The Room Podcast

In this episode of The Room Podcast, we speak with Sergi Bastardas, co-founder and CEO of Orbio AI, a platform using autonomous agents to coordinate the employee journey for frontline workforces. Sergi traces his path from a small town near Barcelona to joining Amazon Spain in its earliest days, and building a global supply-chain business. He shares how a family history of entrepreneurship, a curiosity about the wider world, and Amazon’s culture of operational excellence shaped the way he builds companies. He explains why HR is fundamentally a system of conversations and unstructured data and why Orbio was designed as an agent-native product rather than an AI add-on. From screening and scheduling to onboarding, retention, and exit interviews, Orbio’s agents work across voice, WhatsApp, text, and Teams while keeping people in control of employment decisions. In this conversation, Sergi breaks down the company’s expansion across languages and markets, what incumbent HR platforms would need to rebuild to become truly agent-native, and why he believes AI will empower frontline workers rather than simply replace them. He also reflects on fundraising, building a global company from Europe, balancing marriage with constant travel, and the coach who changed how he experiences the founder journey.

In this episode of The Room Podcast, we speak with Doug Tallmadge, co-founder and CEO of Gradial, a company building AI agents to help enterprise marketing teams execute work across their tools and campaigns. Doug traces his path from growing up in Cincinnati and studying physics at Dartmouth to joining SpaceX and helping build Starlink. He shares what working through seemingly impossible engineering challenges taught him and why finding a market for a startup can be a very different problem from building a product people already want. After ChatGPT launched, Doug and his longtime friends left their jobs to start a company. He explains how their broad ambition to bring AI into enterprise work became a focused business in marketing, where campaign briefs, creative assets, tickets, and manual handoffs create a significant operational burden. In this conversation, Doug breaks down how Gradial’s agents have evolved alongside the models, what it takes to earn enterprise trust, and why marketers should be able to plan their budgets without worrying about tokens. He also reflects on fundraising setbacks, managing the emotional swings of building a company, and the professor who backed an unconventional student project that helped launch his career.

In this season 15 opener of The Room Podcast, we speak with Gavriel Cohen, co-founder and CEO of NanoCo and creator of NanoClaw, an open-source framework designed to make powerful AI agents safer and more practical for real-world use. NanoClaw emerged from Gavriel’s own experience using AI agents to run an AI-native marketing agency. After connecting an agent he called “Andy” to his company’s sales pipeline, Gavriel saw the potential for agents to operate less like chatbots and more like persistent digital coworkers—but also recognized the security challenges that come with giving autonomous agents access to sensitive tools, data, email, and business systems. In this conversation, Gavriel shares the core idea behind NanoClaw: rather than weakening an AI agent, give it powerful capabilities while putting clear boundaries around what it can access—what he describes as putting the agent “in a box.” He also explains why he believes the future of work will involve humans becoming managers of increasingly capable teams of agents, rather than simply replacing people with AI.

Welcome back to The Room Podcast! This week, Claudia and Madison sit down with Tomer London, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gusto, the all-in-one people platform that simplifies payroll, benefits, and HR for over 400,000 small businesses across the U.S. From humble beginnings as ZenPayroll, Gusto has become one of the most beloved products in the SMB ecosystem—known for turning one of the most stressful business tasks into a delightful experience. In this episode, Tomer shares the personal roots behind Gusto’s mission—growing up around his family’s small clothing store in Israel—and how those early lessons shaped his empathy for small business owners. He walks us through finding the right customer base, building emotional resonance into product design, and why “customer love” is the most powerful growth channel. Listeners will gain valuable insights into startup decision-making, measuring true product–market fit, and the mindset needed to scale from a scrappy YC-backed idea into a category-defining company.

We are back with another live rendition of The Room Podcast! This week, Madison sits down with Jack Barrett, Co-Founder and CEO of Almost Friday Media, the creative force behind the viral comedy brand Friday Beers. After starting and leaving his career in investment banking, Jack followed his storytelling instincts into media, co-founding a creator-first company that now spans comedy, live events, digital media, and even its own beer brand. Almost Friday Media has quickly become a cultural touchpoint for millennial and Gen Z audiences craving authenticity, humor, and community online. In this episode, Jack shares how moments of failure shaped his path, how comedy can connect people across generations, and what it takes to build a modern media business in the era of TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram Reels. Listeners will hear insights on evolving with algorithms, scaling creator ecosystems, and staying true to a mission that celebrates friendship, optimism, and laughter. Listen in as we take a look at how Almost Friday Media became a blueprint for the future of entertainment—where community meets creativity.