The Podcast

Celia Wanderley spent years thinking she was going to stay in academia. She had the passion for teaching, the research background, and a computer science degree from Brazil. Then she realized she needed to be closer to application than to theory, and she jumped. That was nearly 30 years ago, and the version of applied thinking she has developed since sits squarely at the intersection of AI, enterprise innovation, and the messy human challenge of actually getting organizations to change.

What I appreciated most about this conversation is how directly Celia pushes back on two ideas that quietly undermine a lot of innovation efforts. The first is that innovation and invention are the same thing. They are not, and the GPU is her example: a piece of hardware designed for video processing that turned out to be almost perfectly suited for machine learning. Nobody invented anything new. Someone just used something differently, and that unlocked one of the biggest technological shifts of our time. The second is that innovation thrives in chaos. In Celia's experience, the opposite is true. The organizations that actually sustain innovation are the ones that treat it as a disciplined process with defined outcomes, not a sandbox where anything goes.

The idea I keep coming back to is her point that psychological safety and discipline are not opposites. You need both, and the organizations that try to build one without the other tend to end up with either a culture that feels free but produces nothing, or a process that produces output but kills the curiosity that makes real breakthroughs possible. That is a harder balance to strike than most innovation frameworks admit.

Here’s a teaser…

Find Celia on Linkedin.

What You Missed on Sunday

Here’s what we covered in Sunday’s newsletter edition…

Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have spent more than $5.8 billion since 2024 hiring the founders and top talent out of AI startups, without formally acquiring a single one of those companies. No merger. No antitrust review. Just an employment offer to the people who mattered and a licensing check to the shell they left behind.

The label everyone reaches for is consolidation. What's actually happening is closer to disassembly, and the way the money moves tells you exactly who a startup is built to protect.

Here’s what you’ll find: