S2E4: The Startup Security Playbook: AI That Keeps Up with AI

Startups Decoded

S2E4: The Startup Security Playbook: AI That Keeps Up with AI — with Francesco Piccoli (Almanax).

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S2E4: The Startup Security Playbook: AI That Keeps Up with AI — with Francesco Piccoli (Almanax).

How LLMs are rewriting application security: less false positives, faster triage, and real-world founder playbooks.

Andy Walsh

Oct 06, 2025

Transcript

Founders are sprinting on AI—attackers are too. Traditional security tools drown teams in alerts and miss the real threats.

In this episode, Almanax founder & CEO Francesco Piccoli breaks down AI-native application security: how LLMs detect logic bugs legacy scanners miss, cut up to 90% of noise, and triage vulnerabilities at the pace you ship. We cover where “shift-left” falls short, how to operationalize low-friction code scanning in GitHub, and what legal/compliance leaders expect before they’ll sign your deal.

If you’re building or buying AI-accelerated software as a founder, CTO, or security lead, this is the playbook.

chapter titles

00:00 AI-Native Security: Why It Matters Now
01:19 Francesco’s Path to AppSec
05:26 Why Legacy Tools Miss Real Bugs
10:48 The Cat-and-Mouse Reality of Cyber
15:46 Legal & Compliance: What Founders Owe
20:34 Founder Best Practices (Week-1 Checklist)
28:46 Cutting 90% of Alert Noise
36:32 Making Security Usable for Devs
39:45 When Breaches Happen: First Calls
41:53 Wrap-Up

Francesco Piccoli

Founder and CEO of Almanax, joins us to unpack how his team is building AI-native systems to catch 5x more bugs while cutting 90% of the noise. We talk about the future of application security, why shift-left isn’t enough anymore, and how triaging vulnerabilities at scale requires a new kind of intelligence.