Tech Can't Save Us

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, hosts Maya Dharampal-Hornby and Savena Surana speak to Ariana Alexander-Sefre, founder and co-CEO at Spoke, a music-based mental wellness app. 

SPOKE hires artists, who are trained by psychologists, therapists and neuroscientists, to produce music that supports mental wellbeing. Through this, SPOKE provides an aggregated platform for people who can connect with young men and other underrepresented young people - musicians, cultural leaders, influential voices - to use their voice in the most impactful way.

They discuss how artists and mental health practitioners collaborate for SPOKE, and the need for a restructured approach to artist compensation and community building within the music industry.

Ariana also shares challenges she has encountered in growing SPOKE, the connection that exists between mental health and activism, and the importance of speaking out against systems of oppression–even when investment gets pulled as a result. 

Find more about SPOKE here: https://spoke.world/

Download SPOKE here (and use it!): https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/spoke-music-meditate-sleep

Follow Ariana here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arianasefre

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, hosts Paul David and Maya Dharampal-Hornby are joined by Tyler Denk,  co-founder and CEO of beehiiv, a newsletter platform that helps creators monetise and grow their audiences.

beehiiv currently sends out over 2 billion emails per month - up from 500 million per month in August 2023. Tyler is no stranger to a fast-growing media organisation. In the episode, he shares his experience growing Morning Brew from 100,000 subscribers to over 3,500,000. 

The episode also touches on the significance of transparency and user-centric development in driving the company's success, why today’s media climate has journalists migrating to newsletter platforms, and what startup he would build if his hands weren’t so full with beehiiv.

Find more about beehiiv here: https://www.beehiiv.com

Follow Tyler here (X): https://x.com/denk_tweets 

And here (LI): https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-denk/

And here: https://mail.bigdeskenergy.com/

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, hosts Paul David and Maya Dharampal-Hornby are joined by Sara Berkai, founder and CEO of Ambessa Play. Ambessa Play is a social enterprise that designs educational toy kits and tools for children, with a focus on supporting displaced and refugee children. 

The conversation centres around the importance of co-designing products with users - specifically, the importance  of understanding the context of displaced children in product design.  


Sara also shares insights on Ambessa’s marketing strategy (which she hadn’t spent a dime on until recently!), the impact of her academic background, and the state of edtech. 

Find more about Ambessa Play here: https://ambessaplay.com/

Follow Sara here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saraberkai/

If you’re a content marketer who doesn’t believe the increasingly common wisdom that “AI will automate the boring parts of your job”, listen to this episode.

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, hosts Paul David and Maya Dharampal-Hornby are joined by Victor Ijidola, co-founder and CEO of Leaps.

Victor explains why Google is deranking your content. In short, people want insights from SMEs, not from content marketers who are, for the most part, abstracted from the issues they pen blogs about.

The conversation details the issues that PR and comms people and content marketers face when collaborating with subject matter experts - from the organisational faff to the trials of transcription - and how digital tools like Leaps can automate much of the process.

Find more about Leaps here: https://leapshq.com/

Follow Victor here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/content-strategist-victor/

In this week’s episode of Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Yaseen Rostom, Founder and CEO of Incredible. 

Yaseen shares insights about the challenges of debt management, the importance of cash flow for small businesses, and how communities can be built within the fintech space. 

The conversation underlines why digital infrastructure will reduce the stress that comes with managing finance, all while addressing the emotional aspects of financial management.

Find more about Incredible here: https://www.getincredible.com/post/hello-world

Follow Yaseen here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yrstm/?originalSubdomain=uk

In this week’s episode of Tech Can’t Save Us, hosts Paul David and Maya Dharampal-Hornby are joined by Gaurab Bansal, Executive Director of Responsible Innovation Labs.

Gaurab shares insights on the practice gap in responsible innovation and attributes it, largely, to the complex regulations US startups face, and the ever-changing political landscape–both impeding startups from scaling sustainably and responsibly.

The conversation also touches on the influence of Effective Altruism on policymakers in the US, and the impact of misinformation (AI-facilitated or otherwise) on democratic processes. 

Find more about Responsible Innovation Labs here: https://www.rilabs.org/

Follow Gaurab here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaurab-bansal/

In this week’s episode of Tech Can’t Save Us, hosts Paul David and Maya Dharampal-Hornby are joined by Rushab Shah, CEO of OneHive.

Rushab speaks about the intersection between education, mindfulness and community engagement, exploring how technology can help educators understand better, and respond to, individuals’ psychosocial needs.

Rushab also touches on the cultural expectations placed on students, particularly within South Asian communities, the emerging hydrogen sector and its workforce demands, and why policymakers increasingly need to view education as a lifelong project.


Find more about OneHive here: https://onehive.ai/

Follow Rushab on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rushabmshah

Learn more about what we do at Literal Humans here: https://literalhumans.com/

In this week’s episode of Tech Can’t Save Us, hosts Paul David and Maya Dharampal-Hornby are joined by Finn Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of Flock Health.

He discusses how Flok Health is reshaping physiotherapy within the NHS through automation and community healthcare. He highlights the challenges faced in delivering timely care for musculoskeletal conditions and the importance of integrating technology to improve access to effective. 

Finn also shares insights on the regulatory landscape, the importance of patient choice, and the potential for scaling AI healthcare solutions across various conditions.

Find more about Flok Health here: https://flok.health/

Follow Finn on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finn-stevenson?originalSubdomain=uk

In this week’s episode of Tech Can’t Save Us, hosts Paul David and Maya Dharampal-Hornby are joined by Sunghee Park, Founder and CEO of SYNKii

Online teaching surged during Covid-19. But with music lessons requiring students and teachers to play in synchronicity, lags in connections that were commonplace on video calling platforms like Zoom, made it nearly impossible for music students to learn remotely. As an experienced private tutor of piano herself, Sunghee faced these challenges first hand, and so she decided to build a solution: SYNKii.



Tune into this episode now to hear why platforms like Zoom are inadequate for music learners, how data-driven insights can be used by teachers to personalise their music lessons, and the opportunities for and limitations of AR technologies in music education.

Find out more about SYNKii here: https://www.synkii.com/

In this week’s episode of Tech Can’t Save Us, hosts Paul David and Maya Dharampal-Hornby are joined by Cien Solon, co-founder and CEO of LaunchLemonade and Director of Scale That Thing!.

AI advocate Cien Solon is fighting to make AI a tool at everyone’s disposal - an “AI for All” as Cien so pithily calls it. To help individuals and organisations harness the power of AI, Cien has founded Scale That Thing!, which offers more tailored services to help businesses scale with AI, and LaunchLemonade, a no-code platform for users to turn their ideas into an AI-powered business.

Tune into this episode now to hear how AI co-pilots can save you time, how LaunchLemonade is breaking barriers for women in AI, and the importance of diversifying investment.

Find out more about LaunchLemonade here: https://launchlemonade.app/

Find out more about Scale That Thing! here: https://www.scalethatthing.com/

Find out more about Cien’s work here: https://ciensolon.com/

Get in touch with Cien here: [email protected]