A grounded look at offensive security, ethics, and how far the fallout can reach.
Offensive security is framed as an ethics and risk problem, with Farzan Karimi, Deputy CISO at Moderna, drawing a clear line between defense and overreach.

Enterprise AI without the gloss.
The Tech Trek is a business-technology interview show focused on how AI and software decisions play out inside real companies. Its strongest episodes stay close to operational trade-offs: security versus speed, automation versus oversight, and leadership ambition versus organizational risk.
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The Tech Trek is an interview-driven technology show about how AI, security, automation, and engineering leadership behave inside real organizations. It favors context over punchlines. Recent conversations look at offensive security ethics, enterprise AI agents, coding tools, procurement automation, CISO responsibilities, founder readiness, and shadow AI. The show’s center of gravity is practical implementation. A topic rarely stays abstract for long; agentic workflows become questions about release processes, observability, governance, and customer impact. Security conversations follow the same pattern. Offensive testing is framed around authorization, blast radius, human behavior after an attack, and the tension between rules-bound defenders and attackers with no rules. AI is treated as powerful, but not frictionless. Episodes ask who owns the risk, what happens when employees bring in unapproved tools, and how leaders can protect innovation without pretending every threat is already understood. The guest list leans toward operators: CISOs, CTOs, founders, and executives building or managing these systems. Their answers often stretch into detailed explanations, which gives the show a working-session quality. It is not a polished futurist monologue. It sounds more like a running enterprise debrief, with each question carrying the baggage of policy, approvals, access, and organizational trust. The show is also comfortable with career and leadership questions. A Tech Trek Brief on moving from engineer to CEO turns founder ambition into a discussion about uncertainty, influence, sales skills, and waiting for the right problem. That range matters. The podcast connects technical change to the people asked to absorb it. Its best moments are not about declaring that AI changes everything. They are about finding the exact place where change becomes a procurement workflow, a security exception, a board-level knowledge gap, or an engineering team learning to move from building to orchestrating.
Made for: For technology leaders, security teams, founders, engineering managers, and operators who want grounded conversations about AI adoption, automation, and organizational risk. It also suits listeners tracking how technical roles change when software, security, and business strategy start overlapping.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by keeping AI and technology debates close to enterprise reality: permissions, procurement, release processes, insider risk, board knowledge gaps, and leadership trade-offs. It gives guests enough room to explain the messy middle between a promising tool and a working organization.
The Tech Trek is a podcast about how modern technology companies are actually built, with a focus on AI, data, platform, and engineering leadership. Host Amir Bormand talks with founders, CTOs, and technical operators about building products, scaling teams, and making the decisions that shape fast-growing companies.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
The Tech Trek makes enterprise AI legible by pressing technology leaders on deployment, governance, security, and the changing shape of skilled work.
The Tech Trek turns interviews with technology leaders into practical examinations of how AI changes work inside companies. Amir keeps the discussion close to decisions: deploying agents safely, redesigning procurement, preparing enterprise software for autonomous systems, and…
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at offensive security, ethics, and how far the fallout can reach.
Offensive security is framed as an ethics and risk problem, with Farzan Karimi, Deputy CISO at Moderna, drawing a clear line between defense and overreach.
A clear look at how AI is reshaping the CISO seat and the trade-offs inside it.
Mike Fanning, Splunk's CISO, leads a useful conversation about how the role is expanding under AI, board-level understanding gaps, burnout, and the strain of defining success.
Shadow AI reframes insider-risk management around intent, visibility, and the workarounds blunt blocking can create.
Shadow AI lands best here as an insider-risk issue, not just a tooling headache. Raj Koo, CTO at DTEX, keeps the focus on intent: the difference between employees trying to get work done and actions that are deliberately harmful.
Agentic software here is framed as platform work, governance, and a wider audience than human users alone.
Amir's conversation with Sumit Arora, Chief Product Officer at Teradata, treats agentic AI as a real change in how enterprise software is built and used, not as a passing label.
A grounded look at AI's dual role in crypto crime, from coding copilots and smart contracts to agentic AML.
Crypto crime is framed as an AI-versus-AI contest, where the same generative tools can sharpen attacks and give defenders more ways to respond.
Procurement is used as a clear lens on AI, shifting roles, and value creation.
Spencer Penn frames procurement as a grounded way to understand how AI is changing knowledge work, and the discussion stays close to Light Source's emphasis on direct material sourcing and large strategic spend.
AI agents meet security alerts, with human review still doing essential work.
This episode looks at how AI agents can move from R&D into production quickly, with Nir Sudhri, head of R&D at 7AI, framing the security use case without softening the risks.


Practical tech decisions for working businesses.


AI leadership beyond the hype cycle.


Customer experience without the gloss.
Spencer Penn, CEO of LightSource, discusses how AI is transforming procurement and knowledge work.
This episode features an interview with Ty Wong, co-founder and CEO of Angle Health, discussing his journey in public service and how his company uses AI to create customizable, ACA-compliant health plans for small and medium-sized businesses.
This episode features an interview with Venkat Chittoor, CTO at Marathon Health, discussing how to effectively implement AI in business through digital transformation, focusing on avoiding pitfalls like shiny object syndrome and ensuring alignment with a strong business plan and measurable value.
This episode features an interview with Yogi Goyal, CEO of Maxima AI, discussing strategies for identifying and hiring outlier software engineers who bring unique backgrounds and transformative experiences to solve complex problems.
Nir Sudhri, head of R&D at 7AI, discusses how the startup uses AI agents to automate security alert investigations.
Farzan Karimi, Deputy CISO at Moderna, joins the show to talk about the ethics of offensive security.
This episode features an interview with Adi Kruaganti, Chief AI and Development Officer at Automation Anywhere, discussing the development and deployment of AI agents in enterprise settings, including topics like security, governance, and customer performance.
This episode explores how AI coding agents are transforming software engineering by shifting engineers' roles from builders to orchestrators, featuring insights from Scott Gale, CTO of Fluency.
This episode features an interview with Scott Gale, CTO of Fluency, discussing how AI coding agents are transforming software engineering by shifting engineers from builders to orchestrators.
This episode features an interview with Spencer Penn, CEO of LightSource, discussing how AI-native workflows and generative AI are transforming procurement processes, particularly in direct material sourcing and supplier negotiations.
Mike Fanning, the CISO at Splunk, joins the show to talk about how the CISO role has grown.
The Tech Trek episode "How Shadow AI Is Changing Cybersecurity and Insider Risk" features Raj Koo, CTO at DTEX, explaining how the company reads employee intent inside security workflows.
Amir speaks with Sumit Arora, Chief Product Officer at Teradata.
Victor Fang, CEO and founder of AndChain AI, tells Amir that crypto crime now uses large language models, deepfake audio, and deepfake video.
This episode features an interview with Ty Wong, co-founder and CEO of Angle Health, discussing his journey in public service and how his company is using AI to modernize healthcare by providing customizable, Fortune 100-level health plans to small and medium-sized businesses.
This episode features an interview with Or Tigley, CTO at MinIO, discussing cloud storage infrastructure, costs, and their impact on AI workloads.