Casey Newton is the author of Platformer and co-host of Hard Fork. He joins Big Technology Podcast for our annual predictions episode. Tune in to hear Newton analyze 2024's major developments in AI, debate whether AI agents will take off in 2025, and explore what might happen to companies like Apple, Google, and OpenAI in the coming year. We also cover quantum computing breakthroughs, self-driving car expansion, and what a potential Trump presidency could mean for tech antitrust. Hit play for an insightful look at where technology is headed in 2025.
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Matt Pierce has been a tech guy for his entire 17 year career. Coming out of grad school, he started out in healthcare tech for a decade or so. Eventually, he started down the path of being an entrepreneur. He is married with 3 daughters - 2 in third grade and one that is a 2 year old. He mentioned the entrepreneurial dilemma of picking 3 of the 5 life choices - family, business, sleep, exercise and friendships - and notes that his three are family, business, and sleep.
After spending nights and weekends burning the midnight oil on a healthcare tech solution, Matt sat down with a prospective client and did the best pitch ever. The client's feedback was that it didn't solve her real problem which was turnover, which boiled down to money. After chatting with the client and a mentor, Matt uncovered the best potential solution to financial stress - on demand pay.
In this episode: Whether AI coding tools are making your code worse, how AI can improve pull requests, building software through prompt engineering, using AI to write cleaner code, and what we can expect from this technology in 2025 and beyond.
Brian Chesky is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb. This week on Big Technology Podcast, we roll back the clock to our interview with Chesky in 2023, where he discussed cleaning fees, listening to customer feedback, and getting involved in the details of the product and user experience. This interview was one of the earliest moments Chesky shared his 'Founder Mode, philosophy, passionately talking about why he gets in the details, even as CEO. Please enjoy this holiday throwback. Alex and Ranjan will return to their regularly scheduled Friday show next week.
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In this episode: The birth of React, how the world’s biggest open-source business is leveraging LLMs, the creator of Jenkins on CI/CD, the creator of Node.js and Deno on open-source evolution, and an open-source development paradigm.
Episode overview
This unfiltered 2017 archive dialogue captures Maya Horgan Famodu (Founder and Partner, Ingressive Capital) before she became known for straight-talking LinkedIn posts about founder insights and personal growth.
Fresh from investment banking, she was forging new pathways between Silicon Valley capital and African startup innovation via carefully-curated investor tours—laying the groundwork for the launch of Ingressive Capital's investment months later.
Listening back, you can hear how the same independence and non-traditional EQ that helped a "small girl from a trailer park" believe she could launch a VC fund was already shaping her vision.
Critical points
- The early signs of the independent thinking that would later become her trademark
- How her unconventional background shaped her approach to investment
- Why bridging Silicon Valley and African tech required a translator's insight
- The unexpected ways growing up between worlds prepared her for building cross-cultural understanding
What we know now
Looking back from 2024, this conversation reveals both professional and personal threads that would define Horgan Famodu's impact:
- The shift from understated confidence to singular public voice
- How her own story of independent creativity would later resonate with investors and founders
- The evolution from curating entrees to the African tech startup opportunity to foreign investors to leading investments
Questions we're pondering
- How has Horgan Famodu's public sharing of her personal journey influenced African tech discourse?
- What role does authentic leadership play in venture capital today?
- How has the relationship between personal story and professional impact evolved in African tech?
Dr. Rona Novick is a clinical psychologist and Dean Emerita of Yeshiva University's Azrieli School. Jinja Birkenbeuel is CEO of Birk Creative, and a parent of three children. They join Big Technology Podcast to discuss the right amount of technology to give to kids and how it impacts the developing brain. Tune in to hear their insights about pandemic-era screen time, the creation vs. consumption debate, how parents should approach digital supervision, and why schools are struggling to manage phones in classrooms. We also cover AI chatbots, Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation," and practical solutions for families. Hit play for an essential conversation about protecting kids while preparing them for an increasingly digital world.
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Reed McGinley-Stempel grew up in Las Vegas, but went to school on the East Coast. Frankly, he didn't know what he wanted to do and "stumbled" into management consulting. When I dug into how someone stumbles into this profession, he mentioned that early on he got some sage advice from his older brother about not rushing to law school because... being a lawyer isn't that fun. So, he followed some friends to Bain & Company.
The more projects he was involved in, the more he got interested in technology. Candidly, one of his motivations for going in tech was the fact that his was moving out to San Francisco to support his wife through law school at Stanford. He considered continuing to do consulting with Bain, but decided tech was the best route and eventually, joined Plaid. Outside of his professional career, he is into the outdoors, loving hiking and taking his very active dog outside. He mentions that living in San Francisco makes the outdoors super accessible.
Reed and his Co-founder both came from Plaid, and worked on the adaptive authentication team. There, they explored how to secure bank authentication to maintain security, but also do it in such a way that reduced friction and created an amazing experience. They found that the biggest problem to be solved was the combination of security issues with passwords, and the low conversion rate of sign up / sign in forms requiring passwords. They wanted to fix this.