Source Code

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Inside India’s booming startup ecosystem Aug 25, 2021

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Girish Mathrubootham is in pay-it-forward mode. After starting Freshworks in Chennai, India, and growing the customer communication startup into a multibillion dollar company, Mathrubootham wants to take the lessons he learned along the way and help a new generation of Indian entrepreneurs do even more, even faster.

India is one of the fastest-growing markets for the tech industry, with hundreds of millions of people coming online and a much more open, global stance than countries like China have adopted toward tech. That’s why Google, Amazon and practically every other tech giant is scrambling to establish a foothold in the country. Mathrubootham said that’s a good thing, but he’s focused on helping the founders already in India to build companies to rival those giants both in the country and around the world.

Mathrubootham joined the Source Code podcast to talk about his experiences as a CEO and an investor, the state of the Indian startup market (particularly for SaaS companies), what his new Together Fund is looking for in Indian companies, and what it means to build “a Silicon Valley” in a city like Chennai.

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For all the links and stories, head to Source Code’s homepage.

Tesla AI, Facebook popularity and sustainable gadgets Aug 22, 2021

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Hirsh Chitkara joins the show to talk about Tesla's AI day, and the looming clash between the electric car company and regulators. Then Issie Lapowsky digs into Facebook's newly released data on the platform's most popular content, and tries to figure out what it all means. Finally, Janko Roettgers discusses his series on the race to make gadgets more sustainably, and why it's both hard to do and incredibly important to get right.

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For all the links and stories, head to Source Code’s homepage.

Inside the hotdesking, data-driven office of the future Aug 19, 2021

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A remote, digital-first future of work would appear to be extremely bad news for a company like Envoy. CEO Larry Gadea and his team have spent a number of years building tools for physical offices, after all, including the visitor-check-in system it’s best known for. (If you’ve ever been in a startup office, you know the one: It’s the iPad in the lobby that makes you sign an NDA and then take a picture at that horrible under-chin angle.)

But Gadea said that while the pandemic created some tough times for Envoy — including forcing Gadea to lay off a big chunk of his employees — it has also helped accelerate the company toward some of its bigger, more ambitious plans. Gadea thinks the industry is headed for a rethinking of what an “office” actually does, with more intelligent tools to make sure every employee has the experience they need when they come in. And in a world where five days a week, 9-5 is no longer the normal setup, those tools seem to Gadea to matter more than ever.

Gadea joined the Source Code podcast to talk about how Envoy has changed over the last 18 months, how he sees physical spaces becoming more intelligent and collaborative, and why there are some serious parallels between the office of your future and the school halls of your past.

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Live: How to have better meetings Aug 18, 2021

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A bonus episode! We recently held a virtual event on all things meetings. How to know when to have them (and when not to), how to prepare for them more effectively, how to have them more productively, how to share information when they're done, and much more. We thought you might enjoy it, so we're sharing it here too.

For more on the event and our guests, click here.

Samsung phones, app store bills and vaccine mandates Aug 15, 2021

Show notes

First, a quick look at Samsung’s new foldable phones, and what it’ll take to make anyone care about foldable phones. Then Ben Brody joins to talk about the new bill in the Senate that would change the way Apple and Google’s app stores work. Finally, Allison Levitsky catches us up on tech’s return to offices, new vaccine mandate policies, and the increasingly flexible future of work.

For more on the topics in this episode:

For all the links and stories, head to Source Code’s homepage.

DuckDuckGo CEO: the easy way to a more private internet Aug 11, 2021

Show notes

DuckDuckGo has been on a tear the last couple of years. In mid-2018, the company’s data showed it was getting about 18 million searches a day; now that number’s pushing 100 million. Both numbers still look like rounding errors next to Google’s gargantuan scale, but DuckDuckGo has cemented itself as one of the most important players in search.

But Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO, doesn’t see search as the endgame for the company. DDG is a privacy company, set out on building what he calls “an easy button for privacy.” Weinberg’s is a slightly unusual vision for privacy on the internet: He wants to let people use the apps they want, the way they want, without being tracked or having their personal data collected and used against them. And it should all happen in the background. Privacy, he said, should be “really making one choice: the choice that you want privacy, you don't want to be coerced.”

Weinberg joined the Source Code podcast to discuss what we talk about when we talk about privacy, how a company like DuckDuckGo can compete in a world dominated by the data-gatherers, whether products can be both private and best of breed, and how he feels about the company’s name as it goes more mainstream.

For more on the topics in this episode:

For all the links and stories, head to Source Code’s homepage.

Gaming's crazy summer, and the infrastructure bill’s tech windfall Aug 08, 2021

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Nick Statt joins the show to talk about all the craziness in the gaming world, from the rise in subscription gaming to the scandal unfolding at Activision Blizzard. Then, Issie Lapowsky joins to discuss the 2,700-page infrastructure bill, and what’s in it for the tech industry.

For more on the topics in this episode:

For all the links and stories, head to Source Code’s homepage.

How ethical AI really works Aug 04, 2021

Show notes

Twitter recently released one of its algorithms into the world — the one that controls how images are cropped in the Twitter app — and said it would pay people to find all the ways it was broken. Rumman Chowdhury and Jutta Williams, two executives on Twitter’s META team, called it an “algorithmic bias bounty challenge,” and said they hoped it would set a precedent for “proactive and collective identification of algorithmic harms.”

The META team’s job is to help Twitter (and the rest of the industry) make sure its artificial intelligence and machine-learning products are as ethically and responsibly used as they can be. What does that mean or look like in practice? Well, Twitter (and the rest of the industry) is still figuring that out. And this work, at Google and elsewhere, has led to huge internal turmoil as companies have begun to reckon more honestly with the ramifications of their own work.

Chowdhury and Williams joined the Source Code podcast to talk about how the META team works, what they hope the bias bounty challenge will accomplish, and the challenges of doing qualitative research in a quantitative industry. That, and what “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” can teach us about AI.

For more on the topics in this episode:

For all the links and stories, head to Source Code’s homepage.

The metaverse is coming, and Robinhood's IPO is here Aug 01, 2021

Show notes

First, a few takeaways from another blockbuster quarter in the tech industry. Then, Janko Roettgers joins the show to discuss Big Tech’s obsession with the metaverse and the platform war that seems inevitable. Finally, Ben Pimentel talks about Robinhood’s IPO, and the company’s crazy route to the public markets.

For more on the topics in this episode:

For all the links and stories, head to Source Code’s homepage.

Netflix gaming, privacy fights and the rise of Tiger Global Jul 18, 2021

Show notes

Nick Statt joins the show to discuss a big week in gaming news, including Valve's new Steam Deck console and Netflix's push into making video games. Then, Issie Lapowsky takes us inside the World Wide Web Consortium, where there's a high-stakes privacy battle being waged over the future of privacy and the internet. Finally, Biz Carson talks about SoftBank, Tiger Global, and a massive shakeup happening inside the VC industry.

(Programming note: We're off next week, back the week following.)

For more on the topics in this episode:

For all the links and stories, head to Source Code’s homepage.