Jody Shapiro was fortunate enough to know he was going to be an engineer from a young age. He did the typical kid things, liked played with legos, and built things, with deep curiosity around how things worked. He was introduced to coding when he was 9 years old - and it clicked. He also found himself interested in the business world. The same curiosity around gears and levers was also extended into business... and he was fascinated by the systems in place that enabled intelligent decisions around pricing, stocking, etc.
He's had the opportunity to indulge in his curiosities, studying computer engineering in his undergrad, and working on incredible problems in the industry. He has worked for Microsoft, video conferencing software, Silicon Graphics, and Google (for 9 years). He finds it's easy to fall in love with tech, but it's important to remember that there are users on the other side of solutions.
When he left Google, he set out to build... a business. He wasn't sure what type of business he was going to build. But he wanted to go work on a big problem, one that everyone had. After spending some time researching, he figured out that everyone has more SaaS than ever before, and companies were having a hard time managing their portfolios. He thought there must be a way to solve this problem, and solve it driven by data.
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.
Sheera Frenkel is a New York Times reporter and author of the best-selling book, An Ugly Truth. She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss her hit book and her reporting process. We address critics's claims that Facebook reporters are harsh to the company because they’re mad Trump won, and they’re also upset that social media is eroding their gatekeeping power. Frenkel listens to these critiques and shares her perspective.
Matt Walker is a sleep scientist at Berkeley, author of Why We Sleep, and the host of a new podcast called The Matt Walker Podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
– Stamps.com: https://stamps.com and use code LEX to get free postage & scale
– Squarespace: https://lexfridman.com/squarespace and use code LEX to get 10% off
– Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil
– BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off
– Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off
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
(09:56) – Putin moment: Lex takes Matt’s sunglasses
(10:17) – Fascination with sleep
(14:26) – Why do we sleep?
(22:58) – Computer vision for driver assistance
(32:19) – Consciousness is fundamental
(40:25) – Lex on human to robot connection
(42:52) – Scent of a Woman is better than “John Wick”
(54:33) – Distinction between coffee and caffeine
(1:20:17) – The science of ‘sleeping on it’
(1:34:10) – Lex on his sleeping schedule
(1:59:14) – Chronotypes
(2:06:44) – How to overcome insomnia
(2:24:07) – Diet and sleep
(2:33:03) – Where do dreams come from?
(2:46:41) – How sleep affects emotions
(2:53:35) – Meaning of life
Ken Gavranovic lives in the northern suburbs of Atlanta - namely Alpharetta - with his wife Heather, and two teenage daughters. As a kid, he was fascinated by the movie war games... but what excited him was not the war aspect, but the fact that kid could sit in front of a computer and build anything with their mind. That... got Ken excited.
While living in Galveston, TX, he dove into computers as a 10 year old, reading books and learning assembly. His first computer job was working on the Pick operating system, where he built a way for people to send faxes from their desk. The year after, his solution was a 2 million dollar business.
Post that, he moved to NY to write software, and then to Florida. While in Florida, the internet started booming (about the same time as AOL). He figured out everyone was going to run their business on the internet... so he moved to Atlanta to be in a place with the highest density of bandwidth, and built what is known as web.com today.
Ken was a part of many transformational things throughout his career. Prior to his current venture, he ran product and engineering at New Relic. He got excited about three things that attracted him to his new role, which was purposeful culture, a world changing goal, and the size of an opportunity in front of him. It was these three things that brought him to the company.
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.
8 trillion. It’s kind of a big number, right? That’s how many signals are collected, processed, and analyzed by Microsoft’s security team every single day. Those signals are travelling from the cloud, coming through endpoints, coming through Bing, coming through Xbox. All of these signals are turned into intelligence, and if you’re a cloud user, that intelligence is an asset to your security. By making the leap to the cloud, the power, size, and flexibility of Microsoft’s threat intelligence becomes your resource.
In this episode of Security Unlocked, hosts Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla are re-joined by Microsoft’s Chief Security Advisor, Sarah Armstrong-Smith, to dive deeper into the back half of her four-part series on Becoming Resilient. We explore different cloud models, the shared responsibility of your cloud service provider, and the growing risks of insider threats.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
Best practices on switching to the cloud and ensuring utmost security
Why you need to adapt to stay ahead of threats
How to build security cleanly into your foundation and keep from it being a messy afterthought
Some Questions We Ask:
What do new users gain by moving to the cloud?
What errors are organizations making when moving to the cloud?
How do we effectively communicate with our security team about business decisions?
Valerie Coffman has a family in San Francisco, with 2 cats - both 18 pounds each - and 2 kids, the oldest being 3 and a half. So you could say she has a lot to juggle, even outside of a startup. Her family spends time outside, in parks, the zoo, museums, etc - as much as she can since they are opening up again post pandemic.
She graduated from Cornell, with her PhD in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics - which I had to google to understand. Prior to her current venture, she was the CTO and Chief Science Officer at Xometry, an on demand marketplace for custom manufacturing - building their software team from scratch.
She and her co-founder started their current venture by exploring why people resist believing scientifically backed, factual information. She wanted to figure out which messages and stories were more effective at communicating these true facts.
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.
Mason began his career as a developer, went on to be a CEO, but also found time to produce 80s alt rock album full of advice on how to run your startup.
Slack began life as a video game company, eventually pivoting to make an internal chat tool it had built into its main business. Descript had a similar journey, taking the editing software Mason and his team developed at Detour, and moving it to become the center of a new business after Detour was acquired by Bose.
Headquartered in Montreal, Lyrebird is the AI division of Descript . It was founded by PhD students studying under Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Prize in 2019 for his pioneering research into deep learning and neural networks.
This UNAJUA Throwback episode takes us back to when Lucy Hoffman, co-founder and head of operations at the Cape Town-based, American mobile content development startup Carry1st joined Andile Masuku and Osarumen Osamuyi for an extended insight-rich chat (published on March 10th 2020). Since recording this conversation, Carry1st has closed a $6 million Series A led by Colorado-based VC firm Konvoy Ventures.
Listen in to learn why, as glitzy ecosystem trends like fintech and mobility continue to dominate headlines, Lucy and the rest of her team at Carry1st are quietly bullish on the mobile gaming industry’s low-key commercial case and 'super-app/super-platform' potential.
Lucy is an experienced American business operations specialist who, prior to joining Carry1st, spearheaded operations at impact investment facilitation startup Nexii and the African Leadership Academy. Before that, she interned for the global diversity and inclusion team at Credit Suisse and spent three and a half years embedded at Morgan & Stanley, where she worked on M&A and capital markets transactions for global power and utility companies.
You can listen to the full original episode here(https://www.africantechroundup.com/lucy-hoffman-carry1st/)
Click here (https://telbee.io/channel/uuatbnkraty1vn-nkazpcg/index.html) to leave us a 60-sec voice note with your reactions to any of the topics raised in the UNAJUA Series. (We will include some of your audio takes in future follow-up episodes.)
Image credits: Kojo Kwarteng
