Happy New Year! This is the time of year when people make big changes. So, I'm bringing back my conversation with the co-author of Tomorrowmind. It's a fascinating book and especially relevant at this time of the year. 

Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman writes that that career trajectories used to be like steamships (full steam ahead), and then they became more like sailboats (lots of tacking), but now we're swirling in whitewater. So how can we stay afloat? How can we flourish? 

On this episode of CRAFTED., we focus on PRISM, the five key skill groups that Gabriella says can help you be more successful: Prospection, Resilience, Innovation and creativity, Social support by way of rapid rapport, and Mattering and meaning. 

Gabriella was until recently the Chief Product Officer at BetterUp, a platform that helps organizations and people level up through a mixture of human and AI coaching. She originally appeared on the show in a two-part episode. Part one is includes more on the tomorrowmind skills and her career path; in part two, she describes how BetterUp builds products and innovated under her leadership. 

And stay tuned as we employ our own tomorrowminds here at CRAFTED... there are some big changes to the show, including a new name, coming this month!

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Featured voices:

• Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Partner at BCG, former CPO of BetterUp, and co-author, with Martin Seligman, of Tomorrowmind 
• Me (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great! I love building from zero to one.

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And if you please…

• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to grow
• Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at crafted.fm
• Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: [email protected] or DM me on LinkedIn
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon!

A guest episode from Famous & Gravy. On each episode, host Michael Osborne and guests look at the life of a famous dead celebrity and ask themselves if it's a life they would've wanted. The show gets into all sorts of things you will not in that person's official obituary or biography. I'm a fan. Here's how they describe today's episode:

This person died 2011, age of 56. He dropped out of Reed College in 1972 and once said that taking LSD was among the most important things he ever did. In the early years of his career, his obsession with detail drove colleagues crazy, but later he inspired extraordinary loyalty. In the 1990s he bought a small computer graphics spinoff from George Lucas and built it into Pixar. He told the world he would step down as Apple’s CEO if he could no longer meet expectations — and then he did. Today’s dead celebrity is Steve Jobs.

Subscribe to Famous & Gravy in all your favorite podcast apps and at famousandgravy.com

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And if you please…

• Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter: crafted.fm
• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to grow
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming in January

This week I'm the guest and my friends at Whiskey Web and Whatnot are the hosts. And they're great hosts, because they send their guests a bottle of whiskey before talking web and whatnot...

As we head into the holidays I hope you'll raise a glass with us and enjoy this very laid back episode... 

Chuck and Robbie hosted me a year ago and I love that they got me on tape when they did, because it was just as I was starting to consider making some big changes to my show... Changes that I will announce in late January... so get excited for that! and please subscribe to this here podcsat in your favorite apps, and get the newsletter at crafted.fm

Here's how they described the episode:

And if you please…

• Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter atcrafted.fm
• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to grow
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon

For more on Whiskey Web and Whatnot...

• Check ou:t https://whiskey.fm
• Connect with Robbie Wagner: https://x.com/RobbieTheWagner
• Connect with Chuck Carpenter: https://x.com/CharlesWthe3rd 

In this episode:
- (00:00) - Intro
- (03:26) - Whiskey review and rating: Woodinville Straight Bourbon
- (09:23) - Apple Podcasts vs Spotify
- (11:20) - Spotify video vs YouTube
- (13:02) - Podcasting audio vs video
- (15:24) - Advice on starting a podcast
- (19:24) - Equipment requirements for guests on podcasts
- (22:15) - Having a pre-interview interview
- (26:06) - Social media and podcasting challenges
- (27:37) - How to grow your audience
- (33:18) - How to make money as a podcaster
- (37:28) - Being yourself vs having a persona
- (38:42) - Monetizing your podcast
- (42:11) - What's missing from RSS
- (43:38) - Dan's non-tech career ideas
- (45:40) - Podcast recommendations
- (49:12) - Dan's plugs

Links
- Woodinville Straight Bourbon: https://woodinvillewhiskeyco.com/
- Crafted: https://crafted.fm
- WNYC: https://www.wnyc.org/
- NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/
- Spotify: https://www.spotify.com/
- Pocket Casts: https://pocketcasts.com/
- IAB: https://www.iab.com/
- National Geographic: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/
- Shure SM7B: https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones/sm7b
- Focusrite: https://focusrite.com/
- Shure MV7: https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones/mv7
- Elgato: https://www.elgato.com/
- AirPods: https://www.apple.com/airpods/
- Audio Technica: https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/
- Morning Edition: https://www.wnyc.org/shows/me
- Chicago Public Radio: https://www.wbez.org/
- Riverside: https://riverside.fm/
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/
- Mr. Beast: https://youtube.com/@mrbeast
- Docker: https://www.docker.com/
- Artium: https://www.thisisartium.com/
- Jay Clouse: https://creatorscience.com/
- Hark: https://harkaudio.com/
- Syntax: https://syntax.fm/
- Hard Fork: https://www.nytimes.com/column/hard-fork
- Big Technology with Alex Kantrowitz: https://www.bigtechnology.com/
- Decoder with Nilay Patel: https://www.theverge.com/decoder
- How I Built This: https://www.npr.org/series/490248027/how-i-built-this
- Acquired: https://www.acquired.fm/
- Smartless: https://smartless.com/
- Wondery: https://wondery.com/
- Sacha Baron Cohen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacha_Baron_Cohen
- Tim Burton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Burton
- Beetlejuice: https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/beetlejuice
- Darknet Diaries: https://darknetdiaries.com/

Looking to fund your startup? If you're new to the process, fundraising can be difficult to navigate. Not only are there a myriad of ways to go about it, but it can be hard to tell whether the tips, tricks, and advice floating around are based on any evidence at all.

[This week, I'm turning the mic over to my friends at The Startup Podcast. featuring Carta's head of insights on what you need to know about today's fundraising environment and how AI is affecting valuations, equity, and how companies grow. Here's how they describe this episode...]

So, what is the truth?

And what are the actual, data-backed insights that can help you choose the best method of fundraising for your own business?

Enter: Peter Walker.

As Head of Insights at Carta, he has access to, and industry knowledge about, the vast sets of funding data that will help you cut through the noise. Today, he joins Chris and Yaniv in discussing the real data behind startup funding trends in 2025 and the key takeaways you can apply to your own startups.

In this episode, you will:

• Discover why Silicon Valley valuations often hurt founders more than they help
• Understand how AI startups now account for nearly half of all venture funding, and what that means for non-AI founders
• Learn how lean AI-driven teams are reshaping early-stage hiring, with Series A companies shrinking from 25 employees to just 15
• See why most founders misunderstand SAFE notes
• Explore why 70% of startup employees never exercise their equity
• Uncover the reasons behind why nearly 40% of startups lose a co-founder within seven years
• Get clarity on founder vesting, equity splits, and why a six-year vesting schedule may protect your company better than four
• Reframe your goals as a founder: why chasing “life-changing money” isn’t the right reason to start a company

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Featured voices:

• Peter Walker - Head of Insights at Carta
• Yaniv Bernstein - Co-host of The Startup Podcast
• Chris Saad - Co-host of The Startup Podcast
• Me (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great. I love building from zero to one.

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And if you please…

• TAKE THE SURVEY: It'll just take five minutes and I'll give $100 to the charity of choice for one lucky respondent
• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to grow
• Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at crafted.fm
• Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: [email protected] or DM me on LinkedIn
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon!

“So if you take any great startup and look backwards, you'll see that 90 percent of their growth came from like 10 percent of the stuff that they tried. So how do you find that 10 percent as quickly as possible?”

Matt Lerner has advised hundreds of startups on how to grow. Now, the CEO of SYSTM has written a book called Growth Levers and How to Find Them where he shares his approach. This episode of CRAFTED. is full of actionable advice on how you can grow your products and companies. Matt will tell us about the mindset shift founders need to make from thinking about their products to thinking about their customers needs. We'll talk about jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) style interviewing and why it's such a powerful approach, but also why at first Matt was put off by some of the overly academic language that often goes with jobs. And we'll talk about how you can get new customers to that aha moment as quickly as possible, so they stick with your product. Plus, lots of real talk about founders and the mistakes they make. 

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Featured voices:

• Matt Lerner (Founder and CEO of SYSTM; the book is Growth Levers and How to Find Them)
• Me (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great. I love building from zero to one.

---
And if you please…

• TAKE THE SURVEY: It'll just take five minutes and these surveys are actually really important for podcasters. 
• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to grow
• Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at crafted.fm
• Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: [email protected] or DM me on LinkedIn
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon

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Key Moments:

• (02:10) - 90 percent of growth comes 10 percent of the stuff you try
• (03:43) - Over-thinkers, under-thinkers, and delegators: the 3 types of founders and the mistakes they make
• (07:30) - Why the pace of learning is so important
• (09:41) - Great examples of companies that learn quickly
• (10:42) - The “locksmith moment” and why you need to find yours
• (12:35) - Jobs-to-be-Done style interviewing and why it’s so effective
• (13:57) - How to do a JTBD interview
• (15:05) - The mindset shift founders need to make from thinking about their product to thinking about the customers’ needs – and why it’s so hard for them to do so
• (21:40) - Growth Sprints and how to set them up for success
• (25:23) - Retention and customer activation: still (!) overlooked by most and why it’s so critical
• (29:16) - Matt writes a blog post on the spot about how working at an oil refinery taught him about startups
• (31:52) - Writing a book is not an agile process! And the fantastic reception for Growth Levers

** I'd be so grateful if you'd take five minutes and answer our annual survey. It'll help me make the show better for you!  **

Hey folks, it's Thanksgiving weekend here in the US and it's the time of year when we think about what we're grateful for, so today I'm re-sharing some words from perhaps the most grateful person I've ever had on the show.

Kelsey Hightower is a legendary developer. And he has an incredible story. He went from sleeping in his car to becoming a pioneer in the Kubernetes world, a distinguished engineer at Google, and then... he retired. At the age of 42. Because he wanted to have more impact on the world than he thought he could have by advancing up the career ladder.

So here are 15 minutes of my original interview with him, because some of the things he said — not about tech, but about humanity, gratitude, and prioritizing what matters — have really stuck with me.

Here’s the full interview, originally released in July 2024. We cover a lot, including how he became so good at live demos, why emotion is the key to great software — and storytelling — and how it’s those “boring innovations” and mindset shifts you need to make as a technologist that will take you from “hello, world” to “hello, revenue.”
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Featured voices:

• Kelsey Hightower: "Retired, not tired" former distinguished engineer at Google and Kubernetes Pioneer
• Me (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great. I love building from zero to one.

---
And if you please…

• TAKE THE SURVEY: It'll just take five minutes and these surveys are actually really important for podcasters. 
• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to grow
• Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at crafted.fm
• Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: [email protected] or DM me on LinkedIn
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon

In this special live Web Summit edition from Lisbon, roboticist, investor, and founder Chris Coomes shares how and why he built X1 Pipeline, an AI platform that evaluates startups the way he would — only much, much faster. It's something he wishes he had when looking for early stage robotics startups while at Google and Amazon. 

We also talk about the strange humanoid robots wandering the convention hall at Web Summit, why "agents" is a vastly overused word and why (his take) most of the agent startups he saw at the conference won't be around next year. Plus, why plugging things in is hard — and why (my take) that's a good thing, because it means we humans will still have jobs (as plumbers and electricians) in the future. 

Enjoy this fun episode, recorded live from the "Croissant Studio" on the floor at Web Summit in Lisbon. 

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Featured voices:

• Chris Coomes — Founder of X1 Pipeline
• Me (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great. I love building from zero to one.

And if you please…

• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to grow
• Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at https://crafted.fm/
• Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: [email protected] or DM me on LinkedIn
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon!

In this special live Web Summit edition from Lisbon, I sit down with Tom Haworth, founder of B13.ai, to talk about why “good enough” AI might actually be one of the most dangerous places we can get stuck.

And you’ll hear Tom say it’s time for the leaders of vibe coding platforms (e.g. Lovable, Replit, Cursor) to acknowledge that they’re great when you need to “demo not memo”, but not great (today and maybe ever) at delivering production-grade, secure code. 

We also make a few detours as we detail a ridiculous week in Lisbon, including:

• How (shocker!) 90% of the conference was about AI
• Why “good enough” AI is not a good place to be
• Whether we’ll graduate to great AI
• AI’s ROI now and in the future
• Why it’s still iffy whether AI agents they can be trusted to accomplish complex jobs
• Robots wander Web Summit, do the Macarena, fall down
• How tennis great Maria Sharapova uses (IBM’s) AI 
• How the presumptuous Web Summit’s app prominently suggests we all message Maria… (as if!) 
• Visa wants to help creators monetize (yay! it me!), using Web3 technologies (yes, they said “Web3”; no, I was not expecting to hear a non-ironic use of that phrase)
• Why self-driving cars are the best robots — and coming soon to more of Europe
• How much Web Summit pampers (and corrupts) the media: I was like a stuffed goose. Hurray for Portuguese custard and other delicacies!
• How even the beer at Web Summit was high tech

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Featured voices:

• Tom Haworth: Founder of B13.ai, a software consultancy that "empowers non-technical innovators and organizations to build with confidence, delivering market-ready solutions that we design, launch and run."
• Me (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great. I love building from zero to one.

---
And if you please…

• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to grow
• Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at crafted.fm
• Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: [email protected] or DM me on LinkedIn
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon!

 Hey everyone. I've gotten so much interesting feedback on last week's Halloween episode featuring the anonymous CTO saying spooky things about AI and coding agents that I thought I'd share a quick solo voice memo style episode with you. The feedback ranges from people saying he's spot on about the insidious problems that AI coding agents create while others saying "he's holding it wrong." In other words, he's not using AI properly. Listen to this short episode and you'll also hear reaction to his claim that "adversarial AI" is not really a thing and why context and data are so critical.

And please please please: take five minutes and complete our annual survey. I have big plans for the show and some new things I'm working on. So I really want to hear from you. And for one lucky survey taker, I will make a $100 donation to the charity of your choice.

Here's the survey. Again: it takes just five minutes and these surveys are actually really important to podcasters and sponsors. Thanks so much!

And go to crafted.fm to get the newsletter and see all past episodes, including the Halloween Special with the Anonymous CTO on Spooky AI Things (listen to this first before listening to today's episode)

AI coding assistants promise to write your code, speed up your sprint, and maybe even make engineers obsolete. But what if the people building with them every day see something very different?

In this special Halloween edition of CRAFTED. — which also marks the show’s third anniversary! — a masked CTO shares what he can’t say publicly: that these tools are powerful, but insidious. In his view, coding assistants are great for auto-complete, but they can’t do what a human engineer does. He says they’re terrible at starting from scratch and will often suggest code that “works in vacuum”, but not in context. And because AI can write so much code, so quickly, it’s hard to catch errors. In short, he sees an increase in short term velocity, at the expense of increased defects and an increasing dependency on systems that are untrustworthy. 

I want to emphasize that this episode features the experience of one very experienced person. There are obviously others who disagree, who say AI coding agents are incredible, so long as they’re managed well. 

However, there are also an increasing number of people questioning the sustainability of coding agents — they're incredibly expensive to run — and also how good they are in the first place.

For example Andrej Karpathy, the guy who literally coined the phrase "vibe coding" and was early at OpenAI and Tesla, just said publicly on Dwarkesh Podcast that the path to AI agents is going to be a lot slower than people in the industry think it will be. He said coding agents are "not that good at writing code that's never been written before" and that there is too much hype right now about where AI really is, with people in the industry, quote "trying to pretend like this is amazing, when it's not." 

And he said: "My Claude Code or Codex still feels like this elementary-grade student." 

Today's guest agrees with Karpathy on a lot of this. Our guest has worked at startups, scale-ups, and big tech companies you've definitely heard of and today he's at a very AI-forward company and using AI coding tools every day. 

Enjoy this special episode of CRAFTED.! 

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And pretty please...!

• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is how podcasts grow!
• Subscribe to the newsletter at https://www.crafted.fm
• Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your feedback on this and other episodes. DM me on LinkedIn or contact me email, via https://www.crafted.fm
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Let’s talk!
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to the show in 2026!

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Key Quotes

• 03:16 The myth of AI replacement: “The idea that AI can actually supplant a software engineer in their current role is basically nonsense.”
• 06:29 Why AI struggles without human input: “If you remove the human engineer from the equation, there’s no place to start from. The AI does not do well when you’re starting from scratch because it doesn’t have the real-world context or the continuous learning required to make that system better.”
• 12:21: The illusion of speed: “Coding assistants help you generate code very quickly. There’s an illusion that your velocity increases. What actually happens is you’re just shipping more bugs to production.”
• 13:30 More code than humans can review: “AI generates so much code that no human can keep that context in their head and review it in a meaningful way. At some point you just have to trust — but who are you trusting? You’re trusting the AI, and the AI cannot be trusted.”
• 14:02 AI & Junior Engineer Hiring: “The narrative that hiring trends have anything to do with AI is absurd. It’s not that AI is replacing junior engineers — it’s that companies are running lean and don’t have the bandwidth to train them.”
• 15:42: Where the AI Bulls and Bears Differ: “Whereas we see flawed systems that aren't ready for primetime [...] they view this as ‘oh, that's, that's insignificant. They will get better almost immediately. It's not a big deal.’ But we've been repeating this cycle for years at this point.”
• 19:50 Where AI Excels: “Where review and revise are part of the process already, that's a really good place for generative AI because you already have a human in the loop.”
• 21:02: What builders need to unlearn “To the extent that people think these things are thinking or reasoning or on any path to AGI at all — they should discard that. These models don’t think. They’re very sophisticated pattern-matching machines, and that’s really it.”

Here’s a jaunty debrief from PopTech, a notoriously hard conference to describe, that always features obscenely talented entrepreneurs and changemakers.

In this episode, Kwaku Aning, Sarah Rose Siskind, and I share some of the great stories and great vibes from this year's conference, including:

• FetusGPT, Sarah’s madcap experiment to train an AI on everything her soon-to-be-born baby is hearing from inside the womb
• Why Colossal Biosciences is de-extincting the dire wolf and other “charismatic animals” (dodos and woolly mammoths are in the works) — and why de-extinction is an important goal that will help us solve lots of other problems along the way
• “Shade-as-a-Service”, a new idea from climate champion, farmer, and entrepreneur Eben Bayer, the founder of MyForest Foods (maker of MyBacon, the top-selling non-meat bacon). The idea is to launch giant parasols into the atmosphere to cool the Earth below.
• Why Tibet and Taiwan are so key to the tech industry (not to mention global stability); Tibetan PM-in-Exile Lobsang Sangay was a speaker.
• How to make progress on what matters most to you, featuring a prioritization exercise from Deep Future inventor and investor Pablos Holman

Featured Voices:

• Sarah Rose Siskind, science and comedy writer and the founder of Hello SciCom, a STEM communications agency
• Kwaku Aning, professional connector, founder/principal of RetroFuturism Consulting
• Dan Blumberg (me!), host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great. I love building from zero to one.

And Pretty Please... 

• Share with a friend! Word of mouth is how podcasts grow!
• Subscribe to the newsletter at crafted.fm
• Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: [email protected] or DM me on LinkedIn
• Sponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Let's talk! 
• Get psyched!… There are some big updates to the show in 2026!