Getting2Alpha

In this episode, Descript CEO Laura Burkhauser talks about what it means to build a human-forward AI video company in a world flooded with synthetic content. Laura came to Descript by an unlikely path — German literature, then product management at companies like Salesforce — and became CEO because she believed in what Descript was building: tools that keep the story in human hands while AI handles everything underneath.Hear about why Descript is investing heavily in AI but not aiming to be the best at AI avatars or fully generated content. How Laura thinks about the 'simplifier' role of a CEO. What she means by three layers of AI video. How business teams have become Descript's fastest-growing audience. And why getting your team AI-native isn't something you can mandate — you have to engineer the conditions for each person's own conversion moment. Finally, Laura also gives her candid take on the Beta version of the Descript API: they don't have a killer use case yet, and they're actively inviting partners to help find one.Laura Burkhauser on LinkedInDescript

Chelsea Howe is the Chief Product Officer at Sunblink, the studio behind the hit cozy life sim Hello Kitty Island Adventure. With deep experience in licensed games, live ops, & design leadership, she brings a sharp, systems-driven lens to how teams build, scale, & innovate.Listen as Chelsea shares how Sunlink is exploring AI in game development, what works & what absolutely falls apart, why game jams are secret engines of team learning, & how emerging trends from China may reshape the future of game design.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chelseahowe/Sunblink: https://www.sunblink.com/

Lisha Li is the founder of Rosebud AI, a groundbreaking platform that makes game creation accessible to anyone. With roots in pure math & AI research, she’s transformed cutting-edge technology into creative tools that empower people to build, remix & share games in entirely new ways.Listen as we explore Lisha’s journey from academia & venture capital to launching Rosebud AI, & how she’s reimagining game design as a collaborative, ever-evolving ecosystem.Rosebud AILinkedin

Hansohl Kim is an engineer at Anthropic, where he focuses on reinforcement learning & AI safety for models like Claude. With experience spanning computer science, biotech, & machine learning, he brings a unique perspective to the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence.Listen as Hansohl unpacks the challenges of alignment, the importance of guardrails, & what it takes to design AI systems we can truly trust.RELATED LINKS:🌐 Anthropic – https://www.anthropic.com💼 Hansohl Kim on LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/hansohl

Hugo Alves is the co-founder of Synthetic Users, a startup helping teams accelerate product development with AI-powered user feedback. What began as a bold idea evolved through iteration & a surprising pivot on the way to product-market fit.In this conversation, we explore where synthetic users shine—and where they fall short. You’ll hear Hugo’s lessons on using AI to simulate real users, plus a live demo of Synthetic Users in action.Join me as we dive into Hugo’s insights on building better products, faster—with the help of synthetic users.🌐 Synthetic Users – https://www.syntheticusers.com💼 Hugo Alves on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugomanuelalves

Amy Bucher is a leading voice in behavioral science & the author of Engaged, with a passion for designing systems that help people thrive—especially in health & wellness.Join us as we dive into Amy’s insights on what really drives behavior change, why personalization matters, & how her work at Lirio is bringing customized healthcare nudges to life.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amybucher/Engaged: https://amzn.to/4moF6ZaLirio: https://www.lirio.com/

Nate Bosshard is a visionary brand builder and entrepreneur who’s helped shape iconic companies like Burton, Tonal, and hims & hers through a rare blend of taste, intuition, and strategic insight.Join us as we explore Nate’s perspective on what makes a brand truly resonate, from crafting emotional worlds to resisting the pull of algorithmic influence. He shares hard-earned lessons on launching category-defining products, building brands that move culture, & why taste might just be your most valuable asset.

Vicki Tan is a seasoned product designer whose work spans Lyft, Headspace, & Pinterest. With a background in behavioral psychology, she brings a unique lens to decision-making and design.Join us as we explore Vicki’s journey, how she turned curiosity into a powerful creative tool, & why her new book "Ask This Book a Question" reimagines cognitive bias as a pathway to insight.

Jason Hreha is a leading expert in behavioral science & a serial entrepreneur who has helped shape the way we understand habit-building and human behavior.Join us as we catch up with Jason on what really matters when it comes to building lasting habits. From his groundbreaking work in applied behavioral science to launching & scaling multiple businesses, Jason shares key insights on designing behavior-driven products, cutting through the noise of self-improvement trends, and focusing on what truly works.👉 Full video podcast available here: https://youtu.be/f4Gn46oQDPA

Andy Budd is a designer, entrepreneur, and investor making waves with his new book, The Growth Equation. With a background in UX design, web standards, and startup advising, Andy now helps founders navigate the complex world of venture funding and product growth.Listen as we explore Andy’s journey from building one of the first UX agencies in the UK to shaping the next generation of startups at Seedcamp. He shares invaluable insights on avoiding the Field of Dreams fallacy, mastering go-to-market strategies, and why a great product isn’t enough—you need to know how to sell it.

Nana Janashia is a pioneering force in DevOps education and founder of TechWorld with Nana, a seven-figure training powerhouse that's transformed how people learn DevOps engineering.Listen as we explore Nana's remarkable path from teaching English in Georgia to building a global tech education platform with over 1 million YouTube subscribers. She shares invaluable insights on structuring complex technical content, maintaining laser-sharp focus in business, and the critical importance of deeply understanding your customers.

Mark Jacobstein is a renowned figure in the gaming and tech universe, with three decades of experience building and leading companies at the forefront of new technologies.Having transitioned from a successful career as a Game Executive to becoming a Venture Builder, Mark offers a unique perspective on innovation and leadership. Listen as we explore his journey from the gaming world to venture building and the lessons he's learned along the way.

Ryan Douglas is the co-founder of DeepWell DTx, a digital therapeutics venture lab dedicated to creating immersive experiences that address mental health challenges.Recently, DeepWell DTx achieved a major milestone: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared five mental health apps, including DeepWell's software development kit (SDK). This marks the first time digital therapeutics have been approved for medical use, paving the way for games to be reimbursed through medical insurance.

Gina Pell, a digital media pioneer, runs an exclusive Facebook group with 27K members and a private professional women's network featuring world-class leaders, from early-stage entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 executives.Gina has built companies, audiences, and communities. She observes a significant shift happening online that will impact us all. Discover why she believes social media is transforming into something the world truly needs, especially now.The What Alliance: https://www.thewhatalliance.co/What Women: http://thewhatlist.com/

Julie Dirksen is an author and learning strategy consultant, renowned for her expertise in creating impactful learning solutions. She wrote the bestselling book Design For How People Learn, and her latest release, Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change, is gaining significant attention.Julie’s diverse clientele includes Fortune 500 companies, international NGOs, tech startups, and research initiatives.Julie blends behavioral science with innovative learning design to craft transformative educational experiences, and her insights are reshaping learning strategies across various sectors.

Mike Maples is a pioneering Silicon Valley investor who founded Floodgate Ventures in 2005, introducing the concept of seed investing. He achieved major successes with early investments in Twitter, Twitch, and Lyft.His curiosity about what it takes to create a world-changing startup led him to explore how revolutionary ideas often appear crazy at first. This journey inspired his new book, "Pattern Breakers," where he delves into the dynamics of breakthrough startups shaping the future.

Jillian Ahrens is the CPO at Realized Care, a digital therapeutics company specializing in VR solutions. She was formerly Associate Director of Product R&D at Pear Therapeutics, where she led a project developing a CBT-based AI chatbot.Discover what Jillian learned at Pear about patient engagement with AI chatbots, and how she's taking those lessons into her cutting-edge work delivering digital therapeutics for chronic pain.

Ryan Douglas is the co-founder of DeepWell DTx, a digital therapeutics Venture Lab focused on creating immersive experiences that address mental health concerns.Ryan has created numerous medical devices, along with several profitable startups. He has deep experience with the regulatory landscape for digital therapeutics, and is pushing to get digital therapeutics accepted by the medical community.Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/xuXe-HtmBMk

Long before World of Warcraft, there was Ultima Online, the first MMO. How did this highly innovative & influential game come to be? And what can we learn from its successes and failures? Starr Long is a game designer and producer who directed the team that built Ultima Online, the first popular Massively Multiplayer Online game. In this in-depth interview, you'll learn how a theater major became a game designer, how Ultima IV blew player's minds, and the shocking things players did early the development of Ultima Online.Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/nzlNq_yiO2Y

Samuel Hulick, a renowned UX consultant and leading authority in user onboarding, operates the well-known website useronboard.com. Through this platform, he expertly deconstructs the initial experiences of popular apps and services, showcasing his insights into effective user onboarding processes.Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/YFFw5u_Aq-s

Jason Hreha is a behavioral scientist, formerly Global Head of Behavioral Sciences at Walmart, who uses his knowledge of human behavior to build better products. With a decade of applying behavioral science to tech challenges, he co-founded Walmart's Behavioral Science Team and pioneered Behavioral Strategy as an interdisciplinary approach. He studied human biology and neuroscience at Stanford University, and is currently co-founder and CEO of Persona, the Startup Assistant company.

Alfie Kohn is an American author and lecturer in education, parenting, and human behavior. The author of fourteen books and hundreds of articles, he is a proponent of progressive education and a strong critic of competition and rewards. Kohn has been described by Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.”Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/Jqcw_0v8ooE

Adrian Hon is an English writer and game designer, known for his expertise in alternate reality games and transmedia storytelling. As the CEO of Six to Start, he created the bestselling fitness game "Zombies, Run!" and authored books like "You've Been Played" (2022) and "A History of the Future in 100 Objects" (2020). He studied neuroscience at Cambridge, UCSD, and Oxford, and has spoken at TED, Long Now Foundation, GoogleX, and Disney Imagineering.Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/n8Nm7YEwfCI

Robin Allenson is a serial entrepreneur who studied AI at University of Edinburgh in the early 90s, and went on to found a series of AI-powered ventures. His current venture Similar.ai uses AI to automate the important and often laborious process of optimizing web sites for SEO. Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/H6P746iG2VM

Douglas Hofstadter is a professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. His research into cognitive science includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. His AI interests explore the subtlest and most slippery aspects of human intelligence, as embodied in deceptively deep analogy problems like ABC is to ABD as XYZ is to what?Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/R6e08RnJyxo

Dr. Julie Gurner is an executive performance coach with a Doctorate in Psychology. She has coached top-percentile executives, talent, and teams operating in fast-paced, competitive environments for over ten years, helping her clients unlock peak performance. She publishes the Ultra Successful newsletter on Substack.Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/YGFEerM6lwM

Joakim Achrén, “the gaming startup guy”, is a games investor, and founder of Elite Game Developers, which provides advice for game founders. He co-founded Next Games (which was acquired by Netflix), and worked as Director of Analytics at Supercell.Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/VEd3uedgY7g

Pavel Samsonov is a design architect and UX Practice Lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS) based in New York City. With a background in graphic design and a passion for human-computer interaction, Pavel has spent the last three years at AWS helping large companies adopt cloud computing and build innovative products using design methods. His professional accomplishments include being named a top UX designer by prominent industry publications, and his work has been featured in major design exhibitions and conferences worldwide. In addition to his work at AWS, Pavel is also a contributor to UX Collective, a prominent online publication in the design community.Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/XmCY_oSmL4U

Kevin Kelly is a writer, futurist, and Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His books include The Inevitable, about future trends, and What Technology Wants, a theory of technology. He is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/wXML1wXlVmI

Celia Hodent, a Game UX Strategist with a PhD in Psychology, has dedicated 15 years of her career to applying user experience (UX) and cognitive science in product development, particularly in the realm of video games. Her impressive portfolio includes her role as Director of UX at Epic Games for Fortnite, as well as work on well-known franchises such as Star Wars: 1313 at LucasArts and Rainbow 6 at Ubisoft. Hodent has shared her expertise with the world in her book, The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX can Impact Video Game Design.Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/xVHNBxTiiXo

Vinayak Joglekar is head of India Operations and Chief Technology Officer at Excellarate, with more than three decades of professional software development and delivery experience. Joglekar earned his mechanical engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Management and mentors bright minds in software development and product delivery.

Osama Dorias is a Lead Content Designer at Blizzard Entertainment. In the past, he’s worked at Unity, Warner Brothers, Gameloft, GEE Media, Ubisoft, and Minority Media. He also teaches game design at Dawson College and loves to empower people in expressing themselves through game-making, especially marginalized people and causes.

Steve Meretzky is an American video game developer best known for creating Infocom games in the early 1980s, including collaborating with author Douglas Adams on the hit interactive fiction version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the comically titled Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Later, he created the Spellcasting trilogy, the flagship adventure series of Legend Entertainment. His keen wit, prose, and coding skill made him one of the first interactive fiction writers admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America. He has been involved in almost every aspect of casual game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design.

Hilmar Pétursson is CEO of CCP Games in Iceland, makers of the long-running space battle game EVE Online. Billed as the world’s largest living work of science fiction, EVE has a highly developed internal economy and deep social structure that makes it an ideal testbed for how the coming Metaverse could work.

Brendan Greene, better known as PlayerUnknown is a video game developer best known for creating PUBG: Battlegrounds. In 2019 he left active development on the game to form PUBG Special Projects and PlayerUnknown Productions, where he is developing an ambitious virtual world far larger than the one in PUBG.

Entrepreneur and angel investor, Rei Wang is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at The Grand, a group coaching platform to help people navigate transitions at the intersection of work and life. Before The Grand she served as CEO of Dorm Room Fund  at First Round Capital where she nurtured a community of 250+ startups, and counseled entrepreneurs on topics ranging from fundraising to management. For her leadership growing Dorm Room Fund from an experiment into the world’s premiere university-focused venture fund, she received the Forbes 30 under 30 award in venture capital.

Philip Rosedale is the founder of Linden Lab, which launched the popular virtual world Second Life in 2003. His goal has always been to build a viable model for a virtual economy or virtual society, not just an entertainment platform. Before Second Life he served as CTO at RealNetworks, where he wrote some of the earliest algorithms to compress video for transmission across the internet. In 2013 he founded High Fidelity, which builds a spatial audio for group chat. He is currently involved with both Second Life and High Fidelity, and advises on Metaverse efforts.

Mitch Zamara is Lead Product Designer on Million on Mars: Land Rush! He has over a decade of experience as a game designer working in the free-to-play social/mobile game space at Zynga and other companies. He specializes in designing game economies.

Gabby Dizon is cofounder of Yield Guild Games, an organization that helps its members make money playing blockchain-based play-to-earn games. As a long-time game developer and player, Gabby had long dreamed of a game guild owned by its members. 

Garry Tan is a software engineer turned entrepreneur turned investor. On his popular YouTube channel he offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. He is intensely aware of the privileged position he is in as a tech-savvy investor in Silicon Valley, and is eager to share his knowledge with the next generation.

Raph Koster is an entrepreneur, game designer, and author of a Theory of Fun for Game Design. He is currently CEO of playable worlds. He was Lead Designer on pioneering MMO Ultima Online, and Creative Director of Star Wars Galaxies. He founded Metaplace in 2006, which was acquired by the social gaming company Playdom.

Amy Bucher is Chief behavioral officer at the digital health company Lirio. She is the author of Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change, and has a Ph.D. in Psychology from University of Michigan.

John Linden is CEO of Mythical Games, creators of the pioneering NFT collectible game Blanko’s Block Party. John has a deep background in gaming, leading AAA titles like Call of Duty, and helping develop the Millenium Falcon ride at Disneyland.

Mark Pincus is a serial entrepreneur and investor who founded the early social media company Tribe Networks, and the mobile social gaming company Zynga. More recently he co-founded investment firm Reinvent Capital in 2018.

Chris Spiek is Chief Product Officer at Autobooks. Chris co-founded the Product Design Consultancy, the Re-Wired Group in 2010 with jobs-to-be-done expert Bob Moesta, and co-authored The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook with Bob Moesta.

Chris Heatherly is head of Games & Engagement at Recur, a pioneering NFT platform. A creative executive who works at the intersection of games and entertainment, Chris oversaw hit games based on IP from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars, when he was an exec at Disney and NBCUniversal

Barry O'Reilly is a business strategist and author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise. He’s worked with top executives at Wells Fargo, American Airlines and Walmart to cut through complexity and make smart decisions in a changing world. In doing this work, Barry has learned that most executives resist unlearning what they already know.Listen as Barry talks about the importance of questioning assumptions, and the power of incentive systems to shape human behavior.

I first learned about John Hagel in the late 1990s, when I was elbow-deep in community-building -- working as a systems designer & UX leader on Ultima Online and eBay. One of my clients gave me John’s book, Net Gain: Expanding markets through virtual communities. It blew my mind and inspired me as I was writing my first book, Community Building on the Web. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to get to know John better. He’s written many books since Net Gain exploded on the scene, and now runs the Center for the Edge at Deloitte, where he leads research efforts that reveal where business is headed next. Come hang out with us and discover what a leading business strategist  thinks about the future of work - and the impact of lost trust on community and marketplace dynamics. 

Schwark Satyavolu is a serial entrepreneur and early-stage  investor at Trinity Ventures. After founding and growing several innovative startups in the fintech space - a journey that included a stint as an executive at Mastercard - Schwark is now building up the fintech practice at Trinity.  His background as an entrepreneur makes him empathetic  to the realities of what startup life is life -- a great quality for an investor to have. I also loved hearing Schwark’s perspective on the future of crypto - because it  comes from such a deeply informed perspective. Listen in and find out how this  successful entrepreneur-turned-investor is shaping the next generation of fintech innovators. 

I first met Siqi Chen at a Lightspeed CEO dinner hosted by Jeremy Liew. We bonded over our mutual love of product design and fascination with customer engagement. Ever since, I’ve followed Siqi’s career from Zynga product lead to fast-pivoting startup CEO to VR executive. I love how Siqi’s ideas about vision and leadership keep evolving. This is a guy who’s always learning. Listen in and learn how this globally-minded entrepreneur is applying his hard-won innovation lessons to carving out a new category of location-based entertainment. Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/55kMlsfoEq8