“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.

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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
• (21:14) - Growth Sprints and how to set them up for success
• (24:57) - Retention and customer activation: still (!) overlooked by most and why it’s so critical
• (28:50) - Matt writes a blog post on the spot about how working at an oil refinery taught him about startups
• (31:26) - 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!

---
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!

A quick debrief from Climate Week / UN General Assembly week, including: 

• How seemingly normal everything felt, in spite of [...you know...] everything
• AI will destroy the climate?
• AI will solve climate change? 
• AI will kill us all? (If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies)
• A call for AI Red Lines
• The UN takes action on AI
• A plea to “stay in the game” (even though it's hard)

Joining me from New York are: 

• Kwaku Aning, creates strategic partnerships that drive meaningful change
• Lendy Krantz, collaboration strategist, helps companies reimagine their operations in physical and virtual environments

And you can join all three of us (hi, I’m your host Dan Blumberg!) from October 7-9th at PopTech in Washington DC. It’s a great conference and I’ll be interviewing many of the technologists and futurists who will be on stage for future episodes of the podcast. If you’d like a discount code, DM me on LinkedIn or email me: [email protected] 

What’s up with “the MIT study” that claims 95% of all AI pilots fail? Did anyone actually read it beyond the headline? (Dan did—and he has thoughts.)

Also: the good, the bad, and the quietly dystopian side of putting AI in kids’ classrooms.

And… are robots really the thing Melania should be worrying about?

That’s just some of what Kwaku Aning, return guest and founder of Retrofuturism, and I get into on this very lively, very bubbly, and very uncrafted edition of CRAFTED.

More new episodes—and a major update to the show—are coming soon. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app and get the newsletter at crafted.fm

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Come hang with us at PopTech

Come hang with us and see live recordings of CRAFTED., at PopTech!

PopTech is a “curator of what’s next” and this will be my third time at the conference. I keep going back because I get new ideas, new inspiration, and really get to know the attendees and speakers. This year’s talk’s include “A possibilist’s guide to the future”, “AI: In service to human(ity),” “Vibe coding for human rights” and more.

To see the full list of talks and speakers, see PopTech.org and if you’ve never been before and would like a discount, DM me on LinkedIn or email me: [email protected]

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Referenced in this episode:

• MIT study on AI profits rattles tech investors (Axios)
• Full 26-page MIT study (Scribd)
• AI Is a Money Trap (Ed Zitron)
• The Fever Dream of Imminent Superintelligence Is Finally Breaking (Gary Marcus in the NYTimes)
• How Chatbots and AI Are Already Transforming Kids’ Classrooms (Bloomberg)
• Alpha School – the “AI-Powered Private School”
• Melania Trump Has a Warning for Humanity: ‘The Robots Are Here’ (NYTimes)

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Like this episode?
You’ll also like my conversation with Khan Academy’s Chief Product & Learning Officer on what happens when AI becomes your tutor—and what it means for the future of learning.

 Software is eating the world, right? We've all heard this phrase by now, but inventor and investor Pablos Holman has something important to add: “The world can't eat software.”

That’s why Pablos focuses on “deep tech”, i.e. how to invent new solutions to real world problems like energy, water, waste, construction, and sanitation. Pablos says we’re still mostly using version 1.0 technology for these fundamental systems, but recent advances, including AI and the ability to prototype and test in software, are enabling incredible innovation in hardware.

Pablos has worked with Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and more. He's kind of a mad scientist and in this episode we’ll discuss things that sound like science fiction, but that Pablos says are coming soon, such as solar panels in outer space that can beam clean energy down to earth, autonomous cargo ships blown by the wind across the ocean, and tiny nuclear reactors buried a mile underground that power the world above. 

At Deep Future, Pablos is on a mission to solve the world's biggest problems, and he's hoping more people will make the jump that he did from software to hardware and into deep tech, because, as he says, “ all the people who've been building software their entire career, those are the ones who are going to save the world.”

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Chapters

02:25 Deep tech and why it’s so important

05:56 How Pablos became an inventor

07:44 Getting Blue Origin off the ground

11:35 Running an invention lab at Intellectual Ventures

13:40 Why solar panels in space will soon power Earth

16:46 Why all problems are energy problems

21:33 Better nuclear reactors are coming

28:25 How rapid iteration in software enables better hardware

31:35 An appeal to software people to get into deep tech — and save the world

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Links:

• Deep Future book, podcast, and firm: deepfuture.tech
• PopTech conference: poptech.org (if you're new to PopTech and would like a discount, email me or DM me on LinkedIn)
• Sign up for the CRAFTED. newsletter: crafted.fm
• Learn more about how Modern Product Minds can help you build the future: modernproductminds.com
• Email me: [email protected]

As AI models grow larger and more powerful, they promise incredible capabilities — but at what cost?

Karen Hao is an AI journalist and her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, is a New York Times bestseller.

We discuss whether the largest AI models are worth their hefty footprint: They consume massive amounts of electricity and water and Karen argues that smaller models better balance cost vs. benefit.

Karen, who has reported for The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and the Wall Street Journal, will also provide a view of AI from outside — far outside — Silicon Valley. She’s reported on AI from across the Global South and says many there feel that AI is a new form of colonialism.

We’ll hear about the fight over data centers in Chile, how New Zealand’s Maori people are using AI to preserve their indigenous language, and why it’s a problem that AI can speak any language, but can only really be policed in a few.

(Our interview was first broadcast in October, while Karen was still writing the book, so we do not discuss her deeply sourced reporting from inside OpenAI.)

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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