Making Note Sonia.ai

Sebastian Serrano — CEO of Ripio, Latin America's largest Bitcoin exchange and wallet — returns to the show to talk with Avish about new developments in the cryptocurrency market. Who's issuing coins and who's buying? What are developers working on? What's new in the area of securitized tokens and nonfungible tokens? Will the decentralized computational model common in the crypto world ever work for Google-style, machine-learning-driven applications? Listen to find out!

Avish’s guest this week is Ramin Ettehad, co-founder and chief revenue officer at Oomnitza, a San Francisco-based startup offering an automated asset tracking platform. Ramin is a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. And his conversation with Avish—which ranges from martial arts to nutrition to enterprise software sales— reveals that there are surprising tie-ins between jujitsu and startup life.

Avish's guest for this episode is Alec Ross, a candidate in the Democratic primary for governor of Maryland. Alec is the author of the 2016 New York Times bestseller "The Industries of the Future," a guide to industries such as robotics and AI that will shape the future economy. He wrote the book after serving for many years as Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and, before that, campaign advisor to Barack Obama. He chats with Avish about the rigors of campaigning and fundraising, the parallels between campaigns and startups, and the arguments for a deeper level of political engagement among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.