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.

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.

Episode One: John Allspaw and the Foundational Essence of Software Resilience

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.

Episode Two: Brett Hurt on Love and Abundance in an AI-Powered Future (Releasing 9/16/2026)

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.

Episode Three: Chris Anyczyk on the Power of Open Source for our Current AI Times (Releasing 9/23/2026)

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.

Episode Four: Byron Reese on Humanity as a Superorganism
(Releasing 9/30/2026)

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.

Episode Five: Dan Van Tran on the Practicalities of Running Resilient Systems (Releasing 10/7/2026)

Dan Van Tran is the CTO of Collectors, a leading global marketplace. He is also 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.

Dan possesses a combination of deep technical judgment, pragmatism, curiosity, and willingness to get into the deep details of how software systems, and the teams behind them, actually work. For disclosure, Dan is an investor in Autoptic.

Episode Six: Jason Baer on Building Organizational and Leadership Resilience (Releasing 10/14/2026)

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. Jason is a former colleague of mine from my own beloved time as the President of the Individual Transformation practice at SYPartners. Our conversation covers leadership, companies, people, and what it takes to move through change with both ambition and humanity.

Episode Seven: Courtney Nash on Sociotechnical Systems and the Pure Joy of Human Learning
(Releasing 10/21/2026)

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.