Changing Shapes

What's the point? And who cares?"

Sabine Devins asks those two questions before she writes anything. Every founder I know who freezes at the blank page is freezing because they haven't answered them yet.

Sabine is a digital storyteller and creative content director based in Berlin. Before that she was a journalist for National Geographic, Voice of America, NHK, Handelsblatt Global. She now works mostly with B2B tech companies — the ones building genuinely interesting technology who haven't figured out how to talk about it beyond their own four walls.

We get into why storytelling has quietly become the load-bearing skill of this era — not the soft skill, not the nice-to-have, the load-bearing one. Why AI fatigue is real and what people are actually craving instead. The two questions she asks before any piece of work. How a single line from a Brexit interview — "20% of my retirement is gone" — taught her what data is missing when it doesn't have a human inside it. And what every product person can borrow from the way a storyteller decides what to make.

If you've ever stared at the LinkedIn post box and not known what to say, this is the conversation.

Chapters
00:00 "AI can only repeat what's already been done"
00:36 Why storytelling became the load-bearing skill
02:45 AI fatigue is real — and what we're craving instead
03:35 The two questions: "What's the point? And who cares?"
07:25 Finding the human in the data
11:38 What's in it for the storyteller — and the question of trust

Recorded at The Social Hub Berlin.

Changing Shapes is hosted by Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes — a podcast about the relationship between idea, maker, and audience, and how to get it right.

"Everything you build eventually teaches you something about yourself. The question is, are you paying attention to learn it?"

This episode is for anyone building anything in public, a product, a company, a content practice, and wondering whether the metrics are telling them the real story.

Tom went into this interview thinking they were going to talk about running. They talked about so much more than that.

Juju Kim is an ultra runner. She ran from LA to Las Vegas. Currently, she's training for 500 kilometers across the Atacama. Her practice started two years ago as a 20-minute deal she made with herself from her bed, after a breakup, in the middle of months of doom-scrolling. The deal was small on purpose: if you're going to rot, run for twenty minutes. Then a second deal: if you're going to doom-scroll, make one video.

What she films now is the inside of that promise, still being kept.

Tom and Juju talk about why she didn't want to be a running influencer, why she keeps the camera on for the part most people would edit out, what happened on day six of the LA-to-Vegas race when her sponsors had already pulled out and a team of strangers told her to go finish without them, and what her audience is actually watching when they watch her.

Recorded at The Social Hub Berlin.

Changing Shapes is hosted by Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes — a podcast about the relationship between idea, maker, and audience, and how to get it right.

The AI era didn't create a crisis of purpose. It made the absence of one harder to hide. When anyone can produce, the question of why you are the one making this becomes impossible to avoid.

There's one thing no tool can replicate. Not because the tools aren't good enough yet, but because of what they are. AI has never lost anything. It has no experience to draw from, no moment that changed how it sees, nothing it built a conviction around because life made it unavoidable.

The guests this season have all of that: moments that cost them something and changed how they see, and a way of working built directly around what those moments taught them. They drew that line before anyone called it a strategy. None of these conversations come with a framework or a playbook. What they come with is proof.

AI can show us what a good friend looks like, but it can’t teach us how to be one. In this episode, Clicqui founder Cynthia Mensah‑Neglokpe and host Tom Horak unpack why AI cannot replace friendship, what most brands get wrong about “community,” and the small mechanics of hosting that actually make people feel seen.

“I really just love people… Every person I talk to gives me a little bit of a puzzle piece to a world I don’t know.” 

Cynthia has built one of Europe’s most interesting women‑only IRL communities, with curated 12‑person dinners and gatherings in Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, Munich and beyond, and together they map what her practice means for the digital products and communities founders choose to build next.

Changing Shapes is a podcast for founders, builders and operators who want to build things that connect with the people who use them. Host Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes, talks with people who have built that relationship between product and audience and gets them to walk through exactly how. Recorded at The Social Hub Berlin.

“Strategist and artist Onika Simon explains how art can change brand strategy from the inside of big systems. After years at global agencies and B Corps, she shows founders and operators how artists see the ‘first touch’ with customers that businesses keep missing. If you care about design, strategy, and art in business, this conversation is for you.

"Brands are like systems trying to find a way to talk to people. Art is how people talk to other people about systems."

Onika Simon spent the first half of her career inside the big global strategy agencies (WPP, advertising on Madison Avenue), and the second half building B Corps and running interventions for the BMW Foundation.

She tells Tom Horak why most expert rooms are missing the most important person, what artists know about the first touch that specialists keep missing, and why most entrepreneurs could never be artists.

For founders, builders and operators who want to build things that connect with the people who use them. Host Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes, talks with people who have built that relationship between product and audience, and gets them to walk through exactly how.

Follow Tom on LinkedIn and subscribe for new episodes.

Recorded at The Social Hub Berlin.

“In this episode, investor and operator Angeley Mullins explains how investors evaluate founders before they even read your pitch deck. She shares what she listens for in the first meeting – resilience, grit, whether you’re a decent human – and why real traction means one thing: has anyone actually paid you?”

"My first and primary motive is to make sure I'm backing good people. Then we go to the business piece." 

Angeley Mullins has scaled seven companies, including one unicorn and one IPO, and she runs every first meeting in that order.

She tells Tom Horak what she listens for in a founder before the deck comes out, why ten thousand email subscribers is not traction until someone has paid, and the ten-second read that tells female founders and founders of color how a VC meeting is going to go.

For founders, builders and operators who want to build things that connect with the people who use them. Host Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes, talks with people who have built that relationship between product and audience, and gets them to walk through exactly how.

Follow Tom on LinkedIn and subscribe for new episodes.

Recorded at⁠ The Social Hub Berlin⁠.

Most AI tools are trained to give you something. An answer, a rewrite, a suggestion. But what if that helpfulness is quietly pushing everyone toward the same voice, the same style, the same median?

Ben Perreau is a former journalist, founder and CEO of Parafoil — a leadership intelligence tool that uses real meeting transcripts to help managers understand how they’re actually leading, not how they think they are. He started his career in newsrooms during the shift from analog to digital, then built startups in music tech before landing here.

In this conversation, Tom and Ben explore:

• Why journalism taught him to separate stories from evidence — and why that skill now matters more than ever

• How most LLMs push you toward the median when leaders need to be differentiated

• The risk of AI becoming a crutch that atrophies skill rather than building it

• Why chatbots are incentivised to always give you something, even when nothing was needed

• Who gets to define the “better version” of a leader that a tool optimises toward

• Why he thinks chat interfaces are like drinking your whole meal through a straw

• His contrarian take: this is actually the best time in decades to start building things yourself

Ben also shares why he named his company Applied Humanity, how Parafoil avoids the surveillance trap by keeping data private to the individual, and why liberal arts degrees still matter.

If you’re thinking about how AI is reshaping management, wondering whether these tools make us sharper or just smoother, or building anything that touches how people work together — this one gets into it.

Links

Parafoil: A leadership intelligence platform that turns real conversations into insight, helping managers improve through evidence rather than heuristics.

Ben Perreau: Founder and CEO of Parafoil (Applied Humanity, Inc.). Former journalist and radio presenter, with a background spanning BBC, NME, Sky Television, and music tech startups Synkio and Gigulate.

Thomas Horak is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes blends craft, culture and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences.

Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

Most tools today are designed to remove friction. AI writes the essay, surfaces the answer, smooths the path. But what if that’s precisely the problem?

Dr. Khairunnisa Mohamedali is a social anthropologist, MD and Chief Innovation Officer at the Smarty Train — an award-winning learning, onboarding and behaviour change agency. She works at the intersection of human-centred design, the science of how people grow, and the hard reality of shifting organisational cultures at scale.

In this conversation, Tom and Khairunnisa explore:

• Why AI fluency isn’t the same as AI literacy — and what organisations keep getting wrong when they train for it

• How convenience erodes the skills we don’t realise we’re losing

• Why the best learning design makes everything except the moment of discomfort frictionless

• How to get from base-level competence to higher-order thinking when AI has already automated the base level

• The difference between inclusion and belonging — and why the entry point to that conversation matters as much as the conversation itself

• Why you can’t change minds with facts, and what you actually need instead

• The case for optimism about human resilience — and the responsibility that comes with it

Khairunnisa also shares her own system for navigating discomfort: how she wrote her PhD 2,500 words a day (borrowing a method from Stephen King), why self-awareness is the most under-invested skill in most workplaces, and what belonging actually feels like when you encounter it versus when you only perform it.

If you’re building learning cultures, navigating a career in an increasingly AI-shaped world, or just wondering whether convenience is quietly making us worse at thinking — this conversation is worth sitting with.

Links

The Smarty Train: The Smarty Train An award-winning learning and development agency specialising in early talent, organisational culture, and human-centred design.

Dr. Khairunnisa Mohamedali, PhD. MD and Chief Innovation Officer at The Smarty Train. A social scientist by training, she uses methodological rigour and a holistic systems approach to lead the design and delivery of experiences that have impact, embed learning, and change behaviours. She is a published methodologist, an award-winning innovator, and was selected as a Woman of the Future 2018.

Thomas Horak is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes blends craft, culture and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences.

Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

Most of us have that guilt—forgetting to check in, meaning to reach out but postponing. Jules (Gulin) Olcer, founder of Village, believes we've passed a cultural tipping point where connection tools need to evolve.

Tom and Jules explore why 93% of our Instagram time isn't spent with people we actually know, how AI can facilitate (not replace) human connection, and why Village is building what Jules calls a "relationship operating system." From her sabbatical reading about systemic crises to a scrappy ChatGPT experiment that sparked the product, Jules shares the journey of creating a social app designed to reduce guilt, not maximise screen time.

Learn why vulnerability needs frequency, how Village measures success without addiction metrics, and what it means to build a product where time-in-app isn't the goal.

Links

Village: https://www.villagesocial.app/
Village is building what they call a “relationship operating system”—a private space where you can track, nurture, and show up for your 5-150 meaningful relationships. Unlike traditional social networks optimised for time-in-app, Village measures success by how well it helps you maintain connections without guilt or overwhelm.

Jules Olcer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gulinolcer/
Jules is the founder of Village, a social app designed to help people show up for the relationships that matter most. With a background in psychology and experience in creative industries and climate-related projects, Jules brings a systems-thinking approach to solving the loneliness epidemic. Village uses AI to send contextual nudges that facilitate deeper human connection without replacing it.

Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-horak/
Tom is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes blends craft, culture and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences.Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

Most software for clinicians gets built twice - once for compliance and then again when teams realize clinicians and patients won’t actually use them.

Tom and Hiba break down what separates the winners from the expensive rebuilds. We examine real examples—C the Signs in primary care, Viz.ai in imaging, Tempus in oncology—and extract six actionable design principles that healthtech builders can implement immediately.

Learn why privacy must be the default (not the disclaimer), how to make consent contextual instead of legalistic, and why explainability builds more trust than sophistication. These tools are turning health records into early warning systems, but only when both patients and clinicians actually trust them.

Perfect for CPOs, product leaders, and founders building in the patient data space.

Links

Hiba on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/hibaganta/⁠ The Needful is Hiba’s newsletter on cultural intelligence for sharper, human-led product decisions. It’s for indie founders and small teams who want clarity without the AI hype. Expect pragmatic strategy, mental models, and cultural research that lift your team’s thinking. Hiba reads features, stories, and signals in one go — from product to org culture — so you can ship with craft, protect user trust, and keep real judgment in the loop.

Tom on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-horak/⁠ Tom is the founder of ⁠All Shapes⁠, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes blends craft, culture and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences.Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.