Built Not Born: The Startup Go-To-Market Podcast
Why Your GPU Investments Are Running at 40% Efficiency, and How Zymtrace Fixes It
March 18, 2026
What if your multi-million-dollar GPU investment was quietly delivering less than half its potential? In this episode of Built Not Born, the conversation focuses on why AI infrastructure performance often lags far behind spend, and how continuous profiling is emerging as a real competitive edge. Join host Sage Nye as she sits down with Israel Ogbole, CEO and cofounder of zymtrace, to explore why most GPU clusters run at just 20–40% utilisation, how traditional observability tools miss the real bottlenecks, and why profile-guided optimisation can unlock massive efficiency gains without demanding deep CUDA expertise. Israel shares hard-won lessons from building a must-have infrastructure product: validating real willingness to pay, avoiding “nice-to-have” traps, and navigating early founder dynamics. The discussion also dives into the growing talent gap in low-level systems engineering, and how rich profiling data can become context for LLM-driven optimisation workflows. It’s a practical, insight-dense conversation for founders, operators, and AI leaders focused on extracting real returns from AI infrastructure, not just scaling hardware.
What if your multi-million-dollar GPU investment was quietly delivering less than half its potential? In this episode of Built Not Born, the conversation focuses on why AI infrastructure performance often lags far behind spend, and how continuous profiling is emerging as a real competitive edge.

Join host Sage Nye as she sits down with Israel Ogbole, CEO and cofounder of zymtrace, to explore why most GPU clusters run at just 20–40% utilisation, how traditional observability tools miss the real bottlenecks, and why profile-guided optimisation can unlock massive efficiency gains without demanding deep CUDA expertise. Israel shares hard-won lessons from building a must-have infrastructure product: validating real willingness to pay, avoiding “nice-to-have” traps, and navigating early founder dynamics. 

The discussion also dives into the growing talent gap in low-level systems engineering, and how rich profiling data can become context for LLM-driven optimisation workflows. It’s a practical, insight-dense conversation for founders, operators, and AI leaders focused on extracting real returns from AI infrastructure, not just scaling hardware.

Here’s what you will learn:

Israel Ogbole
is CEO and Co-Founder of zymtrace, an infrastructure optimization platform specializing in GPU and CPU workload profiling and efficiency. With a background spanning observability and monitoring at industry leaders including Microsoft, New Relic, AppDynamics, and Elastic, Israel brings deep expertise in continuous profiling, performance optimization, and distributed systems. He is recognized for pioneering profile-guided AI optimization techniques that leverage profiling data to enhance compiler efficiency and LLM-assisted code optimization.

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