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:
Robbie and Chuck talk with Dan Blumberg about his journey from radio producer to product manager and podcaster. They explore the art of building great software, podcasting essentials, and the changing landscape of podcast platforms. Plus, Dan shares his kayaking adventures and insights on balancing authenticity and growth.And if you please…
For more on Whiskey Web and Whatnot...
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:
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And if you please…
“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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** 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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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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And if you please…
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:
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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...!
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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:
Featured Voices:
And Pretty Please...
A quick debrief from Climate Week / UN General Assembly week, including:
Joining me from New York are:
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: dan@modernproductminds.com
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: dan@modernproductminds.com
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Referenced in this episode:
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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:
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
AI-generated voices aren’t just realistic — they’re changing how brands, creators, and agencies bring ideas to life. In this episode, Wondercraft co-founder Oskar Serrander demonstrates how their “Canva for audio” is unlocking rapid prototyping for high-quality audio ads, content, and storytelling.
You’ll learn:
Oskar also shares his take on where generative AI is heading, why sameness is the enemy of brand, and what this all means for the next generation of creators.
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Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter 👉 crafted.fm
See how Dan can help you discover, prototype, and launch better products 👉 modernproductminds.com
Kevin Smith is building a totally new kind of podcast app.
Snipd is an AI-native podcast app and building it required a few mindset shifts.
First, what even is a podcast? The way Kevin sees it, podcasts are knowledge. So where most podcast players are, as Kevin calls them, "repurposed music players", Snipd is designed to help you learn. As people listen to episodes, they, or an AI, can save “snips” or interesting moments that they want to remember or share. And the app will also help you review what you've heard, so it reinforces what you've learned.
A second mindset shift is how Kevin had to retrain his engineering brain to build with generative AI. He no longer thinks in if-then-else statements. Rather, he asks himself: How would an intern do it? And not just one intern, but infinite interns…
I learned a ton from the way Kevin thinks and builds, and you will too.
Plus, we discuss the future of podcasting, which looks pretty… weird. You'll talk back to your podcasts, hosts may be synthetic, and shows may not even be designed (at least initially) for human ears.
Chapters:
CRAFTED. listeners can try Snipd, and get a free month of the premium version, here.
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Subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter 👉 crafted.fm
See how Dan and Modern Product Minds can help you build better products and level up your product teams.
What is a good money habit in 2025? And how do you actually help someone build one—without boring them, shaming them, or losing them in the first five seconds?
Chief Product Officer Tim Hong shares how MoneyLion designs for emotion and creates content and products that inspire people to take action.
MoneyLion is a personal finance platform used by millions of mostly younger Americans who are just getting started with their money, so, as Tim says: “It's actually less about bad habits that we fight. It's about having no habits.”
Tim also shares how AI could create a truly personalized (1 of 1) financial advisor, why most financial apps are “like going to the DMV”, and how things like open banking and embedded finance can change that…
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Chapters:
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Looking for your next episode? Here’s another fintech one you might enjoy:
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For all CRAFTED. episodes and to subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter 👉crafted.fm
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Oh, and see how Dan and Modern Product Minds can help you build better products.
Fun news! The Webby Awards have honored CRAFTED. for the third year in a row as a top tech podcast. Thank you — yes, you! — for listening!
This episode features the highlight reel we gave the Webbys. It features great moments from 2024 episodes, including (listed in the order mentioned):
The full show archive is at crafted.fm, where I hope you'll also subscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter.
And please share CRAFTED. with a friend. Just one. Text them right now!
Thanks... and onward!
On a rooftop at SXSW, fellow startup advisor and podcaster Rob Kenedi joins me as we discuss why:
Enjoy this uncrafted CRAFTED.!
And if you enjoy this more casual format, please share your feedback. DM me on LinkedIn or email me: dan@modernproductminds.com
Where to find Rob:
More CRAFTED.:
Linda Liukas is a programmer, children’s book author, and the creator of Hello Ruby, a whimsical series that teaches computing concepts through stories and play. She’s also the force behind a one-of-a-kind playground in Helsinki—designed to teach kids how computers work without them ever touching a screen.
In this episode, Linda shares why, especially with the rise of AI and code-writing copilots, we need to rethink the way we teach tech.
Linda, a.k.a. the “Mary Poppins of Computing”, is on a mission to bring more whimsy, creativity, and fearlessness to kids and grown-ups alike. Enjoy this very fun episode!
You’ll learn:
Chapters
Links & Resources
More on Dan and CRAFTED.
Educator, innovator, super-connector, and conference champion Kwaku Aning and I have coffee and discuss a few things that stuck us at SXSW, including:
Where to find Kwaku:
Where to find Dan and get more CRAFTED.: