Podcast appearances and mentions of Harper Reed

Interview with Harper Reed AI Horseless Carriages Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to 'cheat on everything' Cluely, the AI cheating tool's new (insane) ad: After 5 years of jaw clicking (TMJ), ChatGPT cured it in 60 seconds — no BS : r/ChatGPT China cracks down on 'autonomous' car claims after fatal accident Famed AI Researcher Launches Controversial Startup to Replace All Human Workers Everywhere Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy Kaggle and the Wikimedia Foundation are partnering on open data. Draft executive order outlines plan to integrate AI into K-12 schools A New Form of Verification on Bluesky Survey: Americans Averaged Over $700 in TikTok Shop Purchases in the Last Year The Washington Post partners with OpenAI on search content Films made with AI can win Oscars, Academy says The Welikia project 18 years ago today, Tay Zonday uploaded Chocolate Rain Brilliant Senate testimony in Oregon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Harper Reed Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bigid.com/im storyblok.com/twittv-25 outsystems.com/twit

Interview with Harper Reed AI Horseless Carriages Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to 'cheat on everything' Cluely, the AI cheating tool's new (insane) ad: After 5 years of jaw clicking (TMJ), ChatGPT cured it in 60 seconds — no BS : r/ChatGPT China cracks down on 'autonomous' car claims after fatal accident Famed AI Researcher Launches Controversial Startup to Replace All Human Workers Everywhere Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy Kaggle and the Wikimedia Foundation are partnering on open data. Draft executive order outlines plan to integrate AI into K-12 schools A New Form of Verification on Bluesky Survey: Americans Averaged Over $700 in TikTok Shop Purchases in the Last Year The Washington Post partners with OpenAI on search content Films made with AI can win Oscars, Academy says The Welikia project 18 years ago today, Tay Zonday uploaded Chocolate Rain Brilliant Senate testimony in Oregon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Harper Reed Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bigid.com/im storyblok.com/twittv-25 outsystems.com/twit

Interview with Harper Reed AI Horseless Carriages Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to 'cheat on everything' Cluely, the AI cheating tool's new (insane) ad: After 5 years of jaw clicking (TMJ), ChatGPT cured it in 60 seconds — no BS : r/ChatGPT China cracks down on 'autonomous' car claims after fatal accident Famed AI Researcher Launches Controversial Startup to Replace All Human Workers Everywhere Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy Kaggle and the Wikimedia Foundation are partnering on open data. Draft executive order outlines plan to integrate AI into K-12 schools A New Form of Verification on Bluesky Survey: Americans Averaged Over $700 in TikTok Shop Purchases in the Last Year The Washington Post partners with OpenAI on search content Films made with AI can win Oscars, Academy says The Welikia project 18 years ago today, Tay Zonday uploaded Chocolate Rain Brilliant Senate testimony in Oregon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Harper Reed Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bigid.com/im storyblok.com/twittv-25 outsystems.com/twit

Interview with Harper Reed AI Horseless Carriages Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to 'cheat on everything' Cluely, the AI cheating tool's new (insane) ad: After 5 years of jaw clicking (TMJ), ChatGPT cured it in 60 seconds — no BS : r/ChatGPT China cracks down on 'autonomous' car claims after fatal accident Famed AI Researcher Launches Controversial Startup to Replace All Human Workers Everywhere Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy Kaggle and the Wikimedia Foundation are partnering on open data. Draft executive order outlines plan to integrate AI into K-12 schools A New Form of Verification on Bluesky Survey: Americans Averaged Over $700 in TikTok Shop Purchases in the Last Year The Washington Post partners with OpenAI on search content Films made with AI can win Oscars, Academy says The Welikia project 18 years ago today, Tay Zonday uploaded Chocolate Rain Brilliant Senate testimony in Oregon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Harper Reed Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bigid.com/im storyblok.com/twittv-25 outsystems.com/twit

Interview with Harper Reed AI Horseless Carriages Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to 'cheat on everything' Cluely, the AI cheating tool's new (insane) ad: After 5 years of jaw clicking (TMJ), ChatGPT cured it in 60 seconds — no BS : r/ChatGPT China cracks down on 'autonomous' car claims after fatal accident Famed AI Researcher Launches Controversial Startup to Replace All Human Workers Everywhere Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy Kaggle and the Wikimedia Foundation are partnering on open data. Draft executive order outlines plan to integrate AI into K-12 schools A New Form of Verification on Bluesky Survey: Americans Averaged Over $700 in TikTok Shop Purchases in the Last Year The Washington Post partners with OpenAI on search content Films made with AI can win Oscars, Academy says The Welikia project 18 years ago today, Tay Zonday uploaded Chocolate Rain Brilliant Senate testimony in Oregon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Harper Reed Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bigid.com/im storyblok.com/twittv-25 outsystems.com/twit

Interview with Harper Reed AI Horseless Carriages Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to 'cheat on everything' Cluely, the AI cheating tool's new (insane) ad: After 5 years of jaw clicking (TMJ), ChatGPT cured it in 60 seconds — no BS : r/ChatGPT China cracks down on 'autonomous' car claims after fatal accident Famed AI Researcher Launches Controversial Startup to Replace All Human Workers Everywhere Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy Kaggle and the Wikimedia Foundation are partnering on open data. Draft executive order outlines plan to integrate AI into K-12 schools A New Form of Verification on Bluesky Survey: Americans Averaged Over $700 in TikTok Shop Purchases in the Last Year The Washington Post partners with OpenAI on search content Films made with AI can win Oscars, Academy says The Welikia project 18 years ago today, Tay Zonday uploaded Chocolate Rain Brilliant Senate testimony in Oregon Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Harper Reed Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bigid.com/im storyblok.com/twittv-25 outsystems.com/twit

Right now the news around GenAI seems scattered, all of the place, and confusing. Let's dig into what's working, what's not, and where some future trends are heading. SHOW: 902SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #902 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSOR:Try Postman AI Agent Builder Todaypostman.com/podcast/cloudcast/SHOW NOTES:Most AI Investments Will Lose Money as Market Enters ‘Greed' Cycle (Vinod Khasla, VC)My LLM CodeGen workflow (Harper Reed)"Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?" (Goldman Sachs) Microsoft cancels leases on Data Centers for AINVIDIA announces Q4 earnings IF YOU'RE CONFUSED ABOUT AI, YOU'RE NOT ALONE. There is a ton of AI out there, but it's not always simpleThere's a ton of AI out there, but it's not always affordableThere's a ton of AI out there, and sometimes it blows our mindThere's a ton of AI out there, and open source is starting to be disruptive (again)There's a ton of AI out there, and people are trying to forecast a future that changing too fastThere's a ton of AI out there, and people are struggling with technology and politics overlapping so muchFEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter/X: @cloudcastpodBlueSky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod

A few weeks back in this very email, I put out a request for a new content format we wanted to experiment with that we called “Startup Confessionals”.From my note:If you, or founders you know, are willing to share a startup confessional, we'd love to help. We can make these totally anonymized or public, whatever you're comfortable with. We'll be recording these remotely and aren't looking for hours long conversations — we're planning on editing them into quick lessons and anecdotes.For example, here are “confessional” conversations I've had with people one-on-one just in the last few weeks:— Over/under raising— Surprising/shocking fundraising stories— Horror stories of investors/board members behaving badly— Hiring to please investors — Acquisitions blocked or held hostage by investors/board membersThankfully, a few heeded the call. I think this week's video captures the essence of what we were going for and the experiences we were hoping to mine. This week, we have stories and lessons from some legendary founders —Ben Kauffman Founder of Quirky and Camp as well as CMO at Buzzfeed. Ben has an incredible knack for building brands and storytelling that has attracted some of the largest brand partnerships and most legendary investors. Harper ReedCame into the national spotlight as the Chieff Technology Officer for Barack Obama's re-election campaign. Shortly after, with encouragement and funding from then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he founder Modest which was later acquired by PayPal. Most recently, he wound down a venture backed startup Galactic. He's currently exploring new ideas with his longtime collaborators. Finbarr Taylor  Got his start in tech in various staff roles at companies like Groupon, Pebble, and Y Combinator. As a co-founder of Shogun, he and his partners bootstrapped to over $1M in ARR before raising their first round of funding. That first round let to another and then another. Shogun continues to be a thriving business that Finbarr remains on the board of and actively advises in addition to angel investing. His takeaways from bootstrapping to rocketship growth to near unicorn status are lessons not to be missed or dismissed. This is our first attempt at this format and we're so grateful to Ben, Harper, and Finbarr (as well as the others we have in the can) for being willing to wade into such uncertain waters with us. We're really happy with how this turned out and welcome your feedback on how we can improve it over time. We'd also welcome more stories from you or your networks. If you know someone who'd be fun/interesting/insightful on the topic of unpacking their founder, or early employee experiences and lessons, please send them our way!As always, we hope you enjoy watching this one as much as we all enjoyed making it.Bryce

AI is poised to impact the political process in profound ways. How do we navigate this uncharted territory? Hosts Beth Coleman and Rahul Krishnan are joined by experts Peter Loewen and Harper Reed to unravel the potential influence of AI on democracy and the spread of misinformation. About the hosts: Beth Coleman is an associate professor at U of T Mississauga's Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and the Faculty of Information. She is also a research lead on AI policy and praxis at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Coleman authored Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds using art and generative AI. Rahul Krishnan is an assistant professor in U of T's department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and the department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. He is a Canada CIFAR Chair at the Vector Institute, a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a faculty member at the Temerty Centre for AI Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM). About the guests: Peter Loewen is the director of U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and a professor in the department of political science in the Faculty of Arts & Science. He is also the associate director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. His research focuses on how politicians can make better decisions, how citizens can make better choices and how governments can address the disruption of technology and harness its opportunities. Harper Reed is a technologist who served as a chief technology officer for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. Reed has pioneered crowdsourcing at Threadless.com, founded Modest Inc. and guided the software team at PayPal. His most recent venture was General Galactic Corporation.

Introducing The Snack Pack! On these episodes, the guys invite young people on the pod to discuss their favorite snacks, while feeling incredibly old and out of touch.In this episode, Harper Reed comes on to talk about his best frenemy,  Takis “Fuego” chips. Other topics include: The Great Lays Potato Chip Tournament, what happens when someone eats a cucumber chip, Pete's budding hip-hop career, and one of the strangest Johnny laughs to date.“Hot Cheetos and Takis” by Da Rich Kidzzhttps://open.spotify.com/track/23xKY6BXWgk9D9Ehc9ymtO?si=XkNlvwXjQM6IjVriNxsikAAs always you can email us at Johnnysgotsnacks@gmail.comConsider joining our Patreon at Patreon.com/johnnysgotsnacks@Johnnysgotsnacks on instagram“Totally Accurate” music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):https://uppbeat.io/t/jonny-boyle/happy-like-larryLicense code: IHSL10Z4EM8QNPWD

Harper Reed, founder and CEO of Galactic, joins the show with Scott Kitun. Reed, the former Head of Commerce at Braintree and President Obama's CTO during his re-election campaign, is a longtime tech entrepreneur (and Technori supporter) working to make technology work better for everyone. Like many founders experienced early on in the pandemic, Reed had to make a major pivot. He shares his latest entrepreneurial journey moving Galactic from health/medtech-centered company into one focused on building fintech products native to Web3. Scott and Harper dig into the utter lack of accessibility for regular people to use crypto in their everyday lives, and how to build products with the user in mind. Reed  makes an actionable use case for Bitcoin, and ways of thinking about crypto and blockchain in a way that touch people's lives. They also touch on their Chicago roots, finding funding amidst the pandemic for veteran and rookie entrepreneurs. 

Harper Reed knows more than most that technology designed to do great things can be easily weaponized to do bad things. His view of the role technology should (and should not) play is heavily influenced by decades of work bringing technology to the forefront in industries such as ecommerce, politics, and startups. When the covid-19 pandemic hit, Harper was involved in efforts to help guide technological supports for the critical work being done in communities across the country, and has emerged with a deep sense of awe for the public health community and some ideas on how to make the system work better for all of us.Harper ReedTwitter: @harperConnect with Health2049:Website: https://www.health2049.comFind the complete Show Notes and Transcripts Here -> https://bit.ly/Tech-Harper-ReedTimestamps:Harper Reed's technologist background. [3:56]The collaboration of tech and health care during COVID. [6:03]The US lagged behind in technology solutions. [10:45]The surprising thing about the US health infrastructure. [13.35]Technology doesn't solve all problems. [16:50]Three different paths for the future of health care. [21:16]The ethics of health care data and AI. [25:03]Lessons learned from the pandemic. [31:05]We have to change how we are investing in health care.[33:36]

Harper Reed was the CTO of the Obama campaign.  We talked about how he wound up as the CTO. We also talked about how they employed a lot of Agile and DevOps during the campaign.  This is another great podcast. 

In Episode 11 of Lead Time Chats, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with Harper Reed about how meetings can give everyone a voice in team meetings. Harper is currently CEO of Galactic. Formerly he was CEO of Modest, which was acquired by Paypal, and CTO of Obama for America.Host note: Harper and I originally met at FooCamp in 2013, when he attended a FooCamp unconference session I led called How to Run Efficient Meetings. When we re-connected a few months ago, I discovered that after that one hour session 8 years ago, he revamped meetings at his company, and at every company he's worked at since. We re-united to record a Lead Time Chat nerding out on meetings and to encourage more teams to implement these high-density, high-efficiency team meetings.Jean and Harper discuss:How a 3 hour rambling meeting turned into a 30 minute high density meeting, with a bit of structure and facilitationThe impact that highly efficient meetings have had on Harper's teams over the last 8 yearsHow to create a meeting culture that's not dominated by the loudest people in the roomTips on how to get started with this type of structured check-in meetingFor more on the evolution of check-in meetings, check out this post:Nine years of meeting efficiency: Lessons learned from Range's VP of EngineeringYou can also find some highlights in this blog post:Harper Reed on giving everyone a voice in team meetings 

Your message aimed at a highly targeted audience. Let's talk. dan@selected.sesamers.comTopics Discussed:The world's most impressive bioThe smell of Las VegasDan and seeing Queen with Freddie Mercury at age 5. Thanks Mom!Dan's girlfriend is in love with Harper"What's your pandemic plan?"Discipline? Punishment? Cause and EffectZebra striping the car and the parents reactionLaying the groundwork to sell to PayPalJust for the Hack of ItCooking with Harper"How MUCH IS A LITTLE BIT?""I'm sorry, what were we talking about?"Harper and the House of Cards storyThe Obama Work"Rewarding" workTools used against usWould you do anything differently?Ad Agencies, "Oh no, we never actually did any of that stuff. You guys actually did it.""Pandora's box was cracked open, we  just happened to be the ones that opened it all the way.""We put too much weight on founders to have a strong perspective on the ethical stance of their thing."But ... VC's want to hear conviction(?)Jim, McCoy, Spock and the crew of the NCC-1701Responsible for Brexit?Red votersTalking shit about the EU, this is not a surprise resultA whole boatload of racism"I'm not sure my absentee ballot arrived in time.""My shit was in the post MONTHS ahead of time.""Sex, Politics, Religion and Money."Listening to the other sideVeiled racism? I don't have time for it.Identity politics"When you're accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression." - Franklin Leonard"When I looked at my historic returns, the women I invested in had much greater returns  than then men."The LIGHTNING ROUNDBREAKCheck out virtual events platform Balloon.  Referred to by Mashable as "The Shopify of virtual events".Visit them at joinballoon.com, mention the Selected Podcast and receive a 15% discount.Aaaaaaand we're back!Zooooom.usGalactic.io. Go get in on this shit NOW!Hopin. "They're not screwing around"The return of Anna. Again.My castleDan's recorded an audio book. NDA's damn. Coming soon ...Dressing in black"I don't miss airport security"Harper and CommunityGen X. Me and Al GoreWhat is a community?You want to be a good actor inYou can trust meEstablishing trustAuthenticityThe accidental dissolution of trustHarper's adult bodyThe antithese answers the questionI didn't split the episode. If Joe Rogan can go 3.5 hours a day, let's see if YOU stick around for an hour and a halfHarper's COVID work"I was bored. I needed something to do."People peopledI have to start wearing a hatDress like Harper Reed Glasses dayThe photo didn't do it justiceRead bitches!A Memory Called Empire by Arkady MartineHarper's in the basement"All of my friends getting the COVID vaccine. It creates hope."I'm priority "The End"You bes' check yoself befo' you wreck yo'selfYour message aimed at a highly targeted audience. Let's talk. dan@selected.sesamers.comWhere to Find Us:Find Harper at:EmailTwitterFind Dan at:Linktr.ee 

A US election is far more than just a struggle for the most powerful job in the world, they also provide a glimpse into consumer attitudes and emerging technologies designed to influence opinion. It was during the 2012 US election, for instance, that social media, online data and e-commerce profiling was leveraged for the first time to create a hyper-targeted, digital political campaign, that ultimately swept the Democrats into power. My guest this week, Harper Reed, was intimately involved in that strategy, having served as CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign, where he was the first to bring the mentality and connective capabilities of the tech industry to the political stage.

A US election is far more than just a struggle for the most powerful job in the world, they also provide a glimpse into consumer attitudes and emerging technologies designed to influence opinion. It was during the 2012 US election, for instance, that social media, online data and e-commerce profiling was leveraged for the first time to create a hyper-targeted, digital political campaign, that ultimately swept the Democrats into power. My guest this week, Harper Reed, was intimately involved in that strategy, having served as CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign, where he was the first to bring the mentality and connective capabilities of the tech industry to the political stage.

As an early or growth stage company, scaling is always top of mind. Skills are scarce and expensive, so machine learning and AI have to be the foundation you build on. And balancing this opportunity with the challenges it brings is key. On this special edition of the Georgian Impact Podcast we'll be getting insights on this fascinating topic from Alistar Croll, Beckie Wood, Leslie Fein, Harper Reed, and Jana Eggers. A group uniquely qualified to bring an expanded view of the role of an AI Project Manager. You'll hear about: The unique challenges of scale-stage growth, and what it means to software developers. How AI Product Managers must navigate between: ethics, technology, business acumen, statistics, design, and customer development. The importance of Product/Market fit, and how tools like V2MOM can help. How the wrong team, set of testers, or almost anything else can make ML and AI products behave badly. The need for a diverse team working towards a common goal, and why sometimes you need to step outside your comfortable tech bubble. Who is Alistar Croll? Alistar Croll is a visiting Professor at Harvard Business School and teaches a course entitled “Big Data and Critical Thinking.” Alistar has been directly involved in the launch of major conferences such as: O'Reilly's Strata, Techweb's Cloud Connect, and Interop's Enterprise Cloud Summit. He graduated from Dalhousie University with a B.Com (Honours) and an advanced major in Strategic Marketing. Who is Beckie Wood? Becky Wood is an advisor at VSCO, and was recently Vice President of Product Management and Insights at Pandora. While there she led both music and non-music content strategic product expansion. Along with her team, Beckie helped launch podcasts for millions of listeners and deliver personalized recommendations. She also provided data-and-user research insights that drove product strategy and prioritization decisions. Who is Leslie Fein? Leslie Fein is an advisor at a firm based in San Francisco called Enjoy the Work. Leslie and Enjoy the Work partner with CEO's and founders of startups through seed and even as far as series C and D funding, teaching the craft of entrepreneurship. Who is Harper Reed? Harper Reed is a technologist that predicts the future for a living. As the CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign Harper brought a tech mentality to a political level. As the co-founder of Modest Inc. Harper garnered the attention of PayPal with the technology he developed leading to PayPal acquiring them only a few years after launch. His roles as Head of Commerce and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at PayPal helped him guide his team into the future of e-commerce. Harper is an MIT Media Lab Director's Fellow, sits on the advisory board for IIT Computer Science and the Royal United Service Institute, and is on the Cornell College Board of Trustees.    Who is Jana Eggers? Jana Eggers is the CEO of Nara Logics, a neuroscience-based artificial intelligence company with a focus on turning big data into smart actions. Her understanding of customers and technology comes from technology and executive positions at Intuit, Blackbeard, Lycos and as CEO of Spreadshirt. Jana received her bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at Hendrix College, followed by graduate school at PRI and supercomputing research at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Harper Reed is a technologist that predicts the future for a living. He spends most of his life building big things, hacking things, and talking about doing both of those things. As CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign, Harper was the first to bring the tech mentality to a political level. He believes the talent of a great bunch of humans can transform an organization like nothing else and uses that belief to strengthen, deploy, and inspire every team he works with. Harper also believes his incredible luck has led him to achieve wonderful things like pioneering crowdsourcing at Threadless.com, founding Modest Inc, and guiding the software team at PayPal. You can find Harper hacking on personal projects and enjoying life in Chicago with his partner, Hiromi and their beautiful and bizarre poodle, Lulu. How can we use and channel our pandemic-driven anxiety levels for the common good? And what's the role of technology in all this? We touched upon these and further questions in this week's episode of 'What's NEXT'. Harper Reed proved that he's able to juggle many things at the same time (including knives). He talked about the importance of the community and why some companies should become states.

Harper Reed on the short story Goodnight, Melancholy how technology relates to quarantine and the Corona Virus. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/xia_03_17/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Harper Reed was a celebrated Chief Technology Officer for Barack Obama's successful campaign in 2012. But did he in fact help develop practices that led to put Trump in the White House four years later? This is exactly the kind of contrasting complexity that defines Harper Reed as a thinker, tech entrepreneur and keynote speaker. In this conversation you can hear him apply his questioning and entertaining approach to topics like polarisation, diversity and user experience. We met him after his keynote at the Internet Days 2019 at Stockholm Waterfront. Podcast host: Christian von Essen // Read more at http://www.hejaframtiden.se

Vi fortsätter våra samtal med huvudtalarna från årets Internetdagarna. I det här avsnittet samtalar Internetstiftelsens Måns Jonasson med futuristen, hackern och jonglören Harper Reed. Han har bland annat jobbat med Obamas återvalskampanj, mobila betalsystem och sålt kläder via crowdfunding. Läs också vår textintervju med Harper Reed, och se hans framträdande från Internetdagarna.

Note to English speaking listeners: It’s just the short introduction that’s in Swedish! Precis som förra veckans avsnitt, med danah boyd, är det här samtalet inspelat under Internetdagarna 2019. Gäst den här gången är en annan av huvudtalarna, Harper Reed, som bland annat var teknikchef för Barack Obamas återvalskampanj 2012. Avsnittet tar sin utgångspunkt i […] The post #207 – Harper Reed om vem som behöver förstå vad appeared first on Podcasten Digitalsamtal.

An interview with Ben Milne (Dwolla) and Harper Reed (Serial Entrepreneur + CTO @ Obama Campaign).

Harper Reed is an American technologist, known for being the CTO behind Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, for his involvement in pioneering online crowdsourcing company Threadless, his hairstyle, and many other weird and wonderful projects he gets involved in. Severin met Harper at MIT's media lab in Berlin, in August last year. Being a fan of Harper's work for many years, he took the opportunity to ask him about what Harper calls his life waves: periods in his career when he quit everything and said yes to any new opportunity that came his way. Like this interview. Or building one of the first crowdsourcing communities on the internet. Using social technology to get a president elected. Or predicting the future for a living. All this, and more, including sirens and pan flute recitals, in episode #16 of The Community Podcast.

Viv has a squee moment and catches up with Harper Reed at this year's Kiwifoo event (https://www.baacamp.org/). Harper worked as CTO on the Obama 2012 campaign, casually sold his startup to PayPal and recently left them to work on what’s next - hence his visit to Aotearoa.Harper has a fine Twitter profile that seems to sum him up beautifully:"A normal person doing normal things. Check out this guide to my tweets: http://bit.ly/r1GnK // I take photos and operate computers. Books are my friends."Viv finds out what makes him tick and why fun is the most important thing of all.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Reed- https://harperreed.com/- https://www.linkedin.com/in/harperreed- https://twitter.com/harper- https://github.com/harperreed------------------------------------------------------New Zealand tech, media, & startup podcast hosted by Mike Riversdale, Raj Khushal, Vivian Chandra, and others. Hosts of #WellyTechAll our past shows are on our websitehttps://www.accessgranted.nz Follow and Like us on:https://twitter.com/AccessGrantedNZ https://facebook.com/AccessGrantedNZ https://linkedin.com/company/access-granted-podcast Subscribe to the show however you want:https://www.accessgranted.nz/subscribe/Buy the AG merch:https://www.accessgranted.nz/shop/

A Creative Path to Find What's Next :  Harper Reed could have listed his many accomplishments on the historical monument he installed in his parents’ front yard. It could have said that he founded Modest, a mobile retail startup eventually acquired by Paypal, or that he was CTO of Threadless and the 2012 reelection campaign of Barack Obama. Instead, he and his brother Dylan chose to commemorate their exploration of Uranus. It’s no wonder Rich often hears Paul say “I wonder what Harper Reed would think”. In this episode, we find out; the pair talk to Harper about his dad’s Apple IIc, coming of age during “the most rapid capital expansion in the history of the universe”, political tech, mobile commerce, and what comes next for the defiant technologist.   Links Harper’s website and Twitter Harper and Dylan Reed’s boyhood home monument Threadless Dylan Reed’s Twitter Dylan Richard, cofounder of Modest, on Twitter

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn...these are all major parts of what we use everyday to stay in touch with the communities we are involved in, personally and professionally. What happens though when those lines blur? When something you say from your personal life gets picked up by people involved in your professional life? Is it all worthwhile?   Jason and PJ sit down with Emily Freeman and Harper Reed to discuss the pros, the cons, and few side tracks along the way.   Sponsored by IBM Developer: IBM Sponsorship: Are you building cloud applications with Java, AI, Machine Learning, Serverless and Containers?   IBM Developer provides a large number of Code Patterns, sample applications, articles, tutorials and videos to help you build faster. All code is available on GitHub.   You can incorporate any code into existing applications or use it to start a new application. Simply go to developer.ibm.com to access IBM Developer resources and start building.   Find us on Twitter at @IBMDeveloper

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn...these are all major parts of what we use everyday to stay in touch with the communities we are involved in, personally and professionally. What happens though when those lines blur? When something you say from your personal life gets picked up by people involved in your professional life? Is it all worthwhile?   Jason and PJ sit down with Emily Freeman and Harper Reed to discuss the pros, the cons, and few side tracks along the way.   Sponsored by IBM Developer: IBM Sponsorship: Are you building cloud applications with Java, AI, Machine Learning, Serverless and Containers?   IBM Developer provides a large number of Code Patterns, sample applications, articles, tutorials and videos to help you build faster. All code is available on GitHub.   You can incorporate any code into existing applications or use it to start a new application. Simply go to developer.ibm.com to access IBM Developer resources and start building.   Find us on Twitter at @IBMDeveloper

The Social Media and Politics Podcast is a podcast bringing you innovative, first-hand insights into how social media is changing the political game. Subscribe for interviews and analysis with politicians, academics, and leading industry experts to get their take on how social media influences the ways we engage with politics and democracy. Connect with us on Twitter @SMandPPodcast & Facebook: Social Media and Politics Podcast This episode has been featured in the Financial Times. Matthew Oczkowski, Head of Product at Cambridge Analytica, joins the show to discuss his experience heading digital strategy for the Scott Walker primary campaign and Donald Trump general election. We discuss how the candidates used Snapchat and other social media, the differences between primary and general election campaigning in terms of digital strategy and marketing, and we also discuss how microtargeting works in practice. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattOczkowski. The following shownotes are taken from a blog post about the podcast by American Majority, written by Nick McIntyre. "2016 was the first year in which we saw candidates really start to use Snapchat as a platform for not only reaching voters with unique content, but also for limited information-capturing purposes. Snapchat is a social media platform that allows users to send/post photos and videos that disappear after a short period of time. This platform is especially popular amongst younger generations who use Snapchat as a more private social experience than Facebook or Twitter and can enjoy it with their peers only. The private and mobile aspect of Snapchat poses a challenge for political campaigns, who often rely on Google searches to drive traffic to their websites and other social media platforms. Governor Scott Walker, an avid social media user, enjoyed using Snapchat in his brief presidential campaign to reach voters with different content than other platforms. Oczkowski noted that Walker was extremely authentic, and posted content “like your father” would, as opposed to artistic graphics and edited work. Voters valued authenticity highly in this last election, and Snapchat is a good visual platform for “raw” content. Likewise, the Trump campaign used Snapchat to show behind-the-scenes shots of campaign rallies to portray to magnitude of the “MAGA” movement. Oczkowski used the term “platform agnostic” to describe his preferences on social media for campaigns. All this means is that campaigns will go to whichever platform the voters are on, and message to the demographic appropriately. In Snapchat’s case, this means reaching college age students and those under 35 – a demographic that conservatives have struggled to reach (and convince to vote) at times. New media is giving campaigns a way to capture information as well. One of the advantages of using Snapchat’s advertising feature is that it’s the only straightforward way to measure metrics from Snapchat, due to its private nature. By placing ads on Snapchat, you can track how many people you are reaching, and also give users the option to swipe up and submit their email addresses to the campaign. According to Oczkowski, both Walker and Trump collected tens and hundreds of thousands of emails from Snapchat alone. As Snapchat continues to implement revenue sources into the platform (like Facebook did), it will be interesting to see how they further incorporate advertising into the user experience. It poses an opportunity for future campaigns if offered better targeting and information-capturing, in addition to being a unique content platform. On Targeting Microtargeting has been a part of campaigns for a long time, and even digital microtargeting has been around for close to a decade. However, as more information regarding individuals and their preferences have become available on the open market, tech integration has become more widespread. In 2012, Harper Reed and his team at Obama For America even developed an in-house platform called Narwhal, which integrated voter data from all of their digital information pieces. Companies now possess thousands of data points on individual voters, and campaigns purchase this information so that they can target their message to an individual voter more effectively. While this doesn’t replace the value of door-knocking and live voter contacts, it does give campaigns another avenue to message on certain issues. To paraphrase Oczkowski, gone are the days of “madmen” style advertising, where men would identify an issue or product and sit in a room to come up with an ad targeting a wide sect of the population. On information privacy, Oczkowski, a self-proclaimed libertarian-leaning conservative, noted that most citizens will choose convenience over privacy. The steps necessary to protect some personal information isn’t worth the cost for most consumers. Because U.S. data law is among the least-restrictive in the world, companies can legally collect and sell most basic consumer info. One of the most interesting insights about Trump’s microtargeting was his travel schedule, which was based on algorithms and messaging. Many pundits critiqued Trump’s hectic rally schedule, but it was actually targeted. There was a “Cities to Visit” calculator that ranked possible destinations based on the density of persuadable voters and those with a high percentage of core supporters so that value at rallies would be maximized. This put Trump in areas like the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and states Ohio and Florida. It often put him in suburbs instead of large cities – a strategy some decried but proved effective in multiple Rust Belt states. “Tech can’t fix bad candidates” Above all, a good campaign must combine good messaging with data. “Tech can’t fix bad candidates”, as Oczkowski pointed out. Hillary Clinton ran into this problem. The Clinton campaign tried to copy Obama’s team instead of coming up with a messaging strategy unique to Hillary Clinton. Regardless of how good your tech is, it won’t inspire people to vote for you if the message doesn’t resonate – it is merely gasoline for the fire. Trump had a campaign message that persuaded the right voters that he needed to win the electoral college. The future for campaign targeting and social media is ever-changing. Facebook and Google still dominate the digital ad scene. Trump spent more on Facebook ads than any other digital platform. In addition, TV and traditional advertising still play a large role because it is still a way to reach high-propensity voters. As more of the electorate consumes news online, data collection and targeting will become even more important. Oczkowski is among a new generation of political operatives who specialize in data. “Nerds rule the world” has never been more true on campaigns, where traditionalist political consultants are being replaced by individuals who can prove their worth through actual metrics that lead to more votes directly. This market is still relatively new for everyone, and the campaigns that innovate and message most effectively will win elections, regardless of the platforms used."

Harper Reed is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on data and digital innovation. He served as the CTO of Obama’s re-election campaign and was also one of the founders of Threadless.com. His latest company, Modest, inc, was recently acquired by Paypal, where he is now working to figure out the future of commerce. Over dinner at Soho House in Chicago, we talked about digital bias and the stubborn persistence of paper, why technology is best used as a force multiplier of people power, the quantification of marketing and how smarter tools replace the need for experts, reactionary interfaces and why retailers are afraid of their customers, why iTunes credit is more meaningful to kids than cash, the power of ‘undo’ in e-commerce, and the link between local infrastructure and global innovation.

Harper Reed is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on data and digital innovation. He served as the CTO of Obama’s re-election campaign and was also one of the founders of Threadless.com. His latest company, Modest, inc, was recently acquired by Paypal, where he is now working to figure out the future of commerce. Over dinner at Soho House in Chicago, we talked about digital bias and the stubborn persistence of paper, why technology is best used as a force multiplier of people power, the quantification of marketing and how smarter tools replace the need for experts, reactionary interfaces and why retailers are afraid of their customers, why iTunes credit is more meaningful to kids than cash, the power of ‘undo’ in e-commerce, and the link between local infrastructure and global innovation.

On this most American of holidays, it’s a good time to take a look at how we select the people who run this ol’ country many of you call home. Like everything else, social media and technology are playing a huge role in campaign strategy.    Much was made of President Obama’s digital campaign, and for good reason: He lapped Mitt Romney in reaching people online with the help of his CTO, Harper Reed. Reed and Dylan Richard, the Director of Engineering for Obama’s campaign, joined us this week to talk about what they did on the campaign and about what has changed over the last four years. Are you going to be spammed on Snapchat by Marco Rubio? Hit up on WhatsApp by Hillary Clinton? Probably yes! And can Reddit turn its Bernie Sanders love into something resembling real political momentum? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Once upon a time in the fairytale land of politics, there was an epic clash of magical beasts. On one side, the sea-unicorn called the narwhal. With a wave of his single tusk, he could muster thousands of volunteers, knock on millions of doors and direct a laser-beam of votes on behalf of Barack Obama. On the other side, the narwhal’s natural enemy, the orca, tasked with unearthing voters across the realm for challenger Mitt Romney. This may sound too fantastical to believe, but it’s actually closer to reality than you think. The presidential race of 2012 did indeed see such a contest, between the President’s Project Narwhal team and Mitt Romney’s Project Orca. But the contest wasn’t waged on Middle Earth, it was waged online, by Silicon Valley hackers wielding the power of…database computing. For many, the showdown between the two digital camps came to symbolize the growing and dominant role technology has come to play in today’s politics. But that story is, well, a fairy tale, according to the man behind Project Narwhal. “It wasn’t technology. The answer was that we had a great field team and we had good volunteers and our grassroots was on point ,” says Harper Reed, former Chief Technology Officer for President Obama’s 2012 campaign. “We raised all the money and the finance team did this really great work. Technology just helped a little bit to make some of that stuff faster.” On this week’s podcast, host Andrea Seabrook sits with Harper Reed to recount a story that ended up being too good to be true, about a Narwhal, an Orca, and the real magic behind campaigns that help a candidate’s dreams come true.

Today we're talking with Nick Disabato of Draft, a small interaction design consultancy in Chicago. His previous clients include Gravitytank, New Music USA, Chicago Magazine, The Wirecutter, and too many other attractive, intelligent people to count. We spent quite a bit of time talking about his work designing a delightful user experience for Cards Against Humanity. We discuss... Cards Against Humanity marketing strategy Split-testing Conversion rate optimization And more Links: Cards Against Humanity - http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/ Cadence & Slang - http://cadence.cc/ Draft: Revise - https://draft.nu/revise/ Nick's newsletter - http://eepurl.com/vqJgv Visual Website Optimizer - https://vwo.com/ PS: Be sure to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and write a review. iTunes is all about reviews! Transcript Recording: This is the Unofficial Shopify Podcast with Kurt Elster and Paul Reda, your resources for growing your Shopify business, sponsored by Ethercycle. Kurt: Welcome to the Unofficial Shoplift Podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster and with me today is Nick Disabato from Draft. Nick, how are you doing? Nick: Doing fantastic. How are you, man? Kurt: I'm well. Where are you at? Nick: I live and work in Logan Square, a neighborhood in Chicago and have been here for the past seven years. I've been independent for the past 3-1/2. Kurt: That's good. I'm about right miles from you in Park Ridge. It's funny we're doing this over Skype but we're like a bus ride apart. Nick: We are. We're probably a short L ride apart. Kurt: Tell me, who's Nick D? Nick: Nick D is me as I exist on the Internet and I run a small design consultancy called Draft as you mentioned and we do a lot of things. I publish books. I do monthly A/B testing for people. I run the world's stupidest newsletter but what I think we're here to be talking about is my one-off interaction design product, just more typical client work, more consulting work. I've done it for a variety of e-commerce clients and solved a lot of really interesting problems for both mobile and desktop and I think about these sorts of things a lot. That's kind of ... Kurt: For the lay person, what's interaction design? Nick: Interaction design, it's the process of making something easier to use and it involves hacking out the layout and behavior of a product. That can range from prototyping something and running it by users to see how they enjoy using it or whether they're successful at completing goals within it. It can range from promoting certain design decisions and hacking out functionality. It can involve figuring out edge cases like if you type in a really long response that doesn't belong in a certain form field, what happens? If you click here, what happens? It's figuring out to choose your own adventure capacity of going through a technology product of any type. I've worked... Kurt: It sounds like you're a problem solver for your clients. Give me a good example of a problem you solved with interaction design. Nick: We'll talk about e-commerce stuff. One of my biggest clients over the past few years was a board game company called Cards Against Humanity. Kurt: I dearly love Cards Against Humanity. Tell us about it. Nick: For your audience, if you do not know Cards Against Humanity, it's similar to a card game called Apples to Apples where I'm a person judging a card and everybody else plays another card only it's usually quite inappropriate. You have weird poop jokes or [scathalogical 00:03:03] things. Kurt: The favorite combo I ever got, the winning combo I ever got out of Cards Against Humanity, I will never forget. It was "Santa gives the bad children genital piercings." That was genius. Nick: My personal favorite is 'What's the last thing Michael Jackson thought about before he died?' and somebody played Michael Jackson. Kurt: That one is layers on layers. Nick: Oh my God, I still think about it. It's amazing. I've worked with them to define all of the layout and behavior for their e-commerce system. They now have, in addition to Amazon, you can buy stuff directly through them. You go through and they run through Stripe. It's not through Shopify but it's entirely independent and entirely custom. What they wanted was something that worked pretty well on mobile and they wanted something that was a little more unconventional to fit their business's needs. Cards Against Humanity, for those of you who don't know, they're a relatively unconventional business just in terms of their tone and in the way that they carry themselves and the way that they deal with their customers. Kurt: That has totally differentiated and set them apart. Nick: Yes. I think a large part of Cards Against Humanity's success is their marketing and their outreach. They do a terrific job of both of those but they do a very ... Kurt: I've seen their marketing and it's amazing. They do one-off promo cards. I've got their House of Cards promo set that they did co-branding with Netflix. What kind of outreach do they do? Nick: They do a lot of ... They'll reply to people on Twitter. They'll follow along with people's activity. They'll pay attention to what people are talking about and they'll try and be a little bit proactive about it. As far as their site is concerned, their tone is very distinctive. It's ... Kurt: Absolutely, it irreverent. Nick: Yes, it's irreverent. It's a little bit standoffish, a little bit jerk but fun jerk. It's like [inaudible 00:05:09]. Kurt: Yeah. You love them for being mean to you. It's like Ed Debevic's.. Nick: [Crosstalk 00:05:10]. Yeah, it is like Ed Debevic's a little bit which is a diner in Chicago that ... Kurt: Right, [inaudible 00:05:15]. Nick: It's definitely one of those things where they own their voice and they know how to do it. If you go through the prompts on their Website, if you go to ... I believe it's store.cardsagainsthumanity.com. You can go there and buy stuff and they ask you what country you're from right away. We can go to a UX teardown of why that is but I'll give you the high level. They go to country [crosstalk 00:05:40] right away. Kurt: I'm already there. Nick: If you choose I live in the rest of the world like not US or Canada or UK or something like that, they'll be like, "Begone foul foreigner" or something like that." They'll just make fun of you. "Send us an e-mail for when Cards Against Humanity is available in your inferior country" or something like that. They're just totally blanked up. UI Copy was definitely an enormous component of it. It's part of why I'm getting to this because I wrote a fair amount of the UI copy that is still on there right now. Another thing that you'll see on the page if you go through it while you're listening to this podcast is you'll see a row of information at the top of it. You'll go and buy something, you'll hit Pay Now and you'll see country recipient, e-mail and shipping and what it says is ... It says USA. It'll try and geolocate you and then it'll say, "Not right." You can tap back to that and two things are happening there. You can edit your order as you're going and it reads the order back to you. One thing that you see in Shopify in particular or in e-commerce in general like Amazon or anything like that, it reads your order back to you before you hit Place Order. That's an extra click that you don't necessarily need because you could get this kind of inline feedback. There's no reason why you couldn't get inline feedback. I built the interaction model to fit that and people liked it. There were two things that people called out – the way that the feedback was being read back to you and the way that it was auto-correcting as it goes. If you type in your zip code, it autocorrects to your city and state and is usually accurate. That's pretty cool and it does have for both USPS and Canada Post. It requests little information from you, moves you through the process as fast as possible at the minimum of clicks. I wrote a book that called about interaction cycle, Cadence & Slang. One of the things I say is reduce the number of steps to complete a task. I tried to make this kind of exemplar of that principle by making it as efficient as humanly possible. The other thing that people talk about is when you actually go buy something, which I see you're tapping through that right now, Kurt, that I would ... Once you finish the transaction it says, "Now, go outside" and makes fun of you about the fact that you're on the Internet and it links ... Kurt: It shames you for your order. Nick: It already has your address and if you click "Now, go outside," it searches on Google Maps for parks near you. Kurt: [Crosstalk 00:08:07]. This is incredibly clever stuff. Nick: It's thinking like, okay, I'm on a computer and I'm refreshing it whenever an expansion comes out or I'm doing all these other things and it just wants ... It's like, "Oh, by the way, you're on the Internet. Now, you don't have to be on the Internet anymore. You gave us money. Just go away." That's most of the design decisions behind this. I feel like a lot of people just reinvent the wheel with e-commerce. They want to do something safe. One of the great things with Cards Against Humanity is they don't want safe. They don't care. They want to get the orders okay but if you're messing it up, it's not their fault. It's your fault for this particular organization. [Crosstalk 00:08:56]. Kurt: Yeah, like the whole ... the entire experience ... Like it's easy to use and it's great but at the same time the game ... It starts with a product. You've got this incredibly irreverent game and then that gets extended to the messaging and the copy and the positioning. Then amazingly where everyone else would have stopped, they moved it into the actual user interface. The interaction itself is irreverent. Nick: There are a couple of people at Cards that handle a goodly amount of the logistics in getting the cards printed and shipped and everything. To use a developer term, they are a full-stack operation. They deal with the printer. They deal with Amazon. They deal with the warehouse. They want to build a vertically-integrated system for [crosstalk 00:09:40]. Kurt: I was going to say that sounds like a vertical integration. Nick: They're a good enough business and are popular enough that they can get away with it. They could ... If I did that ... Kurt: It's a great product. People love it. It's a catch-22. People love it because of these irreverent decisions but at the same time, are they able to make those irreverent decisions because people love it? It's like where do you start with that? Nick: I would be putting words in their mouth but I suspect it's kind of a feedback loop. They make these decisions and they realize they're getting rewarded for it by having more business and so, they end up making more irreverent decisions in more irreverent ways. Kurt: Why, yes. You're right. It does. It rewards itself. Anyone could start trying this and if it doesn't work out, you shouldn't do it. Nick: Yeah. I run a large part of my design practice as A/B testing. You could build this and run half of your users through it and if your conversion rate drops, either try and tweak it or throw it away. That way you're not losing an insane amount of sales on your testing idea. You're vetting whether it works for you. I suspect at least certain conceits of these like auto-complete and providing this feedback. I don't see any personal reason why that couldn't exist in other e-commerce context. I really don't. Kurt: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned split testing. Tell us briefly, what is split testing? Nick: It's essentially you have an idea and rather than fighting about it internally about whether it's a good idea, you let people decide and you're letting real customers decide. This can be anything. This can be a call to action button. This can be a headline. This can be a person on your homepage selling the thing. It can be whether a video autoplays or not. It can be any design decision you want and you have a control page which is your original page. You send that by 50% of your users and then the other goes to the other 50%, whatever you're varying and you're measuring success in sales, signups for your mailing lists, whatever have you. It can be anything that you want. Kurt: As long as it's a measurable goal. Nick: You have a goal, right. You can do this with multiple variations. Most of my A/B tests are in fact A-B-C-D-E tests where I'm vetting many different variations of something and many different permutations of something and testing it with real-life people. It reduces risk because you're running many variants. You're optimizing the page slowly and you're throwing away what doesn't work and learning what does work and where you want to be putting more of your efforts. Even a failure, which is a plurality of your tests are failures or inconclusive, you're still learning where you don't want to be putting your efforts, like you don't need to be fighting over that link, that sort of thing. I always try and frame it in a very positive way. Kurt: It's interesting. The way you brought it up is you don't have to fight about it internally. It's a great way to talk about it because in our design practice that's generally how I bring up the idea of split testing is when the client pushes back on something or they attribute some loss in sales to a change and I say, "Actually, we don't have to guess about it. We could split test it and know for certain." It's usually how I introduce that concept. Nick: Yes. Kurt: As soon as you say, "We can know for sure and we can know scientifically," then people become very interested in it. What's your favorite tool for split testing? Nick: I give all of my clients ... I have a monthly A/B testing tool or a service called Draft Revise where you pay me a certain amount every month and I run tests for you and write up reports and that's it. You never have to worry about the practice of doing this. I use something called Visual Website Optimizer. It shortens to VWO. You can go to vwo.com. For a few of my clients, I use something called Optimizely, if you go to optimizely.com. Both of those are terrific. They have very small differences at this point. It's like Canon and Nikon. They're just snipping at each other and it's making both of them much better. Kurt: I've used them. I've personally used VWO. I really liked it. I used the Google split testing tool. That thing's a nightmare. Nick: Yeah, it's changey. I would pay the money for V. If you have enough scale to get statistical validity out of the A/B tests which typically you need at least 3,000 or 4,000 [uniques 00:13:53 ] a month to be doing that for whatever goal you're measuring, usually it's more, you're probably making enough money that you can afford Visual Website Optimizer, no question or Optimizely. Don't do the free Google stuff. It just sucks. Kurt: The amount of time I wasted messing with that wasn't worth it. VWO is so much easier. Nick: Yeah, don't bother. Kurt: The support is really good. I'm not condemning Optimizely. I've literally just never used Optimizely. That's a good way to get into it for our listeners. If it's confusing or they don't want to deal with it, your service is great. I've seen the reports you run and I'm not even plugging it. It's just genuinely good stuff that you do. Nick: Thank you. It's one of those things where a lot of people don't know how to start and they don't know how to do it and I have two different offerings. One of them is a one-off like I give you a guide and I give you a lot of suggestions for what you can test and what you can change things to, things that I would change. You're getting a UX teardown and a write-up of how to put into practice but I find that a handful of those come back to me and they're like, "Can you just do this for us?" Kurt: Essentially, what you've said to them is like, "Here's a plan for immediate success based on my vast experience and you could do whatever you want with it." I imagine a lot of people are going to be, "All right, fine. You know what you're doing. You just take care of those for me." Nick: Yeah, and they're already used to paying me and I give them a discount on their first month. If they pay me $900 for Revise Express Report and then they sign up for a 2000-dollar plan for Draft Revise, you're paying only $1,100 for the first month which at that point you're not getting charged twice. You're able to hit the ground running. I signed up a Revise Express client recently for Draft Revise and it's been going well. We went from not having anything together to contract signed and A/B tests running on their site in three days because I already knew it. Kurt: That's good. Nick: I wrapped my head around it. It was great. Kurt: When you're wrapping your head around it, how do you approach optimizing a site? Nick: It depends on the site. Let's say it's like a typical SaaS business. I look at the things that I know changing them will yield a lot of fruit and that can be common elements to optimize like your headline or your call to action or testimonial quotes, stuff like that which is very optimizing 101 type stuff. Or I'd look at things that I see are clearly bad like if you have an e-mail list signup form and the button says Submit. Unless you are [crosstalk 00:16:39]. Kurt: I look for the stuff that just like, "This is painful. This goes against every best practice. Let's fix this first and get our baseline back to zero." Nick: Yeah. I break things into two categories. One of them is one-off design changes which are beyond the need for testing. Things like if you make your button Submit. Unless you're an S&M site, you have no business making your buttons Submit, all these other things. Then I also look at things and suggest "Let's test this because I'm not sure." The difference between those two is confidence. I'm still changing things. I'm changing elements on the page but I'm not fully confident that changing your headline to this one thing is going to speak to your customers effectively especially because I've been working with you for only three days if I'm doing these teardowns. It's very like intuition at that point. I will check everything within ... If you're a SaaS business, call your conversion funnel like your homepage to your pricing page to your signup page to your onboarding to all that and then you get converted from a trial into a paying customer eventually. There are a bunch of pages that you have to go through in that flow to actually figure that out. I try and vet all of those and figure out if I were building your site and figuring out your marketing page and trying to figure out a really good way to speak to people, would I do this? I bring in my experience working with dozens of SaaS businesses and e-commerce sites to bear on that and eight years of interaction design experience. That's often something that they can't get internally because I don't know any actual fulltime UX employees who've worked for as many individual clients as I have. Kurt: They couldn't possibly. Earlier you had mentioned to me the other day that you're working on something with Harper Reed. Nick: Yeah. I did it for six weeks. It was a one-off project with Harper Reed. For those who don't know, he elected the president at the beginning of ... starting at the beginning of last ... No, two years ago. It was 2012. Kurt: The way I view it is Harper Reed personally defeated Mitt Romney. Nick: His tech team certainly did. He built the team that ... It almost feels like that. If you read the teardowns of it, they're amazing but he has a startup now which is essentially a mobile e-commerce startup called Modest. It's at modest.com and first project that he did was a storefront for a toy and game manufacturer called [Choonimals 00:19:04], if you go to Choonimals Website. He's a friend of mine. He works and lives in Chicago. He works in Fulton Market. They had me come on and just be another pair of eyes on their UX. They already had a lot of interesting UX ideas there. I'm not going to take remote amount of credit for some of the most novel and fascinating parts of it but I agree with the conceit. A lot of the things were already coming together like scanning your credit card with the iPhone's camera is one of them and Uber does that. There's a JavaScript library called card.io that lets you do that where it just turns on your flashlight and lets you take a photo of your credit card and it scans your number in so you don't have to manually type it and reduce the error [inaudible 00:19:52]. He has a thing where you can buy stuff and it's basically buy with one touch and then if you ... You get a grace period where you could undo that. You can un-buy something and then ... Kurt: The easier you make something to buy, if people aren't used to that standard yet, I think there is a lot of that ... I wouldn't call it cognitive dissonance. Nick: I think you're just thrown off expectations-wise. There's a mismatch. Kurt: Yeah. Or it becomes too easy and suddenly, it's frightening. You have to have that grace period, that undo. Nick: I did not come up with these ideas to be clear. I helped refine them and offer my own ideas about them which is just like fit and finish. The idea of un-buying, you might tap something and it says Buy. It's very clear you're buying something but you don't even get an undo button in the app store if you buy something. You tap it on your iPhone. Kurt: Yeah. I bought a lot of silly things. I wish there was an undo button in the app store. Nick: I don't let myself check the app store while I'm drunk anymore because I just threw up and buy some 30-dollar application that's just ill-advised but this is like they're not going to ... It's a physical good usually. They're not going to ship it for another day at least or five hours if it's [overnighted 00:21:08] or something like that. At which point, you have a chance to take back that notion and edit your order. You barely get the chance to edit your order or merge orders on Amazon as it stands. Kurt: With Amazon, it's a scam. You could cancel an order while it's in progress but once you put cancel, it says, "We're going to try to cancel it" and it's like less than 50% of the time that it actually manages to cancel it. Nick: Right and if you're Prime, they probably already have it sent on a drone to you so you don't even know. It's one of those things where it just seems obvious that you should have an undo button when you're buying something. Kurt: Absolutely. You've got a lot of experience with this. Give me one tip for – obviously this is tough because it's general – one tip for an e-commerce store owner who's looking to grow the revenue. Nick: I'm going to drill down into this tip. You need to make it as easy for the person to buy the thing as possible and easy for them to back out of it and so, cutting down the number of steps. If you're asking for any extraneous information, if you are deliberately asking for both billing and shipping address, if you're splitting the person's name into three different fields, if you're not supporting auto-complete, those are all different forms of the same problem which is you're making the person enter more data than is necessary. Make the person input les data. Nobody likes to fill out a form. You don't want to feel like you're in a doctor's office buying a product. That's the one tip that I've got. Kurt: I guess it's pretty common with Shopify store owners. They want to do less work personally. They want like or go, "Can you make it ask them X, Y and Z thing?" and we'd say, "Sure, we could build out these product options for your products." Then when we do it, their conversion rate plummets and they're like, "Why did that happen?" Well, because you just made it really hard to buy from you. Nick: Yeah. Doing this auto-complete ... Going back to Cards Against Humanity, doing the auto-complete for your address and address validation and making it as fast as it is on that site is tremendously difficult. It is not easy programming to be putting in. Doing this focus is really hard but their sales bear out how they're doing. It justifies that decision. It almost says the amount of work that you put into the site and making it smarter, making the defaults easier and making it easier for the person, that's hard work but it directly connects to your conversion rate and if you're delighted about it ... I can't tell you how many positive twits happened when the first storefront came out that talked explicitly about the user experience and shared that out. It said, "Oh, you have to buy something." Who says "Oh, you have to buy something" about an e-commerce store? Kurt: You have to experience this. Nick: You have to experience getting sent to a park nearby you. That's very unexpected. Kurt: People are just ignoring the product itself. They'll just buy it for the sake of the purchasing experience. Nick: Right. Kurt: People don't think ... They would never think twice about someone making the interior of a retail store nice, making it easy to buy something there but as soon as it comes to e-commerce, then suddenly it's like the strange thing that no one wants to spend money on. Nick: It's funny because Apple's retail stores are beautiful and amazing and their UX is incredible. If you go in person, they swipe your card there in front of the computer and somebody walks the computer out to you and ... Kurt: Have you ever paid with cash in the Apple store? Nick: I have not. Kurt: It's same deal but the cash register is hidden inside one of the display tables. Just like the face of the table pops open. The cash box was in there the whole time. It's clearly on remote. They still use their iPhone and then the thing pops open. Nick: Right. Their UX is amazing but I bought an iPhone. I bought the new iPhone from the Apple store online the other day. Kurt: Did you go with the 6 or the 6-plus? Nick: I have 6. Kurt: You don't have monster gorilla paws is what you're telling me. Nick: No, I have normal human being hands and I don't need a Phablet. I have an iPad Mini. Anyway, I was going on it and I was on the Website, not the app just to be clear. I think the app is better but it was not fun. It sucked. It was really flunky and weird and it could be better. You're selling ... You're the biggest company in the world. You can fix that. Kurt: I noticed that they do one clever thing. You can choose multiple payment methods. I don't think I've seen that anywhere else. Nick: Amazon ... Kurt: If you were to max out your credit card and then finish up with a second credit card, they will let you do that. Nick: Or if you have one of those crappy gift cards that you get from the grocery store, like somebody gives you 100-dollar gift card and you have 18 cents left on it and you feel bad wasting that 18 cents, you could put that on the card. Kurt: You could do it. Nick: Right. That's edge [casey 00:25:58], feasible. Kurt: That's an argument I have with people is about edge cases where it's like, okay, we could fix this problem that one of 100 people have but what's that impact on the other 99 out of 100 people? I think Apple has walked themselves into that. Nick: Yeah. They can accommodate edge cases. I know that Amazon used to accommodate that sort of edge case and then they got rid of it for whatever reason. They probably saw that it wasn't diminishing returns or something but anyway. Kurt: That's a thing you could split test. Nick: Right, yeah. I'm sure Amazon does. Amazon A/B tests everything. I get bucketed into A/B tester of their pages all the time. I find it redesigns itself and I refresh it and it goes away [crosstalk 00:26:42]. Kurt: Or open an incognito window and it's a different site. Yeah, I've had that happen. Nick: Yeah. Kurt: If I wanted to learn more from you, the best way would be to do what? Nick: You should subscribe to my mailing list because it's funny. Kurt: I subscribe to it. I enjoy it, lots of good Chicago references in there. Nick: There are a lot of good Chicago ... Kurt: Like the hotdog story. Nick: There was a story ... It's a dog stand that's very popular here. It's closing this week. That is a very good way to get to know me as a person. If you want to know more about interaction design, I would go to cadence.cc which is my book, Cadence & Slang, and grab a copy. It is generally considered one of the more important texts on interaction design by people far more famous and important than me which is terrifying. Kurt: I have read it. It is genuinely good. Nick: Awesome, thank you. That's the best way to get to understand the kind of stuff that I'm talking about with e-commerce. It's applicable to any technological project but the ultimate goal is just to make things more efficient and pleasurable to use. Kurt: Fantastic. That's great. Thank you, Nick. Thank you for joining us and have a great day. Nick: Thank you so much. Take care.

With Allyson on sabbatical and Ruv on the road, we’re pulling a couple of our “best of” episodes from the archive. This week we’re re-posting Harper Reed (@harper), the CTO of Obama for America, who stopped by the show in March 2013 to talk about big data and utilizing technology (smartphones, Websites, social media) to engage voters. He and his team received tremendous credit for helping win the election through use of scalable cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services*) combined with a cutting edge big data engine that helped pinpoint everything from ad buys to volunteer engagement. It’s a great test case for how technology is transforming society. Show timeline: • 0:00 – Introductions and News of the Week • 9:21 – Interview with Harper Reed • 48:57 – Wrap up

With Allyson on sabbatical and Ruv on the road, we’re pulling a couple of our “best of” episodes from the archive. This week we’re re-posting Harper Reed (@harper), the CTO of Obama for America, who stopped by the show in March 2013 to talk about big data and utilizing technology (smartphones, Websites, social media) to engage voters. He and his team received tremendous credit for helping win the election through use of scalable cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services*) combined with a cutting edge big data engine that helped pinpoint everything from ad buys to volunteer engagement.  It’s a great test case for how technology is transforming society.Show timeline:0:00 – Introductions and News of the Week9:21 – Interview with Harper Reed48:57 – Wrap up

With Allyson on sabbatical and Ruv on the road, we’re pulling a couple of our “best of” episodes from the archive. This week we’re re-posting Harper Reed (@harper), the CTO of Obama for America, who stopped by the show in March 2013 to talk about big data and utilizing technology (smartphones, Websites, social media) to engage voters. He and his team received tremendous credit for helping win the election through use of scalable cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services*) combined with a cutting edge big data engine that helped pinpoint everything from ad buys to volunteer engagement.  It’s a great test case for how technology is transforming society.Show timeline:0:00 – Introductions and News of the Week9:21 – Interview with Harper Reed48:57 – Wrap up

On this week's episode, Ben talks with Harper Reed, former CTO of Threadless, former CTO of Obama for America, and currently CEO of Modest. Harper talks about management and his "cabal" of people that he likes to work with. He also discusses his experience on the campaign, healthcare.gov, and procurement laws. When asked about his playbook for success, Harper talks about networking strategies, the use of different languages for different problems, craziness, and much more. Harper Reed If I Knew Then Why the Government Never Gets Tech Right Harper's GitHub Harper's Blog Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @harper on twitter.

Twitter employee #7 tells us what happened when Justin Bieber joined twitter in 2009. An Amazon Data scientist, explains how the cloud is changing our relationship with technology, Obama’s CTO Harper Reed explains why the cloud is awesome + we tour Parse, a hot hot hot (BaaS). But can your host get inside the cloud? *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********

We have a very special interview this week – Harper Reed (@harper), CTO of the Obama for America campaign, stops by to talk about big data and utilizing technology (smartphones, Websites, social media) to engage voters. He and his team have received tremendous credit for helping win the election through use of scalable cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services*) combined with a cutting edge big data engine that helped pinpoint everything from ad buys to volunteer engagement. It’s a great test case for how technology is transforming society. Show timeline: • 0:00 – Introductions and News of the Week • 9:08 – Interview with Harper Reed • 48:37 – Wrap up