Broad Technology & Business
Top 10
Technology Business & Big Tech podcasts
Major technology companies, platform economics, strategy, markets, and business models.
Sector list
Top 10 Technology Business & Big Tech Podcasts of 2026
Showing 10 of 10
Listen now
Latest in Technology Business & Big Tech
All latest episodesAll-In26 min
Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons CEO: The $40K Origin Story, Buying Product-Market Fit & Why Private Equity Can't Compete
(0:00) Luca Ferrari joins the Besties! (1:56) Crashing an AI startup, the $40,000 restart & buying product market fit (4:59) The in-house tech stack, shrinking the teams & the 10 out of 10 standard (9:55) Debt as an accelerant, what happens if rates rise & who else is bidding (14:58) Inside the deal desk: what gets acquired, why they don't build & the founder question (20:22) Building a tech giant out of Milan, Europe's talent pool & the outsider advantage Thanks to our partners for making this possible! IREN is a vertically integrated AI Cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute and software for AI training and inference. You build the future. We'll handle the rest. We're focused on giving every person the tools to reach their full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to all. Open local accounts in 70+ countries to accept payments, earn yield, pay globally, and manage spend. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. For more information,
The Business of Tech35 min
AI’s next test: turning pilots into productivity
Salesforce New Zealand country manager Richard Phillimore-Smith says the next phase of artificial intelligence will hinge on whether organisations can put trusted data, established workflows and people together to solve real business problems. Speaking to The Business of Tech at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Phillimore-Smith said the event reflected an industry at a turning point. The gathering brought together some of AI’s most influential figures, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff. The mood, as is always the case at Dreamforce, a mecca for marketing and sales tech folk, was upbeat. But the keynotes reflected the broader unease about the pace of AI development and the potential for AI to go rogue. Amodei has urged greater coordination among AI companies on safety and oversight, a collaborative effort to slow down development as required, while pointing out that businesses are still using only 5 - 10% of the capabilities AI already delivers. An opportunity to lift productivity Phillimore-Smith said that the immediate opportunity, epitomised by the rise of AI agents and Agentforce, the Salesforce agentic platform, and Claudeforce, which debuted at Dreamforce, is far more practical and less scary. They are using AI agents to improve customer interactions, equip employees with better information and increase productivity. “We know that we have got an opportunity to lift productivity. We know we’ve got an opportunity to lift customer experience. We know we’ve got an opportunity to lift employee experience,” he said. “It has to start with data. Businesses organise to get the data right. AI as a tool can then surface that in the way that customers need it to be.” Phillimore-Smith pointed to Salesforce customer Fisher & Paykel Appliances, where an AI-enabled service experience is built on thousands of existing product and support articles. On the conference floor at Dreamforce, I caught up with Rudi Khoury, chief digital officer at Fisher & Paykel Appliances, who told me that the whiteware maker has seen nearly 45% of service bookings completed online and a 50% reduction in call-handling times since installing an AI agent to handle customer queries. “It's like having more people, but this one can scale more,” he said. “One agent can do a different scale to one person, but they still require management and leadership like a person does, and I think that's often forgotten about in the business context.” Don't forget the dishwasher knob! Agents are now also powering the apps Fisher & Paykel field service technicians use to prepare for in-home visits, with the app serving up detailed information about the customer and suggesting which spare parts to bring on the job. Khoury said running AI agents involved treating them like digital employees, monitoring their performance and output to improve how they operated. “When we first put Agentforce in, the feedback to [Salesforce] was, I need more observability. I need to know how it's going. And over the course of time, they provided those tools- really, really cool testing tools. So actually, we're able to simulate how the agent will perform before we deploy it. That's really great." Xero, another key New Zealand Salesforce customer, deployed an AI customer service agent on its website in April, which is accessible to around five million Xero accounting software users worldwide. “It creates capacity for our people, our specialists, the deep, deep knowledge people, to still be involved, to still be part of it," says Nigel Piper, executive general manager, customer at Xero, which separately has created Just Ask Xero (JAX), an AI agent for use within the Xero interface that accesses a customer's financial data to serve up information quickly. Agritech company Halter, which has seen its Salesforce grow to 300 people internationally as it scales up its smart cow collar business in the US, Europe, and South America, uses AI agents to deliver company data stored in Salesforce to the Halter app. Agents on the ranch A demo at Dreamforce showed how salespeople driving between farms in their company utes can interact with Halter’s voice agent via the app to set up meetings, adjust contracts and get an update on their sales targets. Dreamforce’s major Salesforce announcement was “AI Force”, an approach designed to let organisations access Salesforce data and workflows through the interface that best suits them – whether that is Salesforce’s own software, Slack, Anthropic’s Claude or another AI front end. Phillimore-Smith described it as a move towards greater customer choice, while retaining the security, governance and workflow controls that sit beneath the interface. “Salesforce is saying that our platforms continue to provide everything they have done for 25 years around the trust, the security, the governance, the semantics and all those workflows that your business runs on are still there,” he said. AI at a tipping point But AI Force is also an acknowledgement that the future of software companies is not owning the interface, instead focusing on maintaining and organising high-quality business data so it can be accessed by your AI agents of choice. But the harder task for the majority of Kiwi businesses remains scaling pilots into business-as-usual deployments and building workforce capability. “We’re at that kind of tipping point now,” Phillimore-Smith told me. “Businesses, organisations can see that the technology does work, it’s trusted, and I think we’re now seeing an up-skilling coming off the back of that.” Listen to the entire conversation with Richard Phillimore-Smith on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Peter Griffin attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.
Tech Talks Daily29 min
Barracuda CEO Rohit Ghai on Cybersecurity in the AI Era
How should security leaders respond when AI-powered attacks compress detection and response windows from minutes to seconds? At Barracuda TechSummit 26 in Alpbach, Austria, I spoke with Rohit Ghai, Chief Executive Officer at Barracuda. The conversation took place exactly one year after Rohit joined the company, giving us an opportunity to discuss what brought him to Barracuda, what he inherited, and how his first year has influenced his plans for the business. Rohit explains that Barracuda's focus on smaller and resource-constrained organizations was an important reason he accepted the role. A cyber incident can threaten the survival of a smaller company, particularly when it has a lean IT team and limited access to specialist security knowledge. For these businesses, Rohit argues that AI-supported and increasingly autonomous security is a practical requirement. We discuss Barracuda's platform strategy and why genuine integration must extend beyond a shared interface. Rohit compares loosely connected product portfolios to supermarkets. Customers may find it easier to purchase several products from one supplier, but that commercial convenience does not mean the products share data or produce a coordinated response. Traditional tool sprawl forced analysts to interpret information across several screens. Agent sprawl could introduce systems that act independently, disagree with one another, or take conflicting actions. Rohit believes security platforms must connect information across email, identity, applications, data, and infrastructure so they can reason across the complete attack sequence. Identity is another major part of the discussion. Barracuda's acquisition of Evo Security addresses privileged access for managed service providers and smaller businesses. Rohit expects machine and non-human identities to greatly outnumber human users, raising questions about excessive privileges and how organizations grant temporary access to autonomous agents. We also discuss the economics behind AI security. Rohit explains how Barracuda is adapting its value reports to account for token consumption as well as staffing, software, and security outcomes. Barracuda absorbs the direct token costs associated with its own AI capabilities and selects different models according to the task, an approach intended to keep its products affordable for smaller customers and MSPs. Rohit is cautious about calls for the AI industry to slow development. Coordinating a worldwide slowdown between companies and countries would be extremely difficult. He also argues that cyber defenders cannot pause while attackers continue using widely available models to improve their campaigns. The conversation ends with a wider leadership question. Rohit believes intelligence will become widely available, making empathy and trust more valuable. AI can generate an answer, but customers, partners, and security professionals must decide whether they trust the organization acting upon it. Will connected AI security platforms reduce complexity, or could autonomous agents introduce a new form of operational risk? Share your thoughts.
Big Technology Podcast1 hr 3 min
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan: Why We're Betting On AI And Not Afraid Of It
Neal Mohan is the CEO of YouTube. Mohan joins Big Technology to discuss how AI is reshaping what we watch and create on the world’s largest video platform. Tune in to hear how much creative control should go to algorithms, how YouTube plans to handle AI slop, and whether AI answers could take views away from creators. We also cover YouTube’s partnership with Google DeepMind, Netflix’s push into podcasts, NFL Sunday Ticket, and changes to how YouTube counts views. Hit play for an inside look at YouTube’s AI strategy and what it means for the future of entertainment. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord?
The a16z Show48 min
Amjad Masad on Rethinking College for the AI Era
Erik Torenberg sits down with Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co-founder and CEO Gagan Biyani to ask what education should look like for a generation growing up with AI. Amjad argues that one of the most valuable things young people bring to society is their willingness to question deeply held assumptions. They discuss how education could create more room for that instinct through project-based learning, intellectual side quests, and giving students the freedom to follow an idea deeply rather than optimizing around grades and credentials. They also explore whether young founders are being pushed to professionalize too early, why Amjad thinks starting a company can sometimes be a form of “premature optimization,” and how curiosity led him from learning chess to experimenting with AI that can conduct machine-learning research. Finally, they discuss trust, judgment, and what it means to develop as a person, not just a builder, including why being contrarian and ambitious still needs to be balanced with the ability to work with other people. For more details please see.
Pivot1 hr 13 min
Trump’s Press Crackdown, Paramount Settles, and Anthropic’s $2 Trillion IPO
Kara and Scott unpack the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery settlement, the White House’s escalating fight with the press, and Amazon blocking Meta’s AI assistant. Then, they break down Trump's plans for an AI Force, whether Anthropic can pull off a $2 trillion IPO, and the stakes of Trump’s upcoming summit with Xi Jinping. Watch this episode on the Pivot YouTube channel .
Decoder with Nilay Patel58 min
Can John Ternus find Apple's next big thing?
Today, I’m talking with Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who is the world’s best-sourced Apple reporter. Earlier this month, Apple hosted its annual iPhone hardware event, and this event was special, for a number of reasons. It was new Apple CEO John Ternus’ first major product launch. It was also the debut of the foldable iPhone Duo. So I wanted Mark on the show to explain why this event was so important, and how John Ternus’ Apple will look a lot different from Tim Cook’s. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge . Links: Apple iPhone Duo launch event: the 5 biggest announcements | The Verge The iPhone Duo is Apple’s first foldable | The Verge Tim Cook’s CEO-like pay package shows he isn’t going anywhere | Bloomberg Apple’s Phil Schiller steps down from running App Store | Bloomberg Apple’s new CEO will need to soon overhaul his management team | Bloomberg Apple’s Ternus takes the reins as CEO, with AI as job No. 1 | Bloomberg Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Sharp Tech33 min
(Preview) Doom Debates Go Mainstream, AI Religion and the Economic Future, Several Vectors of the China Question
On today’s Ben and Andrew begin with Andrew’s article on AI alarmism, the primacy of the effective altruists in AI risk conversations, and why these discussions are exhausting without more evidence, even as AI risk becomes the biggest story in American politics. From there: A distinction between regulation malaise five years ago and where we are today, the grind of modern software, and questions responding to Ben’s Update on Monday, including thoughts on why OpenAI and Anthropic won’t unilaterally slow down, why Sam Altman and Elon Musk were incentivized to agree with Dario Amodei, and an emailer who asks whether doomerism hysteria is crowding out more urgent economic questions. Then: Questions on China’s incentives in AI, the strategic benefits of chip sales and distillation, military implications of American lead in AI, and China’s messy cybersecurity situation. At the end: An ode to ApplePay, Walmart, and Walton Goggins (but not Matt LaFleur).
Newcomer Pod59 min
Former SEC Official on FTX, Crypto & Silicon Valley’s Fraud Problem
Renee Jones on how billion-dollar startups escaped public scrutiny, why founders became more powerful than their boards, and what happens when private markets operate in secrecy. Renee Jones, Boston College Law School professor, former SEC official, and author of Untamed Unicorns, joins Eric Newcomer to examine how the startup financing system shifted from investor oversight to founder control. Renee explains how changes to securities laws allowed companies to raise enormous sums while remaining private, avoid meaningful disclosure, and delay going public indefinitely. They discuss what FTX, Theranos, WeWork, and Uber reveal about startup governance; why unicorn valuations can be misleading; how employees are asked to accept stock without the information needed to value it; whether venture capital’s AI obsession is distorting innovation; and why Renee believes stronger disclosure and financial controls are essential. They also debate the SEC’s approach to crypto, the political power of the industry, and whether meaningful private-market reform is still possible.
Acquired3 hr 35 min
The Home Depot
The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate. After being unceremoniously fired from their previous hardware chain at ages 48 and 35, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank took the words of their New York banker Ken Langone (who had also just accidentally caused their firings) to heart: they'd just been "kicked in the ass with a golden horseshoe.” They proceeded to author the greatest compounding story in American retail history, helped by some legendary cameos along the way from Sol Price, Jamie Dimon, and Ross Perot (to name a few). And the ending is as good as any superhero film: from its 1981 IPO to today, The Home Depot has been the single highest-returning equity in the entire US stock market — higher than Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, and everything else! Sponsors: Many thanks to our fantastic Fall '26 Season partners: Sierra WorkOS Anthropic Sentry Links: Sign up for email updates , get our takeaways and research photos from each episode, and vote on future topics! The Official Acquired Meetup on Sept 17th with our friends at Sentry. Join us! The Acquired Home Depot Companion PDF Our Visual Artifacts page for Home Depot Built from Scratch by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank Kick Up Some Dust by Bernie Marcus The Board Wore Chicken Suits by Joe Nocera, The New York Times Frank Blake on Invest Like the Best Ken Langone's interview with Arvind Navaratnam Worldly Partners' Multi-Decade Home Depot Study All episode sources Carve Outs: Silo Season 3 Tires Season 3 Ratio 8 Coffee Maker Trade Coffee Quarterback Comedian More Acquired: Get email updates and vote on future episodes! Join the Slack Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store ! 00:00:00 Start 00:00:43 Intro 00:05:32 Bernie Marcus's Early Career and meeting Arthur Blank (1972) 00:15:58 Ken Langone & Handy Dan (1970s) 00:33:08 Ken Buys Handy Dan, Bernie & Arthur Fired 00:43:55 Ross Perot Almost Buys Home Depot 00:51:20 Pat Farrah & The HomeCo Interlude 01:05:03 First Stores & Early Model (1979) 01:14:16 Home Depot Goes Public & Expands (1981) 01:24:35 Home Depot's Unique Operating System 01:46:01 Arthur Blank Takes CEO & Early Cracks (1997) 01:56:07 The Bob Nardelli Era (2000-2007) 02:12:09 Nardelli's Public Downfall & Firing (2006-2007) 02:24:24 Frank Blake's Turnaround: Crisis & Culture (2007) 02:42:30 E-commerce & Distribution Revolution 02:59:57 Home Depot Today: Pro & DIY (2024) 03:12:04 Analysis: The Paradox of Specialness 03:16:18 7 Powers: Home Depot's Competitive Advantages 03:19:17 Quintessence: Why It Got So Big 03:26:27 Carve-Outs + Outro Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.