Transcript
Brooke Devard (0:00)
Hello hello, it's Brooke Devard from Naked Beauty. Join me each week for unfiltered discussion about beauty trends, self care journeys, wellness tips, and the products we absolutely love and cannot get enough of. If you are a skincare obsessive and you spend 20 plus minutes on your skincare routine, this podcast is for you. Or, if you're a newbie at the beginning of your skincare journey, you'll love this podcast as well. Because we go so much deeper than beauty, I talk to incredible and inspiring people from across industries about their relationship with beauty. You'll also hear from skin care experts. We break down lots of myths in the beauty industry. If this sounds like your thing, search for naked beauty on your podcast app and listen along. I hope you'll join us.
Danny Fortson (0:44)
This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.
ServiceNow Sponsor (0:47)
Danny One thing we keep hearing from business leaders right now is AI Sounds great, but how do you actually make it work inside a company?
Danny Fortson (0:56)
Exactly. Because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech and teams, all doing things slightly differently.
ServiceNow Sponsor (1:05)
ServiceNow sits across all that, acting as a control tower for making work move seamlessly through the organization, connecting people, systems,
Danny Fortson (1:13)
data and increasingly AI agents so that things don't happen in silos.
ServiceNow Sponsor (1:17)
Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people@servicenow.com My first job out of
Danny Fortson (1:24)
uni was for a company called Sparks.com, a startup boasting of being the world's largest online paper greeting card store. The average sale size was one card, which was worth a couple bucks. Once you found a card, we'd then ship it out to you, so postage alone eliminated any profit. But back then I didn't know any better. Like so many other 20 somethings, I was entranced by this thing called the Internet which appeared to be minting overnight billionaires and changing just about how everything worked. I showed up to work in cargo shorts. Yes, cargo shorts. My desk was a painted door set on a pair of sawhorses. I played a lot of table football. It was great until I was laid off along with about a third of the company. As the stock market imploded, Sparks.com's venture capital backers turned off the money spigot. And as chance would have it, it was around then that Michael and Xochist living across the bay from my dingy two bedroom apartment, we're working on a website that may very well have hastened the demise of my first employer and put me out of a job. It was called Birthday Alarm. An astoundingly simple idea. It was a birthday reminder service. Turns out it was wildly profitable. Perched on one of those impossibly steep. Only in San Francisco hills is a stretch of a few blocks of lavish, spectacular homes. It's called, rather unimaginatively, Billionaires row. Birch Castle, an imposing five story stone walled estate the color of milk chocolate. Definitely belongs. It is the home of Michael and Xochi Burch. A few months ago, I showed up at their door to talk to the Birches about the early days of social networking and what will definitely go down as one of the most extraordinary chapters in the story of an industry that has changed, well, just about everything.
