Matt Senter grew up on a small farm in rural North Carolina, dreaming of being a game programmer. A Dad, a husband and musician, he keeps extra busy besides being a startup founder. After selling his prior company CosmicCart, he and his co-founder wanted to make it easier for people to get into cryptocurrency. Having experience with products like Ebates, they decided to build Lolli, which is a rewards platform for shopping online… except the rewards are given in bitcoin.
Sara reveals that she won a $500 gift card at a MongoDB hackathon, building an app that removed mustaches from people's pictures. This was many years ago, and no we were not paid in JetBlue gift cards to have Eliot on the show, although MongoDB is a client of Stack Overflow in other areas.
Mongo comes from humongous, cause, ya know, scale. That, plus HumongousDB.com was already taken and is a real mouthful to say.
Eliot talks about the frustrations he and his co-founder, Dwight Merriman, experienced while working together at DoubleClick and ShopWiki. DoubleClick began as a New York City ad tech company and evolved into the heart of Google’s real-time ad business after being acquired.
Frustrations with the database systems available at both these companies led the pair to decide it was time for a better mousetrap. Today, MongoDB is a public company worth north of $7 billion and a staff of more than 1900 people
We chat about why relational databases are still the core of computer science education in high school and college across the United States, and whether or not this will ever change.
During the show we skimmed some of the latest questions on Stack Overflow related to Mongo. Eliot took it back to his team and Tom Hollander, the PM for Mongo's chart product, delivered a great answer! Can you believe this website is free?
Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist, co-inventor of loop quantum gravity, and a contributor of many interesting ideas to cosmology, quantum field theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, theoretical biology, and the philosophy of science. He is the author of several books including one that critiques the state of physics and string theory called The Trouble with Physics, and his latest book, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum.
This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.
This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”.
Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
03:03 – What is real?
05:03 – Scientific method and scientific progress
24:57 – Eric Weinstein and radical ideas in science
29:32 – Quantum mechanics and general relativity
47:24 – Sean Carroll and many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
55:33 – Principles in science
57:24 – String theory
This week Eric, John, and Thomas talk about the Coronavirus and how it's impacting the tech world. Letsencrypt revoking tons of certs. And Laravel 7 hits the streets and Eric is already coding with it.
Ann Druyan is the writer, producer, director, and one of the most important and impactful communicators of science in our time. She co-wrote the 1980 science documentary series Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981, and her love for whom, with the help of NASA, was recorded as brain waves on a golden record along with other things our civilization has to offer and launched into space on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that are now, 42 years later, still active, reaching out farther into deep space than any human-made object ever has. This was a profound and beautiful decision she made as a Creative Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project. In 2014, she went on to create the second season of Cosmos, called Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, and in 2020, the new third season called Cosmos: Possible Worlds, which is being released this upcoming Monday, March 9. It is hosted, once again, by the fun and brilliant Neil deGrasse Tyson.
This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.
This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”.
Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
03:24 – Role of science in society
07:04 – Love and science
09:07 – Skepticism in science
14:15 – Voyager, Carl Sagan, and the Golden Record
36:41 – Cosmos
53:22 – Existential threats
1:00:36 – Origin of life
1:04:22 – Mortality
Alex Garland is a writer and director of many imaginative and philosophical films from the dreamlike exploration of human self-destruction in the movie Annihilation to the deep questions of consciousness and intelligence raised in the movie Ex Machina, which to me is one of the greatest movies on artificial intelligence ever made. I’m releasing this podcast to coincide with the release of his new series called Devs that will premiere this Thursday, March 5, on Hulu.
This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.
This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”.
Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
03:42 – Are we living in a dream?
07:15 – Aliens
12:34 – Science fiction: imagination becoming reality
17:29 – Artificial intelligence
22:40 – The new “Devs” series and the veneer of virtue in Silicon Valley
31:50 – Ex Machina and 2001: A Space Odyssey
44:58 – Lone genius
49:34 – Drawing inpiration from Elon Musk
51:24 – Space travel
54:03 – Free will
57:35 – Devs and the poetry of science
1:06:38 – What will you be remembered for?
Growing up in the bay area, George Deglin has always been in the middle of the Silicon Valley action. Having both parents being engineers, he was influenced to study Computer Science at Berkley. During that team, he co-founded a startup in the education space. After building this company up, he parted ways to start his next venture. This next venture led to the discovery of the vision for OneSignal – the most widely used Push Notification and marketing platform, sending over 5 billion messages a day.
Echeruo's new venture is called Love and Magic, a startup studio that helps companies of all sizes maximize their ability to innovate.
For anyone that has an idea they have been hoping to turn into a startup, Echeruo and his collaborators just introduced the Startup School of Alchemy. It's being taught at WeWork and Princeton University. It offers a six-week curriculum designed to help aspiring entrepreneurs find product-market fit.Apply with the code "stackoverflow" and you get $1000 off the course, a 40% discount.
Echeruo says his time working in finance and with Microsoft Excel was what gave him the ability to think of how data from maps could be optimized by an algorithm and built into a useful mobile app.
For those who don't know, our co-founder and Chairmam, Joel Spolsky, was part of the team at Microsoft that built Excel. Here is legendary 2015 talk, You Suck at Excel, where he organizes a spreadsheet to keep track of what he pays his Pokemon, ahem,I mean, uh, employees.
You can take a deeper dive into the backstory of how Chinedu built HopStop below, related in his own words.
I've always had difficulty with directions. When I grew up in Nigeria, I remember getting lost in my own house. It wasn’t like it was a mansion, it was a four-bedroom house.
So you can imagine how I felt when I got to NYC and had to get around with the subway and bus system! I remember walking up once to one of those blown up maps in the subway station. My nose was a feet away from the dust laden map. The subway lines looked like tangled noodles. Complexity galore!
New Yorkers used to walk around with these pocket guides—Hagstrom maps. I was going on a date in the Lower East Side. It doesn’t have the grid like the rest of the city. I got lost and was very late getting to the bar.I can't remember how, the date went but I remember what I did first thing next morning. I walked over to the subway station, grabbed a subway MAP and laid it on the floor and tried to figure it out. There’s driving directions. But there weren’t subway directions. So I was solving my own problems.
I was looking for the complete directions—leave your house, turn left, go into this particular entrance, get on this train, get off at this station, use this exit. Because I was, in a lot of ways, the ultimate user, we ended up building a product that solved the complete problem—get me from where I am now to where I need to be.
I was non-technical, I worked for a hedge fund. I may have been thinking algorithmically, I knew that this was computationally possible. But I didn’t know how to make it a reality. In conceiving the problem, I threw all the data into spreadsheets. I interned at this company when I was in college, where I learned about spreadsheets. I found the work very tedious, but I learned how to think about data, to think in tables. It allowed me to conceptualize complexity.
To conceptualize the first subway data as a spreadsheet, I started by staring at the subway map laid on the wood floor of my apartment. The most obvious features were colors, lines, and stops. So those are the tables I typed into Excel first. Then I realized the lines also represented two train directions so I redid the spreadsheet. Then I realized the stops served multiple subway lines, so I redid the spreadsheet. Then I realized some of the stops would only be active during certain periods, so I redid the spreadsheet. We kept on learning and adjusting. It took us a long time before we had a data model that robustly described NYC's subway system. We even figured out how to automatically account for the frequent weekend NYC subway diversions.
To build the first version of the app, I went to eLance, described to these computer scientists the data set in Excel, routes, stops, exits, entrances, and I sent it in. This developer in Siberia, Russia, emailed me, came up with a solution. But he turned out to be a complete genius, he built the core of the first version of Hopstop. Here I was, a Nigerian, sitting in my apartment using messenger, email, on a laptop. And I never met Alex for four years. We built Hopstop over four years without ever meeting each other.
We ran very lean. Alex did all the coding. I did the subway data and user experience. I'd have to ride to different subway stations to note each subway entrance and exit, etc. When we added the bus system, Rajeev and his data team in India helped input the bus stops and schedules. And four years later, we were purchased by Apple, so quite the ride.
