Podcasts about Macromedia

On this special 400th episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, Christopher and guest Al Ramadan discuss their new book, "The Existing Market Trap." They explore the pitfalls businesses face when trying to innovate within established market categories, emphasizing that fitting new ideas into old frameworks stifles innovation. They advocate for category design, which involves creating new market categories rather than competing within existing ones. They also introduce the "13 deadly sins" that entrepreneurs often commit, offering insights to help avoid these common mistakes. You're listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let's go.   Al Ramadan on Understanding the Existing Market Trap The "existing market trap" refers to the tendency of businesses to try to fit new ideas into old categories. This approach often stifles innovation and growth, as companies focus on competing for market share rather than creating entirely new markets. Al and Christopher argue that this mindset is fundamentally flawed and that true innovation comes from redefining problems and opportunities rather than fitting new solutions into outdated categories. Some of the consequences of the market trap include financial loses, Constantly competing in saturated markets can lead to exhaustion and disillusionment among founders, and loss of strategic direction by the company.    Al Ramadan on The Power of Category Design Category design is a business strategy that focuses on creating new market categories rather than competing within existing ones. This approach allows businesses to escape the constraints of established market definitions and pursue groundbreaking innovations. Why is Category Design Important? Category design is essential because it empowers companies to reshape the market landscape rather than simply compete within it. Instead of fitting into existing frameworks, successful businesses create entirely new categories that address previously unmet needs, unlocking fresh opportunities for innovation and growth. This strategic approach also plays a critical role in building belief, both internally and externally, in a company's vision. By shaping perception and defining a unique space, category design helps generate demand, positioning the business as a leader rather than a follower.   The 13 Deadly Sins of Category Design Al and Christopher introduce the concept of the "13 deadly sins" that entrepreneurs often commit when scaling their businesses. These sins serve as cautionary tales for founders who may be tempted to chase after existing market demand rather than focusing on creating new opportunities. Several common pitfalls can hinder a company's success in the market. One is the Engineer's Dilemma, where teams become overly focused on technical features instead of addressing broader market needs. Another is the Obviously Better Fallacy—the mistaken belief that having a superior product alone guarantees market success. Finally, the Horizontal Tool Illusion occurs when a company tries to serve everyone, rather than honing in on a specific market segment. These missteps can dilute value, confuse customers, and ultimately prevent a product from gaining traction. To hear more from Christopher and Al Ramadan about the existing Market Trap, download and listen to this episode.    Bio Al Ramadan is a co-founding partner of Play Bigger Advisors and coauthor of the book, Play Bigger. He also co-founded Quokka Sports, which revolutionized the way people experience sport online. Al then joined Macromedia and Adobe, where he spent almost ten years changing the way people think about great digital experiences. At Adobe, Al led teams that created the Rich Internet Applications category and helped develop the discipline of experience design. In the early ‘90s he applied data science to Australia's Americas C...

Jordan Dea-Mattson, a veteran tech leader, and Jeremy Au discussed how Jordan built developer tools at Apple and went on to lead engineering teams at Adobe and Indeed. They explored how he witnessed Apple's transformation under Steve Jobs, the often unseen dynamics behind major tech layoffs, and what it takes to grow and scale high-performing teams in Southeast Asia. Jordan also shared how he led the rapid expansion of Indeed Singapore, navigated its unexpected closure, and helped his team transition. He also opens up about overcoming personal trauma, leading with integrity, and why real bravery means acting in the face of fear. 1. From curious teen to Apple product manager: Jordan fell in love with computers in middle school, studied computer science, and hustled his way into a job at Apple by fixing bugs and thinking like a product owner. 2. Building early developer tools: He managed key tools like ResEdit and Max bug, and worked on making Apple software usable in Japanese, Arabic, and Hebrew—shaping his global product thinking. 3. Seeing Apple with and without Jobs: Jordan lived through Apple's lost years and felt the seismic shift when Steve Jobs returned—cutting the product line, raising the bar, and restoring focus. 4. From Apple to Adobe: At Adobe, Jordan worked on Acrobat's SDK, then led a cross-product team to improve interoperability—laying the groundwork for what became the Adobe Creative Suite. 5. Layoffs, politics, and unintended consequences: He was laid off during Adobe's merger with Macromedia, learning firsthand how internal politics often decide who stays and who goes. 6. Helping Adobe's products play nice: His team standardized core components like fonts and color management, turning a “preschool” of incompatible products into a cohesive offering. 7. Building Indeed Singapore from scratch: In 2018, Jordan set up the Indeed product center in Singapore, growing it from 4 to 250 people—emphasizing diversity, speed, and engineering quality. Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.braves ea.com/blog/engineering-soft-landings Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VakR55X6BIElUEvkN02e TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyau Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyauz Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyau LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravesea English: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Bahasa Indonesia: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Chinese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Vietnamese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts

30 years ago: Computer industry booms as consoles slump, Nintendo announces Ultra64 & The internet gets scary These stories and many more on this episode of the VGNRTM! This episode we will look back at the biggest stories in and around the video game industry in August 1994.  As always, we'll mostly be using magazine cover dates, and those are of course always a bit behind the actual events. Alex Smith of They Create Worlds is our cohost.  Check out his podcast here: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/ and order his book here: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/book Get us on your mobile device: Android:  https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly92aWRlb2dhbWVuZXdzcm9vbXRpbWVtYWNoaW5lLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz iOS:      https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/video-game-newsroom-time-machine And if you like what we are doing here at the podcast, don't forget to like us on your podcasting app of choice, YouTube, and/or support us on patreon! https://www.patreon.com/VGNRTM Send comments on Mastodon @videogamenewsroomtimemachine@oldbytes.space Or twitter @videogamenewsr2 Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/vgnrtm Or videogamenewsroomtimemachine@gmail.com Links: If you don't see all the links, find them here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/123352781/edit 7 Minutes in Heaven: Cliffhanger (Amiga) Video Version: https://youtu.be/KZ7J9qEpqxI     https://www.mobygames.com/game/29830/cliffhanger/ Corrections: July 1994 Ep - https://www.patreon.com/posts/july-1994-part-1-116538490         https://www.patreon.com/posts/july-1994-part-2-116538674 Ethan's fine site The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/     Defunctland Jim Henson Series - https://youtu.be/BVoGf1JTVeI?si=PBwUInz2t7hBe-Eq     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway     https://en.namu.wiki/w/RX-78%20Gundam     https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/SPECIAL     https://www.theycreateworlds.com/episodes/TCW164         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Cook     Wrestling with Games - XBAND - https://youtu.be/k_5M-z_RUKA?si=tuuDxPGj6GnTPc-B     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service)               1994: Canada to get their own ratings     New VCR proves 6 heads are better than 1, The Toronto Star, August 11, 1994,Thursday, FINAL EDITION, Section: FAST FORWARD; Pg. F2, byline: BY ROBERT WRIGHT TORONTO STARON THE EDGE California presses forward with video game violence bill     https://www.retromags.com/files/file/3018-egm2-issue-02-august-1994/   pg. 29       https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-04-13-mn-45306-story.html IDSA board selected     Mattel takes a second look at games     Mattel Hires Sega Executive, The Associated Press, August 2, 1994, Tuesday, BC cycle Square goes public     CORPORATE PROFILE: SQUARE, Jiji Press Ticker Service, AUGUST 5, 1994, FRIDAY Japanese companies playing with fire     "As derivatives proliferate, so do worries Companies try to control risks from transactions intended to rein in costs but which can backfire, The Nikkei Weekly (Japan), August 15, 1994, Section: FINANCE; Pg. 13, Byline: BY ASAKO ISHIBASHI Staff writer" Acclaim buys Valiant     ACCLAIM ACQUIRES VOYAGER COMMUNICATIONS FOR $65 MILLION Marks Company's Diversification into Comic Book Publishing, Business Wire, August 2, 1994, Tuesday     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_book_collecting#Bust_of_the_speculator_market UK video rental market embraces games... illegally     Games Spark Sagging U.K. Vid Biz; But Many Don't Have Licenses To Rent Them, Billboard, August 13, 1994, Section: HOME VIDEO; Pg. 76, Byline: BY PETER DEAN     Sonic out to zap the 'swapping' boom, The Scotsman, August 23, 1994, Tuesday, Byline: By Chris Mullinger UK teens tune out to games      MEDIA GUARDIAN: LUST FOR NASTIES AND HARD NEWS, The Guardian (London), August 8, 1994, Section: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. T17      Sega announces US theme park     Universal Teams With Sega on Theme Park, Disneyland Annex Scaled Back, The Associated Press,  August 12, 1994, Friday, AM cycle, Section: Business News, Byline: By E. SCOTT RECKARD, AP Business Writer     Report: Sega Plan to Open 50 High-Tech Theme Parks in U.S., The Associated Press, August 16, 1994, Tuesday, BC cycle, Section: Business News Sega buys Data East Pinball     Sega acquires Data East Pinball, Business Wire, August 26, 1994, Friday Doom coming to arcades     DOOM IS ALL AROUND US, Business Week, August 1, 1994, Business and Industry, Section: Pg. 72;        https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Trivia         https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/112509-share-your-epic-doom-related-stories/ Atari Games President passes     Play Meter, August 1994, pg. 32 Hasbro readies to enter VR market     No Headline In Original, ADWEEK, August 15, 1994, Eastern Edition, Byline: By Jennifer Comiteau and Penny Warneford, with Cathy Taylor        https://www.unseen64.net/2018/10/04/hasbro-toaster-virtual-reality-console/ Begone Project Reality, all hail Ultra 64     https://www.retromags.com/files/file/3018-egm2-issue-02-august-1994/  pg. 28      Sega teams up with Hitachi in Japan     HITACHI SALES TO HELP SEGA MARKET VIDEO GAMES, Jiji Press Ticker Service, AUGUST 3, 1994, WEDNESDAY             Sega, Hitachi Sales link up to sell video game machine, Japan Economic Newswire, AUGUST 3, 1994, WEDNESDAY Sega buys Cross Products     The leading video game development tool, Business Wire, August 15, 1994, Monday         https://segaretro.org/Cross_Products         https://web.archive.org/web/19961227100911/http://www.crossprod.co.uk/      Jaguar CD to launch by Xmas     https://www.retromags.com/files/file/3018-egm2-issue-02-august-1994/  pg. 29     ATARI CORP. ANNOUNCES SECOND QUARTER 1994 RESULTS, PR Newswire, August 1, 1994, Monday - 19:55 Eastern Time, Section: Financial News Sanyo gives console market a TRY     SANYO TO RELEASE INTERACTIVE GAME MACHINE TRY, Jiji Press Ticker Service, AUGUST 31, 1994, WEDNESDAY 3DO announces losses     Video Game System Company Posts $ 16.1 Million First-Quarter Loss, The Associated Press, August 11, 1994, Thursday, AM cycle, Section: Business News     COMPANY NEWS; SHARES OF 3DO SOAR ON FORECAST FOR NEW SYSTEM, The New York Times, August 24, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final, Distribution: Financial Desk, Section: Section D; ; Section D; Page 3; Column 1; Financial Desk ; Column 1;                3DO UNVEILS PLANS TO BOOST POWER OF GAME PLAYERS, WALL STREET JOURNAL, August 25, 1994, Thursday, Section: Section B; Page 8, Column 4, Byline: BY JIM CARLTON              ANOTHER KEY EXEC DEPARTS O&M'S, INTERACTIVE GROUP; 3DO POWERS UP TO MEET COMPETITION; INTERACTING:; OTHER NEWS: Advertising Age, August 29, 1994, Section: Pg. 14 Mortal Friday gets $10 million budget     ACCLAIM'S 'MORTAL KOMBAT II' PREPARED TO STRIKE ON 'MORTAL FRIDAY,' SEPTEMBER 9; Company Spending Over $10 Million on Global Launch, Business Wire, August 4, 1994, Thursday     https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_121/page/n29/mode/2up Acclaim buys into FMV    Playthings, August 1994, pg. 19           https://archive.org/details/GamePro_Issue_061_August_1994/page/n157/mode/1up?view=theater Macromedia and Microware want to bring PCs and ITV together     Agreement to Make Computer Programs Available for Interactive TV Use, The Associated Press, August 1, 1994, Monday, AM cycle, Section: Business News, Byline: By STEVEN P. ROSENFELD, AP Business Writer       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microware      Computer industry profits boom     Not drowning, waving at profits, The Age (Melbourne, Australia), August 2, 1994 Tuesday, Late Edition, Section: COMPUTERS; Mass Storage; Pg. 34 SPA reports huge boom in sales     "NORTH AMERICAN PC SOFTWARE SALES REACH $1.48 BILLION, IN FIRST QUARTER 1994; HOME EDUCATION SALES LEAD GROWTH -- UP 128%, PR Newswire, August 8, 1994, Monday - 14:29 Eastern Time, Section: Financial News" CDRom bundles discouraging sales         Dataquest Consumer Survey Shows Where CD-ROM Title Developers Can Be Successful, Business Wire, August 8, 1994, Monday     Sirius Publishing to release long-awaited 5-ft. 10-Pak Volume II, Business Wire, August 8, 1994, Monday     https://archive.org/details/PC-Player-German-Magazine-1994-08/page/n15/mode/2up     https://archive.org/details/Electronic-Games-1994-08/page/14/mode/2up Flash memory prices tumbling     Not drowning, waving at profits, The Age (Melbourne, Australia), August 2, 1994 Tuesday, Late Edition, Section: COMPUTERS; Mass Storage; Pg. 34        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory Cyrix to take on AMD     Infoworld August 8, 1994, pg. 5 Employers begin to crackdown on games     Games they play, The Times, August 1, 1994, Monday, Section: Business, Byline: Jon Ashworth Microsoft targets "loosely supervised Executives"     SUNDAY, August 7, 1994; Playing Games at Work, The New York Times, August 7, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final, Distribution: Magazine Desk, Section: Section 6; ; Section 6; Page 12; Column 1; Magazine Desk ; Column 1; MacPlay expands lineup     Playthings, August 1994, pg. 44 Ad game business booming in Germany     https://archive.org/details/PC-Player-German-Magazine-1994-08/page/n29/mode/2up Media Vision collapse profiled     https://archive.org/details/Electronic-Games-1994-08/page/10/mode/2up     https://archive.org/details/Electronic-Games-1994-08/page/12/mode/2up Victormaxx announces Cybermaxx     Virtual Reality Headset For PCs A Reality, Newsbytes News Network, August 5, 1994       http://videogamekraken.com/cybermaxx-by-victormaxx Mice go 3D     Echoes of Silicon Valley, Agence France Presse -- English, August 04, 1994 08:13 Eastern Time, Section: Domestic, non-Washington, general news item, Dateline: PALO ALTO, California, Aug 4         https://www.ebay.com/itm/304724946528 Microprose to bring Magic to PC         IT'S IN THE CARDS' FOR MICROPROSE(R) AND WIZARDS OF THE COAST(R);PR Newswire, August 10, 1994, Wednesday - 17:23 Eastern Time, Section: State and Regional News     https://www.mobygames.com/game/530/magic-the-gathering/        https://www.mobygames.com/game/6274/magic-the-gathering-battlemage/ Star Trek licenses are a mess     https://archive.org/details/Electronic-Games-1994-08/page/14/mode/2up TEN to bring SimCity online     Total Entertainment Network will feature online debut of popular SimCity, game, Business Wire, August 10, 1994, Wednesday      The web becomes a scary place     E-mail evil, The Jerusalem Post, August 4, 1994, Thursday, Section: OPINION; Pg. 6,  Byline: SANDY ROVNER Siliwood goes Online     DISNEY, AMERITECH, BELLSOUTH AND SOUTHWESTERN BELL PLAN ALLIANCE TO DEVELOP AND OFFER VIDEO SERVICES, PR Newswire, August 8, 1994, Monday - 13:31 Eastern Time, Section: Financial News Fujitsu brings habitat back to USA     Fujitsu to start 'cyberspace' game business in U.S., Japan Economic Newswire, AUGUST 10, 1994, WEDNESDAY Computer Porn outpacing UK lawmakers     https://archive.org/details/Atari_ST_User_Issue_103_1994-08_Europress_GB/page/n39/mode/2up Labor promises telecommunications reform     Party line for fun and games, The Times, August 5, 1994, Friday, Byline: Emma Woollacott        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Communications Interactive TV license purchasers default     SOME TOP BIDDERS AT AIRWAVE AUCTION FAILING TO PAY UP, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania), AUGUST 12, 1994, FRIDAY, SOONER EDITION, Section: BUSINESS, Byline: BLOOMBERG BUSINESS NEWS Acorn enters set top box market     https://archive.org/details/AcornUser145-Aug94/page/n7/mode/2up      Ziff Davis buys Compute     ZIFF-DAVIS ACQUIRES ASSETS OF COMPUTE MAGAZINE; COMPUTER LIFE AND FamilyPC'S ADVERTISERS TO GET UNEXPECTED BONUS CIRCULATION, PR Newswire, August 8, 1994, Monday - 19:06 Eastern Time Teenage reviewers on the rise     Teenage games writers get to call the shots, The Age (Melbourne, Australia), August 2, 1994 Tuesday, Late Edition, Section: COMPUTERS; Pg. 40, Byline: Amy Harmon Computer game book rights up for grabs     Book Notes, The New York Times, August 3, 1994, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final, Distribution: Cultural Desk, Section: Section C; ; Section C; Page 20; Column 5; Cultural Desk ; Column 5;,Byline: By Sarah Lyall         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_novels_based_on_video_games Disney gets MYST rights     Out of the 'Myst': Disney plays game for book, film; Hit CD-ROM software is going Hollywood, The Hollywood Reporter, August 11, 1994, Thursday, Byline: Scott Hettrick Stormfront to simulate strike season     PENDING BASEBALL STRIKE PROMPTS VIDEO GAME DEVELOPER TO PINCH HIT FOR REAL THING, PR Newswire, August 12, 1994, Friday - 09:02 Eastern Time, Section: Financial New          Real Unreal Baseball, The Associated Press, August 17, 1994, Wednesday, PM cycle, Section: Sports News, Byline: By JIM LITKE, AP Sports Writer     Indians overtake White Sox in AL Central; Braves, Expos torrid in Nintendo, Baseball League, Business Wire, August 21, 1994, Sunday Leonard Herman releases Phoenix     https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-04-13-mn-45306-story.html  pg. 32      Nintendo ordered to pay $208 million     Nintendo U.S. unit told to pay 208 mil. dlrs in damages, Japan Economic Newswire, AUGUST 2, 1994, TUESDAY      https://archive.org/details/Electronic-Games-1994-08/page/14/mode/2up     No Headline in Original, Ad Day, August 8, 1994, Section: Corridor Talk Pg. 38, byline: Kevin Kerr Recommended Links: The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/ Gaming Alexandria: https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/ They Create Worlds: https://tcwpodcast.podbean.com/ Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/ The Arcade Blogger: https://arcadeblogger.com/ Retro Asylum: http://retroasylum.com/category/all-posts/ Retro Game Squad: http://retrogamesquad.libsyn.com/ Playthrough Podcast: https://playthroughpod.com/ Retromags.com: https://www.retromags.com/ Games That Weren't - https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/ Sound Effects by Ethan Johnson of History of How We Play. Copyright Karl Kuras    

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to https://www.linkedin.com/twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Google Cloud. Accelerate your startup journey with the Google for Startups Cloud Program. Get up to $200K in Google Cloud credits – or up to $350K for AI startups – plus training and guidance. Apply at⁠ https://startups.google.com/twist Beehiiv. Power your newsletters with AI tools, referral programs, and ad network features—all in one platform. Get 30 days free and 20% off your first 3 months at https://www.beehiiv.com/twist * Todays show: Circle's Jeremy Allaire joins Alex Wilhelm to discuss the growth of stablecoins (49:06), stablecoin market infrastructure (22:23), and their impact on global financial systems (56:07), and more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Circle's Jeremy Allaire joins Alex Wilhelm (2:08) Jeremy's early career and the evolution of the internet (5:28) Transition from Macromedia to Circle's founding (12:10) LinkedIn Jobs - Go to https://www.linkedin.com/twist to post your first job for free. (13:21) Bitcoin, stablecoins, and Circle's compliance (20:53) Google Cloud - Get up to $200K in Google Cloud credits – or up to $350K for AI startups – plus training and guidance. Apply at https://startups.google.com/twist (22:23) The current state and future of stablecoin market infrastructure (28:07) Integrating stablecoins with traditional finance (34:12) Beehiiv - Get 30 days free and 20% off your first 3 months at https://www.beehiiv.com/twist (35:40) Stablecoins' impact on global financial systems (41:30) Circle's business model, scalability, and blockchain potential (49:06) Growth of USDC and other currency stablecoins (51:10) USDC market cap trends and interest rates (56:07) Stablecoins in the global financial system and US regulation * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Jeremy: X: https://x.com/jerallaire LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyallaire Check out: https://www.circle.com * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Thank you to our partners: (12:10) LinkedIn Jobs - Go to https://www.linkedin.com/twist to post your first job for free. (20:53) Google Cloud - Get up to $200K in Google Cloud credits – or up to $350K for AI startups – plus training and guidance. Apply at https://startups.google.com/twist (34:12) Beehiiv - Get 30 days free and 20% off your first 3 months at https://www.beehiiv.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Learn how Andrea Brown, CEO of Reliabl, is revolutionizing AI by ensuring diverse communities are represented in data annotation. Discover how this approach not only reduces bias but also improves algorithmic performance. Andrea shares insights from her journey as an entrepreneur and AI researcher.  Episode timestamps(02:22) Andrea's Career Journey and Experience with Open Source (Adobe, Macromedia, and Alteryx)(11:59) Origins of Alteryx's AI and ML Capabilities / Challenges of Data Annotation and Bias in AI(19:00) Data Transparency & Agency(26:05) Ethical Data Practices(31:00) Open Source Inclusion Algorithms(38:20) Translating AI Governance Policies into Technical Controls(39:00) Future Outlook for AI and ML(42:34) Impact of Diversity Data and Inclusion in Open SourceQuotesAndrea Brown"If we get more of this with data transparency, if we're able to include more inputs from marginalized communities into open source data sets, into open source algorithms, then these smaller platforms that maybe can't pay for a custom algorithm can use an algorithm without having to sacrifice inclusion." Charna Parkey“I think if we lift every single platform up, then we'll advance all of the state of the art and I'm excited for that to happen."Connect with AndreaConnect with Charna

Jeremy is Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Circle, the financial technology company behind the USDC stablecoin. Before Circle, Jeremy co-founded several companies, including Brightcove and Allaire Corporation, which was acquired by Macromedia. Follow Jeremy on X @jerallaire. 0:00 - Jeremy's career growth in parallel to the internet 10:06 - Comparing the first decade of internet adoption to the first decade of crypto innovation 18:37 - Why infrastructure innovation precedes application innovation 25:44 - What happens when the marginal cost of moving value approaches zero 33:59 - Crypto's potential impact on existing institutions and society at large 43:19 - Jeremy's thoughts on internet-native currencies 48:07 - The potential impacts of regulating crypto Mint this episode for free onchain on Base at ⁠pods.media/pod-of-jake/176-jeremy-allaire For more episodes, go to ⁠⁠podofjake.com⁠⁠. Previous guests include ⁠⁠Mark Cuban⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Vitalik Buterin⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Brian Armstrong⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Balaji Srinivasan⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Keith⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Rabois⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Ali Spagnola⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Anthony Pompliano⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Raoul Pal⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Julia Galef⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jack Butcher⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Tim Draper⁠⁠, and over 100 others alike. Learn from founders and CEOs of companies like ⁠⁠OpenAI⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Coinbase⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Solana⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Polygon⁠⁠, ⁠⁠AngelList⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Oura⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠Replit⁠⁠, and investors from ⁠⁠Founders⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Fund⁠⁠, ⁠⁠a16z⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Union Square Ventures⁠⁠, and many more. I appreciate your support and hope you enjoy. Thanks to ⁠⁠⁠Chase Devens⁠⁠⁠ for the show notes and ⁠⁠⁠Yiction⁠⁠⁠ for the music. Lastly, I love hearing from fans of the pod. Feel free to email me any time at ⁠⁠jake@blogofjake.com⁠⁠. Thank you!

Episode timestamps(01:47)  Asa Whillock's career journey at market-leading companies and the role of open source in each (Adobe, Macromedia, Alteryx)(04:56) Feature Labs acquisition by Alteryx and its open source roots in democratizing machine learning capabilities(11:00) Survey findings on enterprise board members' perspectives on AI and the need to move beyond policy creation to implementation and governance.(27:00) Applying AI capabilities and decision-making related to AI  (30:00) The future of AI predominance, including cost reduction, open source model advancements, and the push for demonstrating business value(43:33) Advice for navigating AI expertise and decision-making, including continuous learning, self-awareness of decision-making models, and acknowledging knowledge limitsQuotesAsa Whillock"I love regulation. I think it's great. And people are like, what? Why would you say that? And the reason why I say that is because I think it puts a floor underneath all of us of what do we think good looks like?"Charna Parkey"I think we need to, as a community, focus on meeting them where they are if we really want the democratization that is promised. Yeah, I don't know any other way to do it."  

Hosts Victoria Guido and Will Larry are joined by Trent Walton, CEO of Luro. Trent shares his journey into the design world, from his early fascination with typography and logos to co-founding Paravel. This agency later evolved into creating Luro, a no-code solution for building design systems and tracking their adoption across products. Trent emphasizes the importance of understanding the materials one works with in design and development and stresses the need for a holistic approach to product building. This approach blurs the lines between disciplines, encouraging a generalist mindset over specialization. Luro, as a product, stemmed from the realization that existing design systems often fell short in adoption and application, leading to a search for a more integrated and comprehensive solution. Trent outlines the functionality and vision behind Luro, explaining how it serves not just designers and developers but entire organizations by fostering better collaboration, documentation, and understanding of design decisions. Luro aims to streamline the creation and maintenance of design systems, making them more accessible and manageable, even for teams facing resource constraints. By incorporating performance, accessibility metrics, and the ability to track component adoption and integration, Luro provides a platform for continuous improvement and alignment with organizational goals. Luro (https://luroapp.com/) Follow Luro on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/luroapp/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsS9BEmX1NPBXkbaLGcMZlw), Discord (https://discord.com/invite/aNEdjnR6A5), or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/luroapp/). Follow Trent Walton on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/trent-walton/). Visit his website at trentwalton.com (https://trentwalton.com/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript:  VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with me today is Trent Walton, CEO of Luro. Luro is a no-code solution to build your design system and track adoption across your entire product. Trent, thank you for joining me. TRENT: Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. WILL: Yeah, I can't wait to dive into Luro and get to know more about the product. But before we go into that, tell us a little bit about yourself. I know you're based out of Texas. TRENT: Yeah, I grew up, lived here my whole life. I'm in Austin with the other co-founders, Dave and Reagan. Been a designer probably all my life, always been interested in, like, typography and fonts. When I was little, I used to buy badges for cars from swap meets and take them home, not because I needed, like, I had a car I was building and had any interest in, like, sandblasting or building an engine. I just liked the typography, and the design of the icons, and the logos, and all that kind of thing. And so, now it's evolved into me just being, like, a type aficionado and a graphic design aficionado, and then that evolved into, especially when I discovered the web in the early 2000s, building and designing websites with Dave and Reagan, who I mentioned. And so, we had an agency called Paravel early on and had a lot of time putting into practice kind of that design and development and building for the web. VICTORIA: So, your first interest in design came from, is it a car engine? Is that what I heard? TRENT: Well, yeah, my father is a mechanical engineer, and so is my brother. And they work on cars, have classic, like, old Mustangs and Cobras and things that they build in their spare time. And I have no interest in that kind of work [laughs] but grew up in that environment. And, you know, pre-internet growing up in the '80s, one of the things that really got me was the aesthetic and the design around those kinds of muscle cars, so, like, old Shelby or Cobra or Mustang Ford ads, just, I really got into that. So, I'd buy, like, car manuals for a few bucks, or if there's a Mustang Cobra and there's a cool, like, chrome snake logo with a condensed uppercase typeface or some sort of lettering that says, you know, "Shelby Cobra." And that's when I realized [laughs] where my interests lie. You know, engines are cool. They sound cool. Fast cars are cool. But I was just totally, you know, enamored with the typography and the design aspect that surrounded those things, and then it just kind of evolved from there. Anything else I could get my hooks into, I picked up on. VICTORIA: I love that because when I talk to people about design, for folks who don't have a background in it, they kind of think, oh, design, that's logos. You know, I'm redesigning my house right now. My husband is like, "Oh, it's picking the tiles and the colors. We can do that." And I'm like, "No, like, design, there's a lot more to it. Design is everywhere." Like, you can find design inspiration from car manuals [laughs], it's so funny that you bought those, or from random logo design and actually, like, really good design. If it's something that's designed well, you probably don't even notice it. You just flow and use the space or use the app as you're intended to. TRENT: Yeah. And I also think that getting inspiration or starting ideas out from anywhere but the medium you're working in might be a nice little trick to bring some, like, naïve, fresh perspective to things. So, I try to go back to that stuff as much as possible. I have heaps of manuals I've bought off of eBay in recent years, yeah, things you wouldn't think you'd find on, like, you know, whatever, a graphic designer's bookcase, just anything to sort of break the monotony or break my own little lenses of what a website should look like, or what a logo or a brand should look like, how to step outside of that a little bit. But it's funny because it really does go back to that initial sense of wonder I experienced at those really just, you know, we're talking, like, in a gross, swampy field in Texas with, like, funnel cakes being served at every corner, like, not the most slick, rad graphic designy vibe, but that's where it all started for me. So, I go back there as often as I can [laughs]. VICTORIA: So, how do you talk to founders or people who are thinking about building products? How do you talk to them about design and give them a where to get started approach? TRENT: I don't know that I ever specifically talk about design or even maybe, like, engineering or about performance. I talk about all those things, accessibility, et cetera. I try to blur those lines as much as possible. It's maybe an idyllic thing that I've had for years. But going back to the agency days, I'll call them the agency days, but up until, like, you know, 2015, '16, Dave, Reagan, and I ran an agency called Paravel. And by nature, the three of us are some sort of a hybrid between a designer, maybe, like, a front-end developer. You know, Dave's more of an engineer now. But we've all been very careful to make sure that we're generalists, which I don't know that that, like, career-wise that, might pay off long term, but I cannot work on the web any other way or talk about the web any other way. I've always felt like, I mean, there was the old, which we don't have to get into, gosh, but the debate on should designers code? But I think the essence of that is really, like, should we be familiar with the materials we're working on? So, anytime I start to talk about designing for the web or designing a product, you want to make sure everyone has a clear understanding of the environment that they're working with. So, is it, you know, a website? And is performance important? And is our site that we're redesigning is it performant now? Is it fast or slow? Or am I a designer who only cares, and this is a thing that I have to fight inside of myself all the time? So, I'm not trash-talking anybody, but, like, do I want to load a bunch of fonts and cool images, and is that my KPI is how interesting and engaging the visuals are? Which is a great one to have, but it also, you know, while you're talking about design, you have to consider all of these other things that can define quality for an experience. Maybe those other things don't matter as much from one person to the next. But the more they are in front of me, the more they evolve the way I perceive what I work on. And so, I try to never really isolate any kind of aspect into maybe, like, a stage or a sprint that we're doing as a team. It's just sort of this holistic kind of hippie vibey way to look at sites, but I want to make sure that it's always, like, we're always starting from a very, very broad place that involves every aspect, and all team members and stuff like that. VICTORIA: Well, I love that because I try to think about that in the same way from the other end, like, on the operations perspective when you're talking about site performance. And, you know, like, is the site responding fast enough? And it comes back to the question of, like, well, what is the experience, expectations of the user? And what's important to get done on the site? [laughs] And having those conversations, like, early on and integrating all these different teams from the design and development and operation side to have that conversation so everyone knows what is the goal of the site and what is the important aspects of the user experience that the system needs to be able to support? So, I also like that you said that it's like, well, should you be familiar with the materials that you're using? [laughs] Thought that that was really cool. Like, I'm actually...my husband and I are renovating our home. And I'm talking about why we should invest in design [laughs], and part of it's because there's things to know about the materials. Like, if you're choosing a floor for your house, like, the designers will know, like, what's the durable ones? What's the ones that are going to fit your need, and your cost, and your budget? And so, like, they don't necessarily need to be a person who's going to lay the floors [laughs], but they need to know what to expect out of what you decide to use. TRENT: Yeah, it's, like, all of these constraints. And so, being familiar with the real-world implications of the decisions we make, you know, inform that. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's pretty similar, too. It's like, well, you need this floor because it's more durable in this climate or whatever, same thing for, you know, the websites that we build. It's all contingent upon the outcomes that, hopefully, we can mutually agree on. You know, there's kind of a general sense of, like, performance is important, and accessibility is paramount and extremely important. But then there's some nuance to that as you get into some smaller decisions. So, having these kinds of discussions early on and frequently and almost...the way I like to think about it is rather than, like, a check-in where we say, "Okay, this is it," but having a place where we can all look to check in and find information and share information that's maybe not so fast. One thing I like to think about is things get lost in chats and maybe even tickets, so as you're closing tickets and opening tickets. There's a bug. I solved it. It's gone. Can you send me this logo? Can we tweak this? These micro changes they open and close very, very quickly. And so, there's this firehose that happens. And so, I find that having a place separate from that for discussing these things and remembering these things, and referencing these things while we are in our code editors or inside of our Figma or any kind of design tool that we use to sort of cross-reference and simmer on things as we think about the decisions that we have to make, as opposed to just knocking them out super quick, always being mindful of those constraints. And again, yeah, the [chuckles] materials we're working with, whether it's just, you know, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript or whatever, but all of those things. It's good to be mindful of that. WILL: I know you said that you've been in design for a while, and so I love just picking the brain of someone who's been into it a while and see how far we've come from, especially just the 2000s. So, in your opinion, with design, how do you feel about where we've come since the beginning of tech to where we're at now and, also, I guess, where we're going with the design? TRENT: Yeah. So, I guess I can really just frame...this is going to help me remember just framing [laughs] where we were. I started off on Homestead, which is sort of like GeoCities. I was in college. I graduated, and I think it was 2001, maybe 2000, anyways. And it was mainly just taking images...I didn't even have Photoshop at this point. And you realize you could, like, tile a background for a build your own website. Homestead was one of those kinds of deals. And I thought that was very interesting. So, I had this cheap digital camera. It took a lot of cords to figure out how to, like, port that onto this old, crappy Hewlett Packard computer that was, like, a hand-me-down. Fast forward a couple of years, I had graduated, did not study design, so I'm all kind of self-taught or just taught by the web, the peers, the information that has been shared and been influenced by. But Dreamweaver was out, and Macromedia was huge, and I loved Fireworks. And so, Dave Rupert, I paid him $80 to teach me HTML [laughs], and so we've been together ever since. This is right out of college. And so, the tools that we used there were pretty rudimentary, but Fireworks was rad. Like, it was kind of web-based. It felt like it made more sense. I love Photoshop, and that's kind of, like, a primary graphic design tool that I still use to this day. But early on, it just felt like everything was so harshly limited. So, if you had any kind of idea that you wanted to execute that you could just draw on a piece of paper, mock it up in Photoshop, the amount of work that you had to do to get that to happen was either extremely high, or it was just impossible. And then, if it was impossible, I bet you can guess what we did. We went to Flash, and we made, like, a crappy video of a web page that was not accessible and really hard to use. I was heavy into Flash for, like, two or three years until kind of, as I had been warned by Dave that, you know, HTML and CSS are going to be the way the web works. But when I came back to that, there was this wonderful time where it felt like we were charting out every single...it was just new territory. It's like we had come to this other planet or this other world, and everything that needed to be done, we had to figure out how, like, getting web fonts onto pages, rounding borders. I mean, getting that done aside from slicing images in Fireworks felt like this new monumental discovery that changed the lives of many. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't, but in my world, it felt like that. And so, early on, you can look back on it and go, gosh, everything was a pain in the ass, like, living with all of these limitations. But for me, I do look back at it like that, but I also look back on it as this wonderful time where we were building the web that we're working on now. So, all these things that make designing easier and quicker come with some sort of a, you know, an evolution of your perception, and [inaudible 13:14] fond memories of work along the way. For me, it's sort of I've just always sort of been around working on the web and watching design evolve, and every little step maybe feels like a tiny one or a large one. But these days, it just seems like, oh, this is exactly how it should have [laughs] always been, like, convenient grids and convenient box shadow and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it's been nice to sort of grow up only being a web designer. Like, I mean, I've done graphic design. I've done brochures and, print design, and logo design for sure. But, I have always been anchored to and centered around web design and thinking about things in the context of how they will be applied to the web first and foremost. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you're tight on time and investment, which is why we've created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product's next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: So, what was the turning point for you that led you to found Luro? How did it all get started? TRENT: With Paravel, the agency days, we had a lot of fun. I think, for us, our big agency spike was when responsive web design came out. Ethan coined the term. There was a lot of people on the web, you know, a lot of agencies or a lot of teams, a lot of companies that needed to pivot into that. And so, we found this great working relationship with companies where we would come in and sort of had a little bit more practice just because we got in early learning kind of how to do that well, I think. And it was a sort of we're going to redesign a page, a homepage perhaps, or, like, a marketing page. You'll do that project; three to six months go by. And then the next thing turns into, well, we have this giant network of e-commerce stores. We have this giant network of pages with, like, download centers and support documents. And now, we need to make everything responsive, and it can be anything. We need to make everything accessible. We need to make everything performant. We need to update the brand on everything. And I don't think we're alone in this. I think this is the beginning of the greater design system discussion as it applies to the web. Obviously, design systems predate the web; design systems pre-date, like, 2012 or '13 or whenever we got into it. But projects started to migrate from, "Hey, can you design this really amazing, responsive marketing page," to "We have a system, and we need you to solve these problems." We love working on those problems. I still do to this day. But the reason why we switched from kind of being a, you know, individual contributor-type agency consultant type roles to building a SaaS product was because we were realizing that things got complicated...is a very, like, boring way to say it. But to get a little deeper, it was, we would see things not ship. So, like, our morale went down. The teams that we were working with morale kind of went down. And as I was digging into why things weren't shipping...and when I mean ship, I think, like, pages would ship, of course. Like, here's a page. It just needs to be built, somebody decided, or a new feature needs to be built. Of course, those went out. But the idea of, is our design system or the system that we're designing launched? Is it applied? Is it fully adopted? Is it partially adopted? It never felt like the amount of traction that we were promising or that we were being asked for. And I don't mean we, as in just the three of us, but the entire team or the entire organization who, in many cases, all were bought into the idea of design systems. So, what we found was, when things got real, and we had to give up things, and we had to work on things and prioritize things, it became much more difficult to work in that capacity, probably partially because of the cross-discipline nature of those things. So, as opposed to what I consider maybe a miserable way to work in many cases, is the classic; here's my Photoshop comp. And I have a red line document JPEG that I will give you, whatever engineer I'm working with, or it's myself, and I'm just giving myself a red line document, but you're just going through and trying to make those things match. And that is sort of not fun for the team because now we're just sort of chiseling each other and sort of, like, going through and critiquing our work over and over versus really kind of in the spirit of prototyping and inventing together. I find that products are diminished when you do that. So, as you try to get into this design system part, it requires a lot more insight into what everyone around us is doing, kind of, as I was saying at the beginning, how to have this cross-discipline view of what we are actually working on. And that view is what we thought, and we still believe in many cases, is absolutely missing. So, you can spin up a design system. And Luro is not the only design system tool. Of course, you can spin up your own. And what I mean by that is, like...I'm maybe going to answer, like, three questions in one. Maybe you haven't even asked them yet. But just to kind of frame this, if you ask anyone what a design system is, it might be a different answer. It might be these are my Figma components that I've created and I've shared out, and there's a public link. You know, an engineer might say, "Well, it's the GitHub repo of components that I'm actually using." So, the design is helpful as documentation. But the design system is the code, or the design system is the actual...or the actual components that are live that users see, which I would argue probably is the most accurate, just because we're talking about user experience impacting whatever business objectives we may have. So, those components need to make their way into live sites or products. So, finding out what that answer is, what's the source of truth? What is our design system? What are our components? What are our standards? You have to have multiple sources for that, just because there's multiple people with multiple opinions and multiple measures of success involved in those. And all of those opinions and measures of success, I would say, are valid. So, accounting for those and kind of crossing the streams, if you will, in one sort of central UI, we believed was crucial enough that we should jump out of the agency days and into a product-building scenario. VICTORIA: That's really interesting. So, you saw this pattern in the delivery of your work as an agency that made you want to build a solution to create better outcomes for a potentially exponential number of clients, right? [chuckles] TRENT: Yeah, hopefully. I think that working on how you work together as a team is vitally important, and if you can find the right environment, then the actual product will benefit. I mean, and I'm not even just thinking about these maybe soft things like, oh yeah, if engineers and designers can work together, the typography will be a little bit better, and the site will feel a little bit more cohesive, and it'll be maybe a little bit easier to digest. I believe that. But I also believe that there are people in organizations doing research, financial analysis, customer analysis, A/B testing, you know, all sorts of work that contributes to the decisions that we make about our sites and products that sort of just gets lost in the shuffle, in the firehose of the day to day. So, having something that takes not only a, I guess, what you could classify as the what for a design system, it could be the design of a component. Maybe it's actually even, too, as well, the code that makes up that component. But then there's this giant why. Why does the button look the way that it does? Why does a card have a border around it? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? These things maybe they come up during meetings. Maybe there's something that, as a designer or an engineer, I found maybe on the company's shared OneDrive or somebody mentioned in passing. Those things are vitally important, and they need to be, again, back to the morale and perception evolving; they need to be accessible to everyone. But it's a needle-in-a haystack situation. It's funny. We would consult. And one of my favorite stories is we were building this prototype. We were hired to build a prototype for a startup in Austin. They were on a big, open floor-plan office with the glass meeting rooms. And we were showing off our prototype, and we just felt really clever and witty about the way we were going to solve this and the pages that we were going to build. And who is a friend now, a person named Angela walks by, and she's like, "What are you working on?" And we told her what it was. And she says, "Oh, wow, you know, six months before you started contracting with the startup, we did this all, and we've user-tested it. Everybody's been reorged, and nobody remembers. But I have this PowerPoint I can send you, and it will show you the results. Some of these things you're doing are probably going to be great. The other things you should absolutely not be repeating these mistakes." And I thought about how likely it was that she walked by and happened to see that through the window and happened to look on the sharp television on the wall. And it's probably not very likely, and as we become, you know, we're remote and working remote the likelihood of those things happening maybe goes down. The idea of building a product that increases the likelihood or almost makes it seamless that you can find information relevant to what you were working on, even if you're new to that project or you haven't worked on it for a long time, is very, very key. So, within Luro, you can build a design system. You can add your styles. You can add your components, configure your tokens, and do all that, but you can also integrate those things that I was mentioning: prototyping, research, and testing. We also do an accessibility and performance through Lighthouse and give you metrics there. All of those things are associated to the pages that your site is comprised of. They're associated to the components that you use to build everything. So, we're sort of crossing the streams here. So, if you're going into imagine a button component and you're like, okay, the border-radius is four pixels. The type size is 16 pixels, and here's how you code it. We're putting in an actual button. The class is dot btn. That's all great. It's helping us build the button. But if you are asked by leadership or anyone, "Why did you decide this?" Or "What is the impact of design?" Or "What is the impact of the product team on our bottom line? How are you moving the needle? How are you helping us as an organization achieve?" The answer isn't, "Well, we made the border four pixels just like the design [chuckles] said." That's great. Good job. But I think having all of this information associated with design and associated with engineering not only makes us more informed as contributors to teams but it helps us to articulate the value of what we do on the daily in a much more broad organizational sense. So, you can say, "Well, we user-tested this, and we realized that if we took out these form elements from a signup flow, we get more signups by having fewer steps. And so we removed a step. We user-tested it before and after, and signups went up 30%." That's a much cooler answer than, "Well, our design system helps us be consistent," even though we know that that is vitally important, and it makes our app or our site feel much more cohesive, and it contributes to that sign up metric or a sales metric just as much. But having this data and associating it with a component so it's not something that you have to sort of...I guess it almost sounds subjective if you bring it up and say, "Well, we're moving faster, and we're selling more stuff." That's not great. But if you can link and say, "Well, here's a PowerPoint before," or "Here's a summary of a user test before and after. Here's real numbers," it helps you to portray yourself as the designer or engineer or product team member who thinks very deeply about these things, and it helps you to accurately portray yourself in that way. So, I went on a real tangent, but actually just there, I think I just was describing sort of the nuts and bolts of why we built Luro to not only be a design system tool but, like, what we kind of also call a product development tool, a product development system. So, it's extending the idea of design systems to the practice of building a product with an entire organization. WILL: That's really, really cool, and you did a great job explaining it. I'm excited to see it and see where it's going. I felt like a lot of what you were saying was the why you're doing stuff, why you chose, you know, X, Y, Z. Is that where the analytics and the tracking portion of Luro comes into play? TRENT: Yeah. I think that one thing we heard a lot from agencies or even just teams within an organization that are working on design systems is back to that articulating the value of maybe a design system or articulating the value of the work that we do as designers or product builders and similar to we've done a user test and these are the results, and sales or signups, or whatever the case may be, have improved. I think one of the key metrics for a design system is, is the component adopted? There are other ones, and people will mention those, things like, is it helping a team be quicker? So, if there's a design system team, and then there's multiple product teams within an organization, and they all want to work together, and they want to be able to take the components that they need and build their ideas quicker, prototype quicker, that's a great metric as well. But one that we find vitally important is, are the components live to users? And so, being able to track that has a lot of value. One, obviously, is that communicating that to the greater organization, saying, "You know, we've spun up a design system team. The card component is on 49% of pages. The button is on 100% of pages." And then if you're trying to be more tactical about how to improve the product or even just track down, you know, which components or which pages or which experiences aren't, I guess, consistent with the design system, you can say, well, "There's 49%, and there's 51% of pages that may or may not have the card component." And so, you can go find outdated components if you're trying to phase new ones in, and all of those sorts of things as well. So, the metrics are sort of great from a thematic sense, saying, this is the value that our design system is, you know, affording us as a business and the users are experiencing while they're using our app or our site. But then, also, you can drill down into these metrics and see, okay, the button is appearing here. I can click into pages and see views where it's being used on the page level and see, is it being used properly? Those kinds of things. You can track legacy components as well, so, for example, if we've rebranded the site that we all work on together and our old button was, like, dot button and the new button is dot BTN or however we would want to class those things. And you can use classes. You can use data attributes, all those kinds of things. But I would say we can track legacy along that. So, if your goal is to completely adopt the new design system across the entire network and products within six months or whatever the case may be, you know, month over month, week over week, you can check our, you know, line graphs and see, hopefully, the legacy occurrences of that going down over time. So, if, like, the button is being used less and less and then the dot BTN is being used more and more, you can see those sort of swap places. And so, what we have found is talking about things in sort of an objective or fuzzy way, saying, well, we're trying to ship this, and we're doing these inventories, and we're going through all the pages. And we're clicking around trying to find old things, or we're redesigning pages. But it's very, very difficult. This is just an instant quantification of where our components are manifesting in the product. So, what we do is, with Luro, you can give us...whether it's behind an authentication layer or not, we crawl web pages, first and foremost. So, you can give us a site. And this is all optional. You can spin out a design system without this. But we crawl the site, and then we will go ahead and do performance and accessibility scores for there. So, that's one way to itemize work, where you can just say, well, as an agency, we're going to work with this company, and we want to show them, like, the starting point and expose weak points on where we might be paying a lot of attention to. In the design or engineering phase, we need to improve the speed here. We have accessibility violations we need to think about, all that kind of stuff. And then, once you crawl those, you can add your design system, and then you can cross-reference those, and I kind of mentioned that. You can use CSS classes to do that. And so, you'd enter in dot BTN for button. We've already crawled your pages. And so, we can tell you every time that that class appears inside of any page inside of the network. So, it's this very, like, two-minute way to get a wealth of information that's shared and communicated with...the entire organization will benefit. Like I said, like, leadership they can get a sense of how the design system is being used and adopted, but also, the active teams working on things so that they can go find outliers and work on replacing those. VICTORIA: It's been over a year in your journey with Luro. What challenges do you see on the horizon? TRENT: I still think it is an adoption challenge. I think that, you know, one thing that we found is that a lot of teams, and this is going back to our agency days, but I sort of sort of still see this happening now is that building the design system, you know, let me separate these two things. I think designing components and building the design system in the sense of picking styles, and choosing fonts, and iterating upon something like a search box or, a footer, or a modal that's a lot of work. That's just design and product design and product development in general. But the act of, you know, creating the design system, maybe it's the documentation site, or however, we're communicating these standards across the organization. That part, to me, it's always kind of taken too much time and effort. And to be really candid, the amount of budget that's being allocated for those tasks is less. So, we're having a lot of users who are saying, "Well, I wasn't in charge of a design system. We had a team for that. We don't anymore. And now I'm responsible for it," or "The team's been combined, and I'm working on, like, three things at once." And so, something that's very, very crucial to us at Luro is to help with the struggle of spinning up a design system. For us, I fully believe that there are design systems that can be fully custom available to the public and need to have, you know, every page and view needs to be unique unto itself. But for Luro, the starting place that we get you with, you know, you can link in your Storybook. You can link in Figma components. You can add components manually and all those sorts of things. Where we can get you in a few minutes is really close. And then, if you started to fold in, you know, the idea of performance, accessibility, and then all of the other insights that you can then integrate, so if you're doing A/B testing or user testing and doing research, and you want to make sure that that's all involved inside of your design system, then it becomes a really attractive option. So, I think that decreasing the time it takes to get started and to spin up a design system is the number one thing we see people struggling with and the number one thing we want to bring. I kind of like to compare it to services like Netlify. Like, I remember I used to have to set up servers to demo things for clients, and it would take an hour, and I don't know what I'm doing. And I would break stuff, and they would have to help me fix it. So, then I'm bothering him. And then, now I'm just, you know, will either link to a CodePen or drag and drop a deployed URL from something like Netlify. And it's this amazing, almost like it feels like deploying is just as difficult as, like, sketching something out on a napkin. We want spinning up a design system to kind of feel that way so it's not so precious. You're not worried about...it is just easy to get started. And so, we're kind of integrating all these other tools that you use to make that easier and quicker because if you do have other things that you're working on and you need to move beyond that so that you can focus on prototyping, or designing, and building the actual components, you can do that. And you have that option as opposed to having to be mired in some of these other details. VICTORIA: It seems like change management and integrating change into larger organizations is always the biggest challenge [laughs], even for great innovations. And I'm curious: what types of people or groups have you found are quick to adopt this new method and really the right group for you to center your message on? TRENT: Yeah, it is...I was joking, I think, maybe before the podcast started, but it's, like, very ambitious because it's easy, I think, to say, "This tool is for designers. And if you're a designer, you can integrate your Figma, and then you'll have your components published to your team so that they can use them." And that's absolutely true. Like, if you're a designer, Luro is for you. If you're an engineer and you have just received components, and you need a way to document that and show your coded version alongside the design version and be able to collaborate with people in that sense, it is absolutely for you as well. So, you can see how it's almost like you almost have to frame Luro for individuals across the organization. So, it's one of those deals where...and we've kind of experimented with this with the marketing. And the way we've discussed it, we talked to lots of, you know, leadership, heads of product, CMOs, even CTOs, things like that. And so, it's like, if you're trying to get your entire organization to work better, to ship, you know, more effectively, then Luro is the tool for that as well because we're getting into knowledge retention via uploading. Like, my favorite story there is if you're an A/B tester, probably, and this is what we've experienced, is you run these tests. A lot of time and effort goes into building the prototypes for the test, whether that's you or an engineering team that's doing those things. This is one of the things we used to do as an agency. We would be brought on to prototype something totally new. We would test that alongside the existing experience. And an A/B tester, we'd work with them, and they would create, like, a PowerPoint or something that would explain the pros and cons and what should happen next and summarize the test. And that would live on that person's hard drive, whether it's on their computer or, like, a Dropbox or a OneDrive account. And no one ever thought about it ever again. You would just move on to the next test. But the amount of money spent on us to build the prototype and the amount of money spent on the SaaS to spin up the, like, A/B testing environment and all of these things, and then the time spent on the A/B tester to analyze the results and generate a PowerPoint it's not nothing. And so, one of the things that we find pretty appealing for leadership within Luro is the idea of integrating all of these tools and all this work that you do in mapping them to components so that when you pull up, for example, a button component, you'll see all the user tests that have been added over any period of time. So, if you were a new hire and you're trying to onboard, you can go interview everybody in the organization and ask them about the history of a button or a card component or the history of a sign-up page. But then, also, in a self-service way, you can just click into Luro, click a button, click a card, click to the sign-up page, any of those things, and find all that stuff I was mentioning earlier, whether it's a test, or research, or prototyping, or any kind of documents that have been written. These aren't the arguments that Dave or I might have around the actual border-radius value. Those are small things that probably should be lost in the firehose. But if we have learned an outline button with a stroke is performing way better than a solid-filled button or vice versa, that's important information that doesn't need to disappear in six weeks. So, that's the other kind of metric there is explaining kind of the holistic version, telling the holistic story of Luro to those types. And so, yeah, navigating that and trying to get, like, buy-in on a broad level is kind of what we're working on these days now. WILL: Sweet. So, I actually really like how it's almost like version control. You can see the history of what you've been working on. And I really like that because so many times...you're correct. When I go to Figma or anything, I'm like, why are we doing it this way? Oh, we made these decisions. Maybe in comments, you can kind of do it, but I think maybe that's the only place you can see the version control. So, I like that feature. Like you said, you can see the history of why you did something like that. TRENT: Yeah. And think about that, so if I am a front-end engineer and I receive a design and everyone thinks that, why are we doing it this way? I would hate to code something...I can do it. It's my job. But if I don't understand why, my feeling about work and maybe the quality of my work goes down, you know what I mean? I guess what I'm trying to say is, like, feeling like you understand, and you're lockstep with the entire team, and you understand what the goal is...what are we trying to do? What are we trying to achieve? Like, what have we reviewed that has made us believe this? And if you don't have that information, or if I don't have that information, like, there's some traction within the team, whether it's actual momentum forward and the amount of tickets that are being closed, or just the spirit of what we're doing, that the product is going to be diminished. These are all these little things that add up, up, up, up, up over time. So, being able to show this information to be able to access this information kind of passively. So, for example, if you got VS Code open and Luro open and you can see here's the user test from six weeks ago that shows us why we went with option B, you'll say, "Okay, cool. Even better." You know, you can review those things way before you get things handed to you. You know, it's much more kind of this utopian vision of an open, collaborative deal. And the way I would say that is it's, you know, we all kind of hand things off. So, of course, like, there's some version, even if it's like a micro waterfall that happens on a daily basis. We're all doing that. Like, somebody needs to be done with something to hand it off to something else, so we're not all up in each other's space all the time. But one thing that we like about Luro, whether we use Teams, or Slack, or whatever, it's not a real-time thing where I have to say, "Stop, look what I'm doing [laughs]. Come over here and look because I need you to know this." You can get notifications from Luro, but it's not something that is a context-switching demand type of a situation. So, the idea is if you're like, I'm wondering what's going on. I know this is coming up. I'd like to review. Or I could let you know and tell you, and just on your own time, you can go see this. So, separate from, like, the firehose of tickets and chats, you can see the actual product evolving and some of these, like, key milestone decisions on your own time and review them. And if they've happened before you even started on the project, then you can do that as well. WILL: I think that's probably where the breakdown between developers and designers that collab that's where it probably breaks down, whenever you're trying to get your tickets out as a developer. And then there's a change while you're working on it, and it's a complicated change, but you're still responsible for trying to get that ticket out in time. So, I think, like, what you're saying, you can get it beforehand. So, it sounds like, to me, Luro would be a huge help because you have to have developers and designers working together; if you don't, you're just in trouble in general. But anything that can help the relationship between the two I think, is amazing, and that's what I'm hearing whenever you're talking about Luro. It helps. It benefits that relationship. TRENT: Yeah, that even makes me think a little bit about the ongoing collaboration aspect. So, it's like, if something is shipped...or maybe let's go the agency scenario here. You've launched a site. You've launched a product. How do we know how it's performing? Of course, you'll have everybody...they're going to have analytics, and we'll be talking about that. And are signups up or down? But Luro will run tests. It'll continue to run component analytics. So, you can sense whether, like, somebody is changing a component. Or, you know, is the fully adopted design system not being utilized or being utilized less or more over time? But then, also, we're running, again, performance and accessibility metrics. So, we've seen it where we've shipped a product for a client. You know, we've had Luro running. We've sort of used that as our hub to collaborate over time. And then we'll notice that there's a giant performance spike and that, like, the page speed has gone way down. And we itemize issues and can point you to exactly the page that it's happening on and give you some insight into that. Of course, you could go through after you've worked with the client and run Lighthouse on every single page in your own time for fun, but that's not reality or fun. So, you'll get this information. And so, you almost...before we were telling people who were using Luro, we were kind of using it ourselves just to help ourselves do a better job. About a month into a project, we were able to email a customer, a former client, and say, "Hey, site's looking great. Amazing to see this. There's a 3-megabyte, 50-pixel avatar. Someone uploaded a giant image. It displays as 50 pixels. But somebody must have uploaded the full one to your homepage, and your page speed score tanked." They're like, "Oh, wow, they must [laughs] be monitoring us and checking in on us every day." We love them dearly, but we were not doing that. We were using Luro off to the side. So, there is this other aspect of just sort of monitoring and making sure things stay, you know, as they were or better once we ship things and move forward to the next. VICTORIA: That's really interesting. And I'm excited to explore more on my own about Luro. As we're coming towards the end of our time today, I wanted to give you one last chance to shout out anything else that you would like to promote today. TRENT: Oh, that's it [laughs], luroapp.com, you know, that's the main thing. Check out component analytics. We have a YouTube channel, and I would say that's probably the easiest, a lot of effort, even though the videos maybe I'd give myself an A-minus or a solid A, not an A-plus on video production. I'm trying to get better. But explaining just, like, how to set things up. There's, like, a one-minute, like, what is all this? So, if you want to see all the things that I've been trying to describe, hopefully well on the podcast [chuckles], you can see that really well. So, I'd say Luro App and then the YouTube channel. We've got, like, five, six videos or so that really kind of help get you into maybe what your use case would be and to show you how easily things are set up. VICTORIA: Great. Thank you so much for joining us today, Trent, and for sharing about your story and about the product that you've been building. TRENT: Yeah. Thank you for having me. This has been great fun. VICTORIA: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

On this episode of Lochhead on Marketing, we enjoy the first of many visits from Al Ramadan in 2024, as we talk about moving from being a Category Contender to a Category King. We'll dig into what is a category contender in what it takes to win the 18-to-36-month epic category battle that every tech startup faces. So if you're an entrepreneur or marketing leader who wants to go beyond competing to actually create and dominate your own market, you're in the right place. Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind. Al Ramadan on Tech Industry Category Development and Dominance Christopher and Al discuss the concept of being category contenders, reflecting on past research and their book on category kings. They emphasize the dominance of one company, earning around 76% of the economics in every tech category, despite skepticism. They outline the three phases of category development: define, develop, and dominate, taking approximately 15 years. They note outliers like open AI and Google's swift battles, contrasting with Salesforce's longstanding dominance. They highlight the importance of category design, likening it to a fast-paced battle where one company wins all, stressing its critical role in the tech industry's landscape. Market strategy in a competitive industry Al and Christopher discuss marketing strategies in a competitive industry, emphasizing the importance of a winner's mindset and setting the agenda. They share a scenario where a leader in a crowded field differentiates by framing the problem uniquely, focusing on end-user needs rather than feature sets like competitors. Both highlight the futility of incremental strategies and the significance of capturing mindshare by empathizing with customer problems. They term this the "Battle Royale" for mindshare, where winning means addressing the core problem effectively, rendering feature comparisons irrelevant. Christopher also stresses the pivotal role of understanding customer problems in securing market dominance. Category design and understanding customer needs Al and Christopher discuss category design and understanding customer needs. They highlight the importance of framing the problem uniquely to differentiate in a crowded market. Christopher shares a scenario where a leader in a competitive field focuses on customer needs while competitors emphasize feature sets. They critique the common focus on technology rather than customer-centric solutions, illustrating with examples from Gartner's history and Google Plus. They emphasize that categories are about customers' problems and opportunities, not just technology, stressing the significance of defining the problem scope to win in category battles. To hear more from this Al Ramadan and Christopher Lochhead dialogue, download and listen to this episode. Bio Al Ramadan is a co-founding partner of Play Bigger Advisors and coauthor of the book, Play Bigger. He also co-founded Quokka Sports, which revolutionized the way people experience sport online. Al then joined Macromedia and Adobe, where he spent almost ten years changing the way people think about great digital experiences. At Adobe, Al led teams that created the Rich Internet Applications category and helped develop the discipline of experience design. In the early ‘90s he applied data science to Australia's Americas Cup — an innovation in sports performance analytics. His work in sailing led directly to the idea for Quokka. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. Links Connect with Al Ramadan! Play Bigger | LinkedIn | Category Contenders | The Science Behind Category Design Don't forget to grab a copy (or gift!) of one of our best-selling books:  Snow Leopard: How Legendary Writers Create A Category Of One  The Category Design Toolkit: Beyond Marketing: 15 Frameworks For Creating & Dominating Your Niche

In today's episode I speak with workplace ally Karen Catlin and emergency medicine physician toxicologist Kavita Babu. We discuss Karen's book Belonging in Healthcare. We also highlight what belonging in the workplace can mean at the holidays. For 25 years Karen Catlin built software products and served as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Today, she is a highly acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of five books: Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, Belonging in Healthcare, The Better Allies Approach to Hiring, Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking, and The Better Allies Way.  ​​Kavita Babu, MD is a Professor of Emergency Medicine Chief Opioid Officer, and Director, Division of Toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. She is a graduate of Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University where she also did her residency, followed by her Medical Toxicology Fellowship training at the UMass Chan Medical School.  

Xero co-founder Philip Fierlinger shares the story behind building one of the world's most successful accounting platforms, Xero He discusses his early inspiration from car dashboards and the gamification of bank reconciliations. Fierlinger also reveals how his latest startup Upstock is transforming the inefficient B2B food ordering process and levelling the playing field for small suppliers.    Many of our listeners will know Philip Fierlinger as one of the 5 co-founders of Xero, but let me share with you a bit of background about Philip: For over 5 years, Philip has been creating digital products and experiences that have set new standards of design, business and technology.  In 1992 a university project landed Philip an internship at General Magic where he conceptualised the “Mediaphone” a digital walkman, letting you download music anywhere, anytime. To give you some context this was 9 years before Steve Jobs introduced the iPod and 15 years before Jobs introduced the iPhone. Philip went on to create a digital agency, with his brother in 1994, doing work for Apple, the Beastie Boys, Comcast, Disney, Dreamworks, Macromedia, Palm, Sony Playstation, among many others. After moving to NZ, Philip co-founded Xero in 2006, where he was Head of Design for nearly 10 years. Philip was instrumental in Xero becoming a disruptive platform, an iconic global brand, and a market leading public company worth billions of dollars. And I suspect as he had a focus on design, he had something to do with making Xero beautiful software. Philip is currently Co-CEO of Upstock, a B2B wholesale platform that's transforming the way the foodservice industry operates. Along the way Philip has been an investor and advisor to numerous startups and scaleups including Sharesies, Milanote, Deputy, Atomic, Karbon, Chartio (sold to Atlassian) – helping with product, marketing, growth, team & culture, and investor strategy. In this episode, I talk to Philip Fierlinger Co-Ceo of UpStock.app about . . . Career journey from car design to tech entrepreneurship.  Xero's history, developing an accounting system with a focus on bank feeds and beautiful design.  Prioritising business operations over tax compliance with real-time cash flow visibility. How a three year old inspired the innovative design of Xero Launching a foodservice marketplace, digitising B2B transactions. The business model and pricing for a B2B marketplace.  Streamlining foodservice industry operations with UpStock platform.  A platform for farmers and suppliers to connect and grow their businesses. You have been listening to the Cloud Stories podcast. I encourage you to subscribe and leave a five star review, so other people can find this podcast. From here, I suggest you join the Xero Mastermind group on Facebook for advanced conversations around the ecosystem. I suggest you  subscribe to the informative Accounting Apps newsletter which gives you a great overview of the ecosystem space. It's available at https://HeatherSmithAU.COM.  I encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Cloud Stories podcast. I'm Heather Smith and you've been listening to the Cloud Stories podcast.

Description:Today,  Lee sits down with Tom Hale, CEO of ŌURA, which delivers personalized health data and guidance to make wellness and recovery part of your daily practice. Tuning in, you'll find out how Tom went from growing up with dreams of becoming a train engineer to discovering the OŪRA Ring and writing a letter to the board about why they should hire him as CEO. You'll gain some insight into Tom's journey as a leader, which started with executive positions at Macromedia and Adobe, to becoming President of Momentive, where he set enterprise strategy and led product growth. Join us as we discuss Tom's leadership style, why he says it's lonely at the top, how he got a crash course in fundraising from raising $40 million in less than a month, and so much more!Exclusive Deals from Our Sponsors:AWESOME CX by Transcom provides high touch, personalized customer experience services to consumer brands of any size! Email Lee at lee@stairwaytoceo.com to learn more about their award-winning services and Awesome Coffee Chats.  In This Episode You'll Hear About:•   [02:29] Tom's upbringing in a “dusty town” and his love for trains (and Dungeons & Dragons).•   [08:21] What sparked his interest in the impact that business and tech can have on society.•   [10:42] Some of Tom's early jobs, including computer consulting and summarizing scripts.•   [18:54] The importance of learning on the job and how he went from Adobe to Second Life.•   [24:23] What Tom learned about the gig economy from his time at HomeAway.•   [26:27] How losing sleep led him to discover the Oura Ring and how it improved his health.•   [36:49] The story of how Tom went from a customer of Oura to the company's CEO!•   [44:05] Challenges facing newbie CEOs and the value of having a leadership mandate.•   [46:07] Little-known realities of being CEO, including the loneliness that comes with it.•   [51:44] Oura's company values, which encompass a spirit of collaboration and aiming higher.•   [53:35] Viewing the fundraising journey as a lesson in what investors find compelling.•   [55:42] Insight into Oura's vision for the future: from sick care to human care.To Find Out More:ŌURATom Hale on LinkedInTom Hale on XLee Greene on LinkedInStairway to CEOStairway to CEO on InstagramQuotes:“Pulling on the threads of technology, its impact on society, how people change because of technology, and [my experience] with personal computers – it came together and led me on the path that I'm on today.” [0:10:24]“They put me in [a product management job at Macromedia], and it was probably my [biggest] learning-on-the-job moment, figuring stuff out. I remember some moments of high anxiety because I was like, ‘I have no idea what I'm doing!'” [0:17:45]2“Early in your career, if you're at a company where there's more work than there are people to do it – you can move up really quickly in your career.” [0:19:17]“[When] I went to HomeAway, I was captured by the idea that you could rent a property to someone over the internet and they would come and stay in it. It was an interesting confluence of what we today call the gig economy.” [0:25:22]“For me, during that period of losing sleep, [the Oura Ring] really changed my life.”  [0:27:57]“That kind of power, giving your body a voice, is central to what Oura does.” [0:36:40]“It was all very rational and logical, but there was a strong intent behind [my letter to Oura]. Sometimes, you get that intent coming through and people say, ‘Here's somebody who's motivated.' And motivation counts.” [0:38:53]“I get most excited about working on products that I can understand, touch, and feel and [that are] relevant and relatable – on a really human level.” [0:39:43]“The role of a CEO sometimes is to go against the grain.” [0:47:14]“Our big vision is: how do we become part of the behavioral change that improves health outcomes, that transforms the healthcare industry from one where it's about sick care to something we call human care?” [0:56:14]

For this episode, Rob and I interviewed Roy Rapoport, a people-oriented people leader with decades of experience working for marquee tech companies including Macromedia, Slack, and Netflix. We talked about: * Roy's dream jobs and why they were dream jobs * Why Roy doesn't want to identify as a “great leader” * Shame & Leadership * Mentoring vs. Leading * Why love is a key ingredient to making an impact * Roy's views on retirement and money management * and soooo much more! Enjoy this useful, fun episode full of inspiring truths! Special Guest: Roy Rapoport.

Frommm Wessssst Philadelphia, Ezra Cohen, raised in Mount Airy, Philadelphia, initially pursued a career in animation inspired by the Dire Straits' video "Money for Nothing." He attended the University of the Arts where he delved into various artistic mediums but found his true passion in metal sculpture, particularly artisanal blacksmithing. However, after graduation, a lack of resources and studio space led him and his friend to shift their focus towards graphic design. They established themselves in Philadelphia and New York for their work in Flash animation, featuring in the Macromedia 5 Flash Bible. However, the dot-com crash led to a significant downsizing of their operations, with Cohen transitioning to remote work and ultimately relocating to Prague in 2004.In Prague, after a considerable period of inactivity, Cohen took on a project for AOL following a mass layoff at the company, leading to a year of intensive work. The successful completion of this project resulted in a shift in his career trajectory. He moved to Olomouc, where he began to transition from Flash to open-source CMSs like WordPress and Drupal. This organically evolved into enterprise-level CMSs, custom software development, and eventually a return to front-end design. Cohen's success in his career, as he asserts, largely stemmed from effective networking, an aspect he continues to utilize extensively in his professional pursuits.On a personal note, around a decade ago, Cohen began focusing on his health in preparation for starting a family. He adopted a regular workout routine, reduced alcohol and coffee intake, and started following a flexitarian diet. Inspired by a documentary about longevity featuring Chris Hemsworth, he also explored various wellness practices such as cold therapy and microdosing. Furthermore, Cohen envisions opening a mega art studio equipped with everything from glassblowing to metalworking tools, designed to serve as a creative space for aspiring artists who lack resources, reflecting his own struggles as a young artist.Connect with Jay on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jayaigner/The First Customer Youtube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/@thefirstcustomerpodcastThe First Customer podcast websitehttps://www.firstcustomerpodcast.comFollow The First Customer on LinkedInhttp://www.linkedin.com/company/the-first-customer-podcast/

On today's show, we talk to Sean Corfield about his take on the "Tech Interview" process. With over 40 years of experience at companies like Macromedia, Adobe, and World Singles, Sean has been on both sides of the interview table; and, has been personally responsible for hiring countless engineers. His perspective that most tech interviews are "broken" might be taken with some apprehension if it weren't for the fact that, in 30-years of hiring, Sean has never once had to fire an engineer for lack of ability. So, he's clearly figured out how to hire the right people using a proven and repeatable process.Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Guest: Tom Hale, CEO of OuraWhen he was growing up, Tom Hale's family had pretty ordinary dinner-table conversations: What happened today, how was school, etc. But every day after dinner, Tom and his father would play backgammon, an experience that indirectly taught him a lot about business. Now the CEO of wearable health company Oura, he recalls that the game helped him understand risk-taking, strategy, pattern recognition, and more. Tom's father also insisted they play for money: “If I could win 20 bucks, I could go down to the store and get something. But when I lost, I felt the sting of it. That's the best teacher, because you're learning the preciousness of the decisions you make.”In this episode, Tom and Joubin discuss Tom's radio voice, games of chance and skill, vacation rentals pre- and post-Airbnb, “irritant” service fees, health tracking, the psychology of rebranding, the consumerization of healthcare, personalized medicine, the myth of the founder-hero, rowing machines, and the meaning of work.In this episode, we cover: Returning to the office (00:50) John Doerr and Macromedia (05:15) Post-dinner backgammon (08:01) Tom's past jobs and HomeAway (11:31) Competing against private startups (16:09) How Airbnb captured demand (18:55) Being acquired by Expedia (24:26) What Oura's smart rings do (26:13) Rebranding SurveyMonkey to Momentive (29:55) Leaving Momentive for Oura (31:54) Making the case for himself (34:59) The future of public health, data, and wearables (37:10) “Sleep is strategic” (42:32) Why Oura is an AI company (44:48) The health impact of a taxing job (47:16) Being a non-founder CEO (49:39) Working with people (53:38) What would be in a “working with Tom” doc? (54:52) Managing the psychology of a 10-year-old startup (56:48) Being there for family & colleagues (59:18) Who Oura is hiring, and what “grit” means to Tom (01:02:54) Links: Connect with Tom Twitter LinkedIn Connect with Joubin Twitter LinkedIn Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

The Mogollon culture was an indigenous culture in the Western United States and Mexico that ranged from New Mexico and Arizona to Sonora, Mexico and out to Texas. They flourished from around 200 CE until the Spanish showed up and claimed their lands. The cultures that pre-existed them date back thousands more years, although archaeology has yet to pinpoint exactly how those evolved. Like many early cultures, they farmed and foraged. As they farmed more, their homes become more permanent and around 800 CE they began to create more durable homes that helped protect them from wild swings in the climate. We call those homes adobes today and the people who lived in those peublos and irrigated water, often moving higher into mountains, we call the Peubloans - or Pueblo Peoples. Adobe homes are similar to those found in ancient cultures in what we call Turkey today. It's an independent evolution. Adobe Creek was once called Arroyo de las Yeguas by the monks from Mission Santa Clara and then renamed to San Antonio Creek by a soldier Juan Prado Mesa when the land around it was given to him by the governor of Alto California at the time, Juan Bautista Alvarado. That's the same Alvarado as the street if you live in the area. The creek runs for over 14 miles north from the Black Mountain and through Palo Alto, California. The ranchers built their adobes close to the creeks. American settlers led the Bear Flag Revolt in 1846, and took over the garrison of Sonoma, establishing the California Republic - which covered much of the lands of the Peubloans. There were only 33 of them at first, but after John Fremont (yes, he of whom that street is named after as well) encouraged the Americans, they raised an army of over 100 men and Fremont helped them march on Sutter's fort, now with the flag of the United States, thanks to Joseph Revere of the US Navy (yes, another street in San Francisco bears his name).  James Polk had pushed to expand the United States. Manfiest Destiny. Remember The Alamo. Etc. The fort at Monterey fell, the army marched south. Admiral Sloat got involved. They named a street after him. General Castro surrendered - he got a district named after him. Commodore Stockton announced the US had taken all of Calfironia soon after that. Manifest destiny was nearly complete. He's now basically the patron saint of a city, even if few there know who he was. The forts along the El Camino Real that linked the 21 Spanish Missions, a 600-mile road once walked by their proverbial father, Junípero Serra following the Portolá expedition of 1769, fell. Stockton took each, moving into Los Angeles, then San Diego. Practically all of Alto California fell with few shots. This was nothing like the battles for the independence of Texas, like when Santa Anna reclaimed the Alamo Mission.  Meanwhile, the waters of Adobe Creek continued to flow. The creek was renamed in the 1850s after Mesa built an adobe on the site. Adobe Creek it was. Over the next 100 years, the area evolved into a paradise with groves of trees and then groves of technology companies. The story of one begins a little beyond the borders of California.  Utah was initialy explored by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in 1540 and settled by Europeans in search of furs and others who colonized the desert, including those who established the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons - who settled there in 1847, just after the Bear Flag Revolt. The United States officially settled for the territory in 1848 and Utah became a territory and after a number of map changes wher ethe territory got smaller, was finally made a state in 1896. The University of Utah had been founded all the way back in 1850, though - and re-established in the 1860s.  100 years later, the University of Utah was a hotbed of engineers who pioneered a number of graphical advancements in computing. John Warnock went to grad school there and then went on to co-found Adobe and help bring us PostScript. Historically, PS, or Postscript was a message to be placed at the end of a letter, following the signature of the author. The PostScript language was a language to describe a page of text computationally. It was created by Adobe when Warnock, Doug Brotz, Charles Geschke, Bill Paxton (who worked on the Mother of All Demos with Doug Englebart during the development of Online System, or NLS in the late 70s and then at Xerox PARC), and Ed Taft. Warnock invented the Warnock algorithm while working on his PhD and went to work at Evans & Sutherland with Ivan Sutherland who effectively created the field of computer graphics. Geschke got his PhD at Carnegie Melon in the early 1970s and then went of to Xerox PARC. They worked with Paxton at PARC and before long, these PhDs and mathematicians had worked out the algorithms and then the languages to display images on computers while working on InterPress graphics at Xerox and Gerschke left Xerox and started Adobe. Warnock joined them and they went to market with Interpress as PostScript, which became a foundation for the Apple LaswerWriter to print graphics.  Not only that, PostScript could be used to define typefaces programmatically and later to display any old image.    Those technologies became the foundation for the desktop publishing industry. Apple released the 1984 Mac and other vendors brought in PostScript to describe graphics in their proprietary fashion and by 1991 they released PostScript Level 2 and then PostScript 3 in 1997. Other vendors made their own or furthered standards in their own ways and Adobe could have faded off into the history books of computing. But Adobe didn't create one product, they created an industry and the company they created to support that young industry created more products in that mission.  Steve Jobs tried to buy Adobe before that first Mac as released, for $5,000,000. But Warnock and Geschke had a vision for an industry in mind. They had a lot of ideas but development was fairly capital intensive, as were go to market strategies. So they went public on the NASDAQ in 1986. They expanded their PostScript distribution and sold it to companies like Texas Instruments for their laser printer, and other companies who made IBM-compatible companies. They got up to $16 million in sales that year. Warnock's wife was a graphic designer. This is where we see a diversity of ideas help us think about more than math. He saw how she worked and could see a world where Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad was much more given how far CPUs had come since the TX-0 days at MIT. So Adobe built and released Illustrator in 1987. By 1988 they broke even on sales and it raked in $19 million in revenue. Sales were strong in the universities but PostScript was still the hot product, selling to printer companies, typesetters, and other places were Adobe signed license agreements.  At this point, we see where the math, cartesian coordinates, drawn by geometric algorithms put pixels where they should be. But while this was far more efficient than just drawing a dot in a coordinate for larger images, drawing a dot in a pixel location was still the easier technology to understand.  They created Adobe Screenline in 1989 and Collectors Edition to create patterns. They listened to graphic designers and built what they heard humans wanted. Photoshop Nearly every graphic designer raves about Adobe Photoshop. That's because Photoshop is the best selling graphics editorial tool that has matured far beyond most other traditional solutions and now has thousands of features that allow users to manipulate images in practically any way they want.  Adobe Illustrator was created in 1987 and quickly became the de facto standard in vector-based graphics. Photoshop began life in 1987 as well, when Thomas and John Knoll, wanted to build a simpler tool to create graphics on a computer. Rather than vector graphics they created a raster graphical editor.  They made a deal with Barneyscan, a well-known scanner company that managed to distribute over two hundred copies of Photoshop with their scanners and Photoshop became a hit as it was the first editing software people heard about. Vector images are typically generated with Cartesian coordinates based on geometric formulas and so scale out more easily. Raster images are comprised of a grid of dots, or pixels, and can be more realistic.  Great products are rewarded with competitions. CorelDRAW was created in 1989 when Michael Bouillon and Pat Beirne built a tool to create vector illustrations. The sales got slim after other competitors entered the market and the Knoll brothers got in touch with Adobe and licensed the product through them. The software was then launched as Adobe Photoshop 1 in 1990. They released Photoshop 2 in 1991. By now they had support for paths, and given that Adobe also made Illustrator, EPS and CMYK rasterization, still a feature in Photoshop.  They launched Adobe Photoshop 2.5 in 1993, the first version that could be installed on Windows. This version came with a toolbar for filters and 16-bit channel support. Photoshop 3 came in 1994 and Thomas Knoll created what was probably one of the most important features added, and one that's become a standard in graphical applications since, layers. Now a designer could create a few layers that each had their own elements and hide layers or make layers more transparent. These could separate the subject from the background and led to entire new capabilities, like an almost faux 3 dimensional appearance of graphics..  Then version four in 1996 and this was one of the more widely distributed versions and very stable. They added automation and this was later considered part of becoming a platform - open up a scripting language or subset of a language so others built tools that integrated with or sat on top of those of a product, thus locking people into using products once they automated tasks to increase human efficiency.  Adobe Photoshop 5.0 added editable type, or rasterized text. Keep in mind that Adobe owned technology like PostScript and so could bring technology from Illustrator to Photoshop or vice versa, and integrate with other products - like export to PDF by then. They also added a number of undo options, a magnetic lasso, improved color management and it was now a great tool for more advanced designers. Then in 5.5 they added a save for web feature in a sign of the times. They could created vector shapes and continued to improve the user interface. Adobe 5 was also a big jump in complexity. Layers were easy enough to understand, but Photoshop was meant to be a subset of Illustrator features and had become far more than that. So in 2001 they released Photoshop Elements. By now they had a large portfolio of products and Elements was meant to appeal to the original customer base - the ones who were beginners and maybe not professional designers. By now, some people spent 40 or more hours a day in tools like Photoshop and Illustrator.  Adobe Today Adobe had released PostScript, Illustrator, and Photoshop. But they have one of the most substantial portfolios of products of any company. They also released Premiere in 1991 to get into video editing. They acquired Aldus Corporation to get into more publishing workflows with PageMaker. They used that acquisition to get into motion graphics with After Effects. They acquired dozens of companies and released their products as well. Adobe also released the PDF format do describe full pages of information (or files that spread across multiple pages) in 1993 and Adobe Acrobat to use those. Acrobat became the de facto standard for page distribution so people didn't have to download fonts to render pages properly. They dabbled in audio editing when they acquired Cool Edit Pro from Syntrillium Software and so now sell Adobe Audition.  Adobe's biggest acquisition was Macromedia in 2005. Here, they added a dozen new products to the portfolio, which included Flash, Fireworks, WYSYWIG web editor Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Flex, and Breeze, which is now called Adobe Connect. By now, they'd also created what we call Creative Suite, which are packages of applications that could be used for given tasks. Creative Suite also signaled a transition into a software as a service, or SaaS mindset. Now customers could pay a monthly fee for a user license rather than buy large software packages each time a new version was released. Adobe had always been a company who made products to create graphics. They expanded into online marketing and web analytics when they bought Omniture in 2009 for $1.8 billion. These products are now normalized into the naming convention used for the rest as Adobe Marketing Cloud. Flash fell by the wayside and so the next wave of acquisitions were for more mobile-oriented products. This began with Day Software and then Nitobi in 2011. And they furthered their Marketing Cloud support with an acquisition of one of the larger competitors when they acquired Marketo in 2018 and acquiring Workfront in 2020.  Given how many people started working from home, they also extended their offerings into pure-cloud video tooling with an acquisition of Frame.io in 2021. And here we see a company started by a bunch of true computer sciencists from academia in the early days of the personal computer that has become far more. They could have been rolled into Apple but had a vision of a creative suite of products that could be used to make the world a prettier place. Creative Suite then Creative Cloud shows a move of the same tools into a more online delivery model. Other companies come along to do similar tasks, like infinite digital whiteboard Miro - so they have to innovate to stay marketable. They have to continue to increase sales so they expand into other markets like the most adjacent Marketing Cloud.  At 22,500+ employees and with well over $12 billion in revenues, they have a lot of families dependent on maintaining that growth rate. And so the company becomes more than the culmination of their software. They become more than graphic design, web design, video editing, animation, and visual effects. Because in software, if revenues don't grow at a rate greater than 10 percent per year, the company simply isn't outgrowing the size of the market and likely won't be able to justify stock prices at an inflated earnings to price ratio that shows explosive growth. And yet once a company saturates sales in a given market they have shareholders to justify their existence to. Adobe has survived many an economic downturn and boom time with smart, measured growth and is likely to continue doing so for a long time to come.

Diseñador Gráfico y Productor Egresado de La Universidad Iberoamericana Aprendio y trabajo con Massimo y Lella Vignelli al principio de su carrera. Ha estado involucrado en varias areas del diseño, desde diseño editorial, diseño de empaque, y branding. Durante los 2000 estuvo involucrado en el desarollo de varios portales y fue beta tester de Macromedia durante los principios de plataformas como Flash Fundo el despacho de diseño “Nephews Design Collective” junto con Ferrmaria Castañeda y un gran grupo de colaboradores. Ha estado involucrado en mas de 20 obras de teatro tanto en México como en el extranjero y hay trabajado con personalidades con John Malkovich, Diego Luna, Pedro Almodovar en la creacion de la imagen de varias de sus obras. Actualmente forma parte de Máquina501 la productora de Chumel Torres, en la cual lleva la identidad gráfica de todos los proyectos. Tambien es el Growth Director de México de RSS.com una de las 10 distribuidoras y productoras de podcasts mas importantes en el mundo.

Hoy vuelve Eduardo a hablar con Paco de cómo fue el trato de Figma , que ha pasado que se espera que pase con Adobe, correrá Figma con la misma suerte que Macromedia . Descubrelo en este nuevo episodio especial de Ux al Suave

Leaders, Jon Younger and Steve King are the brains behind many of our industries leading stats. What's unique about Steve is that he's the perfect example of freelancing becoming the natural evolution of work. Steve wasn't a pissed off employee that wanted to ‘ditch the 9-5 to sit on a beach'. He was a VP & GM at leading companies like Lotus Development and Macromedia. In terms of the corporate ladder, he made it, yet he chose to blaze the solopreneur path instead through his firm Emergent Research, There are 7 massive themes that Steve and I discuss. There's now a middle class to the freelance economy 55% of individuals have been independent at some point in their life 60% of Americans don't have the risk profile of a freelancer There was 20%+ growth from 2021 to 2022, with full time freelancers as the leading segment Freelancing is overwhelmingly chosen, and freelancers have the highest levels of fulfillment Misclassification is protecting 25% of the population at the expense of the entire freelancer population We'll also break down MBO Partners recent State of Independence in America 2022 Report. Make sure to check out Steve's leader portal: https://humancloud.substack.com/s/leaders

Join host William Corless for this latest episode featuring an in-depth conversation with Karen Catlin, author of "Better Allies" and a recognized expert on diversity, inclusion, and workplace equality. With 25 years of experience as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen has seen first-hand the decline in women working in tech and is dedicated to making a positive impact on diversity and inclusion. Join Karen and William as they tackle very relevant and topics in today's workplace and addressing important issues such as: ➢ The different types of allies and how to be a better ally in the workplace. ➢ The language that can be useful when trying to support underrepresented groups ➢ The definition and impact of microaggressions. Find out more about the work Karen does here and be sure to sign up for her newsletter. Karen Catlin – Advocate for Inclusive Workplaces | Coach | Speaker | Author

106. Karen Catlin - Generous Allyship  “One of my favorite approaches for giving people feedback on non-inclusive language or other non-inclusive behavior. And that is, seek common ground and then educate.” - Karen Catlin “Be curious, not furious.” - Karen Catlin Karen Catlin Guest Bio: After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. In 2014, Karen started the Twitter handle @betterallies to share simple, actionable steps that anyone could take to make their workplaces more inclusive. That Twitter handle became the inspiration for three books: Better Allies®: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, The Better Allies Approach to Hiring, and Belonging in Healthcare. She also emails a roundup of “5 Ally Actions” to over 30,000 newsletter subscribers every week. A self-professed public speaking geek, Karen is a highly sought-after and engaging presenter who has delivered talks at hundreds of conferences and corporate events. Her TEDx talk, “Women in Tech: The Missing Force,” explores the decline in gender diversity in tech, why it's a problem, and what can be done about it. In addition to speaking herself, Karen is determined to change the ratio for who is on stage giving keynotes and other presentations. To support her goal of bringing more diversity to speaker lineups at tech industry events, she coauthored the book Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking with Poornima Vijayashanker. In addition to speaking about her books, Karen coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies for members of all underrepresented groups. Her client roster includes Airbnb, DoorDash, Google, eBay, and Intuit. Her writing on leadership has appeared in Inc., the Daily Beast, Fast Company, and the Muse, and she's consulted on articles for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times. Karen is a graduate and active alum of Brown University, mentoring students on how to launch their careers. She's also a member of the board of directors of Digital NEST and on the advisory boards for the Women's CLUB of Silicon Valley and WEST (Women Entering & Staying in Technology). In 2015, the California State Assembly honored Karen with the Wonder Women Tech Innovator Award for outstanding achievements in business and technology and for being a role model for women. Guest Favorite Quote:  “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” - Maya Angelou R.O.G. Takeaway Tips: Share the spotlight. Take the 50 Potential Privileges Checklist  Share office housework Set up your profile with inclusive requirements. (closed captions, diverse panels, etc.)  Keep growing on the journey. Subscribe to 5 Ally Actions for specific ideas on how to continue to grow.  Resources: www.karencatlin.com www.betterallies.com Additional Better Allies Content Better Allies Weekly Newletter Karen Catlin on LinkedIn (ln/kecatlin) Karen Catlin on Twitter (@kecatlin) Karen Catlin on Instagram (@karencatlin) Better Allies on Instagram (@betterallies) Better Allies on Twitter (@betterallies) Network Diversity Index Quiz Coming Next: Episode 107, Building Bridges Coaching Tips for Generous Leaders with Shannon Cassidy. Topic: Generous V.I.B.E.   Credits: Karen Catlin, Sheep Jam Productions, Host Shannon Cassidy, Bridge Between, Inc.

Neste episódio do Diocast vamos comentar sobre mais uma grande aquisição ocorre no mercado de tecnologia, a Adobe fecha acordo para adquirir o Figma por 20 bilhões de dólares. Como que esta aquisição pode afetar o mercado de serviços de desenvolvimento web e de interfaces? Será que o Figma vai conhecer o mesmo fim que empresas como Macromedia e Aldus tiveram? Quais são as alternativas que o mercado oferece e principalmente, para o cenário de código livre, quais são as alternativas? Conheça estas respostas e muito mais neste episódio. -- Este episódio do Diocast conta com o apoio da Trybe! Se você já conhece de tecnologia e quer desenvolver suas habilidades, está buscando o primeiro trabalho ou quer fazer uma transição de carreira para o desenvolvimento web, a Trybe é para você! A Trybe conta com uma formação completa em desenvolvimento web com duração de 12 meses, e 9 em cada 10 estudantes conseguem um trabalho em até 3 meses após a formação.

On this episode of Lochhead on Marketing, our guest Al Ramadan talks about what's at stake when it comes to category battles, how you can spot the category challengers who can become category kings and queens, and what they need to become category leaders that earn 76% of the economics. There comes a time in every startup's life, where they face an epic, typically 18-to-36-month category battle. As we reported in our first book Play Bigger, the company that wins that battle earns 76% of the total value created in the category as measured by the market caps for public companies and valuations for private companies. What that means is, in any space, one company earns two thirds of the economics, which makes that category battle, which is typically 18 to 36 months long, arguably the highest stakes game in business. This episode will be available on both Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different and Lochhead on Marketing, because we think it is that important that everyone must hear about it. So without further ado, let's dive into this dialogue. Play Bigger: Looking back, and its impact today Al Ramadan comes into the conversation bearing data about the businesses and companies we've observed when writing Play Bigger, as well as some new players that have achieve the same feat since then. To recap, Al Ramadan and Christopher Lochhead wrote a book back in 2014 called Play Bigger, which talks about category design and how it can make you become a category leader in your chosen space. One of the things they've found out in the course of their research is that Category Leaders tend to corner 76% of the value of said space. Though when they wrote Play Bigger, the world was nowhere near as digitized as it is today. So a lot of the research was based on tech companies back then. But now, as more and more categories are behaving like tech categories due to digital scalability and digital reach, these findings are becoming true for every category. Category Kings to Category Leaders Al Ramadan shares that he and his team looked into the 35 Category Kings that they have observed back in Play Bigger, and check on their current situation in the market sphere. In Play Bigger, we originally published a set of research and tracked 35 Category Kings in the tech space and their market caps at the time were 465 billion and those same companies today are now worth 1.9 trillion. “If you track what happened to those 35 kings, as we call them back then, between the year of 2014 to the year of 2021. You want to know what the numbers are? At the time in 2014, the entire pool of the 35 category kings were valued at 465 billion. They are now valued at 1.9 trillion. That is, they've created more than $1,000,001.5 in market cap and the annual for those people who care about this stuff like Investors and Financial people. The compound interest growth rate of those kings. Market cap wise, is 22.46%.” – Al Ramadan Given this data, it begs the question of how many understand that this is the new dynamic, and how many entrepreneurs and marketers still think that it's a big leap of faith to follow. To hear more from Al Ramadan and how Category Kings can become legendary Category Leaders, download and listen to this episode. Bio Al Ramadan is a co-founding partner of Play Bigger Advisors and coauthor of the book, Play Bigger. He also co-founded Quokka Sports, which revolutionized the way people experience sport online. Al then joined Macromedia and Adobe, where he spent almost ten years changing the way people think about great digital experiences. At Adobe, Al led teams that created the Rich Internet Applications category and helped develop the discipline of experience design. In the early ‘90s he applied data science to Australia's Americas Cup — an innovation in sports performance analytics. His work in sailing led directly to the idea for Quokka. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. Links Connect with Al Ramadan!

On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, our guest Al Ramadan talks about what's at stake when it comes to category battles, how you can spot the category challengers who can become category kings and queens, and what they need to become category leaders that earn 76% of the economics. There comes a time in every startup's life, where they face an epic, typically 18-to-36-month category battle. As we reported in our first book Play Bigger, the company that wins that battle earns 76% of the total value created in the category as measured by the market caps for public companies and valuations for private companies. What that means is, in any space, one company earns two thirds of the economics, which makes that category battle, which is typically 18 to 36 months long, arguably the highest stakes game in business. This episode will be available on both Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different and Lochhead on Marketing, because we think it is that important that everyone must hear about it. So without further ado, let's dive into this dialogue. Play Bigger: Looking back, and its impact today Al Ramadan comes into the conversation bearing data about the businesses and companies we've observed when writing Play Bigger, as well as some new players that have achieve the same feat since then. To recap, Al Ramadan and Christopher Lochhead wrote a book back in 2014 called Play Bigger, which talks about category design and how it can make you become a category leader in your chosen space. One of the things they've found out in the course of their research is that Category Leaders tend to corner 76% of the value of said space. Though when they wrote Play Bigger, the world was nowhere near as digitized as it is today. So a lot of the research was based on tech companies back then. But now, as more and more categories are behaving like tech categories due to digital scalability and digital reach, these findings are becoming true for every category. Category Kings to Category Leaders Al Ramadan shares that he and his team looked back on the 35 Category Kings that they have observed back in Play Bigger, and check on their current situation in the market sphere. In Play Bigger, we originally published a set of research and tracked 35 Category Kings in the tech space and their market caps at the time were 465 billion and those same companies today are now worth 1.9 trillion. “If you track what happened to those 35 kings, as we call them back then, between the year of 2014 to the year of 2021. You want to know what the numbers are? At the time in 2014, the entire pool of the 35 category kings were valued at 465 billion. They are now valued at 1.9 trillion. That is, they've created more than $1,000,001.5 in market cap and the annual for those people who care about this stuff like Investors and Financial people. The compound interest growth rate of those kings. Market cap wise, is 22.46%.” – Al Ramadan Given this data, it begs the question of how many understand that this is the new dynamic, and how many entrepreneurs and marketers still think that it's a big leap of faith to follow. To hear more from Al Ramadan and how Category Kings can become legendary Category Leaders, download and listen to this episode. Bio Al Ramadan is a co-founding partner of Play Bigger Advisors and coauthor of the book, Play Bigger. He also co-founded Quokka Sports, which revolutionized the way people experience sport online. Al then joined Macromedia and Adobe, where he spent almost ten years changing the way people think about great digital experiences. At Adobe, Al led teams that created the Rich Internet Applications category and helped develop the discipline of experience design. In the early ‘90s he applied data science to Australia's Americas Cup — an innovation in sports performance analytics. His work in sailing led directly to the idea for Quokka. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. Links Connect with Al Ramadan!

2022-08-09 Weekly News - Episode 160Watch the video version on YouTube at https://youtu.be/LZtoUnLPU38 Hosts:  Eric Peterson - Senior Developer at Ortus Solutions Gavin Pickin - Senior Developer at Ortus Solutions Thanks to our Sponsor - Ortus SolutionsThe makers of ColdBox, CommandBox, ForgeBox, TestBox and all your favorite box-es out there. A few ways  to say thanks back to Ortus Solutions: BUY SOME ITB TICKETS - COME TO THE CONFERENCE - Have a few laughs! Like and subscribe to our videos on YouTube.  Help ORTUS reach for the Stars - Star and Fork our ReposStar all of your Github Box Dependencies from CommandBox with https://www.forgebox.io/view/commandbox-github  Subscribe to our Podcast on your Podcast Apps and leave us a review Sign up for a free or paid account on CFCasts, which is releasing new content every week BOXLife store: https://www.ortussolutions.com/about-us/shop Buy Ortus's Book - 102 ColdBox HMVC Quick Tips and Tricks on GumRoad (http://gum.co/coldbox-tips)  Patreon SupportGoal 1 - We have 37 patreons providing 100% of the funding for our Modernize or Die Podcasts via our Patreon site: https://www.patreon.com/ortussolutions. Goal 2 - We are 44% of the way to fully fund the hosting of ForgeBox.io News and AnnouncementsLucee Release Roadmap, 6.0, 5.3.9 and 5.3.105.3.9 - Firstly, we have been working on the open regressions 11 with 5.3.9 and hope to release a quick RC this Friday.6.0.0-BETA - There are still a number of blockers which we still need to address, but we are getting very close.https://dev.lucee.org/t/lucee-release-roadmap-6-0-5-3-9-and-5-3-10/10810 WireBox Object Delegators are now born! WireBox Object Delegators are now born!  It's been committed with tests and hopefully this new design pattern will help you create beautiful object DSLs and just allow for less boilerplate in your code.https://ortussolutions.atlassian.net/browse/WIREBOX-131?atlOrigin=eyJpIjoiMGY4OTQwZGE2YTU5NGVkNGI2MDk5YzI1ZDM0MDA0ZGQiLCJwIjoiamlyYS1zbGFjay1pbnQifQ Lucee - Allow reducing the Priority of Concurrent RequestsMicha has been working on a new feature which will help to make uncoordinated DDOS attacks less effective against Lucee, by amongst other things reducing the thread priorityIt's been added to the 5.3.9.151-SNAPSHOT and 5.3.10.39-SNAPSHOTshttps://dev.lucee.org/t/allow-reducing-the-priority-of-concurrent-requests/10807/3 ICYMI - 117 ACF and Lucee roundtable (Part 3 – future CFML) with Charlie Arehart, Gert Franz, Mark Drew and Ben NadelCharlie Arehart, Gert Franz, Mark Drew and Ben Nadel talk about “ACF and Lucee roundtable (Part 3 – future CFML)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.“We're gonna be talking about Adobe ColdFusion and Lucee and how they compare and contrast and all cool new features coming in the next five years that we prognosticate future performance. Improvements might be coming CFML engine updates and how you can best approach those confusion security. And we'll wrap up with some other questions about being a good CFML developer and conferences this year.”https://teratech.com/podcast/acf-and-lucee-roundtable-part-3-future-cfml-with-charlie-arehart-gert-franz-mark-drew-and-ben-nadel/INTO THE BOX - Updates1 month left until the start of the Pre-Conf, the Workshop and 2 days of 2 track content. ITB Pre-Conference Schedule Finalized on the Website (3 sessions TBA)Workshops are starting to fill up - don't miss your chance.https://intothebox.org/ New Releases and UpdatesLucee - Image Extension 1.2.0.1 and 1.0.0.44, isImageFile() invalid file locking fixedBugfix: locked temp image files - isImageFile()https://luceeserver.atlassian.net/browse/LDEV-3931When using isImageFile() for certain formats, if the file wasn't an image, Lucee was leaving the file locked.https://dev.lucee.org/t/image-extension-1-2-0-1-and-1-0-0-44-isimagefile-invalid-file-locking-fixed/10808 ICYMI - CFConfig - Now supports Scheduled Tasks in LuceeThanks to a sponsor, CFConfig now supports importing/exporting scheduled tasks for #Lucee Server (Adobe already had support)!  Please give it a test with the latest version and remember, tasks need imported into the web context of Lucee! #CommandBox #CFML #ColdFusionhttps://www.forgebox.io/view/commandbox-cfconfigICYMI - ColdBox 6.8.0 Released!I am incredibly excited to announce the release of ColdBox v6.8.0 and its standalone companion libraries: CacheBox, LogBox and WireBox. This update includes some important fixes and we managed to squeeze some nice improvements!Bug COLDBOX-1134 Router closure responses not marshaling complex content to JSON COLDBOX-1132 New virtual app was always starting up the virtual coldbox app instead of checking if it was running already Improvement COLDBOX-1131 Updated Missing Action Response Code to 404 instead of 405 COLDBOX-1127 All core async proxies should send exceptions to the error log New Feature COLDBOX-1130 New config/ColdBox.cfc global injections: webMapping, coldboxVersion COLDBOX-1126 Funnel all out and err logging on a ColdBox Scheduled Task to LogBox TaskCOLDBOX-1135 Remove HandlerTestCase as it is no longer in usage.https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/coldbox-680-released/ICYMI - Adobe CFML VS Code Extension released (in Public Beta)https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=com-adobe-coldfusion.adobe-cfml-lspWebinar / Meetups and WorkshopsOrtus Webinar - August - Ortus Team - Into the Box Preview and Q&AAugust 26th, 2022: Time 11:00AM Central Time ( US and Canada )Join some of the Ortus Core Team as they discuss all the great things coming to you from Into the Box, with the Pre Conference Online Sessions, Full Day Workshops and then the 2 day 2 track in Person Conference.The session will be informal, with Q&A from the chat, with maybe a couple of last minute surprise announcements.Register now: https://bit.ly/3cW6LlM Adobe WorkshopsJoin the Adobe ColdFusion Workshop to learn how you and your agency can leverage ColdFusion to create amazing web content. This one-day training will cover all facets of Adobe ColdFusion that developers need to build applications that can run across multiple cloud providers or on-premiseTUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 20229.00 AM - 4.30 PM AESTColdFusion WorkshopBrian Sappeyhttps://coldfusion-1-day-training.meetus.adobeevents.com/ WEBINAR - THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 202210:00 AM PDTMaking Games with Adobe ColdFusionMark Takatahttps://making-games-with-adobe-coldfusion.meetus.adobeevents.com/ WEBINAR - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 202210:00 AM PDTBuilding Custom Adobe Connect Pods with CF2021Mark Takatahttps://building-custom-adobe-connect-pods-cf2021.meetus.adobeevents.com/ FREE :)Full list - https://meetus.adobeevents.com/coldfusion/ CFCasts Content Updateshttps://www.cfcasts.comJust Released LogBox 101 - 1 new videos - https://cfcasts.com/series/logbox-101 Episode 11 - Async Appender https://cfcasts.com/series/logbox-101/videos/async-appenders  2022 ForgeBox Module of the Week Series - 1 new Videohttps://cfcasts.com/series/2022-forgebox-modules-of-the-week 2022 VS Code Hint tip and Trick of the Week Series - 1 new Video https://cfcasts.com/series/2022-vs-code-hint-tip-and-trick-of-the-week  Coming Soon LogBox 101 from Eric Peterson - 3 more videos left! Koding with the Kiwi + Friends More ForgeBox and VS Code Podcast snippet videos Box-ifying a 3rd Party Library from Gavin ColdBox Elixir from Eric Conferences and TrainingRedis Hackathon on DevFrom now through August 29th, 2022, DEV has partnered up with Redis for a community hackathon that will give you the chance to build a new application using Redis or simplify a complex backend. Anyone who submits a valid project (including an official submission post, published on DEV) will be automatically entered to win a variety of fantastic prizes (including up to $2,000 USD).If you're familiar with our hackathons here on DEV, you know that the community has a lot of fun with them and gets pretty creative with what they build. Whether you've joined us in the past or not, we hope you'll throw your hat into the ring by participating in the Redis Hackathon on DEV!https://dev.to/devteam/announcing-the-redis-hackathon-on-dev-3248Into the Box - Pre ConferenceAug 29th - Sep 2nd, 20222 sessions a day, 5 days in the week - 10 sessions totalConference Website:https://intothebox.orgInto The Box 2022September 6, 7 and 8, 2022 in Houston, TexasOne day workshops before the two day conference!Sign up for the workshops before they fill up - couple are almost filledConference Website:https://intothebox.orgCF Summit - OfficialAt the Mirage in Las Vegas, NVOct 3rd & 4th - CFSummit ConferenceOct 5th - Adobe Certified Professional: Adobe ColdFusion Certification Classes & Testshttps://cfsummit.adobeevents.com/ https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family/certificate.html Registrations are now open.Ortus CF Summit Training WorkshopColdBox Zero to MegaHero : REST APIs + VueJS Mobile AppOct 5th and 6th - After CF Summit ConferenceLead by Luis Majano & Gavin PickinPrice: $799 - Early bird pricinghttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/ortus-cf-summit-training-workshop-tickets-375306340367Location: Aria - In the luxurious Executive Hospitality Suite like 2019The suite doubled it's prices but we're working hard to keep the costs to the attendees the sameInto the Box Latam 2022Dec 5th or 7thMore information is coming very soon.CFCampNo CFCAMP 2022, we're trying again for summer 2023TLDR is that it's just too hard and there's too much uncertainty right now.More conferencesNeed more conferences, this site has a huge list of conferences for almost any language/community.https://confs.tech/Blogs, Tweets, and Videos of the WeekAdobe Corner8/4/22 - Blog - Mark Takata - ColdFusion Portal - ACF Builder Extension: Quick FixSometimes we all need a helping hand.Wait.Does an IDE even have a hand?Anyway, imagine if your VS Code was able to flag issues with your code, make suggestions, but then even make those suggestions come to life! The Builder extension for VS Code includes a “quick fix” capability.https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2022/08/acf-builder-extension-quick-fix/ 8/4/22 - Blog - Mark Takata - ColdFusion Portal - ACF Builder Extension: Code RefactoringWhat is “code refactoring”? Is it a cool new UK reality show where you win prizes by changing up your applications to work better? No, but if any tv producers from the UK read this and are interested, call me.https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2022/08/acf-builder-extension-code-refactoring/ 8/4/22 - Blog - Mark Takata - ColdFusion Portal - ACF Builder Extension: Code AssistOften, the main reason we use a purpose-built IDE for our development work is for getting help with things like code completion, hinting, scaffolding and other similar features. This is often a big differentiator from more simplified editors such as, for example, Notepad.https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2022/08/acf-builder-extension-code-assist/ 8/4/22 - Blog - Mark Takata - ColdFusion Portal - ACF Builder Extension: Security AnalyzerSecurity is a critical aspect of programming. The Security Analyzer is a powerful, useful tool for CFML developers to use to help prevent vulnerable code in their application. It can warn about potential threats, give you an idea on the level of the threat, and suggest potential solutions to the issues.https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2022/08/acf-builder-extension-security-analyzer/ 8/3/22 - Blog - Mark Takata - ColdFusion Portal - ACF Builder Extension: PMT Code ProfilerThe Performance Monitoring Toolkit (PMT) provides critical performance data for your running Adobe ColdFusion servers. It monitors all transactions and captures a variety of data metrics including response and run times, errors, and other data. The Builder Extension provides the ability to view data from the PMT server in a report.https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2022/08/acf-builder-extension-pmt-code-profiler/ 8/2/22 - Blog - Mark Takata - ColdFusion Portal - ACF Builder Extension: RDS IntegrationRDS has helped ColdFusion developers with their development workflows for a very long time, and ever since Adobe ColdFusion Builder version 1.0 (code named “Bolt”) CF developers have been able to interact with various aspects of their development environment using RDS. In the ACF Builder Extension, this is also the case, with powerful capabilities that become available when using & logging the extension into RDS.https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2022/08/acf-builder-extension-rds-integration/ 8/1/22 - Blog - Mark Takata - ColdFusion Portal - ACF Builder Extension: Server PanelOne of the incredible differentiating features of the Builder Extension is the ability to setup & control your servers directly from VS Code. This was a very popular feature in ColdFusion Builder (Eclipse) and provides nearly identical functionality here.https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2022/08/acf-builder-extension-server-panel/ Community Corner8/6/22 - Tweet - James Moberg - CFML Legacy ConverterAny #CFML developers working with legacy #ColdFusion code? I'm almost finished developing a CFC that will "standardize/modernize tags, functions, member functions, attributes, operators & SQL case." (I'm hoping to share sometime next week.) #NoMoreManualSearchReplacehttps://twitter.com/gamesover/status/1555990302564814850 https://twitter.com/gamesover8/5/22 - Blog - Ortus Solutions - Ortus Content Digest for week of August 5thIt's August 5th... what has Ortus been publishing this week? We have the CFML News Podcast, some CFCasts and YouTube Videos, lots of Ortus and ITB Blog Posts. We have a lot more planned for next week as well.https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/ortus-content-digest-for-week-of-august-5th/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=contentstudio.io 8/4/22 - Tweet - Brad Wood - Ortus Solutions - Client Cert AuthI think I've finally cracked the client cert auth in #CommandBox.  This was a huge project, but important for our government clients.  Let me know if you want to help test it. I've also refactored basic auth and laid roadwork for digest auth, SSO, and NTLM auth. #CFML #ColdFusion https://twitter.com/bdw429s/status/1555234073630674947 https://twitter.com/bdw429s 8/3/22 - Blog - Dan Card - Ortus Solutions - Integrating ColdBox with Existing Code Series Part 4: More IntegrationRecently, I did a webinar on Refactoring Legacy Code and the question came up about whether or not it was possible to use ColdBox with existing code without converting everything to a ColdBox module or making changes to the existing codebase.https://www.ortussolutions.com/blog/integrating-coldbox-with-existing-code-series-part-4-more-integration/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=contentstudio.io 8/2/22 - Blog - Zac Spitzer - Lucee Release Roadmap, 6.0, 5.3.9 and 5.3.105.3.9 - Firstly, we have been working on the open regressions 11 with 5.3.9 and hope to release a quick RC this Friday.6.0.0-BETA - There are still a number of blockers which we still need to address, but we are getting very close.https://dev.lucee.org/t/lucee-release-roadmap-6-0-5-3-9-and-5-3-10/10810 7/30/22 - Blog - Bang Website - ColdFusion Development Alive & Well Says BANG! DevelopersAs an active ColdFusion Developer since 1998 (when it was still owned by Allaire, prior to being purchased by Macromedia and then Adobe) we laugh every time we hear "ColdFusion is Dead". We've used it non-stop for over two decades while other popular programming languages have come and gone.If you are looking for ColdFusion programmers or Web Developers fluent in Adobe ColdFusion mark-up language and the many uses of ColdFusion for software development, you are in the right place. View our Web Development page for more information about our services. For more information about the ColdFusion Web Development Platform and it's history read on.https://www.bangwebsitedesignphoenixaz.com/blog/ColdFusion-Development-Alive-Well-Says-BANG-Developers.cfm CFML JobsSeveral positions available on https://www.getcfmljobs.com/Listing over 116 ColdFusion positions from 62 companies across 55 locations in 5 Countries.2 new jobs listed this weekFull-Time - Web/Data Developer at Clinton, NY or Remote - United States Aug 09https://www.getcfmljobs.com/viewjob.cfm?jobid=11505 Full-Time - Application Developer IV - Temp (Coldfusion Developer) Remot.. - United States Aug 04https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/Application-Developer-IV-Temp-Coldfusion-Developer-Remote-at-Des-Moines-IA/11504 Other Job Links Ortus Solution https://www.ortussolutions.com/about-us/careers  Tomorrow's Guides - Senior ColdFusion Developer - Remote (UK Based) https://www.tomorrows.co.uk/jobs.cfm  Hamilton https://apply.interfolio.com/110991  There is a jobs channel in the CFML slack team, and in the box team slack now too ForgeBox Module of the WeekError Filter A ColdBox Module to filter error messages to remove unwanted fields and items in the tagContext array to reduce noise and make error items more readable.Note: Based on ideas and work from John Wilson at Synaptrix! Thanks!https://www.forgebox.io/view/errorFilter VS Code Hint Tips and Tricks of the Weekgit nahCustom Git Aliasesgit config –global alias.nah=!git reset --hard && git clean -dfThis cleans whatever you have going on.`git nah`Thank you to all of our Patreon SupportersThese individuals are personally supporting our open source initiatives to ensure the great toolings like CommandBox, ForgeBox, ColdBox,  ContentBox, TestBox and all the other boxes keep getting the continuous development they need, and funds the cloud infrastructure at our community relies on like ForgeBox for our Package Management with CommandBox. You can support us on Patreon here https://www.patreon.com/ortussolutionsDon't forget, we have Annual Memberships, pay for the year and save 10% - great for businesses. Bronze Packages and up, now get a ForgeBox Pro and CFCasts subscriptions as a perk for their Patreon Subscription. All Patreon supporters have a Profile badge on the Community Website All Patreon supporters have their own Private Forum access on the Community Website All Patreon supporters have their own Private Channel access BoxTeam Slack Live Stream Access to Koding with the Kiwi + Friends https://community.ortussolutions.com/  Patreons John Wilson - Synaptrix Jordan Clark Gary Knight Mario Rodrigues Giancarlo Gomez David Belanger   Dan Card Jonathan Perret Jeffry McGee - Sunstar Media Dean Maunder Wil De Bruin Joseph Lamoree   Don Bellamy Jan Jannek   Laksma Tirtohadi   Brian Ghidinelli - Hagerty MotorsportReg Carl Von Stetten Jeremy Adams Didier Lesnicki Matthew Clemente Daniel Garcia Scott Steinbeck - Agri Tracking Systems Ben Nadel  Richard Herbet Brett DeLine Kai Koenig Charlie Arehart Jason Daiger Shawn Oden Matthew Darby Ross Phillips Edgardo Cabezas Patrick Flynn Stephany Monge  (Monghee) Kevin Wright John Whish Peter Amiri You can see an up to date list of all sponsors on Ortus Solutions' Websitehttps://ortussolutions.com/about-us/sponsors Thanks everyone!!! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

I'm in the middle of rebranding my business. There are so many things I can do, so many things I want to do, yet I also want my brand positioning to be clear and attractive. I want others to love my brand as much as I do. As I'm working on this, I see a cartoon by Gaping Void that says, “Don't be the best in the world at what you do. Be the only person in the world at what you do.” Seeing that makes everything click. I think, “Yes! That describes my work which is unique in so many ways.” I already kind of am the only person doing what I do. And I really want to highlight that… but I need help. So my husband Mark, who I've grabbed in my excitement, says to me, “We gotta talk to Peter. This is his zone of genius.” That first conversation with Peter changes everything. What he does is revolutionary in so many ways. And I've brought him onto the show today to discuss exactly what it is that he does and how he helps redefine business. If you want to know: What is category design, how does it help you understand your audience better, and what is the most common challenge when people start approaching business with this new way of thinking? How do you use it to attract potential customers or clients? And how did a customer survey company use category design and find itself worth several billion dollars more than competitors like Survey Monkey? Get a pen and your replay button ready because this episode is chock full of priceless lessons you'll want to listen to again and again!  What you will learn in this episode: How to rethink your business positioning and make it unique How POV storytelling in marketing messages differs from conventional marketing How to use category design to spark intrigue in your business Who is Peter? As a graduate of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, Peter Goldie has spent the past decade as an angel investor and used his knack for creating and launching market-dominating products to advise on business, strategy, and marketing. He honed his marketing expertise while in Brand Management at Procter & Gamble where he built revenue for brands such as Crisco, Pringles, and Ivory. Now his firm advises companies on the emerging concept of category design for business. In addition, Peter founded two startups and has held several operational roles at different companies over the years. He served as GM and SVP at the top digital e-commerce agency Fluid and was the GM and VP at Macromedia where he helped make Flash the most distributed software worldwide. He also took on the position of GM at Alias/Wavefront where he assisted in the creation of the Computer-Aided Industrial Design (CAID) category and the launching of the world's leading 3D animation product, Maya (which won an Oscar for scientific and technical achievement). Links and Resources: Category Design peter@categorydesign.co @pgoldie on LinkedIn Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney Niche Down: How to Become Legendary by Being Different by Christopher Lochhead and Heather Clancy Storytelling School Website @storytellingschool on Instagram @storytellingSchool on Facebook

Qué es HTML 5. El lenguaje que se utiliza en la World Wide Web, el ecosistema de páginas de Internet, es el HTML. Su nombre son las siglas de HyperText Markup Language, que significa literalmente Lenguaje de marcado de hipertexto. Es el estándar con el que están programadas todas las webs, y aunque algunas puedan tener elementos o fragmentos programados en otros lenguajes, siempre tienen que ser "encajados" en el total con este lenguaje. Pero Internet evoluciona, y el contenido que se sube a las webs también cambia con los años, lo que quiere decir que estos lenguajes pueden quedar obsoletos y necesitan ser actualizados. En 1999 se lanzó el estándar HTML4, y como imaginas, las páginas web ahora no tienen nada que ver con lo que eran entonces en cuanto a sus contenidos, y por eso desde hace unos años se está implementando el nuevo estándar HTML5. Por lo tanto, el HTML5 es la última versión del estándar HTML que se utiliza para crear las páginas web que estás visitando, e incorpora algunas novedades interesantes. Una de las novedades, es darle cobertura a la reproducción de contenido multimedia, de forma que ya no tengas que ir a recursos de terceros como el obsoleto Flash Player. Qué cambia en HTML5 Este nuevo estándar no tiene una enorme cantidad de novedades, pero las que tiene son revolucionarias. La más destacada es la posibilidad de añadir archivos multimedia a la web, como vídeos o audios, y que estos no tengas que instalarlos utilizando otros plug-ins. Todo está incluido dentro del código. También se han añadido etiquetas que permiten crear animaciones en 2D, con una etiqueta de canvas y una API que permiten que puedas dibujar elementos en dos dimensiones y animarlos en la web. También se pueden añadir eventos para el teclado, ratón o mandos, que permiten poder utilizarlos para interactuar con una página. Relacionado con lo anterior, también se pueden programar aplicaciones web en HTML5, lo que quiere decir que las páginas pueden ser apps, y no necesitarás instalar una app independiente en el PC o móvil, ya que podrás usarlo igual desde el navegador. También se pueden crear videojuegos con este método, lo que se complementa con poder utilizar teclado, ratón o mando. También se han añadido opciones de geolocalización, de forma que una web puede detectar la ubicación de los usuarios que acceden a ella. Con ello, se pueden ofrecer opciones de idiomas dependiendo del país desde el que entras, o la posibilidad de enlazarse a la página específica de un país. Por ejemplo, si entras en la web de una empresa internacional, puede enviarte a la versión de España de su web si detectas que entras desde aquí. Toda esta funcionalidad hasta ahora se daba a través de Flash, de la compañía Macromedia que después fue comprado por Adobe. Flash en sí representaba un lenguaje de programación, llamado ActionScript y se evolucionó hasta poder hacer aplicaciones de escritorio en ese lenguaje. Flash ha dejado de ser soportado y ha sido sustituido por HTML5 concretamente por Javascript, que a día de hoy también tiene la posibilidad de usar un entorno como Atom y hacer aplicaciones de escritorio que llevan por debajo el motor de chromium como navegador para ejecutar la aplicación.

Qué es HTML 5. El lenguaje que se utiliza en la World Wide Web, el ecosistema de páginas de Internet, es el HTML. Su nombre son las siglas de HyperText Markup Language, que significa literalmente Lenguaje de marcado de hipertexto. Es el estándar con el que están programadas todas las webs, y aunque algunas puedan tener elementos o fragmentos programados en otros lenguajes, siempre tienen que ser "encajados" en el total con este lenguaje. Pero Internet evoluciona, y el contenido que se sube a las webs también cambia con los años, lo que quiere decir que estos lenguajes pueden quedar obsoletos y necesitan ser actualizados. En 1999 se lanzó el estándar HTML4, y como imaginas, las páginas web ahora no tienen nada que ver con lo que eran entonces en cuanto a sus contenidos, y por eso desde hace unos años se está implementando el nuevo estándar HTML5. Por lo tanto, el HTML5 es la última versión del estándar HTML que se utiliza para crear las páginas web que estás visitando, e incorpora algunas novedades interesantes. Una de las novedades, es darle cobertura a la reproducción de contenido multimedia, de forma que ya no tengas que ir a recursos de terceros como el obsoleto Flash Player. Qué cambia en HTML5 Este nuevo estándar no tiene una enorme cantidad de novedades, pero las que tiene son revolucionarias. La más destacada es la posibilidad de añadir archivos multimedia a la web, como vídeos o audios, y que estos no tengas que instalarlos utilizando otros plug-ins. Todo está incluido dentro del código. También se han añadido etiquetas que permiten crear animaciones en 2D, con una etiqueta de canvas y una API que permiten que puedas dibujar elementos en dos dimensiones y animarlos en la web. También se pueden añadir eventos para el teclado, ratón o mandos, que permiten poder utilizarlos para interactuar con una página. Relacionado con lo anterior, también se pueden programar aplicaciones web en HTML5, lo que quiere decir que las páginas pueden ser apps, y no necesitarás instalar una app independiente en el PC o móvil, ya que podrás usarlo igual desde el navegador. También se pueden crear videojuegos con este método, lo que se complementa con poder utilizar teclado, ratón o mando. También se han añadido opciones de geolocalización, de forma que una web puede detectar la ubicación de los usuarios que acceden a ella. Con ello, se pueden ofrecer opciones de idiomas dependiendo del país desde el que entras, o la posibilidad de enlazarse a la página específica de un país. Por ejemplo, si entras en la web de una empresa internacional, puede enviarte a la versión de España de su web si detectas que entras desde aquí. Toda esta funcionalidad hasta ahora se daba a través de Flash, de la compañía Macromedia que después fue comprado por Adobe. Flash en sí representaba un lenguaje de programación, llamado ActionScript y se evolucionó hasta poder hacer aplicaciones de escritorio en ese lenguaje. Flash ha dejado de ser soportado y ha sido sustituido por HTML5 concretamente por Javascript, que a día de hoy también tiene la posibilidad de usar un entorno como Atom y hacer aplicaciones de escritorio que llevan por debajo el motor de chromium como navegador para ejecutar la aplicación.

Daniel Dura, CEO of Graphium Health visits the show this week to discuss anesthesia, technology, and the fascinating career path that led him here -- and what has happened ever since. You'll hear familiar names like Macromedia, Fujitsu, Adobe, and more all painting a story of how Graphium & it's suite of Anesthesia software tools were born. Enjoy!

"Just like you use your dollars with an online payment service, you can still be defrauded USDC. It wasn't the dollars that defrauded you. It was the other side of it." Jeremy Allaire"I actually believe the web of value exchange. Whatever you want to call it, the internet of value is going to be extraordinarily more valuable and extraordinarily more impactful than the web of information." Jeremy AllaireEpisode Summary:In this episode of The Raz Report, Jason Raznick speaks with Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle.Hosts:Jason RaznickTwitter: https://twitter.com/jasonraznickSign Up to Benzinga Pro today to receive most exclusive interviews, news and stock picks fast!https://pro.benzinga.com/Click here for more episodes of The RazReport.Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.Transcript:BZ: We're very excited to have on this edition of the RazReport, Jeremy Allaire founder and CEO of CircleYou're going to hear about building companies, building enterprises and Circle USDC, which is taking the world by storm in a good way. Jeremy, welcome to the show.J: Thank you, Jason. Psyched to be here.BZ: Circle your latest company, I think you've raised over 700 million over $700 million for it. Is that correct?J: that's exactly right.BZ:When you founded this company in 2013 is it where you thought it would be?J: when we founded the company back in 2013, there were a whole set of ideas that we had about digital currency.We were very excited about this idea that you could build what we like to think of back then as an HTTP of money, meaning like a protocol for money on the internet. And by money we meant traditional money.The liabilities of a central bank, what we think of as everyday money. But convey onto that money, the power of cryptocurrency.So Bitcoin obviously itself brought into the world, this idea of a protocol that could work on a decentralized infrastructure to enable people to directly exchange value in digital cash like way.We wanted to build on that same fundamental technology foundation, but enable people to exchange, stable value assets, like dollars or Euros. And we believe that a kind of protocol layer for money would eventually become possible on top of these blockchain infrastructures. And that was a core mission and goal from the outset.We experimented with realizing that idea through building on a lot of, kind of digital currency banking infrastructure, we built a consumer facing application that kind of brought that to life. We actually built it on top of Bitcoin, which was the first-generation blockchain that was available back in 2013 and 2014 and 2015. And in during that time period, and then eventually in 2016, when ethereum, which is the second generation blockchain technology really emerged, it introduced more of the building blocks that we had been looking for back in 2013, when we founded the company.ETH allowed us in 2017 to begin work on and then also release what's now known as USDC, which is in fact the protocol for dollars on the internet and eventually other Fiat currencies too. But founding vision was there, the path to it obviously takes many, shifts.The metaphor I like to use is you can see the mountaintop. You can literally, standing far back, you can see that mountain top and how beautiful that looks, but you actually don't know how you're going to get to the top of the mountain. And you may actually go up one path and realize, oh, I'm staring over a cliff. I need to go back down and go up another.BZ: Ethereum is what allowed you to go create USDC?J: So back in 2012 and 2013 there, there were a lot of technologists or not a lot, actually back then, there was a lot now, but there were technologists getting involved in this space. And a lot of us got really excited about ideas issuing other assets on top of the blockchain or smart contracts and programmable money and what it would mean if you could have if you could say issue a dollar token and have a smart contract that could enable the programmability of that was like a mind-blowing concept.Early in my career, I worked on programming languages, app development, infrastructure, developer platforms, content infrastructure, lots of things like that. And so had a background in thinking about, developer platforms and the idea of a developer, an open infrastructure that was like a developer platform for money on the internet was super exciting. And so there were a lot of ideas on how to do it in 2013. It just technically wasn't possible.The history of Ethereum is really relevant here because Vitalik, who also was really excited about a lot of these ideas of how you can extend this kind of blockchain infrastructure to do other things. A lot of people thought that might happen that Bitcoin itself as an open source project would evolve to do those things. But there was an ideological battle between those in the core development community who really wanted to keep Bitcoin simple and focused on being a kind of digital gold store of value.Then there's a whole other group of technologists that wanted to advance this into being something that's more like an operating system that you could build a lot of things on top of including things like protocols for stable coins,DEFI, NFTs, DAOs all these things that have emerged. So it was really that kind of forking off and development of a new infrastructure layer that then made it possible to pursue and execute something like USDC.BZ: Jeremy, where did you grow up?J:I grew up in a small town in Southeastern Minnesota, a town called Wynnona Minnesota. I went to college in the St. Paul McAllister college and studied political science philosophy and a concentration in economics.I got introduced to the internet in my dorm room, literally in, in 1990 had a high-speed internet connection, which in 1990, there was not a lot you could do on the internet, but I was down the rabbit hole became completely obsessed, made all of my educational work about it and started using it in my studies around what was happening in the former Soviet Union and what was happening in the sort of changing revolutions around the world and got me excited about the idea of an open network, open permissionless networks, decentralization, disintermediation, a lot of these themes that still show up today in the internet space got me into it. And then graduated college there and started working on my first company.BZ: Did you ever go to Mall of America when you were growing up?J:So mall of America merged when I was a little bit older, I think when I was in college.BZ: But as a kid, did you have side hustles where you like selling the newspaper? Like Mark Cuban was doing the garbage bags? Were you doing that?J: I was a paper boy, that was my first job if you want to call it. But I actually had, I got really lucky in a sense when I was a teenager. I convinced my parents to take, like some, a small amount of money. I had been passed down to me from my grandparents and was in like mutual funds, which was a big deal in the eighties. You had mutual funds. I convinced them to let me invest it into baseball cards.So in the kind of mid to late eighties, I ran Southern Cordillera sports cards. So I ran a trading operation and I would deal and I would go and basically do baseball cards. So that was my side hustle that helped me pay for my spending money in college.BZ:Did you have tables ? So you'd buy cards, flip them and did you make some decent money doing it?J:Absolutely. Yeah, so I took long positions. Okay. On on term sort of players. Mark McGuire, Jose Conseco, that's just some of the big onesBZ:What was one of your best trades?J: Brett saberHagan was, 19, he had just an incredible record and I like accumulated a huge bunch of those. And then that was a short-term trade. I keep thinking in a bunch and then flip them at a huge increase in value as everyone wanted the Brett Saberhagen for a piece that I think that was one of the best one of the best trades I did.I would do arbitrage.That's where I go to these shows. find someone who really, wanted X and I would just run around and find it, buy it for Y and then turn it around. So there's that. And then, I had I still have a fairly sizable collection.BZ: How did you get involved in internet in college?J: I had a T1 which was basically like a hard wire, it was effectively ethernet, but hardwired into a campus that were, and, campuses where some of the only places that had access to the internet for research purposes. And a T1 was, even now was whatever, I, that was back then 1.5 megabits per second, which was really good.BZ: You're in college and you're exploring this whole open network of sorts were your parents supportive of that?J: No, not at all. They were like, I don't know what this is. I don't understand this.I graduated college in 1993 the tail end of the first Gulf war recession.. I studied, what I would thought would be interesting to help understand the world and whatnot. And so I was like temping and but, and, on the side I was just going deeper and deeper into the internet space.And and I remember coming home, I quit my temp job and said, fuck this, I'm going to be an internet consultant. I called myself, which was basically like helping educate people about how businesses, how to use the internet and actually, working on the very, very first websites, this was before, even like Mosaic was out, was hacking around.Basically how helping organizations figure out how to build stuff from the web. And I went home and my father was just so distraught and just so afraid that, he didn't understand any of it. And he was like, this isn't a job, so concerned. I was following my bliss and it was good timing in 1993 to be really going down that rabbit hole and learning all the technology and figuring out what it was to. Build stuff back then. That led to the Genesis of some of the first products that I helped build and create.BZ: You called yourself an internet consultant?J: So there all these people learning HTML, and then in 1995, more people.I really wanted to be able to do interactive apps where you could connect a database, you could have interactivity. And my idea was that anyone should be able to build a global online service because back then, like the idea of an online service was you had to have AOL, or you have to have, CompuServe or whatnot.But I was convinced that an open network that anyone could publish to or any device could connect to, it would be a lot better. And so working with my brother, who's a much more of a computer scientist than I am, became the product manager designer for cold fusion and hidden the kind of chief architect. And we ended up working through a lot of ideas and building essentially the first easy to use web programming language and what is now known as an app server, an application server, one of the very first commercial app server, which basically was a piece of software you can put on a machine connected database, do transactions, dynamically generate webpages. And, that paradigm now, is everything from SAS and content management and everything else on, on the internet. So built that and, got super passionate about enabling developers to dream what they wanted to build on the internet, everything from content to community, to e-commerce, to all kinds of things and built, developer platform business.I find it, you can find it out there.There's still millions of sites with that are still run by that it's now owned by Adobe. That product line is owned by Adobe, which bought Macromedia, which is I merged my first company or we merged layer into Macromedia as public company.BZ: And when you started Cold Fusion, you and your brother, what'd you call the coming like the layer corporation?J:.We had a whole family of products. We had the most popular HTML web development tool in the world Homesite.Literally millions of developers use Homesite. So most websites in the 1990s were built using that. And it was one of the reasons why Macromedia wanted to acquire us because they had Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver was really popular with professional designers.But like the average Joe or Jane would get Homesite it was free. And it was like super powerful HTML editor. And so we had millions of people using that.So no, like no one used front page, because it was so awful because it forced you into like these templates you couldn't get control. So Homesite was like gave you access to the HTML and made it really easy to edit the HTML. And we gave it away for free. It was like a feed, it was a freemium product. We wanted to get it out there. And then we got other people into our more advanced products.BZ: So you were doing freemium before, that was even a word. Okay. Did you raise money for Cold Fusion?J:I think it was three rounds of venture capital and then like a mezzanine financing. And then we IPOed in January of 1999.We were a public company on NASDAQ for 2 years. And in January of 2001, we merged with Macromedia, which was about three times larger than us. And merged the two public companies. And I became the chief technology officer of Macromedia.BZ: IPO process versus the M&A process? Which did you like better?J:I like building. And operating. I I like that a lot. it's interesting, there are times and places where M&A makes sense both as a buyer and as a seller, obviously the vast majority of outcomes and business are some form of merger transaction typically or in bankruptcy. So the number of companies that remain independent is smaller.But I think both had a lot of advantages back at that period of time merging at the time was a really good thing for our company and actually gave us a much stronger platform that was, as you recall, when 9/11 happened and the entirety of the certainty of the market, and really the demand for internet software and stuff collapsed alongside the collapse of the.com.BZ: So Brightcove, how did you get to start that?J: So in 2002, when I was chief technology officer Macromedia, we put the ability to render video and PR and have video as like a programmable object in something called flash player and flash player at the time was the most ubiquitous piece of software in the history of the internet.98% of computers in the world had it. We could actually upgrade the internet to a completely new virtual machine that essentially like a new client in like less than 12 months. So we put video in and it was right before broadband came out and like for consumers.And it was really clear to me looking at broadband wifi devices that can be connected to those.And then having a ubiquitous playback mechanism for video. I got really excited, started incubating ideas inside of Macromedia for basically self publishing, self video publishing type of applications actually built something internally that the company did not want to bring to market. I was really frustrated.My vision was video's going to become as ubiquitous as text on the web. Everyone's going to become a video publisher. Every business is going to be able to distribute television quality video to devices everywhere. And so this was in like 2002, 2003. And so I got frustrated and left, went to a VC as a technologist and resident general catalyst and incubated brightCove.And then founded it in 2004, really with this idea that again, video was going to become as ubiquitous as texts on the web and that you needed a new generation of publishing platforms for it. That could integrate everything that was needed for either a brand like a corporation. Or an organization or a media company itself to basically do direct distribution of television instead of relying on cable and satellite and all the old ways and transform other media companies who work in television and video into being into television and video. So it was a video platform company, a SAS company, as we now call these and founded it in 2004.it had a really nice growth run. And I took it public in early 2012. And then stepped into a chairman role after about a year. Cause I had gone down the crypto rabbit hole in 2013 just became obsessed with.What was going on in crypto and made a decision to basically, start Circle.BZ: Mark Cuban emailed me a question, Mark Cuban's known you from his tech days. His question is "what did you learn from your layer or your database days that you are applying today?"J: it's actually really relevant. As I talk about the inspiration for circle and what, I've been inspired by, , in this space. in, in many ways, right?What got me super excited about the internet in the first place was this kind of obsession with the idea of the internet itself, being an open network that was permissionless that anyone could bring a computer to and connect, and that anyone who did that could take open protocols like the SMTP protocol or the HTTP protocol or the VOIP protocol, or these sort of protocols, which are really just public IP, intellectual property, that's open source it's in the public domain.People can write software to it and that you could connect anyone anywhere through these protocols and do really amazing things in terms of information, exchange, knowledge, exchange communications so powerful. That's what drew me into the internet in the first place and kind of an obsession with open networks, decentralized and distributed model.What that could unleash and really a belief that architecture could maximize access and could maximize the ability for people to to reach the most people in the world and entrepreneurship and ideas. So that's what kind of, that was what informed. The work around cold fusion back then. And so if I fast forward to crypto, that was fundamentally the insight for me in 2012 and early 2013 was this is just like a replay.This is just another open protocol on the public permissionless internet that solved a set of problems that hadn't been solved before, which was a way to ensure that data could not be counterfeited. And that transactions could happen in with certainty in an irreversible way without requiring centralization. And these are big ideas and it was like a fundamental new infrastructure layer. The internet was being born. And so when I looked at it and said, okay, This is going to do for the exchange of value. And I don't just mean moving value from point a to point b, I'm talking about the richness of what we do in exchanging value.As people, as entities, as corporations it's going to do for the exchange of value, what the web and those earlier protocols did for information and communications.And to me in 2013, like that was so profound because I actually believe the web of value exchange.If you want to, whatever you want to call it, the internet of value is going to be extraordinarily more valuable and extraordinarily more impactful than the web of information. And so it very much informed how I think about this and the work that we're doing here.BZ: When you started Circle, did you start with anyone else?J: I co-founded, the company was Sean Neville. Sean is absolutely brilliant. He he co-led the company with me almost like co-CEOs for a long time. And then several years ago, he just stepped into a director role. He's on the board of directors and he runs a crypto incubator, a crypto kind of studio incubator.But he and I had worked together back Allaire, my first company we worked together a bunch at Macromedia. We worked together and bright Cove. He's just one of the most brilliant minds technological minds, strategic minds, creative minds.BZ: Was Circle easier to raise money for than your previous ventures because of your huge track record of success?J: When we started the company, I went to people who invested with me and who had made money with me in the past and said, this is what I'm working on. And they're like, Bitcoin I don't get this. You're crazy. This seems crazy. But. We believe in you, so go for it. I mean that kinda kind of thing. So it definitely helped.2013 and then 2014, 2015, during that time, there were not a lot of quote unquote adults in the room, in the space. If people think it's a wild west, now it was an extraordinary wild west back then. And we had, seasoned entrepreneurs, technologists.We had a really strong proactive approach with regulators with kind of major fiduciaries and really worked really hard to try and build something that was compliant and that, differentiated us as well and allowed us to raise quite a bit of capital. I think, a couple hundred million dollars within our first few years of getting started.BZ: And were you personally buying Bitcoin back in those early days?J: Yeah, absolutely. And buying ethereum and when it was less than a dollar. Like Solana and it was less than a dollar.BZ: Do you still own some of that?J: I am a owner of crypto assets. I don't talk about my particular trading and liquidity strategies, I'm quite structurally long on crypto.BZ: How would you define a stable coin to a fifth grader ?J: On the internet today, I can download a piece of software like WhatsApp or or log into a service like Gmail. We're open up Google Chrome, and I can connect to anyone else. Directly, I can have a direct communication with them. It doesn't cost me anything. It doesn't matter where they are in the world.As long as they have a smartphone, they can get that piece of software. We can do that. Or if there's someone who has an idea and wants to connect their computer, the internet and put some content on it, as long as I have a web browser, I can connect to that. And that's generally the case other than, some authoritarian regimes that have great firewalls.But even there, like it's generally the case, you can connect to anyone. I can freely communicate with anyone in China right now. And that model is so straightforward. It's the air we breathe. We don't even think about it. the fact that this kind of open connect and open permissionless, global decentralized network of communications and information exists. So why can't we do that with money?Why can't we have a way. Someone can just download a piece of software from an app store. And and then someone else could download a different piece of software made by a different creator or a different piece of hardware, or log into a service and exchange value with each other instantly globally frictionlessly at no cost. it's really that simple is how do we make it possible for storing, moving dollars or digital dollars to work in exactly the same way we have with information and data. And that's what we set out to solve is that problem and doing it on the DNA of the internet, doing it around this idea of an open protocol that anyone could connect to. So that's really the fundamentals of what USDC allows for. And, but I think. Yeah the idea goes far broader because you now have essentially an open API for dollars on the internet and it's programmable dollars on the internet. And so you can do a lot with that. And the use cases are really exploding,BZ:How big is USDC these days?J:So USDC has grown really fast at the start of the pandemic, there were about 400 million USDC in circulation that was just like, let's call it six months. Or, there's a year after or so after we had launched.Then it grew to 4 billion in circulation by the start of 2021. And it grew from 4 billion to 42 billion in circulation. At the end of 2021 and it's already grown to to over 52 billion in circulation, just in the past couple months here.And so USDC is about that big and I supported, trillions of dollars of transactions. Just on the public internet using blockchains. And it's still early days. It's super early days. Our view is that eventually there could be more than a trillion USDC in circulation and could be used for every imaginable use case for money and use cases that we haven't even thought of because programmable money is not existed until now.BZ: How can USDC offer such nice interest rates when banks are giving 0.5%?J: Look so if you think about. And you have a kind of base layer, which is the sort of digital cash equivalent of USDC. And it's a regulated, digital cash instrument that exists. And it's very easy to exchange, right? With point to point as your friends or others, that you've talked to really straightforward to send it, receive it, use it.And it's become very popular as a digital currency to use in trading, investing, international payments, other things. And so as its utility has grown and as more and more people and firms want to use. +As a form of working capital as a new kind of electronic stored value working capital mechanism, there's higher and higher demand for people who want to borrow it. And so one of the really powerful things about blockchains is not only do they allow these fast transactions to happen, but you can actually build essentially, borrowing and lending models on top of it.And so there's grown over the past in particular, the past several years, the last two to three years, large, both centralized, what are often called CEFI lending markets and what are called DEFI lending markets, where the market of borrowers and lenders is convened by a piece of software on the internet. So you're not dealing with a company you're just dealing with a protocol, but nonetheless you have essentially interest rate markets of borrowers and lenders.The demand to borrow USDC is high. And the interest rate that borrowers are willing to pay is high. And that is the source of those yields. Basically you have borrowers and to put it fairly simply the other side of that borrowing and I'll use circle yield as an example, because it's the one I understand probably the most you lend us USDC and we lend it wholesale to institutional borrowers. So these are in fact, hedge funds, family offices, systemic trading firms, electronic markets, firms, or other major firms in the ecosystem that want to operate using USDC. And these are firms that are borrowing at a high interest rate, but who are generating returns in north of that.An 8% interest rate to borrow at an 8% interest rate or borrowed 10% interest rate. That's not unheard of in a lot of things. Our credit cards are 20% interest rates or 17% interest rates. venture debt, which is what startups borrow typically have interest rates of, 10, 12, 13, 14% on them. interest rates in securities lending markets, which is the interest rates that say an institutional fund would pay to borrow against their stock can be fairly high now, corporate debt that's underwritten where a corporation's borrowing against their balance sheet and their P&L and it's underwritten by an investment bank and has a coupon and rating. So that tends to be a lower interest rate debt product.But generally when you look at interest rates that people borrow, right? They vary from, most single digits to high double digits or higher. And so what you have in USDC is you have a borrowing lending markets that exist at the retail and institutional level, and those are floating right now. So in DEFI right now, you can borrow you can borrow you USDC I think for 3%. the interest rate markets adapt to kind of market conditions and demand.BZ: How secure is my money in USDC ?J:The thing to remember is USDC itself is is regulated examine it's the USDC itself is A full reserve dollar digital currency.Now, if you're lending your USDC to someone else you're determining what is the credit risk that I'm taking with, who I'm lending to. It has nothing to do with USDC. It has to do with what are they doing with it? So there are some major differences, right? Are you a secured creditor or are you an unsecured creditor? is this unsecured credit that's then being used to do highly speculative trading or is, this secured credit with known institutional counterparties? So you're dealing with a huge variance.I like to use the example of a bank, right? If you walk into a branch of Chase and you say here's $10,000, you're depositing, and you're not depositing $10,000, you're lending chase $10,000.And you have a balance that says $10,000. But actually what you have is you have a claim against their loan book. They're taking that $10,000 and they're lending it out eight times over. And you're basically saying, Hey, I think that they're going to be good for that, that the small business loans, the credit card loans, the home mortgages, the corporate debt, all the stuff that they're doing to take my money and lend it out on a fractional reserve basis eight times. But fundamentally, you've got an IOU and now, you might look at a dollar that you've deposited and chase really different than s let's say you went to a bank in Zimbabwe and they said, you can deposit your dollars. And you say I don't know, what are you going to do with my dollars? And so it all comes down to, w what in fact are you w what, in fact are you seeing on the other side of that?So we've tried to design something with circle yield, which is very institutionally friendly. It's regulated, it's supervised it's over collateralized and it only, faces the best quality institutional wholesale borrowers on the other side. And so we've just tried to build some. I think the kinds of features that make it attractive, it doesn't produce the highest yields. It doesn't produce the same yields you might see through some of these retail platforms, but there's a reason for that.BZ: Is there a chance of defaulting?J: this has become a major issue from an investor protection regime, right? So very clearly, like I think the SEC, his view is that these are lending products. They're not banks. And in fact, for the average person they're basically making an investment and a lot of these are offered as an, they're unregistered investment contracts in a sense. What is an S1? And that's one is a public disclosure document that a retail investor can read and understand. And you can decide, you can read through the S one and say what are the risks? What is this? What am I actually getting into here? And so that's fair disclosure. So that's people and, the review of a major regulator the SEC.And so that's one, one standard to look at, there are others that, don't have any of that. And so you don't actually know what the underlying risk is other than the reps that are made through marketing, or maybe some high level stuff. And so I think you have to, you have to look at this through, through that lens. now DEFI is a different story. if you get USDC. DEFI protocols have some advantages to them. But they also have a whole lot of risks to them as well.There've been DEFI protocols that were hacked. And this is like software and all of a sudden the money is managed by software and the software gets hacked and they, that's gone, but you have some, defined protocols that are more pressure tested. There's probably going to be more and more disclosure audit type requirements on defy protocols over time, as well as the market participants want to have better hygiene around them. I think, buyer beware on all this stuff.BZ: USDC has a brand. So do you talk to these exchanges to make sure that they're trying to make sure that borrowers are good ?J: Because USDC is a free floating digital currency it can be utilized in so many different applications in so many different businesses and so on. And you've got, electronic markets firms that might be.Doing a trade with someone with USDC for $300 million in one transaction, you've got other, NFT markets that are utilizing USDC for payments on pieces of digital content and the, and those are, multiple layers removed. it is important though, that we need to always ensure that people understand USDC as a dollar digital currency itself is safe, stable, transparent regulated, compliant, all these things.Just like you use your dollars with an online payment service, you can still be defrauded. It wasn't the dollars that defrauded you. It was the other side of it.BZ: Do you have a minute to talk CND ?J:We initially negotiated a merger with Concord acquisition and business combination agreement in July of last year.And getting through the SEC qualifications taken a bit longer than we had expected. We had thought it would be, consistent with other spots4-5 months it's just taken longer and which is fine, and we're getting through it. We're making progress through every round of comments. But as we walked into the new year the business outlook has changed pretty significantly. The company grew USDC really rapidly. We're in a rising interest rate environment.Our transaction and treasury services businesses are taking hold nicely. And so we looked at the actual deal was set to expire in April. And so we we re-negotiated the deal.We extended the timeline so that it had enough time to get through the dispatch and the, in the sec process.We also eliminated the pipe from the first year. we also issued revised financial outlook for 2022 and 2023, which are considerably stronger from from a both a top line and a bottom line perspective from where we were, nine months earlier or whatever that exact timeline is.And so the increase in the value of the company is really reflective of the tremendous position that we've put ourselves in with the business and obviously the new outlook.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-raz-report/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Die großen deutschen Medien berichten in Sachen Migration und Geflüchtete eher über Probleme und Risiken. So das Ergebnis einer Studie der Macromedia Hochschule Hamburg von vor zwei Jahren. Die Studienmacher hatten dazu hunderte Zeitungsartikel und Fernsehbeiträge aus dem Frühjahr 2017 ausgewertet. Nun liegt eine neue Studie vor - und die Ergebnisse sind dieses Mal ganz anders, erzählt Studienleiter Thomas Hestermann.

Nous avons déjà abordé la question de l'achat dans l'épisode 208, lorsqu'Adobe achetait Macromedia. On continue sur la lancée, mais cette fois-ci on parle d'acquisition en anglais. Vous noterez une petite différence dans le contexte. La série Avec J'Améliore mon Anglais, prenez quelques minutes pour écouter un article de WikiNews accompagné de quelques mots de vocabulaire. Je termine le podcast en vous posant une question en anglais qui fait suite à l'histoire. Pour accéder à tous les épisodes, c'est par ici. Écouter le podcast Prêtez attention au vocabulaire et essayez d'anticiper l'histoire grâce au titre et au vocabulaire, ça vous aidera à comprendre le texte. Pour écouter le podcast, plusieurs options selon vos préférences. Vous aurez reconnu tout au début de cet article le lecteur du podcast en mp3 (audio). Vous êtes libre de l'écouter directement sur cette page-ci. Cliquez sur le bouton Play à gauche de la barre noire. Le télécharger pour l'écouter plus tard, ou l'écouter plusieurs fois. Cliquez sur Download sous la barre noire. Le vocabulaire de cet article Pour progresser en anglais si votre niveau le permet, écoutez le podcast, écrivez les mots et expressions que j'explique, puis vérifiez leur orthographe. Voici la liste des mots et expressions dont je vous parle dans le podcast. Si vous avez une mémoire visuelle, vous voudrez peut-être les lire avant d'écouter le podcast (ou pendant). Romania: la Roumanie Reportedly: selon les informations, introduit le conditionnel A stake: une participation, des parts An assembly plant: une usine d'assemblage Overall: globalement, en tout Buy back (bought back): racheter Debts stemming from: des dettes provenant de A loan: un emprunt A bidder: un enchérisseur Cheap labor (or labour): de la main d'oeuvre bon marché The output: la production A production facility: une usine/ un lieu de production L'article WikiNews Bien sûr, rien de tel que de lire l'article en complément de l'écoute. Ainsi vous aurez la possibilité de vous pencher un peu plus sur la structure des phrases. Mais je vous recommande de pratiquer l'écoute un maximum, voire de rejouer le podcast plusieurs fois avant de lire l'article. Vous trouverez l'article ici. De quoi ça parle? (Spoiler alert!!) Selon votre niveau en anglais, vous aurez saisi plus ou moins de détails. Le plus important est de comprendre le sens de l'histoire. Et très souvent, après avoir compris le sens global, une deuxième écoute vous permettra de noter plus de détails. Résumé: 2007. Ford Motors has decided to buy an unused factory that used to belong to Daewoo Motors, in Romania. Ma question: Why is Renault happy that Ford is buying a plant in Romania?   Avez-vous compris l'histoire sans vous aider du résumé? Avez-vous su répondre à ma question?     L'article J'Améliore Mon Anglais – Episode 213 – Acquisition est apparu en premier sur Langonaute.

Alasdair Mason is the Customer Champion at Balsamiq. He has been developing his passion for great service in a number of fields for over 2 decades. Whether it's mobile computing, winter sports, video hosting or wireframing the one common factor is providing exceptional support. As a resident of beautiful South Lake Tahoe, California he embraces the remote-work lifestyle and, when away from his desk, he loves to golf in the summer and snowboard in the winter. Valerie Liberty is the Head Chef at Balsamiq, but she also handles sales and free inquiries in the Wow! Division. She's their first US employee, and has been helping customers try to rid the world of bad software since the 90s, even before she and Peldi, worked together at Macromedia. Balsamiq may be a flat organization, but she still answers to one manager, 18-year old rescue mutt, Cooper. During this episode we cover: 00:00 - https://www.wa.team (WA.Team) Convert Messages to Happy Costumers 00:54 - Intro 02:57 - Balsamiq's Way of Customer Support 04:35 - Love What You're Doing 05:47 - The Goldencircle of Balsamiq's Freemail 12:18 - The Importance of Longevity 17:28 - Building & Implementing Longevity 23:11 - Alasdair's Favorite Pet at Balsamiq Team 24:14 - Alasdair's Favorite Lake Tahoe Summer Activity 25:09 - Cooper and Nala's Favorite Balsamiq Recipe 26:20 - Who's The One That Hates The Most Going to The Vet? 27:16 - Favorite Hobby That Gets Them Into A Flow State 31:09 - Career Path & Professional Development Tips 35:09 - What Motivates Them to Keep Working Hard 37:16 - What They Love Most About Working at Balsamiq Mentions: Sunir Shah's SaaS District Episode Get in touch with Alasdair & Valerie: https://twitter.com/balsamiqval (Valerie's Twitter) https://twitter.com/alasdairmanson (Alasdair's Twitter) Tag Us & Follow: https://www.facebook.com/SaaSDistrictPodcast/ (Facebook) https://www.linkedin.com/company/horizen-capital (LinkedIn) https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/ (Instagram) More About Akeel: https://twitter.com/AkeelJabber (Twitter) https://linkedin.com/in/akeel-jabbar (LinkedIn) https://horizencapital.com/saas-podcast (More Podcast Sessions)

In Lochhead on Marketing episode 127, we talked with Al Ramadan, Co-founder of Play Bigger Advisors and co-author of Play Bigger, the book. On that episode, we unpacked the upcoming Rivian IPO. Now that Rivian has gone public, we thought it would be cool to get together again, and unpack what happened through a category design lens. Specifically, how Rivian was able to use their IPO not just as a financing event, but a category-defining event. Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind. The Rivian IPO: An Update after the Launch Al Ramadan recaps what Rivian IPO was during the public offering, which had a market cap of $60 billion at the time. This was already a very impressive number, considering that it was still an IPO. What people didn't anticipate is that after Rivian's launch, they blew well past that and now sits over $100 billion in valuation. As a result, they are now the third largest automotive company behind Tesla and Toyota. All in all, it is an incredible IPO, and one to observe in the future as it develops. Betting on Potential vs Performance Despite all that, there are those who are still skeptic of what had happen, and consider it as a fluke or a big risk. But it all boils down to betting on the potential of an idea, rather than just prior performance. Right now, some investors are seeing things in a new light. “I think it's hard for investors to understand because that's been just been the way they are. They look at multiples of revenue or multiples of trucks shipped, or all of those other vital metrics within an organization. But the new investors I think, are starting to look past that.” – Al Ramadan Paving the Way into a New Category What Al finds interesting is that currently, 70% or more of the market cap for the electronic car category is cornered by Tesla. Yet Rivian might have to potential to great its own category within it, and be the category king for it. Because Rivian is not just planning on the electronic cars and trucks. They are also including everything else that comes along with it. We're talking charging networks and stations, dealerships, and the like. It's taking into consideration the whole ecosystem, as supposed to just that one product. “So if you go into this with the mindset of like, I'm going to value this as an automotive industry as it was over the last 125 years, you're gonna miss big time.” – Al Ramadan To hear more from Christopher and Al and their thoughts and updates on the Rivian IPO, download and listen to this episode. Bio Al Ramadan is a co-founding partner of Play Bigger Advisors and coauthor of the book, Play Bigger. He also co-founded Quokka Sports, which revolutionized the way people experience sport online. Al then joined Macromedia and Adobe, where he spent almost ten years changing the way people think about great digital experiences. At Adobe, Al led teams that created the Rich Internet Applications category and helped develop the discipline of experience design. In the early ‘90s he applied data science to Australia's Americas Cup — an innovation in sports performance analytics. His work in sailing led directly to the idea for Quokka. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on Marketing™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on Apple Podcast! You may also subscribe to his newsletter, The Difference, for some amazing content.

Karen Catlin bio: After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is an acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books: "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking."    “We all need to build our network *before we need it…” -Karen Catlin

Karen Catlin is a leadership coach and an acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. After spending twenty-five years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, she witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. She coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies for members of all underrepresented groups. Her client roster includes Airbnb, DoorDash, eBay, Envoy, Intel, Intuit, and Segment, as well as entrepreneurs and individuals. Karen's coaching offerings include tactics for increasing visibility, being more strategic, managing stakeholders, negotiation, and cultivating ally skills.  To help more people cultivate ally skills, she wrote Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces. She also published a companion guidebook, The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring, with best practices to recruit and hire people from underrepresented groups. In 2020, her unique approach to allyship was featured in the BBC's Ally Track tool. Follow her on twitter @kecatlin Dr. Peter Tomaselli  is an emergency physician and medical educator  in Philadelphia. He sees allyship and equity as crucial to providing a safe and effective learning environment and a healthy workplace. His other academic interests include professionalism and hospitality in medicine. Follow him on twitter @pjtomaselli In this episode we discuss Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces The highly-acclaimed, practical guide for how to be an ally in the workplace, now in its 2nd edition. Subscribe to the weekly 5 Ally Actions Newsletter.

Allyship at work is how each and every one of us, on an individual level, can support and empower underrepresented groups to ensure everyone can thrive at work - and that only leads to more goodness for the company. Today, author, speaker, and inclusive workplace expert Karen Catlin and I discuss how to be a real ally, what allyship means, and a shocking new way to look at privilege in your life. She shares practical tips on how to be an ally in your everyday interactions, thus creating a more engaged, inclusive workplace. Key Takeaways:Being an ally is very simple - it is using your position of privilege to create an opportunity for somebody else.Privilege doesn't mean you didn't work hard, it is just something we have because of the social groups we belong to. You can have a ripple effect in your own company. Pick a couple of things and just get started, others will pick up those behaviors and act in a different way as well.  "The first step to being a real ally is understanding that someone else's situation may be different from yours, and you can't discount it just because you've never experienced it yourself." —  Karen Catlin About Karen Catlin, Author of “Better Allies”: After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is a leadership coach and an acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books:  "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking." Connect with Karen:  Website: KarenCatlin.comTwitter: twitter.com/betterallies & twitter.com/kecatlinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kecatlinInstagram: instagram.com/betteralliesCheck out all of Karen's books: BetterAllies.com  Don't forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy Connect with Maria: Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.comLearn more about Maria's brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.comHire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-RossLinkedIn: Maria RossInstagram: @redslicemariaTwitter: @redsliceFacebook: Red Slice

Allyship at work is how each and every one of us, on an individual level, can support and empower underrepresented groups to ensure everyone can thrive at work - and that only leads to more goodness for the company. Today, author, speaker, and inclusive workplace expert Karen Catlin and I discuss how to be a real ally, what allyship means, and a shocking new way to look at privilege in your life. She shares practical tips on how to be an ally in your everyday interactions, thus creating a more engaged, inclusive workplace. Key Takeaways:Being an ally is very simple - it is using your position of privilege to create an opportunity for somebody else.Privilege doesn't mean you didn't work hard, it is just something we have because of the social groups we belong to. You can have a ripple effect in your own company. Pick a couple of things and just get started, others will pick up those behaviors and act in a different way as well.  "The first step to being a real ally is understanding that someone else's situation may be different from yours, and you can't discount it just because you've never experienced it yourself." —  Karen Catlin About Karen Catlin, Author of “Better Allies”: After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is a leadership coach and an acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workplaces. She is the author of three books:  "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring,” and "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking." Connect with Karen:  Website: KarenCatlin.comTwitter: twitter.com/betterallies & twitter.com/kecatlinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kecatlinInstagram: instagram.com/betteralliesCheck out all of Karen's books: BetterAllies.com  Don't forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy Connect with Maria: Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.comLearn more about Maria's brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.comHire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-RossLinkedIn: Maria RossInstagram: @redslicemariaTwitter: @redsliceFacebook: Red Slice

On the first episode of MBO Partners' new podcast, future of work expert Steve King, of Emergent Research, speaks about the genesis of the State of Independence in America report and the highlights in the tenth anniversary edition in 2020. The pair talk about the growing independent sector and the generational shifts over the decade, particularly how Millennial and Gen Z workers are flocking to independent work. They talk about trends related to remote workers, Digital Nomads, and solopreneurs and discuss the various motivations for workers to be drawn to the independent work sector and both the challenges and the health and wellbeing benefits that they find there.They discuss, also, how organizations stand to benefit from a more strategic use of independent workers in an era when flexibility and agility will be key to business success. They examine platform economies and the need for both individual workers and organizations will need to think carefully about strategic partnerships and collaboration. In speaking about policy-related issues, such as the bifurcated economy we are seeing in which middle-wage jobs are getting squeezed out, they suggest ways that both low-wage workers and high-wage, highly skilled workers stand to benefit from the growing opportunities of independent work.This is the first conversation in a podcast series that will highlight the insights in the 2020 State of Independence in America report. Now in its tenth year of publication, the report takes a data-driven approach to understanding the growth of opportunities for both the independent professional and the enterprise organizations looking to hire them. Future episodes of this podcast will provide further insights on many of the key themes surrounding the growth of the sector and share implications for the future of work and overall workforce transformation.About This Episode's GuestSteve King is a partner at Emergent Research, a research and consulting firm focused on the most dynamic sector of the global economy—small businesses. Steve's current research and consulting is focused on the future of work, the rise of the independent workforce and the impact of Big Data on small businesses. Steve has extensive consulting, marketing and general management experience with both large companies and startups. He has served as vice president of Corporate Marketing for Macromedia, vice president and general manager of Asia Pacific for Lotus Development Corporation and vice president of marketing for Isys Corporation. Find Steve at emergentresearch.com. About MBO Partners®MBO Partners is a deep jobs platform that connects and enables independent professionals and microbusiness owners to do business safely and effectively with enterprise organizations. Its unmatched experience and industry leadership enable it to operate on the forefront of the independent economy and consistently advance the next way of working. For more information, visit mbopartners.com.Episode hosted by Aassia Haq; produced and edited by Leslie Jennings Rowley; sound engineered by Bethany Sands. With music by Brian BurrowsMBO Partners © 2020

Alysha has the pleasure of meeting Marc Canter all because she listened to her “Spidey Sense” after Erica O'Grady (Episode 8) told her about Jeff Pulver's networking group (Episode 15) which is how they connected. However, it was after the biggest myrony that connected Daniel Kottke from last week's episode (Episode 17) that Alysha knew meeting Marc was for a greater reason. Hear the continued story from last week's episode of the early days of Silicon Valley where Canter shares about his experience with Jobs and how Canter's software MacroMind (which later became Macromedia) was also in the first Apple Computers. Canter shares his extremely colorful history in the software world including his claim to fame with video games (remember Professor Pac-Man?) and his meeting with Bill Gates…we know even if you are not into computers will appreciate the story he shares. Canter finally explains about his latest creativity & entertainment tool known as Instigate.ai where we will be able to tell a “story” with AI that we get to create. Is this going to be the next big thing after Instagram and Tik Tok? We hope so because for those that are tired of just selfies, Instigate.ai is the answer & more myronies could be shared!! About the Guest:Marc Canter is a software entrepreneur, who co-founded MacroMind (in 1984 in Chicago), which became Macromedia [MACR.] Because of Marc's tireless work, enthusiastic evangelism and creative leadership - Marc is known as "one of the fathers of multimedia."After Macromedia Marc created an Interactive Music Video Band (MediaBand) w/Todd Rungren, created an Interactive TV Talk Show and a venue based Operating system (MediaBar) all leading up to "the Internet." At that time Marc's product Director - was directly responsible for creating 85% of the world's multimedia and generating 100,000's of digital media jobs and production entities.Marc focused on broadband solutions during the early days of the Internet - traveling to London, Amsterdam, Japan and Italy, building "Interactive TV" systems and Digital City prototypes - all leading up to the development of a "white labeled Social Networking" platform (called PeopleAggregator) which he utilized to build 27 different social networks - between '03-'09. The 00's also had Marc getting heavily involved in the rights of User's to their Data and a group called "the Identity Gang."In '09 Marc picked up his family and moved to Cleveland, after having lived and worked in the SF/Bay Area for 27 years. Marc created an "economic development" platform (called "the Digital City Project") which he took out on the road to Amsterdam, Kuala Lampur, Jamaica, Tampa, FL, Kansas City and other cities. Marc's family then moved to Charlotte, NC - where he started yet ANOTHER startup, which originally focused on IoT Authoring tools, but pivoted into an entirely new kind of Messaging App - called Cola.Cola brought Marc back to SF - where he eventually started "Instigate, Inc." which is developing a new kind of "conversational storytelling" tool. Marc is an expert of taking ideas from Zero to One and has been helping software startups develop and grow their companies for over 30 years. Marc is a leader, an interdisciplinary thinker, a Dad and a loving husband to his wife, 5 kids and one granddaughter.Instigate.ai = websitehttps://www.facebook.com/Cantervision = Facebook grouphttps://www.facebook.com/marccanter =...

This week we talk about GeoCities, Adobe Flash, and the Digital Dark Age.We also discuss PenPoint OS, Macromedia, and Kongregate. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

While the rest of the media was focussing on the Olympic Games in Atlanta, we ran an "Olympics Free" Programme...well almost. Problems for journalists in Atlanta with reporters being refused access to events. Lou Josephs discusses Macromedia and ActiveX technology. We link up with Christian Voice in Zambia and ask why it decided to broadcast only in English. Incidentally, as of 2019, the station is still on the air .

An interesting catch-up show as we re-convene for a new season of Media Network. Diana Janssen is back from Asia and has some concerns about how the pace of change is leading to discussions of censorship. Andy Sennitt explains about challenges in Belarus. WorldSpace seems to be expanding. Karl Miosga of WRN explains a plan to carry their network overnight on SAFM. Alok Das Gupta has a new edition of his South-Asia listening guide. ORF KurzwellenPanorama (photo of editor Wolf Harranth) and MN celebrate 15 years of collaboration. Lou Josephs has been testing Shockwave from Macromedia. NOS has abandoned plans to produce a regional TV magazine

Karen Catlin is a leadership coach, keynote speaker, author, and passionate advocate for inclusion in the workplace. After spending twenty-five years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, she witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies. Her client roster includes Airbnb, DoorDash, eBay, and Intuit, as well as entrepreneurs and individuals. Karen's coaching offerings include tactics for increasing visibility, being more strategic, managing stakeholders, negotiation, and cultivating ally skills. Her writing on these and related topics has appeared in Inc., theDaily Beast, Fast Company, and the Muse, and she's consulted on articles for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times. To help more people cultivate ally skills, she wrote Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces. A self-professed public speaking geek, Karen is a highly sought-after and engaging presenter who has delivered talks at more than a hundred conferences and corporate events. She speaks on a variety of topics, including inclusive workplaces and women in leadership. Her TEDx talk, Women in Tech: The Missing Force, explores the decline in gender diversity in tech, why it's a problem, and what can be done about it. Website: https://www.karencatlin.com ATTEND THE PITTSBURGH BUSINESS DIVERSITY CONFERENCE | SEPTEMBER 12, 2019 | Get Tickets Here To comment or connect, visit www.belongingfactor.com or email ibelong@belongingfactor.com About the host: (www.devinhalliday.com, www.rudimentsolutions.com) Devin Halliday is a Northern California native, living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He's explored the people, places and cultures across this beautiful planet. He's been amazed. He's been humbled. He's been outraged. But mostly, he's been inspired. After nearly twenty years leading people and delivering award-winning results in a Fortune 15 technology company, he started a new and fulfilling chapter. As Founder and Chief Belonging Architect of Rudiment Solutions - A People Empowerment Company, he is able to bring a lifetime's worth of inspiration and influence to those looking to achieve more. As the author of the book "BE/LONG/ING FACTOR" and host of the Belonging Factor Podcast, Devin gets to share his personal mission with the world. Check out Serendipity Labs at www.serendipitylabs.com if you want to experience the most amazing office and co-working space I've ever seen! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/belongingfactor/message

Lea Hickman is a Partner at Silicon Valley Group, where she travels around the world working with product teams to help them create better products faster. Her storied career in product management included Netscape, Macromedia, Adobe, and InVision. We discuss the keys to building a great product management team. Read the show notes for this episode to learn more. Resources The Silicon Valley Product Group @leahickman on Twitter Follow Lea on LinkedIn

On today's episode of The F Word, Sheryl Brown is speaking with Karen Catlin of Better Allies. Karen Catlin is a leadership coach, keynote speaker, author, and passionate advocate for inclusion in the workplace. After spending twenty-five years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, she witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Today, Karen coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies. Her writing on these and related topics has appeared in Inc., The Daily Beast, and Fast Company, and she's consulted on articles for The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The New York Times. To help more people cultivate ally skills, she wrote Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces. In today's chat we will discuss: Recruiting Women: What does championing women in the workforce look like today? Why avoiding women today is a bad idea: #MeToo cannot be ignored Male Allies: How do men join the movement to support women? Be sure to connect with Karen Catlin: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kecatlin/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kecatlin Website: https://karencatlin.com/ Email: karen@karencatlin.com

Drew Covi: @drewcovi | about.me Show Notes: 01:04 - Honeywell User Experience (HUE) 05:00 - Deliverables 06:55 - Being a “Devsigner” 17:26 - Flash and Leading to Unique Skills 30:00 - Advice for People Straddling Roles 35:27 - Leveraging Design and Development Skills Together 39:41 - Embracing the Hardware Element 42:05 - Why the “Devsigner”? Resources: AOLpress CSS Beauty CSS Zen Garden Contribute Crave Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #76. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer here at The Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. With me is Elrick Ryan, also a developer at The Frontside. Hello. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on? CHARLES: Not much. Are you excited about today's topic? ELRICK: Very excited. CHARLES: Yeah. You got a personal stake in it because today, we have in the room, not only you but also two developers who are also designers or designers who are also developers. Our guest today is actually the first person who fit this description that I ever worked with. It was a great experience, a great collaboration and his name is Drew Covi. Drew is a senior supervisor of product design at HUE Studios in Golden Valley, Minnesota. DREW: Howdy. How are you doing? CHARLES: Good. Thanks for joining us. Now, you're going to have to explain to us two things, one, what is a super senior product designer and let's start off talking about HUE first. What exactly is HUE because I think it's a cool organization? DREW: I'm working with four people and I'm working on all sorts of brand new ideas. I think the greatest opportunity that I've had in my career at this company, Honeywell is just working with physical product and the digital space. It's a unique opportunity. Not all companies focus on both so it's really been a learning experience for me and working with a great group of creative individuals is also been a real privilege. They say that at the end of the day, the most important thing is other people that you work with and really the entire team here has been fantastic in welcoming me and letting me explore and grow as a developer and as a designer. It's been great so far. CHARLES: Fantastic. Working with that group was absolutely wonderful. What does HUE stand for? DREW: HUE is Honeywell User Experience. Our previous CEO, Dave Cote often called it 'huey' but it's just HUE, without the Jersey accent. I'm going to probably misrepresent but we have over eight to 10 studios throughout the world. Each one focuses on different businesses for the most part. The one here in Golden Valley tends to focus on homes and buildings technologies. The studio out of Seattle, actually tends to focus on, again I'm going to get the acronym wrong here but it's essentially worker safety in industrial safety. CHARLES: What is it that you all do at HUE? DREW: What we do here at the studio here in Golden Valley is we support various businesses throughout the homes and buildings technology space. About fall of last year, Honeywell went through a bit of a shift in their business and they used to do all automation control solutions. Last fall essentially, we saw that one large business that was headquartered and based out of Golden Valley, break into two areas of more direct focus. Out of Seattle, we have folks working on, I think I mentioned before but Seattle works on sensing and productivity solutions. We focus on homes and building space so we're both providing upfront research to understand what the customer needs. We're actually creating everything from very rough user flows to final UIs and we're also working with industrial designers to create final products. Those industrial designers work very closely with engineering. Honeywell has a long reputation of very strong engineering when it comes to the hardware space. We've prided ourselves on excellent instruments and excellent performance. One thing that very few people understand is that we don't just do thermostats. We're in the business of turbos. We're creating the turbos for your car. We're creating all sorts of HVAC equipment. We're also handling various safety equipment. All of these items need designing, not just for end users and consumers but they also need designing for the workers in the field. If we make a product that is more efficient, easier to use and in some cases, more attractive, not only it does lead to more sales, it leads to more efficient work forces that can work quicker essentially. You could get up on a roof and get off in record time. We're not just designing consumer products. We're actually focused on a lot of other items as well, with oftentimes very large returns on investment. CHARLES: In the work that you do and HUE does in general, it sounds like there might be a large software component. Digital design is kind of we know in the web space but then also a lot of industrial design of just how does this thing going to look, how is it going to feel, how is it going to persist, how durable is it going to be, how is it going to withstand usage. Would you get involved in that process? DREW: Usually, the entire organization gets involved with the process very early on. One of the other shifts that happen in the fall as we get involved less in the production and more on the actual marketing side, like marketing deciding what's going to be built. We're actually really at the beginning and understanding what problems need to be solved at first. As far as my practice and my skill set, we do get involved with all that discovery phase work but when it comes to actual deliverables, we oftentimes see our deliverables around the actual creation of understanding user interactions. We will take research from our user research in OVOC, which is an acronym for Observational Voice of the Customer and we'll take those learnings and translate them into whatever solution we decide to build as a team. My output is going to look like a user flow, something you build in OmniGraffle or Visio and then it can start there, which is in the physical space and then we'll actually revolve those concepts into wireframes as well. Wireframes that will then be handed off to other team members who specialize and focus on visual design. Basically, it's kind of a very hands on process from the very beginning to the very end. It's essentially just understanding everything from the physical to the digital. CHARLES: When we were working together, at least in your case, it doesn't stop there. You're actually doing a significant amount of the implementation as well. Let's explore how did you actually end up getting to that position where you were working through interactions, wireframes and workflows and then also, getting to actually build the product in the form of a complex single-page application. DREW: Sure. Absolutely. One of the components that I kind of brought here to the team was a bit of a deeper understanding of frontend web development. I'm often pulled into conversations here and there. In the case of the project that we were working on specifically, it was essentially kind of early days on that project. We had a product that was pretty old and need a lot of work and it was basically, need to be rebuilt. We hadn't seen a lot of single-page applications at that time. In my case, I actually had worked on a couple small projects in my previous job and we can get into that in a little bit, where my career path took me. But essentially, it was me trying to kind of pave the way and eventually have that work scale. It was kind of proving that it could be done, showing how it could be done and then getting other developers on board. My role here has oftentimes involved, basically becoming a liaison between our design teams and our development teams. Ultimately in this case like you mentioned, it did wind up in turning into code that ultimately got factored into production code. It was definitely a time where we were experimenting with what role we would play. I will say in full disclosure that more or less which we're trying to move towards, basically making better informed decisions but not playing as much of a role in actual production code writing. It's something that we want to help scale. I think we'll talk about that kind of role and how well it scales hopefully in a little bit here but ultimately, it kind of changed a little bit. I don't do as much code as I used to. CHARLES: Right but nevertheless, the skill is there. Don't sell yourself short. You weren't slapping together a bunch of jQuery plugins. You were standing up, basically a full stack system with a StubDeck background, then Node.JS. This is back in early days where there was a custom-build tooling. You were using CoffeeScript. There was a lot of exploration and clearly, there is a fierce curiosity which you are actually exploring and actively kind of skinning and moving into the development space, which doesn't happen until people achieve a certain level of comfort. Whether or not you're exercising those skills, I think they have served you well in terms of the things that you've been able to build but also acting in that liaison and understanding what's possible and stuff like that. Obviously, once I met you, you were already there. I'm curious in exploring that journey of coming up the design ladder but also coming up the development ladder too. Maybe we can talk about each one separately and then see how they intertwine. Let's start with the design side. How did you get into that? DREW: I can take you way, way back. I love to talk more about this in a little bit but I think we, as a generation, are kind of very unique in that. We were raised in the birth of the internet. Some of us are old enough to remember the early dial up days and I certainly was one of those. I grew up basically obsessed with drawing and art and painting. I was a designer and artist raised by an engineer, essentially. My dad didn't really have a lot of opportunities to explore his creative side to basically make a living. I want to say that although graphic design existed to a certain extent, there wasn't really the same blend of engineering skills required so he decided to take the tack of I'm going to become an engineer so I was raised in a household where he was building everything but he was also a talented artist. As a kid, I basically did a lot of advanced art classes. I'm kind of a nerd, pretty much a huge nerd. I dropped my entire tenure as a high school student. It was also kind of dawn of video games as well so we had computers coming of age. We had video games coming of age so I was raised looking at digital art effectively, 8-bit, super accessible. It's kind of so early on that it was something that I could actually fathom getting into and creating on my own. I never got to creating any games but I will say that by my late high school years, I was using a tool called AOLpress. For anybody who has ever heard of that, congratulations. You're one of the few. CHARLES: I've never heard of that. AOLpress, we're going to have to link to that in the show notes. ELRICK: I've never heard of that either. DREW: It's awesome. It's got a Wikipedia page. It's got hieroglyphs and stuff. They really went all out on this product. It's basically the precursor to the Dreamweaver. It was a very, very WYSIWYG. I'm sure you've heard of Microsoft FrontPage, maybe. It was basically a precursor to FrontPage, I would say. Same thing, those are the days of framesets and all of that. I was a kid in scouting at the time and I wanted to build a web page for the troops so I built one and put it out there. I kind of remember that moment where I was like, "I'm going to write something and put it on the internet and anybody can see it." That whole experience was just super exciting. I know that if anybody's following Kickstarter, there's one that was started called 'What Comes Next Is the Future.' It was made by Matt Braun and Matt Griffin and it really explored the birth of the web. I would recommend it on your listeners to want to really dive deep if you didn't live through it, check it out. It's a great, great film. All the regulars are there as you'd expect. Zeldman on there, talking about it amongst others. But if it were for the web, I don't know that I would be who I am or where I am today, just because it's such a unique platform. It's so open. It's so readily available. There's no barriers. I would say that I was just an arts student in high school that picked up AOLpress and then got addicted to the web. From there, it was kind of off to the races. In fact, I didn't even know that I could make a living as a graphic designer until late high school. I decided that I wanted to go to school for graphic design, went a year at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and at that point in time, it was pretty much all print design and then Flash. Flash took over in my second year and at that point in time, it was Flash and framesets and tables. There was no CSS for layout. It's very early days. It sounds like you might know what I'm talking about. Have you been there? ELRICK: Yeah. You know, they say everyone in the world has like a twin and I'm like, "Drew is like my technology twin." DREW: Yeah. When we were raised in that time and we had to hack it with framesets and whatever tool -- FrontPage or AOLpress -- you basically, from very early days, realized that you had to force this stuff to happen. It was not easy. There was no documentation and where there was documentation, you were grateful to have it. I remember when I was, probably just about to graduate and if I look back at my portfolio piece, it was definitely still Flash. It was Timeline-based Flash. I also think that in many ways the way the web evolved was perfect. As a designer, I was very comfortable in the Timeline tool. Before ActionScript 3.0 and before they went on object-oriented on us, it was super accessible. You could add little bits of code here and there and create animations. It kind of got you hooked. Then suddenly, I found myself needing to create full screen Flash applications and needing to actually write code. I actually having to say, "If I want this Flash experience to scale, then I need to calculate where things go. I can't just X-Y coordinate and done," so that's where I jumped off and started getting into CSS. CSS was kind of early days as well. Again, this is before iPhone. This is like people were using CSS but people didn't really think it was that important. It was actually kind of discouraged because everybody in the world was using Internet Explorer and why would you need to know CSS. It was unreliable for different browsers and Internet Explorer was the worst. I remember sitting in a Dreamweaver conference, when it was Macromedia had a conference and they showed a webpage and then they hit the print button and they said, "Does anybody here know how this happened?" because the layout had changed, everything looked better and different. It was perfect for print. I remember my hand shot up because they was like, "Nobody was really familiar yet with that print style sheets?" Incidentally, I don't think that people still are familiar with print style sheets but it was a time when finally people were starting to understand that style sheets were more than just a layout tool. You could change them for all these different form, factors and all these different platforms. It was a fun time to be coming up in this age. CHARLES: It sounds like one, CSS and two, Flash were actually kind of gateway drugs into the development world? DREW: Absolutely. CHARLES: We still have CSS, clearly but do you feel like Flash, despite what some people might think about it, it was a full virtual machine that was running. You could code on it with ActionScript. It's kind of like the JVM but only for running inside the browser. Do you feel like designers might not have that gateway available to them anymore or maybe is the web just as big of a gateway to move into that? DREW: Yeah, for sure. I certainly think, beyond a doubt that had it not been for Flash, we would see a lot less creativity in the space. I say that only because at the time, if we had just gone from tables and tried to slowly evolve things, we'd have a much different feel, I believe. Certainly, it's a gateway drug. We'll be in a different web today without it. Is it still required? Are there any equivalents? I've seen a number of drag and drop web UI on the web tools out there and many of them claim to create production quality code. It's certainly possible to get there without Flash. I think, it's certainly its time has passed but we do see tools like Sketch for instance. These are all very much screen-based design tools that seem to leverage a lot of the same web styles and the web approaches. I think we definitely have the tools there to replace Flash. But I think from my perspective, it would be very interesting to go back and imagine, would we have immersive full screen web experiences without that Flash? CHARLES: Yeah. I remember it being very much a topic of conversation, certainly at the beginning of each project or when you were going to implement a feature is, "Are we going to do this using Flash? Are we trying to do this with native HTML? Are we going to use EGADS or Java applet?" ELRICK: Oh, man. Java applets. CHARLES: That was a conversation that was had before the web eventually went out but I think when it was, everything was very, very static. I do think that Flash definitely set the expectation higher and forced the web to evolve so that it could be the natural choice in those conversations. ELRICK: The time when Flash was around, I called it the 'golden age of user interface' because you can literally build any user experience, any user interface with Flash that you could dream up. There was no limitations creatively in the world of Flash. Nowadays, we're kind of limited without box model but it's getting better year-by-year. DREW: It's interesting to me because before Flash really died out, we had these... Let's put it this way. I feel as though, for a long time the web was a very much like a poster site kind of approach. You would have tools that were pretty rough on the eyes, pretty hard to use and then like for certain films, you have these very high budget, fully immersive Flash experiences. For a blip, that did actually translate at some point into Canvas-based and then Three.JS, like 3D WebGL-based experiences in native HTML but I don't see a whole lot of that anymore. It seems as though, it kind of settled down and in many ways, I would say killing Flash kind of evolved the web from more of a presentational platform to more of a usability first platform. It was a bit of a double-edged sword. You could build anything you want like you said but there wasn't a framework to it. It wasn't really responsive and then certainly, when Steve Jobs decided he wasn't going to Flash an iPhone, that was the end of it. Essentially now, we have -- ELRICK: Steve Job dropped the hammer. CHARLES: That was the memo that was heard around the world, right? DREW: Yeah. CHARLES: I just realized that was like 10 years ago. DREW: Yeah, they're celebrating the anniversary for the last couple of months here. It's been a huge deal. CHARLES: There's probably listeners that never heard that memo but it's definitely worth a read. The memo obviously, that you guys are referring to is when Steve Jobs basically said that Flash would not be on iPhone or iPad, not now, not ever. That was the end of it. DREW: People often forget too that when it was first launched, there was no app store. He basically said point blank, "Anything you need to do on this phone, you should be able to do using the web, using native web coding," and Safari at that point in time is really paving the way to bringing those native APIs into the web. You had geolocation through web. In many ways, that too is a huge gateway drug. Suddenly, you start looking at the web, not as just like, "I could use this as a poster site or as an informational site or a new site. I can actually use this to get things done." They're actually treating this platform as a first-class citizen. That to me was super exciting. I don't know if it gets as much attention anymore in the days of Swift and the App Store but I will say that if your listeners do get a chance to check out the show I mentioned earlier, 'What Comes Next Is the Future,' they even dive deep into just how limiting the app store experience can be. At least with the web, you can create whatever you want to create and people seemed to go that you URL and install on their home screen. This is a feature that nobody uses from what I've seen but if you bookmark a web app on your home screen, you can have an icon, you can have a loading screen, you can have all this stuff and nobody really uses it for whatever reason. CHARLES: I think it's the install, it's getting the knowledge about the fact that you can do that. It's not widely disseminated. ELRICK: Yeah, I think its capabilities starting to come up now with people making progressive web apps. They're starting to utilize that being able to put icons on people screens and loading screen and splash and etcetera. CHARLES: Flash really was kind of the gateway into the development world. I'm curious what opportunities do you feel opened up as you started taking on more web technologies, more JavaScript, more CSS and mixing that with the design that you were doing? What unique skills/superpowers do you think that gave you, that made you, that helped you at that stage in your career? DREW: Yeah, for better or worse, it really was the opportunity to get a job first of all. I know that the job market has been in all sorts of flux in the last couple of decades but I would say 12 years ago, in 2005 when I was entering the workforce, graphic design was not necessarily a hot field. I can say with relative certainty that the majority of the people I graduate with, didn't necessarily make their way into graphic design as a profession. I would say probably maybe 30% to 40% actually wound up following their degrees. For the obvious reason at that time, we were starting to see digital replace print. It meant that I was able to get a job for one. It wasn't a dream job necessarily but I was basically a one-stop-shop. I was designing and developing websites as working for a company but in many ways, shapes and forms, I was kind of freelancing as things were. I had a very direct relationship with the clients that I worked with. It was basically churning out websites. If I recall correctly at the time the company wanted to essentially create a Domino's Pizza of the web where we could use CSS to essentially build the actual HTML once and then restyle it. This is actually was a time when a site called CSS Beauty was just coming of age, I think the site still exists but back then, if you want the CSS Beauty, it's big thing was you have one website and people could upload their own CSS and completely change the layout, completely change the look. CHARLES: Are you talking about CSS Zen Garden? DREW: Maybe that was it. There's two of them. CHARLES: I remember that one. DREW: CSS Zen Garden was one of them and I think CSS beauty was a clone maybe of Zen Garden for sure. Maybe you're right, Zen Garden was the one where you actually had a website and Beauty was just showcasing certain CSS sites. I think you're right. Zen Garden was the one. When they saw that, they're like, "Wow, business opportunity. We can build a whole site." We were using something called 'Cold Fusion' and... Oh, it will escape me now. I think it was called 'Contribute.' There's a product called 'Contribute' that Macromedia come up with that worked on Cold Fusion. It was basically a WordPress. You basically set up editable regions, you basically code the site once in that regard in the backend coding and then just rework CSS to create multiple sites. Actually, the opportunity to open up for me, that job was very squarely-focused around the benefits of leveraging CSS. Eventually, that grew tiring. I kind of wanted to get into the actual marketing and advertising space. From there, I started to just jump to the next job. I worked for a very, very small marketing agency. It was called 'Vetta-Zelo' at that time and we focused on lots more Flash, a little bit of CSS websites but mostly Flash Experiences and they actually used Flash in a lot of kiosks and physical spaces. I started to jump into that, understanding PHP, understanding databases because we would do things like we would install Flash Experience on little portable tablets that would then sync up survey responses to a web URL that it would then dump it into a database. About that time, I was always trying to teach myself how to get really deep into the backend of the stack. CHARLES: That was just to make sure that these Flash sites that you're developing would be scalable and more robust? Was that the natural next layer to dig down? DREW: Absolutely. At the end of the day, we wanted to have immersive Flash experiences and we wanted to have the content easy to update. I would build these really crude backend with text areas and they would update a database and then the Flash Experience would pull that in as content. In that way, we didn't have to go in and re-publish the Flash every time, essentially. It was a much more streamlined process. I think we even gave some of our clients the keys, gave them a login and password and they could change certain things. There's an outfit around here called 'Crave.' They are a restaurant in town and we built the website for them -- one of the earlier websites. When you have to do things like update times and menus and things like that, it became pretty essential to having some sort of a CMS behind it. It was all based on necessity, in other words. What you said is absolutely true. We had to evolve what we learned and I had to push what I did to lever on different needs. Throughout my career, I've been the guy who does web and design. One of the things about that is it's kind of a lonely place to be and find yourself in creative agencies, where the majority of skill sets are not in development and trying to explain what's going on or make commitments on timelines and deliver on them. Whenever a bug shows up, it's never really fully understood. It's also a challenge to manage expectations, certainly as a young professional at that point. CHARLES: Yeah, I would say, what would be some advice you would give to somebody who is straddling these roles at that early career stage where they're maybe working for creative agency and fulfilling these two roles but most of their surroundings is towards the design end. DREW: Yeah, I would say for the most part, just be upfront. If there's anything that's unknown, be upfront about it and explain. If you are early in your development career as a designer, do your homework before you committing any commitment certainly. I think it's always better to be upfront about these things than to try to over-promise and then scramble at the end. I will say that a lot of my career has been marked with the term code 'code cowboy' as a designer and teaching myself to code. It was a disparaging term, I guess. I didn't really necessarily take it that way but I think other developers are trying to use it in that way. CHARLES: [Singing to the tune of Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys] Cowboys ain't easy to love and they're harder to hold... ELRICK: It's so true. DREW: You know, I'm not even embarrassed to say it because the truth of the matter is when you're a designer, you're used to just making a mess before you kind of landed on what you're done and what's right. The entire creative process is messy. I think it's inherent. If you're one of these designers turned devs and you basically just hack it until it comes together, that's kind of a natural flow from the creative process. Certainly, as you get more experienced, you want to reduce all that uncertainty and potential for error so you do learn to hone your craft, to use version control, to embrace a framework or embrace some model-view controller approach but none of that really existed in the early days of the web. I kind of came up in a time when you had to hack it. CHARLES: Well, there's a lot of learning that can happen when you're hacking and building things that are kind of ad hoc. As you go, you get to perceive firsthand the problems with them. Without perceiving those problems first, it's hard to really understand the solutions that the internet has come up with to deal with those complexities. DREW: I would say I was like a solo designer developer throughout the early years, because at 2010, I found my people in a local agency called 'Clockwork' and for the first time, I wasn't the only developer on staff. There was a whole team of developers. In fact, the shop was started as a development shop and they were making headway into the creative space and eventually, becoming full digital partners. But had it not been for my opportunities at Clockwork, I wouldn't have picked up my skill set as a backend coder. From the very beginning at Clockwork, they expected you to get your hands dirty and code and get your hands dirty in the terminal, honestly. Command line was required even in our design work. CHARLES: And this is all designers needed to be familiar with the terminal tools --? DREW: Correct. CHARLES: -- Basic coding? DREW: Yeah. Essentially, all of our work, whether it was creative or whether it was documents, were all managed in Subversion. As a part of onboarding, you basically learned how to use Subversion. There were some GUI tools for it but for the most part, it wasn't that steep of a learning curve. It was pretty easy to follow instructions and that was the second gateway drug, I would say. My first gateway drug, again was kind of coming up in the age of the web and getting into CSS and Flash. The second gateway drug was basically being required to learn command line and learning how to navigate a computer without a display. Had not been for that, I don't think my career would have taken the turns that it did. I basically got more into the IoT space. I had set up a home NAS server with Drobo FS, is what it was called at the time and it was just a really basic machine but by jumping into that, I could start to play around with UNIX and tools there. I started using home automation, playing with that and at some point in time, I made the jump from just web into the role that I play here at Honeywell, which is Internet of Things. We do a lot of Internet of Things. In fact, our latest tagline is 'the Power of Connected' so we've embraced it all the way down to our wood mark. It's becoming the new normal for most products so it's a good time to be at the center of all these different areas of expertise, to be in development, to be in IoT and to be in design. That's my path. That's my journey. I would kind of pick it up at a bunch of fortunate circumstances, honestly. ELRICK: Having these two skill sets: your design skills and your development skills, what do you believe that that gives you in terms of an advantage? Having these two skills set and being able to leverage these two? DREW: From my perspective, having both skill sets allows me to understand. I think the biggest challenge when working with large teams, particularly in this space or in any space is to really have a common level of understanding, stepping aside from a functional role and becoming more of a liaison between design development and to be honest with you, as we look beyond that, I took a three or four or five month course in business administration, actually. It was just a night class but I wanted to be able to speak to those needs as well. I think it really is becoming a translator. Serving as a translator between those items and then also being able to understand where the actual boundaries lie, there are a lot of very talented engineers and talented designers and sometimes opportunities are missed because, either timelines are pushing engineers to cut certain functionalities or certain features and there's a lot of pressure. Where we can lend a hand, where we can point to possible alternatives, I think that's where we really build cutting edge products. When we really know each domain, we can push those boundaries. That's where I'd enjoy bringing my skill set to the table. CHARLES: Yeah. I can second that. Having actually worked with you, I think one of the greatest things was the one just with the interactions that you were coming up with, were just really spot on. It wasn't ad hoc. It wasn't some -- ELRICK: Helter-skelter? CHARLES: Yeah, it wasn't helter-skelter. It wasn't some developer coming up with like, "Hey, this is what this looks like," Or, "This is some designer putting up pie in the sky stuff." It was, "I understand what's possible and I'm going to use that to design the best thing that can be possible." It made the designs very pleasant and some of them were just really fun, I think. Thinking especially like that, the hierarchical tree selector was one -- ELRICK: Yeah, that was fun. CHARLES: -- Which the implementation of that was just a joy. But then the second thing is being able to speak with you on the development challenges and really know that you understood that language. It really is being bilingual, I guess in the sense that I'm talking to you in French and you're talking to product owners in German or whatever. But because you're bilingual, the flow of information is as frictionless as possible. DREW: I will say that it was a real pleasure from our end working with your team as well because one of the trends in many businesses throughout the world today is embracing a lean and agile approach to product design development. One of the growth opportunities, I would say in any business is fully understanding how that process works, having the courage to be upfront about what can be accomplished in the time available. I think one of the other things is fully understanding those three pegs of the stool. There's always the budget, the time and then the features of any projects. I think that working with a team that understands that really changes the dynamic. I will say that it was equally a pleasure for us to work with your team because there was just a level of courage in being very forthright and very upfront about what do we need to get the job done? What has to happen? You made my job as a translator, essentially. CHARLES: We aim to please. ELRICK: Absolutely. DREW: Absolutely. The latest evolution of kind of where my career has taken us in the company is embracing the hardware element. We've talked a bit about the web and then how that evolved and then having to get comfortable of the command line and where that took place. I've always wanted to build. I've loved designing but I always want to build it and I want to put it out there. In the last six months actually, I finally decided that I would pull the Band-Aid off and jump into soldering hardware, writing what code I could and building actual physical hardware prototypes. I think the next step for anybody who likes to follow this maker trajectory, for a creative looking to become a maker or a developer looking to get into creative is just not stopping. There's always something there and we're also fortunate to live in a time when I can go on at Adafruit, pick up a kit of parts for under $100 and build something that's completely new. Then by the way, they have a full-on tutorial that takes you through every step of the process and gives you bits of code to get started so what's your excuse at that point? If you've got $100, then you can throw and toss into a hobby, pick up a soldering iron and go to town because there are videos, there's the documentation. Documentation is just everywhere now, where it was never there before. I think the next step for us is seeing how can we very early on show real physical world products to end users and get feedback. How we're taking design now is beyond the digital and into the physical. CHARLES: That's fascinating. I feel like there's this pendulum that swings through the tech industry of things moving from hardware to software and back again. We're in the middle of the swing towards the outside or towards the hardware again, like the distributed hardware versus the dumb terminals. It's distributed across a bunch of devices rather than concentrated on one super-powered desktop computer. The pendulum is going to swing in it but it's just always fascinated to see what the actual arc that it takes is going to be. This has been a fascinating conversation and the reason I wanted to have it and we were actually talking about this before the show started officially, why this topic of 'devsigner?' I think that it's a role that is emerging. I think it's still in the early days. I think that I went from three years ago having never really met this type of person to having met and worked with you. Now, I would say having met and worked with three people here at Frontside who fulfill that role and now knowing a couple professed devsigner or people who operate clearly in the design and the developer space on Twitter. I feel like it's this emerging career track that might not be fully understood or defined right now but clearly, there's something there so we wanted to explore that. I'm curious if we might be able to open up the discussion a little bit on what is the future of this role? What tasks will it be set to accomplish? When you're assembling your team, you say, "Get me one of those because we're going to need that." How is that going to be further refined and designed so that it scales as, perhaps an official career in one, two, five, 10 or 20 years? DREW: I can only speak to my experience in this area and I can say that for the most part, it is a very unique skill set and sometimes, it's hard to come but like you said, you're working now with three people. I think it's growing in prevalence. I believe that where coding was less common in the past, it's becoming so much more common now that it's almost like an expectation just like typing. It is an expectation now. People expect you know how to type. It's not a surprise that we're going to see more and more of these individuals. I would say that any design team out there could almost invariably benefit from having somebody with this skill set, somebody who can translate design concept into a working prototype. I've seen it manifest as a prototyping role, more or less just so that we can have a tangible deliverable for developers. I think it does depend on the team, certainly. If you have small teams with talented frontend developers, then certainly you can work in a lean and agile environment and make very quick iterative change. If you have very large design teams and very large development teams, I would say that having a frontend developer with the skill set in a creative team allows that communication to happen without routine phone calls and lots of meetings, essentially. It's a crystal clear example. I've see it manifest as a prototyping role because the expectation is this code will end up in production but some of the code may. The layout code may end up in production but the functional bits may not. That's not to say that the functionality isn't a part of the experience and that, designers don't care about how well an experience performs. But typically where many designers see the disconnect is in the presentation layer. Having somebody who can carry that over is usually something that is far smaller team can handle. Does that align with your experiences? CHARLES: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I would say that the compliment from having this person on your development team, if you're in mainline development mode or maybe you are a small team, even if it's a production system but you don't have full time design resources, this person can slice and dice the features and understand the hierarchy of interactions and being able to put together some wireframe, some very concrete goals and set those goals for the rest of the development team. But yet also understand what goals are achievable in the iteration. I think it works from the flipside as well. Maybe what we're seeing is the agile of the [inaudible] of everything. What we've seen over the past 15 years or 20 years, what has been the arc of my career is just seeing these feedback loops in every element of product development getting smaller and smaller and smaller. On the development side, we recognize this as being able to feedback loops and verification. Having your tests, you don't actually have to deploy your system to be able to get feedback about whether it works or have it be fully assembled to get feedback about whether it works. But then that manifests in terms of continuous integration and deployment. You're bringing down the feedback loop of getting this out in front of people versus these long deployment cycles that maybe you really have a release every year. It was hard to believe but that was the norm when I started. It was yearly, maybe even once every 18 months. It was not uncommon at all to have released cycles like that. Certainly, three months was very, very short but then those tight feedback loops can also manifest itself, internally in terms of team communication and I think having people who can make those feedback loops between the product and between the implementation, every time you shorten that feedback loop, you're unlocking an exponential amount of time. DREW: Yeah, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head when you talk about setting scope and understanding things as well. Strictly speaking from agile terminology, having a product or a role that can bridge those gaps is critical. I think that the best product owners that I've worked with have understood, have had an appreciation for design but also have had some degree of a development backend as well so they know how to make those critical decisions. In any sort of iterative or agile environment, you have to dice up these features and figure out which ones are going to ship when they're going to ship. I think, yeah you hit it right out of the park with that. Whether or not you can ever have a full-on team of just prototypers, I'm not as convinced that that's necessarily scalable. It seems like there's certainly a role for teams of developer that will break down features and then there's teams of creative as well. CHARLES: I think in terms of the person who would lead that team, this role definitely seems very well fit. DREW: Exactly. CHARLES: I think it's a great opportunity for someone who's looking for a leadership position in terms of developing and seeing products to market, which is kind of similar to what you're finding yourself in today or where you're headed towards, it sounds like. DREW: Yeah, for the most part. It seems like I do find myself in a number of calls in kind of bridging those gaps. It's certainly a different dynamic in the agile environment when work with hardware. That's something that I think we're still exploring and still understanding. Certainly, there are companies that do agile with hardware but there's a whole slew of different challenges. You're not just deploying anymore. You're actually building manufacturing understanding what needs to ship with what. I think the next evolution of our company's growth into this space is how do iteratively produce hardware. ELRICK: Interesting. CHARLES: You got to keep me posted. The next time we have you on the podcast, you're going to have it all figured out, you're going to be presenting your thesis, it's a conference talk upcoming, agile hardware. ELRICK: Yeah, that would be pretty interesting. DREW: Yeah, I'll let you know. CHARLES: In the first iteration, you just throw a bunch of boiling solder on the breadboard and see what works. "Okay, now, that didn't work." DREW: I'll be honest with you. The 3D printing is making lots of possibilities open up in that space but ultimately, you got to ship. We use 3D printing and now we are using these low-cost computers to really prototype real world experiences and near-to-final industrial design. We can do that. CHARLES: Drew, this sounds like you have the coolest job. ELRICK: I know, it sounds awesome. DREW: It become even more exciting than I had initially intended. It's fun times. I think, again we're living in a time when we can 3D print stuff and have it done within a couple of hours. What better time to embrace these technologies and this creative spirit. It's kind of all around us. Honestly, it's just being fortunate. CHARLES: Yeah. Fantastic. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much, Drew for coming on. DREW: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys. CHARLES: It's an amazing place. It sounds like even more fun since we got to work with you. If anybody is out there and they're in the design space and they think that, "Oh, maybe I can't do development," or it's too hard. It's not. There's a lot of people out there who are doing it and experiencing lots of good benefits. I would say that the other thing is if you're a developer, you should think about looking into the design space, something that you might be interested in. I think it's probably less common that the vectors people move from development into design and not vice versa but there's nothing that says that it can't go that way. Mostly, it's because people just aren't doing and they think that that option is not available to them but clearly, it is and clearly, it's a valuable role. I think this role is going to only get more valuable in the future. DREW: I would second that thought and that notion. I give a quick shout out to Erin O'Neal. She's a former colleague of mine who's given a number of talks about that very topic -- backend developers caring about user experience, caring about the design. She's given some talks. You could probably find her on YouTube. Anybody who wants to talk about it, I'm all over the web as DrewCovi. I think I pretty much have that user name in every platform so if you Google me, you'll find me. CHARLES: We'll look for you. Obviously, you can find us at @TheFrontside on Twitter, TheFrontside on GitHub and feel free to drop us a line at Contact@Frontside.io. Thank you for listening everybody and we'll see you next week.

In Episode 42 of The Startup Playbook Podcast, I sat down with Al and Lucas Ramadan from Play Bigger. Al was one of the pioneers in the global movement of bringing analytics to sports. In the early 90's he applied data science to the Americas Cup creating a new category of sports performance analytics. In the late 90's he applied this vision to the Internet creating a new category of digital sports media. His company, Quokka Sports, revolutionised the way people experienced sport. That legacy runs deep in most sports coverage we experience today. He now runs Play Bigger, a category design advisory firm that works with the companies in the portfolios of leading VC firms such as Sequoia and Accel to help them define, develop and dominate markets. Lucas is a data analyst at San Francisco based startup Enjoy Technologies and led a lot of the research and analysis for Al's new book - Play Bigger. In the interview we talk about assessing market potential, why the best founders have a unique market insight, the importance of defining your problem and the need to have courage of conviction. Show Notes: - Quokka Sports - MacroMedia - Adobe - Play Bigger (Company) - Enjoy Technologies - BHP - John Bertrand - America's Cup - Play Bigger (book) - Sequoia Capital - Accel - Steve Vassalo - Zoox - Jeff Bezos - Amazon - Paul Martino - Tribe - Ann Miura-ko - ClearMetal - Mike Maples - Steve Jobs - Starbucks - Howard Schultz  Startup Playbook TV: Ep6 Feat Liam Hanel from Lyra (AI personal assistant to track your carbon impact). In this episode we discuss traction channels on a budget, customer retention strategies and product strategy for B2B vs B2C Feedback/ connect/ say hello:  Rohit@startupplaybook.co @playbookstartup (Twitter) @rohitbhargava7 (Twitter – Rohit) Rohit Bhargava (LinkedIn) Credits: Intro music credit to Bensound The post Ep042 – Al and Lucas Ramadan (Play Bigger) On creating category kings appeared first on Startup Playbook.

This episode was recorded 22 May 2013 live and in person at Adobe's offices in Fremont in Seattle. You can download the m4a file or subscribe in iTunes. (Or subscribe to the podcast feed.) John Nack is Principal Product Manager, Adobe Digital Video. He has a blog (definitely worth reading, especially if you use Photoshop) and is @jnack on Twitter. This episode is sponsored by Microsoft Azure Mobile Services. One of the cooler features recently added is the ability to create custom APIs. Originally you were limited to standard operations on your database tables — but now you can design any API you want. This allows you to create a full REST/JSON API that's tailored to your app, that works as efficiently as possible. (And it's all in JavaScript. Mobile Services runs Node.js. Write your apps in your favorite text editor on your Mac.) Things we mention, in order of appearance (pretty much): Adobe LiveMotion Photoshop John's Blog Kurt Vonnegut Granfalloons despair.com Cocoa 64-bit Carbon 64-bit Unfrozen Cave Man Olive Garden South Bend, Indiana Tiramisu St. Sebastian Breadsticks Monkeys 2005 Movable Type DeBabelizer GifBuilder Anarchie 1984 Mac 2001 Algonquin Hotel Apple II PCjr ASCII Art Clip Art Googly Eyes Bill Atkinson MacPaint Rorschach Test Apple II GS Great Books Quadra 840AV Quadra Ad Director SuperCard Søren Kierkegaard Immanuel Kant Notre Dame Football Windows NT HTML New York City 1998 Flash Macromedia Illustrator Navy ROTC San Francisco GoLive NetNewsWire After Effects Thomas Knoll Camera Raw Photoshop Touch Germany Philistinism Perfectionism Volkswagen Carbon-dating Web Standards SVG CSS Gus Mueller Acorn Neven Mrgan Khoi Vinh Croatia Portland JDI Healing Brush Buck Rogers Creative Cloud Facebook Smugmug WWDC Jetta Ketchup Death-march Comic Book Guy John Gruber “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” Microsoft Surface Metro UI Rahm Emmanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The Mythical Man-Month Content-Aware Fill Shawshank InDesign Adobe Magazine Nike PageMaker Postscript SLR Lightroom Black & Decker Dr. Evil Loren Brichter Instagram Kickstarter NGO Tumblr Acquisition Troy Gaul Blurb The Onion: Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others Data T-1000 Syria MacApp Resource Manager John Knoll Industrial Light & Magic QuickTime OpenDoc Corba OLE SnapSeed Mac System 6 Apple events AppleScript Audio Bus 1992 “The only time you should start worrying about a soldier is when they stop bitchin'” Alan Kay: “The Mac is the first computer good enough to be criticized.” TapBots Tweetbot 2 Android Kai's Power Tools Kai Krause Fremont RUN DMC Porsche Boxster Flavawagon Google Glass Robert Scoble