Future Around & Find Out

We're not building a set of blogs or something like that where the domain is well understood. We're really pushing the forefront of what people are doing with vessels and optimization. "The effect of global shipping on the climate is hard to overstate," reports The New York Times . "Cargo shipping is responsible for nearly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — producing roughly as much ca...

** Please take this three-minute survey to help us create more great Crafted episodes. http://tinyurl.com/craftedsurvey ** Last week, on Thursday January 18th at 4:49pm Eastern, a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on its way to the International Space Station. On board are 4 astronauts from Axiom Space, a private company tha...

“I was a pretty bad people manager and so there was a moment where I decided that this is not going to work and I really need to decide which path I'm gonna go. Am I gonna stay hands on keyboard or am I going to really help build the engineering team and scale the organization?” Edward Kim is the CTO and co-founder of Gusto, a multi-billion dollar company that helps businesses with payroll, benefi...

“The last nine months, no matter what we want to talk about, our customers want to talk about one thing, which is Gen AI.” One year ago, ChatGPT woke the entire world up to the possibilities of Generative AI. Since then, the conversation around AI has not ceased, with constant questions being raised about its safety, accuracy, and potential implications for the tech world. In this episode, Dan hos...

“Nobody's going to drive as fast on the straightaway if they don't have good brakes because if that's not available, then you can't go fast confidently.” John Mileham is the CTO of Betterment, and he’s also a race car driving instructor. Though they seem like vastly different roles, he has the same focus in both: going fast but doing so safely. Betterment is a digital financial advisor that builds...

“The lean startup and MVP model is absolutely the right mindset to have, but that doesn't mean that you have to throw spaghetti at the wall.” Neil Caron, Product and Design Leader at Gartner, is doing something hard: helping a big company to innovate. Gartner is the company many technology buyers turn to for advice when they’re looking to buy mission-critical products. Traditionally, that’s meant...

“Being a part of financial services for the last 15 or 20 years, it seemed like we were always putting lipstick on the pig”. Wade Arnold was tired of putting a nice UI on  creaky infrastructure and he saw how insufficient payment systems are for today’s internet-based businesses. So Wade founded Moov, a fintech that's building systems for the way money moves today – and they’re starting at the ver...

“We just experienced these pains of people feeling unsatisfied, they didn't necessarily feel like there were easy opportunities to be listened to by the company.” CEO Jack Altman is determined to help make work meaningful, and founding Lattice is a big part of that goal. Lattice is an employee performance and engagement software company that wants to put people first. The product was inspired by a...

“When we talk about future cities in space, it seems like they're really far away. The truth is, it's happening right now. We're building those.” That’s the mind-blowing reality that Jana Stoudemire works in everyday at Axiom Space, a leading space infrastructure developer based in Texas. Axiom is building a successor to the International Space Station and developing commercial opportunities in or...

"People using this isn't the thing I'm thinking about. Human beings can tolerate high latency and delays to a certain level. Machines cannot. AI cannot, IoT cannot."  As Chief Product Officer of Graphiant, Ali Shaikh is building data networks that are flexible, secure, and ready to meet the demands of the next generation of people – and devices. And just as the move to the cloud enabled founders t...

“This problem was so painful and so meaningful to people that I just couldn't believe a world where a solution to this didn't exist.” When Barr Moses identified the very costly problem of what she coined “data downtime”, she knew she needed to solve it. Barr is the Founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, a data observability platform that’s on a mission to eliminate data downtime, a problem that can cost...

“It's not columns and rows, but it's the fact that you could fundamentally increase consumer retention, consumer attention, consumer experience, and that's the fun stuff.” That’s how Sol Rashidi pitched a data and analytics mindset to the world’s biggest companies, back before data was King (and AI became Queen). Sol is the former Chief Analytics Officer at Estée Lauder but she got started in the...

“You attract security conscious customers. They push you and ask for more security focused features. You build those, you attract more of those companies.” That’s how Greg Neustaetter helped Egnyte find its niche, providing industrial-grade cloud file storage for compliance-focused clients. Greg has spent 11 years at Egnyte and as VP of Product, he’s helped define and refine their offerings in the...

“Anyone who knows anything about drug development would say it is a slow and painful process”. Cat Miller is CTO at Flatiron Health, a software company that uses technology to “clean up all the gunk in the trials industry”. Flatiron helps researchers develop new cancer treatments by making clinical trials run smarter and faster. They also identify trial data that lead to new treatments, and help d...

“Barbershops have historically been a very cash-dominated business. And shaking that mentality is probably the biggest challenge.” Kush Patel knew that the iconic but old-school world of barbering needed a digital upgrade, so he founded theCut, a barber booking app that helps clients find a barber and then book and pay for their cut. It also helps barbers attract and manage their clients, and the...

  “We haven’t invented a new way to work out since the ancient Greeks. With electro muscular stimulation, we're breaking that.” Invention is a big part of everything Bjoern Woltermann did at Katalyst to bring electro muscular stimulation, or EMS, to the US market – and to US homes. EMS workouts have been around for decades, but typically only in a physical therapy context. With Katalyst, you wear...

Working with the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Jon Favreau, Nev Spiteri has created some of film and gaming’s most incredible visual sequences. Now the CEO of Wevr has gone all in on building software to enable others to create their own virtual worlds — and to do so seamlessly via the cloud. The goal is to help creators spend more time creating, and less time configuring, updating, a...

“Highly complex consumer journeys, lots of entrenched interests, very challenging stakeholder management, and extremely important to your life”. That’s the magic mixture of business interests that Kira Wampler says speaks her love language. Those passions led her to Redesign Health, a company whose mission is to transform healthcare. So far, Redesign Health has incubated, funded and scaled over 50...

“Your business applications should be just as intuitive as every other app or website or anything else that you're engaging with in your day-to-day lives”. That’s the product-led approach that Jon Walton took as an engineering leader at Red Bull, where he spent nearly a decade working on the apps that help the energy drink maker run the extreme sports competitions and spectacles it's known for. On...

“Their revenue growth is stalling. Their cost of mistakes is going up, and everything is stalling and slowing and getting harder.” For most people that doesn’t sound like a job opportunity with much appeal, but it’s  the point where Tommi Forsstrom usually joins a startup. Tommi is a product management executive who specializes in helping companies navigate “the growth stage,” that adolescent era...

“The number one thing we offer our customers is the feeling of not being in an airport.” PS operates a VIP luxury terminal at LAX, with more airports coming soon. Their travelers enjoy high security, luxurious lounges and private suites, great food, and a ride across the tarmac directly to their first-class seats on their commercial flight. But in order to do that, PS needs to coordinate with 70 d...

There’s turmoil in tech right now, so here’s a special episode for job-seekers looking for their next great gig.  On this episode of Crafted , Alex Maher, Director of Talent at Artium, shares tips on how to position yourself, how to talk to recruiters, what *not* to put on your resume, and so much more. Plus, she’ll share her philosophy on talent acquisition and why remembering that we’re human is...

“There was just no way I could say no”. That was how Sonali Zaveri felt about working with Ideas42 Ventures, after learning about the first cohort of entrepreneurs she would advise. Ideas42 Ventures is a venture studio that aims to solve massive social problems by helping founders with lived experience launch companies that address issues like poverty and inequality. The founders are selected base...

For those of you who are brand new to Crafted , this week we’re revisiting our very first episode where we featured experimentation master, Lean Startup Pioneer Andres Glusman: “It's a crime. It's such a waste of time.” That’s how Andres Glusman feels about so many of the tests product teams run. That’s why the former head of product at Meetup founded DoWhatWorks, a company that enables you to see...

How Jon Walker spotted a trend, validated an opportunity, sold his solution before even building it, and created a multi-billion dollar company via the “unfair advantage” of rapid iteration.  Back in 2007, Jon saw desktop software everywhere… at restaurants, doctors’ offices, the gym…and he realized it was all gonna move to the web. “So what’s the opportunity here?” On this episode of Crafted, we’...