Notable Perspectives

What if the future of cloud security isn't about seeing more threats — but stopping them before they ever happen?In this episode of Notable Perspectives, Oren Yunger sits down with Jonathan Langer, co-founder of Act Security — the cloud security company rethinking cloud defense from the ground up. This isn't Jonathan's first rodeo: he and his co-founders previously built and sold their last company for $400 million, then helped scale the acquirer past $100 million in revenue. Now they're back to the hardest thing in startups — 0 to 1 — betting that the era of dashboards, alerts, and endless findings is over, and that security's next chapter is about action, not visibility.Join us as we explore:Visibility Isn't Enough: Why reports, dashboards, and an endless stream of findings no longer cut it — and what "action-oriented" cloud security actually means when you close the loop instead of just surfacing the problem.The Reviewer, Not the Creator: How AI and automation reshape the security professional's job — from hand-writing policies and firewall rules to authorizing and overseeing — and why humans stay in the loop for trust.Confidence Boosters: How a second-time founding team earns the trust of large enterprises to let software enforce security automatically — through simulations, rollbacks, and having already been in the trenches.Sign up for our newsletter, Worth Noting: https://newsletter.notablecap.com/Follow Notable Capital: X: @notablecap LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

What if the biggest barrier to AI transformation isn’t the technology — but convincing people that AI will improve their work, not replace them?In this episode of Notable Perspectives, Christina Pasanen sits down with Kate Barney, Chief People Officer at Smartly — the AI-powered advertising platform that manages over $6 billion in ad spend for 800+ brands including Samsung, Spotify, and Uber. Before Smartly, Kate scaled TikTok's Global Business Solutions workforce from 35 to 8,000 employees in just three years. She's seen what it takes to build at hyperspeed — and now she's rethinking the entire people function for the AI era, from replacing HR ops with an AI agent to running company-wide AI Fridays and Tiger Teams.Join us as we explore:The Tiger Team Playbook: How Smartly built a cross-functional AI strike force that runs Shark Tanks, trains the company, and builds internal tools — without hiring a single external consultant.HR Product, Not HR Ops: Why Smartly replaced a traditional HR operations leader with a product thinker tasked with building an HR agent — and what that means for every people team.The Five-Year-Old Rule: Why cutting entry-level hiring to save money today creates a talent crisis tomorrow — and why new grads might be your best AI hires.Follow Notable Capital: X: @notablecap LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

What does it take to build a company culture where AI doesn't replace human connection — it deepens it?In this episode of Notable Perspectives, Jen Holmstrom and Christina Pasanen sit down with Steven Wang, founder and CEO of Dub — the first regulated copy-trading platform in the U.S., on a mission to make investing more accessible by letting users learn from and follow real, proven portfolios. With over 1.5 million downloads, Dub is reshaping how everyday investors engage with the markets through transparency and alignment.Steven dropped out of Harvard at 19 after selling a VR company and working at Apple to start Dub. Now backed by $47 million from Notable Capital, Neo, and investors including Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Robinhood co-founder Nathan Rodland, he’s building a team where AI adoption isn’t a perk — it’s the baseline.Join us as we explore:The 80/20 Flip: Why AI has eliminated 80% of the grunt work — and how every new hire at Dub is now evaluated entirely on the 20% that's uniquely human.Expect First, Inspect After: How a first-time founder went from micromanaging like a tiger parent to building a trust-first culture — and why it changed everything.The Extraction Playbook: From banning AI in interviews to taking candidates out for drinks, the unconventional hiring process behind one of fintech's fastest-growing teams.Follow Notable Capital: X: @notablecap LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

If you're thinking about the counteroffer only after you've made the offer, you've already lost.In this episode of Notable Perspectives, Jen Holmstrom and Christina Pasanen sit down with Matt Jahansouz, Chief People Officer of Quince. Quince has crossed $1 billion in revenue and a $10.1 billion valuation by rethinking the end-to-end consumer and e-commerce model — selling $50 cashmere sweaters and premium bedding by cutting out middlemen entirely. Matt brings the people leadership playbook behind that growth: how to close elite talent in a bidding war, why workforce planning past 90 days is largely wasted time, and what it actually means to build a team for an AI-driven world.Join us as we explore:Building an AI-first culture: How Quince has woven AI practice into its weekly all-hands — and why the earliest movers will have a compounding advantage.The closing playbook: Why getting someone to accept an offer is only the beginning, and how to get ahead of the counteroffer before you've even made the original one.Lean team advantage: Why top performers actually seek out leaner organizations — and how leaders can make that a recruiting asset rather than a liability.Workforce planning in flux: Why 90-day forecasting horizons have replaced three-year plans, and how ruthless prioritization is the only thing that makes it work.Follow Notable Capital: X: @notablecap LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

What happens when we start talking to machines like we talk to each other?In this episode of Notable Perspectives, Chelcie Taylor sits down with Kwindla Hultman Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Daily. A decade-long bet on real-time audio and video infrastructure, Daily quietly built the plumbing that powers telehealth, education, and enterprise communication. Then GPT-4 arrived — and Daily’s infrastructure became the backbone of the voice AI revolution. Their open-source framework Pipecat is now the most widely used toolkit for building production voice agents, from customer support bots to robotics systems. Backed by $60M+ in funding from investors including Renegade Partners and Lachy Groom, Daily sits at the exact intersection of real-time infrastructure and the AI agent explosion.Join us as we explore:The Lightbulb Moment: How GPT-4 turned a video infrastructure company into the backbone of the voice AI revolution — and why Kwindla saw it before everyone else.Healthcare’s Surprise Adoption: Why the most regulated industry in the world became the fastest adopter of voice AI — and what that signals about every other vertical.Agents Are Just Loops: The engineering reality behind the AI agent hype — and why the hard problems in voice taught Daily lessons the rest of the industry is just now learning.Produced by Breaking Glass Studio.Follow Notable Capital: X: @notablecap LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

How do we secure and manage a rapidly multiplying swarm of AI agents in an enterprise world?In this episode of Notable Perspectives, Glenn Solomon and Oren Yunger sit down with Slavik Markovich and Rishi Bhargava, co-founders of Descope. Former security innovators behind DeMisto (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Slavik and Rishi are now tackling one of the most pressing challenges in modern tech: identity, access, and trust in a world where AI agents act autonomously and unpredictably.Join us as we explore:The Chaos Problem: How AI agents multiply risk across enterprise systems, creating backdoors, misconfigurations, and new attack surfaces.Trust at Scale: Building infrastructure and granular controls to keep AI behavior predictable — and keeping enterprises safe in the process.The Identity Revolution: Why managing agent identities, permissions, and audit trails is now critical to surviving the AI explosion.Follow Notable Capital: X: @notablecap LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

How did a career platform become a nearly $1B AI business?In this episode of Notable Perspectives, Jeff Richards sits down with Garrett Lord, the co-founder and CEO of Handshake — the career network connecting 22 million young professionals to every Fortune 500 company and powering 92% of higher education in America. Garrett left Palantir with a contrarian conviction borrowed from Peter Thiel: that access to opportunity shouldn't depend on which school you attended or who your parents knew. A decade later, that conviction has produced something nobody saw coming — an AI business that went from zero to a nearly $1B run rate less than 18 months, built on the counterintuitive principle that matching people to careers demands more human judgment, not less.Join us as we explore:The Zero-to-$500M Sprint: How Handshake's AI business exploded from nothing to a $500M+ run rate in eight months — and what Fortune 500 companies were desperate for that made the opportunity impossible to ignore.Why AI Needs Humans More: The case for reinforcement learning and "unverifiable tasks" — why building AI that matches people to careers requires more human trainers, not fewer, and what that means for the future of hiring.The Partner Principle: How becoming a husband and father transformed Garrett's leadership — and why he believes the most important decision a CEO makes has nothing to do with the business.Produced by Breaking Glass Studio.Follow Notable Capital: Find Us On X: @notablecap Find Us On LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0 Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094Follow Notable Capital: X: @notablecap LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

How do we systematically evaluate and improve increasingly autonomous AI systems?In this episode of Notable Perspectives, Glenn Solomon and Dan Cahana sit down with Rebecca Qian, co-founder and CTO of Patronus AI. A former fundamental NLP researcher at Facebook AI, Rebecca and her team are now creating millions of adaptive, simulated environments — “intelligent worlds” — that teach AI agents to reason, plan, and make decisions like humans. Join us as we explore:The Eval Problem: Too few evals on too narrow a slice of reality; benchmark and leaderboard culture has created the wrong incentive.Reality of Simulations: The shift from single-turn classification to agents that reason and decide the way people do. And the stakes if you get it wrong — reward hacking, deception, misalignment.Building the Factory: The insight that general intelligence requires generalizable capabilities — not domain-specific data.Chapters:00:00 — The Eval Problem: Why current AI evaluation methods are fundamentally broken—and what it means for building reliable, autonomous systems.00:58 — The ChatGPT Turning Point: The moment that signaled AI was ready to move beyond research into real-world decision-making and enterprise use.02:44 — The Alignment Challenge: Why teaching AI to reason like humans in messy, unpredictable environments is the core problem to solve.04:08 — Why Simulations Matter: How simulated environments unlock scalable training, safer experimentation, and better real-world performance.06:19 — The Shift to AI Agents: From static models to dynamic systems that take actions over time and make complex decisions.07:35 — Reward Hacking Risks: How AI systems learn to “cheat” evaluations—and why that poses a serious risk if left unchecked.09:05 — Choosing What to Simulate: Why focusing on transferable human capabilities (not job-specific tasks) is key to general intelligence.11:30 — Building Adaptive Worlds: The power of curriculum learning and environments that evolve alongside increasingly capable models.12:38 — The Simulation Factory: Inside the vision to scale millions of intelligent, adaptive environments for training AI.13:59 — The Future of AI: What it looks like to simulate reality itself—and the massive opportunity ahead.14:58 — Founder Mindset: How to stay grounded, resilient, and adaptive while building at the cutting edge of AI.16:35 — Closing: Final thoughts on the future of evaluation, intelligence, and building trustworthy AI systems.Produced by Breaking Glass Studio.Follow Notable Capital: X: @notablecap LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

Your website doesn't need to go away — but 90% of its human visitors probably will.In this episode of Notable Perspectives, Chelsea Taylor sits down with Chris Andrew, co-founder and CEO of Scrunch AI. After a decade selling enterprise software to the world's largest banks and insurance companies, Chris spotted a permanent shift in how humans browse, engage, and transact on the web — and built the infrastructure for what comes next.Join us as we explore:The Permanent Shift: AI is already powering over 50% of search in North America. The way people discover brands, products, and information has fundamentally changed — and most companies haven't caught up.Marketing to Agents, Not Just Humans: The martech stack isn't about perfecting the human experience anymore. AI agents are arriving at your website with context and intent, on behalf of a human. If you're not marketing to the agent, you're missing the human.What Scrunch Actually Does: Monitor how AI agents interact with your content, understand how your brand appears across AI search platforms, and deliver content optimized for retrieval — a parallel version of your site built for the models shaping the modern customer journey.Produced by Breaking Glass Studio.Follow Notable Capital: X: @notablecap LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

In this episode of Notable Perspectives, we sit down with Ofer Smadari, co-founder and CEO of Torq. Cybersecurity is in the midst of a massive transformation, and Torq is setting the pace.Ofer has built and sold a cybersecurity company for over $200 million. But he still had that founder hunger and urge to build — this time even bigger. Cut to today, Torq has recently announced a $140 million Series D and a valuation of over $1 billion. This is the story of what happens when a serial founder refuses to settle.Episode SummaryHear how Torq’s founding team went from a previous exit to building one of the most ambitious platforms in modern cybersecurity. In this episode, we dig into:The Pivot That Built Torq: Why the team shut down their original product and redirected their technology toward cybersecurity automation after realizing adoption wasn’t there.The Alert Fatigue Problem: How security teams are overwhelmed by alerts and why automation is essential to eliminate operational noise and scale security operations.Modernizing the SOC: Why legacy security platforms were built for on-prem environments and how Torq’s open, SaaS-first platform enables faster integrations and automation.AI in Security Operations: From no-code automation to AI-driven investigation agents that perform analyst-level tasks and accelerate threat response.Founder Trust and Velocity: How strong co-founder relationships, decisive leadership, and trust across teams enabled rapid pivots and global growth.Produced by Breaking Glass StudioFollow Notable Capital: X: @notablecap LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094