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 gen...
Aug 01, 2024•55 min•Season 3Ep. 13
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 th...
May 08, 2024•45 min•Season 3Ep. 12
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 chan...
Apr 10, 2024•42 min
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 eve...
Mar 27, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 10
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 e...
Feb 28, 2024•37 min•Season 3Ep. 9
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 c...
Feb 07, 2024•32 min•Season 3Ep. 8
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 ...
Jan 24, 2024•36 min•Season 3Ep. 7
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 guardrail...
Jan 10, 2024•36 min•Season 3Ep. 6
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 cla...
Dec 20, 2023•33 min•Season 3Ep. 5
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 product...
Nov 15, 2023•40 min•Season 3Ep. 4
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 ca...
Oct 25, 2023•41 min•Season 3Ep. 3
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 har...
Oct 11, 2023•45 min•Season 3Ep. 2
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 improvi...
Sep 27, 2023•41 min•Season 3Ep. 1
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 su...
Aug 02, 2023•4 min•Season 2Ep. 21
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...
Jun 21, 2023•38 min•Season 2Ep. 20
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 explor...
May 31, 2023•40 min•Season 2Ep. 19
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 lar...
May 10, 2023•32 min•Season 2Ep. 18
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 ...
Apr 25, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 17
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 b...
Apr 04, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 16
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 con...
Mar 22, 2023•31 min•Season 2Ep. 15
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 bi...
Feb 01, 2023•30 min•Season 2Ep. 14
The robots are coming! Actually, they’re already here. Every day there’s a new story in our newsfeeds about how AI technology is disrupting everything from education to healthcare to the workplace. Remarkably, one of the greatest benefits of AI is its ability to improve human communication. AI communication assistants are quickly becoming our trusted advisors, stealthily upgrading our language skills and making us sound like bona fide geniuses across all of our digital platforms. But according t...
Jan 11, 2023•30 min•Season 2Ep. 13
Buying a home ain’t easy. It can be a fragmented, frustrating, often downright painful experience. You scour the market for your dream home, only to find that each property has its own unique set of flaws. You waste another weekend visiting open houses, only to find that what looked so perfect on your phone is a total dud in person. And that's all before you even get to the nitty-gritty of financing and paperwork! But there's a massive opportunity to revolutionize the way people buy homes, and i...
Dec 14, 2022•35 min•Season 2Ep. 12
Look around you. Chances are, most of what you see has, at some point, been shipped on a truck and driven around by a truck driver. Trucking is a massive, $800 billion industry in the U.S. — 80% of every dollar spent moving freight is spent on trucking. Despite its size and scale, America’s traditional freight network of brokers, shippers, and carriers is fragmented, inefficient, and antiquated. It’s also harming the planet. Nearly 35% of all trucks on the road are empty, and all those empty mil...
Nov 29, 2022•20 min•Season 2Ep. 11
What if software could actually treat a disease? That’s the question that Eddie Martucci, a biochemist and biophysicist whose focus is in drug design, wondered 10 years ago. It’s also the question that set his digital therapeutics company, Akili Interactive , into motion. Today, as Co-Founder and CEO at Akili, Eddie and a diverse team of cognitive neuroscientists, data scientists, software engineers, and video game designers (who’ve worked on games like Medal of Honor, Plants vs. Zombies, and Be...
Nov 09, 2022•31 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Seeing your favorite band or artist in concert can be a life-changing experience. Live music bonds us to one another in a way that no other art form can. And with the pandemic waning, live music is having its renaissance moment. Artists are hitting the road, and fans are packing into concert halls, clubs, and arenas to see them play live. But knowing when your favorite artist is coming to town – and when and where to buy tickets before they’re sold out – can be tricky to navigate. Or is it? Fabr...
Oct 24, 2022•21 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Every year we throw away nearly 40% of our nation's food supply – perfectly edible – leaving it to rot in landfills and release harmful greenhouse gasses. Meanwhile, more than 10% of U.S. households are food insecure. Why do we throw this food away instead of getting it to people in need? Hunger isn’t a scarcity problem, it's a logistical one. That’s according to Jasmine Crowe-Houston, the founder and CEO of Goodr , an Atlanta-based startup that’s using technology to fight both battles: food was...
Oct 11, 2022•29 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Nearly 100 million new digital jobs are projected to emerge in the next five years, while another 85 million will be displaced. But with a global shortage of tech talent, there simply aren’t enough highly skilled workers available in areas like data science, programming, cybersecurity, and engineering. Businesses are therefore looking internally to upskill and reskill their employees. At the same time, workers in industries outside of tech are eager to learn new skills, get certified, and earn n...
Sep 28, 2022•24 min•Season 2Ep. 7
It’s official. Electric vehicles are out of the R&D and early adopter phase and racing towards mainstream adoption. In 2022, EVs account for about 8% of all vehicles sold in America, but in the next 10 to 15 years that figure could approach 100%. But there are plenty of roadblocks ahead – most notably, our EV charging infrastructure. Charging today is a fragmented and frustrating experience, full of disparate hardware, unreliable networks, inconvenient locations, and wonky mobile apps. Zak L...
Jul 26, 2022•31 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Social isolation has a profound negative effect on our mental and physical health. Many of us experienced the effects of this first-hand during the height of the pandemic. But for millions of senior citizens, there is no escape from social isolation as they get older. The impact is devastating, often resulting in increased rates of depression and anxiety and an increased risk of stroke, heart disease, and dementia. Kyle Rand has made it his life’s work to help seniors feel less alone and make ag...
Jul 13, 2022•31 min•Season 2Ep. 5
