The Infra Pod

Publicly listed emails

tim@essencevc.fund

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AI Is the Fourth Application Architecture! Chat with Dave McJannet (ex-CEO of Hashicorp, CEO of Dome Systems)

October 06, 2026

Dave McJannet — CEO of Dome Systems, former CEO of HashiCorp, and a veteran of Cloud Foundry, Hortonworks, and GitHub — joins Tim (Essence) and Ian Livingston (Keycard) to argue that AI isn't a feature wave, it's the fourth application architecture after mainframe, client-server, and cloud.Dave walks the stack layer by layer to separate what endures from what gets layered over: compute shifting from CPU to GPU and onto an inferencing layer, messaging (Kafka vs. Temporal) becoming more...

1,000 tokens per second: the case against predicting one word at a time (Kumar, VP of Engineering at Inception)

August 24, 2026

What if the entire LLM industry has been solving language generation the slow way — one token at a time?In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim Chen (GP at Essence VC) and Ian Livingstone (CEO of Keycard) sit down with Kumar, VP of Engineering at Inception, to unpack Mercury 2, the company's diffusion-based language model, and make the case for a fundamentally different way to generate text and code.Kumar breaks down the core mechanical difference: where a GPT-style transformer predic...

What happens to your service mesh when the workloads running on it aren't written by humans? (Chat with William at Buoyant)

July 20, 2026

In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim Chen (GP at Essence VC) and Ian Livingstone (CEO of Keycard) sit down with William Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Buoyant and creator of Linkerd, to explore how AI agents are reshaping the infrastructure layer — from service security to inference routing.Will traces Linkerd's origins to Twitter's 2014 migration from a monolithic Rails app to distributed microservices — the moment function calls became network calls that could actually fail. A...

Heavybit Podcasts · High booking difficulty · 100 - 1,000 listeners

go podcast() · Medium booking difficulty · 100 - 1,000 listeners

Scaling DevTools · Medium booking difficulty · 100 - 1,000 listeners

Software Engineering Daily · High booking difficulty · 100 - 1,000 listeners

The Next Token · Medium booking difficulty · 100 - 1,000 listeners

How do I get in touch with The Infra Pod?

The Infra Pod is hosted by Ian Livingstone and Tim Chen. Its publicly listed email is tim@essencevc.fund. For guest bookings, the host or producer is usually the best person to reach. Podseeker helps you find direct host and producer contacts and pitch from your own inbox.

What is the email for The Infra Pod?

The publicly listed email for The Infra Pod: tim@essencevc.fund.

How many listeners does The Infra Pod have?

Podseeker estimates The Infra Pod reaches 100 to 1,000 listeners per episode. Only the publisher has exact numbers.

Who is an ideal guest for The Infra Pod?

The Infra Pod typically books industry leaders. Typical guest background: Founders, CTOs, senior engineering leaders, and specialized technical experts building infrastructure software, artificial intelligence systems, developer tools, or related computing platforms. Common among recent guests: Founded or led a notable technology company; Built or scaled infrastructure, AI, or developer-tool platforms; Held senior engineering or technical leadership roles at major technology companies. Recent guests include Tyler Wells and Benny Chen.

How hard is it to get booked on The Infra Pod?

High. It mostly books established leaders in its field.

What topics does The Infra Pod cover?

Recent episodes cover Infrastructure Software, Artificial Intelligence, Developer Tools, Cloud Computing, and Open Source. Pitch an idea tied to one of these topics and mention a recent episode.