The {Closed} Session

Rachel Gollub is a distinguished engineer, programmer, and entrepreneur with a storied career in Silicon Valley: she started her career as part of the founding team behind the Java programming language and ended it as CTO of healthcare giant Optum. Along the way, Rachel managed to start several companies on top of a quick stopover at Stanford. In this episode, Rachel reflects on her experiences wo...

Everyone’s talking about what went down at OpenAI - but what does it mean for ethical and responsible AI, and what are the lessons for entrepreneurs on startup board governance? With the abrupt dismissal of CEO Sam Altman, questions loom over the stability and direction of one of AI's most influential entities. Let’s uncover the twists and turns in this high-stakes boardroom drama. Why was Sam Alt...

Everyone’s talking about AI - so The Ethical Tech Project decided to listen . Joining forces with programmatic privacy and data+AI governance platform Ketch, The Ethical Tech Project surveyed a representative sample of 2,500 U.S. consumers and asked them about AI, the companies leveraging AI, and their sentiment and expectations around AI and privacy.  On the latest episode of The {Closed} Session...

The {Closed} Session Spotlight Series showcases a different co-founder from the super{set} portfolio in every episode. Today's guest is Lindsey Meyl, Co-founder at RevAmp (rev-amp.ai), a "Datadog for RevOps" platform that offers observability across the revenue engine, monitoring performance, flagging when something is amiss, and determining the root cause of how to fix it. Lindsey Meyl is an “ent...

Like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed, the fiercest competitors can sometimes become friends. Omar Tawakol is a prime example. As the founder and CEO of BlueKai, he went head-to-head with Tom, Vivek, and the 'Krux mafia' for dominance in the Data Management Platform arena. A serial entrepreneur with roots in New York and Egypt, Omar eventually steered BlueKai to a successful acquisition by Oracle bef...

How does Google search data reveal hidden human truths and behaviors? What philosophical challenges arise when interpreting big data? In what ways does data reflect societal biases and preconceived notions? What's the potential of data science in revealing patterns that might be invisible to human analysts? Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a data scientist, New York Times bestselling author, and sought...

Headlamp makes it easy for clinicians and their patients to access their universal medical records, while also providing advanced AI tools to support more personalized health insights and decision-making.  Lean more about Headlamp Health at Headlamp.com : https://www.headlamp.com/ Find Andrew Marshak on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-marshak/  See Privacy Policy at https://art19...

Marketing has always been about connection, but what happens when AI becomes the mediator? With vast strides in AI-driven campaigns, how do marketers ensure they remain true to their brand and their audience? Who ensures that campaigns are not just data-driven but also ethical and impactful? As we stand on the precipice of an AI revolution in advertising, how does one navigate the intricate balanc...

Checksum automatically generates and maintains end-to-end tests based on user sessions so you can move fast without breaking things. Learn more about Checksum at checksum.ai . Gal Vered's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/gal-vered/ www.theclosedsession.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Are we walking a tightrope with AI, jeopardizing humanity's ethical core? Is AI more than just algorithms, acting as a mirror to our moral values? And when machine learning grapples with ethical dilemmas, who ultimately bears the responsibility? Harvard's Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, James Mickens, joins Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya on "The {Closed} Session." Together, they dive deep...

Is AI our salvation or is it going to kill us all? Tom and Vivek roam widely on others’ takes about artificial intelligence, adding their insight and experience to the mix. Along the way they consider Descartes, Ray Kurzweil, Salt Bae, Marc Andreessen among others. If you are looking for a down to earth conversation that tempers the extremes at either end of the debate, this is the one you’ve been...

What does ‘AI alignment mean? Can philosophy help make AI less biased? How does reinforcement learning influence AI's unpredictability? How does AI's ‘frame problem’ affect its ability to understand objects? What role does human feedback play in machine learning and AI fine-tuning? An acclaimed author and researcher who explores the human implications of computer science, Brian Christian is best k...

Does it matter where you go to college? Should the SAT be abolished? Do you have to have a degree in computer science to work in tech? What are the differences between higher education in the US and in India? Why did Tom and Vivek ban Harvard and Stanford degrees from working at their first company? Even though both Tom and Vivek have – in their own words – fancy degrees themselves, they also ackn...

Few technologies have captured the attention of the general public as well as seasoned software engineers and entrepreneurs like ChatGPT. But how does it work? How can humans use it to increase productivity and output? And how is it likely to evolve?  Our guest for this episode is Rama Ramakrishnan, Professor of the Practice, Data Science and Applied Machine Learning, at MIT Sloan School of Manage...

Alex Kantrowitz, journalist and author of   Big Technology , joins Tom and Vivek in the studio to discuss his road to journalism, ad tech, and the business and ethical considerations of generative AI. Alex recounts his career shift and discusses the impact of generative AI on journalism, drawing from an incident where AI tools were used to plagiarize his work. The discussion also covers the role o...

On the heels of boombox.io's $7M seed fundraise led by Forerunner, Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya sit down with boombox co-founders India Lossman and Max Mathieu for a special episode straight from super{summit} 2023 in New Orleans! Tom, Vivek, India and Max discuss their backgrounds as musicians and techies building a platform where music producers can store, version, and track all of their music fi...

We are delighted to share our new episode of the {Closed} Session podcast with guest Alyssa Hutnik. Alyssa looms large in the privacy world, and she’s been thinking deeply about the intersections of data, technology and the law for nearly two decades. She’s also the Chief Privacy and Data Security Architect at Ketch, a super{set} company, as well as a lawyer.  Listen to the episode and read the tr...

The {closed} session - Season 4, Episode 1 Kicking off the fourth season of the {Closed} Session podcast with a great topic and guest: Frida Polli, CEO and co-founder of pymetrics, which was recently acquired by Harver, joins us to talk about the critical role that technology and specifically AI and neuroscience can play in eliminating bias in hiring and beyond. Listen to the episode and read the...

Twice a month, the super{set} community comes together for a weekly call - often featuring fireside chats with outside speakers and friends of the super{set} Hive. On one such call, we were pleased to welcome Arthur Patterson - founder of the venture capital firm Accel and an investor in Tom and Vivek’s previous companies, Rapt and Krux. Arthur Patterson is one of the greatest VCs of all time, fou...

Twice a month, the super{set} community comes together for a weekly call - often featuring fireside chats with outside speakers and friends of the super{set} Hive. On one such call, we were pleased to welcome Arthur Patterson - founder of the venture capital firm Accel and an investor in Tom and Vivek’s previous companies, Rapt and Krux. At super{set}, we adamantly are not VCs. That said, we partn...

As serial founders, we’ve seen a lot of board meetings. Tom has even been in board meetings where the board has referred to him in the third person, in reference to how great his replacement was going to be! Not a great time (side note: Tom narrowly avoided dismissal - nobody else was crazy enough to take the job of CEO). A board isn’t a thing to be managed, but it also isn’t an opportunity to be...

We have a venture fund at super{set} but aren’t Venture Capitalists. What’s the difference? We’re operators, while the VCs are helpers. The best VCs come in asking the catalytic questions that encapsulate risks and delineate opportunities, but they aren't hands-on with the company. They know when they are needed and when they are not. In the over-caffeinated recent years, seed investments have sta...

A core value at super{set} is passion . Life is too short to phone it in. We bring our authentic selves to work and give our employees the opportunity to do their best. Yes, this extends to the podcast, too - so Tom and Vivek bring their most authentic selves to the pod this episode with some hot takes as they call BULLSHIT. Whether it’s VCs, remote work and productivity, or fetishizing the CEO -...

At super{set}, the money from our venture fund exists exclusively to fund the companies emerging from our studio at inception and give the early team the time and focus to build. At inception, the last thing we want is the wrong CEO showing up, kicking up dust with too much certainty: the art in our model is finding the right CEO at the right time. The average CEO isn’t suited for the early stage...

super{set} is in the business of solving real-world problems, meaning disentangling actual customer problems - not building a product in a vacuum because it looked cool to us. You can’t wait for every feature of your product to be built before you start having conversations - and testing the market-message fit . As your product launches, early customers are less about maximizing revenue streams (m...