The All Turtles Podcast

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) 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Drawn to Paris for its burgeoning startup scene, your hosts speak with Edoardo Manitto, Managing Director of All Turtles Paris, on the eve of our Paris office opening. La Ville-Lumière (The City of Lights) is home to highly-skilled talent, smart investors, and a visa program that welcomes skilled immigrants. The first AT Paris product teams hail from across Europe and are addressing such problems as sexual harassment, language learning, and home security. All Turtles Paris is located at Station F. Show notes The All Turtles crew finds itself in Paris (1:22) Conversation with Edoardo Manitto, Managing Director of All Turtles Paris (1:46) The new All Turtles website! (3:50) All Turtles Paris is based at Station F (4:55) Xavier Niel, Station F, and 42 (6:51) All Turtles Podcast Episode 27 featuring of 42 Goals for All Turtles Paris (7:20) 5 active product teams in Europe: Leade.rs, FastForward.ai, Sunflower Labs, Spot, and Chatterbox  (8:24) The startup scene in Paris (12:35) All Turtles partnership with Bpifrance (13:44) All Turtles Paris job openings (16:45)   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.

Science fiction has long inspired new technologies, from robots to flip phones to artificial intelligence and more. Yet it’s provocative to consider that sci-fi is more often descriptive than predictive. Dystopias can reflect contemporary fears and biases. Utopias may contain robot characters more developed than women characters. Still, the clear path from imagined worlds to today’s tech products is worth celebrating. Speaking of which, this episode marks the end of Season 1. Thanks for listening. Show Notes Welcome (0:12) Conversation with Brittney Gallagher, host and executive producer of Digital Culture LA (2:02) Brittney’s show on KPFK (2:02) “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” - Ursula Le Guin (4:54) Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (7:30) Social science fiction explained (9:29) Foundation by Isaac Asimov (9:41) 1984 by George Orwell (9:48) The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (9:49) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (11:07) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (11:08) The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft (11:52) The Rats in the Walls by H.P. Lovecraft (13:45) Anathem by Neal Stephenson (16:56) We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (19:33) I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (20:21) Evernote’s Three Laws of Data Protection (21:35) Dune by Frank Herbert (25:36) Ready Player One (30:35) The Matrix (30:35) Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (32:31) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (34:43) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which referenced transparent aluminum and voice commands for computers (35:05) Listener questions (41:29) You missed the obvious question, given your clear commitment to it: What impact is 42 having on diversity in the pipeline for developers? (42:05) Can you share your thinking on blockchain for business? Various comments on the show give a negative impression of the technology. While it was created to support cryptocurrency, there are possible uses for various business scenarios. For example, procurement agreements that require definitive validation and perhaps an alternative to PGP servers for email encryption that would require storing a public key on a blockchain. (44:43) David Mazières’ white paper on the Stellar Consensus Protocol (48:02) Jessica’s graphic novel Adventures in Galactic Consensus (48:15) End of Season One: Thank you (50:35) 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.

When Gmail says, “It seems like you forgot to attach a file,” that precise phrasing is the result of careful deliberation by a design team. It’s one example Erika Hall gives in her book Conversational Design. She explains her work as “designing with words” rather than literary writing, and asserts that collaboration by designers, writers, and engineers is required for meaningful user experiences. Listener questions address previous episodes about Duplex and, our favorite scapegoat, blockchain. Show Notes Welcome (0:12) Purchase Conversational Design by Erika Hall on A Book Apart (0:30) Purchase Conversational Design by Erika Hall on Amazon (0:30) Netflix’s company culture (0:37)  Patty McCord’s slide deck: “You should try to build a great company to be from.” Discussion with Erika Hall (2:41) Erika Hall, cofounder of Mule Design Studio The importance of non-verbal signs in communication (12:54) Lightweight prototyping of communication interaction as part of design process and concept of minimal viable conversation (17:18) How does reading poetry help someone become a conversational designer? (19:08) William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow (19:21) Should it ever be ok for a computer to pretend to be a human? (21:49) All the ways to interact with Amazon: “Amazon’s Quest for Global Domination” (video, Wall Street Journal) (24:33) Rev. Walter Ong, Jesuit teacher and scholar of language (New York Times) (26:11) Listener questions (28:47) You came out strongly against Duplex. Can you explain why for someone who would like to be sympathetic to your viewpoint? I feel like I missed chapter 1-5 on what is so wrong with what they did. (29:03) Episode 29 of the All Turtles Podcast featured a discussion on Duplex. (29:03) I don’t understand the reference to blockchain in episode 28. Can you explain? (31:00) Episode 28 of the All Turtles Podcast featured the taxonomy discussion (31:03) 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.

You may have received a slew of emails about GDPR last week. The new regulations seek to protect users’ privacy and took effect on May 25 across the EU. GDPR has guidelines on how long companies can keep users’ data, how they use it, and how they explain their requests for personal information. And because it’s the “World” Wide Web, standards set in Europe will impact companies everywhere. We also celebrate All Turtles’ one-year anniversary, and respond to suggestions about AI impersonating humans. Show Notes Welcome (0:38) Discussion: GDPR (0:56) What is GDPR and why should you care? (Wired) (1:53) Mark Zuckerberg’s apology to the EU (8:55) Guy Verhofstadt’s comments to Zuckerberg: “As one of the three big internet giants together with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who have enriched our world and societies, or on the other hand, the genius that created a digital monster that is destroying our democracies and our societies. That is a question you have to put to yourself.” (9:43) Zuckerberg avoided tough questions thanks to short EU question format (12:40) All Turtles’ Anniversary (19:49) Spot: replace workplace harassment and discrimination without talking to a human (22:31) Disco: effortless recognition and rewards - appreciate employees right where work happens (22:32) Butter: the smart, secure way for teammates to search across work apps (22:33) Taxonomy discussion for early-stage products in episode 28 (23:48) The Silicon Valley method isn’t enough: a better way to build products (24:57) Discussion: Use cases where human-impersonating AI could be beneficial (27:47) It would be very useful for people who have social anxiety, selective mutism, or other disorders that make it very difficult for them to interact verbally with other people. Having a human-impersonating voice assistant would allow them to practice in a realistic way without feeling these anxieties. (29:48) Improving interactions of ALS patients. (30:48) An elderly person in a retirement home who is depressed and needs social interaction may benefit from a human-sounding voice assistant. (31:39) Listener questions (35:49) Bank of America is launching a virtual assistant they’re calling Erica. Why are they trying to make Erica sound human? Does the world really need another female voice assistant (e.g. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, etc.)? (36:01) What’s the role of this podcast in growing your studio? Do you recommend that startups do their own podcasts? (39:28) 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.

When we allow artificial intelligence to impersonate humans, what kind of precedent does that set? It’s one of the questions that was raised after Google unveiled Duplex, and in this episode our hosts consider what the implications of this technology might be. They also ask whether there should be new rules for grammar and speech when speaking with machines. Listener questions include the upcoming book club discussion and our favorite podcasts. Show Notes Welcome (0:11) Laurel or Yanny? (Video) (1:05) Discussion: Google Duplex (1:22) Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference (1:35) Sundar Pichai demoing Duplex (video) (1:56) Google’s statement after Duplex controversy (4:48): "We understand and value the discussion around Google Duplex -- as we’ve said from the beginning, transparency in the technology is important. We are designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we’ll make sure the system is appropriately identified. What we showed at I/O was an early technology demo, and we look forward to incorporating feedback as we develop this into a product." -- May 11, 2018 Pichai’s blog post about Duplex (5:10) Microsoft’s Speech Devices SDK demo (video) (6:13) Discussion: How does All Turtles define practical AI? (15:08) IBM’s 5 attributes of useful AI (18:18) Discussion: levels of formality for speaking to an AI (23:15) Listener questions When will you be airing the book club discussion on Erika Hall’s Conversational Design? (29:00) Answer: Episode 31! What are your favorite podcasts? (30:15) The Daily, a daily news podcast from the New York Times (30:29) Reply All, a podcast about the internet (31:03) Pod Save America, a podcast about politics from former aides to President Obama (31:21) Reveal, a podcast from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX (32:31) Reveal’s money laundering episode (32:41) Desert Oracle Radio (32:58) 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.