Scott Hartley's Blog

CoverWallet, founded in 2016 by serial entrepreneur Inaki Berenguer, continues to be one of the fastest growing startups in New York City. It is focused on reinventing small business insurance, making it easier for small businesses to buy and manage their various policies, all online. Prior to CoverWallet, buying and managing the insurance policies small businesses need, has been a terribly tedious paper and pen process. None of this process had been digitally consolidated until now. 

This wee...

Stanford University is pioneering in many ways, and one of the latest is in considering how to best pair "fuzzies" and "techies" to address some of our gravest societal challenges. Steve Blank, the legendary entrepreneurship professor who all but created the Lean Startup movement now accelerated by Eric Ries, has brought the customer development model to the industries of defense and diplomacy through his courses known as "Hack 4 Defense" and "Hack 4 Diplomacy."

In today's Net Politics blog fo...

Fuzzy and techie may be terms from Stanford University, and the title of my forthcoming book on the need for balance between the Liberal Arts and STEM, an end to the faux opposition. But they're also timeless terms that can describe the beauty and magic of many discoveries. Take, for example, the brilliance of Santiago Ramon y Cajal. According to Joanna Klein of the New York Times, he was "an artist, photographer, doctor, bodybuilder, scientist, chess player and publisher. He was also the fat...

In the process of building an app or site there's usually a lot of repetition. If, for example, you're trying to create multiple screens for an app or a site, you're often left copying and pasting design elements. A Y-Combinator startup called Cloudstitch just made this a whole lot easier by allowing Google Spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel to link directly to Sketch, the design platform. Last week they also built a plugin for Framer, demonstrating how fungible this technology is.

Now, if you w...

MIT economist David Autor is one of the leader experts on our rapidly changing world of automation and potential for human labor substitution. In a wonderful article for the MIT Sloan Review entitled, "The Shifts – Great and Small– in Workplace Automation," he unpacks the reality that middle skill, highly-repeatable jobs (both cognitive and manual) are at risk of machine automation. But he also states that this overlooks the other reality; that when machines automate certain sub-sets of jobs,...

The myth that you're either a "Fuzzy" or a "Techie" is a prevalent one. As evidenced by the many questions on Quora, we think of this as an either/or phenomenon. You either get an English degree or you're a gifted coder with every job at his or her feet. The truth is it's far more complicated and those with breadth of exposure, passion, and curiosity are poised for success. Many "techies" read great literature and play the violin, while many "fuzzies" are eminently quantitative in how they st...

Having grown up in Palo Alto, California, I've had the real privilege of seeing first-hand the incredible changes in technology over the past twenty-five years. What used to require a greater mastery of infrastructure is now being democratized and packaged up. The Full-Stack Developer has given way to the Full-Stack Integrator, someone who can master the macro assembly of the pieces. For example, as I've geared up to launch my book The Fuzzy and the Techie, which comes out with Houghton Miffl...

As highlighted recently in CBC News out of Toronto, about "Why more and more Torontonians are shelling out $10K for coding crash courses" there are tremendous new opportunities for those who low-ego, up-skill, and take on the challenges of learning something new. New bootcamps for every skill, from design to user experience to product management to front and back end development, are empowering people from all walks of life to make their entré into tech. But the logic fails when we think that...

After spending three years of graduate school at Columbia University, where I studied everything from the history of Afghanistan to the legal aspects of U.S. foreign economic policy, I have no doubt that having more, rather than fewer, interests, has helped me in my career. In my piece for Columbia You entitled "Value of Liberal Arts, Even in Silicon Valley,"I argue that this breadth of graduate exposure, on top of my undergraduate studies in political science, have only helped me see the big...

As Laura Bradley of Vanity Fair outlines in her recent article, "What Donald Trump's Arts and Humanities Cuts Would Cost America," Big Bird is back on the proverbial chopping block... except that this time he's not, because Sesame Street already left PBS for the more well-heeled HBO. Where did all the soundbites go?

Trump has proposed cutting public funding to outlets such as the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wh...