the co-matter podcast

Jennifer and Mara are one half, or two of four co-founders, of Zebras Unite.

Spread across 6 continents, 40 chapters and an online community of 4000 founders, Zebras Unite is a global movement that aims to make startup and venture capital culture more ethical and inclusive.

At our third Community Leadership Summit, which took place in early September 2019 in Copenhagen, we had the chance to sit down with Jennifer and Mara to find out how it all came about.

We talk about:

- The story of Zebras Unite: how a movement was born out of an essay on "sex and startups" and the need to change something

- How the movement grew from four co-founders to a global community of 40 chapters and 4000 founders

- The power of metaphors to change culture, self-organized dance parties and distributing power from the few to the many

- A short manual on how anyone can start a movement to solve a problem they truly care about

Here is episode #23 of the co-matter podcast with Jennifer Brandel and Mara Zepeda.

Hampus Jakobsson is an entrepreneur and investor based out of Malmö, Sweden. Throughout his career, Hampus invested in more than 80 startups and is now one of the most sought-after investors in the Nordics.

Earlier this year, he decided to only invest in technologies that contribute to solving the climate crisis. In August 2019 we had the chance to sit down with Hampus at The Conference in Malmö to chat about topics such as:

Why is there no us vs them in the climate crisis?

What is the role of nuclear energy in this crisis?

Why are we acting like super anxious teenagers amidst this global debate?

Here is episode #22 of the co-matter podcast with Hampus Jakobsson.

Petra is a Brazilian filmmaker whose documentary The Edge of Democracy got released on Netflix today. The Edge of Democracy is a very personal film about the political situation in Brazil, told through the eyes of Petra who witnessed first-hand the rise and fall of her country’s leaders. Her movie reflects a crisis in democracy that’s not only happening in Brazil, but all over the world. As we lose trust in our institutions, we are starting to doubt democracy as the best way to govern ourselves. Some of the core beliefs that held our countries together are being questioned right now. If we defined the concept of the nation state as a community united by those core beliefs and values we share, then are our national communities now breaking apart? Why are we getting further apart from each other? What moves us to extreme, divisive opinions and positions?

Yousef is the Global Director of Culture & Community for adidas Running. What he started as a Berlin runners club 6 years ago is now a global community known as adidas Runners, spanning 65 cities and 5 continents.

We wanted to learn about Yousef’s journey with adidas Runners, and to understand how we can build authentic brand communities in times when people don’t trust brands anymore. We talked about how a brand regains trust by building lasting relationships, how a local community scales globally, and how it measures its success. Here is episode #20 of the Community Podcast with Yousef Hammoudah.

Santiago is the founder of Democracy Earth, an open source platform for governance and community participation.

A former video game developer turned activist-slash-founding member of Argentina's political party Partido de la Red, Santi takes us on a walk through NYC's central park to talk about the future of democracy. We explore the intersection between democracy and the internet to understand how technology can help make governance better - in the democratic systems of our future, as well as in any other community we’re building.

And because we like to keep our episodes unpredictable, this one features the lovely–yet sometimes distracting–chirping of birds on a spring day in New York City’s Central Park. Ladies and gents, here is episode 19 of the Community Podcast with Santiago Siri.

Solana Larsen is a journalist, editor and activist currently leading the Internet Health Report: Mozilla’s open source initiative to document and explain the state of the Internet in various areas of global interest.

We talked to Solana on the occasion of the Internet Health Report’s third release. Her view on the health of the Internet swings from guarded optimism to hopeful pessimism in a fascinating way. Adding to that, her journalistic background and her contribution to initiatives like Global Voices and openDemocracy give Solana a unique perspective on topics like digital rights, digital literacy and Internet governance.

Jyri Engeström is a Finland-born, California-raised entrepreneur who has built online social networks since the dawn of the web 2.0 era. With Yes VC, the early-stage venture fund he started together with his partner Caterina Fake, Jyri now invests in the next generation of the web’s social infrastructure.

In our call with Jyri, we talk about him growing up in the Silicon Valley of the 90s, the roots of the social web, communities as essential building blocks of society, the role of venture capital in helping social movements grow, future trends and how the internet, at its best, helps people help other people.

Harper Reed is an American technologist, known for being the CTO behind Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, for his involvement in pioneering online crowdsourcing company Threadless, his hairstyle, and many other weird and wonderful projects he gets involved in.

Severin met Harper at MIT’s media lab in Berlin, in August last year. Being a fan of Harper’s work for many years, he took the opportunity to ask him about what Harper calls his life waves: periods in his career when he quit everything and said yes to any new opportunity that came his way. Like this interview. Or building one of the first crowdsourcing communities on the internet. Using social technology to get a president elected. Or predicting the future for a living. All this, and more, including sirens and pan flute recitals, in episode #16 of The Community Podcast.

Claire L. Evans is a LA-based writer, musician and the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. She’s also one of the most eloquent, articulate and witty people we’ve met to reflect on the state of the Internet today.

In our talk, we covered how Claire met the women who built the internet, how they translated traditional communication formats to the digital world, and what we can learn from early virtual communities about power dynamics, politics and gender bias today.

Khalid Albaih is a political cartoonist and social media activist. Using the Internet as a way of publishing uncensored drawings since 2006, Khalid has been one of the leading visual artists of the Arab Spring and has witnessed first hand how social media evolved - from a tool to fight the establishment to eventually becoming the establishment itself.

In our conversation, we talk about how social media changed since Khalid got started, how politics got involved and the chances for the Internet to remain a space to raise our voices.

Where to find Khalid:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/KhalidAlbaih

http://twitter.com/khalidalbaih

https://www.instagram.com/khalidalbaih