Karthik Puvvada (known by his friends and online as "KP") is the Program Director for On Deck No-Code and is also a leader of the "build in public" movement that is taking the internet by storm. Today's conversation takes place at the intersection of those two tech trends.When KP thinks about building in public, he encourages his audience to use content as a lighthouse to attract other people to your circle. These content pieces help to signal that you're serious about a certain niche and help prevent you from being washed away by the "Internet Content Stream." Stories are how you stand out in a crowded digital world.KP's stories have elevated his no-code platform. He's excited about how the builders of today don't need coding skills to create tools because they can use drag & drop solutions. We talk about projects in the no-code space that are fresh and exciting, as well as classics that have proven real staying power.KP's enthusiasm, humility, and charisma all come oozing out in this conversation. It's hard to imagine walking away from this episode and not having fun creating something. He makes you excited to trust the process and to go out there and build.For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com

Josh Kaplan was an early employee at Morning Brew and was a product manager during their meteoric rise as a media company. Now, he’s taken what he has learned as an operator in a creative space and applied it to his role as co-founder and CEO of Smooth Ops to help content creators scale their businesses.Today’s conversation is about the deeply challenging logistics involved in the creator economy. Josh contends that most creators find themselves thinking relatively short-term. While it’s important to focus on producing great content, it’s also crucial to plan for the future—not just the next podcast episode or newsletter. Creators need operators as partners to help them think about and build for the long term, even as they focus on the next project at hand. This core theme led us in all sorts of interesting directions. We discuss the competition for talented producers on the frontlines of creative markets, how the flow of social relationships has changed, and how to create optionality for content creators throughout their careers.Josh also gives his optimistic vision for the future and reminds content creators to have fun. This episode was a blast.For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com

Bored Elon Musk  (one of Twitter's largest pseudonyms with 1.7 million followers) joins us to discuss the nature of pseudonyms and his investment activity. We also chat about the metaverse, the pseudonymous tech stack, the future of deep fakes, and much more.Pseudonyms are interesting because they are inherently meritocratic. Bias isn't possible because nobody knows who you really are. As the internet becomes more crypto-native and employment becomes more fluid, pseudonyms will only continue to rise in popularity. Already, DAOs are full of contributors that use pseudonyms.It's worth noting that pseudonymity is not anonymity. A pseudonym can build reputation that persists through interactions.Bored Elon is trying to make sure that as one of the first major pseudonyms, he sets the right example with his online reputation. Besides posting memes or tweeting fake startup ideas, Bored Elon is spending a lot of time investing in real companies with the bored fund. Many founders are happy to take his money without knowing who he is - a future where we can interact based on the merits of our activity over our identity is one that will benefit many.For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com

This week's guest on The Deep End is Dr. Emily Anhalt. Dr. Anhalt is a psychologist, emotional fitness consultant, and the Co-Founder and Chief Clinical Officer of Coa, which describes itself as building a gym for your mental health.Today's conversation is about how to train for emotional fitness. Just like trainers at a traditional gym might rotate clients between a leg day, chest day, and shoulder day, Dr. Anhalt and her colleagues have developed classes to train different traits of emotional fitness like resilience, empathy, and self-awareness.In addition to discussing what exactly goes into performing the equivalent of an emotional push-up, we dive into how the pandemic has influenced the mental health landscape, analyze the stigma around seeking help, and compare & contrast in-person therapy with virtual options.For the past twelve years, Dr. Anhalt has been working clinically with executives, founders, and tech employees, and has conducted extensive research with prominent psychologists and entrepreneurs about how leaders can improve their emotional fitness. She and Coa are also partnered with On Deck Health. She draws on her deep experience repeatedly throughout our time together.For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com

Cooper Turley leads a handful of online communities known as DAOs. "DAO" is an acronym that stands for a decentralized autonomous organization. In more colloquial terms, a DAO is an internet community with a shared cap table and bank account. They represent humanity's newest structure for cooperative decision making.Cooper joined us for a live episode last week to help explain why DAOs are exploding in popularity. In our discussion, he explained their governance structures, described the different types of DAOs, made  some predictions for the future,, and answered some wide-ranging questions from our live audience. DAOs are a powerful new mechanism for coordinating humans at scale. If they work as intended, we could be seeing the rise of a new way of organizing people that might last for centuries. We hope you enjoy! For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com

It's a new season of the Deep End and we're moving to two episodes per week (Mondays + Wednesdays)!We lay the groundwork for all of our upcoming episodes by discussing the nature of the open-source web. Our guest, Cal.com Co-CEO Peer Richelsen, views the internet as a democratic, transparent, and open technology that is undergoing a renaissance. Open-source software development was the spiritual precursor to 2021's web 3 boom. Tinkerers like Peer are ecstatic that technologists are returning to the very fundamentals of the web that made it so inclusive and exciting in the early 2000s. In this episode, Peer explains how the Internet can finally return to its decentralized roots because of incentive structures that have developed over the last few years. We also dive into several fun other topics, including how to pick the right web domain, how to build a company with two CEOs, and what the differences in cultures of compensation transparency are between the US and Germany.For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com

Dean Hollis Robbins wears many hats: Administrator, teacher, scholar of black sonnets... but she's also an expert on expertise itself. Today's conversation is about frameworks for organizing knowledge. Dr. Robbins argues that our modern society suffers from mismanaged "self-secretarying" - most of us receive no formal training in how to process & sort the huge amounts of information that we have to process every day. She also straddles the line between higher education and tech. Her involvement in both communities helps her understand how these two different worlds might both be able to learn from each other. This interdisciplinary background of hers made this conversation a fascinating examination of the interplay between breadth and depth.For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com

Patrick Rivera (Product Engineer at Mirror and alum of ODF + ODW) has a front seat on the edge of the crypto revolution. He details the evolution of the internet from Web 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0, discusses the crypto-native creator economy, paints a picture of the current crypto landscape (and challenges), and provides some predictions for the future. For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com

Flo Crivello (CEO of Teamflow) believes that a new way of working calls for an entirely new set of tools. In this conversation, we explore how employers can curate a new kind of space that looks virtual, but feels intimate and collaborative in the same way a traditional office does. Our wide-ranging conversation covers text-based productivity vs. video-based work, the entrance of Facebook into the remote work space, the implications of visa immigrations in a borderless world, and much more. For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com

We sit down with Marc Lore, a serial entrepreneur and self-described "moonshot seeker." He has successfully founded and sold three companies, including Jet.com, which sold to Walmart in 2016 for $3.3 billion. Now, he's building a mission-driven city called, "Telosa," which comes from an Aristotle-coined word "Telos," meaning "a higher purpose.”For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com