Sam Talks Technology

Sam Sethi talks with James Mulvany about how to get started quickly with podcasting.  We then talk about some of the challenges of recording, distributing and discovering a new podcast before we finally look into the future of podcasting.  Google have started to auto-transcribe and index podcasts making them easier to discover.  The next challenge could well be Podcast SEO.  We also talked about t...

Stephen Pankhurst was the co-founder of Friends Reunited along with his wife Julie. In 1999, Stephen’s wife Julie, was pregnant with their first child. She had just used the internet to track down her long lost Grandfather that she had never seen. Realising the power of the internet, and a desire to find out what some of her old school friends were up to, she came up with the idea of FriendsReunit...

Sam Sethi talked to Sháá Wasmund about where her name originated from and how she managed to work for Chris Eubank, Sir James Dyson, Sir Bob Geldof all before she was 30. We talked about how she turned down £45m by not working for Michael Birch and that surprisingly isn’t her biggest regret. We also talked about her current role as an online educator helping small business owners via her Facebook...

Sam Sethi talks with Dr Alasdair Pinkerton and co-host Matt Hodges-Long about the recent UK general election where Alasdair stood in Surrey Heath as the PPC (Parliamentary Prospective Candidate) for the Liberal Democrats. Despite losing to Mr Gove, they managed to use social media to crowdfund £25k and increased the LibDem vote by 16%. We talked about the potential negative effect social media wil...

Sam Sethi talks with Dan Wagner about his three startups MAID, Venda and Rezolve. We talked about how he started MAID in 1984, when he was only 20 before the web and search engines really existed. How he came to be the youngest CEO of Brightstation PLC which was listed on the London Stock Exchange. Dan talks about the struggles at the end of MAID with the dotcom crash before he sold it to Thomson...

Andy McLoughlin is a partner at Uncork Capital in San Francisco, focusing on B2B software opportunities. Uncork Capital is a seed-stage venture firm that commits early, helps with the hard stuff, and sticks around. Really. Andy's investments include LaunchDarkly, Coder, Crossbeam, Focal Systems, Human Interest, Pattern (acquired by Workday), Test.ai, Simplify, Fountain, GreatHorn, Bigfinite, and I...

Sam Sethi talked with Paul Fabretti about how Microsoft's culture has changed since I worked for them back in the 90's. The insular Microsoft of Gates and Balmer, focused on Office and Windows, that I worked for has been replaced by a more open Microsoft focused on Azure and Open Source. But how did this come about? Paul and I talk about the impact of Satya Nadella on the companies new culture and...

Sam Sethi and Cary Marsh have been friends for over a decade. We first met when Cary was CEO of Mydeo and online video hosting company. In this podcast we talked about Cary's two successful kickstarter projects - Bootclaw and My Flipping World. Cary explains why she prefers to raise funds via crowdfunding instead of through more traditional Angel or VC routes having had such a harrowing time raisi...

Jeevan was visiting my good friend Manoj Ranaweera, who runs Techelerate Ventures in Manchester.   We spoke about Jeevan's entrepreneurial journey and his entrepreneurial grandfather. Jeevan talked about the first companies he started.  He started a cab driving company while at University with friends in America. He moved back to Sri Lanka and with his brother tried to start and e-commerce company...

Tony has been a friend for over two decades.  In this podcast we talked about the problem with immutable data and blockchain and the benefits of the Chinese Social Score and why this is all our futures.  Tony also explained why he thinks 'data is not the new oil to mine.  And finally we talked about companies having to deal with so much data that there is a board level need to manage the data, the...

Dan and I first met in 2013 when he launched Grabble and I was running Bagzee, my own real-time price tracking fashion startup.    In this podcast we talked about why he has started a new smart multi-vitamin, how he formed such an impressive team including Dr Tara Swart, Chief Science Officer and Alain De Botton, Philosopher, Writer, Entrepreneur.    Heights is a DNVB (Digital Native Vertical Bran...

Chis and I go back nearly two decades.  We first met when Chris kindly invited me to a charity dinner for Comic Relief.   In this podcast we talked about his new book " Less Perfect, More Happy . - how to overcome perfectionism".  Perfectionism now has a name for this mental health issue. It's called Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder ( OCPD ) a personality disorder that's characterised by...

Sam talked with Walid about why companies are using private/enterprise blockchains and how these projects are moving from proof of concepts through to commercial rollouts. We also talked about the future of blockchains along with some of the challenges holding back the wider adoption of blockchains.

Daniel and I have known each other for over a decade. We first met when he was the  Web & Internet Evangelist for Vodafone. We talked about Sir Tim's recent BBC Reith interview and Tim's new Contract for the Web. Today the web is being fragmented by countries like Russia, China and Iran to name but a few countries limiting their citizens access to stop free speech. Fake News is rife everywhere...

Ali and I talked about what EQT Ventures look for when investing in companies.  They like to make big bets on companies and back them with significant funding.  They look for companies with teams that are led by entrepreneurs that build and code the product themselves.  i.e Bet Big or Go Home Unlike many overly cautious European VC's who focus on short-term revenues, EQT prefer to bet big and domi...

Sam Sethi talked with Ralph Cochrane about the future of video creation and consumption. Ralph and I first met some 13 years ago when he was at BT. However, that was a lifetime ago and since then Ralph has become an award-winning video creator and documentary producer who flies all around the world, living as a digital nomad, filming and/or live streaming video content for his corporate clients. I...

Sam Sethi and  Martin Bryant discussed the future of journalism, podcasting paywalls, subscriptions, libra payments and fakenews. It's clear more and more newspapers are moving to paywalls to replace their dwindling ad-revenue. Is the freemium model dead? Will bloggers and podcasters follow suit as they look to monetise their content. We also discussed the recent launch of Facebook News. Having fa...

Sam Sethi talked with Daniel Snell about the many things we have in common. We have our love for rugby, wine, running marathons and Taekwondo (both being black belts). We also have numerous mutual friends and estranged acquaintances but oddly we had never met before. We talked about Daniel's work on diversity and inclusion over the past 15 years which was truly inspirational. We also discussed why...

Sam Sethi talked with Julien Genestoux about some of the current unhealthy business models that exist today, especially those that rely on advertising for monetisation i.e Facebook or act as gatekeepers for data distribution. i.e Apple Julien talked about how Web 3.0 needs to evolve towards ' Decentralised Autonomous Organisations ' and how blockchain, ethereum wallets, smart contracts and the unl...