<p>About my guest & how to find them online</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlsimon/">Karl Simon</a> is the Co-Founder and CTO of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.getsubatomic.ai">Subatomic AI</a>, an enterprise AI Co-Worker Agent platform that deploys customizable agents adapted to client workflows, philosophies, and reasoning patterns. Rising to prominence in the 2010s as a data and engineering leader across retail, healthcare, and life sciences, Simon became known for building globally distributed data organizations and modernizing legacy platforms to support AI and machine learning at scale. Subatomic, co-founded with CEO Sam Sova and backed by a $7 million seed round in October 2025 led by Vantage Financial, focuses on high-stakes verticals including wealth management, legal, and manufacturing.</p><p>Previously, as a senior technology leader at Hudson’s Bay Company — the retail conglomerate that housed Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, Gilt.com, and other brands now consolidated under Saks Global — Simon led all engineering, business intelligence, and AI/ML functions across the company. Before that, he served in data engineering and analytics leadership roles at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.komodohealth.com">Komodo Health</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.accenture.com">Accenture</a>, and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.gene.com">Genentech</a>, building AI-enabled decisioning platforms and modernizing source-to-target data pipelines across healthcare and life sciences.</p><p>Earlier in his career, Simon joined <a target="_blank" href="https://www.oracle.com">Oracle</a> in manufacturing distribution, where he self-taught data warehousing from Ralph Kimball’s Data Warehouse Toolkit before applying those techniques to improve same-day order fulfillment insights. That formative experience established his approach to grounding AI systems in well-architected data foundations — a philosophy he has carried through more than three decades of digital transformations spanning mobile, big data, and generative AI.</p><p><em>Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.</em></p><p><em>So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.</em></p><p><em>I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.</em></p><p></p><p>Subscribe to The Way of Product</p><p></p><p><em>PS — If you want to collaborate on the show, or you know someone I should talk to, shoot me an email at </em><a target="_blank" href="mailto:[email protected]"><em>[email protected]</em></a><em> with "January752" in the subject line so it gets past my filters. I'm not optimizing for famous guests. I'm optimizing for interesting conversations, even from people who aren't LinkedIn influencers.</em></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at <a href="https://www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe</a>