CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

Dan Blumberg

CRAFTED. is a show about great products and the people who make them. Top technologists reveal how they build game-changing products — and how you can, too. Honored twice by The Webby Awards as a top tech podcast, CRAFTED. is hosted by Dan Blumberg, an entrepreneur, product leader, and former public radio host. Listen to CRAFTED. to find out what it really takes to build great products and companies.

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Top 10 CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Making Music With AI – And Doing So Ethically | Diaa El All, Founder & CEO of Soundful

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

06/04/24 • 28 min

Diaa El All is the founder and CEO of Soundful, which enables anyone to create brand new music in just a few seconds with AI. And on this episode of CRAFTED., we are literally making music.

We’re also talking about the ethics of using AI to make music. Diaa has been very outspoken about what he sees as the misguided practices of other AI+music companies that train their models by just scraping the web. At Soundful, they’ve taken a different approach: they are painstakingly building their own proprietary data by recording musicians playing one note at a time and then layering the notes to create music that sounds better than if you’d just sampled songs.

“We've done it. There is a way where technological advancement and working with the rights-holders and protecting them can co-exist together.”

We discuss:

Why Diaa stands with the music industry against what he sees as other companies' move fast & break things approach to AI

Diaa’s background as a classical musician, DJ, ghost producer, and founder

How Soundful built its data and how it layers sounds together to make music

Soundful’s origin story and how it emerged from Diaa’s work with AI and marketing automation

Why humans are so important when making music

Why music theory rules are important to follow – except when they’re not!

What to expect next... and how incredible AI voice cloning has become

***

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications.

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where Dan Blumberg and team advise companies on product, discovery, growth, and experimentation.

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 Crafted.fm

***

Key Moments:

[02:01] Ethical AI in Music Creation: How Soundful builds its AI ethically, avoiding training on copyrighted materials and using proprietary data.

[05:00] Diaa’s journey from Cairo to the Royal Academy of London, and his various roles in the music industry before founding Soundful

[07:02] Soundful’s origin story

[10:10] Soundful's music creation process, including the use of music theory rules and proprietary data sets to generate tracks

[12:08] How Soundful manages the non-deterministic nature of AI to ensure unique, high-quality music outputs for users.

[14:36] How Soundful levels people up and why he’s so excited to level up that great singer who is not yet a great producer

[17:00] The hardest part of building Soundful - working with the music industry and winning their acceptance

[21:55] Predictions for the future, including advancements in voice cloning and the potential for democratizing creative opportunities.

Asana’s Head of AI on the Profound Ways Work Is Changing | Paige Costello (Head of AI & Co-Head of Product Management at Asana)

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

05/28/24 • 31 min

Paige Costello is the the head of AI and co-head of product at Asana and on this episode of CRAFTED. we're exploring what it means to ship products with AI, how AI will change the way work gets done, and how to organize your teams for success in this brave new world.

We explore:

How the future of work – and communicating about work – is changing
Why Asana chose to create an “AI org” instead of a less centralized innovation approach
How Asana ships — and measures the success of — AI-powered features, e.g. SmartStatus, that aim to take the drudgery out of work
How product management is changing with the rise of AI
Why running an A/B test is harder when a non-deterministic (i.e. unpredictable by design) GenAI tool is involved
Why it’s so important to “get out of the building” and some of Paige’s favorite user research moments from doing so
The latest with “PaigeBot” and what Paige hopes AI can do for her

***

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where Dan Blumberg and team advise companies on product, discovery, growth, and experimentation.

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 Crafted.fm

***

Key Moments:

[02:17] AI-generated status reports: How Asana summarizes a project – or many projects – using AI. And why it needs to do so carefully.

[05:00] How to organize for innovation: How Asana organizes its teams to integrate AI and the strategies they employ for effective AI implementation.

[09:06] How AI will change the role of product managers and why the stochastic nature of AI will be something we all have to get used to

[14:26] Challenges of prototyping and scaling AI

[16:07] How Asana uses AI internally and how it dogfoods its own products

[18:17] Profound implications of AI + the future of work

[22:20] Will AI really help product managers get out of the building more? Or do we just find new excuses not to? And what Paige finds so powerful about “being in someone’s space”

[25:32] An update on “PaigeBot” and what Paige wishes a bot would do for her

Listen to Developers! | Justin Cormack (CTO, Docker)

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

06/25/24 • 32 min

When Docker restructured, the company went back to its roots: super-serving developers. CTO Justin Cormack says that’s why the company is developer-obsessed, not customer-obsessed: “We really wanted to focus on the fact that it's the developer who loves Docker. It's the developer who is going to be using Docker every day...”

Over the past decade, Docker exploded in popularity as companies moved to cloud and adopted software containers as they did... but the company struggled as a business and, five years ago, made massive changes: “When we restructured people were like, `Well, I kind of hope this works, but I doubt it will.`”

Well, it’s working. Docker is now bigger than ever and growing.

On this episode of CRAFTED... We'll discuss developer productivity, how Docker continues to build new products to improve it, and why so many organizations are in an awkward phase, with too many responsibilities being put onto the developer.

We’ll also look beyond the container to new vectors of growth, including helping companies put GenAI to production.

Plus, Justin will share tips for developers on how they can better communicate their needs. And what CFO-types can do in return: “the one thing they can do is actually listen to the developers!”

***

Key Moments:

[3:13] Why Docker needed to restructure and refocus and why the turnaround has been a success

[04:52] Why Docker is “developer-obsessed” not “customer-obsessed”

[6:13] Docker’s explosive growth in its early years: containers, the cloud and microservices

[08:48] Docker's Successful Restructuring and Product Development

[11:22] “Shift Left” and why this trend of putting more responsibility onto developers earlier and earlier in development is great, but also can put too much pressure on developers, who need to be supported

[13:53] How Justin and team prioritize Docker's roadmap

[16:48] AI: How Docker is helping its client build RAG and other GenAI apps, and the tricky infrastructure needed to support them

[19:38] Developer productivity and the importance of the inner loop

[27:01] Developers love their laptops! And why Windows machines have become so popular

[30:40] How to talk so your CFO will listen and the rise of business-focused engineers

***

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Learn more at modernproductminds.com

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

New Frontiers of Health: AI, Psychedelics, the Gut-Brain Axis, and More! | Live from SXSW

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

06/18/24 • 43 min

Software, hardware, and biotechnology are playing an increasingly transformative role in our mental health and wellness. On this episode of CRAFTED., recorded live on the “Next” stage at SXSW, we discuss what investors look for in these new companies and how they separate what’s real — and what’s near-term — from what’s hype.

On stage with host Dan Blumberg are:

Amy Kruse, General Partner & Chief Investment Officer at Satori Neuro, and a trained neuroscientist
Matias Serebrinsky, Co-founder and General Partner at PsyMed Ventures, and the host of Business Trip, which is a great podcast if you want to go even deeper on these topics. Listen at businesstrip.fm
Christie Nicholson, Founder of Studio Lumina, and the co-host for this panel

We’ll explore AI-powered tools for mental health, the new area of “enerceuticals” (energy replacing the “pharma”), psychedelics, and why what’s in your gut is so important to your mental state. Hear from investment experts who have a wide view of this growing startup landscape and better understand which new ventures are likely to succeed.

—

Key Moments:

[03:18] Recent advances in biotech and why advances in data and AI are helping biology become a more “mature” science

[05:30] Why AI is overhyped, but also where it’s not

[09:07] Why psychedelics are overhyped, but also where they’re not

[11:24] What’s real and amazing: brain-computer interfaces, e.g. humans controlling robotic arms with the minds

[13:55] What’s real and amazing: precision psychiatry and neuroscience

[15:42] The emerging field of “enerceuticals” -- using energy instead of drugs, e.g. low intensity focused ultrasound

[17:47] Neuroplasticity: our brains can change!

[23:01] Mental health, the gut-brain axis, and food as medicine

[34:58] The business models of bio tech startups and how to know when a company is making progress on a years-long effort

—

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where my team and I can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Learn more at modernproductminds.com

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 CRAFTED.fm

How BetterUp Leverages AI + Human Coaches to Help People and Companies Flourish | Gabriella Rosen Kellerman (Chief Product and Innovation Officer)

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

06/11/24 • 23 min

Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman is the Chief Product and Innovation Officer at BetterUp, a multi-billion dollar startup that helps people and companies level up. Through a combination of human coaching and AI, BetterUp is able to offer the kind of executive coaching that used to be reserved for... executives.

On this episode of CRAFTED. we dig into how BetterUp ships new products, proves they work, and what's next...

Key Moments:

[2:23 - 7:27] How BetterUp helps companies and employees level up

[7:27 - 11:15] How BetterUp build products — and why they have more than the typical product trio of product/design/engineering

[11:15 - 14:22] Launching the Group Coaching product, testing it, and scaling it (during the pandemic)

[14:22 - 17:42] “Kids in the candy store” – how BetterUp is building with GenAI after so many years of building with GOFAI (good old fashioned AI)

[17:42 - 20:38] Challenges as BetterUp has scaled up and what’s next for the company

[20:38 - 22:26] The “whitewater world of work” and what makes Gabriella optimistic about the future

—

The book: Tomorrowmind

—
CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. Learn more at Docker.com

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 Crafted.fm

—

Is It Cake or a Muffin? How to Position Your Product and Drive More Sales | April Dunford (bestselling author and advisor)

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

08/13/24 • 34 min

April Dunford is an expert at product positioning. She’s advised hundreds of B2B companies on how they can make their products Obviously Awesome — that’s also the title of her bestselling book on positioning.

On this episode of CRAFTED., April shares tips on how you can make your product standout and how you can drive more sales — that’s the focus of her latest book, Sales Pitch.

April says great positioning starts when you truly understand the answer to this question: “If you didn't exist, what would a customer do?”

And the answer may surprise you: “We lose half of our deals in B2B to ‘do nothing!’”

Do nothing – the status quo – is a fierce competitor and April has identified ways to help customers gain the confidence they need to make a scary purchase decision (e.g. buying a new CRM). Key here: don’t sell to your customer; help them buy.

April is fun and has a knack for sharing colorful anecdotes and analogies that will stick with you. e.g. Tune in to find out what buying a toilet has to do with B2B SaaS.

Takeaways from this episode:

Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something to a defined group of people
Great positioning starts with understanding the competition. Not what you think the competition is, but what your customers actually evaluate you against. e.g. Is your product cake (dessert) or a muffin (breakfast)? They’re both made of bread and pretty similar, but they’ve got totally different competitors.
Startups often have great positioning at the outset, but then it slips over time as new competitors copy what you do and your uniqueness gets lost. You need to pay attention to your positioning as the market changes.
Don’t sell! Help your customers buy. Don’t assume they know how to! Imagine you’re selling a CRM... When was the last time your customer bought one? Ten years ago? If ever. Help them contextualize your product among the others out there.
Lead with business outcomes! Not features.

Key Moments:

(00:00) - Introduction
(02:20) - - Working with founders, being "the positioning expert", and why positioning is so tricky to get right
(05:22) - - How to make your product "Obviously Awesome"
(07:18) - - The five elements of great positioning
(15:59) - - Why "do nothing" is your strongest competitor: 50% of B2B deals are lost to "do nothing"
(17:43) - - Don't sell: Rather, "help your customers buy" (and what buying a toilet has to do with this)
(29:50) - - April positions herself: How she grew her personal brand and narrowed in on her solopreneur offering
(33:16) - - Outro

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

How Media Is Made Today: AI and a Modern CMS | Matt Monahan, President, Arc XP, The Washington Post

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

08/06/24 • 26 min

Making media is hard. Distributing it to the right audience even more so. GenAI can help.

Matt Monahan is the president of Arc XP at the Washington Post. On this episode, we're digging into the core technology of any media company: the content management system (CMS), why they’re so hard to build right and how new GenAI tools can reduce the toil required for journalists to get their stories to the right audience.

Arc XP is not only the CMS used by the Washington Post, but it’s also used by many other publishers, broadcasters, and companies with stories to tell. Matt shares more on the challenge of commercializing and white-listing an internal tool for others to use. It’s a tantalizing idea – turn that cost center into a profit center! — but it’s not for the faint of heart.

Plus, lessons from Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, including how the Post uses key Amazon practices, such as the “six page memo” and “one- and two-way doors.”

Key Moments:

(00:00) - Introduction
(02:25) - From print to digital: hard product & organizational changes
(04:17) - Why the CMS is where it all comes together
(06:27) - Commercializing an internal tool: selling Arc XP to other publishers
(10:07) - AWS and the impact of Jeff Bezos on the Washington Post
(11:30) - The famous six-page memo and how the Post benefits from it
(14:06) - GenAI: New features Matt is building to reduce toil for journalists
(19:16) - How to pick the right model and fine tune it
(21:55) - Matt’s a pilot! What flying has taught him about running a business
(23:04) - Being nimble: Why there are more “one way doors” than you think
(24:38) - Outro

Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

My AI Teacher: Khan Academy and the Future of Education | Dr. Kristen Dicerbo (Chief Learning Officer)

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

07/30/24 • 31 min

Dr. Kristen DiCerbo is Khan Academy’s Chief Learning Officer, where she sets the company's product, teaching, and learning strategy — with AI at the forefront.

Khanmigo is amazing. It’s the GenAI-powered product from Khan Academy that helps students learn and teachers teach — and could revolutionize education.

Khan Academy is used by 12 million students a month! And they’ve been an early adopter of GenAI.

Khanmigo coaches students in math and English, helps teachers prepare lesson plans, enables parents to get help as they help their children with their homework, and much more...

On this episode of CRAFTED., Kristen shares how they build with Generative AI — and how you can learn from their experiences to build your own AI experiences.

We dig into how Khan Academy:

Builds with GenAI’s unpredictability in mind
Helps GenAI get good at math (and also built a UX that masks the ways it is bad at it)
Gave Khanmigo an “inner monologue” that helps it slow down and better tutor students
Built a “prompt playground” where they can evaluate various prompts
Built a “prompt library” where they can keep track of prompts
Employ fine-tuning, red teaming, hackathons, and more...

Sal Khan’s new book is entitled “Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)” – On this episode we explore how and why!

***

(00:00) - Introduction
(02:04) - Education + technology: Kristen early experiences
(05:10) - Khan Academy primer: 12M students a month!
(07:36) - Getting early access to GPT4
(09:02) - GenAI: early experiments with tutoring
(11:40) - GenAI is bad at math! How Khan Academy grappled with this
(15:42) - Building an AI-powered writing tutor
(19:49) - How AI can free teachers from grading homework and help students learn more quickly
(21:20) - Prompt chaining: why you need to break up your prompts to get good results
(22:48) - Preventing AI-powered plagiarism
(26:30) - The role of teacher in an AI world
(30:26) - Outro

***

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Driving Product-led Growth (PLG) With Customer.io Founder and CEO Colin Nederkroon

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

07/16/24 • 27 min

Colin Nederkoorn is the founder and CEO of Customer.io, a top customer engagement platform that enables companies to send the right message to the right user at the right time on the right channel. The platform is used by Notion and lots of other top SaaS companies to personalize user onboarding and more.

When Customer.io was founded in 2011, there were analytics platforms and there were things you could do with that data, but as the mobile era was taking off – and user onboarding became even more critical – Colin recognized a need for companies to immediately send users messages based on the actions there users had just taken – or (and this was a lot harder to build) the action they had not taken.

On this episode, we learn from Colin how he built and scaled Customer.io from slideware he pitched to early customers into a company that today boasts top clients and a lofty valuation.

Plus, tips on how you can improve your own onboarding.

***

Key Moments:

[2:17] How Colin got into product management and early experiences

[5:00] Becoming head of product at DevPost (fka ChallengePost)

[7:00] “We were so naive that we just did, we did it.” – Founding Customer.io

[10:12] Onboarding and more ways companies use customer.io

[14:43] Why you shouldn’t optimize your onboarding too early

[17:17] Challenges at customer.io today and their emerging multi-product strategy

[19:12] AI vs. rules engines; and how Customer.io is using AI now and experimenting

[22:22] Why triggering a notification when a user has not done something is so much harder than if they have

[23:55] Infrastructure and constant scaling – one of customer.io’s biggest challenges

***

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AI and the Future of Medicine | Kira Radinsky (CEO of Diagnostic Robotics and Co-founder of Mana.bio)

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

10/01/24 • 36 min

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Kira Radinsky is the CEO of Diagnostic Robotics, which uses AI to make predictions that help patients get better healthcare. She’s also the co-founder of Mana.bio which is using AI to automate drug discovery.

On this episode of CRAFTED., Kira will share more on why she believes that, of all the industries that AI will change, it’s those involving chemistry and biology that will change the most. Plus, why she says: “I just want AI to replace me as a scientist.”

Kira shares:

How Mana.bio is using AI to build new “rocketships” that can deliver drugs to the right planets (cells) — and how they’ve done things in three months that used to take 20 years
How AI is accelerating drug discovery by creating feedback loops that speed up learning
How Diagnostic Robotics makes predictions on patient outcomes that help doctors and care teams provide better care
Why she loves making predictions — Kira is famous for them. Over a decade ago, while getting her PhD and working with Microsoft, she built systems that successfully predicted cholera outbreaks and riots.
How to incentivize bots to make bolder predictions. i.e. It’s easy to predict that there will not be an earthquake today; it’s harder to say today there will be one.
Why predictions are only valuable if there’s something you can do to prevent bad outcomes — and why this makes healthcare an ideal field
How advances in software have enabled her to follow her dream and be a scientist. (Kira doesn’t have the great hands you need to be a lab chemist.)

Key Moments

(02:29) - Why predictions have been so important to Kira from an early age, and her dream to be a scientist
(06:20) - How Kira predicts the future and how she became famous for predicting the first cholera outbreak to hit Cuba in more than 100 years
(10:23) - How Diagnostic Robotics makes predictions that improve healthcare outcomes
(14:56) - Big unlocks to make better predictions — and explain them to doctors
(17:16) - What’s “easy” to predict and what’s hard; how to incentivize bots to make bold predictions (e.g. an earthquake)
(19:23) - Founding Mana.bio and how AI can improve drug discovery
(24:11) - AI will have a huge impact on the administrative aspects of patient care
(28:41) - How Mana.bio creates rapid learning feedback loops
(30:28) - Tips for building with GenAI and why more attention should be paid to causal inference
(33:26) - Where GenAI will be really transformative in the future
(35:09) - Outro

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FAQ

How many episodes does CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators have?

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators currently has 65 episodes available.

What topics does CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators cover?

The podcast is about Product Management, Product, Digital Transformation, Entrepreneurship, Design, Business Strategy, Startup, Development, Software, Growth, Podcasts, Technology, Business, Innovation and Engineering.

What is the most popular episode on CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators?

The episode title 'How Media Is Made Today: AI and a Modern CMS | Matt Monahan, President, Arc XP, The Washington Post' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators?

The average episode length on CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators is 27 minutes.

How often are episodes of CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators released?

Episodes of CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators are typically released every 13 days, 23 hours.

When was the first episode of CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators?

The first episode of CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators was released on Oct 11, 2022.

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CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

Dan Blumberg

Top 10 CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators Episodes

FAQ

How many episodes does CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators have?

What topics does CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators cover?

What is the most popular episode on CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators?

What is the average episode length on CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators?

How often are episodes of CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators released?

When was the first episode of CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators?

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