Mats Olsen
8 May 2026Anthropic xAI Deal, Sama Texts, Memory Stocks Pump, DeepSeek at $50B, VantaCon
Mats Olsen (Dune): Agents, Talent & Org Design
Dune's CTO Mats Olsen joins to discuss Dune's APIs, MCPs and CLIs for agents, and how interfaces are losing network effects as dashboards move into chat. He covers Stripe's agentic-payments bets and crypto's role in that economy, the shift of founder talent from crypto to AI, an engineer 6x-ing PR throughput on Claude Code, and Coinbase-style org changes pushing toward managers with ~15 reports or pods of one person plus agents.
Jeremy Epling (Vanta) Live from VantaCon
Vanta CPO Jeremy Epling calls in live from VantaCon to discuss the newly launched Trust Graph and the Vanta AI agent as a "24/7 GRC engineer," plus the company's recently announced $300M ARR. He talks about AI-accelerated threats and supply-chain vulnerabilities, collapsing product/engineering/design roles and "seeing is believing" prototyping with Lovable and V0, killing projects as a career-defining PM skill, AI-forward hiring, and previews his keynote: custom agents, agent skills, privacy (ROPA/DPIA/GDPR) and the new Customer Commitments product.
Martin Tschammer (Synthesia) on Enterprise AI Security
After the hosts don a rare Synthesia jersey, Synthesia's head of security Martin Tschammer joins live from VantaCon. He explains how enterprise procurement and AI governance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001) shape security, why AI is a catalyst that exposes gaps in security controls faster, shadow AI as the top unsolved concern, and the emerging agentic security market. He also details how Synthesia uses AI for code review, vulnerability triage and security questionnaires, cutting roughly two weeks off the average deal cycle via its Vanta trust portal.
Fredrik Hjelm: Launching Pit with a16z
Voi Technology co-founder Fredrik Hjelm unveils Pit, founded with Voi's co-founders and two of Klarna's AI leads, which builds self-maintaining custom AI software that replaces SaaS licenses and manual workflows — launching with a $16M a16z-led round. He recounts how Ben Horowitz scouted the Swedish ecosystem, describes a digital forward-deployed engineer that turns customer call feedback into ready-to-merge PRs within minutes, argues the next trillion-dollar company will look like a services firm powered by software, and praises Stockholm's startup density.
Fredrik Hjelm: Voi's Growth, London & Celebrity Scooters
Wrapping up the conversation with Voi co-founder Fredrik Hjelm, the hosts cover Stockholm's startup density (Founders House, Klarna and Spotify within a ten-minute radius) and his office setup. Hjelm shares Voi's celebrity moments — Dua Lipa selfies with Voi scooters and Ballon d'Or winner Dembélé riding Voi in Paris — and explains the coral-red branding versus competitors' green scooters. He gives a business update: year eight, profitable with operating cash flow for two years, growing 30–45% year over year (38% in Q1), free day passes during the London tube strikes, and plans to scale the e-bike fleet with London set to become Voi's largest city within one to two years.
Medhi Rais: Davis AI's $5.5M Pre-Seed & AI-Driven Architecture
Medhi Rais, co-founder of Davis AI, walks through the $5.5 million pre-seed raised in about two weeks after Entrepreneur First's demo day, with angels including members of the Spacemaker founding team, Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf and the Sport Bio founders. He explains the product: agent workflows parse parcel data into constraints, and in-house architects work with the system to generate feasibility studies and architectural designs, compressing six-week timelines into two to three days. He covers the service-based model with fixed and variable pricing tied to project volume, the founding story (growing up around construction sites in Morocco and meeting his DeepMind-bound co-founder days before EF), and plans to hire AI researchers on discrete diffusion plus architects for new markets. He closes with his view that architects will shift from production tasks to judgment, and that service-based, vertically integrated companies will win in real estate AI.