The Times Tech Podcast

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder of Gitab, to talk about running a remote-first company (2:45), how it works (5:45), organising informal communication (8:30), minimising meetings (9:45), on-boarding (12:30), convincing investors (14:15), the problem with “hybrid” work models (15:50), the future of cities (18:15), and inventing ways to measure...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Cade Metz, New York Times tech journalist and author of Genius Makers, to talk about the rise of artificial intelligence (3:00), the most important auction in tech (4:35), Europe’s AI crackdown (7:40), Geoff Hinton and neural networks (10:00), how AI starts to spread (13:00), Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis (18:20), why he turned down Facebook’s takeov...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Matt Hall, founder of Larva Labs, to talk about creating cryptopunks (3:00), what he did before this (4:30), creating cryptopunks in 2017 (9:00), cryptokitties (11:00), how it works (12:45), giving them away (14:00), from zero to a $250m market (15:15), why NFTs took off (20:05), who is buying them (24:20), trying 50 other things before this (25:45),...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Yishan Wong, founder of Terraformation, to talk about his plan to plant a trillion trees (3:30), his days running Reddit (8:10), on whether social media is manageable (10:50), working at Paypal and Facebook in the early days (13:15), marrying tech and tree planting (15:15), how he got into climate change (18:00), making tree-planting a b...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder of Alchemy, to talk about the boom in non-fungible tokens (NFT’s) (3:00), his first app (7:50), what Alchemy does (10:10), how much NFT sales have grown since January (14:00), fads and staying power (17:30), the value of digital goods (20:20), the weirdest NFTs (23:30), the future (25:15), how Alchemy makes money (30:30),...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Tim O’Reilly to talk about the end of Silicon Valley as we know it (3:30), how the markets were designed to give us monopolies (6:30), his history in tech (90), incentives (10:30), the coming crash (17:00), the tech industry’s changing culture (23:15), how venture investors now pick the winners (26:15), on whether Silicon Valley can do deep tech (29:1...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Pat Romano, chief executive of Chargepoint, to talk about taking a company public in a pandemic (4:20), the electric car revolution (7:30), about whether there are enough chargers (11:40), why charging cars will be completely different from filling up at a petrol station (11:20), how long before we think of EV’s as just cars (16:50), the...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Timnit Gebru, former co-head of Google’s ethical AI research team, to talk about how she arrived at Google (3:30), starting Black in AI (5:30), why diversity matters (8:40), her work at Google (12:30), gender shades research (15:50), the paper that got her booted from Google (19:10), large language models (20:50), what her paper addresse...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Kulveer Taggar, founder of Zeus Living, to talk about a year like no other (2:50), the first wave of cancellations 6:230), choosing to give money back (10:10), getting blanked by investors (11:40), his “Jerry Maguire” moment (14:15), Zoom layoffs (16:00), regaining ground (20:10), his co-founder’s wife getting cancer (23:10), getting bac...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Varsha Rao, chief executive of Nurx, to talk about running a women’s health company in Covid (2:50), seeing demand double (6:40), the staying power of telehealth (8:50), doing a startup in the first dotcom boom (13:35), what she learned (16:35), being a female founder (18:20), joining as an early executive at Airbnb (20;50), shifting to...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Delian Asparouhov, founder of Varda Industries, to talk about manufacturing in space (3:00), the collapse in launch costs (6:45), SpaceX’s Starship (8:55), coming to America from Bulgaria (11:30), the math Olympiad (12:20), his previous tech jobs (14:55), founder dating (17:45), building space factories (24:20), the ‘coming down’ challenge (26:05), se...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Jason Calacanis, to talk about the de-platfroming of Trump (4:45), the revelation that is Trump-less Twitter (9:15), Silicon Valley v the media (12:15), the editing process (17:30), his term “late-stage journalism” (19:50), subscriptions and popularity (23:25), the direction of journalism (28:00), the increased scrutiny of Big Tech (30:3...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Jared Isaacman, founder of Shift4 Payments, to talk about flying the first civilian mission to space (4:15), on whether he is scared (7:00), starting a company at 16 (8:15), early success (11:15), creating the world’s largest air force (12:35), buying fighter jets around the world (16:05), training for space (17:50), funding kids cancer research (22:5...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Alexis Rivas of Cover to talk about rebuilding home-building (3:45), starting small (7:40), using software to automate the process (9:00), the original idea (11:20), getting into Y Combinator (13:45), the Lego method (15:45), the mini-boom in construction tech (18:20), the homelessness problem (21:30), the cost difference (25:05), overhauling the indu...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Eric Goldman, law professor at Santa Clara University, to talk about what tech regulation will look like under Joe Biden (4:00), Congressional gridlock (7:00), the importance of Section 230 (8:15), social media’s Lehman Brothers moment (10:25), cable news’ central role in disinformation (12:40), what he would do as tech czar (14:05), and the effective...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Sridhar Ramaswamy to talk about the problem with search engines (3:45), leaving Google (6:15), where Google went wrong (10:30), on whether people actually care about privacy (14:00), why the government's antitrust suit doesn’t help (19:00), how you build a search engine without the resources of Google (21:45), the importance of the cloud...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Dmitri Mehlhorn, head of Investing in US, to talk about the business of unseating Trump (3:45), what he saw as an existential threat (8:25), linking up with Reid Hoffman (10:50), the problem he sought to solve (13:00), investing hundreds of millions to make Trump a one-term president (15:55), the importance of Big Data in politics (20:15...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Chris Best, founder of Substack, to talk about how he got started (6:40), newsletters v newspapers (11:20), Silicon Valley’s disgust with the media (13:10), helping writers make money (16:20), Substack’s top earner (22:00), the danger of hardening silos (25:40), giving writers more resources (30:55), the value of editors (34:10), how Substack makes mo...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on George Goldsmith to talk about how he started looking into psilocybin (3:45), its history of research (7:00), what he and his wife did before starting Compass (10:15), the 100 million people suffering treatment-resistant depression (14:15), launching the company (17:15), finding investors (18:45), being worth $800 million (23:00), what t...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and prominent tech commentator, to talk about algorithmic rent (0:00), the Facebook case (5:15), how tech companies quietly changed the terms of engagement (7:40), getting investment from Pierre Omidyar (12:40), how his work got started on algorithmic rent (13:20), monitoring Big Tech’s behaviour c...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Brad Garlinghouse, to talk about remaking the global financial system (2:45), when it could happen (5:30), the cross-border payment challenge (7:10), replumbing the system (12:00), going through the first dotcom bubble (14:20), suing Youtube (16:20), getting impersonated (21:40), China’s control of bitcoin (22:20), the future of finance...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Renee DiResta of the Stanford INternet Observatory to talk about how Twitter handled 2020 (3:30), mainstream media getting a pass (40), Facebook groups (9:45), Sharpiegate (8:30), the election day war room (11:45), conspiracy “tickets” (15:00), how conspiracies spread (16:45), Trump’s centrality to the voter fraud posts (21:40), how these theories pla...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Nate Storey, co-founder of indoor farming unicorn Plenty, to talk about tearing down and rebuilding farms (3:40), the problem he’s trying to solve (6:40), breeding food for transport (8:50), building a farm in Compton (10:45), leveraging Hollywood (13:40), how he got into agriculture (17:10), leaving his first startup (22:10), what an indoor farm look...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Ruben Harris, co-founder of Career Karma, to talk about starting out as a cellist (3:10), why music convinced him to get into business (6:50), buying a one-way ticket (8:55), his first tech job (11:00), working in political technology (17:30), how starting a podcast led to his startup (18:50), quitting his job (20:30), creating Career Ka...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Phil Libin, founder of Mmhmm, to talk about fasting (3:35), starting the company (5:00), what it does (9:15), the end of the social media ice age (13:20), a trillion dollar shift (17:00), why he’s not worried about rivals copying him (24:30), who uses it (27:00), how he came up with the name (30:45), what goes wrong at startups (34:20),...