[REDACTED] Episode 13: How Do You Trust an Agent You Didn’t Watch?
Craig Brown, a field engineer at Quantexa and the solo builder behind Blind Oracle, joins us as Redacted's first inbound guest.
Blind Oracle is a trust and audit layer for AI agents doing business with other agents. It issues agent passports and records delegated work to public ledgers, so anyone can verify what an agent did without having to trust the people who run it. Craig screen-shares the software factory he built to develop it over the past two years. Signals from email, voice notes, social media, and research papers feed planning models, and a governance layer scores the system on alignment, autonomy, durability, and more.
We dig into the questions every serious builder eventually hits. How do you evaluate a system once you've stopped reading its code? How do you build real trust in agents when the underlying models keep changing? And what should true north be when the product is early, and revenue hasn't arrived yet?
Craig is candid about all of it, including his bet that agent-to-agent commerce is coming and that the agents themselves will decide who they trust.
Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open: selling to the robots
00:44 Welcome to Redacted
01:00 Our first inbound guest
02:40 Craig's background: Quantexa and decision intelligence
04:05 From Lockheed Martin to Mantas
05:30 Solution engineering vs. forward deployed engineering
06:15 Building on the side: "the baby" turns one
07:40 Three ways to demo
11:10 What Blind Oracle does: agent counterparty risk
12:15 Agent passports and inter-agent commerce
12:55 Proof on-chain: Nostr and Base
14:40 Inside the software factory: signals, plans, builds
17:05 Feeding an article into the harness
23:35 How do you eval the factory?
24:15 Multi-agent deliberation
25:50 The governance scorecard
29:00 The honest failure: no revenue yet
29:50 Go-to-market for agents
31:00 How "decision confidence" gets measured
33:40 Building trust in an agent system
37:20 True north: the factory or the product?
39:50 The bet on agent-to-agent commerce
42:35 Research papers as signals
44:15 Model benchmarks and routing
46:30 Where to find Craig
---
Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast
Where to Find David:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/
Where to Find Taylor:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/
More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/
---
This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.
We couldn’t share posts like this without our amazing sponsors:
Platinum:
NC IDEA: https://ncidea.org
Gold Sponsors:
- Balentine: https://www.balentine.com/triangle-entrepreneurs
- EisnerAmpner: https://www.eisneramper.com
- Robinson Bradshaw: https://www.robinsonbradshaw.com
Silver Sponsors:
- Automated Consulting Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html
Blind Oracle is a trust and audit layer for AI agents doing business with other agents. It issues agent passports and records delegated work to public ledgers, so anyone can verify what an agent did without having to trust the people who run it. Craig screen-shares the software factory he built to develop it over the past two years. Signals from email, voice notes, social media, and research papers feed planning models, and a governance layer scores the system on alignment, autonomy, durability, and more.
We dig into the questions every serious builder eventually hits. How do you evaluate a system once you've stopped reading its code? How do you build real trust in agents when the underlying models keep changing? And what should true north be when the product is early, and revenue hasn't arrived yet?
Craig is candid about all of it, including his bet that agent-to-agent commerce is coming and that the agents themselves will decide who they trust.
Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open: selling to the robots
00:44 Welcome to Redacted
01:00 Our first inbound guest
02:40 Craig's background: Quantexa and decision intelligence
04:05 From Lockheed Martin to Mantas
05:30 Solution engineering vs. forward deployed engineering
06:15 Building on the side: "the baby" turns one
07:40 Three ways to demo
11:10 What Blind Oracle does: agent counterparty risk
12:15 Agent passports and inter-agent commerce
12:55 Proof on-chain: Nostr and Base
14:40 Inside the software factory: signals, plans, builds
17:05 Feeding an article into the harness
23:35 How do you eval the factory?
24:15 Multi-agent deliberation
25:50 The governance scorecard
29:00 The honest failure: no revenue yet
29:50 Go-to-market for agents
31:00 How "decision confidence" gets measured
33:40 Building trust in an agent system
37:20 True north: the factory or the product?
39:50 The bet on agent-to-agent commerce
42:35 Research papers as signals
44:15 Model benchmarks and routing
46:30 Where to find Craig
---
Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast
Where to Find David:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/
Where to Find Taylor:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/
More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/
---
This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.
We couldn’t share posts like this without our amazing sponsors:
Platinum:
NC IDEA: https://ncidea.org
Gold Sponsors:
- Balentine: https://www.balentine.com/triangle-entrepreneurs
- EisnerAmpner: https://www.eisneramper.com
- Robinson Bradshaw: https://www.robinsonbradshaw.com
Silver Sponsors:
- Automated Consulting Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html
------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:
- Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/
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