Ry Walker started his career building one of the first web agencies in the '90s, sold it right before the dot-com bubble burst, and led technology teams at multiple companies afterward. In 2015, he co-founded Astronomer, scaled it to a unicorn, and then started all over again, raising $20M to found Tembo.

Ry talks with Warner Moore about why he sees life as an open world RPG, the night he was on the phone with an investor asking how to shut Astronomer down before a different call saved the company instead, and why he calls venture capital "liquid bravery." The conversation also covers where AI is headed: why Ry thinks the real transformation is a 10-year story, his case for private, self-hosted AI, how Tembo's cloud coding agents work, and the risk of centralizing an organization's knowledge into a single AI memory system.

The conversation covers entrepreneurship, risk-taking, venture capital, AI adoption timelines, private AI, and lessons from three decades of building companies.

🔗 Connect:

Ry Walker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rywalker/

Tembo: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tembo-inc/

Warner Moore:⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/warnermoore/⁠

Gamma Force: https://gammaforce.io

📚 Mentioned in the episode:

➡️ The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

➡️ Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse

➡️ The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman

➡️ The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Peter Dohm has spent his career working with systems where failure can have serious consequences. He started in telecommunications during the early days of the internet, spent nearly 20 years at Battelle, including serving as CISO, and worked on cybersecurity problems involving nation-state adversaries and major defense systems.

That experience shaped a principle that comes up throughout this conversation: observe everything.

Peter talks with Warner Moore about why visibility becomes so important when you cannot assume every attack can be prevented, how humans can become valuable security sensors, and why some of the most useful signals may come from places security teams rarely look.

He also shares the story of helping leaders rethink the cyber risk around a $20B weapons system by looking at the economics from an attacker’s perspective. Today, as CTO and employee number one at Black Mesa Technology, Peter is applying the same first-principles mindset to biomanufacturing, using AI and LLMs to help smaller manufacturers identify quality issues faster and reduce risk.

The conversation covers nation-state cybersecurity, observability, incident response, attacker economics, first-principles risk management, AI in biomanufacturing, startup product-market fit, and what decades of working with complex systems have taught Peter about managing risk.

🔗 Connect

Peter Dohm: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-j-dohm/

Gamma Force: https://gammaforce.io

Warner Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/warnermoore/

📚 Mentioned in the episode

➡️ The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

➡️ Intelligence Matters podcast

Matt McCann has worked across defense contracting, NASA, computer vision for drones, Amazon AI, and now seed-stage startup life. That is not exactly the standard LinkedIn career path, and that is what makes this conversation so good.

After six years as a software engineer, Matt co-founded PixElement, a computer vision company working with drone technology. After selling the company, he joined Amazon, where he worked on GenAI and reinforcement learning. Now, as Co-Founder and CTO of Zaqa, he is building GenAI agents for industrial customers, where mistakes do not just create bad chatbot answers. They can create real-world consequences.

Warner Moore sits down with Matt for a conversation about reinforcement learning, AI agents that can show evidence, the difference between big tech and startup execution, raising capital, founder grit, family life, and the many versions of winning after an exit.

🔗 Connect

Matt McCann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/r-matt-mccann-0494b512/

Zaqa: https://www.linkedin.com/company/105160161/

Gamma Force: https://gammaforce.io

Warner Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/warnermoore/

📚 Books mentioned

➡️ The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

➡️ Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

➡️ Blindsight by Peter Watts

➡️ The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

➡️ Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky