Vaibhav (VB) Srivastav
Developer Experience at OpenAI
31 Jul 2026Situational Awareness | AI Stocks Fall | OpenAI Join Us | Ebay Scandal
VB Srivastav on GPT-5.6, Codex and Voice at OpenAI
OpenAI EMEA Developer Experience Lead VB Srivastav joins in the studio to cover the GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra, Luna) and the unified ChatGPT experience that folded Codex — now past 10 million weekly active users — into a single chat box for non-developers. He explains the new voice mode for multi-minute context dumps, how agents automate work like Slack and email triage, the path from Peter Steinberger-style power users to everyone, and enterprise enthusiasm for 5.6 launching at 5.5's price point.
Ian Rogers on Ledger's Agent Stack and Agent Security
Returning guest Ian Rogers, Ledger's Chief Human Agency Officer, unveils V2 of Ledger's agent stack, demoing an agent executing a USDC swap that must still be confirmed on the hardware wallet. He argues for a deterministic approval or policy step kept outside the LLM, discusses the accelerating white-hat vs black-hat exploit race, why Ledger Donjon was excluded from Anthropic's Project Glasswing as a French company, and the global game theory around slowing AI development — plus the Christian Hosoi skateboard gift in his backdrop.
Robbie O'Connor on Joining Viktor as CRO and AI Go-to-Market
New Viktor.com CRO Robbie O'Connor joins from Warsaw to explain how, after 12 years across Dropbox, Asana and Notion and a year-long sabbatical, he chose to build go-to-market from scratch at an AI-native company. He shares Viktor's traction — $15M ARR ten weeks post-launch, now $28M across thousands of organisations — its Slack and Teams-native 'AI co-worker' positioning paid from payroll rather than tools budgets, hiring plans in Dublin and New York, and why the classic SaaS playbook doesn't yet map to AI products.
Robbie O'Connor: Settling In as Viktor's CRO
Robbie O'Connor closes out his interview about joining the AI company Viktor as CRO. He describes his first day, where he asked Viktor to build his own 30-60-90 day onboarding plan until founder Frid compressed it to a 3-6-9 day plan, and explains that in an early-stage company everyone is either a builder or a seller while the first 100 hires define the culture. He says he hopes to help channel Frid's ideas into a generational business.
Max Buchan: Valarian's $50M Series B and Enterprise Push
Max Buchan joins the studio bearing Valarian-branded Barbour jackets and discusses the company's $50M Series B. He explains how Valarian hardens the Kubernetes layer upward into 'enclaves' for running sensitive workloads, how enterprise demand to own AI infrastructure with open weights took the business from government-focused to a 50/50 government/enterprise split, and the meaning of Nikesh Arora's large personal check. He also covers compute scarcity, a tier-one bank running daily trading flows on open-weight models inside Valarian, and his take on self-regulation in the AI pacing debate.
Sabba Keynejad: The SaaS Playbook Is Dead
VEED co-founder and CEO Sabba Keynejad breaks down his post arguing the SaaS playbook is dead: SEO and PPC demand capture is weakening, so growth now comes from creating demand through a great first product experience and getting influencers to talk about the product. He shares that VEED attributes roughly $16K a month of revenue to his CEO socials, suggests agents could remove the software layer entirely, and argues founders should build one product exceptionally well rather than five. He teases a big VEED announcement coming in two weeks.
Bangers of the Day: Polymarket and Sam Lessin on Never Competing
In the bangers of the day segment, the hosts react to a Polymarket tweet projecting Apple as the world's largest company and Vittorio's 'age of AI, do nothing, win' quote-post. They then read Sam Lessin's post arguing that competing in early-stage venture capital misprices deals, and that investors should instead fund otherwise unfunded opportunities where they see something others don't.
Aidan Corbett: Wayflyer's $1.5B Fortress Facility and Scaling Lessons
Wayflyer co-founder and CEO Aidan Corbett announces a $1.5 billion forward-flow financing agreement with Fortress to deploy capital to small businesses in the UK, US, Australia and Germany. He explains how banks pulling back from SMB lending over the past decade created the opportunity, shares scaling lessons including 'run towards the fire,' argues Dublin underperforms its potential as a startup hub, and describes how AI is quietly making underwriting and new-vertical expansion faster. The segment opens with the host revealing he once cold-emailed Aidan as a BDR selling Pigment.
Show Sign-Off
The hosts thank the final guest, run the closing ElevenLabs sponsor read, and sign off, promising to see viewers on the next show.
13 May 2026Deel CEO Joins, Thinking Machines, OpenAI Joins, Anthropic SPV’s, Helsing $18B
Vaibhav Srivastav (OpenAI) on GPT-5.5 & Codex
OpenAI's Vaibhav Srivastav joins the studio to recap shipping since AI Engineer London: GPT-5.5 (1M+ enterprises and 28T tokens in week one), GPT Image 2.0, and the real-time model series. He details Codex's growth from ~500K to 4M+ weekly active users, community builds like an Android Codex client and an agent that made $15 from open-source bounties unprompted via slash-goal long-running tasks, Chrome integration he used to file expenses, ~150 plugins including an Adobe Premiere Pro bridge, and using Codex to prep interview briefs.