He bootstrapped a telecom company, survived a DDoS attack by sending attackers Bitcoin every 6 minutes, and scaled to billions of minutes a month. This week he rode shotgun on Skywatch, Bluejay's car podcast.

David Casem, co-founder & CEO of Telnyx, hopped in the car — and we went deep on what the next era of voice AI actually looks like from someone who's been in the trenches longer than most.

The take I keep coming back to: we're moving from AI workflows to AI missions.
Not "did the agent handle the call?" but "did the agent accomplish a multi-step task over hours or days — scheduling, follow-ups, quote collection, the whole thing."

A few things that hit different from this one:

🔹 The workflow era gave us smarter IVRs. The missions era gives every person their own AI assistant.

🔹 Cost and quality aren't a trade-off anymore. The best infrastructure players are improving both simultaneously.

🔹 Culture eats strategy. Telnyx has nearly 400 people vibe-coding internal tools. The best orgs will learn to orchestrate more compute.

Oh, and yes — the DDoS story involves Dune references. You'll want to hear that one.

Watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/T45HOvl3ue0
Listen to it on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3oSUWuySk3sqmWhh9PjRv6?si=pugqWtHQQbqt1-8AerzRCw