Iron Foundry by Terra API

Kyriakos Eleftheriou
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Technology
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Iron Foundry by Terra API features conversations with founders, investors and athletes building the future of health, fitness and technology. Hosted by Kyriakos Eleftheriou, founder and CEO of Terra API. Guests include Vinod Khosla, Bryan Johnson, Lance Armstrong and former Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston. Explore AI, healthcare, human performance and company building. Full episodes, transcripts and key takeaways: https://tryterra.co/podcast

  1. Aug 21

    Vinod Khosla: “It’s Over for Human Doctors”

    Vinod Khosla’s conclusion: “It’s over for human doctors. AI’s just going to be better.” Full episode, transcript and key takeaways: https://tryterra.co/podcast/Vinod-Khosla-Its-Over-for-Human-Doctors Vinod Khosla joins Kyriakos Eleftheriou in front of hundreds of YC AI Startup School founders to explain what the future of healthcare actually looks like. 0:00 Introduction 1:51 When “Do What Users Want” Is Wrong 2:26 Nobody Asked for AI or Fusion 3:51 You Don’t Need a Noble Reason to Start 4:58 Workers, Not Tools for Workers 5:43 Humans Get in the Way of AI 7:52 The Most Important Founder Decision: Who to Ignore 8:15 70% of Investors Add Negative Value 9:40 Most VCs Haven’t Earned the Right to Advise 10:01 Great Founder References Can Be a Bad Sign 10:45 Four Years Destroyed by Polite Investors 12:07 Sam Altman’s Hardest Problem 13:27 Disagreement Is Always Good 15:39 Follow the Talent, Not Today’s Failures 16:55 When Every Telecom Company Bet Against TCP/IP 19:33 “My Willingness to Fail Allows Me to Succeed” 20:57 Judge the Learning Curve, Not the Founder Today 21:13 European Investors Turn Great Ideas Into Decent Ones 22:57 No Doctor Can Keep Up With Medicine 23:41 Drug Interactions Kill More Than Breast Cancer 23:54 Why Vinod Diagnoses Himself With ChatGPT 25:12 Taking a Drug Approved Only for Women 26:44 Three Surgeons. Three Answers. One MRI. 28:28 It’s Over for Human Doctors 30:27 Doctors 73%. AI 88%. Doctors + AI 76%. 31:52 AI Mental Health Diagnosis: 93% 32:52 AI Rated as a Top-10% Therapist 33:19 A Frontier Model Is Not a Medical System 34:32 Human Error Is More Acceptable Than AI Error 36:08 $1T of Healthcare Expertise Should Be Free 38:20 Doctors Will Not Use AI If It Costs Them Fees 38:54 Why the AMA Opposes AI Doctors 39:13 Billing Decides Which Medical Technology Wins 40:34 Administrative AI Is the Smaller Opportunity 41:39 Going Founder Mode on Cancer 42:25 N=1 Medicine Can Route Around Drug Trials 43:06 Founders Go Around Obstacles. Big Companies Don’t. 44:07 Removing Human Drivers Could Save 30,000 Lives 45:38 Radiologists Without AI Are Killing People 46:11 MRI Scanners Should Output Diagnoses, Not Images 48:02 Epic Still Runs on a 1960s Language 49:34 How AI Agents Can Route Around Epic 51:02 Impact Over IRR. OpenAI Made No Sense. 51:48 Fusion Will Not Happen Until Someone Builds It 52:34 Entrepreneurs Make Forecasts Irrelevant 54:17 Light-Rail Capacity Inside a Bicycle Lane

    Vinod Khosla: “It’s Over for Human Doctors”

  2. Aug 6

    Hims & Hers CTO: Mo Elshenawy

    Mo Elshenawy helped put driverless cars on San Francisco streets as President and CTO of Cruise. Full episode and show notes: https://tryterra.co/podcast/Hims-Hers-CTO-Mo-Elshenawy Now CTO of Hims & Hers, he joins Kyriakos to explain why rebuilding healthcare is harder. They discuss closed-loop healthcare, clinical guidelines as code, when AI should remain silent, and whether AI will replace doctors. Mo’s argument: models commoditize. Data and workflow compound. At 25:13, Mo introduces Hims & Hers’ new AI weight loss companion. CHAPTERS (00:00) The Chessboard That Started It All (02:22) AI Changed the Cost of Building (04:17) Healthcare Is Harder Than Self-Driving (06:13) Twice the Cost. 3.7 Fewer Years. (09:17) Conviction Before Driverless Worked (13:47) The Lunch That Changed His Career (15:25) Healthcare Is Actually Sick Care (18:03) Write Your Own Onboarding Plan (19:43) AI Without a Platform Is Demoware (23:06) Why OpenAI Can’t Close the Loop (25:13) Hims’ AI Weight Loss Announcement (28:42) Silence Is a Feature (31:53) Clinical Guidelines as Code (33:32) Most AI Benchmarks Are Theater (36:12) Models Commoditize. Workflow Compounds. (38:46) AI Will Not Replace Doctors (44:37) AI Makes Bad Engineers Worse (48:15) Healthcare Is Still Blockbuster (52:00) Is Hims Getting Into Peptides? (54:06) Concierge Care in Everyone’s Pocket (58:46) AI Destroys the Excuse Not to Build More episodes

    Hims & Hers CTO: Mo Elshenawy

  3. Jul 3

    George Hadjivarnava: Founding Foody, and building AI at Terra

    George Hadjivarnava co-founded Foody as CTO with no VC money, made it profitable in under 2 years, and sold it to Delivery Hero in the biggest tech acquisition in Cyprus. Full episode and show notes: https://tryterra.co/podcast/George-Hadjivarnava-Founding-Foody-and-building-AI-at-Terra Scaling through COVID from restaurant menus to full supermarkets, total downtime: 45 minutes. Now he leads engineering strategy at Terra and he believes the next infrastructure layer won't be built for developers at all. Why in two years 90% of Terra's customers will be agents instead of developersWhy MCPs didn't invent anything new, and the missing layer that transfers intent instead of commandsWhy nothing performs well past 100k tokens despite 1M context windowsThe decision log: AI's most underrated asset inside a companyBootstrapping Foody from phone orders and cash payments to a national exitCompressing hiring from 3 weeks to 1 day with 30,000 applications a yearThe 24/7 AI health system: even a billionaire's team of doctors goes to sleep (0:00) Intro (1:30) Startup ecosystem in Cyprus: more incubators than startups(7:20) Why ecosystems compound(23:00) Flunking Imperial and building websites to pay rent(29:00) Foody's first version: phone orders, cash only(39:35) The Delivery Hero acquisition and COVID scaling(43:05) 45 minutes of total downtime(44:45) You can one-shot an app. You can't one-shot 100M users(50:25) Joining Terra(56:40) The missing agent layer: intent, not commands(1:02:50) The 24/7 AI health system(1:09:35) The 90% agents prediction(1:11:05) Hiring compressed from 3 weeks to 1 day(1:15:35) The decision log: building a company brain(1:19:10) Why 1M context windows are marketing(1:26:35) Three changes to become a real technology hub

    George Hadjivarnava: Founding Foody, and building AI at Terra

  4. Jun 1

    Former Y Combinator President | Geoff Ralston

    ⁠Geoff Ralston⁠⁠ built Rocket Mail before Yahoo Mail existed, built Lala before Spotify worked in America, sat in Steve Jobs' living room to get an acquisition approved, and ran Y Combinator as President. Now he says the most important thing he's ever worked on is making sure AI doesn't kill us. Full episode and show notes: https://tryterra.co/podcast/Early-to-Every-Wave-Former-Y-Combinator-President-Geoff-Ralston In this episode with ⁠⁠Kyriakos Eleftheriou⁠⁠, Geoff speaks about YC, SAIF, the Yahoo acquisition, and the top learnings after decades in silicon valley 00:00 Introduction 03:45 The $70K bet that built Sand Hill Road 06:07 Early to every wave 06:59 "The most important thing I've ever worked on" 08:18 Timing is luck. Here's how to get lucky anyway 10:46 Quitting HP the day he saw the Mosaic browser 15:39 Paul Graham's "packets of cash" acquisition rule 19:35 The Yahoo revolt that almost killed the deal 33:45 Zuck killed Facebook Music in one sentence 39:05 Why Steve Jobs offered him a job — and why he said no 45:40 Running Y Combinator 50:37 Steve Jobs' real superpower 54:06 Why AI is more dangerous than people think 01:01:15 Peter Thiel is wrong about competition 01:03:31 Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection -- Full podcast and writeup → Geoff Ralston on early YC, AI risk, and why Thiel is wrong about competition

    Former Y Combinator President | Geoff Ralston

  5. May 1

    Head of Samsung Next: David Lee - Live in LA

    By the age of 25, David Lee survived stage 4 lymphoma. Not only did he not let it stop him, he worked early in Google, became a partner at SV Angel during the Airbnb / Twitter / Dropbox / Snapchat era, and now leads Samsung Next. In the latest discussion with Kyriakos Eleftheriou in Los Angeles, they discussed: Full episode and show notes: https://tryterra.co/podcast/Head-of-Samsung-Next-David-Lee-Live-in-LA CHAPTERS (00:00) Introduction (02:30) Why digital health still hasn't had its "reusable rocket" (07:00) "Law school is coding for your mind" (08:30) How Elon, Dorsey and Belichick boil any problem down to 3 things (11:00) Telling Yo-Yo Ma from a college cellist — how to spot real talent (14:00) The NFL gets the #1 pick wrong 50% of the time — so how do you pick founders? (16:30) Most pro athletes are scared in big games (19:30) Without a killer product, you have no strategy (22:00) Vanity beats health — why no one wears the clunky device (29:00) Your kids will never do what you tell them — they copy what you do (32:30) Jensen Huang, Saturdays, and why the top person sets everything (37:30) The "red zone of intelligence" AI will never touch (38:30) Why the great fitness instructor gets paid more in the AI era (40:30) Why VC is the wrong financing model for the next decade (41:30) Mike Ovitz and CAA — the playbook for winning in AI Full podcast and writeup → David Lee on Samsung Next, picking founders, and building inside a giant

    Head of Samsung Next: David Lee - Live in LA

  6. Apr 8

    Chief Growth Officer of HYROX: Douglas Gremmen

    42,000 tickets for one New York event. 15,000 gym affiliates. $0 spent on influencers. HYROX CGO Douglas Gremmen joins Kyriakos, CEO of Terra API , at the Connected Health Summit in Stanford to talk through what actually drove that — and what didn't work. Full episode and show notes: https://tryterra.co/podcast/hyrox-cgo-douglas-gremmen The US was their first market outside Germany and their hardest. Three years of losses. A single Lance Armstrong weekend changed the momentum — not because they paid him, but because he just turned up. The gym affiliate program started as inbounds with no structure; it's now the foundation of a bet to reach 100 million people. The CrossFit comparison gets a real answer, not a PR one. But the most interesting parts are the early decisions: rejecting the $2 race t-shirt, the photo package that created the organic flywheel, and a simple principle — invest in the event experience and don't run paid marketing. 00:00 Welcome to Stanford 01:46 Running HYROX at a Conference & the "Bubble" Moment 03:48 The Sweaty Barrier to Participation Problem 05:44 Douglas's Backstory: Sports Marketing & How HYROX Was Born 08:59 From First Event in Hamburg to Leading Global Expansion 10:29 Early Growth: The Van, T-Shirts, Red Bull & the Photo Flywheel 12:36 Global Expansion: Japan, Brazil, India & Getting on the Calendar 14:56 Why the US Was the Hardest Market to Crack 17:28 Losing Money in America — Keeping Belief When the P&L Doesn't Work 19:09 The Lance Armstrong New York Bet: $1M & 30M Impressions 20:27 Influencers at HYROX: Always Organic, Never Paid 21:52 Scaling to 42,000 Tickets: 9 Days of Racing Bigger Than NYC Marathon 23:45 Building Operations: Christian Tutske's Eye for Detail 25:39 Why Athletes Keep Coming Back: Community & Identity 28:00 HYROX 365: From Events Company to 15,000-Gym Affiliate Business 30:54 Accelerating Gym Growth: Big Box Operators & Chicken-and-Egg Dynamics 34:27 HYROX as a Gym Retention Play: Coach Education & Member Stickiness 36:49 Fragmented Gym Tech & the Data Opportunity 38:23 HYROX vs. CrossFit: Honest Comparison & 1,500 Shared Affiliates 43:10 The Pickleball Analogy: Low Barrier + Social + Price = Rocket Ship 46:49 The Path to 100 Million People: Events, Gyms & Knowing Who Trains 49:50 HYROX x Puma: Building a Fashion Brand & the First Dedicated Shoe 54:14 Contrarian Take on the Future of Fitness: Back to Fundamentals 56:35 Physical Events vs. Social Media: Why Credibility Is Harder to Fake 59:11 Post-COVID Perfect Storm & Tickets Selling Out as the New Challenge 01:01:09 Where Will HYROX Be in 5 Years? Formula One, Olympics 2032 & 100M People Full podcast and writeup → Douglas Gremmen on selling 42,000 tickets in a day and scaling HYROX to 15,000 gyms

    Chief Growth Officer of HYROX: Douglas Gremmen

  7. Mar 2

    CTO + Director of AI at Flo Health: Roman Bugaev + Vladislav Nedosekin

    In the latest episode, Kyriakos Eleftheriou sat down with Roman Bugaev , CTO of Flo and Vlad Nedosekin Director of AI Platform, at the Terra API HQ in London, to discuss how they built the top health AI platform globally for women's health. Full episode and show notes: https://tryterra.co/podcast/cto-director-of-ai-at-flo-health-roman-bugaev-vladislav-nedosekin CHAPTERS (0:00) Intro — Flo Health: From 20 People to 80 Million Users (1:02) How Flo became the fastest-growing health company in the world (1:48) Roman's early days: 20 employees, no revenue, product-market fit (3:15) How did you know the product was a hit? (3:25) The underserved women's health market — everyone was building Uber alternatives (4:31) First ML: neural networks for cycle and symptom prediction (5:31) Product evolution — from symptom tracking to AI-powered insights (5:38) Building chatbots inspired by how doctors ask questions (9:18) A/B testing at scale — Flo's custom experimentation platform (11:43) Engineering structure: autonomous two-pizza teams (13:51) Team mistakes — why separate mobile and backend teams failed (15:29) Scaling from 4 servers to 600 services and petabytes of data (17:53) "Whenever it's possible, we are NOT doing AI" (23:15) Why temperature data is critical for ovulation prediction (25:09) Why Flo is the most accurate period tracker — data diversity advantage (28:04) Competition: "We don't really have real competitors" (29:00) AI content creation — generating personalized medical articles (31:01) Hallucinations vs. conflicting medical sources (32:34) The three-person blind test: when AI disagrees with humans (35:10) AI is more consistent than clinicians — but biased against women (36:52) Fine-tuning open-source models on synthetic women's health data (38:25) User profile: the foundation of Flo's personalization (41:19) The digital avatar — your AI health twin that notices what you don't (43:09) AI router: like a GP triage system for language models (46:04) Router also controls tone of voice and remembers past conversations (47:29) "Evaluation, evaluation, evaluation" — how Flo picks models (48:40) Model stability: why proprietary model updates are dangerous for medical AI (51:01) Anonymous mode: privacy that enables AI instead of blocking it (53:49) On-device ML for the most sensitive health data (56:03) Cloudflare outage — "when everyone is down, you're allowed to be down" (56:58) Fine-tuning Llama 7B on Databricks — 10,000+ GPU hours per run (58:07) Training vs. inference cost breakdown (59:45) 100,000-token prompts: the hidden cost of medical AI (1:01:05) Build vs. buy: "Build your competitive advantage, buy everything else" (1:04:47) Value creation vs. value capture teams (1:07:04) The future: AI that knows you better than you know yourself (1:09:00) Time series models: the future of health prediction from wearables (1:10:38) Q&A Full podcast and writeup → Roman Bugaev and Vladislav Nedosekin on scaling Flo Health to 80M users and shipping AI in femtech

    CTO + Director of AI at Flo Health: Roman Bugaev + Vladislav Nedosekin

  8. Jan 18

    Glovo and Yellow.vc co-founder, Sacha Michaud

    In this episode, Kyriakos Eleftheriou, Terra API CEO sits down with Sacha Michaud, co-founder of Glovo, one of the biggest tech successes in the European tech ecosystem,and Yellow.VC, an early-stage fund Full episode and show notes: https://tryterra.co/podcast/glovo-and-yellow-vc-co-founder-sacha-michaud Sacha shares the journey of building the on-demand delivery service from its inception in Barcelona to its expansion across 25 countries and a $2.3 billion acquisition. He discusses the initial challenges of fundraising, competing against larger companies, and the importance of passion and culture in building a successful team. Michaud reflects on the early days of Glovo, where they experimented with a simple app that allowed users to order anything from the city, leading to unexpected viral growth despite initial losses. He emphasizes the significance of adapting to market needs and the evolution of Glovo's business model over the years, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated the demand for grocery delivery. Chapters 00:00 Introduction 02:29 The Birth of Glovo: From Idea to Launch 05:59 Viral Growth and Initial Operations 12:06 Realizing the Potential of Glovo 21:39 Expanding into New Markets 38:55 Navigating Competition and Strategic Decisions 50:39 The $2.3B Acquisition 55:00 Yellow, and investing in new startups 01:04:11 AI and Future Trends in Delivery Full podcast and writeup → Sacha Michaud on building Glovo into a $2B delivery giant and now backing founders at Yellow.vc

    Glovo and Yellow.vc co-founder, Sacha Michaud
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About

Iron Foundry by Terra API features conversations with founders, investors and athletes building the future of health, fitness and technology. Hosted by Kyriakos Eleftheriou, founder and CEO of Terra API. Guests include Vinod Khosla, Bryan Johnson, Lance Armstrong and former Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston. Explore AI, healthcare, human performance and company building. Full episodes, transcripts and key takeaways: https://tryterra.co/podcast

Information

  • Creator
    Kyriakos Eleftheriou
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    71
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Kyriakos Eleftheriou
  • Show Website
    Iron Foundry by Terra API