Future Around & Find Out

Kira Radinsky is the CEO of Diagnostic Robotics, which uses AI to make predictions that help patients get better healthcare. She’s also the co-founder of Mana.bio which is using AI to automate drug discovery.  On this episode of CRAFTED., Kira will share more on why she believes that, of all the industries that AI will change, it’s those involving chemistry and biology that will change the most. P...

Matt Flannery and Branch have done something the banks have not: learned how to profitably lend to people who have little to no credit history. Matt is the founder and CEO of Branch, which issues small loans to millions of people in India, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania.  He's also the founder of Kiva, a microfinance pioneer that skyrocketed from a small project into a worldwide nonprofit that Oprah...

Nithya Ruff is an expert on open source. As the head of AWS’s Open Source Program Office and the Chair of the Linux Foundation, she has a wide view on all things open source.  On this episode of CRAFTED., we discuss: Why Open Source AI is so tricky, but also so essential, to define How open source needs to evolve for the next generation of developers What an Open Source Program Office is — and why...

Mario Rodriguez is GitHub's Chief Product Officer. And he believes that Copilot and other AI advances will unleash a wave of creativity and enable a billion people to be software developers. Mario says the definition of “software developer” will have to change as non-professionals discover that they can make apps, too. And the way they do so will look very different: “It's gonna feel a lot more li...

Henrik Werdelin is on an AI-fueled mission to launch thousands of startups a year.  He is the founder of BARK, which went public, and prehype, a studio that has incubated several unicorns. With Audos, Henrik is building AI agents that can coach founders how he would — if he had infinite time to do so.  And Audos is not just for the cliche founder looking to launch a unicorn… It’s for entrepreneurs...

Sports, and the way we experience them, is changing. And AI, 5G, 3D, and all the other buzzy acronyms are why. Behshad Behzadi is the CTO and Chief AI Officer of Sportradar and on this episode of CRAFTED., we explore ways sports and technology are intersecting in novel, weird, and amazing ways.  Sportradar creates immersive experiences and data products for sports fans, players, leagues, and betto...

Jeff Birkeland is the SVP of Product and Platform at Included Health, a company that aims to be the app on your phone that you first think of when you have a healthcare need. On this episode of CRAFTED., we explore why “the integration itself is the innovation.”  Included Health has more than 2,000 employees across both technology and clinical care, and its services are used by many top companies...

April Dunford is an expert at product positioning. She’s advised hundreds of B2B companies on how they can make their products Obviously Awesome   — that’s also the title of her bestselling book on positioning. On this episode of CRAFTED., April shares tips on how you can make your product standout and how you can drive more sales — that’s the focus of her latest book, Sales Pitch . April says gre...

Making media is hard. Distributing it to the right audience even more so. GenAI can help.  Matt Monahan is the president of Arc XP at the Washington Post. On this episode, we're digging into the core technology of any media company: the content management system (CMS), why they’re so hard to build right and how new GenAI tools can reduce the toil required for journalists to get their stories to th...

Dr. Kristen DiCerbo is Khan Academy’s Chief Learning Officer, where she sets the company's product, teaching, and learning strategy — with AI at the forefront.  Khanmigo is amazing. It’s the GenAI-powered product from Khan Academy that helps students learn and teachers teach — and could revolutionize education.  Khan Academy is used by 12 million students a month! And they’ve been an early adopter...

Kelsey Hightower is a legend. He regularly gives live software demos in front of tens of thousands of people, improvising them like it’s jazz. He’s a master storyteller and a master craftsman. He helped evangelize and establish Kubernetes and recently retired (at 42!) from Google where he was a distinguished engineer.  Kelsey loves to level people up and in this conversation we discuss the power o...

Colin Nederkoorn is the founder and CEO of Customer.io, a top customer engagement platform that enables companies to send the right message to the right user at the right time on the right channel. The platform is used by Notion and lots of other top SaaS companies to personalize user onboarding and more.  When Customer.io was founded in 2011, there were analytics platforms and there were things y...

DevPost powers most of the world’s hackathons. And, according to founder and CEO Brandon Kessler, lately there is one overarching directive: “Executives from the top down are saying: `We need to do hackathons to uncover the value of ai.`” Nearly every one of the 1,200 hackathons DevPost powered last year was AI-centric.  On this episode of CRAFTED., we explore why hackathons are still such a power...

Wonder aims to be a “super app for mealtime”, with people turning to it for everything from delivery to groceries to meal kits and more... It’s a very ambitious food-tech startup founded by Marc Lore, the legendary founder who previously built, scaled, and sold Diapers.com and Jet.com (to Amazon and Walmart, respectively).  Wonder is rapidly opening stores across the East Coast that, as they put i...

When Docker restructured, the company went back to its roots: super-serving developers. CTO Justin Cormack says that’s why the company is developer -obsessed, not customer-obsessed: “We really wanted to focus on the fact that it's the developer who loves Docker. It's the developer who is going to be using Docker every day…”  Over the past decade, Docker exploded in popularity as companies moved to...

Software, hardware, and biotechnology are playing an increasingly transformative role in our mental health and wellness. On this episode of CRAFTED., recorded live on the “Next” stage at SXSW, we discuss what investors look for in these new companies and how they separate what’s real — and what’s near-term — from what’s hype.  On stage with host Dan Blumberg are: Amy Kruse, General Partner & C...

Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman is the Chief Product and Innovation Officer at BetterUp, a multi-billion dollar startup that helps people and companies level up. Through a combination of human coaching and AI, BetterUp is able to offer the kind of executive coaching that used to be reserved for... executives.   On this episode of CRAFTED. we dig into how BetterUp ships new products, proves they work...

Diaa El All is the founder and CEO of Soundful , which enables anyone to create brand new music in just a few seconds with AI. And on this episode of CRAFTED., we are literally making music. We’re also talking about the ethics of using AI to make music. Diaa has been very outspoken about what he sees as the misguided practices of other AI+music companies that train their models by just scraping th...

Paige Costello is the the head of AI and co-head of product at Asana and on this episode of CRAFTED. we're exploring what it means to ship products with AI, how AI will change the way work gets done, and how to organize your teams for success in this brave new world. We explore: How the future of work – and communicating about work – is changing Why Asana chose to create an “AI org” instead of a l...

“So if you take any great startup and look backwards, you'll see that 90 percent of their growth came from like 10 percent of the stuff that they tried. So how do you find that 10 percent as quickly as possible?” Matt Lerner has advised hundreds of startups on how to grow. Now, the CEO of SYSTM has written a book called Growth Levers and How to Find Them where he shares his approach. This episode...

On April 1st, 2013, ProdPad promised something revolutionary: “We now take your backlog of ideas, and with highly advanced big data crunching algorithm technology, automagically render a complete and accurate product roadmap. [...] The Auto-Roadmap Tool not only builds itself, but also covers for the hardest part of the Product Manager’s job: Getting complete buy-in from your team.” Amazing! And p...

Enjoy this bonus, happy hour edition of CRAFTED., recorded live during SXSW. It’s a very unCRAFTED. CRAFTED. Featuring four innovators on a rooftop in Austin talking about what struck them at this year’s SXSW. Kick back and unwind with Christie Nicholson (Founder of the Studio for Communicating Complexity), Kwaku Aning (Director, Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Thinking (CIET) at San Die...

Career trajectories used to be like steamships: full steam ahead. And then they became more like sailboats: lots of tacking. But now… we’re swirling in whitewater. And, as the Chief Product and Innovation Officer at BetterUp, Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman helps people build the skill they need to flourish: “When you're kayaking in the whitewater. It's hard to get a sense of what could be around th...

“You have to invest into change. You cannot invest into stasis. Daniel Kimerling has a keen eye for the trends, technologies, and cultural shifts that are going to be big. A decade ago, he took an insight – that developers needed powerful tool so they could embed banking services into their apps – and launched Standard Treasury, the very first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) startup. Today BaaS and "e...

A highlight reel that will will help you find great episodes in the Crafted show archive, featuring some of the incredible founders and product builders we featured in 2023. You'll hear voices belonging to the founders of Gusto, Lattice, Monte Carlo, Moov, Wevr, PS, as well as from senior leaders at AWS, Redesign Health, Betterment, Flatiron Health, Predibase, and Bauplan, and more!  And we want t...