Podcasts about hipmunk

Reddit. You know the name, you've used the site. It's a ~$10B company, with nearly $1B in revenue. Their 1B+ monthly active users are so powerful they can move markets.  This is the story of how it all began.On this episode, we interview Chris Slowe, Reddit's current CTO and Founding Engineer. Chris was in YC's first-ever batch with Steve and Alexis. He was their roommate. When Chris's own startup failed, he moved over and joined them to build Reddit. This was almost 20 years ago, in 2005.It only took them a year to hit 1 million monthly active users. But it took them well over 5 years to hit $1M in revenue. Here's the story of how they hit product-market fit and built the world's most powerful online community. Why you should listen:- Learn how Reddit got started in 2005 and why it took them many years to monetize- See how word of mouth & organic growth are the key to building a community like Reddit- Hear Chris's perspective on scaling teams and organizations, preserving culture, and signs of clear product-market fit - Why applying lessons from your first startup to your second one is not as easy as you think it might be KeywordsReddit, Y Combinator, growth, startups, founders, acquisition, Conde Nast, community-driven platform, culture, word of mouth, Google, organic growth, Hipmunk, monetization, product-market fit, scaling, startup adviceTimestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:01:55) The Start of Reddit(00:07:13) Joining Reddit(00:12:56) Building Communities(00:20:37) The First Year of Reddit(00:22:56) The Acquisition(00:26:50) Staying Lean(00:28:58) Leaving Reddit to do Hipmunk(00:37:14) Hiring for Hipmunk(00:41:08) Coming Back to Reddit(00:45:05) Making the Mobile App(00:47:13) Monetization(00:50:05) Finding True Product Market Fit(00:50:41) One Piece of Advice

Danilo Campos, Proprietor of Antigravity, joins @quinnypig on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his philosophy behind building tools that not only enhance developer experience but also improve the future of our world. Danilo shares his thoughts on how economic factors have influenced tech companies and their strategies for product, open source, and more. He also shares what he thinks is another, better way to approach these strategies, without ignoring the economic element. About DaniloDanilo Campos wants a world where technology makes us more powerful and expressive versions of ourselves. He worked with GitHub and the White House to deliver coding platforms to public housing residents, supported Glitch.com in its last days as an independent, and developed products for multiple early-stage startups, including Hipmunk. Today Danilo offers freelance developer experience services for devtools firms through Antigravity DX.Links Referenced: Antigravity DX: https://antigravitydx.com/ Blog: https://redeem-tomorrow.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn, and periodically on this show, we like to gaze into the future and tried to predict how that's going to play out. On this episode, I want to start off by instead looking into the past, more specifically my past. Before I started this place, I wound up working at a company called FutureAdvisor, which was a great startup for all of three months before we were bought by a BlackRock. I soon learned what a BlackRock actually was.While I was there, I encountered an awful lot of oral tradition around a guy named Danilo, and he—as it turned out—was a contractor who had been brought in to do a fair bit of mobile work. Meet my guest today, Danilo Campos, who is at present, the proprietor of a company called Antigravity DX. Thank you so much for joining me, I appreciate it.Danilo: Hey, Corey, it's good to be here.Corey: It's weird talking to you, just because you were someone that I knew by reputation, and if I were to take all the things that were laid at your feet after you no longer had been there, it feels like you were there for 20 years. What did you actually do there, and how long were you embedded for?Danilo: I loved the FutureAdvisor guys. I thought they were such a blast to work with. I loved what they were working on. I learned so much about how finance and investing works from FutureAdvisor, and somehow it was only seven months of my life. I'd been introduced to the founders as a freelance iOS developer at the time—this was 2014—and a guy I had worked with at Hipmunk actually put me in touch with these guys, and we connected. And they needed to get started doing mobile. They'd never done any mobile stuff, they didn't have anyone on staff who did mobile stuff.And by that point, I'd shipped I think, must have been half a dozen iOS native apps, and so I knew this stuff pretty well. I understood the workflows, I understood the path to getting from idea to shipped product, and they just wanted occasional help. How do we wireframe this? How do we plan the product that way? How do we structure this thing? And so, it started off as this just, kind of, occasional troubleshooting consulting thing.And I think about August 2014. They call me in for a meeting, they said, “Hey, we're stuck. We don't know how to get this thing off the ground. Could you help us get this project moving so that we actually ship it?” And so, I just came and embedded for seven months, and by the end of it, I was just running the entire iOS engineering team. We had a designer working with us. We had, I think it was four folks who were building the product. We had QA. It was a whole team to get this thing out the door. And we got it out the door after seven months of really working at it. And like I said, it was a blast. I love those folks.Corey: I have to be clear, when I say that I encountered a lot of what you had done. It was not negative. This was not one of those startups where there's a glorious tradition of assassinating the character out of everyone who has left the company—or at least Git repos—because they're not there to defend themselves anymore. There were times where decisions that you had made were highlighted as, “We needed to be doing things more like this.” There were times it was, “Oh, we can't do that because of how you wound up building this other thing.”And it was weird because it felt like you were the hand of some ancient deity, just moving things back and forth in your infinite wisdom of the ancients. It was unknowable, and we had to accept it as gospel, whether we liked it or not, at different times. In practice, I now know this was honestly just the outgrowth of a rapidly expanding culture where you've got to go from a team of five people to the team of 50 and keep everyone rowing in the same direction, ideally. But it was a really interesting social dynamic that I got to observe as a result, and I'm just tickled pink to be able to talk to you now. What are you doing these days?Danilo: Thank you for the context, by the way, because you know, I move on, as you do in a contract capacity, and you hope things work out.Corey: Yeah. To be clear, it was never a context of, “There's the bastard. Get him.” Like, that is not the perspective we are coming at this from at all.Danilo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and it's hard because it was a very strange, alien codebase compared to the rest of the company. I get how it ended up in that spot. These days, I am a freelance developer experience consultant, and I spent a year-and-a-half at Glitch.com. And developer experience was always something that I really cared about. I did some work at GitHub that was about getting people—specifically teenagers living in public housing—into computing and the internet, and I'd had to do a bunch of DX work to make that happen because I had an afternoon to get people from zero to writing code.And that is not a straightforward situation, especially in a low-income housing environment, for example, right? So, I cared about this stuff a lot. And then I spent a year-and-a-half at Glitch.com, and it was like getting a graduate degree on everything about the leverage for creating outcomes in developer tools. And I just, I felt like I was carrying some gift from the Gods. I just, I felt the need to get this out to the wider world, and so that's what I do with Antigravity.Corey: When I got to catch up with you in person for the first time at the excellent and highly recommended Monktoberfest conference—Danilo: Excellent.Corey: —that the folks over at RedMonk put on every year, it was interesting, in that you and I got to talking very rapidly, not about technology as such, but about culture and the industry and values and the rest. It was a wonderfully refreshing conversation that I don't normally get to have so soon after meeting someone. I think that one of the more interesting aspects of our relatively wide-ranging conversation in a surprisingly brief period of time focused, first off, among the idea of developer tools and what so many of them seem to get wrong. I know that we basically dove into discussing about our violently agreeing opinions around the state of developer experience, for example. What are the hills you're willing to die on in that space?Danilo: I think that computing generally exists to amplify and multiply our power. Computing exists to let us do things that we could not do with the simple, frail flesh that we're born with, right? Computers augment our ambitions because they can do things with infinite iteration. And so, if you can come up with something that you can bottle in the form of an algorithm that repeats infinitely, you can have incredible impact on the world. And so, I think that there's a responsibility to find ways to make that power something that is easy to hand to other people and let them pick up and run with.And so, developer tools, to me, has this almost sacred connotation because what you're doing is handing people the fire of the Gods and saying, “Whatever you can come up with, whatever your imagination allows you to do with these tools, they can repeat infinitely and make whatever change you want—for good or for ill—in the world.” And that's very special to me. I think we've gotten bored of it because it's just, you know, it's a 50-year-old business at this point. But I think there's still a lot of magic to it, and the more we see the magic, the more magical outcomes we can coax out of everyday people who become better developers.Corey: From my perspective, one of the reasons I care so much about developer experience is that the failure mode of getting it wrong means that the person trying to understand the monstrosity you've built feels like they're somehow not smart, or they're just not getting it in some key and fundamental way. And that's not true. It's that you, for whatever reason, what you have built is not easily understandable to them where they are. I go back to what I first heard in 2012, at a talk that Logstash creator, Jordan Sissel wound up saying, where his entire thesis was that if a user has a bad time, it's a bug.Danilo: Yeah.Corey: And I thought that that was just a wonderfully prescient statement that I wanted to sign onto wholeheartedly. [That was 00:09:08] my first exposure to it. I know that's not the entirety of developer experience by a long shot, but it's the one where I think you lose the most mind share when you get it wrong.Danilo: Well, and I'm glad that you bring that up because I think that kind of defines the spectrum of the emotional experience of interacting with developer tools. On one end of the spectrum, you've got, “I feel so stupid. This has made me feel worse about myself. This has given me less of a sense of confidence in myself than I had when I started.” And at the other end of the spectrum, the other extreme is, “I cannot believe I am this cool. I cannot believe that my imagination has been made manifest in this way that now exists in the world and can go out and touch other people and make their lives better.”Those are the two, kind of, extremes of the subjective emotional experience that can come from developer tools. And so, I think that there is a business imperative that really pushes us toward the extreme of making people feel awesome. I think about this in the context of Iron Man, you've seen Iron Man, yeah.Corey: Oh, yes.Danilo: All right. So, the Iron Man suit is the perfect metaphor for a developer tool that is working correctly for you, right? Because on its own, the suit is not very interesting, and on his own, Tony Stark is not all that powerful, but you combine the suit and the person, and suddenly extraordinary emergent outcomes come out. The ambition of the human is amplified, and he feels so [BLEEP] cool. And I think that's what we're looking to do with developer tools is that we want to take a person, amplify their range, give them a range of motion that lets them soar into the clouds and do whatever they need to do up there so that when they come back down, they feel transformed. They feel like more than what they started.Corey: I would agree with that. There's a sense of whimsy and wonder as I look through my career trajectory, going from a sysadmin role, where you there was a pretty constant and hard to beat ratio in most shops—and the ratio [unintelligible 00:11:29] varied—but number of admins to the number of servers. And now with the magic of cloud being what it is, it's a, “Well, how many admins does it take to run X number of servers?” Like, “Well, as an [admin done 00:11:39] right, I can manage all of them because that's how programming languages work.” And that is a mystical and powerful thing.But lately, it seems like there's been some weird changes in the world of developer tooling. Cynically, I've said a couple of times that giving a toss about the developer experience was in fact a zero interest rate phenomenon. Like, when you're basically having to fend off casual offers of 400 grand a year from big tech, how do you hire and retain people at a company that has one of those old, tiny profit-generating business models and compete with them? And a lot of times, developer experience was part of how you did that. I don't know that I necessarily believe that that is as tied to that cynical worldview as I might pretend on the internet, but I don't know—I do wonder if it's a factor because it seems like we've seen a definite change in the way that developer tools are approaching their community of users and customers.Danilo: Well, my immediate reflex is to open up the kind of systems theory box and look at what's inside of that. Because I think that what we are experiencing, if we use the interest rate lens, is a period of time where everyone is a little bit worried that the good times are over for good. And I feel the sense of this in a lot of places. I think developer experience is a pretty good avatar to try this on with because I definitely also perceive it in that sphere.During the heyday of 0% interest rates, everything was about how much totalizing growth can you achieve? And from a developer tools perspective, all right, well, we need to make it so that the tools, kind of, grow themselves, so let's invest a lot in developer experience so that people very quickly get onboarded, without us having to hold their hand, without us having to conduct a sales call, let's get them to the point where they can quickly understand—because the documentation is so good and the artifacts are so good—exactly how to use these tools to maximum effect. Let's get them to a point where it's very easy for them to share the results of their work so that other people see the party and really want to join in. And so, all kinds of effort and energy and capital was being invested in this kind of growth strategy.And now I think that people are, again, a little bit afraid that the good times are over, and so we see this really sales-driven culture of growth, where it's like, all right, well, for this company to succeed, we have to really make sure that we're going and closing these big sales, and if individual developers can't figure out how the hell this works, well, that's their problem, and we're not going to worry about it. And we've talked about this: this fear of the good times being over drives people, I think, to all kinds of bad behavior. The rug-pulling that we've seen in open-source licensing where somebody's like, “All right, I've taken a bunch from this community, and now I'm going to keep it, and I'm not going to give anything back.” This is the behavior of people who are afraid that the good times are behind them. I don't have the luxury of being that pessimistic about the future, and I don't think our industry can afford it either.[midroll 00:15:03]Corey: The rules changing late in the game is something that has always upset me. It feels inherently unfair, and it's weird because you can have these companies say that, “Look, we've never done anything like that. Why wouldn't you trust us?” Right up until the point where they do. Reddit is a great example, where for years, they had a great API—ish—that could do things that their crap-ass mobile client natively couldn't. And Apollo was how I interacted with Reddit constantly. I was a huge Reddit user. I was simultaneously, at one point, moderator of the legal advice subreddit and the personal finance subreddit. I was passionate about that stuff, and it was great.And then they wound up effectively killing all third-party clients that don't bend the knee, and well, why am I going to spend my time donating content and energy and time to a for-profit company that gets very jealous when other people find ways to leverage their platform in ways that they don't personally find themselves able to do. Screw ‘em. I haven't been back on Reddit since. It's just a, “Fool me once, shame on me story.” Twitter did the exact same thing. I built a threading Twitter client simultaneously deployed to 20 AWS regions, until they decided they didn't want people creating content through their APIs and killed the whole thing with no notice. Great. Now, they're—I got an email asking me to come back. Go to hell. I tried that once. You've eviscerated people's businesses and the rest.And you see it with licensed changes as well. But it all comes down to the same thing, from my perspective, which is an after-the-fact changing of the rules. And by moving the goalposts like that, I wonder what guarantees a startup or a project that doesn't intend to do those things can offer to its community. Because, look, HashiCorp made its decision to change the licensing for Terraform. Good for them. They're entitled to do that. I'm not suggesting, in any way shape or form, that they have violated any legal term.And I don't even know they're necessarily doing anything that doesn't make sense from their point of view. And the only people I really see that upset about it are licensing purists—which I no longer am for a variety of reasons—people who work at HashiCorp, obviously, and their direct competitors who are not sympathetic in that particular place. But as a counterpoint, if they wind up building a new open-source project, of course, I'm not going to contribute. I mean, that's a decision I get to make. And I don't know how you square that circle because otherwise, if that continues, no one will be able to have a sense of safety around contributing to anything open-source unless they're pleased to wind up doing volunteer work for a one-day unicorn.Danilo: So, I really appreciate the economical survey of the landscape that you just provided because I think that captures it really well. The Reddit case in particular breaks my heart. I will go to my grave absolutely loving Steve Huffman. Steve Huffman gave me my first break as a paid developer and product designer, and he was an enormous pain in the ass to work with, and I loved every minute of it. Like, he's just an interesting, if volatile, character.And I see that volatility playing out with Red Hat in the incredible hostility that they were conveying around being held to account for these changes. And I have a lot of sympathy for that crew because they've built all this value, they kind of missed the euphoria boat in terms of, you know, getting the best price for an IPO, for example, and they've got to figure out, all right, how do we scrape together value from what we've got within the constraints that we have? How do we build a fence around the value that we've got and put a tollbooth in front of it so that the public markets are excited about this and give us our best bang for the buck? That's Steve Hoffman's job. That's his crew's job. I understand the pressures and I respect that.And I think that the way they went about it this year was short-sighted because what it does is it undervalues everybody who isn't in the boardroom, making decisions with them. I think what we have to understand that when we build software, Metcalfe's law applies to developer tools just as much as any other network here. And so, the people who are stakeholders, who are participants, who are constituents of your community, are load-bearing members of the value chain that you are putting together, and so when you just cut them out, you might be nicking an artery that bleeds out very, very, very slowly. And the sentiment that you just expressed here about how your experience of Reddit was soured, I mean you're the enthusiast type, right? Like, who wants to sign up for the drama of flame wars and moderation except if you really just love it?And so, what they were able to do was take people who, for years, absolutely loved it, and just drain away their love and enthusiasm for it. And the thing is, over time, that harms the long-term value that you are trying to actually protect. When we live in a world where computers can do all of this stuff infinitely, when they will provide us with extraordinary scale, when information can be copied and distributed at near-zero marginal cost, what we're doing is setting up chains of incentives to get people to do stuff, essentially, for free. You were unpaid labor doing that moderation, and the reason that you did it for free was because it was fun, was because it spoke to something inside of you that really mattered, and you wanted to provide for a community of other people who also cared about these topics. And that fun was taken away from you. So, there's a bunch of this stuff that doesn't fit into a spreadsheet, and if we make decisions exclusively on what fits into a spreadsheet, we're going to turn around someday and find that we have cut off some of the most valuable parts of what makes this industry great.Corey: I agree. I feel like companies have a—they launch, and they want the benefits of having an open-source community, but as they grow and get to a point of success and becoming self-sustaining, it's harder to see those benefits because at that point, it just feels like it's all downside: you are basically giving what you built away to your direct competitors, you are seeing significant value scattered throughout the ecosystem that you are capturing a very small portion of, and it becomes frustrating—especially in historical environments—where you have the sense of—back when you built the company years ago, it's well, obviously we'd be the best place to host and run this because no one's going to run this as well as the people who built it. And then cloud companies, with their operational excellence, come in and put the lie to that, in many cases [laugh]. It's like, oh dear. Not like that.And I understand, truly, the frustration and the pain and the fear that drives companies in that position. And I don't have a better answer, which is my big problem because I'm just sitting here saying, “You're doing it wrong. Don't do it like that.” “Okay, well, what should they do instead?” “No, I just want to be angry. I'm not here to offer solutions.” And I feel for them. I do. I have a lot of empathy for everyone involved in this conversation. It just sucks, but we need a better outcome than the current state, or we're going to not see the same open innovation. Even these days, when I build things, by default, I don't build in the open, not because I'm worried about competitive threats, but because I don't want to deal with people complaining to me about things that I've built and don't want to think about this week.Danilo: I think that we're living through the hangover of—I mean, if you looked at the crypto craze as an example of this hangover, right—here we were with the sky the limit. We can sell monkey pictures for extraordinary amounts of money and there's nothing behind it. We went from euphoria to fear in the space of a handful of quarters. And so, that has put all of us, even the most optimistic, in a place where we feel our backs are against the walls. But I think the responsibility we have is, again, computing fundamentally changes the economics of so many categories of labor, and it changes the economics of information generally.And so, we can do a bunch of stuff that doesn't cost that much over the long-term, relative to the value it creates. But it only works if we have a really clear thesis of the value we're creating. If we don't value the contributions of a community, if we don't value the emergent outcomes that arise from building something that's very expressive, that then lets outsiders show up and do things that we never predicted, if we're not building strategies that look at this value as something that is precious instead of something to be cut off and captured, then I think that we just continue to spiral down the drain of paranoia, and greed, and fear instead of doing things that actually create long-term sustainable growth for our business.Corey: I really wish that there were easier, direct paths. Like on some level, too, it's—I feel like this is part of the problem, that every company views going public as its ultimate goal.Danilo: Yeah.Corey: At least that's what it feels like. Like The Duckbill Group. If we ever go public, my God, I will have been so far gone from this company long before then, just because at that point, you have given control over to people who are not aligned, in many cases, with the values that you founded the company with. Like, one of the things I love about being a small business is that I don't need to necessarily think the next quarter's earnings. I can think longer-term. “Okay, in two or three years, what do I want to be doing?” Or five or ten. I'm not forced into this narrow, short-sighted treadmill where I have to continually show infinite growth in all areas at all times. That doesn't sound healthy.Danilo: I agree, and I think that this is a place where I can give you a lot of hope because I look at a handful of economic tailwinds that are really going to make it possible to build businesses in a different way than was practical before. If we look at the last cycle, one of the absolute game changers was open-source. So, you showed up and there was already a web server written for you, and there was already a database written for you, and so you would just pull these things off the shelf instead of having to hire a team that would build your web server from scratch, that would build your database from scratch. And so, that changed the economics of how companies could be made, and that created an entire cycle of new technology growth.And if we look for an analogy of that kind of labor savings for the next technology cycle, we're going to see things like cloud-based serverless services, right? So like, now you don't need to even administer a Linux server. You don't need to know how the server works under the hood. You pay one company for an API that gives you a database, and they manage the stuff. So, I'm thinking of companies like Neon, or PlanetScale, right? You give them cash, they give you a database, they worry about it, they do all of the on-call stuff, you don't have to think about. So, this makes it even cheaper to build things of higher complexity because you are outsourcing much of the management of that complexity to other firms. And I think that that pattern is going to change the overall costs of starting and scaling and maintaining any sort of web-based product. And so, that's number one.And then number two, is that when we look at stuff like large language models, the stuff that you can do with ChatGPT in terms of figuring out how to solve a broad array of problems that maybe you don't have a lot of domain expertise in, I think that means that we're going to see smaller teams get even further than we expect. And so, the net result of these trends is going to be, you don't need to take vast amounts of venture funding in order to get to a company that serves a large number of people at a meaningful scale, with meaningful returns for the principles involved, and then they don't have to go all the way down to the IPO route. They don't have to figure out some sort of mega-scale unicorn exit; they can just build companies that work, that solve customer problems, keep it close, and then you don't have the totalizing endless need for growth. I think we're going to see a lot more of that this cycle.Corey: I sure hope you're right. I think that there's been a clear trend toward panic, or at least if not panic, then at least looking at current conditions and assuming that they'll persist forever. We just saw ten years of an unprecedented bull run, where people tended to assume that interest rates would be forever low, growth was always going to be double-digit at least, and there was no need to think about anything that would ever argue against those things. For the first few years of my consulting company, it was a devil of a problem trying to convince people to care about their AWS bills because frankly, when money is free, there is no reason for someone to. They are being irrational if they do. Now, of course, that's a very different story, but at the time, I felt for a while like I was the one who was nuts.Danilo: So, the interest rate conditions are always going to make people behave a certain way. That's why they exist, right? We have monetary policy designed to influence business behavior. And if we look at that zoom, then we say, “All right, look, this stuff is all cyclical. We know there's going to be good times, we know there's going to be lean times, but at the end of the day, we care about building stuff.” Right?I don't spend a lot of time with the sort of venture capitalist set who's really obsessed with building, but I really love building. I just, I can't stop building things. It is what I was put on this planet to do, and I think that there are so many people who feel exactly the same way. And so, regardless of the larger interest-rate phenomenon, we have to find a path where we can just build the stuff that we need to build. Build it for our reasons, for the right reasons, not because we just want to cash out. Although, you know, getting paid is great. I don't begrudge anyone that.Corey: You can't eat aspirations, as it turns out.Danilo: That's right, right? We've got to worry about the economics, and that's reasonable. But at the end of the day, making things happen through technology is its own mission and its own reward, regardless of what some sort of venture fund needs to make return happen. So, I think that we are going to get past this moment of slump and return to the fundamentals of we need to build technology because building technology makes us feel good and creates impact in the world that we absolutely need. And those are the fundamentals of this business.Corey: I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think that I've been around too many cycles—this is a polite way of saying I'm old—and you learn when that happens that everything that feels so immediate and urgent in the moment, in the broad sweep of things, so rarely is. Not everything can be life or death because you'll die lots of times.Danilo: Yeah.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Danilo: If you want to engage me for my thinking and strategy around humanist technology tools growth, you should find me at antigravitydx.com. And if you want to read more about what I think about, I maintain a blog at redeem-tomorrow.com, and you can learn all about my thinking about the last cycle, and the coming one as well.Corey: And I will absolutely include a link to that in the [show notes 00:31:52]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Danilo: It's a pleasure, Corey. Thank you for having me. Really great to chat.Corey: Danilo Campos, proprietor at Antigravity DX. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment taking care within that comment to link to a particular section of the FutureAdvisor code repo.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business, and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

In episode 97 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Michael Levin and Adam Goldstein. Professor Levin is a Distinguished Professor and Vannevar Bush Chair in the Biology Department at Tufts University. He also directs the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. His group, the Levin Lab, focuses on understanding the biophysical mechanisms that implement decision-making during complex pattern regulation, and harnessing endogenous bioelectric dynamics toward rational control of growth and form. Adam Goldstein was a visiting scientist at the Levin Lab, where he worked on cancer research, and is the co-founder and Chairman of Astonishing Labs. Previously Adam founded Hipmunk, wrote tech books for O'Reilly, and was a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (02:37) Intros* (03:20) Prof. Levin intro* (04:26) Adam intro* (06:25) A perspective on intelligence* (08:40) Diverse intelligence — in unconventional embodiments and unfamiliar spaces, substrate independence* (12:23) Failure of the life-machine distinction, text-based systems, grounding, and embodiment* (16:12) What it is to be a Self, fluidity and persistence* (22:45) The combination problem in cognitive function, levels and representation* (27:10) Goals for AI / cognitive science, Prof Levin's perspective on building intelligent systems* (31:25) Adam's and Prof. Levin's recent research—regenerative medicine and cancer* (36:25) Examples of regeneration, Adam on the right approach to the regeneration problem as generation* (45:25) Protein engineering vs. Adam and Prof. Levin's program, implicit assumptions underlying biology* (48:15) Regeneration example in liver disease* (50:50) Perspectives on AI and its goalsLinks:* Levin Lab homepage* Forms of life, forms of mind* Adam's homepage* Research* On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems* Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere* Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior* Life, death, and self: Fundamental questions of primitive cognition viewed through the lens of body plasticity and synthetic organisms* Modular cognition* Endless Forms* Future Medicine: from molecular pathways to the collective intelligence of the body* Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: an experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds* The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition* Machine life Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe

1) Jeff Bezos - Amazon - 0:00 2) Steve Jobs - Apple - 0:12 3) Pierre Omidyar - eBay - 0:33 4) Michael Dell - Dell - 0:595) Sergey Brin - Google 1:166) Biz Stone - Twitter 1:357) Gary Vaynerchuk - Wine Library 1:508) Daniel Ek - Spotify - 1:589) Kevin Rose - Digg, Tiiny - 2:2910) James Altucher - 'Choose Yourself' - 2:5511) Robert Greene - 'Mastery' - 3:2112) Guy Kawasaki - Apple - 3:3513) Steve Wozniak - Apple - 4:0614) Mark Cuban - Broadcast - 4:2615) Sam Altman - Loopt - 5:01 16) Tony Fadell - Nest - 5:1217) Danae Ringelmann -Indiegogo - 5:26 18) Simon Sinek - 'Start With Why' - 5:4619) Seth Godin - Marketing guru - 6:25 20) Evan Williams - Blogger, Twitter, Medium - 6:52 21) Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn - 7:1322) Jack Dorsey - Twitter, Square - 7:4523) Kevin Systrom - Instagram - 8:0824) Drew Houston - DropBox - 8:34 25) Brian Chesky - Airbnb - 8:53 26) Peter Thiel - PayPal - 9:0427) Elon Musk - Tesla, SpaceX - 9:14 28) Alan Schaaf - Imgur - 9:3629) Chris Sacca - Baller Investor - 9:56 30) Paul Graham - Y Combinator - 10:18 31) Dennis Crowley - foursquare - 10:40 32) Eric Ries - The Lean Startup - 11:11 33) Leah Busque - TaskRabbit - 11:25 34) Anthony Casalena - Squarespace - 11:44 35) Alexis Ohanian - Reddit, Hipmunk - 12:03 36) Jason Fried, Basecamp - 12:21 37) Palmer Luckey - Oculus Rift - 12:42 38) Kamal Ravikant - AngelList - 12:52 39) Ben Silbermann - Pinterest - 13:19 40) Tony Hsieh - Zappos- 13:43 41) Andrew Mason - Groupon - 14:1442) Richard Branson - Virgin - 14:3943) Andrew Ljung - Soundcloud - 15:0844) Justin Kan - Justin.tv - 15:3045) Jessica Livingston - Y Combinator - 15:5946) Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook - 16:1447) Marc Andreessen - Andreessen Horowitz - 16:1548) Dustin Moskovitz - Facebook - 17:2249) Tim Ferriss - 4 Hour Work Week - 17:4750) Emmett Shear - Twitch - 18:24

Alexis Ohanian is an internet entrepreneur and investor. He is best known as the co-founder and former executive chairman of the social media site Reddit. He also co-founded the early-stage venture capital firm Initalized Capital, helped launch the travel search website Hipmunk, and started the social enterprise Breadpig. He was also created and funded the 776 Foundation.  Alexis Ohanian joins Thanasis Antetokounmpo discussing; Reddit, leaving Reddit, Candy Funhouse Box, the 776 Foundation, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence's potential role in healthcare, TGL Golf and the LA Golf Club.  Thanasis also gives Alexis some True or False and Amazing Facts while Alexis gives Thanasis some of his best impressions.

In Ep. 77 of Earned, we're joined by Roxy Young, Chief Marketing Officer at Reddit, the mega-popular discussion forum that's home to thousands of digital communities, aka Subreddits. We start the episode by hearing what's on the horizon for Reddit, including its goal to expand beyond English-speaking geographies, before learning what drew Roxy to join Reddit back in 2017. Next, Roxy breaks down Reddit's main revenue stream—advertising—and explains why Reddit's varied, vibrant communities drive so much value for advertisers looking for their target audience. We then discuss examples of how brands have successfully activated communities on Reddit, as well as the challenges associated with managing open discussion forums. Roxy shares how Reddit continues to strengthen its relationship with creators—in this case, community moderators—via roadshows and feedback sessions, and we explore how Reddit has maintained its “brilliantly absurd” personality amid rapid growth. To close the show, we ask Roxy about her secret sauce for joining mega-successful companies early on (including Netflix, Sephora, and Hipmunk), and she reveals her personal favorite Subreddits.In this episode, you will learn:Why community is at the heart of RedditHow advertisers tap into Reddit's passionate communities How Reddit fosters relationships with its creators (aka moderators)Resources:RedditConnect with the Guest(s):Roxy Young's LinkedInConnect with Conor Begley & CreatorIQ:Conor's LinkedIn - @conormbegleyCreatorIQ LinkedIn - @creatoriqFollow us on social:CreatorIQ YouTube - @TribeDynamicsCreatorIQ Instagram - @creatoriqCreatorIQ TikTok - @creator.iqCreatorIQ Twitter - @CreatorIQ

Zohaib Ahmed joined us at the Synthedia synthetic media conference in September to discuss Resemble's work re-creating the voice of famed pop artist Andy Warhol. A Netflix documentary was under development that centered around Warhol's diaries. The creators thought it would be more impactful if the viewers could hear the ideas and experiences of Warhol in the artist's own voice. So, they began searching for a synthetic speech provider that could create a voice clone.   Ahmed goes through the creation process and some of the challenges faced along the way. Plus there are a couple of nuances that you will find interesting.   Zohaib Ahmed is the CEO and co-founder of Resemble AI. He appeared previously on the podcast in episodes 251 and 103. Ahmed previously was a lead software engineer at Magic Leap and Hipmunk and a developer at Blackberry.   Voicebot's Eric Schwartz interviews Ahmed in this episode and Bret Kinsella adds commentary at the end about the evolution of synthetic speech. 

Zohaib Zohaib Ahmed co-founded Resemble AI in 2019 after working as a software engineer at high profile and innovative companies including Magic Leap, Hipmunk, and Blackberry. Zohaib's work at Magic Leap introduced him to novel UI interactions and his work analyzing user data led to deep learning models. From there he began to explore synthetic media and speech synthesis and Resemble was born.   Resemble AI graduated from the Betaworks Synthetic Camp accelerator back in 2019 and was recently in the news for creating Andy Warhol's voice for a new Netflix documentary. 

We're psyched to introduce you to Marc McCabe, founder of Nomad Capital and one of the latest and greatest European micro VCs in our opinion. We love Marc and are sure you will too. Marc has done angel investments for more than a decade in consumer tech and has held operating roles at AirBnB and been part of the team at SV Angel as well as a **Sequoia Scout.** He has worked on investments in Stripe, Pinterest, Kaggle, Hipmunk, ElaCarte and many more. Marc has also co-managed a **Y Combinator** focused micro-fund where he invested in 50 companies across 3 funds including **6 Unicorns** and leading their seed investments to be followed by many great funds like **A16Z**, Founder's Fund, Tiger and Spark Capital.With Nomad Capital, Marc focuses on finding SaaS tools built by incredible teams that can help the next generation of companies build better products, faster and more effectively. We hope you will come to love Marc as much as we do. In this episode you'll learn:- What Marc learned at AirBnB and SF Angels and how he applies it in Nomad today - Marc's take on scout models and reflections from having been one for years- All about the thesis behind Nomad Capital and how he as a solo GP executes multiple deals per month- Why Marc doesn't lead rounds with Nomad and what kind of value he as an Operator and hyper connected investor brings to the table

Welcome to the The Voice of Retail , I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.I am delighted to share an entire episode from the second season of my Conversations with CommerceNext podcast featuring an interview with the founder and CEO of CSC Generation, Justin Yoshimura.Justin and the team have mastered the art of transforming challenged retail brands on the verge of liquidation into high-performance, 'digital-first' operations.By using their fine-tuned omnichannel technology platform, CSC Generation has a data-driven recipe for retail operations, which is undoubtedly the driving force behind its rapid expansion.Listen in now as my co-host Scott Silverman, and I sit down with Justin, who pops open the hood and shares with us how his youth shaped his approach to business as well as the inner workings of CSC's success. Together, we talk about the business of retail acquisition, entrepreneurial grit and how to prioritize company culture when scaling up your business.Thanks for tuning into this special episode of The Voice of Retail.  If you haven't already, be sure and click subscribe on your favourite podcast platform so new episodes will land automatically twice a week, and check out my other retail industry media properties; the Remarkable Retail podcast, the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast, and the Food Professor podcast.  Last but not least, if you are into BBQ, check out my all new YouTube barbecue show, Last Request Barbeque, with new episodes each and every week!I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company & Maven Media, and if you're looking for more content, or want to chat  follow me on LinkedIn, or visit my website meleblanc.co!  Have a safe week everyone! About JustinI am currently the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of CSC Generation Holdings, one of the dime a dozen "unicorn" start-ups.*After being told that nobody would ever hire me, I quit the bureaucracy and negativity of Palos Verdes High School to start a marketplace for unlocked cell phones, which was acquired by a family office when I was 19 years old. More recently, I founded 500friends, the leading loyalty and retention marketing platform for retailers, which merged with Merkle in 2014, and was eventually acquired by Dentsu Aegis in 2016.I also invest between $50k and $1M in interesting companies run by interesting people, eg:*Consumer Internet Companies (excluding social networking): Hipmunk (seed, acquired by Concur), Dropoff (seed), Next Force Technology (seed), Dave (seed), Macro Ventures (seed), Imperfect Produce (seed), Flowclub (seed), Network Eyecare (seed)*SaaS/b2b Companies: Firebase (seed - acquired by GOOG), Zencoder (seed - acquired by BCOV), BounceX (seed, co-lead Series A), Mux (seed), BigFinite (seed).*Funds: Bling Capital, Ovo Fund, Luma Capital Partners, Dundee Venture Capital, Crown Capital Management.Besides business and things I shouldn't be discussing on LinkedIn, I love animals, especially dogs, (many) cats (but especially Persian and Himalayan breeds), dolphins, whales, capybaras, platypus, manatees and turtles. Despite this, I am not a vegetarian, primarily because I lack self discipline. However, I do want to clarify that I do not eat any of the animals listed above, and would judge you for doing so, especially considering the prevalent belief that eating wild animals purchased at "Wet Markets" is what caused COVID (https://wildaid.org/protectwildlife/)I've also been included in vanity lists such as the Forbes 30 under 30, Inc 500, AlwaysOn top 100, DM News 40 under 40, etc, but thankfully, I stopped advertising this in my LinkedIn headline when I was 19 after realizing I was being a DB. For a formal bio, please go here -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_YoshimuraABOUT US: Scott SilvermanAn ecommerce veteran, Scott Silverman has been active in the industry since 1999 and is passionate about digital retail and the innovation driving the industry. Scott Silverman is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. Previously, he spent 10 years as Executive Director of Shop.org where he launched the Shop.org Annual Summit. Scott co-invented “Cyber Monday” in 2005 and was the founder of Cybermonday.com in 2006, a shopping site that has generated more than $2.5 million for Shop.org's scholarship fund. Michael LeBlanc  is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice.   He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada's top retail industry podcast,       The Voice of Retail, plus        Global E-Commerce Tech Talks  and       The Food Professor  with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois.  You can learn more about Michael       here  or on       LinkedIn. 

Welcome to the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast, I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with CommerceNext and presented by Bloomreach.CSC Generation has mastered the craft of transforming challenged retail brands at the brink of liquidation into high performance, ‘digital-first' operations.By using their fine-tuned omni-channel technology platform, CSC Generation has a data-driven recipe for retail operations which is undoubtedly the driving force behind the company's rapid expansion.Today on Conversations with CommerceNext, my co-host Scott Silverman and I sit down with the founder and CEO behind it all - Justin Yoshimura. Justin opens the hood and shares with us how his youth shaped his approach to business as well as the inner workings of CSC's success. Together, we talk about the business of retail acquisition, entrepreneurial grit and how to prioritize company culture when scaling up your business.Thanks for tuning into this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext.  Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast platform where we'll be sharing career advice and marketing strategies from eCommerce and digital marketing leaders at retailers and direct-to-consumer brands each and every episode.   CommerceNext is a community, event series and conference for marketers at retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Through our online forums, interviews, webinars, summits and other in-person events, we harness the collective wisdom of our community to help marketers grow their businesses and advance their careers. Join CommerceNext events to meet other industry leaders and learn the latest ecommerce and marketing strategies. You can find upcoming events at CommerceNext.comAboutI am currently the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of CSC Generation Holdings, one of the dime a dozen "unicorn" start-ups.*After being told that nobody would ever hire me, I quit the bureaucracy and negativity of Palos Verdes High School to start a marketplace for unlocked cell phones, which was acquired by a family office when I was 19 years old. More recently, I founded 500friends, the leading loyalty and retention marketing platform for retailers, which merged with Merkle in 2014, and was eventually acquired by Dentsu Aegis in 2016.I also invest between $50k and $1M in interesting companies run by interesting people, eg:*Consumer Internet Companies (excluding social networking): Hipmunk (seed, acquired by Concur), Dropoff (seed), Next Force Technology (seed), Dave (seed), Macro Ventures (seed), Imperfect Produce (seed), Flowclub (seed), Network Eyecare (seed)*SaaS/b2b Companies: Firebase (seed - acquired by GOOG), Zencoder (seed - acquired by BCOV), BounceX (seed, co-lead Series A), Mux (seed), BigFinite (seed).*Funds: Bling Capital, Ovo Fund, Luma Capital Partners, Dundee Venture Capital, Crown Capital Management.Besides business and things I shouldn't be discussing on LinkedIn, I love animals, especially dogs, (many) cats (but especially Persian and Himalayan breeds), dolphins, whales, capybaras, platypus, manatees and turtles. Despite this, I am not a vegetarian, primarily because I lack self discipline. However, I do want to clarify that I do not eat any of the animals listed above, and would judge you for doing so, especially considering the prevalent belief that eating wild animals purchased at "Wet Markets" is what caused COVID (https://wildaid.org/protectwildlife/)I've also been included in vanity lists such as the Forbes 30 under 30, Inc 500, AlwaysOn top 100, DM News 40 under 40, etc, but thankfully, I stopped advertising this in my LinkedIn headline when I was 19 after realizing I was being a DB. For a formal bio, please go here -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_YoshimuraABOUT US: Scott SilvermanAn ecommerce veteran, Scott Silverman has been active in the industry since 1999 and is passionate about digital retail and the innovation driving the industry. Scott Silverman is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. Previously, he spent 10 years as Executive Director of Shop.org where he launched the Shop.org Annual Summit. Scott co-invented “Cyber Monday” in 2005 and was the founder of Cybermonday.com in 2006, a shopping site that has generated more than $2.5 million for Shop.org's scholarship fund.Veronika SonsevVeronika Sonsev is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. She also leads the retail practice for Chameleon Collective and is a contributor for Forbes on how to grow retail and ecommerce in the age of Amazon. Having spent the last 10+ years working with some of the largest retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, Veronika has intimate knowledge of the challenges facing retail and ecommerce today. She is also an advocate for women in business and founded the global non-profit mBolden, which is now part of SheRunsit. Michael LeBlanc  is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice.   He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada's top retail industry podcast,       The Voice of Retail, plus        Global E-Commerce Tech Talks  and       The Food Professor  with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois.  You can learn more about Michael       here  or on       LinkedIn. 

With new AI technology, voice actors might be afraid of deep-fakes, or someone stealing their voice. But did you know that the same technology may be able to track where your voice is used and flag any deep-fakes? This week, we welcome Zohaib Ahmed, CEO of Resemble.ai and Tanja Milojevic, voice talent and Community Manager. In addition to offering a variety of solutions for voice cloning, character voices, and other content building with synthetic voices, Resemble AI runs an open-source project called Resemblyzer which allows detection of deep-fakes or misuse. Listen in as we discuss the ethics, accessibility, and the importance of storytelling in AI voices. Guest Bios About Zohaib Zohaib Ahmed is the CEO of Resemble and oversees tech development. His previous experience includes leading engineering teams at Magic Leap, Deepen AI, Hipmunk, and BlackBerry. At Hipmunk, he was the lead engineer of the first AI Assistant for Travel, built using modern NLP techniques. Zohaib graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in computer science. About Tanja Tanja Milojevic is highly motivated, talented, and dedicated to audio description. Tanja is working with Resemble AI to clone her voice and as the Community Manager. Tanja has worked on: Games (the gate, Flippd, and others in development), Audible (Baby Teeth), Pseudopod, Podcastle, Podscape, Radio Dramas (Edict Zero, What's the Frequency, 11th Hour, You Are Here, A Scottish Podcast, Koach Studios, Electric Vicuna Productions, Campfire Radio Theater, All's Fair, Organism, Greater Boston, Twilight Radio Theater, Misfits Audio, Darker Projects, Brokensea Audio, 19 Nocturne Boulevard, Audioblivious Productions, Icebox Radio Theater, The Grey Area, The No Sleep Podcast. Top 10 Takeaways With Resemble, voice actors can choose from three levels of control for use of their voice: No Control, Content Filters, and Full Approval. Resemble has thorough terms of service that spells out voice usage. There are two ways to record for Resemble: record samples on the Resemble website or upload previous materials. Resemblyzer is an open-source project that allows you to derive a high-level representation of a voice. Resemblyzer allows for detections of deep-fakes and synthetic voice misuse. Resemble has emotional gradients that can be added to their AI voices. Resemble can analyze audio, edit and supplement a voice actor's work. Voice talent can use Resemble starting at $30 per month. Resemble's marketplace can “score” voice samples based on professionalism, and companies can license these voices to use per character usage. Resemble wants voice actors to have a major role in the industry. Referenced in this Episode Learn more about Resemble.ai Visit Tanja's Website Recorded on ipDTL Share This Resemble AI believes in compensating voice actors #VOBOSS AI voices improve accessibility #VOBOSS Passive income is never a bad thing #VOBOSS Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast, the AI and Voice series. I'm your host in Anne Ganguzza and it is my pleasure to introduce some very special guests that are with me today. First Zohaib Ahmed is the founder and CEO at Resemble.AI. Zohaib also previously led engineering teams at Magic Leap, Deepen AI, Hipmunk and Blackberry. We also have special guest Tanja Milojevic, award-winning voice talent and community manager of Resemble.AI. Tanja assists in onboarding and supporting voice talent through Resemble's synthetic voice creation process. She has over 10-plus years of voice acting experience, and her work ranges from character voices for audio dramas, to short story narrations, to audio descriptions for the blind and more. Zohaib and Tanja, thank you both so very much for joining me today. Tanja: Thank you, Anne. I love your podcast, so I'm very excited to be here. Anne: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much! I appreciate that. So I've been interviewing quite a few companies that produce voices in the AI space for the series. So I'd love to start off by asking if you could tell us a little bit about your company and the products that you offer and what makes you different. Zohaib: Yeah, so we started off, for example, with one core problem in mind. We looked at the computer vision community, you know, all those lucky people who have Photoshop since 1991, and they'd have all these fancy tools, Unity, and you name it, to do all these fancy movies and graphic effects and all sorts of visuals that we kind of take for granted now. And we looked at them and we said, hey, why don't audio people have any of these tools? Why, why are they still stuck with old knobs on a screen that kind of resemble literally what the physical version of that instrument would be in real life, just on a computer screen? And we kind of looked at that and looked around and closer and closer. And we found that there were a lot of use cases where extending voice actors would make life a lot easier. And it would also create a lot of interesting applications that couldn't be done before. So that's kind of where we started. And since then we kind of went in all sorts of directions, but in our very core, we were building synthetic voices. So we were like our core business is to take any sort of arbitrary speech data that's unstructured, create these high quality synthetics, and then kind of go from there. And over time we've decreased latency. So we're able to generate content within a few milliseconds, like seconds or minutes of conversations in a few seconds or milliseconds. We're able to do unique audio editing, where you have like a hybrid text-to-speech where you paste in your own voice and say, in this podcast, I'm kind of blabbing on, and if I wanted to remove bits and pieces, I can do that. Or if I wanted to change a few words, I could do that. And my synthetic voice would kick in in those parts. We found pre-production and post-production value in all, everything that we're doing. And then within all that, you know, we kind of want to still keep a performance of voice actors. So we want them to not only sound like them, but to be as emotional as they are and to kind of get the performances as they do. So, yeah, we've been around for a little bit over two years now, and we've worked with more than 150,000 users who have created voices on our platform. We try to make it as accessible as possible. That's kind of the big differentiating factor between us and everyone else is we tried, from day one, our goal was, well, this is a lot more powerful if we give it to the user and let them clone their voice, then you know, Anne can go ahead and click on her voice and figure out, oh, I'd love this on my podcast. And she'll come up with the ideas, and we kind of just facilitate her ideas. So that's been our, that's been our motivation has just been like putting it out to feel people's hands. And we have like 150,000 of them now and growing every day and all sorts of different use cases have popped up. Anne: Wow. So I want to get in a little bit more into how you create your voices on your platform. But before that, I'd like to ask Tanja a question. Tell us a little bit about your voiceover career and what was it that led you -- some of my voice talent friends would say -- to the dark side? What was it that led you to your interest in AI? Tanja: Well, seeing that I love Star Wars, I think that's a great reference, dark side. That's, that's awesome. So I generally stumbled upon voice acting when I was in high school. I've always been interested in acting ever since I was a kid. I received one Christmas a tape recorder that, you know, with some blank tapes at the time, and that was the best thing ever. 'Cause then I started recording stories and everybody's conversations and annoying the whole household in general. So, so that's where that started, and I was always interested in it. And then I had a friend, her and I would do a lot of improv kind of over the phone. Do you remember the days where after 9:00 PM, doesn't matter what phone plan you had, it would be free. Anne: Wow. I don't know if that was the case in my zone, wherever I was. I don't remember that. Tanja: Yeah, here in Massachusetts, that was, that was kind of a thing. Just, you can just call after 9:00. Anne: Oh wow! Tanja: So we would improv a lot, needless to say, and not be very alert for school. But then I stumbled upon, actually at my local library, a talking book, a couple of audio books for school, A tale of Two Cities and Pet Sematary by Stephen King. And they turned out to be audio dramas. So, you know, full sound effects, story, everything was in audio and I, I was intrigued. So then I did a bunch of research, and I found out about voice acting and a website called Voice Acting Alliance where anyone could audition. It was meant for amateurs. You didn't have to know what you were doing at the time. So I got a really terrible compressor microphone, Linin from Radio Shack, I think, and started using that and did as many auditions as I possibly could and listened to people's feedback. Everyone was so gracious and welcoming. So I was hooked. And after that, I just started getting into whatever I could with voice acting, anything from audio dramas, which the independent podcasting movement now has a lot of those, and they're growing. There are several places to find them, so many amazing stories out there that there just isn't enough time in the day to listen. So I I've been involved in that consistently for 10 years. Recently, I'd say about a couple of years ago, maybe a year ago now, I started recording audio descriptions for a couple of different companies, which is a track that's added to a media, like whether it's a TV series or a film, and it describes essential costume changes, action sequences, facial expressions, and so on and so forth meant for the blind and visually impaired to access media on an equal playing field to everyone else. So that's been a lot of fun. I've done a couple of short stories, narration, kind of narration based, playlist intros, radio spots, things like that, tied in here and there. And then I accidentally actually stumbled upon Resemble.AI because I've always been fascinated with artificial intelligence and smart assistants. Being someone with the visual impairment, I use screen readers all day, every day. My phone has a screen reader. I have, I kid you not, four Echoes in my house. So that gives you an idea of how much I love artificial intelligence and assistants. So I was looking for voice cloning and specifically searching as a voice actor, how do you become a virtual assistant? And Resemble.AI popped up with voice cloning, of course, with how Zohaib was discussing earlier, the ability and the power that it gives the user where you can then clone your voice for free. I never saw that anywhere. I've, I haven't come across any other website that allows you to just record and it's there. So I tried it and then I sent in data. I also applied on the form, and I heard back from one of the team and started the dialogue of, hey, I want to do all the voices, like everything. I don't, I don't care what it is, whatever you guys need. And it evolved into this role. So it was a very organic process that was serendipitous for me. So really excited to be here. Anne: Absolutely. That's a really wonderful story. And I saw on your website, I've listened to some of your demos, and I know that you're very passionate about the acting part of voiceover and being able to tell the story. I think you have an affirmation that you said, it's not just the voice that matters. It's how you tell the story. Tanja: Absolutely. Anne: I guess my question going into that is how does AI fit into this? Do you envision an AI voice being able to tell the story as a voice actor would? Tanja: I do. I mean, I think that we have room here to definitely include both where, for example, a client might want to use the artificial voice for a smaller character, but then they might want to, down the line, hire that voice actor, if they're readily available and also not remaining anonymous, which is an option for our voice talent as well. Then they might get additional work with that company depending on what the needs are, especially if they are someone who's, who's available and responsive, and the company likes their voice anyway. But that said, the emotional gradients that we have, that we offer at Resemble really allow the developers to add these emotions to the clips that they're generating, whether it's sad, angry, caring, happy, et cetera, scared. There is a lot of customization that's available for the developers. And we do take feedback very seriously. Anyone's feedback for improvement, we're ever evolving and improving. So with just the rapid changes in AI technology in the last decade, I'll be looking forward to seeing how much more realistic and how much more powerful neural TTS voices will become over time, since it's literally, it's just a matter of time and of data crunching. Anne: Excellent. Zohaib, can you talk to me a little bit about how voices are created on your platform? Zohaib: Yeah, so we, we wanted to make it as simple as possible. So there's, there's two ways of creating voices. The first option is anyone could go on our web platform, record 50 sentences. Typically these sentences are fairly short, five to eight words each, and after 50 sentences, we will build the voice for you in the next 15 to 20 minutes. There you go. There's your voice. And the second way is you upload some sort of unstructured data. So you can imagine a lot of talent that we work with, and a lot of customers that we directly work with, they are sitting on top of data where they've previously recorded data that convey a certain emotion or that it conveys a certain style of speech. So it allows our folks to kind of create domain specific voices. So for example, if Tanja is doing a voice for a telco on like IVR, so it's like you pick up the phone, and you call Verizon and kind of talks back to you or synthetic voice talks back to you, that kind of data set is very different than if Tanja was doing like an audio drama. Anne: Right? Zohaib: She needs to be a lot more emotional, and it's a completely different performance. So we tried to capture in exactly the kind of data or the performance that we want to reproduce to your earlier question, in terms of emotion and inflection, the model the AI is built in a way such that it tries to predict the right emotion or the right inflection, given a few words or whatever you're typing in. So that's a couple of ways of doing it. Once we ingest that data, typically the 30-second technical pitch is it consumes the audio as well as a transcription of that audio. And then it tries to learn what the transcript would output. And at the end of it, once it's learned a mapping between the words and the audio and the reason we could do it at 50 samples and not 20 hours like it used to be, or 100 hours like it used to be is because the model has already has a notion of English. So it's, you don't need to provide it with everything. It's just -- Anne: So you have a base model. Zohaib: -- we try to cover most of the phonetic -- exactly. Anne: Ah, okay. Zohaib: We do that for -- across different languages. So if you wanted Tanja to speak Spanish, and assuming Tanja doesn't speak Spanish -- Anne: Right. Zohaib: -- we can record her English and then get her voice to speak Spanish because the AI has learned some notion of Spanish already. And then during prediction time, it's just, you give it text and then you say, hey model, if this Tanja synthetic voice was generating this particular text, what would this audio look like or sound like? And it tries to make predictions. That's what most machine learning does. It's just prediction at the end of the day. Anne: Right. So then if people are creating voices on your platform, are you using those? Is that data that gets fed in for the machine to learn from, in order to create that ball or -- Zohaib: No, no. Yeah. So the, the underlying model is -- it's stagnant. Anne: Oh, okay. Zohaib: So like we freeze it in time and then we don't append data to it. And the reason we don't append data to it, that's like live data that's being adjusted is typically in any stream of machine learning, it's bad data, even a little bit of bad data hurts you significantly, so -- Anne: Oh, interesting. Zohaib: -- you don't want to pollute data at all. So you kind of want to -- you know, it's like if you, if you were building an application for measuring house prices, and then all of a sudden, you started sneaking in outliers into that dataset, the predictions would get worse overall because of these outliers. So we don't include any of user data into any of these models. Those are all like custom models that we've collected data ourselves specifically for building that task. Anne: Gotcha. Zohaib: And those are like stuck in time. Anne: So that's been done. And so there's no other mo -- I'm just curious. So there's no other models that will improve that model. Is that correct? Or there's no other information that can be added that would improve the model, or you're maybe continually trying to improve it or no, you're, you're good with this model? Zohaib: No. So we were constantly trying to improve it. There's two ways of improving the model. One is like where we lack data. So for example, if we understand that our model used to struggle with deep voices, deep male voices -- Anne: Okay. Zohaib: -- we would go ahead and be like, oh, that's because we didn't collect enough -- Anne: Enough. Zohaib: -- of this kind of data. So we'll go ahead and try to fill in those gaps and see like, okay, what else are we missing now? So we always can try to improve it with data. Anne: Gotcha. Zohaib: But then some of the bigger advancements, the bigger improvements occur due to just architecture changes. So just recently we've done things like produce audio at 44 kilohertz most, if not all, text-to-speech engines produce it at 22 or 24, but that's like architectural change in the model that produces better results. So yeah, there's only really two avenues to go. Either you feed it more data and see if you could tweak things or where you, once you get stuck there, you look at the architecture of the model, and you say, well, what are we not able to do better? Are we not able to render higher frequencies? Are we not able to predict certain emotions really well? Did we struggle with a particular accent, et cetera, then you kind of adjust the architecture from there. Anne: So, that's interesting. So it leads me to think about, let's say if I were to produce my own voice, my emotion, right, or my model emotion maybe would be completely different than maybe somebody else's or maybe the model's emotion or inclination toward that emotion. Is that correct to assume that, and it would be better if I wanted a model of my voice to upload more data? Zohaib: Yeah. So we definitely do that. So it's the fundamental model is built up of all sorts of accents and a variety of data. What we've seen is the dataset that we provide you to record typically captures -- it's like phonetically balanced. So it captures like most of the phonemes that you're -- that we speak in. So that kind of gets us really far, but we have had scenarios where we -- I, I recall one with this company out in New Zealand that, you know, recorded or sent over some data. And when we generated it to my non-oceanic ears, it sounds good. It sounds like, yes, like people in New Zealand sound like, and then we sent it over to them and, you know, there's like all sorts of like, oh, but it, New Zealand, we don't do -- Anne: Right. Zohaib: -- the, the R's like that. That's how Australians do the R's, and that accent is slightly different than the Australian. So when do you get, when you get really integrated, then yeah. We need to collect more data from that kind of source. Anne: Interesting. And is it also, let's say, for example, as a voice talent, right, I want to have my human voice, right, that I use and get paid for, but I also want to have my AI voice available, and maybe I want to do a lot of, I want to do IVR systems. I do a lot of them now anyways, figuring that that's going to be one genre that's going to utilize AI voices. If I were to give you data that I've already recorded, where I've done a lot of phone voices, would that make a better phone voice for me versus let's say something, like, I might do some acting and do some more dramatic emotional stuff? So if I wanted to create an AI voice for IVR systems, I would maybe give you more data that would be inclusive of that type of read, versus maybe I could have another AI voice that would be my, you know, my more dramatic voice that could be for video games or for whatever, and then work more on the emotional aspect of the data. Tanja: Yep. Yep, exactly. Zohaib: Absolutely. Everything is domain specific. Anne: Got it. Zohaib: So you give us data that's like IVR, it produces a better idea. Anne: Right. Yep. Got it. Now I assume that, you know, I can't create my own voice for free there or can I? That would be -- I don't imagine it's free to create my own voice, like, or an accurate representation of my voice? Zohaib: Yeah. So if it's like for a custom data set that we're ingesting, it's no longer free -- Anne: Got it. That makes sense. Zohaib: -- because there's some sort of pipeline that we put you through. Anne: Sure. Okay. Zohaib: But yeah, there are different, depending on which aspect you're coming from, whether you are a VO, you're a voice talent, or whether you are a company that just happens to have voice data, the pricing kind of varies from there. Anne: Well, I always found it interesting because I literally, I've been doing my VO BOSS podcast for four years. Literally I could give you probably the most conversational aspects of my voice if I were to just give you all that data. And that would create a very conversational Anne for an AI voice, I would hope anyway. Zohaib: Yep. Exactly. Tanja: Right. Anne: Okay. Right. Okay, so let me ask you a question. Do you sell AI voices as well? So let's say if somebody is using -- that they don't necessarily want to create their own voice. If they want to use your platform for, you know, creating audio files, can they use your voices at a, at a cost? Zohaib: Yeah. So we do have a marketplace. Anne: Okay. Zohaib: So we, we invited a lot of voice talent. And actually, if you just go and build a voice, we -- it rates, we rank your voice in some way, or we score your voice in some way, depending on what kind of microphone you use and what kind of support you've got. Anne: Okay. Zohaib: So we do invite people to add their voice to this marketplace. And then from there on, those voices are available for a selection to our customers. Anne: Got it. Zohaib: So our customers can say, oh, I really like Anne's voice. And they'll click on your name, they'll listen to a sample with your synthetic voice and be like, oh yeah, that's, that's exactly kind of what I want. And then they could propose a project to you -- Anne: Got it. Zohaib: -- and then we kind of facilitate that kind of agreement. Anne: So then my next question is, is there compensation and usage for any, let's say, company that wants to use my voice, and is it on a per job basis? Zohaib: Yeah. So the way that we look at it is, it's on a per character usage fee. Anne: Okay. Zohaib: So we do compensate voice actors on a per character level. Anne: Okay. Zohaib: So if you are building an IVR voice, is that more that that customer uses your voice? We show you exactly what that character usage is, so you can track it. And then there's some sort of compensation at the end of every month. Anne: Oh, okay. So it's a monthly thing? It's not necessarily based on per job? Tanja: Right. It's just how many characters were run through your -- Anne: Got it. Tanja: You can have multiple voice models, and maybe clients are using all of them, different clients. It would all simply be based on how much data these clients were running through these voice models collectively on a month to month basis. And the royalties would come out of the characters generated. Anne: Got it. So then if my voice were recognizable, right, and it was a great AI voice, I would be concerned as a voice talent that maybe the usage of that voice might not be in alliance with my brand, right? Or maybe they're using it for something that I would not necessarily be aligned with with my brand. Is there any sort of, you know, job control in that respect? Zohaib: Yep. So we have three levels of control that we offer at the moment. So the first is no control. We have plenty of voice talent that does -- that do like impersonations of voices, or they do like really specific character voices that aren't really tied to them in any way. And they're okay with anyone doing anything with those voices. So if you're making a game, the character in that game could be anything. It doesn't really matter to them. So that's like one level, I guess. Anne: Okay. Zohaib: I'll jump to the most extreme level, which is, we also have the ability for the talent to completely make it a manual process and make it so that there has to be a project description, and that it has to be accepted. They have to be sample lines that are discussed with that or show to the voice talent and then the project executes. And then there's like category in the middle, which is kind of like exploratory right now. But it's something that I think not only voice AI or hopefully not just us, but other people are also trying to do, which is something we call a content filter. Anne: Yeah, mm-hmm, yeah. Zohaib: So the idea is that we're able to detect with texts whether something is political -- Anne: Yeah. Zohaib: -- whether it's not safe for work, and we're automatically able to prevent that from ever being generated. So at the moment, it errs to the side of caution. So there are a lot of false positives, but that's because we want to be extra safe for that scenario -- Anne: Sure, absolutely. Zohaib: -- where, you know, if you've mention Donald Trump on there -- Anne: Sure. Zohaib: -- it'll most likely say, hey, that's political -- Anne: Right. Zohaib: -- and doesn't want you to say anything. Anne: Or if there's -- yeah. Or maybe there's swear words or, you know, words that I would never say myself -- Tanja: Right. Anne: -- wouldn't be represented -- okay. Very interesting. So tell me a little bit about, I saw something on your website about Resemble Protect. What is that, what does that do for us, Resemblizer? Is that what it -- Zohaib: Yeah, exactly. So that's an open source project that we have. It's, it's on GitHub, github.com. Anne: Is that what you were just describing to me? Was that the Resemble Protect or? Zohaib: Nope. So yeah, Resemble Protect [inaudible] it's the same thing. Anne: Got it. Zohaib: The idea behind Resemblizer was when we first started, there were a lot of components that kind of build up our voice model. So you can assume that since we're detecting emotion, we can also offer just emotion detection as a service, since we're detecting different sorts of languages and different sorts of voices, we can kind of offer -- like we do some sort of fingerprinting to identify or disentangle your voice from the text that you're reading or your accent, et cetera. So Resemblizer basically is this open source package. It ships with, or it comes with like this pre-trade model. So what that means is as a user of that open source or free package, you don't need to train anything. There's no ML working to do. You don't need to buy compute or have powerful computers. Because open source project is basically our way of looking at this problem of speaker identification and deepfake protection, and basically looking at it and saying like, this is like a problem for everyone to solve. And this is a machine learning network that's able to distinguish between fakes and reals. And we kind of put it out in the public because it's not our core product or anything. So we're like, well, let's put this out there and see what other people can do with it. So we've had people who are trading that model with a lot more data that we traded with, so like different languages, et cetera. Anne: Sure. Well, that's amazing. I think that's really wonderful. And that is an open source project that you began and put it out there? Zohaib: Exactly. Anne: That's really great, because I've always said that there's gotta be some sort of a way for us to figure out where is our voice being used. I mean, we have enough problems as it is, and I'm sure Tanja can identify that we don't know if our voice is being used, you know, in another region or, you know, another campaign that maybe we didn't agree to in the first place. I mean, that's always been -- Tanja: Right. Anne: -- you know, something that voice artists have been concerned with is usage. And there really hasn't been a way that I'm familiar with outside of some other voice talent and saying, "hey, I heard your commercial in California. I thought you said it was only for east coast." And so that's really how we found out before. So I would think with AI voices, I would hope, that there would be technology that would allow us to figure out where is this voice being used. And also, I guess my question would be, does that also take care of if let's say, 'cause you have a model, right? I can speak Spanish, even though I don't. So is there a way, is there hybrid models of, of AI voices, like two or three different people and then youcreate a whole new voice? Is that a thing to create new voices like that? And then if so, how do you know if your voice is involved in there? Zohaib: Yeah. So we've been experimenting with a technique that kind of does what you just described, which is like blending voices together. We've been using it largely for a different purpose. So we work with customers who are trying to get really particular pronunciation of words or a really particular performance, but they want to keep the original voice that they're, that they're using or the target voice. But that target voice, we just don't have enough data in that target place to get that kind of pronunciation. So typically what we've done in the past is refer using Tanja's voice and her voice has said something in particular, and you want to control exactly how she's pronouncing those words. What we typically do is augment her data with someone like your data. And then we kind of blend some of it together enough that we can disentangle the way that you're pronouncing, pronouncing the words versus how she's saying them. And we can blend different aspects of voices together that way. But yeah. Anne: Is that, is that like a separate model? Like, you know what I mean? Like is that like a new model that you've generated? Zohaib: You can think of it as a new model. Anne: Okay. Zohaib: You can think of it as new model, but our --so that's when you, when we say model, it's always kind of weird because models are models are comprised of models. Like there's a model that just does like emotion detection. There's a model that just does pitch detection. There's one that's just looking at languages and making sure it's conditioning on the right languages. There's one for like gender, et cetera, speaker. And these are all like disentangled pieces. And then you could, these are like blocks, and you could put one block with the other block and get something different, if that makes any sense, but they're fairly modular by design. Anne: Okay. Okay. Well, I do want to mention that I did check your website for any terms of service and ethics policies, which I just want to make sure that my BOSS listeners know that yes, I found a wonderful page on that. And I really liked that you had a statement that said once your voiced is created, that we own all the rights to that voice, and that you don't use that voice data to train other models, which is something I've not seen on some other websites that generate AI voices. So I appreciate that, nor do we resell the voice data to third-party companies. So yeah, I appreciate that you have that page. And I just want to kind of put that out there. So BOSSes know I like to work with companies that are concerned with ethics in this. It's kind of a crazy time for us as a lot of voice talent are fearful that they're going to be losing a lot of work. So with that, I think my last questions to you guys would be, first of all, Tanja, where do you see the future of voiceover, let's say, in five years? Tanja: That's a great question. So I really do think that we are in the beginning of a new market, but that said, I don't think that we're in danger as voice talent of losing our jobs. And just because AI is going to be very powerful, and companies are going to want to utilize it, because for them it's less paperwork. And maybe these are companies that don't necessarily go out on Fiverr or voices.com or look at people's websites to find talent. They just don't have the bandwidth, or they would rather just work with a third party where they have a selection of voices already available, and they just sign an NDA agreement or something, and then they move forward. And then, so these companies are normally, in my opinion, not places we would be searching for clients anyhow -- Anne: Yeah. Tanja: -- or not clients that are readily available to us in our search, auditions or working with our agents or what have you. So that said, a lot of these places are going to be using AI, in my opinion, mainly for IVR, conversational with all these apps that are coming out, new apps, continuously, virtual assistants, probably smaller characters in games, non-player characters, and even e-learning, I think e-learning is going to be huge, or even folks making their websites more accessible, I guess, to all, by having an AI read their blogs or maybe customizing ads. Anne: Right, sure. Tanja: So you, you get the idea, it's like it's endless of what the use cases could possibly be. I think that this is a nice blend, a nice way for voice talent, to get additional marketing that maybe they would have to do themselves. And it would take longer. They'd work with new clients that maybe they wouldn't have sought out initially. And also their voice would be used ethically, I would say in five years, because I think all the companies that are not paying attention to ethics right now, in five years, we're going to know who they are. There's only so far you can go -- Anne: Yeah, yeah. Tanja: -- before your -- somebody's going to come out, concerns are brought up. So yeah, I really do think, you know, we'll be more educated then as voice talent on what the market is. And I think if we get in on the market now, we'll be there when it's saturated in the future, we'll still be there. So I don't see any problems or concerns myself as a voice talent. We just need to educate ourselves and really ask those hard questions and make sure that it is something that we're comfortable with and then move forward. Passive income is never a bad thing. Anne: Well, I agree with you there. [laughs] Zohaib, where do you see the future of AI and the future of Resemble in five years? Zohaib: Yeah, so Tanja kind of mentioned all sorts of interesting concepts that we might see in the future or we're already seeing now. So that's, that's one thing. So there are a lot of interesting things that we can do. And honestly, I'm in the camp that I don't quite know exactly what the answer to that question is. I can make really good predictions, but a lot more people are a lot more creative than I am. So they will figure out where to use this. So already we have some interesting use cases within EdTech and within banks to like old companies that you would think would never do anything innovative, but since they have the solution now, they're able to be a bit more flexible with what they can do. But in the long run, I think a good parallel to look at is, if you look at how movies were made and especially like visuals, so you went from this world of actors to like stunt actors perhaps, or from stunt actors, actors, whatever you had for a long time, we did that little dance. We went to like a green screen -- Anne: Yeah. Zohaib: -- you know, which is more recent. Then we had like technology like mocap that came out where you just wear a suit, and then you kind of just do the action and maybe the face stays still. And that's, that's the rest. There's a, there's a movie on Netflix called The Irishman -- Anne: Yup. Zohaib: -- which they take, I believe, Robert DeNiro and make him older. And those are like all things that, you know, that's a very good path to look at when you're looking at audio, because we're lucky in audio that we're kind of the last people that people think about. It's like kind like the addition at the very end, like, oh no, we needed someone to voice over. And what I think we want to do is kind of become like the first thought that people have is like, oh, this is a core part of the -- Anne: Sure. Zohaib: -- entire movie or the entire product. Anne: Absolutely. Zohaib: And you have a lot of these scenarios where you have these gorgeous looking movies that get like really high budgets, and the, the dialogue and the VO is just so underwhelming because it's such a last minute effort to piece that together. And sometimes the writing and the dialogue doesn't kind of go hand in hand, or sometimes there's just not enough time to improvise as voiceover talent. And we kind of want to change the way that works. And I think like in five years or so, you will start seeing a lot more experiences that will involve AI voices. And I'm not sure if those experiences are what we see today. Perhaps you'll start seeing dubs of movies and films where the original voiceover talent is -- that type of voice is kept and the character is still kept, but they're now speaking Mandarin or Japanese or Spanish without worrying that, hey, it sounds like a different character that can be jarring to the entire experience. Anne: Right, right. Zohaib: So yeah, there's, I think there are plenty of things, but if you just take a peek at like the computer vision and the visual world, there's like a pretty clear path or some sort of a vague path where AI voices can go as well. Anne: Well, you guys have been so gracious. Thank you, both, so very much for joining me today and having such an interesting conversation. Where can my listeners go to find out more about you guys? Zohaib: Yeah. You can go to www.resemble.ai. We're also Resemble.AI on practically every social media thing out there. You can email any of us. You could get all of us if you email team@resemble.ai. They'll send an email to everybody. Yeah. You can find out more. Anne: Well, thank you, guys, again so very much. It's been a pleasure having you here. I am going to give a great, big shout-out to my sponsor, ipDTL. You two can connect like BOSSes and find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week, and we'll see you next week. Bye! Zohaib: Bye. Thanks for having us. Tanja: Bye, thank you so much for having us. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to Coast connectivity via ipDTL. CONNECT + FOLLOW Twitter @vo_boss Instagram @vo_boss Facebook /VO BOSS YouTube VO BOSS SUBSCRIBE YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/VOBOSS Spotify https://rb.gy/meopx8 Apple Podcasts https://rb.gy/chdamm Amazon Music https://rb.gy/luw83x Google Podcasts https://rb.gy/koc3ls Stitcher https://rb.gy/hslkgj TuneIn http://tun.in/piZHU iHeart Radio https://rb.gy/uixh90 Pandora https://rb.gy/knoz7c SPONSORED BY ipDTL: https://ipdtl.com Anne Ganguzza Voice Productions: https://anneganguzza.com

I've known Alexis Ohanian for almost fifteen years, ever since we were in the trenches together as part of the first Y Combinator cohort. He is best known as the co-founder of Reddit, a fellow former partner at YC, and the founder of his new venture fund, Seven Seven Six.  Alexis and I became close friends during our time at YC together, and I witnessed the trials and tribulations he went through while building Reddit first-hand. I've had the pleasure of watching my friend grow into a great founder, leader, investor, and parent. In this episode, Alexis opens up about his personal struggles during the early days of Reddit, the challenges of modern parenthood, and the philosophy behind Seven Seven Six. I really appreciate Alexis for being so vulnerable in this episode, and I think it is a powerful message that all founders need to hear. Follow Alexis on Twitter here, and find out more about Seven Seven Six here. Enjoyed this episode? The incredible stories on this podcast are made possible by our sponsors, check them out to support The Quest Pod:Universe | The best mobile command centre for building your online business and content.Cashapp | Spend, save, invest in stocks and cryptocurrency easily 

Travel expert Adam Goldstein, creator of Hipmunk, creates his second travel app By scottmcgrew

Hipmunk's founders are building a successor to their now-defunct flight search service. The startup was acquired by SAP-owned travel and expense platform Concur in 2016, and its CEO Adam Goldstein departed in 2018.

The Hipmunk story is one of idea versus reality, Silicon Valley versus the status quo, big challenges and an eventual sale to an unlikely suitor.The company's co-founder, Adam Goldstein, is now candid about what happened to the company from its creation in 2010 until the SAP Concur acquisition in 2016.From the original vision and how it evolved under the glare of an adoring West Coast tech press and curious travel media, to appearing at The Phocuswright Conference for the first time and facing the snark of a vocal rival CEO - Hipmunk had quite a ride.Goldstein joins us as the latest guest on the How I Got Here podcast. HIGH is a weekly show produced by PhocusWire and Mozio, aimed at getting the inside stories behind startups and innovation in travel and transportation.It's hosted by PhocusWire's Kevin May, and Mozio co-founder and CEO David Litwak.

When the definitive history of online travel is written in the decades to come, Steve Hafner will be remembered for many things.It may well be for his signature and extremely direct style of commenting on the industry ("Hipmunk - road kill" being one of his most infamous) during countless appearances at travel events.But hopefully the pivotal role he played alongside Paul English in the creation of Kayak will be his legacy.After learning the travel business at Orbitz, Hafner met English and the company was formed in 2004 with a mission to get the widest array of air tickets as possible in front of users.The rest is history (an IPO and then a sale to Booking Holdings for $1.8 billion in 2012), as the saying goes, but it's a fascinating example of determination and smart thinking that brought Kayak to where it is today.Hafner is the latest guest on the How I Got Here podcast. HIGH is a weekly show produced by PhocusWire and Mozio, aimed at getting the inside stories behind startups and innovation in travel and transportation.

Digital #10Do you remember Black Mirror’s Nosedive episode? We’re a step closer to it. After a £2.5M listing has been rented to organize a rave party, Airbnb has developed software that can analyze guests’ online personas to calculate the chances of them trashing apartments. The software scans for traits such as “neuroticism,” involvement in crimes,” “narcissism,” “psychopathy,” and -poetically enough, “Machiavellianism…”Digital.#9MakeMyTrip, added destination videos (covering 130 destinations) to its mobile app to inspire travelers. The new service is called Trip Ideas and, according to the Indian OTA, 10% of its users are already accessing video contents. Currently, Trip.com owns a 49% share in MakeMyTrip.Digital.#8Great (or terrible, depending on who’s reading) news for Facebook: WhatsApp is about to launch its advertising platform. The ad feature will be launched somewhere in 2020.Digital.#7AI-fueled RMS, Beonprice, received €2.5M in funding, bringing the company’s total funding to €5M. Check out my interview with Cristina Hernández Santonja, Business Development & Strategic at BeonPrice, here.Digital.#6Remember Joe Dante’s classic, Innerspace? Now it’s a reality! Xenobots are “entirely new life-forms,” created from frogs’ stem cells. They’re so small that they can be injected in the human body. Researcher Joshua Bongard stated that xenobots are “neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.” Xenobots can be used to clean up radioactive waste, get plastic out of the oceans, and — of course- transport medication inside human bodies. Xenobots can live over a week without external nutrients, but their lifespan can increase to several weeks in the right environment.Digital.#5Hyatt Hotels partnered with meditation app Headspace, offering mindfulness exercises to both guests, employees, and corporate customers. Hyatt staff will be offered a complimentary subscription to Headspace, and guests will receive access via in-room content.Digital.#4The metasearch industry is not in great shape: after SkyScanner tried to remove “the pain of meta,” and Trivago showed disappointing Q3, now Hipmunk gets shut down. Who’ll be next?Digital.#3According to a LinkedIn survey, “blockchain will be the most in-demand hard skill in 2020.” Blockchain overtook skills such as cloud computing, AI, and UX design, and, interestingly enough, the 2019 LinkedIn list did not include blockchain at all…Digital.#2Yahoo Finance published an interesting piece on how Google is hurting OTAs, metasearch engines, and hotel review sites. Here are a few takeaways: “Google Travel (…) was launched last year. It remains a breakthrough move for the company in this market. (…) Google Travel allows the company to deliver personalized travel experience to users, (…) the search giant is banking on integration of AI into its travel tools. (…) All the above mentioned strong endeavors by Google are likely to hurt the sentiments of the online travel agencies (OTA) further.” You can read the full article here.Digital.#1Born as a personal project, Bespoke became a product that is now used by millions of travelers. Today, Bespoke’s chatbot assistant, Bebot, allows foreign tourists to discover hidden gems in the area quickly and encourages in-market spent by visitors. The chatbot also helps cities and transport authorities to promote sustainable tourism by making recommendations that spread the visitor-flow across multiple sites and attractions. Today, during the live broadcast of Digital. I will have the privilege to be joined by its Founder and CEO, Akemi Tsunagawa. Make sure to tune in on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, or directly on the website at 3:00 PM CET.

If you're still using Hipmunk for trip planning, it's time to find another site. Sooner than later, really. The Hipmunk team announced this afternoon that it'll be shutting down in just one week's time. Come January 23rd, says the blog post, both the Hipmunk website and app will be shuttered. The team also tweeted: We're saying goodbye. On Jan. 23, 2020, the Hipmunk product will be retired; the app and website will no longer be available at that time.

In a little over a week, the travel metasearch engine Hipmunk will shut down. It's an abrupt and disappointing end for a product acquired by SAP Concur around three and a half years ago. It didn't have to go this way, though. We're now hearing that Hipmunk co-founders Adam Goldstein and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (both of whom left Hipmunk in years prior) made an offer to buy the company back rather than have it shutdown, to no avail.

Welcome to TechCrunch daily news, a round up of the top tech news of the day. -- Travel site Hipmunk is shutting down -- Google brings its security key capabilities to iPhones -- and Ev Williams' venture firm raises a new fund. Here's your Daily Crunch for January 15, 2020. First up: Four years after being acquired, Hipmunk is shutting down. Founded by Adam J.

More juicy details about the Galaxy S20 lineup, Google Smart Lock lets you do 2FA on your iPhone, proof that no-code development is the new hotness, why do the Feds even need Apple to unlock those iPhones, and Jack Dorsey says we are never, ever, ever going to get… a Edit Tweet button. Probably.Sponsors:MetalabBelovedRobot.com/ridehomeLinks:Exclusive: Leaked Samsung Galaxy S20+ Hands-on confirms 120Hz display, ultrasonic under-display fingerprint scanner, and no headphone jack (XDAdevelopers)You can now use iPhones as Google security keys for 2FA (9to5Google)Google acquires no-code app development platform AppSheet (VentureBeat)Four years after being acquired, Hipmunk is shutting down (TechCrunch)Apple Takes a (Cautious) Stand Against Opening a Killer’s iPhones (NYTimes)European Venture Report: VC Dollars Rise In 2019 (Crunchbase News)Disney+ was the most downloaded app in the US in Q4 2019 (TechCrunch)Twitter’s Jack Dorsey on edit button: ‘We’ll probably never do it’ (The Verge)Subscribe to the ad-free feed here.

Welcome to TechCrunch daily news, a round up of the top tech news of the day. -- Travel site Hipmunk is shutting down -- Google brings its security key capabilities to iPhones -- and Ev Williams’ venture firm raises a new fund. Here’s your Daily Crunch for January 15, 2020. First up: Four years after being acquired, Hipmunk is shutting down. Founded by Adam J.

I had been looking to interview an engineering executive to get their insights into the hiring/recruiting process. And to my great fortune, I was able to have Michelle Grover on the podcast. Michelle is a VP of Development at SAP focused on a variety of products including Hipmunk, Concur Mobile, and TripIt.  I appreciate Michelle being on the podcast as she shares with us:  Her journey into engineering Views on diversity and inclusion Advice on how recruiters can work more closely with engineering teams How delegating is her productivity hack To get in touch with Michelle, connect with her: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-grover-24b835149/

Steve Huffman is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Reddit, home to thousands of communities, endless conversation, and authentic human connection. To date, Reddit has raised over $550m in funding from some of the world's leading investors including Sequoia Capital, Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Sam Altman, Josh Kushner, Alfred Lin and Tencent, just to name a few. Steve started his career at Y Combinator as one of their first alumni back in 2005. At YC, Steve co-founded Reddit with Alexis Ohanian, which they sold in 2006 to Conde Naste Publications. In 2010, Steve co-founded Hipmunk, making business travel seamless and easy. Then in 2015, Steve re-joined Reddit as their CEO. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Steve made his way into the world of startups and came to be one of the very first ever entrants in the now hailed Y Combinator? How did that lead to the founding of Reddit? Why did Steve return to Reddit, the company he founded, in 2015? 2.) What were Steve's biggest lessons from his journey with Hipmunk when it came to product feedback and iteration? How does Steve assess people's reliance on data today to drive product decisions? Why does he believe 3 criteria must be considered? What are the other two? What time did Steve see the confidence of his own intuition really increase? 3.) How does Steve think about stress management today? What was he like when he was younger in his relationship to stress? What did he actively do to change his relationship to stress? How has Steve seen himself change and develop as a CEO? What have been the inflection points? What has he struggled and also made mistakes in the journey? 4.) What have been Steve's biggest lessons when it comes to hiring truly A* talent at scale? What are the commonalities in the very best hires Steve has made? In the cases of it not working, what does Steve advise founders on the right way to let someone go? How does one do it with efficiency and compassion? 5.) Why does Steve believe that in dense cities, self-driving cars will not be that useful? How does Steve envisage the future of consumer transportation? What does he believe are the alternatives to self-driving cars? How does Steve see the future for the unbundling of social networks? Will they be unbundled into specific communities? How will this look? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Steve’s Fave Book: Shogun: The First Novel of the Asian saga: A Novel of Japan As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Have you wondered on how we plan and book our travel? Find amazing places to stay around the world? In this episode, we reveal our secrets on how we do this. In this episode we share 10+ years of their travel lifestyle and give you insights from their very best curated experiences. We all know that feeling of getting off a plane for the first time, arriving at our destination, being so hungry and tired, we literally blow a bunch of our trips budget in a tourist trap restaurant in the cities main square, just to fuel our desperation. The No.1 tip any traveller should hold to, is prior planning. Alex researches the heck out of every detail before he even book the flights. Infact, the flights aren't the first thing he looks for.   It's essential to find the right place in the right location, that is at the heart of your interests. Are you looking for a beach holiday, a city break or something in nature. All of these options come with their own unique requirements, and planning is the only way to maximise your experience whatever your interests are.   “Travel is the way to self discovery, each time you do it, you know more about what you like, what suits you and what your tastes are” - Alex Ikonn [11:00]   Alex and Mimi share all the tools and secrets they use to make every trip like a dream experience. And you can do it too.   You'll hear this and much more:   How exploring your own city for new experiences that you didn't know were there, can be just as fun, rewarding and cheaper than travel Why you should set your expectations before you go? Be realistic. Budget Vs Luxury, when is it time to drop the lower quality option? From maps to flights, hotels and restaurants, Google should be your first choice tool for travel. Get a clear idea of the location before you choose by pinning your findings to Maps and Pinterest Visualise your surroundings in advance with street view. Prepackaged vacations are fine if you want a lazy, no pressure vacation, but they don't maximise your possibilities. How staying with a host can be much more rewarding than getting your own place It can be cheaper than an hotel if you split the cost and rent a villa Find the worst reviews, don't only read the good ones. Check if there is going to be issues you don't want to deal with Never trust Trip Advisor, find your own curated referrals. Blogs are your friend. Use a business account to collect fly points Price matching and cross check every option Check airlines directly, some of the cheapest flights aren't on comparison sites, same with hotels The last minute myth.   Where to stay tools: Airbnb.com Onefinestay.com Plumguide.com Homeaway.com Booking.com Vrbo.com/ Homestay.com Couchsurfing.com   Our top 3 Luxury curated stays: Tablethotels.com Mrandmrssmith.com Designhotels.com Flight finder tools: Google.com/flights Kayak.com Expedia.com Flightfox.com Hipmunk.com Skyscanner.net Azair.com

Special Guest: Keith King For money-saving travel tips, check out www.keithkingreport.com/ Colleen & Catie's Picks for Money-Saving Travel Colleen Destination: Chicago, big cities are doable on a budget! Accommodations: A place like Stay Alfred or AirBnB that allows you to rent a home or apartment are a great way to save money if you’re bringing a family. Meal/Restaurant: If you do stay in a home or apartment, you’ll have a kitchen so you can cook your own meals. My family and I did this during a stay at Stay Alfred in Chicago. Free/Low Cost Activity: Museum Free Days Parks, art shows, festivals Beaches for swimming and relaxing Money-saving tip: If you’re traveling to a big city, don’t stay right downtown. Stay in a hotel in a nearby suburb or neighborhood, where the cost may be lower. Catie Destination: The Grand Canyon, Arizona or Napa, California Accommodations: Camping is a great way to save money and experience the Grand Canyon. Meal/Restaurant: Bring your own lunch or make sandwiches along the way to save money. If you’re going to Napa, you can also bring your own bottle of wine with you. Free/Low Cost Activity: State or National Parks for hiking. Exploring the local towns and window shopping. Money-saving tip: If you’re driving, bring your own snacks and water, so you’re not stopping and spending extra money along the way. You can even brew your own iced coffee and put it in individual bottles so you can enjoy that afternoon pick me up without the Starbucks price tag. "What's" with the "Trip Sisters" What’s in Your Suitcase? USB-C Travel Dock from OWC - Available for $28.98 on www.macsales.com This travel dock that allows you to charge multiple devices at once with ports for USB 3.1 Gen 1 | SD Card | HDMI | Mac | PC. Also supports 4K display resolution – up to 4096 x 2160 at 30Hz and is fully compatible with all Thunderbolt 3 equipped Macs & PCs. What’s on your phone? Swagbucks - Free, available on iOS or Android Swagbucks is a free online rewards program where you can do simple things like take a survey, watch a video, or shop through their portal and earn cash or gift cards while doing so. What’s the tip? Tips for Traveling on a Budget (from MoneyUnder30.com) 1. Decide what you need—and what you can live without - Prioritize what you want on your vacation. 2. Join a travel rewards program - It’s free to sign up and if you’re new to the program, you may be able to earn tens of thousands in bonus points for opening up a travel rewards credit card. Travel rewards programs aren’t limited to airlines—hotels have them, too. And you can earn points on a wide variety of purchases through the loyalty program’s partners. 3. Do your research to find the lowest airfare - WhichBudget is a good place to go next. You can search for cheap flights on hundreds of airlines in over 200 countries. Also try to limit your packing to a carry-on bag so you can avoid checked luggage fees. You can do laundry in the middle of your trip if you need to. 4. Find a free place to stay - Plan a trip to a friend’s city and ask to sleep on a couch or spare bed. Another option is CouchSurfing or MindMyHouse for house sitting options. 5. List your space with airbnb - Get extra travel money by renting out your home on AirBnB or a similar site while you’re gone. 6. Curb your dining expenses by cooking at home - Use your kitchen at an AirBnB to save money on eating out. 7. Be flexible with a last-minute deal - If you’re not picky about the timing or destination of your next trip, you can save money with last-minute deals on hotel rooms, vacation packages and airfare. (Hotel Tonight (hotels), Jetsetter (hotels and packages), Hipmunk (flights))

“Para viajar nuestra prioridad debe ser ahorrar”¿A quién no le gusta viajar? Quien no lo hace es porque aún no ha puesto en orden sus finanzas, por eso en esta ocasión en “Gimnasio Financiero”, Francisco Eguiza e Isabel Gómez Aguado conversan y comparten algunos consejos y recomendaciones para planificar nuestras salidas¿Cómo conseguir un balance entre vivir bien, viajar, salir a comer o al cine, y además mantener unas finanzas estables? Para Francisco Eguiza e Isabel Gómez Aguado este equilibrio se logra en el momento que decidimos establecer prioridades dentro de nuestros gastos. “Mucha gente dice que no viaja porque no tiene dinero. Pero pienso que en realidad lo que quieren decir es que no viajan porque no se han organizado ni han planificado, o porque no es su prioridad. Si estamos interesados en viajar, tendríamos que poner un ahorro para esa salida en un primer lugar”, comenta Paco.Una de las principales recomendaciones que ofrecen los conductores de “Gimnasio Financiero” es que evitemos en lo posible a las agencias de viajes, ya que podemos encontrar opciones de hospedaje más económicas en sitios de internet especializados, sólo es cuestión de familiarizarnos a consultar estos recursos digitales.“Una agencia de viajes puede manejar precios muy costosos. Lo mejor es ir a internet y buscar sitios de vuelos baratos, de hoteles baratos, promociones, etc. Por ejemplo, sitios como Hipmunk, Kayak, Expedia son muy conocidos y populares entre la gente que viaja. En México, como el internet aún no permea tanto en la cultura, se desconocen estas opciones y por eso las agencias abusan con sus costos”.Otro consejo sería el de no tenerle miedo a los hostales. Paco señala que existen sitios web como TripAdvisor donde todos los hostales u hoteles que están incluidos valen la pena. “Revisen las reseñas, ahí se darán cuenta si es un lugar limpio, si la gente se queja del servicio o, por el contrario, dejan comentarios favorables. En Hostelworld puedes ver fotos de los hostales, las regaderas, del baño, cosas que a los viajeros nos interesa mucho”. Durante el viaje, también es importante considerar los gastos de comida y entretenimiento, para esto hay que delimitar un presupuesto específico para esos consumos; si sobra algo de ese monto se puede acumular para el día siguiente. En el caso de la comida, Isabel recomienda llevar snacks durante los paseos o recorridos, con el fin de que, si uno siente hambre, no comprar y con esto evitar los “gastos hormiga”.Otro punto a tomar en cuenta en estos gastos extra, es el de las compras. Paco recomienda no hacer shopping dentro de un viaje: “Tal vez sea muy complejo, pero el peor gasto cuando viajas es el shopping; y es que ropa encuentras aquí y en San Diego, o en París, etc. Además, la ropa de esos países la puedes comprar en Amazon a precios módicos”.

“Para viajar nuestra prioridad debe ser ahorrar”¿A quién no le gusta viajar? Quien no lo hace es porque aún no ha puesto en orden sus finanzas, por eso en esta ocasión en “Gimnasio Financiero”, Francisco Eguiza e Isabel Gómez Aguado conversan y comparten algunos consejos y recomendaciones para planificar nuestras salidas¿Cómo conseguir un balance entre vivir bien, viajar, salir a comer o al cine, y además mantener unas finanzas estables? Para Francisco Eguiza e Isabel Gómez Aguado este equilibrio se logra en el momento que decidimos establecer prioridades dentro de nuestros gastos. “Mucha gente dice que no viaja porque no tiene dinero. Pero pienso que en realidad lo que quieren decir es que no viajan porque no se han organizado ni han planificado, o porque no es su prioridad. Si estamos interesados en viajar, tendríamos que poner un ahorro para esa salida en un primer lugar”, comenta Paco.Una de las principales recomendaciones que ofrecen los conductores de “Gimnasio Financiero” es que evitemos en lo posible a las agencias de viajes, ya que podemos encontrar opciones de hospedaje más económicas en sitios de internet especializados, sólo es cuestión de familiarizarnos a consultar estos recursos digitales.“Una agencia de viajes puede manejar precios muy costosos. Lo mejor es ir a internet y buscar sitios de vuelos baratos, de hoteles baratos, promociones, etc. Por ejemplo, sitios como Hipmunk, Kayak, Expedia son muy conocidos y populares entre la gente que viaja. En México, como el internet aún no permea tanto en la cultura, se desconocen estas opciones y por eso las agencias abusan con sus costos”.Otro consejo sería el de no tenerle miedo a los hostales. Paco señala que existen sitios web como TripAdvisor donde todos los hostales u hoteles que están incluidos valen la pena. “Revisen las reseñas, ahí se darán cuenta si es un lugar limpio, si la gente se queja del servicio o, por el contrario, dejan comentarios favorables. En Hostelworld puedes ver fotos de los hostales, las regaderas, del baño, cosas que a los viajeros nos interesa mucho”. Durante el viaje, también es importante considerar los gastos de comida y entretenimiento, para esto hay que delimitar un presupuesto específico para esos consumos; si sobra algo de ese monto se puede acumular para el día siguiente. En el caso de la comida, Isabel recomienda llevar snacks durante los paseos o recorridos, con el fin de que, si uno siente hambre, no comprar y con esto evitar los “gastos hormiga”.Otro punto a tomar en cuenta en estos gastos extra, es el de las compras. Paco recomienda no hacer shopping dentro de un viaje: “Tal vez sea muy complejo, pero el peor gasto cuando viajas es el shopping; y es que ropa encuentras aquí y en San Diego, o en París, etc. Además, la ropa de esos países la puedes comprar en Amazon a precios módicos”.

Paige Totaro is a travel blogger and travel group planner with two twin girls. When her children were 12 years old, she knew it was time for the entire family to take a year off and go traveling. How did she manage to do this without losing her mind? Find out on this week’s episode of Go Solo Live!   Key Takeaways: *Who is Paige and where is she currently located? *How did Paige get started solo traveling? *It took Paige a year of planning before she and her family could take a year off to travel. *Paige was very happy she did a family trip because everybody bonded together as a family. *What was Paige’s travel experience before she traveled with her family? *Paige took a writer’s workshop where she got to hike, think, and write with a group of ladies! *It’s not always practical to travel with the family. *What was it like to travel solo in Cuba? *How does Paige’s husband feel about her traveling solo? *What’s next for Paige? *What tips does Paige have for the moms who want to travel with the whole family? *Paige shares where she finds her cheap flights.   Mentioned in This Episode: Transformviatravel.com Transform via Travel on Facebook @GoSoloLive on Twitter Email: Jennifer@TransformviaTravel.com Patreon.com/gosololive Go Solo! by Jennifer Buchholz Kiwi.com/us Skyscanner.net Hipmunk.com Cheapoair.com Secretflying.com   Connect with Paige: Website Unquotetravel.com Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest YouTube   Leave a Review: Did you like this episode? Please leave an honest review on iTunes with your feedback! Also, please subscribe to the Go Solo Live podcast on iTunes, to get notified when a new episode gets released. I appreciate your listening to this week’s show. And tune in next week for another great guest.

Glenn speaks with industry legend Lee Pillsbury about his career and newest passion, hotel industry technology. Through his investment arm Thayer Ventures he owns pieces of many companies you've heard of, such as Hipmunk, Duetto, Nor1, social tables and many more. First, Glenn talks about technology from another angle, slot machines. Skill based slot machines are here and Glenn gave one a spin (yeah, bad pun). He battled against the classic aliens of Space Invaders and shares why the industry is banking on slot machines that allow users to bring their skill rather than just pray for luck. You guessed it, it's all about those millennials. Visit our sponsor: Kevin Barry Fine Art Hear how Kevin Barry Fine Art is Reinventing Hotel Art for an Interactive and Social Generation Subscribe on iTunes: No Vacancy with Glenn Haussman Subscribe on Android: https://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Ifu34iwhrh7fishlnhiuyv7xlsm Send your comments and questions to Glenn@rouse.media.  Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/novacancy Follow Glenn @TravelingGlenn Learn more at http://novacancy.libsyn.com Produced by Jeff Polly: http://www.endpointmultimedia.com/

This week, Travis and Stewart talk about the world's first dedicated Snapchat conference/awards show and a new solution that solves the ephemeral messaging platform's biggest issue. We then interview Adam Goldstein of Hipmunk -- the travel company and app that was just acquired by Concur -- and talk chatbots, natural language understanding, and the never-satisfied customer. And boy, do those customers ask some challenging questions.

In this podcast Kelly offers his best tips, strategies, suppositions, advice resources to help educators make the absolute most of their summer break. Mentioned in this podcast:  P90X workout program.  Body Beast DVD workout program.  Coach.me app for the iPhone. Find it on the iTunes store.  Moleskine Journal: Here's the journal I use to reflect, plan, and record everything that matters. Love it! Kayak.com and HipMunk are great tools for planning a trip. Find both on the iTunes store.  Books to read: Along Came a Leader by Kelly Croy. What makes a better school? A better class? Leaders! This book is for you, your colleagues, and your students.  Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess: This book makes you get excited about teaching.  Freeletics app for your iPhone. Great new app for getting fit. Find it on the iTunes store.  Teacher Step: Online grad classes for teachers. Inexpensive. 9 Months to finish. Use your search engine to locate these courses.  Muse headband to practice Mindfulness. Headspace app to practice Mindfulness. Breathe app to practice mindfulness.  Rumble Roller: Pamper yourself and give yourself the gift of a massage every day.  Thank you cards. Send handwritten notes of thanks to people who helped you this past year. These are cool "chalk board" thank you cards.  Teachers Pay Teachers: upload a lesson or two. You will be happy you did.  Explain Everything app for the iPad. This is one of my favorite iPad apps. Find it on the iTunes store.  (Enjoy the podcast & please subscribe & leave your review on iTunes. Thanks!) Kelly Croy is an educator, author and speaker.  You can subscribe and listen to his Wired Educator Podcast here. Invite Kelly to speak at your event here. Subscribe to The Wired Educator blog here. Kelly's book, Along Came a Leader is available for purchase here.   

This week’s Travel Today with Peter Greenberg comes from the Phocuswright Conference 2015 in Hollywood, Florida. The Phocuswright Conference has built a travel symposium consisting of over 1500 attendees from all over the globe. Attendees can be described as today’s travel, tourism, and hospitality industry’s most influential leaders, visionary thinkers, and innovators around the world. Not to be overlooked are the brightest 35 leaders in the travel industry who are under the age of 35 and take part in the Young Leaders Summit during the conference. Here to speak with Peter Greenberg about the event is Tony D’Astolfo, the Phocuswright Managing Director, who will speak about all the trends taking place during this year’s Phocuswright Conference. Adam Goldstein, the Co-Founder and CEO of Hipmunk is also joining to discuss how Hipmunk works and can work to any traveler’s advantage. All this and more on this episode of Travel Today with Peter Greenberg. 

This week’s Travel Today with Peter Greenberg comes from the Phocuswright Conference 2015 in Hollywood, Florida. The Phocuswright Conference has built a travel symposium consisting of over 1500 attendees from all over the globe. Attendees can be described as today’s travel, tourism, and hospitality industry’s most influential leaders, visionary thinkers, and innovators around the world. Not to be overlooked are the brightest 35 leaders in the travel industry who are under the age of 35 and take part in the Young Leaders Summit during the conference. Here to speak with Peter Greenberg about the event is Tony D’Astolfo, the Phocuswright Managing Director, who will speak about all the trends taking place during this year’s Phocuswright Conference. Adam Goldstein, the Co-Founder and CEO of Hipmunk is also joining to discuss how Hipmunk works and can work to any traveler’s advantage. All this and more on this episode of Travel Today with Peter Greenberg. 

Wish you could travel more but think it’s too expensive?  Nathaniel Boyle has devoted his life to travel and will school us on finding cheap flights. There are so many air travel booking sites now, Expedia, Travelocity, Hipmunk however the prices are all about the same.  Nathaniel recommends booking directly through the airlines.  It’s often cheaper and can offer more protection than booking through a third party. It’s much easier if you need to make a change to your itinerary and some low cost carriers like Southwest only offer direct sale. The most important thing when buying a cheap ticket is time.  When you buy your ticket, the time of year you’re planning to travel, and the days of the week you choose to fly on.  The best time to buy is on a Tuesday or Wednesday.  Those are also the best days to fly. Off season will always be cheaper. Orlando over a holiday will always be expensive. Flying to Europe in March is cheaper than flying in July. Nathaniel uses Kayak as a baseline to see what they’re selling it for and then play around to see what you can do to get a lower prices than that.  But don’t over think it.  If you see what looks to you like a great deal, jump on it. Rome2Rio is another great resource.  It tells you how to get from point A to point B for the least amount of money via air or ground travel.  SkyScanner and Google Flights with give good over views of pricing.  The travel time may be longer but if you don’t mind connections, they can save lots of money. If the thought of pulling the trigger on the ticket makes you sweat, check out Flyr.  It tells you the likelihood that your flight price will go up and down.  Data nerds like Andrew love this site. I’ve actually listened to Nathaniel’s show from day one and it’s great.  He has excellent tips and terrific guests. Check him out. If you are looking for some more great tips on the best time to book your next vacation check this out! Show Notes Ommegang Valar Morghulis:  A Game of Thrones inspired beer. LMM Financial Rant Hotline:  Call 856-818-3738 and leave us your money rant. The Daily Travel Podcast: Nathaniel’s daily podcast devoted to all things travel. Airfare Watchdog Alerts:  See when your preferred flight changes price. The Flight Deal:  A site that posts crazy low airfares daily.       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Travis Sherry from Extra Pack of Peanuts teaches us how to see the world without spending a lot by seeking out cheaper destinations, scoring the best flight prices, and alternatives to hotels that will save you a fortune. Traveling is on top of nearly everyone’s list of goals but many people don’t because they believe they can’t afford it.  Traveling doesn’t have to be expensive and there are options for almost any budget that will allow you to see the world. If you want to drink on the plane without paying ridiculous airline prices you have a few options.  If you’re flying international, choose an international carrier rather than a domestic one.  The drinks are usually free.  You can also bring those little bottles of alcohol in the quart bag you’re allowed through TSA checkpoints as long as each bottle is 3 ounces or less.  Buy them at your local liquor store, not the airport to save even more. Chat up flight attendants during their downtime.  If you’re charming you can score free drinks from them, maybe free snacks too. For a long flight, first of business class will be a lot more bearable than cattle class.  The difference in ticket price can be as much as fifteen times higher though.  This is where frequent flyer miles come in handy.  A coach round trip ticket bought with miles will be around 35,000 miles,  business just double that.  You can obtain miles through credit card sign up bonuses and by flying the same airline as much as possible.  Check to see what airline has a hub at your local airport and sign up for their free frequent flyer program. Price flights through ITA Matrix.  You can’t book via this site but the price you find can be booked through a site like Kayak or Hipmunk.  ITA Matrix will provide you with lots of comparative data such as the best date to book the flight and the cheapest airport to fly out from. The other big expense when traveling aside from the flight is accommodations.  There are so many better alternatives to hotels, especially for long term stays. Airbnb  rents apartments or homes for way less than a hotel.  You’ll also have more amenities like a full kitchen which allows you to save money by cooking some meals at home. Hostels are cheaper than a hotel and a great way to meet fellow travelers.  You can even house sit and stay for free.  Travis’s friend runs Trusted House Sitters which can show you opportunities all over the world for free accommodations. You can stretch your travel dollars by choosing less expensive regions.  In Western Europe, Spain and Portugal offer greater value than places like Paris or London.  Eastern or Central Europe are about half the price of Western Europe.  South  East Asia will allow you to have a five star experience for a fraction of the price of a lot of places in the world. Packing is always a travel bugaboo.  Travis recommends the Tortuga Travel Back Pack.  Pack what you would need for a week no matter how long your trip.  You can do laundry anywhere. Traveling is something everyone of us deserves to experience.  It changes your life in ways that nothing else can.  Stop thinking it’s an impossible dream.  Travis is flying to Brasil for the World Cup for $5.  Anyone can do it. Show Notes Extra Pack of Peanuts:  Travis’s site where h... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you like what Scott Mackenzie had to say in this episode about earning and redeeming points and miles? If you'd like to get started with points and miles, then you can check out my book The Beginners Guide to Points and Miles. And be sure to follow his blog, Hack My Trip. Photo by: Nick Ciorogan Before Scott Mackenzie mastered earning points and miles, he was earning his Ph.D in neuroscience. He launched his travel hacking blog, Hack My Trip, while he was still in school. It was flying to interviews for his graduate school interviews that introduced him to earning enough frequent flyer miles for his first redemption. He quickly earned enough to extend his travel perks into his time spent living the frugal life of a student. Graduate students don’t generally have large sums of cash to help them fly to Asia during their school breaks; but Scott had figured out the secret to not only taking trips a student could pay for, but that most people couldn't afford to take. In this episode, Scott allows me to pick his brain to help you get started thinking about travel hacking to earn points and miles so that we can break down the cost-prohibitive aspects of travel and see the world for as close to free as possible. Words from a Travel Hacker: “A good redemption gets you where you want to go with minimal inconvenience and you end up happy.” Tweet this! What You’ll Learn What is Travel Hacking, and how does Scott define it. Rather than travel for free, Scott considers it a moderate investment to travel in a much higher class. The basics of mile-running. How and why Scott might spend $125 and hours on a plane in coach to earn enough miles to redeem for a first class ticket to Asia. How Scott took his wife on a 2-week honeymoon to Southeast Asia, flying business class, and staying at the some of world’s best hotels, all on points and miles. Why diversification of points is a good strategy. Scott’s advice to get started earning and redeeming points and miles The ways Scott thinks about travel hacking to earn successfully Where Scott generally transfers his American Express Membership Rewards and Ultimate Rewards points How Scott defines a good redemption, and why good redemptions are subjective. Scott’s Best Travel Advice The First Step: Have a plan. Don’t book at random. Don’t overlook opportunities to consolidate value and leverage earning. Money Saving Tip or Travel Hack: Cut your expenses. Priorities are important. “I’ve never subscribed to cable. Only got texting this month!” Use forced savings to make automatic withdrawals from one bank to another, so you don’t even have regular visibility on the other account. Cheapest Airfare: Practice makes perfect. Scott’s Guide to Using ITA’s Matrix. http://hackmytrip.com/2012/01/introduction-to-using-ita/ Then book through Hipmunk, which integrates ITA’s display features as well as the advanced routing language. RouteHappy helps ease the decision making process by showing seating, comfort, details of your journey. Travel Book: Travel Gear: Macbook Air 13” Weirdest Food: Durian Mentioned in this episode Scott’s blog, Hack My Trip Scott on Milepoint.com @hackmytrip on Twitter Hyatt Points Program Starwood Preferred Guests points program OpenFlights.org Scott’s Guide to Using ITA’s Matrix. Google Flights Hipmunk RouteHappy Music Credit: Passion Pit - Moth’s Wings (Artec Remix), Aaron Static – Intrepid Journey Like the show? I’d love a rating and review! Take action and please share the show! All you have to do is click one of the social sharing buttons at the top of this post. Also please leave a rating or review on iTunes! It just takes a second and you can help the show increase its rankings on iTunes just by this simple and quick...

April 16, 2014 Travel Nerd Adam Goldstein & Adversaries into Allies Bob Burg

Alexis Ohanian is an internet entrepreneur, activist and investor, best known for co-founding the social news website reddit, helping launch travel search website Hipmunk, and starting social enterprise Breadpig. He also is the author of bestseller "Without Their Permission".

Alexis Ohanian is an internet entrepreneur, activist and investor, best known for co-founding the social news website reddit, helping launch travel search website Hipmunk, and starting social enterprise Breadpig. He also is the author of bestseller "Without Their Permission"

Welcome to episode #380 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast. I have been hearing about the new business book, Without Their Permission, for well over a year. Alexis Ohanian and I share the same publisher and editor (Grand Central Publishing - Hachette Book Group). Alexis is one of the most impressive young people you will ever meet. He is the co-founder of Reddit, Hipmunk and more. He's a passionate startup guy and investor (deeply rooted with Y Combinator) and his new book is all about using the Web for good and using the Web to build a business. The book lives up to its hype (because if it didn't, he would get mauled on Reddit ;). That hasn't happened so far. Alexis is a very passionate individual who really believes that the Internet allows all of us to reach potentials that have never before been imaginable. It was a please to connect with him. Enjoy the conversation... Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #380 - Host: Mitch Joel. Running time: 39:32. Please send in questions, comments, suggestions - mitch@twistimage.com. Hello from Beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the Blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on twitter.  Six Pixels of Separation the book is now available. CTRL ALT Delete is now available too! In conversation with Alexis Ohanian. Without Their Permission. Reddit. Hipmunk. Y Combinator. Follow Alexis on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'. Get David's song for free here: Artists For Amnesty. Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #380 - Host: Mitch Joel. Tags: advertising podcast alexis ohanian blog blogging brand business book business podcast david usher grand central publishing hachette book group hipmunk internet culture itunes marketing podcast podcast podcasting reddit without their permission y combinator

Alexis Ohanian- Author of Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed, co-founder of Reddit, internet entrepreneur, and advisor to Hipmunk and Breadpig. While Chris and I were in our dorm room playing FIFA 2001 on the Playstation2, Alexis Ohanian and his roommate, Steve Huffman, sat in their dorm room a mere 60 miles away working on a website that is now a cultural phenomenon known as Reddit. While Reddit is often called the "front page of the Internet," or an easy way to waste an entire work day, it is known for its open nature and diverse user base. After leaving Reddit, Alexis continued his entrepreneurial path and helped launch the travel search website, Hipmunk, and an "uncorporation" named Breadpig. Breadpig is a site that allows for the making and selling of "geek" merchandise, with the proceeds being given to charity. Alexis seems to always be at the forefront of the Internet and he became an Internet activist speaking out against Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA). In his new book titled Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed, Alexis shares his stories, ideas, and tips for young entrepreneurs who are looking to "make the world suck less." -- This episode is brought to you by Squarespace – the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to create your own website. For a free trial and 10% off, go to Squarespace.com and use offer code smart10. Easy – Everything is drag and drop. You can use drag and drop to add content from your desktop, and even rearrange elements of content within a page. 24/7 support – Squarespace has an amazing 24/7 support team in New York City. They do live chat during the week, and have extremely fast email support throughout the day and night. Design Focused – Squarespace really cares about design. All their templates are extremely clean, and allow your content to be the focus of your website.

This is part 2 of our interview with Sacha Greif. In this episode we talked with him about how to find a partner, and the pain involved in building up a product income. Sacha is a designer and coder from Paris, France, but he’s now living in Osaka, Japan. He’s worked with companies like Hipmunk, but he’s best known for his cool side-projects. His most recent, called Telescope, is an open source platform for creating your own Hacker News.

Travel Disruption by Social Media… Getaround. AirBNB. Hipmunk. All changing the travel universe as we know it. What are these services? What's the impact? 

Many founders I interviewed on Mixergy told me about how their companies virtually disappeared after they sold them. But 4 years after selling Reddit to Conde Nast, Steve Huffman is so proud of how much its grown that he’d be happy to still own it. I asked him to teach me how he grew his community, why some Y Combinator-backed founders, like him, succeed while others don’t get any traction and why he never resented his co-founder for getting so much attention. I also asked Steve about Hipmunk, the travel site he launched which replaces the spreadsheet-like search results that most travel sites use with a more useful design. Steve Huffman graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Computer Science in 2005. Immediately after leaving Virginia, he founded reddit.com with his college roommate, Alexis Ohanian. Sponsored byShopify – Remember the interview I did about how the founder of DODOCase sold about $1 mil worth of iPad cases in a few months? He used Shopify. It’s dead simple and very effective. Grasshopper – Don’t make the mistake of comparing Grasshopper with other phone services. Check out their features and you’ll see why Grasshopper isn’t just a phone number, it’s the virtual phone system that entrepreneurs (like me) love. Walker Corporate Law – Scott Edward Walker is the lawyer entrepreneurs turn to when they want to raise money or sell their companies, but if you’re just getting started, his firm will help you launch properly. Watch this video to learn about him. More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint