Zero Prime

The Zero Prime Podcast with Pete Soderling explores the early stories of top startups as seen through the eyes of their engineer-founders. In each episode we uncover insights on what it takes to start a company as an engineer in the words of the founders themselves. From the most cutting edge infrastructure companies to the newest trends in developer tooling, we introduce you to the engineer-founder personalities behind the up and coming software startups that you can’t afford to ignore.

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July 8, 2026

Ep 39: TextQL’s Ethan Ding: Every question has a price. Make sure the answer is worth more.

Ethan Ding, co-founder and CEO of TextQL, joins ZeroPrime and AI Council Co-founder, Pete Soderling, to make an argument that most data leaders have been waiting years to hear: you don't have to clean everything, migrate everything, or centralize everything before AI can work on your data. Ethan's path from Bessemer to a hypergrowth stint at Tackle, let him see how much time teams spent moving the same business logic from one database to another, over and over. TextQL was born from a different

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June 30, 2026

Ep 38: Snowflake’s Bala Kasiviswanathan: Your data doesn’t need a new home. It needs new context.

What's actually stopping enterprises from putting their AI to work? Bala Kasiviswanathan, who oversees Snowflake CoCo, Snowflake's AI coding agent, as VP of Developer and AI Experiences, says the real answer isn't access. It's fragmented context. Pete Soderling sits down with Bala to make the case that democratizing access to data was last decade's challenge. The next one is democratizing who gets to build — without creating enterprise chaos in the process. They unpack why governance and spee...

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May 8, 2026

Ep 37: Everyone wants bigger context windows. Linus Lee thinks that's the wrong instinct

Linus Lee, Head of AI at Thrive Capital, sits down with Pete Soderling to talk context engineering, monolithic agents, and the failure mode most teams aren't measuring yet. Most teams building AI agents right now are reaching for bigger context windows. Linus thinks that's the wrong instinct. He runs AI at Thrive and ships an internal research agent called Puck that's processed billions of tokens in production — which means he's seen the failure modes most of us are still pretending don't exist

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May 7, 2026

The end of the pointer era: Chang She on rebuilding data infrastructure for AI

For 50 years, the pattern has been the same: store the data in the database, keep the big files somewhere else, link them with a pointer. It's powered most production systems we've ever built. Chang She thinks AI is about to break it. In this episode, Pete Soderling sits down with Chang She ahead of AI Council SF 2026 to talk about why the old data stack wasn't built for what's coming, what agents are doing to database throughput, and why anyone with a serious background in performance "starts

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April 30, 2026

E33: Vik Korrapati Is Building Vision AI the Slow Way. It's Working.

On this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, Pete Soderling sits down with Vik Korrapati, Co-founder & CTO of Moondream — an open-source vision language model that lets any developer build vision AI apps through prompting, no PhD required. Vik shares what he's learned building Vision AI in the trenches: Why the benchmark everyone optimizes for is the wrong one How an unglamorous engineering philosophy beats flashy research breakthroughs Why his team rewrote the parts of the stack everyone else

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April 28, 2026

Q&A with Eno Reyes, Factory: AI agents are shipping your code. Who's checking their work?

On this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, Pete Soderling sits down with Eno Reyes, Co-founder & CTO of Factory — a software development agent platform that has run missions lasting 14 days straight, with hundreds of agents executing continuously. In this conversation Pete covers: Can you scale AI coding agents without things quietly breaking? Is there an equivalent of a PR for specs? What does developer trust actually require? What will happen to the product manager role? How does the qua

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About the Host

Pete Soderling

Founder: Data Council & Zero Prime Ventures

Pete Soderling is the founder of Data Council and Zero Prime Ventures. As a former software engineer, repeat founder and investor in more than 70 data-oriented startups, Pete’s lifetime goal is to help 10,000 engineers start successful companies. Most importantly, Pete is a community builder — from his earliest days of working with the data engineering community starting in 2013, he has witnessed the unique power of specialized networks to bring inspiration, knowledge and support to technical professionals.