Colorado Innovators: Tony Fagan, CEO of VideoAMP

In this episode of The Bear Roars, Dan Caruso sits down with Tony Fagan — CEO of VideoAMP, former longtime Google engineering leader, and one of the sharpest technical operators in Boulder — for a candid conversation on what the AI platform shift actually looks like from inside an established software company.

After nearly 15 years at Google, where he led data science and machine learning teams behind YouTube's advertising business, Tony moved to VideoAMP as CTO and recently stepped into the CEO seat. Dan and Tony dig into why this moment isn't an incremental software upgrade but a generational platform shift — on the scale of the internet, the iPhone, and the mobile web — and why mid-stage software companies are uniquely exposed if they wait.

They unpack how Tony is rebuilding VideoAMP in real time: tearing out expensive third-party systems and rebuilding the hardest parts of the stack from scratch with six people and AI agents writing the code, cutting compute costs to roughly 20% of what they were, and standing up custom LoRA-adapted models on their own hardware for specialized tasks like writing Rust and SQL. They also get into the organizational side — why role boundaries between product, engineering, and professional services are blurring; why traditional middle management is quietly being absorbed into AI-native workflows; and why flatter, smaller, faster project teams are becoming the new unit of work.

At its core, this episode is a real-time field report from a CEO navigating the AI platform shift while it's still unfolding — and a call to other operators to move faster than feels comfortable.

Learn more about VideoAMP: https://videoamp.com/

Order Dan's Book – Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book

Listen to Dan's Song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch

Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen

To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com