First Commit

First Commit is where founders tell the story from the start: what they saw, what they risked, and what it actually took to get from zero to something real.

First Commit is a business podcast hosted by Laura Hamilton, with 73 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Laura Hamilton hosts First Commit, a business show with 73 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  First Commit

  The Dark Factory: What's Left for Humans When Agents Ship the Code | Robert Brennan, OpenHands

  Aug 21, 202627 min

  Pair programming with AI gets you 20 to 30% faster. Robert Brennan builds for the workflow that gets you 10x. In this episode of First Commit, Eliya Elon and Laura Hamilton sit down with Robert Brennan, CEO and co-founder of OpenHands — the open source research project that became one of the most starred AI coding agent repos on GitHub. Robert has spent over a decade in commercial open source. Early on, as Cursor blows up and every competitor pivots toward an IDE, his team makes the opposite call: the IDE is an old form factor, and what developers need is an interface for managing fleets of agents. He walks through what that bet looks like two years in, from the banks that refuse to build on closed source to the critic model his team trains to grade its own agents. Join us as we explore: The Dark Factory : What software development looks like when agents write, review, merge, and monitor code end to end — and the two jobs Robert thinks stay human. 20% vs. 10X : Why the pair programming model caps out around a 30% gain, and where the order-of-magnitude lift actually sits. The Per-Token Trap : Robert on refusing usage-based pricing while competitors post eye-popping revenue at negative gross margin. Open Source as Distribution : Why large banks tell OpenHands they will only build on infrastructure they own in the long term.

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  First Commit

  The Web Belongs to Agents Now | Aviv Shamny, Limy AI

  Jul 23, 202630 min

  40% of searches now end without a click, and on many sites AI agents already outnumber human visitors. So who are you actually marketing to? In this episode of First Commit, Eliya Elon and Laura Hamilton sit down with Aviv Shamny, co-founder and CEO of Limy AI. The problem Aviv and his co-founders chase is one most marketers haven't priced in: AI agents now discover, fetch, and convert on products across the web, while the old signals (clicks, impressions, organic rankings) erode underneath them. Limy builds the connection layer between brands and agents, operating server-side where agents actually work, so companies can see and influence how they show up in machine-driven answers. Join us as we explore: Machine intent over clicks : Why Aviv chases structured machine intent instead of the impressions-and-clicks approximations marketing has always lived with. Server-side, not clickstream : How Limy operates where agents actually work, the server layer, rather than overlaying human browsing data onto machine logic. Making a site agent-ready : What actually earns agent visibility and why there's no silver bullet. Prime years over the beach : Why Aviv picks marketers over "insurance vibes," and what a Fortune 100's real monetization moment looks like. Follow Notable Capital: Find Us On X: @notablecap Find Us On LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/

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  First Commit

  Why Math Might Be the Last Language AI Hasn't Conquered | Carina Hong, Axiom

  Jul 9, 202632 min

  Math might be the last programming language AI hasn't conquered. In this episode of First Commit, Eliya Elon and Laura Hamilton sit down with Carina Hong, founder and CEO of Axiom, the company building an AI mathematician — and, fresh off a $200M Series A at a $1.6B valuation led by Menlo Ventures, one of the most-watched bets on "verified AI." Hong leaves a Stanford PhD in March 2025 to chase a specific window: reasoning models maturing, coding capability compounding, and the formal-proof language Lean finally becoming robust enough for industry-scale work. While frontier labs skip formal math as too data-scarce to bother with, she bets the opposite — that math is special, that it transfers the way code does, and that a system which proves its own work is worth building long before anyone is paying attention. Join us as we explore: Formal vs. informal AI: A model that answers in Lean can be verified by simply running the program — Hong explains why that guarantee changes everything you can build on top of it. Where proofs pay off: Chip design, software verification, and cryptography get tractable the moment a plain-English spec becomes something you can actually prove. Research taste as strategy: Hong hires across mathematicians, formal-methods veterans, and young high-agency engineers, and makes the case that taste is the one thing a research org can't get wrong. The founder's obsession: The "I couldn't do anything else" moment, plus her theory on why cheap capital fragments a field instead of cracking it. Follow Notable Capital: Find Us On X: @notablecap Find Us On LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/

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  First Commit

  Building AI Agents Enterprises Will Actually Trust | Mayada Gonimah, Thread AI

  Jun 25, 202631 min

  What does it take to build AI agents that enterprises will actually trust with their most critical workflows — and what happens when the company building those agents has no security clearance to see them deployed? In this episode of First Commit, Eliya Elon and Laura Hamilton sit down with Mayada Gonimah, co-founder and CTO of Thread AI. Mayada spent her career at the deepest end of enterprise infrastructure — building prime brokerage systems at Goldman Sachs, PCI-compliant payment rails at the New York Times, and software for the Department of Defense at Palantir — without always having the clearance to see her own work run in the field. That constraint forced a discipline that now defines Thread AI: build infrastructure so reliable it functions correctly wherever it's deployed, under whatever conditions, whether you're watching or not. Thread AI builds AI-native orchestration for enterprises running mission-critical, multi-step agentic workflows — think end-to-end invoice processing, insurance claim routing, compliance monitoring — in financial services, healthcare, and public safety. Join us as we explore: The orchestration gap: Why tools like Temporal solved durability but not non-determinism — and why that gap became Thread AI's founding thesis in spring 2023. Selling to enterprises early: How Thread AI closed contracts with some of the largest regulated organizations in the world before product-market fit was fully established — and why multi-cloud and compliance weren't optional. The "applied AI" role: What Thread AI's forward-deployed applied AI engineers actually do, why strong distributed systems fundamentals beat AI hype on the hiring scorecard, and why the last 10% of production always wins. Follow Notable Capital: Find Us On X: @notablecap Find Us On LinkedIn: @ Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0 Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

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  First Commit

  On Friction, Conviction, and Knowing When to Join Instead of Found | Dor Fledel, Anthropic

  Jun 12, 202652 min

  What does it actually take to validate a startup idea — and why should you make it harder on yourself? In this episode of First Commit, Eliya Elon sits down with Dor Fledel, co-founder and CEO of Spera Security. Built in just under 18 months, Spera — an identity security posture management company — was acquired by Okta for a reported ~$100M. Dor then led Okta's SecureAI, PAM, and ISPM product lines before recently joining Anthropic to help enterprises adopt AI securely. A Talpiot program alumnus and Unit 8200 veteran, Dor brings an intelligence-trained rigor to how he thinks about building, validating, and committing. Join us as we explore: Friction as a Feature: Why deliberately making it harder for customers, co-founders, and employees to say yes is actually the sharpest signal you have about whether your idea is real. Meeting People Where They Are: How Dor learned to stop pitching identity security to people who were already convinced — and start positioning for the world they've already heard ten times. The Personal Stack: Why the hardest co-founder conversation often has nothing to do with equity or roles — and everything to do with whether someone's partner will move across an ocean in 18 months. Follow Notable Capital: Find Us On X: @notablecap Find Us On LinkedIn: @Notable Capital Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/

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