Tank Talks

Every operator should watch this.

Mike Mahannah turned a $1M sheet metal shop into @amazon's top data center supplier and sold it to Modine for ~$260M.

Today, he coaches CEOs at Resonance Consulting, helping them spot the blind spots he once had.

On this episode of Tank Talks he shares all the lessons from 40 years of operating, in under an hour:

Full episode on Tanktalks.fm

Your best hire might be your biggest problem.

Mike Mahannah fired his top two sales hires because they weren’t a culture fit. And funnily enough, sales went up, and everyone was happier.

"When you're clearly not a fit for the culture, clearly not a fit for the business, end it."

That lesson cost Mike years to learn, today it’s all free on Tank Talks.

Mike is a 2x exited operator. He's sold a heating and cooling firm to his own employees and a then, a ~$260M manufacturer to Modine. Today he's a partner at Resonance Consulting, coaching CEOs through the same blind spots he once had.

If you're building or working at a startup, this episode is 40 years of operating lessons in under an hour.

Full episode on

Everyone always wants to throw AI at everything and burn as many tokens as you can.

But costs are catching up...

@Uber burned its 2026 AI budget in 4 months.

@Microsoft is capping token spend.

The token maxing era seems to be coming to a close, and Shomik Ghosh of @Sierra_Ventures thinks that's great news.

If everyone kept token maxing, AI demand would look far bigger than it really is. Companies would build for demand that isn't there.

This shift is finally getting us closer to the real number.

Shomik started his career on a fixed income trading desk. Now, he is a partner at Sierra Ventures, where he still reads public markets to spot where real demand is showing up in AI.

This episode is a must listen if you invest in, build on, or bet on AI. See full episode on TankTalks.fm

@midjourney started as an AI image generator.

Now it's building full-body medical scans to deploy across the US.

Shomik Ghosh, Partner at @Sierra_Ventures says this is his favorite trend right now: Founders whose ambition refuses to stay in its lane.

From creators and images to the medical world.

"We need more of that."

Shomik has sat on almost every side of the table: starting off as a fixed income trader, then a first employee at a startup, then an early backer of Snyk at @Boldstartvc . Today, he's a partner at Sierra Ventures, investing in frontier and applied AI.

Full conversation with Shomik on Tanktalks.fm

Andrej Karpathy (@AnthropicAI ), Noam Shazeer (@OpenAI ), John Jumper (@AnthropicAI ) can work at any company they want

So why did they all choose to go back to the frontier labs?

Shomik Ghosh @shomikghosh21 at @Sierra_Ventures says their moves back to labs are the clearest sign that we're very close to recursively self-improving models.

Shomik spent six years backing companies at the earliest stage at @Boldstartvc. Now, he's a partner at Sierra Ventures, he invests across frontier AI, including @ReflectionAI_ .

On this episode of Tank Talks, we sat down with him to talk about where AI is headed, and the signals that he looks for and trusts more than any other market benchmarks.

This episode is a must listen if you invest in, build on, or bet on AI. See full episode on Tanktalks.fm