Director of Engineering at Hyperact: Jacob Clark on AI, Ethics, and the Human Side of Building Tech

In 2019, every investor wanted a climate slide in your pitch deck. Then came the war, rising interest rates and fading VC money, and sustainability slid down the priority list. Corentine leads product at Sweep, a sustainability intelligence platform that collects, harmonizes and makes sense of companies' sustainability data, so they can report, comply and act on it. Sweep was founded in 2020. Its customers account for around 2% of global emissions.

PostHog (https://posthog.com) has a marketing team of five people. The engineering org they serve is thirty teams across sixteen products. From the outside it looks like a plan. Joe Black, who leads that marketing team, says the inside is mostly chaos — and that's the part he likes.

When ChatGPT was released, everyone said we'd lose our jobs to AI in three months. This is year four, and this episode looks at what actually changed.

AI is getting blamed for a wave of layoffs across tech — but is that actually true? Our guest Jack Godau, a fractional CTO who steps into organizations when something has fundamentally broken down, doesn't buy it. If AI can genuinely make a team ten times more effective, he argues, firing people instead of putting that to use makes no sense.

Everyone said Google missed the AI train — too big, too slow. Ben Trollope has a front-row seat that says otherwise. As a Customer Engineer at Google, he's the technical sidekick who joins the call when startups across Germany, Switzerland and the Nordics want AI in their product.