Jon Dahl was a philosophy major in college, and eventually, obtained a graduate degree studying theology. He thought he would go into academia, but he quickly figured out that he needed to make money as well. So he started a dev shop and taught himself to code. He is married with 2 kids in their teens, and a 21 year old cat who believe or not... is not playful. They like to read and travel, and watch shows together.
While he was running his dev shop, Jon took on a project that required him to build a video transcoder. Although this was a hard problem to solve, he learned a lot and this served as the catalyst for him to pursue building the product that he wished he could have bought while dev'ing this project.
Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist at Genesys & WSJ Best Selling Co-Author of “Empathy in Action” joins the show to discuss how government organizations can personalize experiences at scale while still delivering empathy in every touchpoint through technology. We also introduce the concept of Experience as a Service (EaaS) and how it will disrupt the new normal, ways that the concepts in her book relate to the recent executive order including human-centered design, and the legacy she hopes to leave on CX with this book.
Standing in for Musa Kalenga on this African Tech Conversations instalment is Andile Masuku, whose day job is serving as Head of Community at Founders Factory Africa (FFA).
Andile extends a recent lunch break exchange he had with his FFA colleagues Hope Ditlhakanyane (Head of Venture Sourcing) and Nzwisisa Chidembo (Head of Engineering) at the office. This podcast offers a candid glimpse into the personal blockchain investment and venture building proclivities of two top-drawer African tech industry pros. It's a show not to miss.
Editorial Disclaimer: While the Celo Community Fund supports this African Tech Conversations episode, African Tech Roundup maintains complete editorial oversight. Opinions expressed by the host, Musa Kalenga, and his guest do not necessarily reflect the views of the African Tech Roundup or the presenting sponsor, Celo Community Fund.
SUPPORT US: Value our work? Then, join our Patreon Community (https://www.africantechroundup.com/patreon/) and help the African Tech Roundup platform remain single-mindedly focused on serving Africa's tech and innovation ecosystem with robust independent insight and learning content.
While blockchains are huge right now, finding one to build on that doesn’t use a ton of energy, has good privacy protections, and operates efficiently is harder than it looks. The original breakout blockchain, Bitcoin, was slow to adopt any innovations coming out of research. Other blockchains use the electricity of a small country to play elaborate gambling games. For someone looking to build the future of Web3, what are your options?
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk to Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman. After finding out that the Bitcoin blockchain wouldn’t incorporate all the good ideas generated around it—proof of stake, privacy improvements, and smart contracts to name a few—he decided to build his own.
Arthur has a background in machine learning and statistics but spent his early 20s teaching self-driving cars how to turn left and working in quantitative finance for high-frequency trading. High-frequency trading was data-driven, but there was so much noise that machine learning didn’t do very well. Self-driving cars, meanwhile, presented a more structured problem, so neural networks could yield good results.
Around that time, Arthur got bit by the crypto bug. It lived at the intersection of a lot of his interests: Cryptography touched on computer science and math, but his time in finance got him wondering about banks and money work. The idea of individual sovereignty scratched a personal philosophical itch.
Naturally, Arthur decided to try some mining software. It took all of his computer’s resources, so he uninstalled it. But after seeing the price of Bitcoin break a dollar and other news items about it, he looked closer. He started to think about what a company could do if it didn’t have to maintain banking relationships. He thought about possible applications, like decentralized poker.
When Bitcoin refused to adopt the improvements developed by competing alt coins, Arthur started thinking about a new blockchain that would respond to new developments and focus on efficient processing, security, and a good smart contract system. Forking the code wasn’t enough; he needed a new ledger.
That’s when Tezos was born. It was initially built by a small team of OCaml programmers using that language’s functional subset. Arthur was inspired by the example of WhatsApp, which was built by a small team of senior Erlang engineers. While OCaml would limit the talent he could hire, it would be a very efficient way to build an error-free transaction system. He could have built the whole thing in Java, sure, but Arthur estimates that it would have cost a whole lot more.
If you’re interested in learning more about what an engineer’s blockchain ecosystem looks like, check out the Tezos home page. Discover building on Tezos: https://tezos.com/build/
Guest: Eric Koslow is the Co-founder of Lattice, the people success platform. Prior to Lattice, he spent time engineering at TeeSpring, and now he is building a new venture called VStream.
Questions:
What impact does user communication have in the HR SaaS space?
What infrastructure issues arose that caused you to look for a notification infrastructure vendor at Lattice?
Tell me about your new venture Vstream, and how important will your communication strategy be?
Have you experienced particular preferences from your user base, as far as how and when they are notified?
How does Courier fit into your overall messaging strategy?
Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic and former editor-in-chief of Wired. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a nuanced conversation about why the media is losing the public's trust and whether it has a chance to regain it. Listen for a wide-ranging discussion on business models, politics, and the tech press's relationship with the industry's builders.
Izzy Azeri has been in the tech industry for 20 years, starting out at places like EMC and VMWare. He's married with three kids, living in Franklin, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. He loves soccer and CrossFit, which helps him destress from his tech work. The family has a place in Maine, where they can be outside, swim, etc. - whatever they can do to keep active and stay healthy Post the Google acquisition of his prior startup, Stack Driver, Izzy and his co-founder were looking to get back into early stage. After interviewing a number of engineering leaders, they noticed a trend - while software development was speeding up, QA was becoming a bottleneck in the SDLC.
Jason is now a managing director at Redpoint Ventures and has led one investment so far, backing a company called Alchemy that is focused on infrastructure and dev tools for web3.
He describes himself as a "very average" programmer, but an excellent engineer, and explains how he parlayed his unique skill set into key roles at Heroku and GitHub.
OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(08:29) – Programming
(27:30) – Johnny Depp and Amber Heard
(32:23) – Las Vegas
(37:25) – Spirituality
(40:38) – Ayahuasca
(50:56) – Depression and fame
(54:40) – Introvert
(1:07:19) – Advice from Charlie Sheen
(1:19:58) – Making music
(1:32:33) – Lesson from Rick Rubin
(1:38:34) – Believer
(1:46:05) – Father son relationship
(1:47:22) – Dan’s first song
(1:51:34) – Cat Stevens and Harry Chapin
(1:56:17) – Advice for young people
(2:04:49) – LGBTQ
(2:09:11) – Religion
(2:13:53) – Meaning of life
(2:17:02) – Dan sings
Vivian Schiller is the executive director of Aspen Digital, former head of news at Twitter, and former CEO of NPR. She joins Big Technology Podcast for a discussion of why the public distrusts elites. This conversation takes place in Davos — as the World Economic Forum conducts its annual meeting — and dissects its controversial initiatives such as the "Great Reset." Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss the latest with big tech and Joe Biden's tech agenda.
