Pilot Wave

Pilot Wave
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Technology

Pilot Wave is a podcast at the intersection of artificial intelligence and private markets, exploring how production-grade AI is transforming industrial businesses from the inside out. Pilot Wave Holdings is a private equity firm purpose-built for AI rollups. The firm leads majority buyouts of manufacturing, infrastructure, and essential services businesses and transforms them with production-grade AI. The strategy has delivered market-leading realized returns and venture-backed AI spinouts incubated directly from portfolio operations. Founded by Afsheen Afshar, MD, PhD (Stanford), former Chief AI Officer at Cerberus Capital Management and Chief Data Science Officer at JPMorgan, Pilot Wave brings institutional-grade AI expertise to Main Street businesses.

Episodes

  1. 6d ago

    From Model UN to John McCain: Why Democracy Needs Leaders Who Disagree Better, with Marianne Viray

    Marianne Viray started on Model UN as a teenager in Lisbon, arguing for Mongolia, and went on to work for Senator John McCain on campaign finance reform. She now runs Disagree Better, a nonpartisan nonprofit that trains and promotes leaders who can argue hard without attacking character. She joins Afsheen Afshar to explain why that skill matters for democracy, for companies and for the Thanksgiving table. How far off are Americans about what the other side actually believes? What happened when Republican and Democratic governors talked immigration behind closed doors? And did John McCain’s decency cost him in 2008? Whether the room is a statehouse, a boardroom or a family dinner, how we disagree decides what actually gets done. In this episode: From arguing for Mongolia at Model UN to working for Senator John McCain What McCain was like when the cameras were off The family stat: one in five Americans has cut off an immediate relative over politics How to stay in an argument when it gets heated Why the real problem with money in politics isn’t the $11 billion The Ozempic for Instagram?   Connect with Pilot Wave: Website: https://www.pilotwaveholdings.com  X: https://x.com/pilotwaveai    Guest/s: Marianne Viray https://www.linkedin.com/in/marianne-viray-ab4610204 https://disagreebetter.us Host/s: Afsheen Afshar https://x.com/snaff  https://www.linkedin.com/in/afsheen-afshar-9a924b

  2. Sep 21

    The Viral NYC Bureka Shop That Runs on Claude Code, with Fritz Oleshansky, Co-founder of BUBA Bureka

    BUBA Bureka sells out most days and has the line on Bleecker Street to prove it. The back office running it was built by someone who had never written a line of code. Fritz Oleshansky barely worked in restaurants before opening the shop, and he joins Cooper to walk through how he built the whole operating layer, inventory, prep, SOPs and catering, by asking AI chatbots questions and eventually letting Claude Code do the building. The through line is what happens once the bottleneck stops being AI's intelligence and starts being the operator's imagination. Fritz taught himself to build software one chat prompt at a time, graduated to Claude Code, then Fable, and used it to mine years of staff text threads for tribal knowledge, wire the POS to a weather API to predict bake quantities, and build a system that texts the whole staff the moment a recipe or allergen changes. None of it, he insists, replaces the job of a restaurateur. Freed from spreadsheets, he spends more time doing the one thing software can't, which is making people feel welcome. In this episode: Why old-school food costing pushed Fritz toward automation before AI ever entered the picture Going from asking ChatGPT and Claude in a chat window to running Claude Code, and vibe-coding a front-of-house/back-of-house inventory log as the first build Mining years of staff text threads with AI to surface the shop's unspoken tribal knowledge and turn it into real SOPs Connecting the POS, a weather API, and sales history to generate bake suggestions, and the rainy day that got it wrong The early mess of a database-less "staff hub" built on digital sticky notes, and the fix that turned it into software worth packaging for franchisees Turning a rambling voice memo into a formatted SOP that texts the whole staff and tracks who's read it Why Fritz thinks AI infrastructure belongs as a line item on every new restaurant's opening budget What doesn't change when the robots can bake a perfect bureka Connect with BUBA Bureka: Website: https://bubabureka.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bubabureka/ Connect with Pilot Wave: Website: https://www.pilotwaveholdings.com X: https://x.com/pilotwaveai Guest: Fritz Oleshansky https://www.linkedin.com/in/fritz-oleshansky-50513287 Host: Calvin Cooper https://x.com/cooper_nyc_ https://www.linkedin.com/in/coopernyc

  3. Sep 4

    The Myth of Independence in the Age of AI, with Mark Spindel

    Mark Spindel ran a AAA balance sheet at the World Bank, built and wound down a billion-dollar macro fund, and co-wrote the political history of the Federal Reserve. He joins Afsheen Afshar to trace a line from Salomon Brothers in the 1980s to the Fed's position today, and to what both mean for allocators trying to price AI. The through line is empirics and its limits. Salomon had more PhDs than any firm on the Street and still committed too much capital. Spindel's read is that the models held and the behavior did not. He applies the same test to this cycle. Hyperscaler and AI-related borrowing is approaching the scale of bank debt. Capex is enormous. Productivity has not yet arrived in the official statistics, and his explanation is the one Pilot Wave underwrites: technology does not deploy itself. Workflows get redesigned and workforces get retrained, or the gain stays theoretical. In this episode: Salomon Brothers, and what its rise and collapse show about hubris, empirical overconfidence, and the limits of knowing the price of everything Writing The Myth of Independence, and watching the thesis play out as political pressure on the Fed intensified Why situational awareness, not data alone, separates firms that survive from firms that don't How the Fed is modeling AI's effect on growth, productivity, and the labor force in real time Given the chair, Spindel raises rates sooner, and reads the hesitancy at the Fed as more political than economic The hyperscaler debt boom, and what it means that AI-related borrowing is approaching the scale of bank debt Barton Biggs on no asset class surviving too much money, and where that applies now Why radiology is the counterexample worth sitting with: disrupted by better models, and more radiologists practicing than ever How allocators separate real GPs from AI opportunists: track record, incentive structure, proximity to decision-makers   Connect with Pilot Wave: Website: https://www.pilotwaveholdings.com  X: https://x.com/pilotwaveai  Guest/s: Mark Spindel https://x.com/PotomacRC  https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-spindel-4aa69a135  Host/s: Afsheen Afshar https://x.com/snaff  https://www.linkedin.com/in/afsheen-afshar-9a924b

  4. May 21

    AI Rollup Case Study: From LBO to Exit and VC-Backed Spinout with John MacKinnon, President of CAUS

    Most AI investing stories are theoretical. This one has receipts. In this episode, Afsheen Afshar sits down with John MacKinnon, President of Connect Atlantic Utility Services (CAUS), a Nova Scotia-based high voltage transmission and distribution contractor that grew into one of Atlantic Canada's most sought-after infrastructure businesses under Pilot Wave ownership. Together they walk through the entire arc of a majority buyout that produced a cash-flowing infrastructure business, an AI spinout built for less than one percent of revenue, and ultimately a realized return. John doesn't sugarcoat it. He was skeptical at the start, the ERP rollout nearly confirmed every doubt, and the decision to build Detect from scratch after every platform on the market came up short felt like a serious gamble. What changed his mind wasn't the pitch. It was watching the flywheel actually spin: Connect's cash flow funding the technology, the technology compounding the value of the business, and the data eventually making the exit decision obvious. If you're an investor trying to understand what the AI rollup model looks like when it actually works, or an operator wondering whether any of this translates to the real world, this is the episode to hear. What We Got Into: Closing a majority buyout during COVID with a seller Afsheen had never met in person Why a battle-scarred operator with plenty of scar tissue was skeptical from day one The ERP rollout that went sideways and nearly proved every doubt right Running dozens of ideas through the "9 out of 10 are dumb" filter before zeroing in on asset inspection Why every drone and inspection platform on the market failed and the decision to build from scratch How Detect evolved from a drone company into a data and algorithms platform with a dataset that didn't exist anywhere in the world The flywheel: how Connect's cash flow funded Detect's development for less than 1% of annual revenue The live demo that changed everything: flying over a customer's own assets in real time from a boardroom 500 miles away A buy-and-hold-forever firm that sold when the data said to and why that was the right call   Resources Mentioned: Detect: https://detectinspections.com/  Connect with Connect Atlantic Utility Services: Website: https://centuri.com/connect-utility-services/   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-mackinnon-a3267b13  Connect with Pilot Wave: Website: https://www.pilotwaveholdings.com  X: https://x.com/pilotwaveai  Host/s: Afsheen Afshar https://x.com/snaff  https://www.linkedin.com/in/afsheen-afshar-9a924b

  5. May 12

    The Pilot Episode: AI Meets the Real Economy

    Welcome to PilotWave -- the podcast at the intersection of AI and the real economy. We talk to the researchers, builders, acquirers, and investors pushing this industry forward. In this pilot episode, we turn the mic inward. Founder and Managing Partner Afsheen Afshar, Senior Partner Arik Oganesian, and Director Calvin Cooper introduce the firm and the thesis behind it. Seven years in, PilotWave has learned that buying industrial businesses and transforming them with AI demands something most firms can't fake -- a rare hybrid of private equity discipline, venture-style risk tolerance, deep technical expertise, and enough EQ to work with sellers who've never thought about an AI strategy. The three dig into the origin story, the hard lessons, and what the OpenClaw moment reveals about where autonomous AI is actually headed. What We Got Into: The origin of the firm and why the AI rollup model was considered a dumb idea until it wasn't Why "AI rollup" is a misnomer -- and what PilotWave actually does The hybrid capability stack that makes or breaks this model EQ as an operational edge when working with traditional business owners OpenClaw and what fully autonomous AI exposes about risk, liability, and human intuition Why human instinct degrades when AI does everything -- and why that matters for portcos The ownership model as the only structure that gives you real leverage The North Star principle and how it clarifies every tough decision   Connect with PilotWave: Website: https://www.pilotwaveholdings.com  X: https://x.com/pilotwaveai  Hosts: Afsheen Afshar https://x.com/snaff  https://www.linkedin.com/in/afsheen-afshar-9a924b    Arik Oganesian https://www.linkedin.com/in/arik-oganesian    Calvin Cooper https://x.com/cooper_nyc_  https://www.linkedin.com/in/coopernyc

  • 5 Episodes

About

Pilot Wave is a podcast at the intersection of artificial intelligence and private markets, exploring how production-grade AI is transforming industrial businesses from the inside out. Pilot Wave Holdings is a private equity firm purpose-built for AI rollups. The firm leads majority buyouts of manufacturing, infrastructure, and essential services businesses and transforms them with production-grade AI. The strategy has delivered market-leading realized returns and venture-backed AI spinouts incubated directly from portfolio operations. Founded by Afsheen Afshar, MD, PhD (Stanford), former Chief AI Officer at Cerberus Capital Management and Chief Data Science Officer at JPMorgan, Pilot Wave brings institutional-grade AI expertise to Main Street businesses.

Information

  • Creator
    Pilot Wave
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    5
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Pilot Wave