Wizardest

Avani Agarwal is a UX Designer at Google where she works on products that center around social good, and she is also the co-Founder of Stature, a lifestyle brand for petite women. Prior to joining Google in 2011, she previously worked as an Art Director at Yahoo. Avani discusses her approach to design, creating a unified UX across Google, designing for consumers vs. brands, her experience as a startup founder, how AI and data can help inform design decisions, and assorted other topics.

Founded by former Microsoft engineers and designers, FiftyThree is the creator of the award-winning app Paper and their latest release, Paste, is taking on the holy grail of productivity tools: presentations. As an early proponent of iPad as a device for creating, Georg talks about the journey he’s taken at FiftyThree, design vs. engineering, auto-layouts, the economics of the App Store, and drawing inspiration from dance.

How can we break out of our media echo chambers? The Week aims to provide a balanced, spin-free collection of news and opinion pieces from all across the political spectrum — a service needed today more than ever. Ben Frumin talks politics, echo chambers, business models for news, and why it’s important to see things from the other side.

Marissa DeVito, daughter of legendary producer and record executive Don DeVito (Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Aerosmith), talks about the current state and future of the music industry, her days creating early digital and social marketing strategies at Universal Music Group for artists like Justin Bieber, working at Sony Music Studios with Green Day and Beyoncé, pioneering digital remixing with her former startup Umixit, and ridiculous stories of getting lost with Bob Dylan as a child, and well as her current role working with brands at SoundCloud.

The AP has been reporting and distributing news for over 170 years, first delivered by boat and today by fiber optics. An industry veteran for over 40 of those years, we discuss how the business of news has changed over time, the AP’s unique wholesale and non-profit models, the resiliency of text-based media, paradigm shifts both past and future, and a variety of other topics.

The News Partnerships team helps journalists and media companies better leverage Facebook at a time when Facebook is playing an ever important role in the distribution of news — both real and fake. We talk all about fake news, workings of The Algorithm, business models for news, the age of individuals as publishers, and other assorted topics.

In my first ever solo episode, I explore my initial thoughts around iPhone X and its role as the first mass market AR device. I also discuss how AR will change the world in the future.(spoiler: glasses you wear all the time, loss of touch with physical reality, everyone having pet dinosaurs)

Angela Lee is Founder at 37 Angels, Chief Innovation Officer at Columbia Business School, and a lifelong educator and entrepreneur who was named one of Entrepreneur’s “6 Innovative Women to Watch”. We discuss what it takes to become an angel investor, the process of choosing which startups to invest in (hint: saying no a lot), and the power of education.

To celebrate the 10th episode, one of my best friends, Steven Tartick, talks about the future (and present) of Broadway, how AI will impact the creative process, VR theater, our time together at Apple, productivity hacks, and more.