The Times Tech Podcast

Chieh Huang, founder of Boxed.com, talks about setting up a 'Costco for millennials', struggles with funding, the challenge of shipping giant boxes, and his unique employee benefits like paying university fees and unlimited maternity leave.

Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring, talks about getting rejected on national television, turning failure into funding, being lambasted by British customers, following the James Dyson model, starting ten other companies, luring Sir Richard Branson as an investor, being sued by a giant rival, showing up at customers’ houses, and shipping a faulty product that nearly bankrupted him.

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Oren Jacob, former CTO of film studio Pixar and founder of computer conversation startup Pullstring to talk about the new age of voice technology and talking Barbie (2:30), how the Amazon Echo ended the family shopping trip (7:30), his years at Pixar (12:00), building Mrs Potatohead (13:30), how a stuffed bunny inspired his startup (14:45), cold-calling speech experts (18:30), doing market research in a tent (20:30), raising the first round of venture capital (23:30), the difficulty of doing speech recognition for children (25:30), the many tech revolutions making voice systems possible (28:45), turning algorthms into characters (36:00), whether bots kill jobs (40:00), expecting too much from machines (46:00), and the importance of a voice assistant elegantly saying “I don’t know” (47:45). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Rich Pierson, co-founder of Headspace, the popular meditation app, to talk about how it started in London nine years ago (6:30), meeting his co-founder (8:00), quitting his job marketing deodorant (9:15), starting out with group meditation events (13:00), accidental focus groups (16:00), moving to California (16:45), going from 18 to 170 employees (19:30), layoffs and mistakes (20:00), convincing investors to put money into mindfulness (21:30), competing with 3,000 rival apps (25:00), struggling to manage people (30:00), helping nurses with “compassion fatigue’ (34:00), and signing up big companies (34:45). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Phil Libin, founder of Evernote, one of the first companies to be labelled a “unicorn”, to talk about his plan to create the Netflix of artificial intelligence (1:00), growing up poor (3:30), selling his first company at 16 (6:00), starting another after September 11 (9:45), creating Evernote (11:00), being one of the first apps in the App Store (13:45), getting funding from fanboys (17:00), being saved by a random Swede (19:30), the downside of the hype cycle (21:30), leaving Evernote (24:30), becoming a venture capitalist (25:45), his worst day at work (29:30), bureaucracy robots (32:45), and building something for yourself (36:00). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Will Marshall, founder of Planet, a billion-dollar startup that operates the world’s largest constellation of satellites, to talk about taking a picture of earth every day (2:30), making satellites the size of shoeboxes (4:30), the space renaissance (6:30) increasing crop yields from 300 miles overhead (10:30), selling data to hedge funds (14:45), buying Google’s satellite arm (15:45), the rocket bottleneck (16:30), how smartphones changed space (18:45), the perils of rubbish travelling at 20,000 mph (20:15), blowing up satellites (22:30), how he came to America from Britain (23:45), the future of the space business (28:30) and creating an accidental unicorn (29:45). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Jon Callaghan, founder of True Ventures, on investing in things before there is a market (3:15), finding Fitbit (6:00), backing big ideas (9:15), celebrating failure (16:00), a drone investment that crashed (21:00), backing Wordpress (26:00), why we're not in a bubble (27:15), turning computers on human health (32:00), why venture capital is a weird business (35:00), how money gets in the way of good ideas (39:45) and why robots are 'the next big thing' (42:15). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Sunday Times tech corespondent Danny Fortson brings on Marco Zappacosta, the 31-year old founder of Thumbtack to talk about building a billion-dollar startup, getting rejected 42 times by venture capitalists (7:00), finally getting a "yes" (10:30), the importance of having entrepreneur parents (13:30), the myth of overnight success (14:30), competing with Amazon (17:30), insecurity in the "gig" economy (21:30), the atomisation of work (26:30), his worst day (31:30) and advice to his younger self (35:00). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Sunday Times' tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Silicon Valley power couple and investors Mitch and Freda Kapor to talk about publicly challenging Uber, on Freada's pioneering work on workplace sexual harassment (6:30), on whether Uber can be fixed (9:45), their early days at Lotus (12:30), investing in startups (16:00), how they found Uber (18:45), how tech can fix itself (23:00), the evolution of hacking (27:30), the need for Internet "peace talks" (29:15), and the backlash from their Uber letter (32:15) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Sunday Times' tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Cal Henderson, co-founder and CTO of Slack, the wildly popular business messaging platform, on founding photo sharing company Flickr (2:30), its ill-fated sale to Yahoo (6:00), starting again (9:00), the accident that became Slack (10:30), being a unicorn (14:30), his early days in London (17:00), learning to be an optimist (19:15), why he's not worried by Microsoft (21:00), 'Calloween' (25:00), the power of emojis (28:00), what's it's like to be personally worth hundreds of millions of dollars (32:45) and loving Lego (34:00). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.