Podcast > Unscaled > EPISODE 4

The Minimum Virtuous Product

Airbnb, Uber, and Facebook have had the public turn against them when their products caused damage. Even if the founders of these companies had good intentions, they could have made better use of data and AI to measure the impact of their products. It’s time to update the MVP acronym from Minimum Viable Product to Minimum Virtuous Product. Companies should strive to build morally sound design principles from the start with accountability, explainability, and transparency.

Episode Links

Show notes

Hemant Taneja’s book Unscaled: How AI and a New Generation of Upstarts are Creating the Economy of the Future

Venture capital firm General Catalyst

Hemant Taneja bio

Ronda Scott bio

What went wrong with the world wide web (2:01)

The problems with moving fast and breaking things (2:21)

The original goals for the Internet (3:08)

Hemant’s first internet job (4:05)

Ronda’s first internet job (4:45)

The difference between being right and being statistically right (6:30)

The biggest problems online today (7:55)

Governance doesn’t exist (8:13)

Current environment won’t support new businesses trying to do good (9:44)

Ronda’s 1972 GMC truck, “Kitten” (10:55)

Siloing has created deep divisions and polarization (11:30)

Do San Francisco’s problems reflect those of the tech industry? (12:20)

Is education better or worse today? (13:45)

Khan Academy (15:50)

Three classes of problems online (17:15)

Unintended consequences (17:25)

Intended, legal consequences (17:31)

Intended, illegal consequences (17:41)

Scale makes consequences more damaging (19:25)

Problems are the same as the 1990s, but the audience is orders of magnitude larger (20:41)

It’s time to rethink the concept of scale (22:03)

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