Tag: Podcasts

You’ve certainly heard about the volatile ride cryptocurrency investors have been on of late. But all of the focus on the wealth being created and/or lost tends to drown out the underlying technology that is enabling these forays into not just new kinds of digital currencies, but also new ways of thinking about transferring wealth, ownership, access, all kinds of data, and more. AWS Solutions Architects Santanu Dutt and Anand Iyer explain the potential for Blockchain technology to up-end industries.

As the co-creator, with Cornell Tech Professor Serge Belongie, of the AI and machine learning-based visual classification system Visipedia, Pietro Perona has spent the past seven years working on a “switchboard” that lets anyone, everywhere ask questions and immediately obtain an answer.

Josh Elman, a consumer specialist at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, couldn’t have been blunter about “acquihiring,” the practice of big companies paying big bucks for startups to hire teams for their expertise. “There was this funny little period time where that seemed like it was a thing,” Elman recently told a crowd of startup entrepreneurs at the AWS Loft in San Francisco. “I think that’s gone.”

That doesn’t mean big companies aren’t buying startups, Elman continued. In fact, it turns out that acquihiring didn’t translate to getting better talent than just hiring—it’s just more expensive.

Panos Panay wants to change the mindset of music students—and as the Vice President of Innovation and Strategy at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, he’s in a great position to do so. At Berklee, Panay says, students are not only learning about music theory and composition, but they are also developing entrepreneurial skills he believes will help them become better musicians.

Based in Lisbon, Aptoide is an alternative app store where anyone can create a channel and share what they’ve been downloading with family, friends, and followers in their social timeline. Aptoide CEO Alvaro Pinto says he co-founded the company because he wanted to create a more social app store experience, rather than settle for the algorithmic method other popular app stores use.

Honesty is the name of game for Ruth Penford, the director of talent acquisition for Shazam. In fact, Penford believes honesty is so critical for recruiting, the first thing she did after joining the music sharing startup was to invite in a group of consultants to ask current employees about how they felt about the company.

When Antoine Blondeau, the co-founder and chairman of Sentient Technologies, first began working with artificial intelligence, the concept was still known as “algorithmic science.” In the decades since, AI has evolved into a much sexier topic because, according to Blondeau, when operating on mission speed and plugged into the right workflow, AI will learn quicker and faster than humans—resulting in business models that can evolve at machine speed. “That is the revolution,” notes Blondeau.

“It’s got to be a sickness or in my DNA.” That’s how Arth Labs Co-founder and CEO Gautam Ivatury describes his penchant for launching startups.