All episodes of A Productive Conversation

A Productive Conversation · 2025-07-02 · 41 min · 8,531 words

Ben Chelf Talks About Reimagining Reading and the Power of Presence

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player

Quick one first. There's a word we lost somewhere between the factory and the laptop. My new book is called Productiveness, and mikevardi.com slash productiveness is where you can get it. Okay, in we go. Hi, I'm Ben Shelf, and I'm about to have a productive conversation with Mike Vardi.

Reading has fundamentally changed in the digital era. While we have access to more books than ever before, we also face an endless barrage of notifications distractions, and screen fatigue. My guest today, Ben Schelf, is working to change that. Ben is the co founder and CEO of Seoul, a company dedicated to reimagining the reading experience.

Before launching Seoul, he was a founding partner at Elementum Ventures and co founded Caverity, a software company and security company that attracted major investors and was later acquired by Synopsys. Named one of Computer World's top 40 under 40 innovative IT professionals and inducted into the Stanford Inventor Hall of Fame, Ben has a deep history of driving technological change. In this conversation, we dive into why single purpose devices are making a comeback. how the soul reader is built to remove distractions, and what this means for the future of reading.

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