Unlearning Traditional Product Path
What would it mean to unlearn growth as the ultimate measure of success in technology? Can we imagine and build digital ecosystems rooted instead in care, accountability, and justice?
In a market where growth is the default goal, mission-driven products follow a different playbook. This debate explores what it takes to build products rooted in values—what makes them stronger, what holds them back, how teams can balance integrity with impact, and how VC money can influence the process.
Originally recorded November 8th, 2025
Speakers Featured
Peter Rojas
As SVP of New Products, Peter Rojas leads the teams that drive Mozilla’s early stage product exploration and development. Before joining Mozilla, Peter was Head of Product for New Product Experimentation at Meta, and a senior product director for Messenger and Instagram Direct. He also served as founding partner at Betaworks Ventures, a consumer tech-focused seed stage venture capital firm that made notable investments in Rec Room, Hugging Face, Bunch, 8th Wall (acquired by Niantic), Squad (acquired by Twitter), Campus, and Streem (acquired by Frontdoor).
Peter has been a contributor for Wired, The New York Times, Village Voice, Slate, Salon, Vice, Surface, Food & Wine, Popular Science, Fortune, Money, Guardian, Cargo, and Business 2.0. He was also a host for HGTV's “I Want That: Tech Toys”, and began his career as an editor and writer for Red Herring, the technology magazine that defined the dot com era.
Catherine Bracy
Catherine Bracy is Founder and CEO of TechEquity, an organization doing research and advocacy on issues of tech and economic equity to ensure the tech industry’s products and practices create opportunity instead of inequality. She is also the author of World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy (Dutton: March, 2025).
She was previously Code for America’s Senior Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem where she grew their Brigade program into a network of over 50,000 civic tech volunteers in 80+ cities.
During the 2012 election cycle she was Director of Obama for America's Technology Field Office in San Francisco, the first of its kind in American history. Prior to joining the Obama campaign, she was the administrative director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She is on the board of directors at the Data & Society Research Institute and Terner Housing Labs.
Harry Booth
Harry Booth is a journalist based in TIME's London bureau. Since joining TIME in 2024, he has contributed to several of the magazine's flagship editorial projects, including the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI, Philanthropy, and Climate, as well as TIME's Best Inventions coverage. His reporting focuses on how AI and other emerging technologies shape—and are shaped by—our world.