So where do we go from here? How do we build a more inclusive future in tech? A good place to start is by listening to those who have worked to improve equity in Silicon Valley for years. "Culture Fit: Racial Bias in Tech" is a 6-part All Turtles Podcast series taking in-depth look at racial inequalities in the tech industry.…

We’re turning the mirror on ourselves to assess diversity, equity, and inclusion at All Turtles. If we believe every company could benefit from open conversations about diversity issues, we need to start with ourselves. "Culture Fit: Racial Bias in Tech" is a 6-part All Turtles Podcast series taking in-depth look at racial inequalities in the tech …

Racial bias has not only worked its way into tech workplaces, it’s also in the products we build. How can we mitigate the harm that these biases cause in the products Silicon Valley puts out into the world? "Culture Fit: Racial Bias in Tech" is a 6-part All Turtles Podcast series taking in-depth look at racial inequalities in the tech industry.…

A common excuse tech companies make for their lack of diversity is to blame the “pipeline,” saying there aren’t enough qualified candidates from historically excluded groups in the talent pool. Why do tech companies lean on this argument, and what are they missing? Culture Fit: Racial Bias in Tech" is a 6-part All Turtles Podcast series taking in-d…

It’s time to hop into the way, way back machine. We’re examining the history of Silicon Valley to better understand how we got to the current moment of racial inequity in tech. "Culture Fit: Racial Bias in Tech" is a 6-part All Turtles Podcast series taking in-depth look at racial inequalities in the tech industry.…

Introducing "Culture Fit: Racial Bias in Tech," a 6-part All Turtles Podcast series taking an in-depth look at racial inequalities in the tech industry. In episode 1, people from communities that have long been excluded by Silicon Valley’s monoculture share their personal stories and walk through the data on the lack of diversity in tech. When it c…

Brian Christian is the bestselling author of The Most Human Human and Algorithms to Live By. His latest book is called The Alignment Problem. He’s here today to talk about everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix this lack of alignment, including lessons to be learned from a near missile strike. What will the futu…

How is digital media impacting our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection? This is an important question to consider, especially as we become increasingly dependent on technology. Our digital dependence has been amplified during the pandemic, as we rely heavily on virtual communications. Today, Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, Come…

Products aren’t neutral—that’s our ethos at All Turtles. Products are built with a point of view that impacts the community of users and plays a role in the development of privacy guidelines. In this episode, All Turtles’ three cofounders (Phil Libin, Jessica Collier, and Jon Cifuentes) discuss community and privacy. Phil is the CEO of mmhmm, and J…

For startups, securing funding can be a long and bumpy road, and in many ways the pandemic has made it even bumpier. Tellus (an All Turtles product) has still found success in recent months, and today their CEO Tania A. Coke is imparting key lessons from their fundraising process. How did she and her team build new relationships with investors enti…

Mmhmm, our newest All Turtles product, upgrades video calls with beautiful backdrops and rooms, the designs for which had to be put together in record time. Allie Packard, our fearless Senior Designer, is here to share how she and her team went from the earliest mmhmm sketches to the product we see today. How did they create such dynamic and varied…

Mmhmm is our latest All Turtles product, which we built to make video calls more efficient—and more fun. After our podcast’s summer hiatus, we’re eager to share how we spun out this product at breakneck speed during the pandemic. Mmhmm’s suite of tools make any Zoom or Google Meet something to look forward to, with beautiful backdrops and rooms, im…

When you ask Amazon’s Alexa to complete a task, that voice interaction is possible because of the work of people like Noelle Silver. She wrote some of Alexa’s earliest skills, and as her career took her from Amazon to Microsoft, she saw an opportunity to launch the AI Leadership Institute. On today’s podcast, she covers her current work as the VP o…

Product design is collaborative, but with extended shelter-in-place guidelines, teams have had to reassess what it means to work together. Figma is one of the best tools for product creators working remotely, but even before we were relegated to our homes, Figma had become essential to us at All Turtles because of its intuitive features. Figma’s Di…

With campuses closed and classes relegated to Zoom sessions, COVID-19 has had an indelible impact on education. Scoodle, a UK-based learning platform that connects students with tutors, is ensuring students can still get the support they need. On today’s episode, Scoodle’s cofounder and CEO Ismail Jeilani is sharing how this pandemic has brought re…

What do you do when a global pandemic wipes out your business model as an early-stage startup? If you’re Sebastian Müller, cofounder of Lanterne, you quickly pivot to create a product to help people stay safe as coronavirus spreads. That’s how he and his team began building Crowdless, an app that provides real-time information on the crowdedness of…

Where did the conspiracy that “Bill Gates engineered coronavirus” come from? This is the type of query that Renée DiResta investigates as the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, where she tracks the spread of misinformation (and disinformation) online. She’s been monitoring the dissemination of narratives about the emergenc…

And now for an episode that was recorded pre-COVID-19. Today, David Yakobovitch is joining the show to share his perspectives on AI and the future of work. David hosts the HumAIn Podcast, a show about artificial intelligence, data science, and developer education. He’s also a Principal Data Scientist at Galvanize, a technology learning company that…

George Arison is the founder and CEO of Shift, an online marketplace for buying and selling used cars. George has led his company through the first phase of their response to the coronavirus pandemic, which involved creating a program to reduce prices for healthcare workers. The pandemic’s economic impact has also meant that they’ve had to furlough…

Over the past couple weeks on the podcast, we’ve talked about COVID-19’s impact on the future of work and the future of health. Today, we’re delving a little deeper into how we can come back from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Phil is calling “the great unpause.” Why are “recession” and “recovery” ill-fitting terms to describe …

The COVID-19 pandemic is fundamentally changing the way we think about and manage health. We’d already suspected that the future of work and the future of health were intrinsically linked, but this pandemic has shown how the trajectory of one is fully determining the course of the other. Today on the podcast, we’re discussing a 3-phase framework fo…

COVID-19 has thrown so much into uncertainty, including the way we work. With shelter-in-place regulations falling over increasing swathes of the population, companies who have the capacity to instruct employees to work from home have done so. Due to the global economic downturn that the pandemic has brought forth, it’s safe to say that COVID-19 is…

A single patient’s healthcare data is likely stored in different silos. It can therefore be difficult to assemble a complete picture of health when old records, more recent information, and regularly updated stats from a smartwatch should all be taken into account. Enter Seqster, a Saas solution for compiling healthcare data and making it easily ac…

Have you ever had an online conversation with someone only to realize later that you’d been talking to a bot? Computers are reshaping our idea of what it means to be human. Today on the podcast, author Brian Christian explores how computers reveal our most human capabilities and other themes from his book The Most Human Human. He also discusses the…

On prior episodes of this podcast, we’ve discussed Carrot, a company that’s pioneering the future of work and health by providing global fertility benefits to employers. Because there’s so much to discuss, we made a whole new podcast for Carrot called Baby Steps. It’s about the many diverse paths people take in the pursuit of parenthood, and we’re …

How is the internet making people more or less seen? Researcher Mary Gray’s new book Ghost Work explores the lives of people who are paid to train AI. These workers are contributing to the AI we use every day, but they’re often left out of conversations about how this technology is evolving. Mary asserts that AI is not replacing or eliminating work…

Designers and medical professionals are both key to building the future of health. Dr. Kyra Bobinet is working within that intersection by using neuroscience to help people design healthy lives. She’s an MD and the CEO of engagedIN, a neuroscience-based design firm. Both design and behavioral change are iterative processes, and Dr. Bobinet has expe…

Sita Magnuson has the spirit of an entrepreneur and the heart of an artist. She’s been able to make a career for herself by channeling both of these strengths into cofounding initiatives like Fort Future, Dpict, and Easthampton Co.Lab. Today on the podcast, she shares her thoughts on process design and the creative methods she uses to generate disc…

What does it mean to democratize DNA? Shirley Wu is answering that question as the Director of Health Product at 23andMe. 23andMe’s mission is to pioneer the future of health with their genetic testing technology, and to help people understand, access, and benefit from the human genome. They’ve had to stay ahead of the quickly evolving pace of the …

In many ways, the future of fertility is closely tied to the future of work, as companies determine how to best ensure that their employees are holistically supported. Employers have a unique and important role to play when it comes to access to fertility care, especially in the U.S. where 150 million people get their health coverage through employ…

Sift is a news therapy app that unpacks contentious topics so you can feel better equipped to keep up with the headlines. Today on the podcast, we’re giving you an audio taste of one of Sift’s topics—climate change—so you can hear what Sift is all about. Listen as we walk you through the impact climate change is having on our mental health. Show no…

Terah Lyons is the Executive Director of the Partnership on AI, a consortium that aims to establish best practices for AI systems and to educate the public about AI. They’re working to explore AI’s impact on the world, including on the labor market and the economy. Before this role, Terah worked in the office of the CTO for the Obama administration…

We interrupt our normal programming for some brief announcements on upcoming changes to the podcast. We’re transitioning from weekly episodes to bi-weekly in order to accommodate some exciting new projects. But stay subscribed, and stay tuned, because we have some incredible guests slated for our future episodes. See you in two weeks! We want to he…

Spot is an All Turtles product that’s ushering in the future of work by using technology to build better environments for employees. It’s a software solution for tackling harassment and discrimination in the workplace with an AI reporting tool. We’ve discussed Spot on the podcast before, but today, Spot’s CEO Jessica Collier is talking to design le…

Dr. Arun Wiita’s lab at UCSF uses emerging technologies to discover new treatments for blood cancers. Today on the podcast, he shares his insights on the future of cancer research, including why he thinks the next big advancement will involve modifying DNA as a way to improve early detection. Machine learning is starting to play a bigger role in th…

Unreasonable Group works with entrepreneurs who are offering solutions to seemingly intractable challenges. Today on the podcast, their Head of Creative Partnerships, Dave Smith, is talking about how they approach some of the world’s biggest problems. Their cohort of founders is tackling everything from clean energy to 3D scanning and big data for …

As tools like Figma, Slack, and more are allowing employees to stay connected from disparate locations, the concept of the remote workforce has become increasingly attractive. With the benefits of added flexibility for employees and opportunities to hire people from around the world, some companies have constructed entirely remote teams. Octane AI …

AI has already made its way into in the medical field, and today, Dr. Eric Topol gives us a sense of the many ways in which medical professionals are already taking advantage of this technology. Dr. Topol is a cardiologist and the author of Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. He acknowledges AI’s security ris…

For some, tongue twisters are simply amusing ways to pass the time, but Dairien Boyd and other designers at All Turtles knew that these verses had value: they could help people practicing a new language perfect their pronunciation, or give someone working on public speaking skills a way to work on their enunciation. Dairien and his team built Twist…

We may never get to use a crystal ball to tell us where the world is headed, but Amy Webb’s futurist analysis might be the next best thing. She’s a quantitative futurist, founder of the Future Today Institute, and author of The Big Nine. Her work is rooted in measurement and data; her models determine emerging signals and track their velocity over …

Welcome back to our regularly scheduled programming. After our summer SciFi-preneuership series, we’re ready to launch season 3 of the All Turtles Podcast. Today we’re introducing the new season and its themes: the future of work and the future of health. So much of our lives are maladapted for the human experience, and we want to talk about how to…

Dune, a novel set 20,000 years in the future, is a sweeping saga that touches on themes ranging from the consequences of AI (and the lack of AI) to the values of environmentalism. This is the last episode of SciFi-preneurship, so we’re closing out with a discussion reflecting on all the works we’ve featured. Thanks for joining our conversations abo…

Star Trek is one of the most iconic shows to ever grace television, not just for its contributions to the genre of science fiction, but also for its inspirational message about the potential for technology to build a positive future. There are many examples of technologies in the show inspiring actual tech that exists today. We dive into some of th…

Ursula K. Le Guin’s influence on science fiction is so significant that we dedicated two episodes of this series to her work, as we had so many guests who wanted to talk about her impact. Le Guin’s writing helped expand visions of what society could be, which provided meaningful inspiration for today’s guests, Dr. Christine Corbett Moran (cybersecu…

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of science fiction’s most influential writers. Her science fiction philosophy, which underscores our entire SciFi-preneurship podcast series, is that science fiction is meant to be descriptive rather than predictive. A hallmark of her writing is that it tends to be more inclusive of different gender and sexual identity expr…

As technologists continue to build the future, what laws should govern the things they create? Ethical guidelines for technology are essential; Isaac Asmiov presented one version of what they may look like when he introduced the Three Laws of Robotics in his collection of short stories I, Robot. This work of science fiction inspired many, including…

In the Metaverse, a shared virtual reality space, a character wrestles with a computer-crashing virus that also causes harm in the real world. Thus begins Snow Crash, a Neal Stephenson novel that, when written in 1992, described futuristic systems that eventually became reality. Snow Crash’s impact is so significant that this episode has a record n…

In 2019, we’re 35 years beyond 1984; at this current juncture, we can see just how predictive George Orwell’s novel turned out to be, and which dystopian elements we’ve managed to avoid (so far). This seminal work of science fiction provided a road map of exactly where not to go when building the future, and on today’s episode, Emily Dean and Dr. C…

The impact of the The Matrix on science fiction is difficult to overstate, but beyond the genre itself, it also deeply affected the viewers whose worldviews were made askew. Three of those viewers are featured in today’s episode to talk about their reactions to the film and the ways in which it contributed to the work they do now: writer/director E…

SciFi-preneurship is a new summer series from the All Turtles Podcast that examines how science fiction inspires people to create things that impact our lives today. In SciFi-preneurship, we’re using an expanded definition of entrepreneurship: we don’t just mean Silicon Valley startup founders; we’re talking to people who make things, especially th…