Tech Overflow

Entrepreneurs get the glory, investors get the spreadsheets, and John Lilly says that’s exactly how it should be. John (former VC, now angel and board member, and newly involved with Gigascale Capital) joins us to demystify venture capital for curious builders: how funds are raised from limited partners, why returns follow a power law, and what investors actually do between writing a cheque and a company becoming real. Along the way, we unpack his simple working framework: see, win, decide, t...

Google Search feels like magic because it is solving an impossible problem on your behalf: you show up with a complex information need, type a couple of words, and expect a great answer almost instantly. We unpack what’s really happening in that split second, from the early days of cluttered 90s search engines to why Google’s clean interface, speed, and relevance changed everything. We walk through the core machinery that makes web search work: crawling (and why it has to be “polite” to webs...

Big tech isn’t a buzzword anymore, it’s the scaffolding holding up the modern economy and, increasingly, modern politics. We sit down and map the real shape of power behind the Magnificent Seven: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, NVIDIA and Tesla. We talk through what they do, why they dominate the S&P 500, and the part most people miss, where the revenue comes from versus where the profit actually lands. If you’ve ever wondered why Amazon can run on thin retail margins while AWS ...

You pick up your phone to do one thing, and five minutes later you cannot even remember what that thing was. That is not just “bad discipline” or a modern character flaw. It is the result of deliberate product design, engagement metrics, and relentless experimentation that turns curiosity into habit. We walk through how big tech measures engagement in the real world, from daily active users (DAU) and monthly active users (MAU) to the DAU/MAU ratio and frequency metrics like 3D7 a...

Ever had an ad land so perfectly it felt like your phone must be listening? We open season two by pulling back the curtain on why targeting feels psychic without constant eavesdropping. Smart speakers like Alexa and Siri rely on wake words and short cloud trips to respond, but the real signals come from everyday behaviour: where we go, what we search, how we scroll, who we share with, and even the Wi‑Fi we share at home. We walk through the mechanics in plain English. Location is a powerhous...

A single field mismatch bricked fleets of Windows machines. A simple gesture turned dating into a swipe. A major grocer is hacked and down for 45 days. A driverless car pulled up with no one inside. As we gear up for the launch of Season Two on March 3, Hannah shares her favourite stories from Season One. We went under the hood and explained tech in an accessible way for every curious listener. In this episode, we share what you've missed and our favourite parts for our loyal listeners. We s...

A taxi pulls up with no one in the front seat. Would you get in? We invited Waymo director Nick Pelly to take us from that first uncanny moment to the engineering that makes a driverless ride feel calm, confident and, by the data, far safer than most humans behind the wheel. We walk through the full autonomy stack in plain English: how cameras, radar and LiDAR fuse into a single view of the world; how perception, prediction and planning work together to thread through double‑parked vans, nud...

A fake contractor calls the help desk, a password gets reset, and suddenly a national retailer has hackers inside. We open the door on the human side of hacking—how believable stories and helpful habits become the first domino—then trace the technical steps that turn a small foothold into a system‑wide crisis. We walk through the anatomy of the Marks & Spencer breach: social engineering as the entry point, slow‑burn privilege escalation, and the moment attackers reached the Active Direct...

What happens when a search engine is driven by a text file of hand-written rules? You get a Jaguar car ranking first for an iPod query on eBay, and you get the perfect setup for a practical tour of how AI actually creates value. We unpack the journey from brittle if-then logic to machine learning that learns relevance from real outcomes. In this episode, we break down AI, machine learning, and large language models (LLMs) in clear terms, showing how they fit together and where they differ. W...

Catastrophic software failures can seem like acts of chaos, but behind every major tech outage lies a story of human decisions, technical constraints, and cascading consequences. The July 2024 CrowdStrike incident—which Hannah describes as "the single biggest outage in the history of computing"—offers a perfect case study into what happens when critical systems fail. Hannah and Hugh dive deep into how a seemingly minor error (a file with 21 fields when the software expected 20) managed to cr...

Ever wondered what makes your favorite apps work so seamlessly—or why others feel frustratingly clunky? The secret often lies in the mysterious realm of product management. Join Hannah Clayton-Langton and Hugh Williams to learn more. Hugh Williams, former engineering vice president at Google and eBay, and a senior engineer at Microsoft, takes us behind the digital curtain to reveal how great technology products actually get built. With insider stories from his career, Hugh explains that effe...

Tech Overflow is coming on Monday September 15 to wherever you get your favourite podcasts! In Series 1, co-hosts Hannah Clayton-Langton and Hugh Williams demystify technology for anyone who's interested in tech. They talk about coding, product management, building apps, what happens when a site goes down, all about AI and how it works, and have a few special guests on the show. The first episode is all about coding: what is it, what do software engineers do, and will they be replaced with AI...