Beyond the Noise: Signals, Stories, and Spicy Takes

Beau Button, the straight shooting co-founder who doesn't mince words (fair content warning for language on this one!) grew up in New Orleans tinkering with QuickBASIC on a neighbor's IBM PS/2. Years later, he would co-found Atlas Reality, the company behind Atlas Earth, and its spinoff company TesoroXP. In this episode of Beyond the Noise, Matt sits down with Beau to talk through his early interest in computers and to trace his career path from the Piggly Wiggly deli counter to his job at 16 building e-commerce sites in classic ASP, and eventually through founding Atlas Reality. Beau walks through the rise and fall of Atlas Empires, the hard lessons about user acquisition costs and retention, and how those lessons shaped Atlas Earth, a location-based virtual real estate app that has paid out over $13 million in cash to its players. He also explains how the technology that turns real-world card spending into in-game currency became its own company, TesoroXP.Then the conversation turns to AI. Beau explains why he’s addicted to coding agents, and why he’s also spending real money on a Mac Studio, a DGX Spark cluster, and RTX 6000 GPUs to build a local alternative. He shares his skepticism about whether the current economics of frontier models can last, his experience with open-weight models and harnesses, and why he thinks the next few years will bring the democratization of AI. 

In this episode, Matt talks with David Crawshaw, co-founder and CTO of Tailscale and co-founder and CEO of exe.dev. David's love of computers started in northern Australia, where he taught himself to program by hacking on the Clipper-based medical record software his father wrote for the family's practice. From there, David followed his passion (a girl, not programming) to the US, where he spent 7 years at Google working on search infrastructure, Google+, the Go team, and a stint porting the gVisor network stack to Fuchsia. He talks through founding Tailscale, and how it began with a desire to take complicated things in computing and make them simpler, not with a specific product idea.David explains how Tailscale came out of consulting for a small Canadian bank that needed two-factor auth for a legacy SMB-based system, how a weekend WireGuard prototype grew into a mesh network everyone said would never work, and why he eventually "hired himself out of a job." The conversation then turns to exe.dev. David describes how an early coding agent led his team to a bigger problem: agents are far more useful when they get a real computer, and the sandboxes built for them are the wrong shape. They dig into running always-on VMs on local NVMe, why cloud network disks hurt IOPS, and how a TLS reverse proxy can give agents access to services without ever exposing the credentials.Along the way, David and Matt cover learning to code before the internet, why apprenticeship still beats most formal training, the strongly held opinions about garbage collection, and why the best advice for founders is also the most annoying: talk to people.

Randy Shoup's path into software started before he was born. His father, Richard Shoup, was one of the earliest computer science PhDs in the country and part of the original crew at Xerox PARC, where he built Superpaint, the world's first digital paint program with a live video frame buffer. Randy grew up begging to spend weekends in that lab... then set out to become an international lawyer instead, until two years at Oracle and a law firm internship convinced him engineering was the better fit.In this episode, Matt Klein sits down with Randy to walk through three decades of Silicon Valley: building a graphical query tool at Oracle before the web existed, joining email-security pioneer Tumbleweed through its IPO and the dot-com crash, architecting eBay's first real-time search engine, running App Engine at Google in the early days of cloud, and returning to eBay a decade later as Chief Architect to modernize a 5,000-person engineering org. They close on the AI boom: why Randy sees direct parallels to 1999, why Jevons paradox may mean more engineers, not fewer, and why the technical debt of this moment is being created at industrial scale.

Joe Beda has been on the frontlines of a changing industry for many years. From shipping Internet Explorer on physical CDs at Microsoft in the mid-'90s, to helping stand up Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage, co-creating Kubernetes, founding Heptio and selling it to VMware, then walking away from the industry entirely, he's seen it all (or at least, seen a lot). In this episode, Joe joins Matt Klein to unpack what it actually felt like inside Microsoft's hyper-aggressive culture versus Google's passive-aggressive one, why Google, despite superior engineering, lost ground to AWS's relentless customer focus, and the battle to create an internal engineering bubble in the face of bureaucracy. Joe also opens up about burnout, stepping away after VMware, and what brought him back as CTO of Stacklok, where he's now building on-prem MCP governance and LLM gateway infrastructure for regulated enterprises. They close on where MCP, CLIs, and token economics are headed, and whether AI progress looks more like Moore's law or a leveling S-curve.

Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb and co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering, sits down to talk about how AI is forcing a rethink of observability, engineering practice, and the "three pillars" model she's spent years pushing back on.Charity traces her path from an off-grid childhood in rural Idaho to a piano scholarship, San Francisco startups, Parse, Facebook, and eventually starting Honeycomb - by her own admission, partly to get out of burnout. She gets into why "work is family" is the wrong frame, why she took Intercom's 2X productivity challenge seriously enough to issue a rare mandate at Honeycomb, and why she's tired of the triumphant vibe coder discourse.On AI: the three pillars made sense when infra teams operated code they didn't write and couldn't change. Now agents are writing, shipping, and debugging that code, and Charity argues it's forcing a rare reset, a chance for the median engineering team to finally get feedback loops only the top few percent have ever had.