Danielle Newnham Podcast

As April 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the Arm architecture, I am re-releasing my episode with Steve Furber. What began as an ambitious project in a small corner of Cambridge, U.K., has grown into the world's most widely adopted computing architecture, now powering billions of devices – from sensors, smartphones and laptops to vehicles, datacenters and beyond. It was at 3pm on 26th April 1985...

Dr Alvy Ray Smith is the co-founder of Pixar, a computer scientist and pioneer in the field of computer graphics and to celebrate 39 years to the day that Pixar was officially founded, I wanted to release my interview with Alvy from Series 3. After starting his career in academia, Alvy had an epiphany following a serious skiing accident. He decided to move to California to combine his two passions...

Today’s guest is Zahaan Bharmal – Senior Director of Strategy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Google where he has spent the last 16 years. He is also author of The Art of Physics: 8 elegant ideas to make sense of almost everything. In this conversation, Zahaan and I discuss his younger years, how he struggled at school and had big questions about the world and how The Hitchhiker's Guide...

Today’s guest is Nuno Coelho Santos – a Portuguese Product Designer who has worked at some of tech’s top companies from DeepMind to Meta’s WhatsApp , and Google Health. He was at DeepMind working on their Streams app for clinicians when Covid struck and his team were pulled into helping the UK Ministry’s of Health Departments Covid response. In this wide ranging conversation, we talk about Nuno’s...

This week's guest is David Senra , ex-founder and host of   Founders podcast – one of my favourite podcasts where each week, David devours a biography of a founder and shares his favourite lessons with the world, whether it’s Charlie Munger, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Kobe Bryant, The Wright Brothers, Lucille Ball, Jay Z, Enzo Ferrari and many more! But David has a really interesting story himself an...

Today’s guest is Charlotte Stavrou – founder and CEO of SevenSix agency – an award winning influencer marketing agency. In this episode, we talk about Charlotte’s childhood and how it shaped her work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit, how her dyslexia diagnosis last year allowed her to feel whole after the education system left her feeling broken. We also discuss why so many founders are now becomi...

Today’s guest is Asif Ahmed, Partner & Head of Early Stage for Tech & High Growth companies at accountancy firm Cooper Parry. He previously founded Acclivity Advisors which was acquired by Cooper Parry and his role at both has been to work closely with early-stage founders and entrepreneurs across all accounting, tax and advisory disciplines - ensuring founding teams are able to help navigate and...

Today’s guest is JZ, currently Chief Product Officer at Linktree and previoysly SVP of Product at Webflow. And before that, she led product teams at Airbnb, WeWork, Dropbox and gaming startup Pocket Gems. In this episode, we discuss JZ’s life growing up – how frequent moves to different cities and countries built her up resilience and adaptability, how she got into product management despite being...

Today’s guest is Anil Ananthaswamy - an award-winning science writer and former staff writer and deputy news editor for New Scientist magazine. He is a 2019-20 MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow and has been a guest editor for the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and organizes and teaches an annual science writing workshop at the National Centre for Biological...

Today’s guest is Simon Brading who works at App Agency Brightec and is the co-founder of Mentora Money which he started in 2022 with his wife, Anna – a financial education instructor. Their mission is simple but important - to create a platform to help as many people as possible learn basic financial principles so that they can make money, look after their money and reduce money stress.  In this c...

Today’s guest is the wonderful Doug Menuez – a documentary photographer, director and photojournalist whose incredible career has seen him cover the AIDS crisis, the Ethiopian famine, the birth of the digital revolution in the 1980s where he documented founders like Steve Jobs, Marc Andreessen, Bill Gates, the Adobe founders and more and that is how he came on my radar. His book, Fearless Genius:...

What's coming up on Series 14 of the Danielle Newnham Podcast. I have long toyed with the idea of branching out away from solely focusing on tech founders. I started the podcast 3 years ago now with the idea of interviewing people in the tech field because that’s what I knew – that was the field that I had been in and I believed that the human stories behind the game changing tech were important w...

Today’s guest before a little summer break is Yancey Strickler – previously co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter, currently co-founder of Metalabel. Yancey is also a writer and in 2019, his excellent first book was published - This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. In the book and in this conversation, Yancey also discusses a useful decision making framework that he came up...

Today’s guest is Sharmadean Reid MBE , a serial founder and author. Sharmadean grew up in Wolverhampton, surrounded by strong female influences before she went to London to study at Central St Martins. She then became a successful stylist and creative consultant before starting her first business at 25 -  WAH nails – a pioneering nail salon in East London.  Despite wanting to quit after six months...

Sean Dadashi is co-founder of Rosebud . Born to Iranian parents who emigrated to the US after the revolution in 1979, Sean grew up in Los Angeles and was on a path of studying mechanical engineering before he switched courses after a year to study Cognitive Science with a minor in Computer Science. He then became a CTO before starting his own company - Somatic Studios in 2016 – where he used his p...

Today's episode is all about how to grow your podcast. I answer questions from listeners such as:   Should I do audio or video? How do you find your guests? How to promote your podcast What platforms work best to promote your podcast Should you use YouTube? Should you do clips? Is the podcasting space too saturated? Things I would do differently if I were starting a podcast today How do you resear...

Today’s guest is Danielle Strachman, co-founder of 1517 venture fund which, in their own words, backs dropouts working on hard problems and sci-fi scientists at the earliest stages of their startups.  Prior to starting 1517, Danielle worked with Peter Thiel, and Michael Gibson (who I Interviewed in Series 8, Episode 60) and together, they ran The Thiel Fellowship for five years. For those who don’...

Today’s guest is Chrisman Frank – co-founder and CEO of Synthesis – the online platform that teaches kids how to solve complex problems and think critically. Born out of the school Elon Musk set up with Chrisman’s co-founder Josh Dahn (interview with Josh here ),  Synthesis has two main products – teams where kids learn as a group to work on complex problems, and its AI tutor which was born out of...

Today’s guest is theoretical computer scientist Leslie Valiant - currently the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Among his many accolades, Leslie was awarded the Turing Award in 2010 for transformative contributions to the theory of computation, including the theory of PAC learning which stands for Probably Approximately Correct, as...

Today’s guest is founder and VC Brett Martin who I first started following ten years ago when we were both in the mobile space. Brett is currently Co-Founder of Kumospace and co-founder of  Charge Ventures . Kumospace is a venture backed virtual office space platform that provides immersive and interactive virtual spaces for hosting team meetings, and social gatherings. Charge Ventures is a ventur...

Today’s guest is June Angelides MBE – a former founder, turned VC. June grew up in Nigeria before coming to London to study Economics. She then joined Thomson Reuters working on the news desk, covering syndicated loans before she got a call to join Silicon Valley Bank  (SVB) who were just starting up here in London. She joined a small team there, working on both the Venture Debt Team and Early Sta...

Today’s episode is a special one as it is my very first LIVE recording of the podcast which took place last month with the one and only Chris Anderson of TED. Recorded at the stunning Kindred in London, it was such a special evening and a delight to have so many fans of the podcast and Chris in the audience. In this episode, we discuss Chris’ childhood, growing up with missionary parents in Afghan...

Today’s guest is Tamiko Thiel – lead product designer of The Connection Machine – a revolutionary massively parallel artificial intelligence supercomputer which was developed in the 1980s. Originally conceived by Danny Hillis from MIT’s artificial intelligence lab where he was studying under Marvin Minsky, Danny got an incredibly talented team together including Richard Feynman, Brewster Kale, Tam...

Today’s guest is the one and only Stephen Wolfram - a physicist, mathematician, computer scientist and entrepreneur He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research , the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha and Wolfram Language , The Wolfram Physics Project and the author of bestselling A New Kind of Science among many other books. A visionary polymath, Stephen published his first scientific paper...

Today’s guest is Riva Tez -  a philosopher, curious thinker, intellect, investor and one of my favourite people  on the internet.  She studied Philosophy at UCL before digging deeper into technology and engineering and starting the Berlin Singularity. She went on to co-found Permutation Ventures — an early stage VC fund which focused on AI startups and, she has also worked with Jim Keller at Intel...