In this episode of Software Leaders Uncensored, host Steve Taplin sits down with Peter Horadan, CEO of Vouched, and one of the few tech leaders who has helped scale multiple “boring” backend automation companies into multi-billion-dollar giants. Peter walks through his journey from Microsoft in the pre-internet era to leading engineering at Concur, Avalara, and launching Lockstep before its acquisition by Sage. He reveals why digital identity is on the verge of a massive transformation, how mobile driver’s licenses and cryptographic IDs will replace today’s broken verification, and why AI agents logging in as humans is the next huge security nightmare. Peter also shares candid lessons on remote culture, AI coding limits, leadership, and why anyone with the itch to found a company should stop waiting and start building.

In this episode of Software Leaders Uncensored, Steve Taplin talks with Behnam Bastani, CEO and co-founder of OpenInfer, and former AI executive at Meta, Roblox, Google, HP, and Kodak. Behnam breaks down why the future of AI will live at the edge—not the cloud—and how his team is building a fully integrated hardware–software ecosystem that delivers low-cost, private, on-device AI inference. He explains OpenInfer’s breakthrough “Mementos” technology that lets engineers move between Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and other tools without losing context or history. Behnam also discusses Bay Area culture, talent retention, global instability, hardware regulations, AI adoption failures, and why innovation requires embracing chaos instead of fearing it.

In this episode of Software Leaders Uncensored, host Steve Taplin talks with Jimi Li, CTO of ALM, whose career spans startups, GE, L’Oreal, Coach, News Corp, consulting, and now leading a fully digital legal-industry intelligence company. Jimi shares how he evolved from a two-person startup engineer to global technology leader, and why transformation is 80% psychology and communication—not architecture. He breaks down AI’s real value, the productivity leakage problem, the rise of human-in-the-loop systems, and why every tech leader must build an AI-powered second brain. Jimi also explains how ALM moved from publishing to data and intelligence, how to lead globally distributed engineering teams, and why asking the right questions will matter more than knowledge itself.