PRESS PLAY
The tech industry is great at talking about the future, especially on podcasts. What we're not so great at is taking the time to understand our past. And that's what this podcast is all about. From the Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor generation through the founding of social media, the history of Silicon Valley has many lessons for us. And we'll be interviewing the people who lived through these experiences to bring their knowledge to you. You'll get explanations for how we got where we are, which can also suggest where the future might be; along with a few laughs and inside stories from those who lived through it. So pull up a seat and listen to the tales of the past, in which may lie see…
Second Life lagged; computer magazines sat in men's sections. If that nags at you, pull up a chair.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A candid, grounded conversation about illness, continuity, and why strategy depends on the people who execute it.
Mortality gives this episode its edge, not as a grand theme but as a practical question: what happens to a company when the founder cannot give it the same attention.
A clear look at how Second Life’s early promise ran into hardware limits, audience fit, and timing.
Second Life’s bid for a wider audience gives this episode its cleanest line of tension. Melinda Byerly and James Au frame the platform as a case where the habits of later virtual worlds arrived before ordinary computers could make them feel easy.
A veteran analyst connects fax-era research, enterprise infrastructure, and conscience to the judgment tech still demands.
Rachel Chalmers brings a long arc of enterprise infrastructure, analyst work, open technology, accelerators, and corporate innovation to a focused conversation about how tech judgment gets built.
Shereen Mitchell examines how speech rules can miss racial context when harassment and threats are treated unevenly.
The second part of Stayin' Alive in Tech follows Shereen Mitchell through a direct, unsettling conversation about digital suppression and the uneven logic behind speech rules.
Mitchell connects tech's gender divide to marketing choices, from men's-section magazines to products reframed for boys.
Shereen Mitchell reframes technology's gender story by moving from early web spaces like bulletin board systems and gopher protocol sites to the quieter marketing decisions that shaped who was made to feel at home.
A grounded career conversation about risk, instinct, and the choices that shape a builder's next move.
Kara Golden's path from circulation at Time, Inc., through CNN advertising sales and into a startup spun out of Apple gives the episode a clean narrative thread: an entrepreneurial identity taking shape before it has a name.
Tech founders and investors, with the operating details left in.
Specialists walking through software's tradeoffs, one system at a time.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
Melinda Byerly returns to Stayin' Alive in Tech after early-stage breast cancer treatment and dedicates the season conclusion to her late business coach Craig Barnes.
Melinda Byerly interviews James Au, author of The Making of Second Life, about his three-year experience reporting from Linden Lab’s virtual world as avatar Hamlet Linden.
Rachel Chalmers tells Melinda Byerly how her engineer father, Robin, shaped her early fascination with technology through Australia’s first portable computer and an Osborne One.
Shereen Mitchell and host Melinda Byerly examine online harassment of women of color, including threats against Black women's children and the history of incidents such as Donglegate and Gamergate.
Shereen Mitchell tells Melinda Byerly how growing up in projects in Harlem and the Bronx shaped her path from coding at about age 10 to founding Digital Sisters and Stop Online Violence Against Women.
Melinda Byerly interviews Kara Goldin, founder and CEO of Hint Water, about moving from journalism and advertising sales into technology and beverages.
Heidi Bauer-Williams describes moving from a 3,000-person town in northern Vermont into computer science after a Johnson O’Connor test identified exceptional problem-solving ability.
Melinda Byerly and Bob Alberti trace why Internet Gopher, created at the University of Minnesota, gave way to graphical web browsers after modem speeds rose from 2,400 baud to 56K around 1994-1995.
Bob Alberti tells Melinda Byerly how Minnesota's 1970s computer networks led to GameBit Multisystems, Gopher, and early online communities.
Host Melinda Beyerle interviews Linda Popke about early days at Sun Microsystems, exploring the fraught relationship between engineering and marketing through satire videos and personal anecdotes.
Host Melinda Beyerle interviews Owen Thomas about his time at ValleyWag and the story that led to Peter Thiel backing a lawsuit against Gawker.
Host Melinda Byerly interviews Silicon Valley veteran Jim Long about his career spanning engineering, founding companies, and venture capital, sharing stories of tech titans and lessons from the past.
Host Melinda Beyerle introduces Deirdre Strawn from AWS, discussing her non-STEM background and career journey through tech industry changes.