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© 2024 The Next Great Thing
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An exploration into new digital products and experiences — and conversations with the people making them great. What separates a good digital product or experience from being the next great thing in our lives? It’s not just one thing, it’s lots of things — ideas, people, inspiration, distribution, longevity, luck. Host Andrew Greenstein talks with founders, CEOs, product heads, makers, producers, designers, and digital creationists about how they’re coming up with big ideas, pushing creative boundaries, and expanding what’s possible in the digital space. The Next Great Thing podcast is a production of SF AppWorks. Learn more at www.sfappworks.com.
51 Episodes
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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 g...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 an...
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 guardra...
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 c...
How does the 171-year-old Gray Lady stay so innovative? Design, technology, and storytelling. 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 user 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 prod...
As Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of fintech startup Brex, Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi are true “friendpreneurs” – and 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 ...
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 ...
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 impr...
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...
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 sl...
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 exp...
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 l...
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 generati...
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 fo...
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 ...
Our pets aren't just furry friends, they're family. And the pandemic brought this bond into focus for millions of Americans, with one in five households adopting a new dog or cat. But like any family member, pet parents need to care for their pets – and many of them turn to Rover, the world’s largest online marketplace that connects pet owners with pet sitters and dog walkers. That wasn’t always the case. Back in 2011, when Aaron Easterly and his two co-founders started Rover, they faced two ...
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