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AI After Dark

AI After Dark

Written by: Alex Gras
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About this listen

 AI After Dark is a podcast hosted by Alex Gras, venture capitalist at Mercury, focused on how real companies are built once the hype fades and the hard decisions begin. Through candid conversations with founders, CTOs, and operators, the show cuts through buzzwords to talk about people, systems, risk, and the trade-offs that actually matter. Alex brings a background as an operator, founder, and revenue leader, with a belief that technology matters, but people come first. This podcast is for builders who care less about trends and more about what lasts.2025 Digital Wildcatters, Inc Economics
Episodes
  • Kyle Ledbetter from Dreambase

    Kyle Ledbetter from Dreambase
    Apr 29 2026

    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.

    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


    Click here to view the episode 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
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Hunter Honnessy from Unlimited.ai

    Hunter Honnessy from Unlimited.ai
    Apr 21 2026

    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.


    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


    Click here to view the episode 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

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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Gustavo Herrera from Knowme Global

    Gustavo Herrera from Knowme Global
    Apr 7 2026

    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.


    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


    Click here to view the episode 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
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    1 hr and 3 mins
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