

The Infra Pod
The Infra Pod
The Infra Pod brings you insightful and thought-provoking discussions on the world of infrastructure software. This podcast is started by two engineers, Ian Livingstone (tech advisor for Snyk) and Tim Chen (General Partner at Essence VC), team up with a rotating cast of guests to dive deep into the latest trends and hot topics in the software infrastructure space.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Dec 4, 2023 • 37min
Modal is upping the game for serverless! Chat with Erik
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 and listen with us how the journey started, and what's Erik hot spicy future take on the serverless infra.

Nov 6, 2023 • 37min
Let's stop prompting and start programming... Chat with Omar about DSPy
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 a programming framework that searches and optimizes the best prompts for the task.
Come listen about the thought process around DSPy and how it can fundamentally changes how we interact with LLMs and AI models as a whole!

Oct 23, 2023 • 33min
Are all future data infra products will be built on Cloud storage? Chat with Warpstream
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 is designed from ground up to work on top of Cloud storage like S3, and also what the future implications mean.

Oct 9, 2023 • 38min
What happens when LLMs have a API App store? Let's chat Gorilla and beyond!
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, that allows LLMs to call APIs automatically.
We dive into how Gorilla works and what is the future implications it brings to the infra / developer space.

Sep 4, 2023 • 36min
Security problems are.... infra problems! Chat w/ Mike Malone from Smallstep
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 problems becomes infrastructure problems.
How does the industry potentially change if we think about security problems from the infra angle? What's the hurdle and benefits?
Listen in to learn more!

Aug 21, 2023 • 39min
When will AI take over developers? Debate with Guido Appenzeller
In this podcast, Guido Appenzeller, ex-VMWare & Intel Group CTO, debates with Maxis Ian Livingstone and Timothy Chen about the future of AI in developer roles. They discuss the impact of language models on infrastructure software, the importance of embracing new technologies in software development, the potential applications of autonomous agents in workflows, and the challenges of predicting the future in infrastructure and AI.

Jul 31, 2023 • 46min
Transactions don't belong to databases anymore, let's discuss the Modern Tx Stack (w/ Yoko from A16z + Tony from Inngest)
Transactions is what makes critical applications with state works in production, and it has been decades of research and iterations of having developers leveraging the tools that exists to implement transactions in their applications.
Ian and I are sitting down with Yoko (investor from a16z) and Tony (CTO from Inngest) to chat about the new Modern Transactional Stack (https://a16z.com/2023/04/14/the-modern-transactional-stack/), and how it's looking to shape up the industry in the near future.

Jul 17, 2023 • 37min
How will the world run on GPUs? (w/ Stephen Balaban from Lambda Labs)
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, into a Computer Vision API, and finally a GPU hosted cloud.
We also introduced a new section called the "Spicy Future", and we got spicy :) Come listen to how we noodled on how we will get closer to AGI and what will happen when it does.

Jul 3, 2023 • 40min
Let's learn how to survive in the Modern Data Stack in 2023... Chat with Josh Wills (ex-Slack)
Josh Wills, former Director of Data at Slack/Cloudera, discusses the challenges and benefits of the Modern Data Stack. They delve into topics like the evolution of data tech, the changing landscape of data and engineering, the potential of DBT, the future of hybrid execution, and the lack of framework in the modern data stack.

4 snips
Jun 20, 2023 • 40min
Ditch the cloud for bare metal in 2023? Chat with Zach (Equinix, ex-Packet)
Ian and Tim chat with Zachery Smith about his journey starting Packet and customer trends at Equinix in 2023. They discuss the importance of hardware in innovation, attracting developer-focused users, carbon impact, decoupling of supply chains, and the future of hardware and AI.


