Orbit - An Hg software leadership podcast

Every December, Rob Toews publishes ten AI predictions in Forbes, then comes back a year later and grades himself in public. That habit of putting a stake in the ground, and owning the misses, makes him one of the more interesting voices in the space. In this conversation with Jon Wulkan, he explains why the frontier has narrowed to a handful of Western labs, why even well-resourced challengers have struggled to keep pace, and why the much-feared "SaaS apocalypse" is probably overdone.

They also dig into the economics underneath the hype: why model prices are likely to rise once the big IPOs land, why one of the three remaining frontier players has a structural funding edge the others can't match, and why an obscure accounting question about chip depreciation could reprice the entire AI infrastructure trade. Along the way, Toews reaches for a comparison that sticks: we're building data centers that draw twice the power of San Francisco, while the human brain runs on 20 watts. His advice for vertical software CEOs? Hire for slope, not y-intercept..

In this episode, John Cranmer is joined by Gil Elbaz, Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer at Onyx Security, the company building the secure AI control plane for the agentic era. Gil, formerly in the CTO office at Nvidia working on multi-agent infrastructure, argues that the AI attack surface has fundamentally changed. The old boundary between what is yours and what is not has collapsed, and every agent, every MCP, every tool connection is now part of the perimeter.

The conversation moves from the rise of shadow AI inside enterprises, where employees reach for any tool that makes work faster, to the harder problems underneath: rogue agents taking destructive actions they were never asked to take, multi-agent communication happening invisibly through Slack and email rather than direct A2A channels, and offensive AI systems like Mythos finding more zero-days in weeks than internal red teams find in years. Gil shares his playbook for getting your arms around it: visibility first, then policy, then runtime protection. As he puts it, the right seatbelt is what lets you drive faster.

The inventor of DevOps explains why AI needs engineering rigour and human collaboration.

The engineer who coined "DevOps" in 2009 thinks he is watching the same pattern play out again, only faster. In this episode of Orbit, Patrick Debois joins Nathaniel Barnes, Hg's portfolio CTO, at our annual Digital Summit in Paris, to map the parallels between the DevOps movement and what is happening right now with AI agents in software teams. The framing question: what if context is the new code?

Patrick unpacks the four phases of his context development lifecycle, generate, evaluate, distribute, observe, and explains why the maturity of a company's CI/CD pipeline is the single best predictor of how well it will absorb AI. He and Nathaniel dig into context drift, customer-facing "vibe coding" as a discovery engine, the silos that agents are quietly breaking down, and why the companies winning right now are the ones that skipped the 27-step plan and just started. As Patrick puts it: "We are at the age where it doesn't need to be perfect. We just need to be there." Essential listening for any technology leader navigating this moment.

When Jonathan Sanders pitched Light to investors, the reaction was unanimous: rebuilding ERP would take a decade and a hundred million dollars. He did it in two years, with AI at the core. Today Light powers AI unicorns including Lovable and Legora, and Jonathan joins Hg director Soren Holt to explain how. The conversation goes well beyond automation. It's a builder's account of a first-principles redesign.

Jonathan and Soren cover the move from template-based OCR to context-aware agents, why eighty percent of AI's value comes from doing things that were previously impossible rather than making old tasks faster, and how Light's customers now sweep entire transaction populations during audits rather than sampling. Jonathan walks through Light's hackathon programme with CFOs, the operating model behind a remote engineering organisation, and the shift from finance as operator to finance as orchestrator. The line that lands hardest: "Fear is not a strategy." An essential listen for any finance leader thinking about what 2030 actually looks like.

Evan Goldberg co-founded NetSuite in 1998 with a five-minute phone call to Larry Ellison when his "graphics stuff" wasn't going great. He pioneered cloud computing before SaaS existed, sold to Oracle for $9 billion, and stayed at the helm for a decade more. Now at 40,000 organisations and $4 billion ARR, Evan has presided over two tectonic platform shifts and says AI dwarfs both.

Recorded at Hg's 'Office of the CFO' dinner in New York back in February, Goldberg explains why autonomous close agents that find exceptions while you sleep are "never going back" territory, his perfect metaphor for why AI still needs integrated data ("cell phones don't help you speak French"), and why customers "have no interest in becoming ERP hobbyists." He reveals he quit Oracle for MIT's AI lab 30 years too early, why mixing deterministic systems with probabilistic AI is the answer, and his tactical advice for founders: step back from strong growth numbers to spot destructive trends, then make painful changes even if they crater quarterly results. From a coffee-stained computer to global success, this is founder wisdom about building companies that last through multiple technology revolutions.