The New Disruptors

Marco Arment's career has come in two main acts: as the first employee of Tumblr, he helped create a service that changed the fundamental nature of blogging by introducing both ease of creation and social networking. While there, he toyed with a service, to let him read Web pages offline without formatting, that became Instapaper. In late 2010, he left Tumblr to focus on that service full time. Now Marco is a successful podcaster and the editorial director of The Magazine — the best publication ever created — at which I'm the editor and he's my boss! (I still have a job after we recorded the podcast.)

Our conversation will be aired in two parts, each about an hour long. In this first part, we talk about how as a Tumblr developer Marco found out he didn't want to manage people, how Instapaper developed, and issues of managing resources and scaling. In the second, we move further into podcasting, The Magazine, blogging, advertising, and other areas.

On Twitter, Marco Arment, Instapaper, and The Magazine.

Duncan Davidson and Greg Koenig joined forces a few years back to start Luma Labs, a firm that makes across-the-chest camera straps. The two collaborated first on Luma Loop, a free-sliding camera strap, and then created Cinch, one that holds a camera tighter but still allows for movement. The Loop was kaboshed by a potential patent lawsuit; the second model has been a good seller, but with volume comes decisions about ramping up production. In this episode, we discuss all that, how they developed the original Cinch and Cinch 2 (about to be released), and quite a bit about rapid prototyping.

On Twitter, find them at @lumalabs, @duncan, and @gak_pdx (Greg)

Aly and Beth Khalifa have decades of experience in product design, both as consultants for clients and in making their own stuff. The Teastick was the first product they made and sold themselves; the Impress coffee filter is the latest. The North Carolina designers are bursting with ideas and work actively to promote collaboration, including in their own shared work space.

@GamilDesign on Twitter

Craig Mod writes essays that have the power to change the way you look at everything around you. At regular but somewhat distant intervals, he posts a long bit of writing that retrains your mind to see the world as he does. But he doesn't just talk: He creates projects that demonstrate his points as a designer and publisher of print and electronic work.

Craig and I had such a great but long conversation that we decided to split it into two parts. This is part 1, about publishing and crowdfunding; part 2, on publishing to different platforms, will air in a few weeks.

On Twitter, he is @craigmod.

Jonathan Coulton has called into existence a world in which a bearded Brooklyn-residing, Yale-graduated, Whiffenpoof-participating programmer singing songs on nerdy topics he records in a home studio posted to the Internet can quit his job, build an army of fans, give his music partly away, attract 700 people to a themed cruise, become a regular on public radio, and have his work ripped off by a major network television show. We talk about his singing background, how his career began and progressed, and how you bring your fans with you when your style matures.

Zach Weinersmith, the artist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, takes nerdy Web comics to their logical extreme, and has developed a huge following among science geeks. We talk about his career, the popularity of Web comics, and fulfilling big Kickstarter campaigns in this podcast.

Find him on Twitter as @zachweiner; his SMBC comics feed is @smbccomics.

John Gruber is either the world's biggest Apple fanboy or the most nuanced explicator of Cupertino's smoke signals, depending on whom you ask and on what day. In a more objective reality, John's Daring Fireball is the place you go to if you want to have a bigger-picture understanding of the universe in which Apple is firmly in the center. We talk about how he turned Daring Fireball from a side project into a heavily visited and deeply satisfying outlet for his writing.

Dalton Caldwell is the head of App.net (sometimes called ADN for App Dot Net), which some think is a Twitter competitor, but it isn't quite. It seems to be a typical venture-backed startup firm, but it is not quite that, either. There's a lot more under the surface of App.net, including neutrally hosted services, ecosystems aimed at software developers, and crowdfunding, among other topics, which we talk about in this episode.

App.net is offering a limited number of free-tier accounts, introduced last week and explained in the podcast, to listeners of The New Disruptors. Follow this link to sign up. If the link says there are no invitations left, please send me an email (click Contact above) or message us through our Twitter or App.net accounts.

Taylor Levy and Che-Wei Wang run CW&T, an art and design studio that produces an array of items ranging from purely commercial to completely aesthetic. The way they string projects along that spectrum offers a lot of insight into how one can fulfill one's own artistic vision in a world of commerce. They're also the team behind the Pen Type-A, a large and ultimately complicated Kickstarter project that we'll get.

Lumi makes a fabric-dye that becomes permanent when exposed to bright full-spectrum light, as from the sun. But that's not why the founders, Jesse Genet and Stéphan Angoulvant, are on the show. Rather, it's the way, starting with an obsession of Jesse's when she was 17, that the two bootstrapped a company using collaboration, crowdfunding, and craftiness.