Future Around & Find Out

Career trajectories used to be like steamships: full steam ahead. And then they became more like sailboats: lots of tacking. But now… we’re swirling in whitewater. And, as the Chief Product and Innovation Officer at BetterUp, Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman helps people build the skill they need to flourish:

“When you're kayaking in the whitewater. It's hard to get a sense of what could be around the bend, but if you know if what's coming up is a sudden cascade or versus another, you know, set of gentle bumps, or maybe it's a calmer space in the river, it can give you a great advantage.”

On this episode of Crafted, we focus on the five key skill groups that can help you be more successful: Prospection, Resilience, Innovation and creativity, Social support by way of rapid rapport, and Mattering and meaning.

And, good news! These skills can be trained!

Gabriella writes about these skills in Tomorrowmind, which she co-authored with Martin Seligman. And, at BetterUp she builds products that help companies — and their people — build these skills at scale. On an upcoming episode of Crafted, we’ll explore how BetterUp does this using human coaching, backed by artificial intelligence systems. 

Welcome to Crafted, a show about great products and the people who make them. 

Crafted is produced by Modern Product Minds. 

Sign up for the Crafted newsletter and explore past episodes at modernproductminds.com

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Key Moments:

• [00:00 - 01:01] Introduction
• [02:16 - 06:40] From psychiatry to tech
• [06:40 - 09:53] Key skill needed for a "tomorrowmind"
• [09:53 - 13:51] Developing Resilience Skills
• [16:55 - 18:53] Enhancing Perspective and Creativity
• [18:53 - 22:35] Planning and Dynamic Adaptation
• [22:35 - 26:05] The Role of Coaching in Skill Development
• [26:05 - 27:35] Outro and What's Coming in Part Two

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Here’s the book:

• Tomorrowmind 

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Crafted is sponsored by Artium, a next generation software development consultancy that combines elite human craftsmanship and artificial intelligence. See how Artium can help you build your future at artium.ai

Daniel Kimerling has a keen eye for the trends, technologies, and cultural shifts that are going to be big. A decade ago, he took an insight – that developers needed powerful tool so they could embed banking services into their apps – and launched Standard Treasury, the very first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) startup. Today BaaS and "embedded finance" are huge. 

Now, as a VC and the founder of Deciens Capital, Dan is again looking for change:

The right team:

And business models that actually make sense:

This is a fun episode! Listen in for a masterclass in disruption. Also f-bombs. Lots of f-bombs. More on Crafted than ever before. Yet also mixed  with grace and humility. Dan is a mensch. :)

Key Moments:

[0:00] Introduction

[2:07] How Dan got started in tech, as the very first employee at TechCrunch

[4:58] Founding Standard Treasury, the very first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) company after meeting the founders of Twilio and Stripe and seeing the API’s and “embedding” were going to be huge

[7:25] “What you kind of come to see is that to some degree everything is a financial plumbing problem.”

[9:12] “You have to invest into change. You cannot invest into stasis.”

[11:37] Founding Deciens Capital

[12:23] The “industrial logic” of most VC firms and how Deciens aims to stay small and serve early stage founders

[15:07] What Dan looks for when making an investment, including grit, variant perspective, and a MacGyver-like adaptability

[18:36] Generative AI: Why VC’s are rushing in, but he’s skeptical about business models. Will all the spoils just go to the open source community + NVIDIA? 

[22:36] What Dan is excited about: the future of VC and building financial service products that people actually love

[24:24] Personalization: “[Big banks] really serve a very median audience. And we have a number of companies [...] that are far outside of that middle lane. And thankfully, because of the power of the internet, the search and distribution costs for those opportunities is way lower than it would have been in a analog era.”

[25:11] How Dan goes out of his way to help people – and how you can learn from his system

[28:50] Outro

[29:27] An F-bomb laced Easter Egg parting gift

Books mentioned:

• "A Brief History of Financial Euphoria" by John Kenneth Galbraith
• "Power Law" by Sebastian Wallaby

About Crafted

Crafted is a show about great products and the people who make them. Hosted by Dan Blumberg, an entrepreneur, product leader, and public radio host with deep experience not only delivering major software releases, but also as the producer of the best known, and most listened-to, public radio shows. Dan has founded startups and led product releases and growth initiatives at LinkedIn, The New York Times, and as a consultant to fintechs and big banks. Before getting into tech, Dan led the team behind Morning Edition on WNYC, the most listened-to show on the nation’s largest NPR station. Dan produced, edited, reported for, and hosted this and other marquee news shows at WNYC and WBEZ and also frequently reported on national news events for NPR. Crafted is produced by Modern Product Minds. 

A highlight reel that will will help you find great episodes in the Crafted show archive, featuring some of the incredible founders and product builders we featured in 2023. You'll hear voices belonging to the founders of Gusto, Lattice, Monte Carlo, Moov, Wevr, PS, as well as from senior leaders at AWS, Redesign Health, Betterment, Flatiron Health, Predibase, and Bauplan, and more! 

And we want to hear from you! We're planning big things this year and want to learn more about what you want to hear. Please take two minutes to take this short survey: https://www.tinyurl.com/craftedsurvey 

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Crafted is sponsored by Artium, a next generation software development consultancy that combines elite human craftsmanship and artificial intelligence. See how Artium can you build your future at artium.ai

"The effect of global shipping on the climate is hard to overstate," reports The New York Times. "Cargo shipping is responsible for nearly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — producing roughly as much carbon each year as the aviation industry does."

So... Nautilus Labs uses AI to make maritime vessels more efficient by helping giant cargo ships optimize their routes across the oceans and suggesting when they need maintenance, saving money and reducing carbon emissions in the process.

On this episode of Crafted, former CTO Todd Sundsted describes how they model ships and their routes and push the envelope with AI. He also shares his approach to organizational design and how to align teams to customer problems.

Key Moments:
00:00 - Intro
01:53 - Helping cargo ships be more efficient
04:17 - Getting the data from difficult environments
06:24 - Aha moments
07:37 - Improving Nautilus Labs’ organizational design
12:31 - Aligning teams to the impact they have
15:15 - Outro

** Please take this three-minute survey to help us create more great Crafted episodes. http://tinyurl.com/craftedsurvey **

Last week, on Thursday January 18th at 4:49pm Eastern, a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on its way to the International Space Station. On board are 4 astronauts from Axiom Space, a private company that’s building a brand new space station. 

To celebrate the successful launch of AX-3, we’re bringing you one of our favorite episodes from the Crafted archives: an interview with Axiom’s Director of In-Space Manufacturing. Keep listening to find out why Axiom is building a commercial space station — and why microgravity is such a special environment for building things like computer chips and for doing biological research that could lead to new cancer treatments.

“When we talk about future cities in space, it seems like they're really far away. The truth is, it's happening right now. We're building those.” That’s the mind-blowing reality that Jana Stoudemire works in everyday at Axiom Space, a leading space infrastructure developer based in Texas. Axiom is building a successor to the International Space Station and developing commercial opportunities in orbit that go way beyond satellites. Central to all this is the unique environment of microgravity, which allows you to do things that just can’t be done on earth.

On this episode, Jana takes us to the final frontier, and shares Axiom's plans for advanced biomedical research, space-made semiconductors that could enable quantum computing, and what this means for future scientific advances. She’ll also get into the challenges of building a state-of-the-art lab that will orbit around the earth, from the equipment and personnel, to where does that exercise bike go?

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. 

Crafted is sponsored by Artium, which helps startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft needed to build great software for years to come. Learn more at ThisIsArtium.com (and let us know you learned about us from the podcast).

“I was a pretty bad people manager and so there was a moment where I decided that this is not going to work and I really need to decide which path I'm gonna go. Am I gonna stay hands on keyboard or am I going to really help build the engineering team and scale the organization?”

Edward Kim is the CTO and co-founder of Gusto, a multi-billion dollar company that helps businesses with payroll, benefits, and human resources. In this episode, we’re talking about scaling up and why Gusto’s focus on quality code and engineering mindset is so critical. Plus, Edward tells us how he learned to be a great manager, how watching his parents struggle to run their small business planted the seed for Gusto, and and what it was like recruiting top talent to work on a “boring” problem like payroll, back when Instagram and social-local-mobile startups were all the rage.

Key Moments:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:50 - Why Edward loves solving problems for small businesses
• 04:20 - Building out version one
• 06:48 - Finding product market fit
• 09:48 - What does Gusto offer today?
• 11:15 - The secret to good code
• 15:49 - Growing as an engineering leader
• 18:44 - What’s next for Edward and Gusto?
• 20:04 - Exploring Generative AI
• 22:09 - Outro

“The last nine months, no matter what we want to talk about, our customers want to talk about one thing, which is Gen AI.”

One year ago, ChatGPT woke the entire world up to the possibilities of Generative AI. Since then, the conversation around AI has not ceased, with constant questions being raised about its safety, accuracy, and potential implications for the tech world.

In this episode, Dan hosts a panel at NYC Tech Week 2023, discussing the evolution and potential of Generative AI with Jacopo Tagliabue of Bauplan, Cat Miller of Flatiron Health, Raghvender Arni of AWS Industries, and Justin Zhao of Predibase. Together, they discuss the journey in taking Generative AI from prototype to production, delving into the need for a stable foundation of best practices in data and software development, how to overcome the challenges of evaluation and performance, and the cruciality of red teaming and guardrails to ensure the viability and usability of AI models.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 02:19 - About the guests
• 12:58 - GOFAI vs GenAI: Should you just be using a classifier?
• 18:54 - AI + health data
• 23:24 - How do you make sure evaluation works?
• 24:57 - The foundations needed to take GenAI to the next level
• 34:22 - Is now the time for experimentation or business models?
• 36:49 - The science fiction of today that will be commonplace tomorrow
• 42:42 - Outro

“Nobody's going to drive as fast on the straightaway if they don't have good brakes because if that's not available, then you can't go fast confidently.” John Mileham is the CTO of Betterment, and he’s also a race car driving instructor. Though they seem like vastly different roles, he has the same focus in both: going fast but doing so safely. Betterment is a digital financial advisor that builds software that can automate your finances… so safety is key. In this episode, John describes how he empowers teams and creates conditions that foster creativity, speed, and security. 

In this episode, John breaks down how his experience on the racetrack has influenced his approach to innovation, drawing on the recent improvements to Betterment’s Cash Reserve product, the difficult transition to implementing GraphQL in the organization, and how performance envelopes are expanded with the confidence of safety.

“The lean startup and MVP model is absolutely the right mindset to have, but that doesn't mean that you have to throw spaghetti at the wall.” Neil Caron, Product and Design Leader at Gartner, is doing something hard: helping a big company to innovate. Gartner is the company many technology buyers turn to for advice when they’re looking to buy mission-critical products. Traditionally, that’s meant reading reports and talking to analysts, but with the new BuySmart software-as-a-service product, they can now collaborate more seamlessly with each other as they go through their checklists and make a decision. 

In this episode, Neil shares more on the challenge of innovating at a legacy corporation, including how to manage relationships with existing clients, pick the right pricing strategy, and the importance of autonomy in an innovation group — and how to go about getting it.

“Being a part of financial services for the last 15 or 20 years, it seemed like we were always putting lipstick on the pig”. Wade Arnold was tired of putting a nice UI on  creaky infrastructure and he saw how insufficient payment systems are for today’s internet-based businesses. So Wade founded Moov, a fintech that's building systems for the way money moves today – and they’re starting at the very bottom of the stack and building their way up. 

On this episode, Wade shares how Moov emerged from an open source project, how its embrace of developer communities has become a competitive advantage, and why he encourages everyone to “respect the craft” of software development.

This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com and start a conversation at [email protected]

* Special note to Money 2020 attendees: say hi to us in Vegas! Email [email protected] or connect with host Dan Blumberg via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dblums/