Jeff takes us inside VAST’s unconventional origin story, beginning its first year focused entirely on architecture. 

They also get into the culture behind the company, the value of educating customers, a few startup stories that probably shouldn’t have worked, and Jeff’s philosophy that business is a lot better when you’re having fun along the way.

Clinking glasses and energy of the lobby included.

The Agent(X) Podcast is sponsored by Vultr.

Patrick has seen an infrastructure shift like this before. Before Palma, he co-founded Replex during the early rise of Kubernetes, and now he sees a similar moment unfolding around MCP and AI agents.

The conversation digs into what happens when agents move beyond answering questions and start accessing the real systems businesses run on. Patrick and Kevin break down permissions, zero-trust governance, enterprise adoption, European data sovereignty, and why giving AI more power only works if companies know exactly what that AI is allowed to do.

They also get into the parallels between MCP and Kubernetes, the realities of building for large enterprises, why “move fast and break things” doesn’t always work, and whether the bigger enterprise AI problem is hallucinations… or permissions.

The Agent(X) Podcast is sponsored by Vultr.

Manik spent more than a decade at Block and collaborated with Google on the launch of gRPC, technology that helps software systems communicate at scale. Today, he’s focused on a similar challenge for AI: creating open standards that allow agents built by different companies to connect, communicate, and work together.

Kevin and Manik explore the infrastructure behind agentic AI, why interoperability matters, the role of open source, and what needs to happen before AI agents can operate seamlessly across tools, platforms, and organizations.

Recorded live at the RAI Amsterdam.

The Agent(X) Podcast is sponsored by Vultr.

From leading Twitter's open-source program to helping build CNCF, Chris has spent his career bringing developers and competing companies together. Kevin and Chris explore the importance of open collaboration, and what the cloud-native revolution can teach us about building the next generation of AI infrastructure.

The conversation covers why security is becoming one of the biggest challenges in AI, how SUSE has expanded its decades-long partnership with AMD from CPUs to GPUs, and why running agentic AI means thinking about the entire infrastructure stack. Kevin and Sanjeet also dig into sovereign AI, enterprise deployments, Kubernetes, and why inference has become the center of gravity for modern AI workloads.

Plus, Sanjeet shares the unlikely story of how a rejected SDR call eventually turned into a partnership between SUSE and Vultr, talks about vibe coding an SAT app for his son, and explains why, if he weren't in tech, he'd probably be running a restaurant instead.

The discussion dives into AMD's evolving AI roadmap, the growing role CPUs play alongside accelerators, and how open-source software and AI-assisted development are changing the way engineers build and deploy modern workloads. Along the way, Mahesh shares why customer feedback has become one of AMD's biggest competitive advantages and how those conversations directly shape the next generation of hardware.

Plus, Mahesh reflects on his own journey from electrical engineer to product marketing leader before wrapping up with his takes on startup culture, Austin's best food, and where the next great AI company will come from.

John explores the rapid evolution of AI hardware, emerging workload demands, GPUs, and the data architectures enabling enterprise AI. He also shares his deepest curiosities - and how they've shaped his career.