Serial entrepreneur Shirish Nadkarni came to the U.S. as a teenager with $25 in his pocket. After graduating from Harvard Business School, he worked at Microsoft where he engineered the $400 million acquisition of Hotmail and launched MSN.com, the world’s leading web portal. Striking out on his own in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom, he founded TeamOn Systems, an early pioneer of mobile email that was later acquired by BlackBerry before becoming BlackBerry Internet Email servicing over...

Angelika Fuellemann is a designer who worked early on with BookSense.com, then got hired by Audible early on, so this is the early story of Audible. It’s funny… audio, streaming music, podcasts, audiobooks, it seems so obvious now, but it really is funny to look back and think about how off the wall this seamed before the smartphone. You mean books on tape will be a thing?  For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Josh Marshall is one of the key people who brought blogging into the realm of serious, award winning and respectable journalism. The story of his blog/publication, Talking Points Memo, or TPM is the story of blogging becoming legit and serious, but also the story of modern media over the last 20 years of digital disruption. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Is technology really rotting our brains, destroying our society... or is that what everyone has always worried about with every technological advance, going back to tv, or telephones, or even writing letters? The new book, Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter tries to look at this question from a historical perspective. Is it really different this time? But more importantly... to what degree has technological change impacted how we...

Well, as we say in this episode, he’ll always be known as the inventor of the hashtag, but Chris Messina has been central to so many things in tech over the last 20 years or so. Helped Mozilla launch Firefox. Founded BarCamp where so much Web 2.0 goodness happened and was launched. Cofounded the first co-working space in San Francisco. Helped Google try to grok social with Google+. Oh, and that hashtag business. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

I’ve said before I wish I could cover technology history beyond just North America, more… Well, Charles Miller has started a great podcast in Britain called Tech Business History. Charles used to report on the tech business as a BBC documentary producer. In the first series of his podcast, he’s exploring the dot com boom in the UK with some of the people he met when he was filming for the BBC back in 1999. It’s a fantastic show that I’ve fallen in love with, so what I want to do is play you...

Everyone knows Karen Wickre, because she’s one of those classic connectors. Once we finally got in touch, I wasn’t surprised to learn we knew about half a dozen of the same people though we had never remotely crossed paths. But Karen knows everyone because she’s popped up Zelig-like in a bunch of interesting places over the course of tech history over the last 30 years or so. Early tech journalism. Planet Out. Early Google employee. Early blogger. Early tweeter. Editorial Director at Twitter....

Kevin Scott is the current Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft. We talk about his entire career, how being an academic seemed to be his path before he transformed the ads system at Google. Then he revolutionized the entire advertising industry at AdMob; is credited by some people by saving LinkedIn from technical rot; and now, today, oversees Microsoft's efforts in AI, VR/AR all the future things. Fantastic conversation. Kevin's podcast is: Behind the Tech

Today we continue my efforts to preserve the history of the ISP industry. Today it feels like the Internet is simply all around us all the time, but there are amazing entrepreneurial stories about how that crucial infrastructure was laid. Today we talk to Sonic founder Dane Jasper, who can not only give us the history of the industry, but the present day as well, as Sonic is still a thriving and important independent ISP.

20 years ago, the acclaimed documentarian Doug Block released a landmark film, Home Page. Doug’s documentary accidentally chronicled the birth of blogging, featuring several people we’ve talked to on this very show, including Justin Hall. But the documentary also captured a moment in time, the web going mainstream, the beginnings of the dotcom bubble, the early days of Wired, Hotwired and Suck and also so many of the things I ask people about on here regularly. How people learned to live...

Dan Maccarone is a digital design veteran, websites, products, strategy. He's got some amazing stories about the dotcom bubble, about the aftermath, and the rise of Web 2.0. He shares some unique design lessons but also, the story of the birth of Hulu, which I don't think has really been covered anywhere before.

Part two of the WSJ's online adventures intersect with several other stories we've covered on here over the years.

We’ve had a couple of people come on here to discuss how the New York Times got online, but the spiritual yin to their yang is the Wall Street Journal and we haven’t done enough to explore their path to embracing the internet. It’s worth doing that because they embraced a different model from basically day one. Almost alone among the web media pioneers, the Journal went the subscription route. So, we’re going to talk to Rich Jaroslovksy, who headed the team that brought the Journal online, to...

It’s bothered me for a while that over the 5 years or so of this podcast, we haven’t focused very much on some corners of the history. For example… the legal side? Copyright law? Intellectual property law? How much have we talked about disruption and piracy and filesharing and all that stuff? So, I spoke to Richard Chapo, who has been doing Internet Law since the web went mainstream. We talk about the Napster era, we talk about how much of an influence the adult industry had on digital law,...

Part three of our epic conversation with Stephan Paternot. Here's what happens when you've been through the wringer. When you've been to the top of the rollercoaster and also down to the bottom. Here's how you take stock of your life, how you reinvent yourself, re-find you entrepreneurial spirit... I feel like there are so many lessons in these three episodes. Lessons for entrepreneurs today. Lesson for... I dunno. People in the crypto space? My thanks to Stephan Paternot for an insanely...

Ok, part 2 of the Stephan Paternot mega-episode right now. This is where we get into the meat of it, the good stuff, the whole crazy roller coaster ride of being the hottest startup of the dotcom era. And I was going to make this the last episode, but as I was editing this, I realized that after we get done with this story, Stephan talks a lot about what happens after... what happens after you've been on a crazy ride like this. How you have to reinvent yourself, and your life, and your...

I said in the book, I think TheGlobe.com was the quintessential dot-com company. We spoke to one of the cofounders previously, Todd Krizelman. Todd was great, but he was time constrained and he didn’t quite get as personal about the story as I would have hoped. Well, I finally got to talk to the other founder of TheGlobe, Stephan Paternot. And Stephan was… AMAZING. He shared the whole story, the whole wild ride, from a historical angle, from a business angle, from an entrepreneurial angle and...

David Schwartz is the Chief Technology Officer at Ripple, the company behind the cryptocurrency XRP. What is it like to start, build and build out a crypto startup? Is it different than the web and internet startups that we’ve covered on this show for years? What is Ripple? How is it unique in the crypto ecosystem? What is it trying to do for the world? All of this… and yes, why is crypto so tribal… and yes… where is the crypto space even at in this moment in time (December 9th, 2018, btw,...

Ken Norton is a partner at GV, Alphabets venture capital arm, but before that, he was a product manager at Google, where he led the development of products like Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Mobile Maps. But he was also early at JotSpot which became Google sites, was a product manager at Yahoo, was an early employee at CNET and was CTO of Snap, a company probably none of you have ever heard of but I’ve been dying to talk about for years. No. Not snapchat. The original Snap. The...

Matt Britton not only sold the first ads to and for Facebook, way back in 2004, he gives us a really insightful and, frankly, unbiased look at what Facebook was like as a company in its very earliest days.

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I figure most of you should know who Matt Cutts is, but if you don't, let's just leave it at this: he's about to give you the best, most behind-the-scenes oral history of early Google we've gotten so far on this podcast. He was the head of Google's web spam team for nearly 15 years. He's also the current head of the USDS, so if you what to know what YOU can do for your country—if you're in technology and you want to make the government work better—listen to this episode!