Changing Shapes

Tom Horak

Every product creates a relationship between the people who build it and the people who use it. Changing Shapes is a podcast for founders, builders and operators who want to make things that connect with the people who use them. Host Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes (allshapes.io), talks with people who have built that relationship between product and audience, and gets them to walk through exactly how. Tom founded the studio behind Five Minute Journal and The Doctor’s Kitchen. He started his career in fine art and has spent over a decade thinking about what makes that relationship hold up. New episodes weekly.

  1. Jun 16

    Storytelling Is the Number One Skill of the AI Era — Sabine Devins

    What's the point? And who cares?" Sabine Devins asks those two questions before she writes anything. Every founder I know who freezes at the blank page is freezing because they haven't answered them yet. Sabine is a digital storyteller and creative content director based in Berlin. Before that she was a journalist for National Geographic, Voice of America, NHK, Handelsblatt Global. She now works mostly with B2B tech companies — the ones building genuinely interesting technology who haven't figured out how to talk about it beyond their own four walls. We get into why storytelling has quietly become the load-bearing skill of this era — not the soft skill, not the nice-to-have, the load-bearing one. Why AI fatigue is real and what people are actually craving instead. The two questions she asks before any piece of work. How a single line from a Brexit interview — "20% of my retirement is gone" — taught her what data is missing when it doesn't have a human inside it. And what every product person can borrow from the way a storyteller decides what to make. If you've ever stared at the LinkedIn post box and not known what to say, this is the conversation. Chapters00:00 "AI can only repeat what's already been done"00:36 Why storytelling became the load-bearing skill02:45 AI fatigue is real — and what we're craving instead03:35 The two questions: "What's the point? And who cares?"07:25 Finding the human in the data11:38 What's in it for the storyteller — and the question of trust Recorded at The Social Hub Berlin. Changing Shapes is hosted by Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes — a podcast about the relationship between idea, maker, and audience, and how to get it right.

    16 min

  2. May 22

    The Practice of Shaping Your Inner World | Juju Kim

    "Everything you build eventually teaches you something about yourself. The question is, are you paying attention to learn it?" This episode is for anyone building anything in public, a product, a company, a content practice, and wondering whether the metrics are telling them the real story. Tom went into this interview thinking they were going to talk about running. They talked about so much more than that. Juju Kim is an ultra runner. She ran from LA to Las Vegas. Currently, she's training for 500 kilometers across the Atacama. Her practice started two years ago as a 20-minute deal she made with herself from her bed, after a breakup, in the middle of months of doom-scrolling. The deal was small on purpose: if you're going to rot, run for twenty minutes. Then a second deal: if you're going to doom-scroll, make one video. What she films now is the inside of that promise, still being kept. Tom and Juju talk about why she didn't want to be a running influencer, why she keeps the camera on for the part most people would edit out, what happened on day six of the LA-to-Vegas race when her sponsors had already pulled out and a team of strangers told her to go finish without them, and what her audience is actually watching when they watch her. Recorded at The Social Hub Berlin. Changing Shapes is hosted by Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes — a podcast about the relationship between idea, maker, and audience, and how to get it right.

    17 min

  3. Trailer

    Changing Shapes Trailer

    The AI era didn't create a crisis of purpose. It made the absence of one harder to hide. When anyone can produce, the question of why you are the one making this becomes impossible to avoid. There's one thing no tool can replicate. Not because the tools aren't good enough yet, but because of what they are. AI has never lost anything. It has no experience to draw from, no moment that changed how it sees, nothing it built a conviction around because life made it unavoidable. The guests this season have all of that: moments that cost them something and changed how they see, and a way of working built directly around what those moments taught them. They drew that line before anyone called it a strategy. None of these conversations come with a framework or a playbook. What they come with is proof.

    1 min

  4. May 13

    Why AI Can’t Replace Friendship (for People Who Build Products)

    AI can show us what a good friend looks like, but it can’t teach us how to be one. In this episode, Clicqui founder Cynthia Mensah‑Neglokpe and host Tom Horak unpack why AI cannot replace friendship, what most brands get wrong about “community,” and the small mechanics of hosting that actually make people feel seen. “I really just love people… Every person I talk to gives me a little bit of a puzzle piece to a world I don’t know.”  Cynthia has built one of Europe’s most interesting women‑only IRL communities, with curated 12‑person dinners and gatherings in Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, Munich and beyond, and together they map what her practice means for the digital products and communities founders choose to build next. Changing Shapes is a podcast for founders, builders and operators who want to build things that connect with the people who use them. Host Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes, talks with people who have built that relationship between product and audience and gets them to walk through exactly how. Recorded at The Social Hub Berlin.

    16 min

  5. Apr 29

    How Art Changes Brand Strategy Inside Big Systems (with Onika Simon)

    “Strategist and artist Onika Simon explains how art can change brand strategy from the inside of big systems. After years at global agencies and B Corps, she shows founders and operators how artists see the ‘first touch’ with customers that businesses keep missing. If you care about design, strategy, and art in business, this conversation is for you. "Brands are like systems trying to find a way to talk to people. Art is how people talk to other people about systems." Onika Simon spent the first half of her career inside the big global strategy agencies (WPP, advertising on Madison Avenue), and the second half building B Corps and running interventions for the BMW Foundation. She tells Tom Horak why most expert rooms are missing the most important person, what artists know about the first touch that specialists keep missing, and why most entrepreneurs could never be artists. For founders, builders and operators who want to build things that connect with the people who use them. Host Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes, talks with people who have built that relationship between product and audience, and gets them to walk through exactly how. Follow Tom on LinkedIn and subscribe for new episodes. Recorded at The Social Hub Berlin.

    29 min
  6. How Investors Evaluate Founders (Before They Read Your Deck) | Angeley Mullins

    Apr 22

    How Investors Evaluate Founders (Before They Read Your Deck) | Angeley Mullins

    “In this episode, investor and operator Angeley Mullins explains how investors evaluate founders before they even read your pitch deck. She shares what she listens for in the first meeting – resilience, grit, whether you’re a decent human – and why real traction means one thing: has anyone actually paid you?” "My first and primary motive is to make sure I'm backing good people. Then we go to the business piece."  Angeley Mullins has scaled seven companies, including one unicorn and one IPO, and she runs every first meeting in that order. She tells Tom Horak what she listens for in a founder before the deck comes out, why ten thousand email subscribers is not traction until someone has paid, and the ten-second read that tells female founders and founders of color how a VC meeting is going to go. For founders, builders and operators who want to build things that connect with the people who use them. Host Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes, talks with people who have built that relationship between product and audience, and gets them to walk through exactly how. Follow Tom on LinkedIn and subscribe for new episodes. Recorded at⁠ The Social Hub Berlin⁠.

    29 min

  7. Apr 7

    EP 17: Rising above the median trap - with Ben Perreau

    Most AI tools are trained to give you something. An answer, a rewrite, a suggestion. But what if that helpfulness is quietly pushing everyone toward the same voice, the same style, the same median? Ben Perreau is a former journalist, founder and CEO of Parafoil — a leadership intelligence tool that uses real meeting transcripts to help managers understand how they’re actually leading, not how they think they are. He started his career in newsrooms during the shift from analog to digital, then built startups in music tech before landing here. In this conversation, Tom and Ben explore: Why journalism taught him to separate stories from evidence — and why that skill now matters more than ever How most LLMs push you toward the median when leaders need to be differentiated The risk of AI becoming a crutch that atrophies skill rather than building it Why chatbots are incentivised to always give you something, even when nothing was needed Who gets to define the “better version” of a leader that a tool optimises toward Why he thinks chat interfaces are like drinking your whole meal through a straw His contrarian take: this is actually the best time in decades to start building things yourself Ben also shares why he named his company Applied Humanity, how Parafoil avoids the surveillance trap by keeping data private to the individual, and why liberal arts degrees still matter. If you’re thinking about how AI is reshaping management, wondering whether these tools make us sharper or just smoother, or building anything that touches how people work together — this one gets into it. Links Parafoil: A leadership intelligence platform that turns real conversations into insight, helping managers improve through evidence rather than heuristics. Ben Perreau: Founder and CEO of Parafoil (Applied Humanity, Inc.). Former journalist and radio presenter, with a background spanning BBC, NME, Sky Television, and music tech startups Synkio and Gigulate. Thomas Horak is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes blends craft, culture and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences. Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

    35 min

  8. Mar 31

    EP 16: If AI does the thinking, what is left to learn? - with Khairunnisa Mohamedali, PhD

    Most tools today are designed to remove friction. AI writes the essay, surfaces the answer, smooths the path. But what if that’s precisely the problem? Dr. Khairunnisa Mohamedali is a social anthropologist, MD and Chief Innovation Officer at the Smarty Train — an award-winning learning, onboarding and behaviour change agency. She works at the intersection of human-centred design, the science of how people grow, and the hard reality of shifting organisational cultures at scale. In this conversation, Tom and Khairunnisa explore: Why AI fluency isn’t the same as AI literacy — and what organisations keep getting wrong when they train for it How convenience erodes the skills we don’t realise we’re losing Why the best learning design makes everything except the moment of discomfort frictionless How to get from base-level competence to higher-order thinking when AI has already automated the base level The difference between inclusion and belonging — and why the entry point to that conversation matters as much as the conversation itself Why you can’t change minds with facts, and what you actually need instead The case for optimism about human resilience — and the responsibility that comes with it Khairunnisa also shares her own system for navigating discomfort: how she wrote her PhD 2,500 words a day (borrowing a method from Stephen King), why self-awareness is the most under-invested skill in most workplaces, and what belonging actually feels like when you encounter it versus when you only perform it. If you’re building learning cultures, navigating a career in an increasingly AI-shaped world, or just wondering whether convenience is quietly making us worse at thinking — this conversation is worth sitting with. Links The Smarty Train: The Smarty Train An award-winning learning and development agency specialising in early talent, organisational culture, and human-centred design. Dr. Khairunnisa Mohamedali, PhD. MD and Chief Innovation Officer at The Smarty Train. A social scientist by training, she uses methodological rigour and a holistic systems approach to lead the design and delivery of experiences that have impact, embed learning, and change behaviours. She is a published methodologist, an award-winning innovator, and was selected as a Woman of the Future 2018. Thomas Horak is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes blends craft, culture and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences. Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

    34 min
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Trailer

About

Every product creates a relationship between the people who build it and the people who use it. Changing Shapes is a podcast for founders, builders and operators who want to make things that connect with the people who use them. Host Tom Horak, founder of All Shapes (allshapes.io), talks with people who have built that relationship between product and audience, and gets them to walk through exactly how. Tom founded the studio behind Five Minute Journal and The Doctor’s Kitchen. He started his career in fine art and has spent over a decade thinking about what makes that relationship hold up. New episodes weekly.

Information

  • Creator
    Tom Horak
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    23
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Tom Horak
  • Show Website
    Changing Shapes