“AI has been the wild west”: Creating standards for agents with Sean Falconer
Confluent is an all-in-one, real-time platform that allows you to stream, connect, process, and govern your data.
Connect with Sean on Linkedin, and listen to the Software Engineering Daily podcast, where he co-hosts.
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23andMe BANKRUPT, Saylor Still Buying Bitcoin, + Founder Interviews | E2102
Today’s show: In this episode, Alex and Lon kick things off with the latest tech news — including 23andMe’s dramatic collapse, MicroStrategy’s half-million Bitcoin haul, and whether we’re finally seeing a rebound in startup M&A. Then they sit down with three standout founders building the future across AI chips, data privacy, and healthcare. First up, Etched CEO Gavin Uberti explains why they’re betting big on transformer-specific ASICs. Then, Skyflow co-founder Anshu Sharma breaks down how they’re helping enterprises use LLMs without leaking private data. Finally, MedServe’s team walks us through how they’re securing medications in outpatient clinics and staying on the right side of the DEA.
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Timestamps:
(0:00) Alex kicks off the show
(1:15) 23andMe bankruptcy and SPACs impact
(5:23) MicroStrategy's Bitcoin strategy
(8:58) Increase in M&A activity and market trends
(10:06) Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist
(13:37) Browser use, agentic AI, and VC market insights
(19:28) Financial responsibility in startups
(20:28) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST
(21:56) Interview with Gavin Uberti of Etched
(30:32) Fidelity Private Shares℠ - Visit https://www.fidelityprivateshares.com ! Mention our podcast and receive 20% off your first-year paid subscription.
(32:12) Economic and technical aspects of chip efficiency
(39:53) Etched's market demand, manufacturing, and AI scaling
(43:05) Founder insights and hardware startup potential
(45:43) Introduction to Skyflow and Anshu Sharma
(50:19) Skyflow's growth and customer acquisition strategies
(1:03:09) ServiceNow's new product and Skyflow's bullish outlook
(1:06:33) M&A interest and AI stack value creation
(1:12:06) Skyflow's funding and cybersecurity customer trust
(1:13:12) Introduction to MedServe and Milwaukee's startup ecosystem
(1:16:30) MedServ's solution to drug dispensing and diversion
(1:23:05) Economic challenges and solutions for smaller facilities
(1:26:50) MedServe cabinet features and use case demonstration
(1:29:51) Cybersecurity and physical security of MedServe systems
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Follow Etched:
Website: https://www.etched.com/
X: https://x.com/Etched
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/etched-ai/
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Follow MedServe:
Website: https://medserverx.com/
X: https://x.com/MedServeRX
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/medserverx/
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Follow Skyflow:
Website: https://www.skyflow.com/
X: https://x.com/SkyflowAPI
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skyflow/
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Follow Alex:
X: https://x.com/alex
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm
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Follow Lon:
X: https://x.com/Lons
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Thank you to our partners:
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(20:28) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST
(30:32) Fidelity Private Shares℠ - Visit https://www.fidelityprivateshares.com Mention our podcast and receive 20% off your first-year paid subscription.
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
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Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com
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Why one founder thinks the Apple Vision Pro is going to make it
This is our interview show, where we sit down with interesting, knowledgeable folks and dive deep into what they are building, designing, or thinking about.
Today, we have Anshu Sharma back on the podcast. Last time, the Skyflow CEO riffed with us on interest rates and business cycles. This time, we wanted to talk to him about a theory he recently wrote up for TechCrunch: The Innovator’s Dilemma.
Or perhaps, a partial solution to that dilemma. The gist is that instead of using lower-cost products to take on incumbents, you might want to start at the top end of the market. This comes to bear today with the Apple Vision Pro headset, which is very expensive, and is entering a category replete with big investments and occasional returns.
Equity will be back tomorrow with our regular news roundtable, so we’ll chat with you soon!
For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website.
Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more!
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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Competitive Differentiation: 10 Years Then 400% Growth
Anshu Sharma spent 10 years thinking about one problem before writing a line of code. When he finally launched Skyflow with a SaaS go-to-market strategy built on competitive differentiation through deep expertise, the first customer call ended in a sale.
Learn how Skyflow achieved competitive differentiation by creating an entirely new product category - a privacy API for sensitive data. Anshu built the product for 12 months without a single customer conversation, defying conventional startup wisdom. The result: 400% year-over-year growth, $70M raised, and 100+ customers through thought leadership content that educated the market from first principles.
This is a masterclass in competitive differentiation for founders building category-creating products where no market exists yet. Anshu also shares how he saved a major customer who tried to cancel after a leadership change.
Key Lessons
🎯 Deep expertise replaces customer discovery for competitive differentiation: Anshu studied data privacy for 10 years at Salesforce and Oracle, making interviews unnecessary because he knew the problem better than buyers.
🏢 Category creation requires a different SaaS go-to-market playbook: New infrastructure categories need enough product built for a CTO to see why the architecture is fundamentally different.
📉 Customer cancellations become growth opportunities: When Skyflow's largest customer tried to cancel after a leadership change, Anshu listened to the new CTO's priorities and turned a critic into a champion.
💰 Thought leadership drove competitive differentiation from 10 to 100 customers: Blog posts explaining from first principles why a data privacy vault was needed generated inbound leads consistently.
🚀 Seed investors fund asymmetric bets on new categories: Most VCs rejected Skyflow, but one saw a company that could become worth $100B if it worked, leading to a $6M seed round.
Chapters
Introduction
Anshu's favorite quote from Marc Benioff
What Skyflow does and how it works
Skyflow's ideal customer profile
Revenue, growth, and team size
How tokenization and data vaults work
Origin story - 10 years of seeing the privacy problem
What triggered the decision to finally start Skyflow
Building the MVP without talking to customers
How long the MVP took to build
Self-funding vs raising - first 6 months
Why category-creating companies cannot pivot
MongoDB and the category creation pattern
Getting the first 10 customers
Why Anshu sets context before showing demos
Narrowing down the ICP for a horizontal product
Getting from 10 to 100 customers with thought leadership content
Story of a customer trying to cancel
Lightning round
Resources
Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/363
Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email
From startup to Google and back again
Sean hosts Partially Redacted, a podcast about data privacy, security, and compliance.
He also hosts the podcast Software Engineering Daily, which features technical interviews on everything from the ethics of GPTs to cloud-native search and WebAssembly. Start with the recent episode Surviving ChatGPT with Christian Hubicki (of Survivor fame).
You can also read about how he crowdsourced a behavioral model for Survivor.
Sean spent four years working in developer relations (DevRel) at Google. Here’s a Software Engineering Daily episode about the role DevRel plays at Google.
Connect with Sean on LinkedIn or Twitter (I mean, X), or check out his website.
Kudos to Great Question badge winner Kai Sellgren for asking How to remove an element from a vector given the element?.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Simplify Data Security For Sensitive Information With The Skyflow Data Privacy Vault
Summary
The best way to make sure that you don’t leak sensitive data is to never have it in the first place. The team at Skyflow decided that the second best way is to build a storage system dedicated to securely managing your sensitive information and making it easy to integrate with your applications and data systems. In this episode Sean Falconer explains the idea of a data privacy vault and how this new architectural element can drastically reduce the potential for making a mistake with how you manage regulated or personally identifiable information.
Announcements
Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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Modern data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days or even weeks. By the time errors have made their way into production, it’s often too late and damage is done. Datafold built automated regression testing to help data and analytics engineers deal with data quality in their pull requests. Datafold shows how a change in SQL code affects your data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values before it gets merged to production. No more shipping and praying, you can now know exactly what will change in your database! Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to book a demo with Datafold.
Data teams are increasingly under pressure to deliver. According to a recent survey by Ascend.io, 95% in fact reported being at or over capacity. With 72% of data experts reporting demands on their team going up faster than they can hire, it’s no surprise they are increasingly turning to automation. In fact, while only 3.5% report having current investments in automation, 85% of data teams plan on investing in automation in the next 12 months. 85%!!! That’s where our friends at Ascend.io come in. The Ascend Data Automation Cloud provides a unified platform for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability. Ascend users love its declarative pipelines, powerful SDK, elegant UI, and extensible plug-in architecture, as well as its support for Python, SQL, Scala, and Java. Ascend automates workloads on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and open source Spark, and can be deployed in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $5,000 when you become a customer.
Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sean Falconer about the idea of a data privacy vault and how the Skyflow team are working to make it turn-key
Interview
Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data management?
Can you describe what Skyflow is and the story behind it?
What is a "data privacy vault" and how does it differ from strategies such as privacy engineering or existing data governance patterns?
What are the primary use cases and capabilities that you are focused on solving for with Skyflow?
Who is the target customer for Skyflow (e.g. how does it enter an organization)?
How is the Skyflow platform architected?
How have the design and goals of the system changed or evolved over time?
Can you describe the process of integrating with Skyflow at the application level?
For organizations that are building analytical capabilities on top of the data managed in their applications, what are the interactions with Skyflow at each of the stages in the data lifecycle?
One of the perennial problems with distributed systems is the challenge of joining data across machine boundaries. How do you mitigate that problem?
On your website there are different "vaults" advertised in the form of healthcare, fintech, and PII. What are the different requirements across each of those problem domains?
What are the commonalities?
As a relatively new company in an emerging product category, what are some of the customer education challenges that you are facing?
What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Skyflow used?
What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Skyflow?
When is Skyflow the wrong choice?
What do you have planned for the future of Skyflow?
Contact Info
LinkedIn
@seanfalconer on Twitter
Website
Parting Question
From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?
Closing Announcements
Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used.
Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.
If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email hosts@dataengineeringpodcast.com) with your story.
To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers
Links
Skyflow
Privacy Engineering
Data Governance
Homomorphic Encryption
Polymorphic Encryption
The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
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Will rising interest rates decimate startup valuations?
This is Saturday, which means it's not a usual day for us to drop an episode. But what are we if not try-hards at heart? So, we're back today.
What do we have on store for you? I brought Anshu Sharma onto the podcast -- and a Twitter space, so make sure you are following the podcast, yeah? -- to chat interest rates, technology growth, startup valuations, and how they all tie together. Sharma was the right person to have on the show because he's been a big tech employee (Oracle, Salesforce), an investor (Storm Ventures, and as an angel), and he's a founder to boot. So he's been around not just the block, but several in the world of technology over time.
TechCrunch has covered SkyFlow, his startup, a few times including its most recent fundraise.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/welcome-to-the-post-pandemic-economy-startups/
Sharma finds some of the in-market worry about rising rates harming tech stocks silly. His thesis boils down to the value of growth on a longer time-horizon than what a DCF-tuned spreadsheet might tell you. That said, rising rates will impact some startup inputs, like venture funds in the medium-term, so there was a lot to chew on.
We try to keep Equity pretty high-level, and focused on discrete events. But why have a show if you can't use it to scratch your own itches from time to time?
The pod is back on Tuesday due to an American holiday this Monday. Chat soon!
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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