Danielle Newnham Podcast

Hello and welcome to the Danielle Newham Podcast where I interview tech founders and innovators to learn the inspiring, human stories behind the game-changing tech we use every day. If you are a new listener, welcome. If you are a long-time listener, welcome back and thank you, thank you for sticking with me. I am really excited about Series 7 because we have some truly fantastic guests who are re...

Today’s guest is Deb Liu – CEO of Ancestry.com , the billion dollar genealogy company. Deb also serves on the Board of Intuit and is the co-founder of Women in Product.  In this interview, Deb talks me through her personal and career journey from growing up in a small town where less than 1% of the community were Asian to how she overcame racism to become a VP at Facebook where she spent 12 years...

What can I say about today’s guest? He started life in London before being sent to live with his grandmother in Ghana at a just a few months old. He was a young boy when he returned to live on a London council estate with his father and it was then that he said he realised that they were poor but that also his life thus far had not been down to his own doing. That he had found himself in these cir...

50 years ago today, Atari was born! So I am celebrating with a REPLAY of Series 2 episode with the legendary Atari founder   Nolan Bushnell – serial entrepreneur and a pioneer of the video games industry. After an early interest in engineering, Nolan went on to study Electrical Engineering before setting up Atari with Ted Dabney and Al Alcorn (I interviewed in Series 1, EP 8 - listen here ). Atari...

This is a re-released episode from Series 1 with Second Life founder and High Fidelity co-founder Philip Rosedale. As a child, Philip Rosedale dreamed of creating a fully-fledged virtual society and that’s exactly what he did with Second Life. Despite it being conceived many years before, Second Life was launched in 2003. Almost two decades later, and with one million active users and hundreds of...

Today’s guest is Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen – serial entrepreneur, inventor, pioneer in VR, medical imaging and telepathic technology, former professor at MIT Media Lab and currently, founder of Openwater. Mary Lou spent many of her childhood years unwell before she was finally diagnosed with a brain tumour in her twenties. And going through that had a huge impact on her life as you might expect. For the...

Today’s special guest is Dex Hunter-Torricke, a speechwriter and Communications leader who has had the unique experience of working closely with top tech leaders including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. After starting his career at the UN, where Dex worked with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Dex moved to Google before heading to Facebook where he led executive communic...

Today’s guest is Brit inventor Tom Lawton who has married the skill of design and engineering to create some really special products including BubblePix which would allow you to take 360 degree panoramic views, way before smartphones and beloved by many including Apple’s design team. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss Tom’s childhood and inclination towards curiosity and truth telling,...

Today’s guest is Ayah Bdeir , a Lebanese engineer, interactive artist, social activist, and founder and inventor of littleBits .  Pioneering in the open source hardware space, littleBits is the easy-to-use electronic building blocks used by millions of kids all over the world and was acquired by Sphero in 2019. (The prototype also holds a place in the permanent collection at MoMA). Growing up in B...

Today’s guest is Jane Metcalfe , co-founder of WIRED and founder of NEO.LIFE. In 1993, Jane and Louis Rossetto founded WIRED leading the charge in informing, education and exciting the world about the digital revolution – a term Lewis coined. 25 years later and Jane is doing it all over again with NEO.LIFE and what she calls the neobiological revolution. NEO.LIFE is a digital media and events comp...

Today’s guest is Ken Miller who was employee number twenty two at PayPal. Having originally joined Elon Musk’s X.com, Ken was in charge of anti-fraud which was a difficult job at the best of times, not least at the dawn of the internet. Ken spent seven years at PayPal dealing with everything from fraudulent accounts, the death of a much-loved colleague to the unceremonious ousting of then-CEO Elon...

Today’s guest is Gil Perry , Co-Founder and CEO of D-ID the technology company behind the viral MyHeritage clips where old photos have been brought to life. A former Commander in the Special Forces unit of the Israeli Defence Forces, Gil and his army friends and co-founders started D-ID to work on protecting images and videos from facial recognition software but not long after and when Covid came,...

Firstly, huge apologies for saying Juicero wrong during this episode - I should have looked up the pronunciation beforehand! I thought the company was called Juiceroo! Right, apology out of the way and back to today's episode. Today, I am answering listeners questions from why I started a podcast, what were the events that shaped me as a child and who my favourite guests were. Trigger warning, in...

Today’s guest is Kevin Bethune – designer, innovator, founder, engineer and author. Kevin has had a multi-faceted career, starting out as a mechanical engineer in the nuclear power industry before focusing on business and design where he ended up at Nike designing two shoes despite being employed on the business side vs a product designer. But that’s Kevin all over – he follows his heart and passi...

It’s hard to believe it but has been a year now since I kicked off the show and as I have gained tens of thousands of new listeners since then, I thought it might be nice to head back in time and re-share my very first guest – the one and only - Andy Hertzfeld who also happens to be one of my favourite people in tech.  Andy helped revolutionise the home PC industry as part of the original Macintos...

Today’s guest is Noor Shaker – a Syrian serial biotech entrepreneur, computer scientist and inventor. Noor started life in Syria where she fell in love with technology and the potential of Artificial Intelligence. Flouting convention at the time, Noor moved to Europe to continue her studies, gaining a Masters in AI and PhD in Machine Learning.  In 2006, she became Assistant Professor at Aalborg Un...

Today’s guest is designer, founder and CEO,   Cat Noone. Cat grew up with her grandparents in Brooklyn, New York. She started her career in web design and then worked in special education before founding the Iris app which was a modern-day emergency alert – and going on to co-found and be Chief Designer Officer at Liberio, an eBook publishing tool.  Cat is now co-founder and CEO of Stark – which p...

As it’s International Women’s Day, I wanted to do something a little different and hand the episode over to some of the amazing women I have had on the show and I will link to each of their original episodes in the notes below. Today, we have Shellye Archambeau, Rana el Kaliouby, Sherrell Dorsey, Soraya Darabi, Eileen Burbidge, Yodit Stanton, Donna Auguste, Megan Smith and Dr Catherine Breslin and...

Today’s guest is Sherell Dorsey , founder and CEO of The Plug – an online news and insights platform covering black tech founders, companies and ecosystems.  She is also author of the book, Upper Hand: The Future of Work for the Rest of Us. In this interview, we discuss what she was like growing up - from having a technophile grandfather who inspired and encouraged her to use tech, to her entrepre...

"It was hard and we succeeded." This is a quote from David Sacks, entrepreneur, investor and an early PayPal employee and I think it sums up the PayPal story well. PayPal is a unique and pivotal company in our wonderful tech history. Its founders alone include some of the most successful and prolific engineers, entrepreneur and investors from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman....

Today’s guest is Brendan Dawes - an award-winning artist whose career has focused on using generative processes involving data, machine learning and algorithms, to create interactive installations, electronic objects, online experiences, data visualisations, motion graphics and screen and print work. His work has been celebrated all over the world including three Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibi...

What does the future of education look like? This is a question I have pondered for the last ten years or so and today’s guest - Josh Dahn – has the answer.  Seven years ago, Josh was teaching Elon Musk’s kids at Mirman– a private school for highly gifted children in LA when Elon approached him about rethinking the traditional education model. Josh jumped at the opportunity and in today’s episode,...

Today’s guest is Joe Fernandez – A Cuban American entrepreneur, probably best known for being the co-founder of Klout which launched in August 2008. Klout was years ahead of its time because it measured social media influence years before others started paying attention to it. And the story behind Joe even starting the company and some of the adventures he had whilst building it before its sale fo...

Today’s guest is entrepreneur and investor Soraya Darabi. Soraya started her career as the New York Times’ first-ever Manager of Digital Partnerships and Social Media, right at the dawn of social media’s first wave. There, she positioned the global news leader on fast-growing social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and partnered with startups and to establish award-winning campaign...

Today’s guest Adam Wiggins, probably most well known for being co-founder of Heroku – a platform as a service that enables developers to build, run, and operate applications in the cloud. On his website, Adam describes himself as someone who is working to improve computers in service of human creativity and prosperity which I love and this is very much a theme that weaves its way throughout our co...