On July 1, 2026, Jonathan Teubner walked out of the CEO seat at Filter Labs and Erol Yayboke sat down in it. This conversation was recorded that same day.
Jonathan decided years ago he wouldn't be the lifetime CEO. The founder instincts that keep an early company alive — high risk tolerance, selling a product that doesn't exist yet, chasing every opportunity — become a liability at scale, and he wanted out of the seat before that turned existential. A recruiter told him he couldn't hire his way out of it. So he watched his successor grow into the job instead, without telling him it was a test.
Erol lays out what he's keeping (the nerdiness, the flatness, the allergy to meetings) and what changes as Filter Labs becomes a Washington company selling into defense, intelligence, finance, and marketing. Then the conversation turns to the reason the company exists: Russia's move against Telegram just made a generation of single-source monitoring tools useless, and a decade of answering data quality problems with data volume is catching up with everyone.
Highlights:
Why Jonathan started planning his exit two years before it happened
The exact moment a founder's risk appetite becomes a liability
How Erol was tested for the CEO role without knowing it
Life in the seat: five years without a single day fully off
What the Telegram shutdown reveals about single-source intelligence tools
Why "more data" stopped being the answer, and what good data looks like instead
The Harvard Square DNA Filter Labs keeps as it becomes a DC company
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