Barriers to Entry

This time on BTE, co-host is back and he’s in the hot seat. Bobby Bonett — former Barriers to Entry co-host and newly appointed President of SANDOW DESIGN GROUP — trades the microphone for the guest chair, live at NeoCon 2026. And the plugs were flowing… Andrew and Bobby cover Bobby’s path from SiriusXM and the NBA to building a house of brands at SANDOW, including the 16-day launch of D...

“Spinning Cycles” This week Andrew welcomes Amra Tareen, serial entrepreneur and CEO of ALL3D.AI , for a conversation that starts with laundry—and never really leaves it. Across four startups and two decades of building at the intersection of design, e-commerce, and emerging technology, Amra has mastered the art of the pivot: reading the spin cycle, knowing when to hold on, and knowing when to let...

How do we prepare for the future without trying to predict it? Recorded at NeoCon, Andrew Lane speaks with futures designer Nick Foster, former head of design at Google X and author of Could, Should, Might, Don’t . Together, they explore how designers can think beyond trends and forecasts, challenge assumptions about emerging technologies like AI, and imagine futures that are not just possible, bu...

Beyond the Prompt This week Andrew welcomes Stacy Thorwart, AI educator, founder of The Intelligent Designer, and a fast-growing voice in the design technology space whose social platforms now reach tens of thousands of designers learning how to navigate AI. After years working with designers at Steelcase—and later helping lead global AI strategy—Stacy stepped into entrepreneurship to help the des...

The Creative Assistant This week Andrew welcomes Michael Villegas, Design Director at IA Interior Architects, for a conversation that begins in an unexpected place: a suburban mall in the 90s. From arcades and Hot Topic to skateboarding and early experiments in Microsoft Paint, Michael traces how those early creative influences shaped the way he thinks about technology and design today. Now workin...

Testing the Fences This week Andrew welcomes Harvey Schaefer of MillerKnoll for a conversation that starts with a sore throat, a quick detour into Severance , and lands in a surprisingly human place: change management. As a leader in MillerKnoll’s growing internal machine learning and AI team, Harvey isn’t building flashy tools for the sake of it—he’s helping people across a complex organization u...

Good Scaffolding This week Andrew welcomes Kellan Shanahan, a public artist turned-Lead Product Designer at Arktura, for a conversation about how curiosity, experimentation, and iteration shape the development of products and systems. A key player on the product design team, Kellan shares how his work helps drive Arktura's reputation for blending design, engineering, and manufacturing into a tight...

The Curse of Youth This week Andrew welcomes Caroline Murphy, Design Engagement Strategist at SANDOW, for a conversation that starts with a familiar modern curse of youth: being the default tech support person in your family. From there, Andrew and Caroline dig into a bigger question—what happens when young designers are expected to master both design and AI at the same time? Caroline shares how h...

Architecture as a Startup Season 4 opens with a milestone moment: Andrew Lane’s first solo episode as host . With a little encouragement from Producer Rob, Andrew welcomes back friend of the show Matthias Hollwich , founder of HWKN Architecture , for a conversation about why the architecture industry may need to reinvent itself entirely. Matthias argues that today every architecture firm needs to...

User-first In a special NeoCon edition episode of BTE, Bobby and Andrew are joined by tech and design leader Chris Barton, founder of the renowned music app Shazam and Wednesday’s NeoCon keynote speaker. The trio dives into insights, stories, and observations from Chris’s impressive career in tech, which includes founding Shazam “in the 1900s” nearly a decade before the App Store existed, followed...

Making Data Approachable This week, Bobby and Andrew welcome a guest whose career arc has been about finding the fusion between art and data. From bringing data-driven experiences to life for everyone from IBM to the Masters to The New York Times , to dedicating time to her own personal and community projects, Mary blends two practices that many struggle to connect in the first place. Now, as an E...

The Architect’s Architect  Bobby and Andrew once again have their hands full this week with a dynamic duo joining them in the podcave. Arktura’s Steven Ranta and HKS’s Nathan Ferrance sit down with the gang to explore the many challenges of partnering to create innovative work. It’s hard enough to do this on your own, but Arktura has made a name for itself by pushing boundaries. In this explo...

Humanity-first For an unprecedented third time, Bobby and Andrew are joined on the pod by ThinkLab President and Design Nerds Anonymous host, Amanda Schneider. In another of their always forward-looking conversations, the trio discusses the rapid adoption of AI in the design industry, the barriers to further growth, and how people could be the key to unlocking technology in the future. From there,...

Where art meets innovation Bobby and Andrew sit down with a leader who’s made his career on the cutting edge of technology, art and design while working with some of the world’s biggest brands and businesses. As the CEO of the experimental ‘new media’ company, Volvox Labs, Michael leads an interdisciplinary team of designers, technologists, artists and creatives who strive to create meaningfu...

“That’s the job” This week, Bobby and Andrew have the pleasure of welcoming a leader who’s made his way up through the ranks of one of the world’s most prestigious architecture firms by doing it all. Eli Hoisington rose up at HOK working in nearly every facet of the design business, which today gives him a bold and informed take as Co-CEO. Peering into Eli’s data-driven lens on the futur...

The Innovation Roadmap To kick Season 3 off with a bang, Bobby and Andrew welcome not one, but two guests to the pod to get into the meat of how AI and human-centric feedback are driving innovation at one of the largest architecture design firms in the country, CannonDesign. CIO, Brooke Grammier and Director of Digital Products, Joel Yow, take the guys through a roadmap to remove barriers to...

All great end-of-year specials feature two parts. And that’s why we’re back with Part 2 of Barriers to Entry’s 2024 “Best-of” Clip Show. Andrew and Bobby are back together - and in the holiday spirit - revisiting some of the most memorable moments from the BTE universe in 2024. Hear from Federico Negro (Founder, Canoa), Amanda Schneider (President, ThinkLab), and Lionel Ohayon (Founder and CEO, iC...

It’s Part 1 of Barriers to Entry’s 2024 “Best-of” Clip Show! Andrew Lane and Bobby Bonett revisit the year that was in the BTE universe. Listen in to the year’s most memorable soundbites and topics, featuring appearances from Kelly Knapp (Creative Director, ex-Sphere), Mathieu Lehanneur (Designer) and Eran Chen (Founder and Executive Director, ODA). Andrew and Bobby explore themes of creativity, o...

Enjoy Sense of Space by Turf now available on all podcast platforms . An architect and designer are on a journey to help their community understand the nuances of designing for the built environment. Join Ella Hazard and Faraz Shah through questions and conversations while they explore all the stuff we interact with as designers, architects, and people. Please enjoy the following episode: What are...

This week, Bobby and Andrew get into their flow state with an enlightening conversation about the intersection of technology and creativity with Magic Leap’s Joel Krieger. In a conversation that ranges from the benefits of stretching outside of your comfort zone, to the differences of the impacts of AR and VR in a creative process, to leaving the world a better place than we found it, we go deep w...

Launch and learn In our third in a series of pods recorded live at NeoCon 2024, Andrew and Bobby actually don’t outnumber the guest as they’re joined by both Annie Ming of HBF and Cosmo Kramer of Bitreel to talk about how visualization technology is helping HBF re-imagine how to launch their latest product line, the Firma Collection. The conversation dives deeply into the journey of both sale...

This week, Bobby and Andrew welcome a leader who’s obsessed with the intersection of architecture and technology and the evolution of the practice as a whole.  The founder of established firm, ICRAVE and more recently co-founder of innovative customer experience firm, Journey, Lionel Ohayon joins to share some powerful ideas on how everything is shifting.  Discussing everything how digit...

Technology meets sustainability This week, we’re back at the NeoCon SURROUND podcast studio with friend of the pod and two-time guest, Karli Slocum for the second of our 3part (see what we did there?) NeoCon ‘live’ broadcast specials. Bobby and Andrew hear an update from Karli on a range of exciting processes that 3form is implementing to make production more sustainable and how they’re pushi...

We’re keeping it in the (SANDOW) family this week as we welcome the Editor-in-Chief of Metropolis Magazine, and leading thinker on industry sustainability, Avi Rajagopal. Buckle up as the team nerds out with Avi on everything from how blockchain technology can impact supply chain, to judging the first Interior Design Metaverse Architecture & Design Awards, to what Indigenous culture is teaching us...

A Designer and Product come together This week, Bobby and Andrew are live from NeoCon with a guest who’s lived the majority of last two decades at the intersection of design and technology, Canoa CEO and Co-founder, Federico Negro. A world-class storyteller, Fed takes the guys through his early startup ethos of “buildings equal data”, his time leading design through the explosive growth of We...