Aboard Podcast Aboard

If a huge company wants to “partner” with your small business, can that ever be a fair partnership? Paul describes a recent mentorship dilemma to Rich, and they discuss the dynamics that make the position of the smaller player in that scenario so challenging. Plus: Musings on public-spectacle trials past and present, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and the existential dread prompted by even the most innocent Slack notifications.

From copyright violations to environmental concerns to the looming threat of the singularity, AI is a hot-button topic these days. Paul and Rich talk through many facets of this conversation, and discuss how they think about the AI components of Aboard. Plus: A little roleplay in which we learn that Paul thinks Aboard is an earnest mid-century cartoon character.

Most weeks, the Aboard Podcast is only sponsored by Aboard—but this week, Paul and Rich celebrate Aboard’s relaunch by devoting the whole episode to their shiny new AI-powered product! After they take a (technical and non-technical) look at exactly what’s going on under the hood, they discuss the ways Aboard uses AI to help humans, not supplant them.

Just a quick update today, because....WE'RE LAUNCHING A SHINY NEW VERSION OF ABOARD!!! Paul and Rich will be back on Thursday with a full episode (which, as you can imagine, will be about the shiny new version of Aboard). In the meantime, check out all our changes—open up the app or visit Aboard.com!

This past week, the big news in the design software world was Canva’s acquisition of Affinity, and Paul and Rich kick off the episode by asking, “Is this a failure on Adobe’s part?” But of course Adobe remains a massively profitable company—so what drives the impulse to frame a giant tech company’s misses as overarching “failures”? As they mull over various motivations, they discuss how to reframe success on your own terms, outside the simple metrics of competition or industry trends.

Can we all agree that the vibes are off? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich dig into our broader societal malaise (the effects of the pandemic; our phones as an endless portal to misery) and discuss how business leaders can combat these feelings. Plus: Some early analysis of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Apple, and a story about a Formula 1 team using a single Excel spreadsheet for…everything.