The Innovators Podcast

In this episode of The Next Great Thing, we sit down with Konstantine Buhler, a Sequoia Capital partner and AI pioneer, to explore the transformative journey of artificial intelligence. From his early days at Stanford to his influential roles in startups and venture capital, Konstantine shares his unique perspective on the evolution of AI, highlighting key milestones such as the deep learning revolution and the impact of groundbreaking algorithms like AlexNet. He explains how AI has already generated trillions of dollars in value by predicting user behaviors and optimizing business processes, long before the advent of ChatGPT. Konstantine also shares his insights on the differences between startup and venture capital worlds, advice for entrepreneurs, and how AI can enhance human creativity and connections. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on real customer needs and using AI as a tool to solve significant problems and discusses Sequoia Capital's pre-seed program, ARC, which leverages decades of experience to help startups with market approach, hiring, scaling, and more. One fascinating point Konstantine makes is about the future of AI. He envisions a world where multiple AI models collaborate and compete, each excelling in different areas, leading to better outcomes for consumers and businesses. Show notes, episodes, and more at thenextgreatthingpodcast.com. For more information on SF AppWorks, visit sfappworks.com. Follow Andrew on LinkedIn at @Andrew Greenstein Questions? Feedback? Guest recommendations? Email us here.

Renate Nyborg has been building consumer-focused apps for as long as the App Store has existed. She’s held senior leadership roles at Apple and Headspace. She was the CEO of Tinder, the world’s most popular dating app, at the height of the pandemic. It was during this critical time that Renate saw up close the importance of human connection and the profound negative impacts of loneliness, especially among men and younger people. This experience ultimately inspired her to create Meeno, an app that uses AI to offer personalized advice for any relationship issue – with friends, family, coworkers, roommates, dating, and more. Renate shares her journey in founding Meeno, explaining how she’s developed and tested the app and gathered critical user feedback along the way. She highlights Meeno’s unique approach to delivering bite-sized, expert-validated advice that empowers users to build confidence, communicate better, and improve their relationships. Finally, Renate discusses the challenges of launching an AI startup in the current landscape, emphasizing the importance of staying focused on customer needs and happiness, user experience, and solving genuine problems rather than getting swept up in the AI hype machine. Show notes, episodes, and more at thenextgreatthingpodcast.com. For more information on SF AppWorks, visit sfappworks.com. Follow Andrew on LinkedIn at @Andrew Greenstein Questions? Feedback? Guest recommendations? Email us here.

As the planet warms, we're experiencing more frequent and destructive extreme weather. Yet, 85% of the world lacks critical atmospheric data for precise forecasting that could help us better prepare. John Dean and Kai Marshland, Co-Founders of WindBorne Systems, are on a mission to close this gap. Born out of the Stanford Student Space Initiative, WindBorne began as a project to extend the flight duration of conventional weather balloons. Realizing the impact of their technology on climate change, they turned their project into a venture-backed startup serving both private and government partners like NOAA and the U.S. Air Force. John and Kai share how WindBorne deploys a global constellation of autonomous, navigable, AI-powered balloons that fly longer, are more sustainable, and collect more real-time measurements than standard balloons. Their data is fed into powerful AI models to create the world's most accurate forecasts – better than Google DeepMind’s GraphCast – unlocking the potential to improve disaster preparedness and climate resilience worldwide. Show notes, episodes, and more at thenextgreatthingpodcast.com. For more information on SF AppWorks, visit sfappworks.com. Follow Andrew on LinkedIn at @Andrew Greenstein Questions? Feedback? Guest recommendations? Email us here.

Technology connects us more than ever. Yet, we feel lonelier than ever. Worldwide, one in four adults (more than a billion people) feel lonely. And 36% of all Americans — including 61% of young adults aged 18-25 — feel “serious loneliness.” It’s gotten so bad that, in 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a health advisory about America’s loneliness epidemic, equating social disconnection to the physical health risks to that of drinking alcohol, obesity, physical inactivity, and even smoking 15 cigarettes a day. In this session from SXSW 2024, Andrew Greenstein, Co-Founder and CEO at SF AppWorks and host of ‘The Next Great Thing’ podcast leads a thought-provoking discussion, joined by panelists Leslie Witt, Chief Product and Design officer at Headspace; Kyle Rand, Co-Founder and CEO at Rendever; and Erick Hachenburg, Founder at Tenor, creator of GIF Keyboard. Together, they dive into the paradox of loneliness in our hyper-connected world, explore how the complex relationship between loneliness and technology impacts different cohorts (especially young people and older adults), and offer their vision for a mentally healthy digital future. Background reading: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation 2023: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the  Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community Health Risks of Social Isolation and Loneliness - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Technology’s role in the ‘loneliness epidemic’ - The Washington Post  Loneliness or social isolation linked to serious health outcomes, study finds - CNN The Global State of Social Connections - Meta-Gallup Show notes, episodes, and more at thenextgreatthingpodcast.com. For more information on SF AppWorks, visit sfappworks.com. Follow Andrew on LinkedIn at @Andrew Greenstein Questions? Feedback? Guest recommendations? Email us here.

Arvind Jain, Co-Founder and CEO of generative AI workplace search startup, Glean, has an impressive, 25-year career in Silicon Valley. It’s safe to say he’s learned a thing or two along the way. He’s held engineering roles at Microsoft and Akamai, spent more than a decade working on Search at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, and started two companies, Rubrik, in 2014, and Glean, in 2019. Arvind joins us to reflect on key takeaways and pivotal moments across his career as he’s moved between engineering and entrepreneurship – and shares lessons he’s learned about himself as a founder, what it takes to scale a startup, and how to build the right team. He also takes us inside Glean’s AI-powered enterprise search platform, built on technology that combines AI models like GPT-4 with a powerful search engine. Finally, Arvind offers his vision for the future of productivity, where everyone – regardless of their role or title – will use a personalized AI assistant to help them be more efficient and productive at work. Show notes, episodes, and more at thenextgreatthingpodcast.com. For more information on SF AppWorks, visit sfappworks.com. Follow Andrew on LinkedIn at @Andrew Greenstein Questions? Feedback? Guest recommendations? Email us here.

Named to TIME’s inaugural AI 100 list, Nancy Xu is an AI innovator who worked on early foundation models at Stanford’s AI Lab before founding Moonhub. It’s here where she’s revolutionizing recruiting with AI-powered assistants. But Moonhub didn’t start as an AI company. Nancy reveals invaluable insights she learned from her company’s early days as a traditional recruiting agency, explaining how these lessons fueled an AI recruiter that frees human recruiters from manual, repetitive tasks like candidate sourcing and outreach. She argues that AI will revolutionize hiring efficiency while empowering career mobility and purpose. Workers will get greater access to job opportunities. Recruiters will be able to source larger, more diverse talent pools and focus on building meaningful candidate relationships. And companies will save time and money. Nancy also shares her optimism for our AI-assisted future, making a pragmatic call for policies and training programs to ensure a smooth transition into this transformative era.  Background reading: Moonhub's Nancy Xu on the TIME100 AI list TIME100 AI - full list This Startup's AI Is Used By Billion Dollar Companies To Hire Top Talent - Forbes Show notes, episodes, and more at thenextgreatthingpodcast.com. For more information on SF AppWorks, visit sfappworks.com. Follow Andrew on LinkedIn at @Andrew Greenstein Questions? Feedback? Guest recommendations? Email us here.

Devo Harris isn't your typical tech founder. He’s a builder. A creative visionary who’s most comfortable at the intersection of media and technology. From co-founding G.O.O.D. Music with Kanye West, to launching John Legend’s career, to snagging a Grammy, to pioneering interactive choose-your-own-adventure web videos before they were cool, Devo's entrepreneurial journey is nothing short of extraordinary. Now, he’s the founder and CEO of Adventr, an AI-powered smart video platform that lets any creator make interactive, Internet-connected, hyper-personalized videos at scale – across the web, ad networks, and social media. Devo explains how Adventr is disrupting the digital media landscape with videos you can talk to, stories you can steer, and brands that come alive. He shares how he’s not just building a tech company; he's forging the future of storytelling – one interaction at a time.

AI is booming, but transforming industries still requires custom models that most companies can't build, customize, and deploy themselves. That's the opportunity May Habib saw early and seized. As Co-Founder and CEO of Writer, May and her team have built a full-stack generative AI platform tailored for enterprise companies, giving knowledge workers across a range of industries access to AI's unprecedented capabilities. Combining generative language models with specialized training and guardrails, Writer lets enterprises generate content, analyze data, automate workflows, and more through a no-code interface. Its secret sauce? Palmyra, Writer's own family of LLMs optimized on customers' data for accuracy and tailored to their security needs. May joins the show to share her entrepreneurial journey, trace Writer's pandemic-era origin story, and walk through how business teams are using the platform to build their own tools. She also shares her vision for an AI-augmented business world — one where “if you aren't an AI-enabled team, it'll feel like you're working without the Internet.”

AI like ChatGPT and DALL·E 2 is raising important questions about human creativity. Will AI one day replace us as creators and storytellers? Keith Peiris believes AI can boost creativity rather than hinder it – and he’s built a platform to do just that. Keith is the Co-Founder and CEO of Tome, an AI-powered storytelling and presentation platform that lets anyone turn their ideas into stories and presentations within seconds – from fundraising pitches and sales proposals to landing pages and classroom presentations. He joins the podcast to explain how Tome helps anyone tell compelling stories that convey ideas and persuade others. A former product leader at Instagram, Keith traces Tome’s origins from the start of the pandemic – releasing early prototypes to friends and launching on Product Hunt – to going viral and reaching 10 million users in the months after ChatGPT was released. He shares how, as Tome has scaled, he and his co-founder, Henri Liriani, have balanced using off-the-shelf LLM models with proprietary technology.  And he discusses why critical thinking remains an essential and enduring human skill, even with increasingly intelligent generative AI. 

How does the 171-year-old Gray Lady stay so innovative? Design and technology. Georg Petschnigg, Head of Product Design at The New York Times, shares how his team collaborates with editors, journalists, and experts across the organization to design multimedia experiences that make the most of readers' time and help them understand the world. From unraveling complex topics like the pandemic and elections to creating utility, delight, and moments of clarity across The Times’s vast product ecosystem, Georg reveals the design cues that signify the tone of a story and the dynamic elements used to convey unfolding events. He explains how new formats are being used to enrich reporting and storytelling at The Times. And, he shares his perspective on ongoing efforts to humanize generative AI and its potential to enhance news accessibility and comprehension. With decades of digital product and business experience, Georg is uniquely positioned to understand where tech has been and where it’s going – giving a rare yet fascinating look at the intersection of design, technology, and news.

As Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of fintech startup Brex, Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi are true “friendpreneurs” – a​​nd they’re not even 30 years old. As teens, they met over Twitter in Brazil, hacking and jailbreaking their way through high school. After their payment startup Pagar.me (“basically the Stripe of Brazil”) achieved success, they left Brazil for Silicon Valley, where they used their unique insight into the payments landscape to start Brex in 2017. Originally offering credit cards to startups, Brex has moved and scaled at incredible speed, reaching $100 million in revenue just 18 months after launch, and expanding from credit cards into a global spend management platform that both startups and enterprise customers rely on. Today, the company is valued at more than $12 billion. But scaling this big, this fast hasn’t always been smooth. Henrique and Pedro share their journey, wisdom, and experience managing risk and making tough decisions and pivots. They also explain how their complementary skillsets, friendship, drive, and long-view approach fuel their ambition to build Brex into a global fintech powerhouse – one that’s challenging established financial services and payments players.

Noam Bardin is drawn to working on world-changing ideas. As the former CEO of Waze, the popular traffic crowdsourcing app, he got the chance to do that. Now, as Founder and CEO of social media startup Post News, he’s on to his next big idea: bring civil discourse and fact-based journalism back into our feeds. Post isn’t another “Twitter alternative,” Noam says; it’s an antidote to the toxic brew of misinformation and echo chambers that have been swirling on the big social media platforms and harming society for years. Noam explains how Post plans to reshape the media landscape by rewarding hundreds of publishers, journalists, and creators via micropayments as an alternative to ads and subscriptions. He also recounts important lessons learned from early on in his career and from his time at Waze on how to make big decisions and engage a community of users to create experiences they love. Having seen social media's harms firsthand, Noam wants to realign platform incentives at Post to reduce polarization, elevate fact-based discussions, and counter the global rise of authoritarianism. It’s a bold, ambitious mission. Is Post part of the next great wave of social media? ******* Humanitarian aid organizations seeking donations to aid victims of the war in Israel:  Magen David Adom Alliance for Middle East Peace The International Red Cross

Marissa Mayer is one of the most successful and influential women in tech. As employee #20 at Google, she played a lead role in building the iconic products we use every day, like Google Search, Gmail, AdWords, and Google Maps. As President and CEO at Yahoo, she learned important lessons on leadership, growth, and engagement. Now, she's in a role she’s never had before: founder. As the Co-Founder and CEO of Sunshine, Marissa is focused on cleaning up our contacts and making us happier by improving our relationships -- with a little help from artificial intelligence. Marissa joins us to share how she’s seen AI evolve from her days as a Stanford student researching AI to now -- and why we might be on the eve of another technological revolution. She reflects on her experience in scaling and risk-taking at Google and always putting the user first. And, she discusses her long-term vision for Sunshine, why we should take a cautious view on AI regulation, and why search still has a long way to go. 

We’re off for the summer, but stopping by with a quick update on a few cool happenings at The Next Great Thing! Now through August 20th, vote for ‘The Paradox of Loneliness and Technology,’ our live podcast recording at SXSW 2024. We’ll be joined on stage by some incredible friends of the pod: Leslie Witt, Chief Product & Design Officer at Headspace; Kyle Rand, Co-Founder & CEO at Rendever; and Erick Hachenburg, the Founder of Tenor, which created the first-ever GIF Keyboard. Then, be sure to visit www.sfappworks.com to get your free copy of our new book, ‘Just Start (Up): The Founder’s Guide to Becoming The Next Great Thing.’ It’s chock-full of lessons, inspiration, and practical advice on growing and scaling your startup. You’ll learn from some of our favorite podcast guests, like Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, the CEO of Grammarly; Jenny Arden, the Chief Design Officer at Zillow; and leaders from thredUP, Coursera, Rover, Truepic, and more. See you in the fall for Season 3 of TNGT! VOTE HERE: https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/132358 

We’re constantly looking for ways to track, goal-set, and optimize our physical fitness. Why don’t we do the same with sleep – something we spend one-third of our life doing and foundational to our health? This question was Matteo Franceschetti's "ah-ha" moment. A former competitive athlete, Matteo has had a lifelong obsession with optimizing recovery and personal performance. Sleep is not just rest, he realized; it's fitness. So, in 2014, he co-founded and became the CEO of Eight Sleep, a sleep technology company whose smart mattresses and mattress covers -- or, “Pods,” as they’re called – utilize medical-grade sensors and AI to regulate mattress temperature and help you track and optimize your sleep fitness. Eight Sleep has been recognized as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies and TIME's Best Inventions. Matteo joins us to explain how the company got there, walking us through his founder journey and Eight Sleep’s early days – from a successful crowdfunding campaign to sourcing manufacturers in China, persistence in applying to Y Combinator (third time’s the charm!), securing investors, signing influencers, and navigating the push/pull dynamics of product-market fit.

Imagine exploring inside any building or space, right down to the tiniest details, from anywhere on the planet. That’s exactly what 3D “digital twins” allow you to do. With specialized cameras, a mobile app, sensors, AI, and deep learning, we can now use cutting-edge technology to capture detailed and precise data points inside physical spaces, then stitch them together to create immersive and interactive 3D models, or digital twins. These digital twins allow anyone, anywhere to virtually explore and navigate inside any real-world building or physical environment – from houses to hotels, from museums to factories to Egyptian tombs – with astonishing realism. RJ Pittman is the CEO of Matterport, a pioneer in the 3D digital twin space. A computer engineer, serial entrepreneur, and tech industry veteran, RJ has held senior leadership positions at Google and Apple, and, prior to Matterport, was Chief Product Officer at eBay. RJ joins us to explain why Matterport is much more than a virtual 3D tour provider on your favorite real estate app; it’s a data-first, AI-driven company that’s generating insights across more than 10 million buildings and spaces (and counting), creating the largest spatial data library in the world. He also shares insights he’s gleaned throughout his impressive 20+ year career as a founder and entrepreneur in tech, including lessons in scaled leadership from industry greats like Marissa Mayer, Tim Cook, and (yes) even Henry Ford.

We’re in a clothing waste crisis, buying more clothes than ever but tossing them out twice as fast. Americans trash 11.3 million tons of textiles annually – a whopping 2,150 garments every second! The fashion industry, especially fast fashion, is also one of the world's biggest polluters, responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions. But there’s a growing movement among consumers and retailers to give the unwanted threads clogging our closets a new lease on life. Enter thredUP, one of the largest secondhand apparel marketplaces for women's and kids' clothes, shoes, and accessories. Founded by a cash-strapped Harvard grad student named James Reinhart and his co-founders in 2009, thredUP is today one of the largest online resale sites But it’s also a massive technology and logistics company. With sprawling automated distribution centers and a custom-built, proprietary operating platform, thredUP processes an impressive 100,000 unique items daily. In addition to its consumer-facing marketplace, the company also runs a Resale-as-a-Service (RaaS) program to help brands and retailers participate in the growing secondhand economy. James joins us to share his unconventional founder story and how his lifelong obsession with market failures and solving really hard problems has been a driving force behind thredUP’s growth. He talks about how Gen Z is leading the sustainable resale revolution and why the circular economy will change the way the world shops.

The United States is in the midst of a mental health crisis. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in five adults in the U.S. experiences mental illness each year. And yet, only about half of those who need mental health care receive it – often because of a lack of access to affordable, quality care. Increasingly, people are turning to technology to feel better. But, how do you design health tech to be as effective as traditional mental health care? And where does generative AI fit in? We explore these questions and more with Leslie Witt, Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace Health, one of the world’s largest digital mental health and wellness platforms. Headspace Health has brought together the popular Headspace app for mindfulness, meditation, and care services from its merger with Ginger in 2019, which provides personalized mental health support, coaching, and therapy. Headspace Health has been used by over 100 million people in 190 countries. Leslie talks about the company's mission to make mental health care more accessible and inclusive; the opportunities and challenges of designing and building digital products for mental health and wellness; and the potential of large language models and generative AI to revolutionize our relationship with mental health care.

We’re at a global climate tipping point. Along with policymakers, public-private partnerships, and political will, technology is central to solving our planet's biggest existential threat. One solution that’s gaining momentum: buying and selling carbon credits. The market value for carbon credits is huge – it could be worth more than $50 billion by the end of the decade. But accessing these markets can be complex, and navigating them can demand significant investments of time and resources for businesses. But what if helping remove carbon from the atmosphere was as easy as a click of a button? Brennan Spellacy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Patch, a platform that enables access to 115+ verified carbon removal projects worldwide – like carbon mineralization in concrete, reforestation, and direct air capture – helping companies to achieve their corporate net-zero goals and embed climate action into digital products and services. Brennan joins the podcast to discuss the mechanics of carbon credit buying and how software makes this process easier; lay out the business case for participating in carbon markets; and highlight opportunities for climate tech growth and investment in the years ahead.

Before the decade is out, over 90% of all the content on the internet will be artificially generated. From deepfakes of famous faces to flattering (or not-so-flattering) Instagram and TikTok filters, we've already seen a glimpse of what's possible. But as generative AI rapidly evolves and becomes more widespread, fake media is getting real… deceptively real. Separating fact from fiction will soon become nearly impossible, and, left unchecked, the proliferation of fake and manipulated digital content will lead to the dangerous erosion of trust and transparency in institutions, services, relationships, and society. But Jeff McGregor sees a more optimistic future. As CEO of Truepic, a company named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2022, he's on a mission to restore authenticity, transparency, and trust across the internet. Truepic's patented secure camera technology verifies and authenticates digital media at the point of creation by capturing, signing, and sealing the metadata inside of every photo or video, creating a tamper-evident digital fingerprint that can be tracked across the web. Jeff joins the podcast to explain why, in an era of AI-generated synthetic media, establishing a framework to ensure the authenticity of visual media is critical. He also shares his insights on the broader implications of digital manipulation for society and how Truepic is addressing these challenges to bring trust and transparency back online.