Author Archive

Tech Tonics: Jason Lehmbeck of SpecialX – Empathy as a Service

December 2nd, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Jason Lehmbeck of SpecialX – Empathy as a Service

Like many entrepreneurs, he was born with the itch. Jason Lehmbeck grew up around his father and grandfather, both entrepreneurs in their own areas of expertise– dad was a geologist who worked with the mining industry and grandpa had a [See the full post…]

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Ben Ravani: Building the Best Trusted Hybrid Cloud

November 22nd, 2019 |
Ben Ravani: Building the Best Trusted Hybrid Cloud

With the average annual cost of a data breach for a company about to exceed $4 million and the emergence of regulations like GDPR and the CCPA, businesses more than ever must prioritize data safeguards. “If you look at enterprises, [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Shami Feinglass – Doctor, Policy-Maker, BMX rider

November 20th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Shami Feinglass – Doctor, Policy-Maker, BMX rider

Shamiram “Shami” Feinglass, MD, MPH, should have been a born again flower child.  She spent her childhood among the San Francisco royalty that defined the 60’s and 70’s rock and roll culture here in the City by the Bay.  Her single [See the full post…]

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Steven Kaplan on Writing The ROI Story for Future Heroes of the Cloud Era

November 15th, 2019 |
Steven Kaplan on Writing The ROI Story for Future Heroes of the Cloud Era

We have never seen a time like this, where IT is being besieged on multiple fronts, according to Steven Kaplan, author of The ROI Story: A Guide for IT Leaders. On one side is the public cloud and on the [See the full post…]

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Designing APIs with Empathy

November 8th, 2019 |
Designing APIs with Empathy

It is important for developers to build up their own empathy in order to design APIs with a UX mindset. That makes APIs easier for other engineers to use more effectively, according to Kollivakkam Raghavan, Director of Engineering for Prism [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Sam Brasch, A Modern Day Alex P. Keaton at Work

November 4th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics:  Sam Brasch, A Modern Day Alex P. Keaton at Work

Born and bred in Mill Valley, California, where we record our podcast, Sam Brasch saw himself as a modern-day Alex P. Keaton – he just wanted to be a business man. He was “that kid” who was reading the Lee [See the full post…]

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Steve Poitras: Birth of the Nutanix Bible

October 31st, 2019 |
Steve Poitras: Birth of the Nutanix Bible

“In the early days, people had no idea what hyperconvergence was,” recalled Steven Poitras, principal solutions architect at enterprise software company Nutani. Hyperconverged (HCI) infrastructure combines compute, storage and networking in a single location, vastly simplifying data center operations that [See the full post…]

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Shattering Monoliths: Dispersion of Computing

October 24th, 2019 |
Shattering Monoliths: Dispersion of Computing

Today’s monolithic mainframe approach to computing will soon be shattered and dispersed because that’s the nature of computing, according to Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey. This animation brings to life a talk Pandey gave to technology analysts at .NEXT in Anaheim, [See the full post…]

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Why Security is Priority Number One for Any Cloud Service

October 22nd, 2019 |
Why Security is Priority Number One for Any Cloud Service

With the average cost of a data breach for a company now at $3.8 million and the emergence of regulations like GDPR and the CCPA, businesses have more than customer distrust to contend with if their data is not properly [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Kari Nadeau, Where Curiosity Meets Compassion

October 21st, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Kari Nadeau, Where Curiosity Meets Compassion

Stanford professor Kari Nadeau lives the life, some would say the dream, of what Judah Folkman has called the inquisitive physician, integrating her deep knowledge of chemistry, her experience in biotech drug development, and her clinical acumen and deeply-felt compassion for [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: David Altshuler, Physician-Scientist In Pursuit Of The New

October 7th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: David Altshuler, Physician-Scientist In Pursuit Of The New

David Altshuler was living the academic dream as professor and human geneticist at Harvard and MIT, where he was co-founder and Deputy Director of the Broad Institute.  Yet in December 2014, he left this life to join Vertex, in continued pursuit of [See the full post…]

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The Data Center is the New Uber

September 20th, 2019 |
The Data Center is the New Uber

Zach Hilliard always loved cars and started his career as a diesel mechanic. Today he’s senior director of site reliability engineering for Cyxtera Technologies, a Texas-based provider of data centers around the globe. He sees the Uberization of data centers, [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Glenn Pierce, All In

September 9th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Glenn Pierce, All In

Physician, scientist, patient, advocate: Glenn Pierce inhabits all four roles, and seems the physical embodiment of the translational impulse, driven by his own experiences coping with severe hemophilia to advance the science – and the policy – he hopes will [See the full post…]

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Mike Robbins: Building Winning IT Teams

September 6th, 2019 |
Mike Robbins: Building Winning IT Teams

As a professional ballplayer, he became fascinated with the power of team chemistry. His next career in business showed him that team chemistry was confined to sports. “At my very first job I realized, ‘Oh, that’s not a sports thing…that’s [See the full post…]

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Satyam Vaghani: When More Machines Than Humans Connect to the Internet

August 29th, 2019 |
Satyam Vaghani: When More Machines Than Humans Connect to the Internet

With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT), IT departments are facing a significant shift as human demand for data is surpassed by machines. Machine-to-machine communications ­from robots, retail store sensors and other connected devices are forcing IT departments to [See the full post…]

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Gene Kim: DevOps is Reshaping IT

August 22nd, 2019 |
Gene Kim: DevOps is Reshaping IT

Many say DevOps makes companies more agile and focused on business value. Gene Kim sees the practice helping developers and operations professionals work together faster while maintaining secure and reliable IT systems. In this interview, the co-author of The Phoenix [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Navigating the Healthcare Highway with Megan Callahan, Lyft’s Head of Healthcare

August 19th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Navigating the Healthcare Highway with Megan Callahan, Lyft’s Head of Healthcare

When Megan Callahan was growing up, she was supposed to end up in healthcare – she didn’t even know there were alternatives. And she has spent her career and life in and around the field in more ways than she [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Chris Gibson, Free Range Innovator

August 5th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Chris Gibson, Free Range Innovator

With confidence he attributes to his free-range childhood, Chris Gibson has followed his instincts and his heart, stepping away from the MD/PhD program in which he’s enrolled to co-found and lead Recursion Pharmaceuticals, one of the buzziest companies bringing AI [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Sumit Nagpal, At the Crossroads of Tech and Healthcare

July 22nd, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Sumit Nagpal, At the Crossroads of Tech and Healthcare

Sumit Nagpal was born to a pair of healthcare entrepreneurs and raised in Kashmir, India.  When he was 13, he came to the United States where he saw diversity for the first time.  Sumit followed his parents into the Ivy League, [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Imran Haque, Grounded Data Scientist

July 8th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Imran Haque, Grounded Data Scientist

A computational biologist by training, Imran Haque has managed to achieve the near-impossible: embracing the promise of data science in medicine while retaining his critical faculties.  He may well be just the sort of innovator required at the intersection of medicine and [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Zoe Barry, Driving Entrepreneurship from the Fast Lane

June 24th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Zoe Barry, Driving Entrepreneurship from the Fast Lane

When Zoe Barry was a kid, she had two things she wanted to be when she grew up, either a veterinarian or “someone who writes checks.” She gave the first a shot and ended up settling on the second.  Today she is [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Karen Hong, Turning Grad School Pain To VC Gain

June 10th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Karen Hong, Turning Grad School Pain To VC Gain

In graduate school, Karen Hong’s dream of becoming a biologist crashed into the inconvenient reality that she couldn’t stand working in the lab. Undaunted, Karen, pivoted into venture capital, and hasn’t looked back. As befits a future geneticist, Karen chose her own [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Rebecca Kaul – Bending Tech to People, Not People to Tech

May 20th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Rebecca Kaul – Bending Tech to People, Not People to Tech

Rebecca Kaul had planned to be a doctor.  But life and the HMO era got in the way.  As a result she went down an entirely different and windy path through chemical engineering, public policy, consulting on information systems and [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: Calum MacRae, Reimagining Medicine From Within

May 6th, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: Calum MacRae, Reimagining Medicine From Within

A brilliant cardiologist and geneticist, Dr. Calum McRae rose to the top of academic medicine – then decided to reinvent it, from the inside.  He just may be the person to do it. Born on the Isle of Skye off the coast [See the full post…]

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Tech Tonics: From Farm to Negotiating Table – James Dromey of the Murdoch Royal Children’s Institute

April 22nd, 2019 |
Tech Tonics: From Farm to Negotiating Table – James Dromey of the Murdoch Royal Children’s Institute

Dr. James Dromey was supposed to be a farmer in County Cork, Ireland and has the milking experience to prove it. But apparently cows were not his destiny, even though he was a farm family’s only son. Instead, James left [See the full post…]

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