As the planet warms, we're experiencing more frequent and destructive extreme weather. Yet, 85% of the world lacks critical atmospheric data for precise forecasting that could help us better prepare. John Dean and Kai Marshland, Co-Founders of WindBorne Systems, are on a mission to close this gap. Born out of the Stanford Student Space Initiative, WindBorne began as a project to extend the flight duration of conventional weather balloons. Realizing the impact of their technology on climate change, they turned their project into a venture-backed startup serving both private and government partn ..read more

Technology connects us more than ever. Yet, we feel lonelier than ever. Worldwide, one in four adults (more than a billion people) feel lonely. And 36% of all Americans — including 61% of young adults aged 18-25 — feel “serious loneliness.” It’s gotten so bad that, in 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a health advisory about America’s loneliness epidemic, equating social disconnection to the physical health risks to that of drinking alcohol, obesity, physical inactivity, and even smoking 15 cigarettes a day. In this session from SXSW 2024, Andrew Greenstein, Co-Founder and CEO ..read more

Arvind Jain, Co-Founder and CEO of generative AI workplace search startup, Glean, has an impressive, 25-year career in Silicon Valley. It’s safe to say he’s learned a thing or two along the way. He’s held engineering roles at Microsoft and Akamai, spent more than a decade working on Search at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, and started two companies, Rubrik, in 2014, and Glean, in 2019. Arvind joins us to reflect on key takeaways and pivotal moments across his career as he’s moved between engineering and entrepreneurship – and shares lessons he’s learned about himself as a founder, what it ..read more

Named to TIME’s inaugural AI 100 list, Nancy Xu is an AI innovator who worked on early foundation models at Stanford’s AI Lab before founding Moonhub. It’s here where she’s revolutionizing recruiting with AI-powered assistants. But Moonhub didn’t start as an AI company. Nancy reveals invaluable insights she learned from her company’s early days as a traditional recruiting agency, explaining how these lessons fueled an AI recruiter that frees human recruiters from manual, repetitive tasks like candidate sourcing and outreach. She argues that AI will revolutionize hiring efficiency while empower ..read more

AI is booming, but transforming industries still requires custom models that most companies can't build, customize, and deploy themselves. That's the opportunity May Habib saw early and seized. As Co-Founder and CEO of Writer, May and her team have built a full-stack generative AI platform tailored for enterprise companies, giving knowledge workers across a range of industries access to AI's unprecedented capabilities. Combining generative language models with specialized training and guardrails, Writer lets enterprises generate content, analyze data, automate workflows, and more through a no ..read more

AI like ChatGPT and DALL·E 2 is raising important questions about human creativity. Will AI one day replace us as creators and storytellers? Keith Peiris believes AI can boost creativity rather than hinder it – and he’s built a platform to do just that. Keith is the Co-Founder and CEO of Tome, an AI-powered storytelling and presentation platform that lets anyone turn their ideas into stories and presentations within seconds – from fundraising pitches and sales proposals to landing pages and classroom presentations. He joins the podcast to explain how Tome helps anyone tell compelling stories t ..read more

How does the 171-year-old Gray Lady stay so innovative? Design and technology. Georg Petschnigg, Head of Product Design at The New York Times, shares how his team collaborates with editors, journalists, and experts across the organization to design multimedia experiences that make the most of readers' time and help them understand the world. From unraveling complex topics like the pandemic and elections to creating utility, delight, and moments of clarity across The Times’s vast product ecosystem, Georg reveals the design cues that signify the tone of a story and the dynamic elements used to c ..read more

As Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of fintech startup Brex, Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi are true “friendpreneurs” – a​​nd they’re not even 30 years old. As teens, they met over Twitter in Brazil, hacking and jailbreaking their way through high school. After their payment startup Pagar.me (“basically the Stripe of Brazil”) achieved success, they left Brazil for Silicon Valley, where they used their unique insight into the payments landscape to start Brex in 2017. Originally offering credit cards to startups, Brex has moved and scaled at incredible speed, reaching $100 million in revenue just ..read more

Marissa Mayer is one of the most successful and influential women in tech. As employee #20 at Google, she played a lead role in building the iconic products we use every day, like Google Search, Gmail, AdWords, and Google Maps. As President and CEO at Yahoo, she learned important lessons on leadership, growth, and engagement. Now, she's in a role she’s never had before: founder. As the Co-Founder and CEO of Sunshine, Marissa is focused on cleaning up our contacts and making us happier by improving our relationships -- with a little help from artificial intelligence. Marissa joins us to share h ..read more

We’re off for the summer, but stopping by with a quick update on a few cool happenings at The Next Great Thing! Now through August 20th, vote for ‘The Paradox of Loneliness and Technology,’ our live podcast recording at SXSW 2024. We’ll be joined on stage by some incredible friends of the pod: Leslie Witt, Chief Product & Design Officer at Headspace; Kyle Rand, Co-Founder & CEO at Rendever; and Erick Hachenburg, the Founder of Tenor, which created the first-ever GIF Keyboard. Then, be sure to visit www.sfappworks.com to get your free copy of our new book, ‘Just Start (Up): The Founder ..read more