The Founder`s Code

An AI agent hit an authentication error it couldn't get past. So it deleted the company's entire source code. Then the backup repo. Nine minutes, start to finish. "That should keep CISOs up at night."

On The AI Floor, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Jack Nelson, Chief Information Security Officer at Ivanti, for a ground-level look at what agentic AI is actually doing to enterprise security. Jack came to the CISO seat by an unusual ...

On The AI Floor, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Jasmine Singh, General Counsel at Ironclad, for a hype-free look at what AI is really doing to legal work. Most people in legal either build these tools or buy them. She does both: she helps shape the platform, then runs her own company's contracts on it.

Before Ironclad she was a litigator in San Francisco big law, led global commercial at Pinterest, was Deputy GC at Patreon, and to...

"People assume any AI launch is a rocket. It looks more like a kitchen remodel, with inspectors watching behind you." Mounika Paruchuri sets AI strategy inside a regulated US bank, so she has a very grounded view of what enterprise AI actually takes.

On The AI Floor, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Mounika Paruchuri, Senior Director of AI and Emerging Technology Transformations at Best Egg (now Barclays Bank US), for a hype-free lo...

"If you've got nonsense coming into a system, you've got nonsense coming out of it, no matter how powerful the system is." Domenico Cipolla runs an ERP that powers 1,800+ companies, and he's putting AI agents inside it - so he has a very grounded view of what enterprise AI actually does.

On The AI Floor, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Domenico Cipolla, co-CEO of Xentral, the German cloud ERP backed by Sequoia and Tiger Global, for...

On The AI Floor, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Sören Petsch, Senior Director of Procurement at Root Insurance, for a ground-level look at what AI agents actually do inside a finance org today - the ones already in production, the receipts, and the 80-90% of procurement work that is pure administrative tedium.

Sören has spent 15 years in procurement across software, retail banking and insurance. He's implemented workflow automatio...

On The AI Floor, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Stan Hansen, COO of Egnyte, for an honest, ground-level look at why "under-promise, over-deliver" beats the hype - and how a data-infrastructure company serving 23,000 customers turned AI into roughly a third of its new business.Before Egnyte, Stan spent two decades leading teams at Adobe, Domo, Pluralsight (which he helped take public) and Wells Fargo - running organizations of mor...

A law firm charged Xavier £15,000 for half a page of legal advice. He ran the exact same question through an AI tool, got the same answer in two minutes – then negotiated the bill down to £2,000.

Xavier is General Counsel at OneAdvanced, and instead of treating AI as a threat, he turned his 30-person legal team into an AI lab: he declared an "AI adoption month," ran a two-day "legathon," and shipped 15+ AI agents in 10 days. T...

What does it actually take to keep up with AI - not the keynote hype, but the real, ground-level version?

To open Season 2 of The AI Floor, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Larry Jin, VP of Product at Docusign, for an honest look at how one of the world's most trusted software brands is reinventing itself around AI and AI agents - and the thinking that makes a shift like that possible in the first place.

Before Docusign, Larry helped...

Most founders are drowning in noise. New AI tools every week. New frameworks every month. New "must-do" advice every scroll. Sebastian Haas built a filter that ignores almost all of it - and it's how he scaled Talon.One to 300 people across 55 nationalities, powering loyalty for Adidas, Sephora, KFC, Nordstrom and Joe & The Juice.

In this episode, Shamil sits down with Sebastian to unpack the way he actually thinks. Not the foun...

He quit his job at a multi-billion dollar company with nothing but a half-formed idea, zero technical knowledge, and a conviction that privacy would matter. For almost a year, Bart Vandekerckhove tried to sell a product that didn't exist - without a CTO, without a prototype, and without anyone taking him seriously.

Then he built Raito into a real company and sold it back to the very place he left.

In this episode:

- Why Bart resigned ...

She went from ops analyst to COO — without an MBA, without a safety net, and while her mom was going through cancer treatment.

Maria Camila Ramirez is the Chief Operating Officer of OnTop — a YC-backed global payroll and fintech platform that helps companies hire and pay people anywhere in the world. In just a few years, she grew from founding team member to leading the company's financial infrastructure, AI transformati...

How does a family's total financial loss inspire a multi-million dollar crypto ecosystem? In this episode, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Cyrus Fazel, founder and CEO of SwissBorg.

Cyrus shares his incredible journey from growing up in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution to spending eight years in hedge funds , and eventually raising $52 million through one of the biggest community-driven ICOs in crypto history.

We dive deep i...

Software development as we know it is evolving. In this episode of The Founder's Code, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Albert Santalo — a computer scientist, serial internet entrepreneur, and CEO of Archie Labs.

Albert breaks down why simply adding AI to old coding processes is like putting an electric battery in a combustion engine, and why we need a complete reimagining of how software is built. We dive deep into the rise o...

In this episode of Founder’s Code, James Hirst — the co-founder and COO of tyke.io. James shares his unconventional journey of being a university dropout with no technical background who went on to help build a global API management platform used by some of the world's biggest institutions.We discuss why chasing VC funding headlines often leads to catastrophic business decisions , why corporate "hybrid" work turns remot...

Everyone is waiting for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to arrive, but what if the entire narrative is a massive delusion?

In this episode of Founder’s Code, we sit down with Luke Hinds, creator of Sigstore (the cybersecurity tech used by Google and GitHub) and CEO of Always Further. Luke drops some hard truths that shatter the mainstream AI hype, explaining why AGI is fundamentally misunderstood and why fully autonomous...

In this episode of Founder's Code, Mike Piccolo — founder of Motia Dev, talks about the uncomfortable shift most founders are ignoring.

He went from sweeping construction sites to orchestrating AI for enterprise. He lived through the framework wars. He knows that "learning to code" isn't the safety net it used to be.

This conversation isn’t about AI hype or the latest tools.

It’s about what happens when the cost of b...

In this episode, we sit down with Clara Bernardes, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Biorce. Clara and her team are on a mission to implode the pharmaceutical industry from the inside out by cutting the time it takes to bring life-saving drugs to market in half.We dive deep into the Founder’s Code: from the heartbreaking personal tragedy that served as the company’s "Patient Zero" to the controversial ethics of...

In this episode of The Founder’s Code, Shamil Malachiyev sits down with Patrick Smith, a serial entrepreneur who faced 11 failed ventures before the age of 25. Today, Patrick is the founder of Zally, an applied AI research lab that is revolutionizing digital security by turning human behavior into "digital body language" for continuous authentication.

Patrick shares his incredible journey from scaling a DJ business to 1,000 jo...

In this episode of Founder's Code, Janus Klack-Matysen, Co-Founder & CDO of Pixelz, breaks down what actually happens when AI enters the core of your business — not as a tool, but as a direct competitor. Pixelz operates in a category many believed AI would wipe out first.Instead of fighting it, they rebuilt their model so AI became a multiplier, not a replacement.In this conversation, we cover:– Why some AI campaign...