How AI Turned a Designer Into a CTO

Ex-CIA Operator: Why America Is Losing The Cyber War

Ashley Vaughan spent years inside the CIA running cyber ops before realizing the tools meant to keep clandestine work invisible were leaving fingerprints all over the blockchain. Now she is building Numan, a stealth startup using AI and crypto rails to create private financial infrastructure for national security ops and anyone who needs money movement to stay quiet. She gets into polygraph interviews, why the agency treats disruptors like black sheep, and why space could be the next frontier. Click here to watch a video of this episode. [https://app.collide.io/content/1x8wmgF] Join the conversation shaping the future of energy. Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward. Apply today at collide.io [http://collide.io/] Click here to view the episode transcript. [https://share.transistor.fm/s/49fd5d3c/transcript] 0:00 What Ashley is building in stealth 1:20 Getting recruited into the CIA at 25 4:30 The leap of faith and the mission pull 6:40 The resume gap nobody can read 8:30 Why she left the agency 11:15 Disruptors as black sheep 14:35 Playing poker against China and Russia 15:55 Offense will always beat defense 17:15 Why crypto rails are leaking intelligence 19:25 Suitcases of cash do not work anymore 21:40 Introducing Numan 24:14 How the wallet works for operators 25:53 Building alongside the customer 28:55 Why government adoption is broken 33:41 Trading repeatability for security 38:43 Raising pre-seed and the road ahead 44:29 Why the agency looks nothing like TV 45:53 Skip a generation 46:17 China is playing the long game 49:53 Trust as the founder advantage 50:20 Silicon Valley discovers defense tech 52:15 Trying to land a one liner 54:22 Outpacing private sector copycats 55:19 What one ups Numan 57:03 Electromagnetic warfare and old oil rigs 59:31 Nobody planned for the digital attack 1:02:00 The most controversial position

Ex-JPM Trader: Why Expertise Is No Longer The Edge

Seven years trading at JP Morgan, a Fulbright scholarship to the US, and one circled line in a careers book at Warwick. Anekha Sokhal, Founder and Machine Learning Engineer at Moshi, walks through how she's building an AI-native analyst platform for energy and macro traders. We get into screen real estate wars on trading desks, why people lie about their workflows, building Toyotas instead of Ferraris, and what it actually takes to leave a dream job to chase a harder one. Click here to watch a video of this episode. [https://app.collide.io/content/4FWDRaw] Join the conversation shaping the future of energy. Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward. Apply today at collide.io [http://collide.io/] Click here to view the episode transcript. [https://share.transistor.fm/s/4f8ae41f/transcript] 00:00 - Screen real estate and the death of the application 04:00 - Building Moshi after eight years of trading 08:00 - Tribal knowledge, generational gaps, and AI FOMO 12:30 - A statistical edge in a zero-sum industry 17:30 - Toyotas vs Ferraris and learning to fail fast 23:30 - Team culture at startup speed 27:00 - Solo founding and always selling 33:30 - From a careers book at Warwick to JP Morgan 37:00 - Leaving the dream job for a Fulbright to Rice 43:30 - Prioritization and listening without taking it personally 49:30 - The hard moments and finding conviction

How AI Turned a Designer Into a CTO

Going from designer to CTO sounds like an impossible career pivot, but Kyle Ledbetter, Co-Founder and CTO of Dreambase, walks through how AI handed him the permission slip he didn't know he needed. We get into building a Dream Team of data agents on top of Supabase, why dashboards are just the Trojan horse, agent orchestration, the case for CLI as the default interface, and the slightly terrifying moment his wife's AI generated Instagram feed knew her better than he did. Click here to watch a video of this episode. [https://app.collide.io/content/bHQxRfS] Join the conversation shaping the future of energy. Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward. Apply today at collide.io [http://collide.io/] Click here to view the episode transcript. [https://share.transistor.fm/s/1b59cad8/transcript] 00:00 From designer to CTO 04:30 The co-founder unlock and imposter syndrome 07:30 Rethinking team design with AI 10:00 Mini CEOs and agents as employees 12:00 The Dream Team of data agents 15:00 Why Dream Base sits on Supabase 18:30 Why can't Claude just build this 21:00 Specialization beats generalists 25:00 MCP apps and email as UI 30:30 Critical thinking for the next generation 37:30 What keeps Kyle up at night 42:00 Faster horse vs building a car 45:00 Legacy industries adopting AI 48:00 What comes after dashboards 50:30 The rise of the CLI 54:00 When the algorithm knows you better than your spouse 58:00 What Dream Base really is

Why This AI Startup Doesn't Use AI For Math

Hunter Honnessy, CTO and Co-Founder at Unlimited.ai, gets into what defensibility actually looks like when anyone can vibe code a SaaS over a weekend. Conversation runs through building moats with data plus intelligence layers, why finance software doesn't have to suck, forward deployed engineering, where vibe coding leaves junior devs, a grounded take on AI fear mongering, and why 2026 is the year agentic workflows stop being primitive. Click here to watch a video of this episode. [https://app.collide.io/content/cXt1GHQ] Join the conversation shaping the future of energy. Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward. Apply today at collide.io [http://collide.io/] Click here to view the episode transcript. [https://share.transistor.fm/s/891cc9d4/transcript] 0:00:00 Defensibility in an AI-native world 0:04:00 User delight and the wow factor as a moat 0:07:00 Who Unlimited serves and finance's legacy problem 0:11:00 Why business-minded CTOs ship faster 0:15:00 Monthly releases and cutting prototypes to hours 0:21:00 Forward deployed engineering and what keeps Hunter up at night 0:26:00 Vibe coding and the future of junior engineers 0:33:00 Painkillers vs vitamins and how Unlimited came together 0:39:00 Hiring cracked engineers and the Jim Simons lesson 0:45:00 AI as augmentation, not replacement 0:46:30 2026 as the year of agentic workflows 0:52:45 What's next for Hunter and Unlimited 0:57:00 AI fear mongering vs the good news nobody reports https://twitter.com/collide_ai https://www.tiktok.com/@collide.io https://www.facebook.com/collide.io https://www.instagram.com/collide.io https://www.youtube.com/@collide_io https://bsky.app/profile/collide-ai.bsky.social https://www.linkedin.com/company/collideai

How AI Cut Hiring From 42 Days To An Afternoon

Alex Gras sits down with Gustavo Herrera, Founder and CTO of Knowme Global, to talk through why recruiting still sucks and how AI might actually fix it by doing the one thing everyone avoids, sitting down and talking to people for two hours. Gustavo breaks down why LLMs are just glorified averaging, how he picked Llama Index over LangChain by keeping it simple, and why the industry's obsession with automation is backwards when the hardest part is capturing who someone actually is. They dig into prompt versus context engineering, why philosophy matters more than people think, and how AI is forcing everyone back to the most human things we do. Click here to watch a video of this episode. [https://app.collide.io/content/cS8mvnC] Join the conversation shaping the future of energy. Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward. Apply today at collide.io [http://collide.io/] Click here to view the episode transcript. [https://share.transistor.fm/s/45b14e89/transcript] 0:00 - Why Gustavo went back to school to learn AI for recruiting 4:30 - Choosing tech stacks and avoiding bleeding edge tools 9:15 - How Knowme ingests long-format interviews to build candidate profiles 14:45 - Prompt engineering versus context engineering 19:00 - Why LLMs will never be truly intelligent 24:20 - Philosophy's role in shaping AI and society 30:45 - How employers don't actually know what they want 36:15 - Speeding up the 42-day hiring process with AI interviews 42:00 - Why Knowme does the unscalable thing nobody wants to do 47:30 - Preventing AI from embellishing candidate answers 54:10 - Training interviewers to strike the right conversational tone 58:45 - When to use deterministic solutions versus agentic AI 1:01:40 - AI bringing us back to our humanity https://twitter.com/collide_io https://www.tiktok.com/@collide.io https://www.facebook.com/collide.io https://www.instagram.com/collide.io https://www.youtube.com/@collide_io https://bsky.app/profile/digitalwildcatters.bsky.social https://www.linkedin.com/company/collide-digital-wildcatters