The All Turtles Podcast

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Unscaled 3: Algorithmic Canaries Sep 11, 2018

Show notes

How can you tell if the product that you're creating will cause harm? What signs should Facebook have noticed long before its product wreaked havoc on democracy? There are "algorithmic canaries" to watch out for—akin to the birds used in coal mines to help detect deadly gases—now for the digital age. AI is a tool that can be harnessed to efficiently measure a product's impact, whether good or bad.

Show notes

Hemant Taneja's book Unscaled: How AI and a New Generation of Upstarts are Creating the Economy of the Future (referral fees will be donated to charity)

Hemant Taneja, managing director at General Catalyst

Ronda Scott, marketing partner at General Catalyst

How can product makers include algorithmic canaries? (1:30)

Historical comparisons (like the internal combustion engine) (1:40)

The benefit of AI (2:25)

Why it took so long for people to discuss the harmful effects of Facebook (4:47)

The role of the internet (5:15)

In the internal combustion engine example, what should have been done? (5:40)

Comparison to nuclear energy (6:50)

What went wrong with Facebook? (8:49)

The "move fast and break things" slogan (9:40)

The purpose of regulation (11:48)

The scooter wars (13:20)

What should they have done? (14:16)

Jump bikes (15:04)

Products that try to advantage some people at the expense of other people (16:55)

The importance of measuring impact (18:55)

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Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and listener questions for future All Turtles Podcast episodes. Season 2 is coming soon!

Email: hello@all-turtles.com

Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT

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Unscaled 2: Scaling the Truth Sep 06, 2018

Show notes

There's been a big change in the way businesses are built: they no longer need to have sky-high valuations and thousands of employees before they can make an impact. "Scale" as we know it has run its course, leaving a wide-open pasture where startups can focus on building products that matter instead of getting big fast. What lessons should entrepreneurs take from this shift? And how does it influence how success should be measured today? Join Phil Libin, Hemant Taneja, and Ronda Scott to find out.

Show notes

Hemant Taneja's book Unscaled: How AI and a New Generation of Upstarts are Creating the Economy of the Future

Hemant Taneja, managing director at General Catalyst

Ronda Scott, marketing partner at General Catalyst

Scale has run its course (1:06)

Markers of scale breaking (1:50)

The problems of getting big (3:00)

Companies that made an impact before they got big (3:22)

How to have a broader impact (5:15)

The importance of renting (6:27)

Proctor and Gamble's model (7:05)

The differences between consumer-facing goods and innovations in healthcare (8:50)

Where fintech fits in (9:55)

Digital goods like movies on Netflix (12:10)

How tailored products can be even when they come from small companies (12:58)

Is it bad news for the economy that companies don't need to hire thousands of employees to make a big impact? (13:50)

The All Turtles model and hyper-focused product teams (14:44)

Employment during the restructuring of the economy (15:58)

Why businesses don't have to build everything themselves (16:26)

We've moved from vertical integration to API integration (17:25)

Anyone can be an entrepreneur (18:10)

How should success be measured? (18:48)

Customer empathy (18:58)

No longer needed to get big before making an impact (20:24)

Feedback loop (20:30)

The best way to get bigger in scale (21:00)

Getting to truth first (22:30)

We want to hear from you

Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and listener questions for future All Turtles Podcast episodes. Season 2 is coming soon!

Email: hello@all-turtles.com

Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT

For more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.

Unscaled 1: What Went Wrong with the World Wide Web? Sep 04, 2018

Show notes

Welcome to the Unscaled Series, eight new episodes from the All Turtles Podcast featuring Phil Libin in conversation with General Catalyst's Ronda Scott and Hemant Taneja. Hemant's book Unscaled provides a framework for the series' discussions on what it means for a company to scale today. Episode 1 examines the internet's role as an equalizer—both for businesses and for bad actors—and asks how entrepreneurs can address the most pressing problems online today.

Show notes

Hemant Taneja's book: Unscaled: How AI and a New Generation of Upstarts are Creating the Economy of the Future

Venture capital firm General Catalyst

Hemant Taneja bio

Ronda Scott bio

What went wrong with the world wide web (2:01)

The problems with moving fast and breaking things (2:21)The original goals for the Internet (3:08)

Hemant's first internet job (4:05)Ronda's first internet job (4:45)

The difference between being right and being statistically right (6:30)

The biggest problems online today (7:55)

Governance doesn't exist (8:13)

Current environment won't support new businesses trying to do good (9:44)

Ronda's truck -- picture coming ASAP! (10:55)

Siloing has created deep divisions and polarization (11:30)Do San Francisco's problems reflect those of the tech industry? (12:20)

Is education better or worse today? (13:45)

Khan Academy (15:50)

Three classes of problems online (17:15)

Unintended consequences (17:25)

Intended, legal consequences (17:31)

Intended, illegal consequences (17:41)

Scale makes consequences more damaging (19:25)

Problems are the same as the 1990s, but the audience is orders of magnitude larger (20:41)

It's time to rethink the concept of scale (22:03)

We want to hear from you

Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and questions for future episodes. Season 2 is coming soon!

Email: hello@all-turtles.com

Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askATFor more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our websit

Bonus 08: The Darjeeling Limited Aug 15, 2018

Show notes

If targeted advertising is so bad, then why do we use it at All Turtles? That was the question that came up in a Twitter debate between Phil Libin, cofounder and CEO, and Jeremy Brand Yuan, who runs product marketing. Rather than stir up a social dust storm, they sit down for a pot of tea and make peace. Entrepreneurs looking to market test potential products and messages will learn the pros and cons of behavioral targeting, and how to keep their strategies on the up and up.

Show notes

Pouring tea with Jeremy Brand Yuan, Product Marketer at All Turtles (1:05)

Wistaria tea house (3:51)

Conversation about targeted ads (3:57)

Phil's article about anger on social media and the attention economy

Spot, the All Turtles product that helps you report harassment and discrimination at work

Leaders, the All Turtles product that matches diverse and engaging speakers with event organizers to book speaking opportunities

How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did (Forbes)

EdgeRank, Facebook's newsfeed algorithm

Inside Twitter's struggle over what gets banned (New York Times)

Anger on social media (27:00)

We want to hear from you

Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and questions for future episodes:

Email: hello@all-turtles.com

Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT

For more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.

Bonus 07: Her Aug 08, 2018

Show notes

When it comes to issues of race and gender, how do people impact AI and how does AI impact people? To answer this question, Stephanie Dinkins has been speaking with a robot since 2014 and working with communities of color to develop more inclusive AI and to promote AI literacy. Her conversations with Bina48, a robotic head modeled on a black woman, challenge common assumptions about gender and race by AI and suggest ways to build more equitable systems.

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Show notes

Stephanie Dinkins (Dinkins Studio)

Conversations with Bina48

Project al-Khwarizmi

What the Artist Sees in the Mirror (New York Times)

Execution: Select, Copy, Paste (BBC)

Future Perfect (Art in America)

America 3.0 (Vice)

Eyebeam studio

Dinkins involvement with Bina48 (2:20)

Bina48 advanced social robot (Wikipedia)

Racism and Bina48 (3:45)

Bina48 on Racism

Gender and Bina48 (6:39)

Martine Rothblatt (Wikipedia)

Building more inclusive AI with Project al-Khwarizmi (8:35)

Videos from PAK (scroll down page)

Not the Only One project (19:12)

Dialogflow for building conversational experiences

We want to hear from you

We're getting ready for Season Two of the All Turtles Podcast and we'd love your feedback: Please take this brief survey

Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and questions for future episodes:

Email: hello@all-turtles.com

Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT

For more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.

Bonus 06: Pirates of Silicon Valley Aug 01, 2018

Show notes

The rumors about Steve Jobs taking acid before dying, Mark Zuckerberg's first business card, and why Silicon Valley is where it is are just some the tales unearthed by Adam Fisher's Valley of Genius. Fisher joins host Blaise Zerega to discuss the culture of Silicon Valley and Steve Jobs' outsized influence upon it, as well as to offer some predictions about its future. From semiconductors to Atari to the PC, their conversation connects the dots to AI, AR, and beyond.

Show notes

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made it Boom by Adam Fisher

Blaise Zerega (left) and Adam Fisher at the Donatello Studio on July 26, 2018. (Image credit: Philip Dudchuk)

Vanity Fair excerpt: "Google was not a normal place": Brin, Page, and Mayer on the accidental birth of the company that changed everything

Wired excerpt: Sex, beer, and coding: inside Facebook's wild early years

Smithsonian excerpt: What Will Be the Next Big Thing to Come Out of Silicon Valley?

Reception and reviews (2:07)

New York Magazine

New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

The National Book Review

Culture and geography (8:07)

William Shockley (Wikipedia)

Nolan Bushnell (WIkipedia)

Steve Jobs (Wikipedia)

The importance of Atari to Apple (12:22)

Steve Jobs spirituality, death, and memorial service (15:55)

Neem Karoli Baba

Ram Dass

Did Steve Jobs take LSD before dying? (17:04)

Steve Jobs Memorial Held (The Wall Street Journal)

Steve Jobs' official cause of death released (The Telegraph)

Future of Silicon Valley (19:45)

Kevin Kelly

The Big Bang Theory

HBO's Silicon Valley

How Green Was My Valley (Wikipedia)

We want to hear from you

Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and questions for future episodes:

Email: hello@all-turtles.com

Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT

For more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.

Bonus 05: Airplane! Jul 25, 2018

Show notes

Dylan Marriott is a cofounder of Spot, an All Turtles product, but during his free time, he's a pilot. In this mini bonus episode, he talks to Phil Libin about the four lessons he's learned from flying that are applicable to entrepreneurship. Both flying planes and launching companies require preparation, perspective, maximized optionality, and the ability to keep calm under pressure. Listeners, please prepare for takeoff.

Show notes

Conversation with Dylan Marriott, cofounder of Spot (0:30)

Spot, an AI chatbot that allows users to report workplace harassment and discrimination without talking to a human (0:24)

A video of Dylan flying a seaplane in Italy (0:50)

We want to hear from you

Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and questions for future episodes:

Email: hello@all-turtles.com

Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT

For more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.

Bonus 04: Doctor Doctor Jul 18, 2018

Show notes

Our Doctor Doctor mini-series features conversations between PhDs. Jessica Collier, cofounder of All Turtles, talks to Daniel Nicolae, cofounder of Spot, about each of their transitions from humanities PhDs to working in tech. Spot is an All Turtles product that lets users report workplace harassment and discrimination without talking to a human. Working on Spot, Daniel applied lessons he learned from academia, including the ability to follow through on challenging tasks.

Show notes

Conversation with Daniel Nicolae, cofounder of Spot (0:50)

Spot, an AI chatbot that allows users to report workplace harassment and discrimination without talking to a human (0:44)

Penultimate, the digital handwriting Evernote app (5:24)

We want to hear from you

Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and questions for future episodes:

Email: hello@all-turtles.com

Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT

For more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.

Bonus 03: Jack in the Box Jul 12, 2018

Show notes

We're excited to announce that Butter.ai, an All Turtles product, is joining Box. Jon Cifuentes chats with Jack Hirsch, cofounder and CEO of Butter.ai, about the vision and execution of the deal. Butter.ai was built for people to find documents across multiple productivity apps. Jack shares the story of the team's initial funding through their time at All Turtles and up to the offer from Box. He reveals how to successfully navigate an acquisition when you've built something that solves a real problem.

Show notes

Butter.ai joins Box (0:30)

Jack's Medium post about Butter.ai joining Box (0:30)

The previous episode of the All Turtles podcast that featured a conversation with Jack about Butter.ai (0:35)

Conversation with Jack Hirsch, cofounder and CEO of Butter.ai (0:47)

Box, the cloud storage company (1:17)

Butter.ai, the smart, secure way for colleagues to search across work apps (1:48)

General Catalyst, a venture capital company (2:44)

Evernote, a mobile app designed for note taking, organizing, task lists, and archiving (3:10)

WeWork, a coworking and office space company (8:24)

Slack, real-time messaging, file sharing, and search (10:48)

Jack in the Box (image credit: Carlos Rocafort IV, All Turtles)

We want to hear from you

Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and questions for future episodes:

Email: hello@all-turtles.com

Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT

For more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.

Bonus 02: Before Sunset Jun 27, 2018

Show notes

Another day in Paris, another day in Paradise. Our hosts speak with Christine Foote, cofounder and COO of Leaders, an All Turtles product that matches event organizers with speakers. Foote describes the challenges of broadening the pool of speakers to increase diversity and range of viewpoints, and expanding the types of events where speakers might appear. Part of All Turtles Paris and based at Station F, Leaders makes finding speakers with both expertise and availability seamless for event organizers.

Show notes

The launch of All Turtles Paris (1:10)

Conversation with Christine Foote, COO of Leaders (1:18)

Leaders matches people organizing events with speakers who are interested, qualified, and available (1:20)

Loic Le Meur, cofounder and CEO of Leaders (3:25)

LeWeb, the largest web conference in Europe, cofounded by Loic Le Meur (3:28)

The Color Factory (18:08)

We want to hear from you

Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and questions for future episodes:

Email: hello@all-turtles.com

Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT

For more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.