In Episode 13, Paul Karner and Dave Mangot sit down with tech veteran Michael Frendo, the current CTO of New Relic (a Francisco Partners and TPG company) and former executive at Proofpoint (a Thoma Bravo company).

Michael strips away the hype of "vibe coding" and shares the hard operational realities of leading a thousand-person engineering organization through the AI revolution.

He reveals why a 5x increase in coding speed only yields a 15% overall efficiency gain, why Agile has created "bad habits" that are actively hurting AI deployments, and why the true P&L winners of the next 18 months will be the firms that "skate to where the puck is going" by preparing for distributed, edge-based AI.

Key Takeaways:

The 15x Fallacy: Coding only accounts for 10% to 20% of the software development lifecycle. Michael breaks down why focusing solely on developer speed misses the broader delivery bottleneck—and why systemic redesign of testing, deployment, and architecture is the only way to capture true bottom-line ROI.

Agile's Bad Habits: The "iterate-as-you-go" Agile culture has made engineering teams sloppy. Michael explains why AI actually demands a "go slow to move fast" approach, requiring more holistic, upfront architectural design to prevent runaway token costs and unstable systems.

The 1,000-Engineer Hackathon Playbook: How Michael got an entire enterprise organization engaged in AI, generating 200 projects and 24 viable product features in a single week by shifting the responsibility of "making time" directly onto his directors.

The 18-Month Horizon: Why standard LLM wrapping is a shortsighted strategy. Michael outlines how the commoditization of software delivery will shift value to small language models, localized reasoning models, and proprietary data moats.