Catalyst Podcast

  What Is Creative Capital, Anyway?: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade meet with Jules Ehrhardt, founder of Creative Capitol Studio FKTRY, the author of the term ‘digital product studio’, and an advocate for authenticity. On this episode, we talk about the problems with the old-guard agency model, where creatives are going instead, and how creativity is commodified and sold like sausage links...

Harpal Singh Design is Not an Add-On: Why did it take so long for design to come back into the conversation? This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk about Digital Transformation and the marriage between Design and Engineering. We talk about how how the importance of design is often misjudged when it comes to Digital Transformation (hint: it’s crucial), and how what may be common sense to designers isn’t always common sense to others...

  Making the World a Better Place: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss how the ingegrity of platforms like Facebook and Twitter has been compromised by their growth. We talk about Facebook as a company versus Facebook as a system, and why they are crumbling...

  Trusting Your Gut: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade are joined by Michael Shaoul, the philosopher-manager of Marketfield Asset Management and expert on business cycles and the convergence of world events and geopolitics. Is the cycle of commercial real estate on its deathbed? Are shoes the only thing immune to downtrodden cycles? We discuss what happens when people tell you that you’ve got it all wrong, and exactly what you should do if you see a volcano at the company party...

Pull to Refresh? How about Smile to Fave: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss the building blocks of software development. Why do apps so often look and behave the same? We break down the tension between working within beautifully designed parameters and the need to innovate...

Product is Humbling: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk about John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies In a Silicon Valley Startup, a book about “what can go wrong when you believe stuff”. Drawing comparisons to Wild Wild Country’s Baghwan and the late Steve Jobs, this episode discusses the founder of Theranos’ charisma within the culture of Silicon Valley...

  Don’t Quit Your Day Job: This week, Paul Ford and Gina Trapani sit down with Rick Webb, COO of Timehop, to discuss his 2015 book Agency: Starting a Creative Firm in the Age of Digital Marketing. Rick lays out how anybody — even someone born in a ditch in Topeka — can start an agency. He also leads a discussion about the legacy of viral marketing in his own career, and the history of the advertising mega-structure...

The Only Success that Matters: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss the figurative moats that protect companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google from competition. Has anybody really figured out how to disrupt their markets? Why isn’t Postlight jumping on machine learning and blockchain? This episode is about companies zeroing in on their own strengths and focusing on their right-sized ideas...

Learning from Failure: On this week’s episode Paul Ford and Will Denton sit down with Victor Lombardi to talk about how great experience design often fails. We talk about taking a humanist approach to UX design within a corporate role, look at design that has failed, and find ways to detect early signs of failure. We also make fun of Google Plus. ►iTunes/►SoundCloud/►Overcast/►Stitcher/►MP3 /►RSS Victor — 4:47: “When your product is money, it’s hard not to get greedy...

Great Experience Design Leads To Anti-Competitive Practices: In the wake of the EU’s decision to issue Google a $5 billion fine, Paul Ford and Rich Ziadetalk about how great experience design obliterates competition while antitrust laws cramp designers’ style...