Episodes

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Mike Collins, founder and CEO of Alumni Ventures. Collins has spent four decades in venture capital and built a firm designed to give individual investors access to diversified private-market portfolios. AI can help investors discover companies and process information, but it cannot make a strong startup accept their capital. The conversation reframes venture investing as an access and portfolio-construction problem, not a sea...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Matt Edelman, CEO of Super League. Matt explains why gamification has become a default expectation for younger digital consumers, not an optional engagement tactic. The conversation reframes gaming as a major behavioral and commercial environment rather than a niche media channel. Advertising spending remains concentrated in television and social media even as younger audiences divide significant attention across gaming, while...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Dilip Chetan, founder of DefensibleZone.ai. Dilip brings more than two decades of experience across Google, Meta, Oracle, Salesforce, and Intuit, spanning engineering, product strategy, human factors, and customer research. The conversation challenges the assumption that AI adoption is primarily a technology deployment or workforce reduction exercise. AI can automate tasks, write code, analyze data, and operate agents, but ...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Roland Austrup, Chief Growth Officer at Innventure. Large companies produce valuable technologies, but they are rarely structured to build new businesses around them. The conversation reframes innovation as only the first stage of value creation. A technology can work, address a real market need, and still fail because productization, leadership, supply chains, financing, and market adoption were treated as secondary concer...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Alexandre Mongeon, CEO and Co-Founder of Vision Marine Technologies. Alex is building electric marine propulsion systems for family boats, commercial use cases, and future autonomous vessels. The conversation frames marine electrification as the next EV market after cars. The episode reframes electric boats as a commercialization problem, not only a battery or engineering problem. Alex explains why range, charging, customer...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Jordan Solender, founder of Jordan Solender Coaching and IT Select. The central tension is simple: if every decision still depends on the founder, AI will not fix the business. Jordan argues that most founders are not resource constrained, they are clarity constrained. The conversation reframes AI from a shortcut into a leverage layer that only works when outcomes, SOPs, KPIs, and ownership are clear. Instead of chasing too...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Ahmed Sameh, CMO at Fortis. Ahmed brings a fintech and B2B marketing view on how SMEs are changing the way they run daily operations. The conversation reframes POS as more than a payment terminal. For small businesses, the real constraint is not accepting cards, it is connecting payments, inventory, customer data, loyalty, invoicing, reporting, and AI into one operational system. Ahmed explains why adding more tools often c...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Logan Yonavjak, Co-Founder and CEO of Founder Readiness Engine. Logan brings an investor and operator view into how founders and senior leaders can be assessed beyond resumes, charisma, and gut feel. The conversation reframes leadership assessment as a decision system, not a personality test. Logan explains how transcript data, developmental psychology, quantitative linguistics, and AI can surface signals such as coachabili...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Dr. Steve Rondeau of AxonEG Solutions. Dr. Steve brings more than two decades of work across developmental medicine, EEG brain scans, biomarkers, and mental health diagnostics. The core tension is clear: mental health has too often treated labels as answers, while the brain may be telling a different story. The conversation reframes AI in healthcare as a decision-support layer, not a replacement for clinicians. Dr. Steve ex...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Lara Hamilton, a technology leader at HelpDesk Realty. The conversation focuses on why more AI will not help companies that have not fixed their processes first. Lara reframes AI adoption as an operations problem rather than a technology problem. The discussion moves from property management and paperless workflows to AI agents, security, documentation, and the practical friction that slows teams down. The core argument is ...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Jason Li, CTO at Laurel. Jason brings experience from enterprise software, Salesforce, Ironclad, and AI-native product development. The conversation reframes AI adoption away from replacing work and toward understanding work. Faster code generation does not eliminate engineering bottlenecks. Quality, technical debt, review processes, and organizational design are becoming the limiting factors. If you are leading engin...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Jürgen Dauck, advisor, consultant, and creator of the Leadership Operating System. AI is not the real bottleneck. Broken organizational design is. The conversation reframes AI adoption as a leadership and operating model problem rather than a software rollout. Jürgen argues that companies built around control, reporting, and top-down approval are too slow to capture real value from AI. The discussion moves from misaligned K...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Dan Pratl, Founder and CEO of Quadron. Dan is building infrastructure around trust, credibility, reputation, and human judgment in a world where AI can generate expert-looking work at near-zero cost. The conversation reframes one of the most common assumptions about AI. The scarcity is no longer knowledge creation. The scarcity is verification, judgment, and the ability to demonstrate that a person stands behind a claim. Ra...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Raphael Peyret, Founder and Principal Advisor at SHA/RP. Raphael brings experience across product, cybersecurity, Google, and startup execution from MVP to acquisition. The main tension is clear: companies keep chasing scale before the basics are working. The conversation reframes AI security, startup growth, product management, and GTM as the same sequencing problem. AI-native threats matter, but unpatched systems, weak cr...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Alex Grant, SVP of Sales at North. Alex brings more than 16 years of experience building sales teams across fintech, payments technology, and SaaS. The conversation centers on a hard tension: AI can create more opportunities, but it still cannot create trust by itself. The conversation reframes AI in sales and fintech as an execution problem rather than a technology topic. Alex explains why companies are using AI to move fa...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Eugene Cheah, CEO of Featherless AI. The AI bottleneck is no longer just GPU access. Power, memory, inference cost, and model reliability are becoming the real constraints. Eugene reframes the AI infrastructure debate away from a simple race for bigger models and more chips. The conversation connects energy capacity, HBM shortages, open source model adoption, linear attention architectures, and the enterprise need for predi...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Helen Gu, Founder and CEO of InsightFinder AI. Helen brings decades of research in distributed system reliability, anomaly detection, and AI-driven operations. The conversation focuses on why AI reliability is becoming a business risk, not just an engineering issue. The conversation reframes AI observability as a production control layer for enterprises deploying AI agents. Helen explains why traditional DevOps and SRE prac...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Jason Remillard, Founder of Data443. Jason brings more than 30 years of cybersecurity, data security, infrastructure, and enterprise risk experience. The conversation focuses on the gap between AI adoption speed and the security operating models still built for slower systems. The episode reframes AI security as an execution and visibility problem, not only a model risk problem. Jason argues that security teams lose when th...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Omid Pakseresht, CEO of Goodfolio. Omid works on enterprise AI systems that move beyond pilots and into real business workflows. The conversation reframes enterprise AI failure as a systems problem, not a model problem. Omid argues that most AI initiatives break because the workflow, ownership model, governance layer, audit trail, and adoption path were never designed properly. The model may work, but the enterprise system ...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Laura Fu, GTM Architect at DevRev. Laura brings a RevOps and sales enablement lens to a question many GTM leaders are now facing: AI does not fix sales by sitting on top of old workflows. The conversation reframes AI in go-to-market as an operating model problem, not a tooling problem. Laura argues that AI-native execution requires new feedback loops, better data capture, agent-readable systems, and a different view of enab...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Ross Barnes, Founder of Galahad Group. Ross brings a rare operator view on AI adoption, shaped by his background as Global CTO at a WPP agency and his current work building AI platforms and adoption frameworks. The conversation reframes agentic AI as a management problem, not a prompting problem. Ross argues that useful AI systems need purpose, boundaries, delegation, accountability, and human judgment. The episode moves aw...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Stanley Leong, private wealth advisor and author of Engineering Your Finances. The core tension is simple: technical people often apply logic to money, but still make emotional financial decisions. The conversation reframes wealth planning for engineers, founders, and senior tech professionals as a risk management problem rather than a returns problem. Stanley explains why concentrated employer stock, overexposure to techno...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Tim Freestone, Chief Strategy Officer at Kiteworks. AI is already inside the enterprise, but control is not keeping pace. The conversation reframes AI security as a data control problem rather than a tooling problem. Tim argues that agents are not just another interface. They act, call tools, move data, and introduce a new identity layer that most enterprise security architectures were not designed to govern. If you a...

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Ritesh Patel, CEO and Co-Founder of Ticket Fairy. He has built a full-stack operating system for the global events industry, spanning ticketing, payments, marketing, and AI. The conversation reframes event technology as an infrastructure problem, not a commerce problem. Ticketing looks simple on the surface, but hides deep system complexity, fragile scaling layers, and continuous engineering trade-offs. AI is not simplifyin...