The Change Resilient Podcast
Welcome to the Change Resilient Podcast. Here, Autoptic Co-Founder & CEO Steve Semelsberger holds conversations with global thought leaders working at the intersection of resilience (malleability, flexibility, adaptability, steadfastness, etc.) and change (intentional/unintentional, small/large, slow/fast, etc.).
While software systems are a key topic, the podcast also discusses humanity, organizations, biological ecosystems, social structures, and more. Authors, founders, CTOs, CEOs, analysts, DevOps practitioners, researchers, professors, open source advocates, and others are all guests.
We joyfully address topics from the personal to the universal, from the deeply detailed to the wide sweeping. Given Autoptic's mission, we will spend a fair amount of time talking with practitioners about the latest in AI-driven DevOps and SRE techniques for latent incident detection and avoidance. Wonderfully nerdy stuff that we cherish.
Listen on Spotify Apple, Amazon, YouTube, and wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
Got a topic you'd like us to cover? Interested in participating in a conversation? Have ideas for making this an even better podcast experience? Drop us a line here.
Episode Zero: A Show Introduction
Host Steve Semelsberger offers his perspectives on the why behind the Change Resilient podcast—and enthusiastically previews the show's first seven guests. Listen on Spotify Apple, Amazon, YouTube, and wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
Listeners, you will love this episode. Right out of the gate we interview one of the world's leading thinkers on software resilience, resilience engineering, and human factors. John Allspaw is a founder of the Resilience in Software Foundation and a principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs. He previously served as CTO of Etsy, where his work helped shape many of the practices that became central to the DevOps movement.
John’s landmark 2009 talk with Paul Hammond, 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation, helped change how the industry thinks about the relationship between development and operations. John is also the author of The Art of Capacity Planning and Web Operations, and holds a master’s degree in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund University.
More recently, John’s work has focused deeply on resilience engineering, adaptive capacity, expertise, and how people actually make complex software systems work in the face of surprise and uncertainty. Show details, including a complete transcript and referenced links, are here.
Brett Hurt is a serial software entrepreneur who has built seven successful companies. He founded Coremetrics which was acquired by IBM, co-founded and led Bazaarvoice through its IPO, and most recently co-founded and led data.world, which was acquired by ServiceNow in 2025. Brett is also an investor, a Henry Crown Fellow, and the author of The Entrepreneur’s Essentials.
His newest chapter is Love Conquers Fear—a USA Today best selling book, podcast, and broader mission exploring what happens as AI and other key technologies accelerate, with the goal of helping humanity make it to the Age of Abundance for All. Complete show transcript, including referenced links, is here.
Chris Aniszczyk is an open source technologist with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration.
He's currently a CTO at the Linux Foundation focused on infrastructure and developer experience while running the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Furthermore, he's a Partner at Capital Factory where he focuses on mentoring, advising and investing in open source and infrastructure focused startups.
He has a strong passion for supporting open source focused founders and entrepreneurship. For disclosure, Chris is an investor Autoptic. Complete show transcript, including referenced links, is here.
Byron Reese is a longtime serial entrepreneur who holds numerous technical patents and has started a half dozen companies over the past thirty years. He is currently CEO of a startup called PhotoOp AI.
Byron is also the author of several bestselling science books, including We are Agora. His AI book, The Fourth Age, sold 500K copies in 14 languages. He and his wife have resided in an old Victorian home in Georgetown, Texas for a quarter of a century where they homeschooled their four children. Complete show transcript, including referenced links, is here.
Courtney Nash is the co-founder and CEO of The VOID, where she researches system safety, resilience, and failure in complex sociotechnical systems. She’s also vice president of the board of the Resilience in Software Foundation.
A former cognitive neuroscientist, Courtney has spent much of her career exploring how people learn, make decisions, and respond when complex systems behave in unexpected ways. Over the past two decades, she’s held roles at organizations including Verica, Fastly, O’Reilly, Microsoft, and Amazon. Today Courtney is one of the more influential voices in resilience engineering and modern incident analysis. Complete show transcript, including referenced links, is here.
Jason Baer is the CEO of SYPartners, a transformation consultancy that has spent more than 30 years helping leaders and organizations navigate moments of consequential change. Jason joined SYP in 2013 and became CEO in 2026 after serving as Managing Partner, Chief Client Officer, and President. Jason has advised senior leaders at organizations including AARP, NBCUniversal, Alphabet, Coach, Verizon, and Paramount.
In our broad and fluid conversation we discuss purpose, organizational resilience, the pace of change, some of the books and ideas that have shaped Jason—and what he’s learning now that he’s sitting in the CEO chair himself.
A complete show transcript, including links to multiple books and articles, is here.
Dan Van Tran is the CTO of Collectors, a technology company that helps people authenticate, grade, vault, and sell collectibles. Heis a technology executive, engineering leader, and CTO advisor who has spent his career building and evolving complex software organizations and production systems.
At Collectors, Dan has led engineering through a period of significant growth and modernization, balancing the realities of legacy technology with the need to move quickly, improve reliability, and build for the future. He also advises CTOs and technology leaders on architecture, organizational design, engineering effectiveness, and navigating large-scale change. This is an episode packed full of pragmatic wisdom for the realities of building and operating software systems here in late 2026. Yet, even if you're not a technologist, you'll enjoy Dan's stories of his family's migration from Vietnam, his approach to leadership, and how he finds resilience in the face of AI-fueled change.
A complete show transcript, including links to multiple books and articles, is here.
Upcoming Episodes
Future episodes of the Change Resilient podcast include:
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Hypotherapist Krista Jack on the Power of Rewiring the Unconscious
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Modern CTO founder Joel Beasley on the Practice of Tech Leadership
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Musician J Alan Andrews on Art as a Practice of Resilience
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Researcher and author Richard Davidson on Human Flourishing
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Impact expert Preston James on Steadfastness Through Systemic Challenges
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Entrepreneur and investor Nora Jones on the Evolution of Reliable Systems
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Futurist Cecily Sommers on Change as a Personal Operating System