Ian Nowland
24 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Infrapod, Tim and Ian sat down with Ian Nowland (ex-SVP of Datadog, co-author of Platform Engineering book), a platform enginee...
The Materialized View infra influencer is back again! Chat with Chris Riccomini
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of 'The Infra Pod,' Tim and Ian delve into a deep, insightful conversation with a special guest, Chris Chris Riccomini. As a...
How to invest in infrastructure companies since inception stage? Chat with Elliot at Boldstart VC
27 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Infra Pod, Tim and Ian are joined by guest Elliot Durbin, General Partner at Bold Start Ventures. They dive deep into the world...
Why do we need a cloud native data lake for geospatial data? Chat with cofounders of Earthmover (Ryan and Joe)
13 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Future of Data in Climate and Earth Sciences In this episode of The Infra Pod, Tim and Ian sat down with the cofounders of Earthmover Ryan and Joe to...
Let's review our favorite infra hot takes in 2024!
31 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim this time around sat down and talk about their learnings interviewing the great guests we had on this podcast, and picked our favorite mom...
Navigating the Future of API Development with AI! Chat with Speakeasy CEO Sagar Batchu
30 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of The Infra Pod, Tim and Ian sat down with with Sagar Batchu (CEO of Speakeasy) about APIs and software development. Sagar shares his...
Code refactoring is more than a AI problem! Chat with Jonathan at Moderne
16 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Jonathan Schneider, CEO of Moderne, about large-scale source code refactoring and the journey of starting a company focused ...
Big Announcement! We are now called ....
02 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
You probably already notice our name has changed if you get this episode! Listen to Tim and Ian talk about how we started this podcast, why we change...
AI native development is more than just using copilots! Chat with Guy Podjarny (CEO of Tessl)
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Guy Podjarny (CEO of Tessl, ex-CEO of Snyk) to talk about his new journey to build Tessl, that's aiming to build a fundament...
Will AI agents automate security in the enterprise? Chat with Mukund (Senior Director of Product Security at Chime)
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Mukund (Senior Director of Product Security at Chime) to talk about his history to building security teams and projects, and...
How Github grew from 0 to millions of developers, and now bringing that to Devops! (Chat with Ted, ex-CTO of Github)
14 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Ted Nyman (ex-CTO of Github, CEO of Cased) to chat about how it feels like to be part of the early days of Github, how did i...
Incubating Infrastructure at Scale (Chat with Dane at Cloudflare)
19 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Dane (SVP of Emerging Tech and Incubation at Cloudflare) to chat about Cloudflare's journey of incubating emerging infra...
Security is moving to the frontend?! Chat with David at Arcjet
05 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with David (founder of Arcjet and Console.dev), where David is building a new company that's bringing security to the fronten...
Will HTAP database eat both OLAP & OLTP? Chat with Moritz & Christian at CedarDB
22 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with the cofounders of CedarDB (https://cedardb.com/) that's building a all-in-one database that merges both OLAP and OLTP in...
Why do we need a functional package manager like Nix? Chat with Ron at Flox
08 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Ron (CEO of Flox, Nix foundation chair) to talk about the origins of Nix (functional package manager for Unix-like systems) ...
Quantum is breaking security soon?! Chat with Michele from EvolutionQ
10 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Michele (CEO of EvolutionQ, founder of Institute for Quantum Computing) that has been building quantum safe security product...
English is the default programming language via GPTScript! Chat with Darren from Acron
13 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Darren who is the cofounder of Acorn Labs that's building open source infrastructure to build AI applications. We chatte...
Infrastructure cost will change how company runs in the future! Chat with Damon from Millwork Analytics
29 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Damon Fletcher (CEO of Millwork Analytics), after running as a CFO at DataRobot and Tableau for many years, decided to start...
A new S3 is coming, for every data system to be built on S3! Chat with Ovais from Tigris Data
15 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Ovais Tariq from Tigris Data, that's building a new S3 that's globally distributed by default, etc. Listen in if yo...
Vector databases is not a feature? Let's dive deeper with Chang
01 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Chang She from LanceDB to talk about what's happening on the vector db world, and how Lance started from a file format i...
Databases are becoming commodity, what's next? Chat with Chris from Materialized View
19 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Chris Riccomini (ex-Distinguished eng at Wepay, co-creator of Apache Samza) to talk about the spicy takes he has been sharin...
Billing is a infrastructure problem, and it's shifting fast! Chat with Alvaro from Orb
30 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Alvaro (CEO of Orb) about how he dived into the Billing problem as a engineer, and now building a company Orb that's pow...
Infra Reflection on 2023 with Tim and Ian!
08 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Tim and Ian sat down to talk about what we learned in 2023 and our reflection on Infrastructure companies and projects as a whole! Come sit down and ...
Rust is for big data! Chat with Andy Grove
18 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Andy Grove (creator Datafusion, Apache Arrow PMC chair) to talk about his original mission to build the Big Data ecosystem i...
Modal is upping the game for serverless! Chat with Erik
04 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Erik (CEO of Modal Labs) that's gaining wide adoption of the serverless platform built for data teams. Come sit down a...
Let's stop prompting and start programming... Chat with Omar about DSPy
06 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim sat down with Omar Khattab about the research project DSPy, that's changing how users interact with LLMs from creating prompts to have...
Are all future data infra products will be built on Cloud storage? Chat with Warpstream
23 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim invited the cofounders of Warpstream (Serverless Kafka built on S3) to talk about the tradeoffs of building a new Streaming product that i...
What happens when LLMs have a API App store? Let's chat Gorilla and beyond!
09 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and Tim are back to interview another YAIGer Shishir G. Patil, who is a PhD at Berkeley that worked on the popular LLM research + project Gorilla,...
Security problems are.... infra problems! Chat w/ Mike Malone from Smallstep
04 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ian (Snyk) and Tim (Essence VC) sat down with Mike (CEO of Smallstep) to talk about how software security will change, as we see more security problem...
When will AI take over developers? Debate with Guido Appenzeller
21 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
YAIG Maxis Ian Livingstone (Snyk) and Timothy Chen (Essence VC) are back this time with another maxi Guido Appenzeller (ex-VMWare & Intel Group CT...
Transactions don't belong to databases anymore, let's discuss the Modern Tx Stack (w/ Yoko from A16z + Tony from Inngest)
31 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Transactions is what makes critical applications with state works in production, and it has been decades of research and iterations of having develope...
How will the world run on GPUs? (w/ Stephen Balaban from Lambda Labs)
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ian and I sat down with Stephen Balaban (CEO / founder from Lambda labs), to talk about how Stephen started Lambda Labs inspired by Japanese Anime, in...
Let's learn how to survive in the Modern Data Stack in 2023... Chat with Josh Wills (ex-Slack)
03 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Modern Data Stack swept in the industry last few years, and even though it's still in the buzz, it seems more daunting than empowering. Ian ...
Ditch the cloud for bare metal in 2023? Chat with Zach (Equinix, ex-Packet)
20 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
2023 is when the cloud should have 100% adoption right? However, we're seeing a surge of embracing your own bare metal in 2023 from companies all ...
State of WASM beyond the browser with Steve at Dylibso
05 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
WebAsseembly (WASM) is growing immensely now beyond the browser, and now everyone is talking about how / when the adoption will happen everywhere else...
Is frontend eating the whole stack? Chat with Kurt (Fly.io), Jack (Amplitude) and David (Stately)
23 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is backend dead? Is front-end eating the whole stack? Ian and Tim invited several YAIGers to discuss about how front end and back end is changing, w...