Danny In The Valley

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Chieh Huang, founder of Boxed.com, to talk about setting up the “Costco for millennials” in a two-car garage (1:30), why Brexit and small houses make coming to the UK hard (3:00), growing up as a son of immigrants (5:30), making his first fortune selling an office-decoration game to Zynga (9:00), the entrepreneurial itch (17:30), taking on the $200bn big-box retail industry (20:30), struggling for funding (23:00), the challenge of shipping giant boxes (26:30), being an “undercorn” (29:00), paying university fees for the children of his workers (30:00), unlimited maternity leave (31:15), the financial calculus behind those benefits (34:15), predictive shopping (37:15), and trying to please a Tiger Mom (39:45). Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring, the video doorbell company, to talk about about getting rejected on national television (2:00), turning failure into funding (4:00), putting his email address on every box (11:00), being lambasted by "nasty" British customers (12:15), following the James Dyson model (14:00), doing 24 hours on the home shopping television, (17:00), starting ten other companies (19:00), getting his first outside money (21:45), spending $1m to buy the ‘ring.com’ domain (26:15), luring Sir Richard Branson as an investor (32:45), being sued by a giant rival (34:45), showing up at customers’ houses (38:00), and shipping a faulty product that nearly bankrupted him (39:45). Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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). Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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). Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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). Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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). Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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). Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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). Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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) Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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). Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Dirk Ahlborn, chief executive of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies to talk about traveling at airline speeds over land, why the idea has failed in the past, (7:00) his part-time army of scientists (11:00), Trump putting a hyperloop on the wall with Mexico (17:30), the end of short-haul flights (26:00) bringing the first "pods" into service by 2020 (42:00) making it free to ride (45:00) and why using freelancers is the best way to make the hyperloop a reality (50:00) Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Ryan Pamplin of Meta, developer of augmented reality glasses, to talk about the next paradigm in computing and why it won't be the another Google glass (4:30), replacing the smartphone (7:00), the death of privacy (14:30), when holograms will replace text books (23:00), Disney's plans (27:00), a life full of spam (33:00), what Apple's going to do (35:00), typing with your mind (42:00) and hoverboards, obviously. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Sunday Times' tech correspondent brings on Jason Calacanis, one of Silicon Valley's most prolific "angel" investors, to talk about being one of the first investors in Uber (3:00), being the Cesc Fabregas of investing (9:00), how to fix Uber (12:00) how to make it as a foreign entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, Google and Facebook's damaging monopolies (28:00) having more Twitter followers than Barack Obama (38:00) and buying Tesla's very first Model S. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Sunday Times tech correspondent brings on Saman Farid, a investor who specialises in all things robotic to talk about how artificial intelligence is making machines smart (6:00), robots that pick apples (10:00), how China is planning to outlaw human drivers (15:00), why the building industry is about to be turned upside down, burger bots and maid bots (25:00), the end of accountants (33:00) and the future of humanity. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/dannyinthevalley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.