Tech-Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help B2B professionals build powerful relationships for their businesses. My guest is Guillaume Moubeche, Founder and CEO of Lempire. Guillaume is a prototype of a tech entrepreneur on a mission. In the last 3.5 years, Guillaume Moubeche has founded 2 businesses. One that he grew to $600,000 ARR and sold. The other, Lempire, he is currently growing past $10M+ ARR and +20.000 customers worldwide - all without funding. The fact his business is now valued at more than $150,000,000 inspired him to write the book titled "The $150M Secret" - and with that, he follows one the core principles that got him where he is today: share knowledge with as many people as possible. Lempire is a group of passionate and curious individuals who have a very healthy obsession with building the world’s finest products and helping entrepreneurs worldwide grow profitable and successful businesses. Their mission: help 1,000,000 entrepreneurs to build profitable businesses by 2025. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Guillaume to my podcast. We explore his approach to building a successful SaaS business with a bootstrapped mindset. He shares how, in anything he does, community is a fundamental pillar of his approach. He talks about how, over time, he has mastered taking something that doesn't exist off the ground. Last but not least, he elaborates on how he's been able to successfully overcome some extreme throwbacks in his entrepreneurial life - such as his two co-founders leaving the business without notice - and how this has made him and the business stronger.

Here's one of his quotes It took us maybe two years to go from zero to 1 million in annual recurring revenue. But after two years, I realized in the community that people were struggling with their emails, ending up in spam. I was like, 'I can automate that.' And that's when I launched Lemwarm, which was a new product to help people get the best email deliverability possible. It's quite funny to see how things work. Because if you're very close to your customers, and you're listening carefully to what they're saying and what is the real struggle, then it's a lot easier to actually build a solution from it.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

The power of community - and how this helps build momentum across product, marketing, and sales.

How he's creating differentiated power over his competitors beyond his products.

The secret behind Guillaums' formula: Growth = Speed * Momentum

Why he's for perfect execution and not for perfect process - and how that helped him.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guillaume Moubeche

Website Lempire

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable all of us to collaborate, build culture, and thrive together - remotely. My guest is Brett Martin, Co-founder and President at Kumospace. Brett is a serial entrepreneur. He began his career on Wall Street as an equity research analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, Since then, he has spent his entire career building or investing in technology startups, including stints as an EIR at PrimaryVC, Co-Founder of Switchapp and Sonar (pioneering location-based social network), Director of Investments at Appfund and Vice. Today he's the President & Co-Founder of Kumospace, the virtual office platform where teams show up. When the pandemic hit, he quickly realized the technology for hosting immersive virtual events was pretty terrible. He knew there had to be a better way. And thus, Kumospace was born. Their mission: to make online connections more meaningful by building the most human spaces on the internet. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Brett to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the ay we enable remote work these days. Brett shares his vision on creating solutions that are game-changers in this space. Then he talks about how the biggest hurdle in going to market is not so much selling the product but selling the organizational transformation that's required - and how they go about solving this. Last but not least, he talks about the biggest lessons he learned around go-to-market and scaling his organization- and how to avoid making the same mistakes next time.

Here's one of his quotes Truly disruptive tools usually compete on a completely different axis than what they've replaced. So they're not just cheaper or faster, but they're actually qualitatively different in a way. That changes the game. Virtual offices, like Kumospace, have that characteristic. Sure, there's no substitute for truly being in person with other people. What I can say is that by working remotely, there are all these crazy benefits that you could never get if you tried to co-locate everywhere in one city. You don't have to pay hundreds of 1000s of dollars for office space. You can hire the best people from anywhere in the world. You can give your people the flexibility to choose where in the world they work. You can give them time flexibility. That changes the game. And but I am a believer in anything that can be done over the Internet will eventually be done over the Internet.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

The principles Brett used to narrow down the focus of his SaaS business

How to go about gaining traction if the sales is not about your product, but about getting people to gain a leap of faith

The secret behind Kumospace' 'crazy high' retention rates

Brett's secret (today) to hit the numbers predictably.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Brett Martin

Website: Kumospace

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give revenue teams a scientific approach to revenue and stop flying in the dark. My guest is Toni Hohlbein, Co-founder and CEO of Growthblocks. Toni has spent the last decade growing B2B SaaS startups successfully as a CRO, leading to two exits. He discovered that revenue planning and execution was fundamentally broken. The old approach is finance-heavy and is skipping over a ton of important details CROs need to know to hit their revenue targets. So he started working on a solution and created an operating model that help the business he was working for hit target 12 quarters in a row. He learned that other startups had the same problem, which sparked the idea to create Growblocks together with his cofounders Olafur & Andrew. The mission: help organizations unlock their revenue potential. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Toni to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way businesses run revenue operations. Toni shares his vision of how to solve this - based on an approach that delivered remarkable results at his previous company - helping them grow from €10 to €50 million in 12 straight quarters. He shares the big lessons learned in taking his startup from idea to ready for primetime and outlines what ingredients have been fundamental to get right from the start. Last but not least, he shares what he's specifically steering for to create a SaaS business people will start talking about and keep talking about.

Here's one of his quotes We are not a forecasting tool that tells you which number you're going to hit in q1. We're helping you to figure out what number you are gonna hit at the end of the year. What are the long-term revenue goals you want to achieve? Then you start executing. And what you then very quickly see is that some part of the engine is going to veer off course. Otherwise, you would have probably seen this in the post-mortem that you have in your quarterly business review in three and a half months from now. We ping you if something is off. We give you a root cause analysis of why it is off. And then you can fix it. And that is a very nice, straightforward, you could even say, agile cycle that we are enabling organizations to do in real-time instead of having quarterly business reviews to then tweak something.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to go about challenging the status quo in a mature market

How changing one word in your positioning can change everything for the traction you experience

How to empower your champions to drive the buying process from the inside

The mistakes many startups make that put their buyers in a disagreeing spiral, instead of a nodding spiral

How to spark word-of-mouth if you're selling big enterprise SaaS tools

For more information about the guest from this week:

Toni Hohlbein

Website Growthblocks

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to build organizational superpowers. My guest is Jason Radisson, Founder and CEO of Movo. Jason is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He inherited his single mother’s work ethic as he worked various blue-collar jobs to fund his education. He started his career at McKinsey & Company. He then became an entrepreneur and joined the early days of Uber, where he launched and grew cities in the western US as a Regional General Manager. Fast forward to today, and Jason has built multiple tech unicorns, including rideshare giant 99. His latest venture, Sh1ft helps remove friction from employment across frontline labor industries such as manufacturing and healthcare. He is passionate about using technology to empower and uplift the frontline workforce, which he believes is the backbone of the economy and society. That became the trigger to found Movo in early 2019 to address the challenges and opportunities of this segment, which is often overlooked and underserved by traditional HR solutions. Their mission: To improve the gig economy by making it as good for employees as it has been for employers. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jason to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way the market has access to talent. Jason puts his finger on the opportunity HRTech vendors have failed to address and shares his vision of how to solve this global problem by taking a fresh approach. He shares his big lessons learned on how and when to scale the business. And last but not least, the tells a story about how they created remarkable differentiation when the market needed it most. Here's one of his quotes We can replace Workday for massive employers. That's what we're gunning for. Just our philosophy towards sharing, It's been almost an afterthought by the HR tech industry to have your workforce talking to each other and sharing with other people. We think people should share, and you should be able to follow people who are in your profession in other countries, and you should be able to have casual mentoring and casual interactions outside of work. And it's kind of the antithesis of where traditionally, HR software has been. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How you can gain instant differentiation by creating the antithesis of the accepted traditional approach

That augmenting your tech with human touch can mean your breakthrough

How adding cross-company community-building components to connect peers can become the stickiness factor your solution has been waiting for.

How to deal with advice from investors - especially when it's extremely tempting.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Jason Radisson

Website Movo

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to take the pain out of software training. My guest is Ken Babcock, Co-founder and CEO of Tango. Ken Babcock spent most of his career in the Bay Area at Uber, where he held roles in Launch Operations, Data Science, and Product Strategy from 2014 to 2018. In 2019 he decide to do his MBA at Harvard Business School. But shortly in, he and his co-founders, Brian Shultz and Dan Giovacchini, dropped out of Harvard during the pandemic to start Tango. Today he's the Co-founder and CEO of Tango, which takes the pain out of documenting processes by automatically generating how-to guides while you work. Since then, the company has grown to over 350,000 users and is trusted by people and teams at organizations, including Netflix, IBM, Salesforce, Nike, and more. Tango has been recognized as a finalist for Product Hunt’s Product of the Year, Google's 12 Favorite Chrome Extensions of 2022, and Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech for 2022. They have raised $19.7M in venture capital funding to date. Their mission: building a future of work where processes are easier to document and faster to follow. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ken to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we capture and transfer knowledge. Ken shares how the company went from idea to GTM in literally months due to how the problem was exposed during Covid. He shares stories about how he overcame their biggest hurdle for growth: how to market their solution. And he shares some of Tango's secrets to spark viral growth and increase conversion from free to paid plans. Here's one of his quotes What we saw with a lot of our users is that their prior way of doing something was taking screenshots, manually going in and annotating the screenshots, dumping them into a Word doc, and typing it all up. And so the old way of doing things was so clunky. It wasn't anything that was rocket science. But it was extremely tedious. And what we found with the market is everybody knows that this is a problem. What we realized was that people actually didn't know that there would be a solution out there. So that was the hardest part: How do we shift our marketing strategy, knowing that our best users, the people that are doing things the old way, aren't even going to know that they can solve their own problems? During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why putting all functionality in your Free plan is a good thing

That product market fit is an illusion, and how to go about that

How to stay ahead of the market and user expectations

What's the magic combo of core principles to create alignment and scale in your organization

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ken Babcock

Website Tango

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This podcast interview focuses on exploring the biggest business lessons learned after our last podcast interview 5 years ago. My guest is Ryan Falkenberg, Co-founder and Co-CEO of CLEVVA. Ryan has always been fascinated by what makes people tick and what makes them perform optimally. He’s been frustrated at the slow pace of change when it comes to education and learning. To address that, he created a learning consultancy, Hi-Performance Learning, that aimed to push the boundaries of organizational learning through e-learning, gamification, and expert systems. To then remove the constraints by tech. bandwidth, he founded CUDA Technologies. Yet no matter how they optimized formal learning, a core problem remained. People still had to memorize and repeat complex decision formulas in a world that was accelerating. It was time for a complete rethink. This was the starting point for CLEVVA back in June 2011. In the meantime, CLEVVA has been in business for well over 12 years, and five years have passed since Ryan was on my podcast last. This interview inspired me in many ways, and parts of it ended up in chapter 1 of my book, "The Remarkable Effect." Since so many things happened since I decided to invite Ryan back on my podcast. We explore the big lessons Ryan learned over the last five years. He shares a story about what made him realize they competed for the wrong business in the wrong market. He then explains what he changed from a mindset perspective and how that helped them get remarkable traction in a completely new category - thereby attracting the right customers and the right partners. Last but not least, he shares his experiences in how to create funding freedom for the business - and how that liberates them to do the right thing. Here's one of his quotes We took ownership of the outcome. So we didn't put on a lens of a Software as a Service company. We put on the lens as a solution as a service company. So we actually then got teams to be able to specialize in these conversations. And so that we could not just say to our customer, here's the software, I'll teach you how to build that conversation; we said we will deliver a virtual agent having those conversations, and it will be up and running in four weeks. And we will take ownership of that and be accountable for the performance. And so what changed as well is, is our customers didn't feel we were having to convince them on our software. What we were showcasing is we actually were selling an outcome, a measurable outcome that would have conversations that mattered. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That even if you add significant value, it doesn't mean it will help you scale

The importance of clarifying what business you're really in (and how that changes everything)

How changing one small thing can move you from nice to have to ultra-sticky and mission-critical

When you know the moment is right to build an ecosystem

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ryan Falkenberg

Website CLEVVA

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Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give self-care businesses give their clients more of the magical moments that matter. My guest is Matt Danna, CEO of Boulevard. Matt is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He's addicted to building technology for the creative class and passionate about the intersection between design and technology. Matt has spent his entire career building technologies to empower creative professionals., Matt was head of product for the LA-based talent agency Wasserman. His career also includes product leadership positions with Awesomeness, a multi-media platform company, and the global media company Fullscreen. He co-founding Boulevard in 2016 as he and his co-founder realized this industry - the professionals who help us look and feel our best - has traditionally been underserved when it comes to tech and support. So their mission is to change that by enabling their customers to give their clients more of the magical moments that matter. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore how the company evolved from a scheduling solution into a complete experience platform, positioning for the salon and spa industry. Matt explains how they carved out their niche and how early architectural design now provides them with a multi-year competitive advantage. helping them stand out from competitors who added these features later. He elaborates on how they accelerated growth and reduced CAC by leveraging the power of network effects and customer referrals. He shares his story of how brand trust, design, and community have become core differentiators for the company, thereby creating a magnetic effect. Last but not least, he explains how the company achieved minimal customer churn during covid, and was able to add well over 600 customers in a market that was effectively closed. Here's one of his quotes The hardest nut to crack over time has been our go-to market motion. My co-founder and I were both engineers. And so, learning how to sell a product was entirely new territory for us. And there's this perception out there from some founders if you build it, they'll come. That never happens. And so you have to be so intentional about your go-to market. You have to be very, very focused on what's your ideal customer profile. That is something that we continue to refine on a quarterly basis, Who are we best set up to support? Who do we have pricing power over?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

What it really means to understand a problem in its full depth - and why that makes all the difference for your success

What it takes to find the sweetspot where you have pricing power

What they did differently that gave them defensible differentiation from day one

Why we should think differently about product market fit

For more information about the guest from this week:

Matt Danna

Website: Boulevard

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This podcast interview focuses on what it takes to scale the growth of your SaaS business by establishing a remarkable ecosystem. My guest is Barrett King, Sr. Manager - Global GTM Strategy, Partner Ecosystem at Hubspot and host of the Outcomes Podcast. Barrett is a highly motivated and results-driven professional with over 10 years of experience in building partnerships and executing go-to-market strategies for SaaS companies. He's the host of the Outcomes Podcast - Where Partnership & SaaS meet - and Senior Manager for Go-to-Market strategies for the Global Partner Ecosystem at Hubspot. It's that combination that triggered me to invite him to my podcast. We explore the art of building and managing partnerships in B2B SaaS organizations. Barrett elaborates on the critical components to focus on throughout the acquisition, onboarding, and lifecycle stages of partners. He shares his experience in concurring the complexity of managing partnerships as businesses evolve and the necessity of diversifying these partnerships for mutual benefit. Lastly, he addresses how to overcome the personnel challenges in various stages of a partnership program, underlining the importance of specialization as the program matures. Here's one of his quotes Folks will always say things like: "We want to go and build an ecosystem." You're saying the wrong thing. We want to build a partner program, you're not even thinking about it the right way. I always stopped them there, and I say: "Think about your customer needs first that you don't deliver. That's where your opportunities lie." During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why you should consider shifting from partnership for revenue to partnerships for customer value

What to do / no to do when you want partnerships to play a vital role in scaling your SaaS business organizations

Where to make concessions around successful partnerships if you want to deliver the most value to the customer.

How to go about managing partnerships that lead to mutual benefits, increased leverage and enhanced reach and value delivery.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Barrett King

Podcast: Outcomes - Where Partnership & SaaS Meet

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to +10% revenue from better search, feed, and ads ranking. My guest is Andrew Yates, Co-founder and CEO of Promoted. Andrew Yates formerly led ads ranking, auction, and marketplace engineering and research teams at Facebook and Pinterest. He specializes in designing billion-dollar content marketplaces that maximize long-term revenue while protecting both seller and user experiences. Andrew has published over a dozen patents in online advertising optimization. Andrew met his co-founder at Pinterest. That's where they built Pinterest ads together and realized they could unify ideas from ads and search engineering to make all commercial media better. This became the founding idea behind Promoted, which they started in April 2020 Their mission: to match every buyer with every seller across every app. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Andrew to my podcast. We explore Andrews's entrepreneurial journey and ideas and what challenges he had to overcome around go-to-market, winning over the biggest skeptics, and creating a revenue flywheel. He explains how breaking away from existing structures and established norms has helped them to break through. Last but not least, his lessons learned around product strategy - and how he arrived at his first principles to drive remarkable value in the shortest amount of time. Here's one of his quotes We didn't have an open-source philosophy when we first started. Our original philosophy was: Make sure it works. Make sure you build something valuable, put it into production, and make sure that it works and test it against good engineering teams that have the resources, time, and attention to build a similar system and it needs to outperform them. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to break into an industry by introducing a business model that emphasizes customer collaboration and ownership

How to create a shift in value by applying a proven model that's remarkable in one category on a different problem in a different category.

How a development team of <10 FTE can consistently outperform teams of +100 FTE

How going against the common notion of comprehensive and fully-featured product launches has helped them in surprising ways.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Andrew Yates

Website Promoted

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to ensure everyone with an electric car to always have access to services on the go. My guests are Gijs van Lookeren Campagne and Jan Borghuis, co-CEOs at Ease2pay. Gijs and Jan share a long history together. They started their first company, Greenwheels, together in 1995. Together they're captivated by new technologies that can change the world, dreaming about how it can be easier, better, and especially without hassle. With Greenwheels, this meant innovating car rental into a 24/7 self-service concept. And today, with Ease2pay (which they founded in 2017) they are gradually making that dream a reality again, enabling managers of gas stations, charging stations, parking garages, camper sites, marinas, inland ports, and truck parks to turn their location into a self-service site. In this way, they are making the energy transition easy for everyone. And this inspired me, and hence I invited both Gijs and Jan to my podcast. We explore what stands in the way of making the rapid transition to electronic vehicles happening. The two founders discuss their journey of building the business from scratch, and how the accelerated this by leveraging M&A from the start. They share insights about the complexities of merging companies and the potential losses in synergy if done improperly. They also discuss some of the mistakes they've made along the way, including delayed integration of acquisitions and changes to pricing systems without careful consideration. Here's one of their quotes We are facilitating the energy transition. Ton, you didn't make the transition yet yourself. I didn't make that transition myself, actually. So why people don't do that transition to battery electric cars? Because it's a lot of hassle. You need to have three plastic cards if you want to go on holiday. But most people have multiple cards, and then the card doesn't work here, and it is not bookable, so you drive to France, arrive at the station to charge, and there are three people waiting in front of you. So Book, Park, Charge, and pay at the base, we think there's an innovation to be done to facilitate people. And that would drive the adoption of battery electric cars - but also ships, boats, and trucks. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to create a work environment where the team becomes your advantage.

How to accelerate the process of gaining a multi-year headstart advantage and gaining product traction fast.

What they've learned from launching a new B2B concept into a market that's dominated by multinationals.

What they believe is the formula to being ready for the market and shaping a sustainable business with long-term success.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Gijs van Lookeren Campagne

Jan Borghuis

Website Ease2pay

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help us all deliver a buyer experience that wins deals. My guest is Erdem Gelal, Co-founder and CEO of Flowla. Erdem Gelal has a wealth of work experience, beginning with an internship at PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2010, Accenture in 2011 and a Financial Analyst role at Procter & Gamble the same year. His entrepreneurial journey started when he co-founded cubic.fm in 2013 and ProceedLabs in 2015. ProceedLabs was acquired in 2018. This didn't stop his passion for exploration. In 2020, he co-founded TalentGrid, and in 2022 Flowla, where he's currently the CEO. Flowla is on a mission to build an outstanding & frictionless way to get deals done. Because it's time we all should stop relying on emails to do that. They believe B2B processes deserve a consumer-grade approach, so closing B2B deals can be as easy as checking out a cat litter box on Amazon. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Erdem to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the B2B SaaS sales process. Erdem explains the fundamental decisions that helped take the company from its idea to where they are today, why he doubled down on a bottom-up PLG approach, and what he's learned to get traction going. We discuss his big learnings to drive the adoption of the solution and to spark word-of-mouth recommendations. Last but not least, he shares how their mantra to build 100 true fans has helped to be remarkable from the start. Here's one of his quotes When we ask our users: 'What do you like most about Flowla,' the top answer we get is: Standing out from the crowd. They like the idea of making a difference to stand out in the noisy inbox, and increase win-win rates, not only because everything is just in one place, but also because they can reduce ghosting. It definitely crosses a certain threshold when it comes to an inbox with 100s of unread emails. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to leverage AI to prepopulate templates to scale conversion, and boost user adoption

How having a helpful conversation helped them to close more business

How to accelerate your journey toward product-market fit

How he's leveraging internal champions to do the upwards selling within their organization.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Erdem Gelal

Website Flowla

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable every PLG B2B SaaS company grow their MRR without high upfront costs. My guest is Joran Hofman, CEO of Reditus. Joran is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. Back in 2020 he was an affiliate for 80+ SaaS tools and was generating an average of 30k in organic visits each month. Due to the issues he experienced with the current affiliate management software tools, it never resulted in the passive income he was hoping for. After getting frustrated time & time again by the clunky affiliate management software and losing precious affiliate revenue, he decided to solve the problem at the core. This is how Reditus was born. Their mantra: When the affiliate does well, so will B2B SaaS companies; in the end, so will Reditus. This inspired me, and hence I invited Joran to my podcast. We explore his journey into affiliate marketing and the founding of his B2B SaaS company. He shares his biggest challenges on his early journey, such as a complete rebuild of his platform - and discusses how tuning segmentation has helped to optimize traction. He also reveals the secrets to helping his customers, B2B SaaS companies, get irresistible value from his platform. Last but not least, he provides two pieces of advice that peer B2B SaaS CEOs can do their advantage with. Here's one of his quotes What we're trying to build is a huge network with people who have access to your ideal customer profile. So it's not just building a network of affiliates. It's also knowing what kind of reach they have and where they have their reach so you can really tap into their market. The ideal world is that they have a channel where they don't have to pay upfront costs to actually do marketing because that's the huge benefit of affiliate marketing. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why the definition of a Minimum Viable Product puts you on a dangerous path as a startup.

His first principles (one being prioritizing quality over quantity) to create leveraged results

What are the critical ingredients to get right if you want to grow your business through affiliation

How adopting a freemium model with an affiliate program can be an effective way to encourage user adoption, revenue generation and competitive advantage.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Joran Hofman

Website Reditus

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that powers businesses to accurately answer the question: What will customers buy? My guest is Sebastian Baier, Founder, and CEO of Buynomics. Sebastian is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He was a Director with Simon-Kucher & Partners, where I worked with leading international companies on pricing and portfolio structure. That's where the idea sparked for Buynomics. In July 2018, he co-founded Buynomics. Buynomics employs large-scale simulation technologies to digitize customers and predict their behavior. Their mission: to enable companies to answer all their market-facing questions, including pricing, product offers, and promotions. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Sebastian to my podcast. We explore why it is so hard to get pricing right. And then Sebastian digs into the different ways we have to approach it and why. He shares his first principles when it comes to product development and elaborates on what he learned from initially going to market with far too broad segmentation. Last but not least, he shares a do and a don't based on what he learned in the last 5 years. Here's one of his quotes Key questions about revenue management are always the same. They're the same if you're Coca-Cola or if you're running a lemonade stand. But they are extremely hard to answer. What is the right price? What is the right promotion? And they have a gigantic impact. What makes it really difficult to think about it is one thing and one thing only: You don't know how your customers will react. During this interview, you will learn four things:

His take on building a category-defining product

What rules to apply before considering building a partner channel

His lessons learned from niching down towards the optimum

Why he didn't follow the guidance from VC and expert consultants to embrace a more aggressive go-to-market motion

For more information about the guest from this week:

Sebastian Baier

Website: Buynomics

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help B2C business spend their money right - to increase profitability. My guest is Tobias Konitzer Ph.D., CEO of Ocurate Tobias Konitzer is an academically trained entrepreneur who has a proven track record of turning research into technology and into a product that addresses ubiquitous pain points. He worked for Facebook Research and completed a Ph.D. in computational social science at Stanford University. In 2017 he co-founded of PredictWise, where he initially acted as Chief Scientist and became their CEO in 2020.PredictWise processed a large array of public opinion data collected from 260M+ Americans on hundreds of data points. During his tenure at PredictWise, Tobias started to understand the value of this database in conjunction with modern machine learning for consumer-facing companies: Companies have a hard time optimizing over and understanding margins (LTV:CAC ratio) that is crucial for both profitability and accurate financial forecasting. On this premise, Tobias founded Ocurate, empowering brands to focus on the right customer by predicting lifetime value, churn, conversion and growth at the individual level, with unprecedented accuracy. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Tobias to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the ability of many B2C companies to grow profitably. Tobias shares his big lessons learned in starting a revolution, and what it took to create solid traction. He touches upon the importance of investing in getting positioning right. Last but not least he shares his advice on what it takes to build a SaaS business that cannot be ignored, and what mindset and habits to develop to not burn out from the many failures you'll have to deal with on your way. Here are some of his quotes "I used to tell my investors, the vision is making a new way to thinking about efficient spending, the organizing principle of b2c companies. And this new way of of efficient spending, we call, folks call, lifetime value. And I want to say one more word here. The idea behind lifetime value is using AI to predict exactly how much profit, not revenue, but profit, every customer will bring to you as a company. And now, the big idea here is, if I would know that with 100% accuracy, all these other things all of a sudden, are very, very easy." During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to win more customers by getting on the same wavelength

Why valuing slowness can be the key to rapid growth

Why too many SaaS businesses don't have a product-market fit issue, but a positioning issue

Why you shouldn't found your SaaS business before you deeply understand the real pain point

For more information about the guest from this week:

Tobias Konitzer, Phd

Website Ocurate

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to connect business people in ways that are more engaging and drive more value. My guest is Baptiste Boulard, CEO of Swapcard He's an ex-lawyer who turned entrepreneur and tech enthusiast. This Henry Ford quoted what drives him the most: “Anyone who stops learning is old – at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. Life is about keeping your mind young.” Today, Baptiste is CEO and Co-Founder of Swapcard. He swapped his career in law to launch Swapcard alongside two childhood friends with a vision to change the way people network at events. What's underpinning their vision is the belief in the impact of human-to-human interaction in a digital world. Swapcard is therefore on a mission to bridge the gap between the online and face-to-face world - thereby aiming to unlock meaningful encounters that have, until now, been impossible. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Baptiste to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the space where we make our biggest marketing investments: the world of events. How a lot of things have been solved on the process side - but not what's most valuable: Networking. Baptiste shares the big lessons learned from his entrepreneurial journey. What was required to not only survive the Pandemic crisis but to actually come out stronger. The pivots he's led to move from 'nice to have' into the 'mission critical' domain. And what is required to build a SaaS business that the world talks about? Here are some of his quotes: "When you are an entrepreneur, you're building a future which doesn't exist. So if you're not curious it's very hard to because there is no recipe and no one who can really help you. What you have to do is be very curious in terms of your reflection, the people you meet, and grab ideas from everything you do" During this interview, you will learn four things:

What skills to develop when you're building a future that doesn't exist - and there's no recipe.

What to do when everything you've done and all the value you build seems to become worthless

That even in the densest markets you have ample opportunity to dominate a niche

That a strong culture is the foundation to survive any crisis - and how to go about building one.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Baptiste Boulard

Website Swapcard

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to grow the success of every organization by enabling a fluid knowledge flow. My guest is John Hudson, CEO of Luma1 John is a global tech entrepreneur and investor. While he's worked in tech including retail, e-commerce, and real estate, the main focus has been based on his belief that training is the fastest way to move the needle in any organization and the right technology can make it move faster and be even more impactful. This became the founding principle behind founding LUMA1 in 2017. The company is on a mission to enable people and organizations to drive tangible improvements to training and communications by creating and delivering video experiences that today’s workers want. And this inspired me, and hence I invited John to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's business world when it comes to transparent communication and sharing knowledge. We discuss how it holds organizations back when it comes to accelerating change, and what's missing to fix the problem. We discuss his big lessons learned in his attempt to embrace product-led growth and how he's steering product development to focus on what matters. Last but not least John shares his views on what it takes to build a B2B SaaS product that makes people say "I need to have that!" Here are some of his quotes "The fastest way to move the needle in any business is knowledge flow. And that can be done through communications, or it can be done through formal learning, coaching, whatever it might be. A lot of organizations just don't do it. I've visited a billion-dollar company that actually does no formal training. It's all done ad hoc, But it's got nothing to do with time, money and knowledge to do it. Oftentimes in businesses, there's this sort of black box, things are sort of cloaked in this mysterious thing." During this interview, you will learn four things:

That people need to feel cared about - and how to embrace that as a product concept

What we can learn from mistakes made in the eLearning space when it comes to getting users engaged and committed.

Why a critical design criteria in development needs to be how your product helps organizations move as fast as they need to move - without dependence

What it takes to spark arousal amongst users and customers

For more information about the guest from this week:

John Hudson

Website LumaOne

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give us back the energy and power to do the things where human intelligence and imagination shine. My guest is Ilia Zelenkin, CEO Bitskout. Ilia spent close to 15 years of his career at Nokia, ultimately as head of product & service innovation, Global Services. He then co-founded SafeRoom, a control center for Encrypted Data. In 2020 he co-founded Bitskout which he's heading up as the CEO. He's passionate about technology changing the world, excited to build Star Trek alike futures, and solving problems that matter. What gets him out of bed every morning is his passion to help people become happier doing their work. The thought that 83% of people who go to work today are disengaged makes him triple his efforts. Bitskout was founded to free people up to do creative and meaningful work and with that bring back passion and satisfaction to the job. Their mission is to give us the affordable tools to make it happen NOW. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ilia to my podcast. We explore what's broken in managing projects within small companies - and why we should not accept the waste that goes on with that. Ilia shares his vision about how to make the most advanced technology affordable and the journey he's on to turn his intelligence platform into an expert platform that could not only forecast your work but check it later on as well. We also dig into his first principles to create solutions that create a pull from users i.e. a desire for more. Here are some of his quotes "what I did, I wrote every any crazy, stupid ideas that I had in my head for six months, five ideas per day, anything crazy. Anything that comes to mind. And eventually, what happened, you start noticing patterns, and you start noticing things, how they're connected. They came up with the problem, and it was a combination, a sequence of problems. So number one was building solutions to help deliver teams' projects faster. And I noticed that we couldn't breach a certain kind of project waste percentage. So we always were losing around 30% of the project times on some stupid things." During this interview, you will learn four things:

That the ability to invent something is a skill - a muscle that you can train

That the best roadmap choices start with minimum viable experiments

How to optimize your pricing strategy so it incentivizes desired behavior

That it takes the same amount of effort to do something great - so why settle for something mediocre

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ilia Zelenkin

Website Bitskout

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that gives B2B SaaS businesses the opportunity to increase their value by making their product multiplayer. My guest is Nimrod Priell, CEO of Cord. Nimrod has been a software pioneer from the very first start. He's got over 20 years of experience in development, data science, and product management and decided in 2019 it was time to make the jump to take on the entrepreneur role. He loves thinking about how we work and how we can make that experience better. This is exactly why he started Cord. With a team of designers, engineers, and product craftspeople that have collected some secrets from their tenures at leading tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Adobe - they are on a mission to leverage those secrets to make collaboration at work more effective. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Nimrod to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way SMEs can create true value from their ever-growing SaaS stack. We discuss the underlying problem and what needs to change in the mindset of the SaaS Vendor community to cross the chasm that will bring more value for all. Lastly, Nimrod shares his views on what it takes to build a SaaS business that cannot be ignored. Here are some of his quotes "The average SME today, Okta says, has over 90 different SaaS tools. So I saw how these companies work internally, with a lot of tools that are bought, not built-in, and don't have this 'connective tissue.' The tools are built single player and all the communication around them gets stuffed into Slack and inbox. I saw this as a problem because these are b2b SaaS vendors, and this is a problem for their clients." During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why the winners in the next decade in SaaS will be the one's building collaboration in their tools

Why complacency in SaaS is the biggest risk of becoming irrelevant - and what to do about it.

How turning away a lot of business can be a very solid way to grow fast

A secret to creating a viral effect with the products you build

For more information about the guest from this week:

Nimrod Priell

Website Cord

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to finally prevent us from relying on anecdotes that lead to biased decisions and with that build products customers love. My guest is Daniel Erickson, Founder, and CEO of Viable.

Daniel has been active in software development since 2006. He took an untraditional path from most. Together with his co-founder he skipped college altogether and straight out of high school created a consulting firm in Portland to help early-stage companies build their very first products, create MVPs, get their first users, and/or get their first investment. After doing the same thing over and over again for clients as a consultant, he really wanted to dig into a longer-term problem. And being an early member of the Node.js community where he helped organize a lot of conferences, got him an early engineering job at Yammer.

From there he moved to Getable where he was the CTO, and to Eaze where he was VP of Engineering. Today, he's the founder and CEO of Viable.

Viable is on a mission is to help us better and more quickly understand what customers are telling us, so we can immediately find the most important things we should be working on.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Daniel to my podcast. We explore the challenges many SaaS businesses face in finding product-market fit. Daniel shares his experiences, and what's required to do / not to do in order achieve this - whether you build a product from the ground up, or evolve an existing product. He also shares his experiences that not every product is fit for a product-led growth approach, and what it takes to spark adoption and to grow meaningful traction. Last but not least he leaves his views on what it takes to build a software business the world talks about.

Here are some of his quotes

"It actually came from my time at Gettable. And I spent four years there, trying to find product-market fit, and never quite found. But I did learn a lot about collecting customer feedback, using customer feedback to guide a roadmap. And it just kind of got me obsessed with this idea of using customer feedback to build a really great product. So I started actually looking around on that one and came up with this idea to go tackle that. So the initial spark was actually solving my own problem. It was I knew I was going to have to solve the product-market fit problem at some point. And I knew that customer feedback was the best way to improve a product. I actually came across a blog post from Rahul Vora about how Superhuman found product-market fit, I applied some of those ideas to the system. And then went off to the races from there and quickly realized that this was a larger problem than early-stage startups."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

That it can take years to find product-market-fit if you are not making some critical choices

Why it's way easier to design and build a remarkable product when you got a very specific user in mind.

How to create products that result in jaw-drop moments every time you demo it.

That just solving a customers problem doesn't mean that you're going to have a product that grows

For more information about the guest from this week:

Daniel Erickson

Website Viable

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to grow our happiness and connectivity at work - especially when we're part of a distributed team. My guest is Scott Markovits, CEO Spontaneousli.

Over the past 8 years, Scott has worked with over 1000 early-stage founders and startups, helping them build the foundations of successful products, companies, and teams. He's passionate about building awesome new products and creating amazing employee experiences. Another aspect he's fascinated about is: Remote work So much that he's hosting a podcast, Leading from afar, that's all about remote leadership ad sharing experiences, wisdom, and tools to make remote successful at companies all around the world.

And this inspired him to start his own Startup, Spontaneousli - A company that's on a mission to make remote work more awesome.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Scott to my podcast. We explore how switching to a remote-first world has created a range of new challenges - some very valuable to solve. Just think about the Great Resignation. We discuss the innovation opportunity ahead - and how big impact can be created with seemingly very simple solutions. Scott shares how complacency and comfort in sticking to traditional thinking can put the best companies in harmful situations. Last but not least he shares his views on creating a remarkable software business and why bootstrapping should be considered by more SaaS companies.

Here are some of his quotes:

If you read articles around remote work or the future of work, many of the companies have been very positive, saying: Productivity has been through the roof. We can get work done. Everything's fantastic on the work side, but we want to get people back into the office because we're missing out on the engagement and the happiness and those bursts of inspiration. I see it is really a lacking of tools.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

That we often make the mistake of creating solutions that literally mimic what we think needs to be done, without thinking about what it needs to achieve.

Why often it's not the quality of the solution that prevents creating traction, but our inability to change human behaviors

Why we shouldn't be obsessed with Product-Market fit, but with Problem-Market fit.

Why avoid going the funding route and focus on building a SaaS business that's sustainable.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Scott Markovits

Website Spontaneousli

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable desk-less workers to perform at their highest potential, with minimal intervention to their workday. My guest is Rami Darwish, Founder, and CEO of Arrow Labs

Rami is a founder and entrepreneur in digital technology for the enterprise and b2b segment. He has a deep understanding of business growth and scale strategy. He's an expert in workforce management and digitalization of the field operation and beyond that, he has a deep understanding of mobility in the enterprise.

In 2011 he founded Arrow Labs a company that's on a mission to provide companies pioneering and reliable workforce management solutions that impact their people and operations in a meaningful way.

It envisions a world where employees can connect, collaborate and perform at their highest potential, with minimal intervention to their workday.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Rami to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of the desk-less worker and how this negatively impacts efficiency, accuracy, customer service, and safety. Rami shares the approach they've taken to enable field workers to deliver their best work in the toughest conditions. He also details what they did to not only survive the pandemic but come out stronger altogether. Last but not least he shares his experiences in creating momentum, especially in a market that hasn't got a change or growth mindset.

Here are some of his quotes:

I used to work for fortune 500, corporate companies in the tech space. And I was working on large projects that would cover an entire city, for example, a safe city project or an integrated city project. And we have a lot of tools, everything from video wall tools to access to databases and information in real-time. But when you're doing a large city-type project, you're interacting with the real world. You're not sitting in a bubble, you're interacting with people, workers in the street, frontline people that either are providing you valuable information, or you need to provide them valuable information. What I realized while I was doing that was: Oh my God,...as soon as we want to get information out to the front line or get information from the frontline back into the HQ, everything stops being digital became manual.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to avoid wasting lots of energy, time, and money by focusing your efforts on people who believe what you believe

Why you should always strategize about the two or three moves ahead - plan early - do a lot of smaller executive steps ahead of time

That there's a fine line between being capital efficient and missing an opportunity - take chances.

Why every opportunity should start with the simple question: Do I firmly believe in it?

For more information about the guest from this week:

Rami Darwish

Website Arrow Labs

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to relieve salespeople from having to use CRM, so they can focus on what they're best at: In the moment selling. My guest is Adam Honig, CEO of Spiro AI

Adam has worked my entire career in the technology industry. His specialty is building companies and organizations that sell and deliver enterprise software and solutions in the B2B space.

All of the companies that he helped found were focused on dramatically improving their operations. Two of these companies went public, and two of them were successfully sold at favorable valuations.

Although much has changed in the technology business since he started his career he believes a few things always remain the same: it's all about the business outcomes and not the technology itself. And you can never go wrong telling the truth. It's never worth it working with a jerk. And being the category king should always be your goal.

After watching the movie 'Her' which shares a vision of artificial intelligence, played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson guiding sales reps to larger commission checks, he knew it was time to transform CRM and deliver the outcomes the world had been waiting for. Today he's the CEO of Spiro, a proactive relationship management platform. Spiro is on a mission to end an era where companies waste millions of dollars on CRM. How? By creating a platform that works for Salespeople, instead of the other way around.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Adam to my podcast. We explore what's broken in CRM and how the things CRM demands its users to do is fundamentally flawed. Adam shares why the problem won't be solved by making existing solutions look nicer, but that the solution is in doing things completely differently. We dig into the journey Spiro has been through to get traction and how it overcame the tough battle to get people to adopt new technologies. He also shares the big lessons learned in deeply understanding the real outcomes customers want to solve and what it requires to build a software business that stands out in a dense market.

Here are some of his quotes:

Really good salespeople are really good 'in the moment'. Having the conversation really listening well, understanding what's happening. They're not the same people who are good at then typing all of that up. It's just it's a different skill. And so the things that CRM asks them to do are the things that they're bad at. It's structurally flawed. And so, the salespeople who are really good at updating the CRM are the really bad salespeople. I had one sales VP telling me when he takes over a new job as a VP of sales, he looks to see who does the best job at CRM, and he fires those salespeople. Crazy.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why we have to stop creating solutions that demand users to do things they're not good at and principally despise. Focus on what they need to be successful instead.

That often the only way to deliver remarkable impact is doing the hard things first.

Why we should do away with the preconceived notion we know our domain like no one else - it can seriously get you stuck in sales

Why it's key to set your ego aside as a CEO and invest time listening to your customers. Not leadership, but actual users. Not once, but weekly.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Adam Honig

Website Spiro AI

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to end the era of being inundated with media every single day. And my guest is Gregory Lim, Co-founder, and CEO of Persosa.

Greg was the former CMO of Lifelock, and the founder of Qual & Quant, a full-service strategy, finance, and marketing agency. He combines his background in finance and marketing and believes that great marketing is the perfect combination of math and magic. He likes to challenge the status quo - and for one the market believes that a 3% conversion rate is normal in digital marketing.

This is why he co-founded Persosa in 2016, a startup that's on a mission to solve the challenge of creating media experiences consumers love without them feeling interrupted by the information they’re not interested in, and doing this all while continuing to bring in needed revenue and keeping advertisers happy.

And that inspired me, and hence I invited Gregory to my podcast. We explore what's broken in digital marketing and how the disconnect with what's normal in the real world is leading to many inconvenient and often creepy experiences. He shares the big idea behind his company and how this will help brands to have more organic, natural conversations with their clients - leading to higher, and faster conversion. He also shares the big lessons learned in building his company, what's been instrumental to where Persosa is right now, and what he'd do differently next time.

Here are some of his quotes: "Just recently, we started focusing on building partnerships with these large media companies, specifically in TV and web publishing. So an example today is: you're watching television, you see an ad for a Ford F150 truck. Like most Americans, 97% of people watch TV with a second device in their hand. You see this great ad for a truck. You say: I want to learn more about it. You go to ford.com, and they show you a minivan. That's a real lost opportunity. Not only for the company, but it's a disconnected conversation with the consumer."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

That building a product that drives transformative change is not enough. The other thing is how to remove all critical barriers to adopting it.

How critical it is to understand what your customers want, but then layer in your vision and give them something beyond what they're asking for.

Be aggressive in those areas where you can learn what resonates with your customers instead of burning your marketing budgets (how conservative they might be)

How getting to Break Even first opens a lot of doors and opportunities to control your growth rate and gives leverage when you talk to investors.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Gregory Lim

Website Persosa

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to the personal development and aging challenge for all of us. My guest is mil Jimenez, Founder, and CEO of Mind Bank AI

Emil Jimenez is a marketing expert with over 18 years working on global campaigns. He started working in the communications industry as a web designer in NYC. In 2009 he opened Passion Communications in Prague with the vision of building a brand empire for himself and his clients.

Since 2020 Emil has set out to produce the most transformational idea of his life. This was the birth of Mind Bank AI - a company that's on a mission to allow humanity to go beyond their limits and live forever through data. What started as daddy’s quest for immortality has expanded into something bigger for humanity because the next personal computer is you.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Emil to my podcast. We explore how observing his little daughter sparked an idea that turned into a vision that could potentially solve some of the world's biggest problems. Preventing Mental health issues by increasing mental strength, providing education and access to expert knowledge for those that need it most, new ways of knowledge monetization, and even immortality. Emil shares the insights from the journey he's been on to bring this from idea to reality. Last but not least he explains his secrets to creating a software business that we'd miss if were gone.

Here are some of his quotes:

So Mind Bank is a platform for you to create a digital twin of yourself. We want to make a platform for people to bridge AI, and move humanity to what we call AI-enhanced humanity. It's not about the metaverse because the MetaVerse is all about living in another place. Now we're more concerned about ThisVerse. How do I take the AI and data and all the sides that we have to make me or make you a better person and help you in your personal development?And ultimately, store your wisdom. How much wisdom and knowledge is lost when people pass away, especially in family wisdom? So we have the technology to not only learn about ourselves and optimize ourselves, but also that wisdom could last forever - and add value to your family forever. And that's really building this database of humanity.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why having an eye for what matters - and for the things we'd miss if they were gone - is a fantastic source to spark meaningful innovation

That even if everyone is blown away with your big idea is not a guarantee funding will flow in. Never underestimate this.

Why thinking big and long-term will make it a lot easier to keep focused and overcome critical challenges short-term.

Why thinking about money should come last in all the strategic decisions you make

For more information about the guest from this week:

Emil Jimenez

Website Mind Bank AI

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Learn from the most inspiring ideas I've encountered or explored this week that could help you find new ways to stand out, eliminate the need to compete on price, and make tangible progress in creating a SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone. Subscribe here

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help companies to build trust towards their customers and close deals faster by putting their privacy compliance on autopilot. My guest is Stine Mangor Tornmark, Co-founder and CEO of Openli.

Stine has 10+ years of experience as a lawyer from Plesner law firm and Trustpilot. At Trustpilot, she built up Trustpilot’s Legal and Compliance teams and processes from when the company had one office with 70 employees to 850 employees across the globe. She believes that privacy is a fundamental right every individual has and should have.

She realized the struggle she had at Trustpilot to comply around privacy - and that's a large company with deep pockets and a large legal team. Imagine then how small and medium-sized businesses struggle. It's almost an impossible task.

And that's why she co-founded Openli in 2018, a Legal Tech startup that's on a mission to help companies become better data citizens.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Stine to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of proving compliance around privacy data as a business. We dig into why this is the case, and why it's so hard to solve. Stine then shares the approach they've taken to solve the problem - and the hurdles she had to overcome in doing so. We discuss what it took to create momentum and end up with a customers base that's close to 100% referenceable and how that required them to think differently about what their product needed to be all about.

Here are some of her quotes:

in 2018, I was sitting at a lunch table complaining and really just emphasizing the difficulties of ensuring compliance across all these different nationalities and countries. And my co founder said: 'there has to be service out there, Stine. There has to be.' And he started looking for one and we couldn't find any. And you know, when the butterflies start to flap and you get the tingling in your body. That's how I felt at that point. And that's why we founded Openli.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Where to strategically focus your investments when you're starting a SaaS business

How you turn something that's perceived as a cost of doing business into a competitive advantage for your customers

How to go about creating momentum when nobody is looking for your SaaS solution

How to keep your SaaS business on track when adversity hits - and how to come out stronger?

For more information about the guest from this week:

Stine Mangor Tornmark

Website Openli

Subscribe to Value Inspiration on Friday’s A weekly musing on how to shape the B2B SaaS business your customers just keep talking about.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that gives each of us the power to fulfill our potential without sacrificing all the other good things in life. My guest is Manuel Bruschi, Founder, and CEO of Timeular.

Manuel is a former web developer that has been recognized as a Forbes 30 under 30, a Ted speaker, and also a former Austrian National Champion in Rugby 7’s! He's passionate about the most important resource for a life worth living: Time.

That's why he co-founded Timeular in 2015. Timeular is a B2B SaaS business that empowers people to track their job routines to then analyze and design better ones. It's on a mission to help 10M+ people to live a more healthy and rewarding work-life

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Manuel to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the current market for timesheet applications. Why no matter how simple we make these apps, people still won't use them. He then shares how's found the simplest possible solution to the problem: A handshake with your time. We then drill into the journey to take this from an idea into reality and what hurdles he had to overcome to create momentum (and keep the momentum). Last but not least he shares how he's shaped his organization to be customer-obsessed in everything they do in order to build products their customers cannot live without.

Here are some of his quotes: We are making something that many people find very annoying way more simple and way more fun. That's the obvious benefit they get. But then when people actually start to track their time, immediately and more in detail, they see where their time is really going. Because the funny thing about time is: our perception of time is distorted by our emotions. One hour of fun feels like five minutes, and one hour of something boring feels like five hours. That's why we always think those nice things don't take as much time as we think. And the boring things take way more time than we think.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why not only focusing on business value - but as well on user value will help to create momentum

That a product is only worth developing if people are prepared to pay a premium for it.

That it's not only about creating launch momentum but about securing long-term retention

The value in obtaining a frugal mindset to build a product that people want to use the entire day

For more information about the guest from this week:

Manuel Bruschi

Website Timeular

Subscribe to Value Inspiration on Friday’s A weekly musing on how to shape the B2B SaaS business your customers just keep talking about.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help ambitious people become more focused and productive. My guest is Jonas Vossler, Founder, and CEO of Flow Lab.

Jonas is fascinated by everything that happens at the intersection of new technologies, business, and society. He's convinced that in today’s world, innovation is the primary driver for economic growth and for change in our society. It is due to the progress induced by a variety of innovations and inventions, especially in health and technology, that the population of Western industrialized countries enjoys a high standard of living.

Still, we all experience a variety of mental distractions and emotional distress in our workdays that prevent us from finding the motivation, focus, and energy to perform at our best and use our time productively.

And that's exactly the problem Jonas wants to solve - and hence he founded Flow Lab, a company that's on a mission to help people find more flow in their lives.

And that inspired me - and hence I invited Jonas to my podcast. We explore why with all the technology around it's still so hard to be productive and deliver peak performance in our work. We also discuss the journey Jonas has been on to solve this massive problem. He shares examples about the strategic decisions he had to take, the challenges he's faced in gaining traction in the market, funding his business, and what was required to be ready for that in the first place. Lastly, we discuss his big lessons learned to create a software business that's resilient and what it takes to build something that people just keep talking about.

Here are some of his quotes:

The tools we provide they're going to help people be their own mental coach, so to speak, to develop self-leadership capabilities that take me through the day in a way that I feel for myself as positive and productive. And what that can mean is: the ability to focus when I need to ability not to focus when I don't want to. The ability to recover. The ability to be emotionally balanced. The ability to motivate myself. There are so many micro-decisions that can be decisive throughout a given day, for me to make this a productive day.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

What being crystal clear about segmentation actually means and why focusing just on demographics is not enough

Why having a compelling vision and realistic optimism are key ingredients to build resilience in your SaaS business

That, in order to become a remarkable software business you have to invest in soft skills in communication - especially when emotion get involved.

That the pressure to get the funding is nothing compared to the pressure that's is building once you get the funding

For more information about the guest from this week:

Jonas Vossler

Website Flow Lab

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Welcome to episode 200 of the Tech-entrepreneur on a mission podcast.

Because this is a big milestone on the journey I didn't want to devote this podcast to one guest - instead I got 22.

A big element of every single episode of the podcast is the advice from tech-entrepreneurs to other tech-entrepreneurs about the most valuable lessons learned in building a remarkable SaaS business.

So I've made a hand-picked selection of quotes from the 200 episodes that have featured between the 1st of January 2018 and today. And in doing so I've uncovered 7 different themes.

Just Start & Think big

Declaring war to the problem

Challenge the status quo and create change

The right mindset - because there are no shortcuts

The power of creating leverage

Clarity about value

Removing ego - act as a team

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This podcast interview shares the big lessons learned from the failed attempts and required pivots running a startup that was on a mission to take down Facebook. My guest is Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm, author of "How Hard Can It Be"

Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm is a consultant, lecturer, and head of sales and business development at GLOBHE. He is also the founder of multiple startups, including internalDesk, a SaaS platform for enterprise collaboration, where he served as COO.

He's passionate about entrepreneurship, neuroscience, resilience and making the world a better place. He works on projects he believes in and with people who 'go for it'; He finishes everything he starts; He trains like if there was no tomorrow; He enjoys the 'now' and looks forward to the journey.

He goes by the mantra of "Get comfortable being uncomfortable." And that's no understatement. In his book 'How hard can it be' he explains his personal journey in building a startup that got founded around the big idea to 'take down Facebook'. The book is a jet-setting parable of the European startup scene that takes on the most elusive business topic of them all: failure.

And that inspired me, and hence I invited Arnaud to my podcast. We explore the journey Arnaud and his team went through with their startup, the pivots that were required, and the commercial, financial and emotional challenges this brought along. We pinpoint the critical ingredients to getting right from a solution perspective to create virality - stickiness - and growth that's sustainable. Last but not least he addresses what to be prepared for as a founder and how (and why) to embrace failure as a hidden gem.

Here are some of his quotes: People have a lot of ideas, constantly, I guess that's what we do as humans, we have plenty of ideas, but ideas are cheap. What matters is his execution. And unless you execute, and how long can you execute once you've decided that you are someone who indeed executes? You know, how long can you go? How far can you go?People start companies, but they all drop along the way. People drop, people drop, people drop, and they stand on that shelf as a souvenir of startups that tried anything and did not go all the way through?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

That having a product that's functionally rich and technically scalable is only half the battle. Business model scalability is the other one.

That the best thing you can do for your company is to demonstrate persistence in sticking to the one thing you're after. Don't pivot too early

That a ground principle of creating something remarkable is to focus on doing something utterly different (not better)

Why you need to be persistent in finding problems that are mission-critical, not just nice to have

For more information about the guest from this week:

Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm

Website "How Hard Can It Be"

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to make change to the effectiveness and fairness of our justice system. My guest is Jacqueline Schafer, Founder, and CEO of ClearBrief.

Jacqueline began her career as a litigation associate at the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison, and spent the majority of her career as an Assistant Attorney General in the Washington and Alaska Attorney General’s Offices, where she specialized in appellate practice and complex litigation.

Before joining the startup world, Jacqueline also served as in-house counsel for the national nonprofit Casey Family Programs, where she negotiated agreements with state courts across the country and managed impact litigation. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and cum laude from Boston University School of Law. Today she's the Founder and CEO of Clearbrief, a legal tech startup that's on a mission to transform the legal writing process and create a fairer justice system.

And that inspired me - and hence I invited Jacqueline to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the legal tech market. That the focus is too much on the process, and not on the outcome - a more just legal system. Jacqueline shares her vision for the Justice system and how she's carefully architecting a product that's both sticky for its users, has strong network effects, and an ability to create a fairer justice system for all of us. She talks about the biggest hurdles she had to overcome - and what's been critical in her eyes to create a remarkable software business that has staying power.

Here are some of her quotes: "I was doing a pro bono asylum case, representing a woman and her toddler, and in those cases, it really comes down to a final hearing, and it's life or death for these individuals. And so, there was a moment at that hearing where I saw the judge was not inclined to find in favor of my clients. But I pointed him to a sentence in my brief, which was a 50-page intense legal document. That was what convinced the judge. He looked at the evidence, he looked at that report, in the context of my argument, and we won the case."

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why you should develop a strong evidence skill and avoid taking shortcuts in finding product-market-fit.

How to build a product that has staying power with its core users and put a smile on their face - every single day.

Why it's key to connect the dots to the larger impacts we're aspiring to understand the true problem we're solving.

How to introduce meaningful change to an industry that's not changed in decades.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Jacqueline Schafer

Website Clearbrief

Subscribe to Value Inspiration on Friday’s A weekly musing on how to shape the B2B SaaS business your customers just keep talking about.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to build the best content, connect people across the world and create happy customers. My guest is Volker Smid, CEO of Acrolinx

Volker has more than 25 years of management experience in the software, internet, technology, and media industry around the globe. Throughout his career, he served as CEO of Searchmetrics and EVP Digital & Technologies at the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. He was CEO of Hewlett-Packard Germany, Vice Chairman of BITKOM, President EMEA and Asia/PAC at Novell Inc., SVP Sales Midmarket at Parametric Technology Boston, and SVP at POET Inc. in San Mateo, California.

Today he's the CEO of Acrolinx, a company that's built around the vision to create a world connected by amazing content. Its mission is to supercharge the billions of enterprise content touchpoints that power the global customer experience.

And that inspired me, and hence I invited Volker to my podcast. We explore what's broken when it comes to managing content in the enterprise world. We drill into the negative effects and the cost of content that frustrates people, and this multiplies as the scale, consumption, and complexity grow. Volker then talks about how he's steering his organization to be a fully aligned organization - and how having a strong and clear vision and mission that are focused on transformational change are critical to achieving this. Last but not least he shares his lessons learned in leading his company through the crisis, and what was required to become a stronger company altogether.

Here are some of his quotes: My first statement, when I came to realize that this world was being turned upside down, was: This is a global crisis. And there will be winners and losers in the global crisis. And I believe we have a fair chance to come out of this crisis being a stronger company - without knowing what that meansBut the first address for the organization was the reminder of. It is a crisis. Every crisis is a mix between challenges and opportunities. Let's be very, very cautious and careful about the challenges. But let's focus on the opportunity.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to embrace uncertainty and fear when adversity hits - and the power of trust in each other to overcome the biggest challenges.

Why every company should educate and develop every employee to be able to tell a 30-second story about the company

Why capturing the transformational stories from customers are critical to creating an aligned and proud organization

Why leaders should encourage every employee to go out of their comfort zone and do things they have never done before

For more information about the guest from this week:

Volker Smid

Website Acrolinx

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to bridge the best of both worlds to create remarkable results in an increasingly remote workplace. My guest is Matt Compton, Co-founder, and CEO of Filo.

Matt is a two-time founder and former IBM, ExactTarget, and Salesforce. He spent his entire career solving complex problems within product development, sales, marketing, and business strategy. Through a unique skill set combining engineering and business, he specializes in building and leading cross-functional teams to solve organizations' largest problems.

Today he's the CEO of Filo, a company that's on a mission to build a future where online meeting fatigue is replaced with meaningful engagement and increased productivity.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matt to my podcast. We explore how his company emerged from an attempt to prevent a hackathon event from being canceled. It's a story about what's humanly possible to achieve in a matter of weeks when the problem is highly valuable to solve and timing is critical. Matt shares the challenges he had to overcome in finding a repeatable business model and making the business sustainable. Last but not least he shares his experiences on what it takes to shape a remarkable software business.

Here are some of his quotes: We're helping people come together in order to get real work done, but without having to be in the same place to do it.While it's always great to be in person, and I'm excited to get back in person when we can start doing more of that. Having to do it isn't good for anybody. It's not good for us as people, it's not good for our families. It's not good for the environment. It is not good for business, because it just slows everything down. It's incredibly expensive. We like to move fast. So this is a problem we have been talking about for many years. And we had an opportunity at the beginning of the pandemic in order to put our money where our mouth was. And going back to curiosity, being ambitious, and working with great people - It was an opportunity. We had four weeks and we said "hey, what if?"

During this interview, you will learn four things:

The importance of laser-sharp segmentation - in particular, understanding who you're not for

How to continue momentum when the virality effect of 'the start' fades out

How to tune messaging when you're bringing something to market and people are not in the mindset and may not even think there's a solution out there they need

What to change to be able to better deal with failure - and become stronger from it.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Matt Compton

Website Filo

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This podcast interview focuses on the art of product innovation - and how people, not technology, often play a fundamental role in creating success. My guest is Derek Mendonça, Co-Founder Singular Aircraft

Derek is a highly accomplished business leader with a passion for people & results; specifically, for empowering people to get the best results, aligned around an ambitious vision.

He believes people perform at their best when they are challenged. When they are allowed to explore, encouraged to push their boundaries, and inspired to compete against their own prior achievements.

Derek excels at creating the engagement, excitement, and professional challenge that leads to positive organizational change and encourages innovation.

And exactly this skill caused him to co-found Singular Aircraft. It's a company that produces the largest and most versatile unmanned civilian aircraft. The company is on a mission to solve some meaningful and growing problems such as fighting the massive wildfires around the globe, poaching, and delivering goods to operations in dangerous or remote areas.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Derek to my podcast. We explore how making big progress is so often not about introducing new technology, but changing the mindset of people. Derek shares many anecdotes about his fascinating journey (and opportunity) with Singular Aircraft. How small thinking literally stopped countries that need it most to make a big impact. He talks about the big lessons learned to overcome seemingly impossible hurdles - and what helped him to stay sane in that process.

Here are some of his quotes:

We wanted to make something different. We wanted to make something that everyone could afford. Most planes, as you know, are very expensive.We wanted to make something affordable, at a price point that nobody could compete with us. So our competitor is a 4x4 Land Rover. In terms of cost, not a plane, any 4x4 is my competitor. Because that's the real cost of operations. Obviously, we can take much carry much more and travel further, than where a 4x4 can go. But that is my competitor. So we made it at a price point. And it was a huge risk because we thought at the time: Time will tell whether we're genius, or crazy.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

It's easy to think about the downsides. It's hard to be positive - choosing not to spend time or energy on what can go wrong, but what can go right

Why we need to start with the end in mind - and envision how your product can make the biggest possible difference

The power to catalytic invention - create something that excels at the three A's: Applicability, Accessibility, and affordability

How to create something that drives word of mouth from the start

For more information about the guest from this week:

Derek Mendonça

Website Singular Aircraft

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help us maximize the impact behind all our creative decisions, and my guest is Anastasia Leng, Founder, and CEO of CreativeX. Early in her career, Anastasia gained experience in brand strategy at Interbrand, spent 5+ years at Google, where she worked on every ad tech and analytics product, led entrepreneurship efforts in EMEA, and was responsible for early-stage partnerships for Google Voice, Chrome, and Wallet. In 2012 she co-founded Hatch, one of Time Magazine’s Top 10 Startups to Watch in New York and one of four most innovative retail companies. Today, she’s the Founder & CEO of CreativeX, an automated creative excellence platform used by the world’s most loved brands. The company is on a mission to advance creative expression through the clarity of data. And that inspired me, and hence I invited Anastasia to my podcast. We explore what’s holding companies back in their growth because they’re guessing what works/what doesn’t work in relation to their creative efforts. Anastasia shares how she solved this problem internally first, and how investors then made them aware of the size of this problem globally. She explains how this triggered a major pivot and the effort and determination it took to get to Product-Market-Fit. Finally, she shares some of the secrets she learned in turning her company into a remarkable growth story. Here are some of her quotes: We make a lot of promises and have a lot of efforts to try and do things like be responsible citizens as brands to promote different people of all different colors and orientations. And yet, when we look at the content we put out, we don’t always tell that story. And I think part of it is because it has become very, very difficult to analyze content at that scale and in an objective way. We can help o even get an initial pulse check as to how you’re doing on things that don’t even relate to marketing performance. What is the message you’re really sending, I think is the broader question. And how do we help you figure out whether or not the messages that you are really sending actually are in line with the brand values and the things that you would like to be sending? During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why having an honest perspective about how your company is really running is key. Staying in that bubble and thinking you’ve got everything together will just make the mess bigger.

Why we’re often the biggest obstacles in our own way

Make the big bets. Think ‘what’s the worst that can happen and push forward.’ Your reflection will tell you ‘why didn’t I do this sooner’

Why success often starts by cutting things down to the core

For more information about the guest from this week:

Anastasia Leng

Website CreativeX

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable people on the manufacturing floor to boost continuous improvements and focus on that matters. My guest is Martin Cloake, CEO of Raven AI Martin is an experienced executive and award-winning technology entrepreneur with a background in Manufacturing, Data Science, IP, and Operations Management. He holds multiple patents and is a Mechanical Engineering graduate from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. He's a problem-solver, relentless resourceful, and always assumes something can be done. When he saw the massive investments in Industry 4.0 increase, but most companies failing to get the benefits they'd aspired for he decided to found Raven AI. Raven is on a mission to help manufacturers accelerate Continuous Improvement, improve the service to their customers and increase profits. How? By spotting opportunities and providing real-time guidance that empowers and engages manufacturing teams. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Martin to my podcast. We explore why many manufacturers have a false sense of what they think has happened, vs what actually happened. The result of this: they can't solve their most pressing problems because they can't pinpoint with accuracy what these actually are. Martin shares how he's solving this problem and what choices he's made on his journey to do so in a remarkable way. Here are some of his quotes: The gold standard that I always thought of for technology was GPS for your car. So one of the things that GPS does is that it doesn't drive your car, it doesn't dominate your attention. Every once in a while, it gives you a little insight. And then based on that insight, you're way more effective. So there's this idea where as humans, we are awesome at solving problems, we're awesome at collaborating with one another. Where technology and data can help is to sift through data to make sure that if we're standing in front of a problem, we're standing in front of the right problem and the most important problem.So I always saw that there's this opportunity to combine what we are best at with what technology is best at. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That to succeed in creating momentum and successful adoption we have to go at the speed of humans

What it takes to sell your SaaS solution to people on the shopfloor (vs the boardroom)

How creating remarkable software starts with people that care about what they are building - and people that are empowered to make decisions

That people often think going small and incremental is easier than doing things that are big. Fact is - Doing something big is far easier to get people on board and excited about the journey.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Martin Cloake

Website Raven AI

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to let us all create a bigger impact, by spending less time in meetings. My guest is Alessandra Knight, Co-Founder, and CEO of Katch. Alessandra studied anthropology and has always had a passion for learning about different people and cultures. She values people-first thinking. And this landed her at Dots - a mobile game studio, where she quickly moved up to an operations-lead-slash-strategic-advisor role for the executive team. Her role was geared towards optimizing time for herself and her colleagues. Soon she started seeing how hard true, uninterrupted focus time was to come by. This sparked a project within Dots to search for a way to give the team more time to do work and less time in meetings. And this became the big idea behind Katch. Katch is on a mission to create a world where people make the time to connect with who they want, on topics that matter at times that work best for them. It's giving all of us the ability to live our lives versus being controlled by our calendars. And that inspired me, and hence I invited Alessandra to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we manage our time or have our time managed for us - and how that erodes the impact we can make. The traditional ways to manage calendars is flawed - since it doesn't take our mindset, energy levels, and priorities into account. Alessandra shares the big idea behind her company and how she'll use technology to give us back uninterrupted focus. She also shares some of her big lessons learned building her SaaS business and what is important to succeed beyond having a remarkable solution. Here are some of her quotes: Our life is a spontaneous train of events We never know how the next hour and whatnot will be scheduled. We're creating a product to work hand in hand with spontaneity and believe that being able to have these conversations ad-hoc, when you're in that right headspace to connect with someone, is important.Being able to focus on what's most important in the moment, being more productive, and still having time to do what matters most. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That it's very possible to disrupt a market that's been around for decades and is dominated by extremely large tech-giants

Why passion for the product is not enough,w the passion needs to be about how the product help impact the lives of others

That we always try and move forward in our paths - but sometimes we have to move laterally to get where we need going - and that's OK

Why openness, passion, and diversity are key ingredients to create a SaaS business that's able to create remarkable momentum.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Alessandra Knight

Website Katch

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to shape the conditions where everyone can come to work in an environment that’s right for them. My guest is Nico Blier Silvestri, Co-Founder and CEO of Platypus. Nico has an extremely diverse and robust 15-year career in recruitment, working at industry-leading companies, including Yahoo!, Trust Pilot, and Unity. He's been pioneering his own brand of culture-centric recruitment. Through his time as Chief People Officer, Strategic Business Advisor, and Director of Talent, Nico has now channeled his business and recruitment insights into Platypus His experience has taught him that company culture is at the core of every step of an employee journey, from attraction to management, to retention. He believes that culture is democratic. That all employees have an impact on the culture of an organization, bringing their personal values as cultural drivers - and that company culture is not defined by top-down values but by everyday actions. This became the founding principle of Platypus, which Nico leads as their CEO. It's on a mission to help organizations understand their culture better and make sure every employee, whether current or future, has the opportunity to prosper. This inspired me, and hence I invited Nico to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the market where it comes to building thriving cultures. We discuss that's very much a management issue - and what difference can be made if technology and people blend in the right way. Nico shares his stories about the journey he's been through in taking the Platypus from an initial vision to where it is today. He shares the mistakes he made and explains how we overcame some big hurdles to get to Product-Market Fit and create a solution that makes a significant difference in the eyes of his customers. Here are some of his quotes: My big picture genuinely is to kill bullshit branding. I'm exhausted from looking at videos or organizations advertising themselves. It's all the time the same. Put another logo, there's nothing genuine and honest about the reality of this. It's not helping the organization. and it's certainly not helping the candidates or the people outside. Secondly, we really want to achieve is for people to find the right organization for them to work in. That's the whole idea with Platypus. Platypus is this amazing animal that probably shouldn't exist because it's so specific. But in the right environments, in the right setup, it's happy, it's thriving, and it exists and it's evolving. That's why for us we call it Platypus because it's all about finding the right environment for the person. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That a critical lever for success is positive conflict. You don't need people that agree with you. You don't need to hear what you've just said in a different voice.

Remove the ego from leadership. You're not in a leadership position, because you're right all the time. You're in a leadership position because you're the best at getting the best out of people.

That as a CEO you want to go so fast, and you're so self sold into your own idea that it's critical to have people that are not you making decisions on the product.

How to go about making the decision to kill your product, and start all over again.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Nico Blier Silvestri

Website Platypus

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give all of us new options to communicate more humanly and be trusted faster. My guest is David Jay, Founder, and CEO of Warm Welcome David was recently named a Top 100 Tech Innovator and Influencer. David is a startup junkie, he has started service-based companies and several software companies. He believes that business can be a tool to help us build better relationships and connect us to a purpose far beyond ourselves. Today he's the CEO of Warm Welcome. A startup that's on a mission to create a world that is more personal, more human, more joyful than ever before. They believe that most people would prefer to engage with another human instead of a robot - and that relationships are what make our lives rich and give us meaning. This inspired me, and hence I invited David to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way communicate digitally and what that leads to. We then discuss the approach David has chosen to solve this problem in a remarkable way. He shares his big lessons learned in building the solution in an as lean as possible way. He addresses the challenges he faced in creating momentum in a completely new category - and ends with his fresh take on the concept of 'launching'. Here are some of his quotes: It really helps people stand out. Everybody is been doing things the old way. Everybody has a funnel built. They have email campaigns. You sign up for a product, and you get 20 emails. And they all look the same. They're beautifully designed, they're full of text and graphics. But when you put your face behind something, you build trust way faster than you do with pretty graphics. And for most products and services, people want to trust the person that's making it before they're going to buy it. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That we're too often building remarkable software, but forget the power of human touch. Combining the two creates something that stands out.

That, in order to more often succeed, we should replace the word 'launch' with 'planting seeds'.

Why we should always test the water in the market with something lightweight - something we can still adjust without wasting money.

Why it's key to turn early customers into evangelists - and how to go about that.

For more information about the guest from this week:

David Jay

Website Warm Welcome

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help young people speak their truths and tap into their superpowers. My guest is Ivy Mahsciao, Founder and CEO of evrmore. Ivy is a champion for human potential who has a 20+ year background in consumer psychology and product science, with a category-defining product management portfolio that includes Genentech, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Nike. Today she's the CEO of evrmore - a startup that's on a mission to help people see their innate potentials and impacts in the world by bringing our social and emotional selves back online. It's an inclusive betterment platform for young people to develop transferable core skills and social mobility. This is especially helpful for those who might be going through the most challenging time in their lives, such as the current pandemic, immigration trauma, grief, separation, and other difficult transitions aka life. This inspired me - and hence I invited Ivy to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's world where it comes to helping young people to grow their self-knowledge and having a strong self-narrative. We discuss how the non-stop push of information and chasing social proof has created a big problem in society. We then explore the journey Ivy has taken to fix the problem once and forever - and the challenges she's faced along the way. We discuss her strategies to scale and accelerate by leveraging the ecosystem in her tech stack. Lastly, we discuss her take on building a remarkable software business. Here are some of her quotes: The MVP in the traditional sense is just not going to cut it now for something like evrmore. So then what is that thing? This is again, another thing that I want to demystify for the founder’s entrepreneurial experience. When you're building something from nothing - from just the screaming dots you're trying to connect - you also realize that you're always going to feel like you're not going fast enough. There's just not going to be any shortage of Crunchbase news, or acquisition news or funding news, you're always going to be like I needed to launch this thing, six months ago, eight months ago, two years ago, or something like that. Not downplaying that anxiety, I think it's an important one to clearing the air and just being vulnerable. And just say "that is very much my reality." You're always trying to balance those external pressures. So what is that gold standard of knowing what to measure, knowing what to validate before you hit that first Launch button and say, This is now my maximum minimal viable products? During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to find highly valuable innovation opportunities by growing your skills to capture any idea and actively connect the right dots

That the essence about the minimum viable product is often misinterpreted - and how thinking about maximum-minimum viable product can help

How asking the most piercing questions and describing it from a qualitative standpoint will help define the essence of your business

That it's your responsibility as a tech-entrepreneur to cherish your hunches and intuitions - and create the pathways for them to become useful.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ivy Mahsciao

Website evrmore

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help create the workplace culture we'd all dream to work in. My guest is Petri Lehtonen, CEO of Flowtrace Petri is a startup leader turned into an entrepreneur. He's what he calls a professional Inter-team communicator. He's had significant exposure to strategic partnerships, nurturing startup cultures, and building cloud products. After 20 years of tackling the slow and manual processes of organizations and teams, Petri figured there must be an easier, modern way of making work more transparent and avoiding the recurrent pitfalls of teams not collaborating with each other. He realized that work is changing whether we like it or not. The tools we use are also part of that change. For a leader to understand their organization, new ways of overseeing are needed. The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 was the final push - as it made it even more pressing to solve the obstacles of collaborating remotely. That became the founding idea behind Flowtrace in 2020. Flowtrace is on a mission to bring about the future of work for everyone. It's doing this by building a platform and focusing on the things that really matter in inter-team collaboration – making modern work more meaningful. And that inspired me, and hence I invited Petri to my podcast. We explore what's broken when it comes to creating successful company cultures - and what are the consequences of failing. We discuss what culture creation really is all about, and how technology can play a fundamental role in amplifying the benefits in areas such as boosting productivity, creativity, quality, and/or innovation. Lastly, we dig into Petri's big lessons learned around creating a product-market fit and creating momentum through messaging. Here are some of his quotes: I started a little bit differently than many other founders. Becoming a founder, I knew I wanted to build something that b2b companies can leverage. I wanted to increase the communication and collaboration in the startup tech industry. So the next six months, I spent talking with people who are in the same position as I am. I was trying to find a viable, feasible and valuable solution in these conversations. So I was basically designing my solution just by talking the first half a year.Towards the end of those hundreds of calls and conversations I had some people started to ask at the end of the call, "Can I actually try your solution?" It obviously shocks you a little bit, but when it happens many times enough, you realize, I actually don't have any product. Maybe now it's time I need to actually build it. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That success starts by being specific - Being specific about the value you create and who'd benefit most from this value

Why selling the vision will help you grow momentum faster than selling the features

That it's essential to get to product market fit fast - and how to achieve that almost without coding a single line

That there's often a big difference between what customers want and what you think they want - and how go about that by addressing the fundamentals

For more information about the guest from this week:

Petri Lehtonen

Website Flowtrace

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This podcast interview focuses on the journey and the big resilience lessons learned by a startup as it moved from start, to launch, various pivots towards ultimate success. My guest is Paul Wickers, Founder, and CEO of Huggg.me Paul spent 14 years in the Structured Finance team at RBS and then Santander. During this time he came to study the social economics of the greetings card industry. He realized that the success of physically sending a greeting card in the offline world had never been achieved in the online world. This helped him develop the insight that the principles of giving and receiving emotionally impactful gifts could be applied in a digital way - it just had to be done in a different way. This became the launch of Huggg in 2015. Paul build the platform in his spare time, left his job in 2016, and the platform was first launched in July 2017. But the journey of his company wasn't an instant success from the start. And it's the story of business resilience that really caught my attention - and inspired me to invite Paul to my podcast. Listening to this interview will feel like watching a movie trailer unfold. We explore the lessons Paul learned as he took his product to market. Initially towards Consumers, later towards Business to Business. We discuss the importance of product-market fit. We discuss his lessons learned when it comes to allocating funding to the right levers in the business. We go through what happened when COVID hit the world - the rationalization that followed, then the hibernation, then the rebirth, and finally how sheer perseverance and focusing on the problem, not the product helped him succeed. Here are some of his quotes: At the start, any startup idea, especially if it's novel, is a great big bag of all the things that are likely to go wrong. Because in all likelihood, it won't be a success, it's just statistically unlikely for you to actually succeed. So on day one, you've got a great big bag of problems that you're going to have to overcome. And your job over time is to make that bag lighter before you take it to an investor. Because the more of those risks you've gotten rid of, and you've got a lighter bag, when you go forward to raise the next round of money, the better your proposition is because you don't want to prove it. Now what I spent was too long on like creating the first product and not enough time just knocking over those barriers. Actually, because I underestimated I was confident that the idea would work. And I didn't realize how hard product-market fit is. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That if you can create a constant feeling of genuine urgency around the mission you'll get the best out of people longer term.

That your company will become stronger by being plain honest about what's the real situation in a crisis situation. It helps create great bonding

That nothing is ever as bad or as good as it first seems.

That when one thing goes away, other things will open up. So focus on the positive things that you can do, rather than the negative

For more information about the guest from this week:

Paul Wickers

Website Huggg.me

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to grow the impact we can make by superpowering our communications. My guest is Surbhi Rathore, Co-Founder, and CEO of Symbl. Surbhi is an international tech leader who advocates for Women in AI with a personal mission to inspire more women to work in Data Science. She comes with experience from technical and customer-obsessed roles in both startups and enterprises such as Nevis Networks and Amdocs. She is a national speaker, an accessibility equity champion, and the ultimate adventure capitalist. Today she's is the CEO and co-founder of Symbl.ai. With her team, she's on a mission to leverage AI technology to democratize conversational tech to make collaboration effortless. And in line with that, they created a new category of voice tech infrastructure – “Conversational Intelligence as a Service”. This inspired me, and hence I invited Surbhi to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we communicate and collaborate digitally. We discuss what is required to capitalize on the potential of human intellect by making collaboration effortless. We also address the tough choices Surbhi made in not going with the flow - but instead taking a radically different approach to solving the big problem in the market. Last but not least we discuss what it takes to build a remarkable software business. Here are some of her quotes: When we started the company, it was super crowded. There were so many businesses trying to build automated meeting notes products. I think we always had the right positioning in our minds. But as a founder, it's so hard to articulate that and other people. It was hard for us to just articulate our go-to-market motion of the product that we are building the right way. Although we had an idea that what is going to set us apart. But I think it just came over time as we evolved in terms of 'Okay, we want to we want to build a platform that enables businesses to analyze conversation data without building an in house data science team.' So making it absolutely easy and removing the dependency on data. So there is no data labeling training annotation that goes in the cycle. It's a plug-and-play experience. And that really created a very compelling like aha moment for businesses. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why, to streamline your business and get razor-focused, it's key to get crystal clear on your positioning.

That love for the problem is critical to success, but there are some other equally crucial skills to develop/look for in new hires

The importance of the role of marketing and content creation early in the lifecycle of your company to establish the foundation for inbound traffic

How to prevent investing your newly gained funding on the wrong initiatives

For more information about the guest from this week:

Surbhi Rathore

Website Symbl

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform our workplace into a fair workplace - starting with fair pay. My guest is Maria Colacurcio, CEO of Syndio Maria is a tech veteran – she previously co-founded Smartsheet, which went public in 2018. She spent three years at Starbucks, one of the first Fortune 50 companies to go public with pay equity results. Having started her career working on congressional campaigns, she has a long history of mission-driven work, and a compassionate and competitive attitude to spur change. She serves on the board of the nonprofit Fair Pay Workplace and has been named by Goldman Sachs Builders + Innovators Summit one of this year’s 100 most intriguing entrepreneurs. As a CEO and a mom of 7, Maria is walking the walk on eradicating workplace inequities. Today Maria is the CEO at Syndio, a SaaS startup helping companies around the world create an equitable workplace for all employees, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity. That inspired me, and hence I invited Maria to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's workplace when it comes to valuing people for the contribution they bring and paying them fairly independent of who they are. We discuss the pivot and what it took to change course. We discuss the effects the Pandemic introduced, and what was critical to not only bounce back, but actually come out stronger. And last but not least we address the role of the CEO in creating a business that people love talking about. Here are some of her quotes: If we get it right we quite literally transform society. I think the gender and race pay gaps resulted in lifetime wages that are often hundreds of 1000s of dollars less for women and people of color. So I think when you think about the wealth gap, and how we just compound over time, that's where we have a tremendous opportunity to transform society. And for companies, it's just as big because, if we get it right, it means they move away from this cycle of annual one and done remediation. And they actually get to stay on top of this proactively overtime on both sides.We really believe that workplace equity is a combination of two things. We started with pay equity, and now we're moving over to more broad workplace equity to look at promotions and when you can get to both. That's when you have a company that Really has an enduring ability to create value and to measure how they're valuing their employees not just for who they are, but the contributions they bring. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That the odds of success and surviving any crisis starts with having a solution that's perceived as mission-critical, and not a nice to have.

How to prioritize your roadmap by focusing on the smallest ingredient that driving the biggest impact for your ideal customers

That your ideal customers are not the ones that have the biggest budgets, but the ones where you align on world-views and show the courage to stick to it no matter what

How to focus your leadership team on looking at a problem and brainstorming a solution collaboratively without blaming and fingerpointing

For more information about the guest from this week:

Maria Colacurcio

Website

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to move us to where we are at the centre of our own digital life, and back in control over our own data. My guest is Julian Ranger, Executive Chairman and Founder of Digi.me. Julian is an aeronautical engineer specialising in interoperability and the military internet. He founded STASYS Ltd in 1987, and grew it to a staff of 230, with subsidiaries in the USA, Germany, Malaysia and Australia prior to sale to Lockheed Martin in 2005. He's an angel investor in more than 20 start-up businesses, including firms such as Hailo, DataSift, and Astrobotic. His passion for the power of personal data led him to build new businesses. Today he's the Exec Chairman and founder of digi.me, a company that's on a mission to enable the Internet of Me, enabling us to do amazing things with our personal data without compromising our privacy or security. And that inspired me, and hence I invited you Julian to my podcast. We explore how the internet has become a place where no one is in control anymore over their own data, but no one is in control over all data. And exactly the latter is the problem that stops us from having the level of personalization we really want, and the big breakthroughs we all need, like precision medicine. Fixing privacy, security and consent is not the way forward. That's about stopping the bad stuff from happening. What we need is a way to share more and better data - to make the good stuff happening (without the bad stuff) Here are some of his quotes: Rich data, now ask yourself, is there a company in the world that can do that? And people say, 'well, Google, and Facebook and Axiom', but if you take a circle of my data, they have a wedge. But they don't have my health, my purchases, or my media, my wearables, and stuff. In fact, because of all the stovepipes or silos, whichever analogy you like, it is impossible for any company to bring all that data together to get a rich data library view. So we are effectively stopped from our future at this point. And the laws are shrinking those wedges that people have, but nobody said, Well, how do I open up the whole circle to do it? Now when you look at it, no company can. But there is one entity in the whole system that knows all about you and me. Yourself.You know where your data is. You have a right for that data. And you're the only entity with unlimited usage rights. When you understand those three things, you can only aggregate rich data at the individual. And that's the key insight for what my business does. That's our big idea. And it's no less than enables the future of the world. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why too often we approach the problem from the wrong end - by not looking far enough ahead: the simple desired outcome for the user

What it requires to succeed when your big idea hits the road and you discover that the road is not quite as smooth as you'd like

That everybody is lucky - but that many are just not seeing the luck around them.

Why as entrepreneurs we often spend too much time on the idea and the instantiation of it, and not enough time on the internal and external messaging

For more information about the guest from this week:

Julian Ranger

Website Digi.me

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This podcast interview focuses on the art to transform our visions into reality - and with that create products that create meaningful change. My guest is Radhika Dutt, Author of Radical Product Thinking Radhika is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in four acquisitions, two of which were companies that she founded. She is an Advisor on Product Thinking to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Singapore’s financial regulator and central bank. She teaches entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern’s D’Amore McKim School of Business and is an advisor to several startups. She graduated from MIT with a Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering, and speaks nine languages, currently learning her tenth. Radhika co-founded Radical Product Thinking as a movement of leaders creating vision-driven change. She was on my podcast in December 2019 as a consequence of that. Recently she released her book Radical Product Thinking - and that was the perfect reason to interview her again. We explore what's broken in the way we build software products - and the challenges that lead to excessive cost, compromised growth potential, demotivated teams, and so on. We discuss in detail how you can recognize looming problems, and what you can do differently to fix them once and forever. Here are some of her quotes: It's not that companies don't have a vision, you can have varying degrees of good visions. But it's incredible how expensive it is when your vision isn't quite right, or you haven't uncovered these misalignments. And the cost of not having this alignment is what really keeps coming up in organizations. You see it at every step where somehow your vision becomes disconnected and you start running into what I call 'product diseases', which is where innovation kind of dies on the vine. And that's really the cost of them. Not starting with a deep enough detailed enough vision. During this interview, you will learn four things:

The methodology to create a remarkable vision and translate it into everyday action.

What signals to look for to understand whether you have a sizeable innovation problem

The simple framework to avoid vision debt in your organization and how to empower everyone to successfully apply it

how to engineer a culture of innovation by approaching it as if it was a product

For more information about the guest from this week:

Radhika Dutt

Website Radical Product Thinking

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to provide all of us with a highly intelligent and hyper-personalized assistant. My guest is Peter Voss, Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist of Aigo AI Peter is a serial entrepreneur, engineer, inventor, and pioneer in Artificial Intelligence. He coined the term ‘AGI’ (Artificial General Intelligence) with fellow luminaries in this space. He started in electronics engineering, then fell in love with software. His first major success was developing a comprehensive ERP package and taking that company from Zero to 400-person IPO in seven years. Fueled by the fragile nature of software, he embarked on a journey 15+ years ago studying what intelligence is, how it develops in humans, and the current state of AI. This research culminated in the creation of a natural language intelligence engine that can think, learn, and reason -- and adapt to and grow with the user. He founded Aigo in July 2017 where he's focused on commercializing the second generation of their AGI-based ‘Conversational AI’ technology. The most simple way to explain what the product is about is this: It's a chatbot with a brain. What does this mean? It remembers what was said before. It can learn interactively. It has a deep contextual understanding. It can reason and explain itself. The result: It finally makes meaningful ongoing conversations with technology possible. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Peter to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of Chatbots - and why conventional approaches can only bring us so far. We then explore what can be i.e. what potential is ahead of us if we take a different approach. Peter further talks about the challenges he faced and overcame through sheer perseverance. Here are some of his quotes: We started with a brain. This was really my motivation of initially starting the AI company in 2001. It was not to build a chatbot. The motivation was to build an intelligent machine, an intelligent system, a system that can learn and reason and understand and remember, and so on. So that was the starting point. And then we said: "Okay, we have a brain. What do we want to use this brain for?" Do we want to put it into a robot to help, run the robot? Do we want to use it for conversation? Or do we want to use it for image recognition, to help it to drive a car or something? And, as I said - we decided that the best path forward for us was to focus on the conversation. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That the more human our software becomes, the less friction in adoption we'll experience

That staying true to your vision and aiming to be different (not just better) will give initial pushback, but will help overcome the biggest hurdles

That true innovation is not about embracing the latest shiny technology, but about solving meaningful problems in a remarkable way.

How to overcome the trap of losing all your resources and energy on building table-stake features to overcome sales bottlenecks - thereby risking you'll lose your biggest sales argument: your edge

For more information about the guest from this week:

Peter Voss

Website Aigo AI

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This podcast interview focuses on the big resilience lessons learned during the recent Pandemic. My guest is Ronni Zehavi, CEO and Co-founder of Hibob Ronni has over 25 years of experience in multinational, hi-tech companies. Prior to setting up hibob, he was an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Silicon Valley-based Bessemer Venture Partners. He’s the strategic advisor and co-founder of Team8 Cyber Security, a powerhouse developing disruptive tech in the cyber security space. Ronni was also the co-founder and CEO of Cotendo, a content delivery network which in 2012, just four years after it was founded, was acquired by Akamai in a $300m. Ronni has a BA in History and Educational Management from Tel Aviv University and a MA in Organisational Sociology from Bar-Ilan University. This is the second time Ronni features on my podcast, the first episode was launch in December 2019. The reason why I invited him again is to hear about his story of what happened after that - and in particular - how they navigated the effects of the pandemic. We explore what happened with HiBob the moment COVID kicked in in March 2020. How did Ronni and his Management Team shift their focus? What became the critical priories (and why). And what decisions did they take to not only survive but to actually come out stronger as a business? Here are some of his quotes: The restart around COVID had a very good impact from an 18-month retro perspective. We were more focused. Really made a crystal clear vision, so we all understand what we do and why we do it, i.e. "all hands on deck, let's make sure that we cross this uncertainty together."We slowed down expansion to the US because we were new there. And we doubled on the markets where we felt more comfortable: Europe, UK, Israel. We tried not to cut our budget in engineering. Because we knew, at some point it will be over, so we really want to take advantage and speed up some other projects that we thought are relevant. During this interview, you will learn four things:

The critical things to refocus the business on when a crisis kicks in, especially if you don't know if its behavior will be U, V, or for example W-shaped

What to do differently to ensure you will come out stronger from a crisis

Why you should be on your marks not to BS yourself - and how to avoid that in a smart way.

Why a crisis is a great opportunity to grow the bond inside the business, the alignment, and everyone’s commitment

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ronni Zehavi

Website Hibob

Link to our initial podcast interview

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give blind people their sight back and make robots see and interpret exactly what we see. My guest is Sheila Nirenberg, Founder, and CEO of Bionic Sight and Nirenberg Neuroscience. Sheila Nirenberg is a professor of neuroscience at Cornell Medical School and the founder of two start-up companies in New York City – one that develops new kinds of prosthetic devices (Bionic Sight, LLC), and one that develops new kinds of smart robots (Nirenberg Neuroscience LLC). Her lab at the university focuses on basic science, and her companies take what’s learned in the lab and use it to develop solutions to real-world problems. She’s won numerous awards for innovative research, including a MacArthur “genius” Award, and has been featured in a TED talk, a BBC documentary, a PBS documentary, the Discovery Channel, Scientific American, as well as many peer-reviewed publications. The reason? Her work on cracking the neural code of the retina i.e. the code the retina uses to communicate with the brain to allow us to see. And that inspired me, and hence I invited Sheila to my podcast. We explore what's still broken in deep-learning approaches and how that holds us back. We dig into her breakthrough - and what opportunities this enables for remarkable innovation that impact all of us. During our conversation, she shares some of her biggest challenges which were often led by the limited mindset of humans rather than driven by limitations in technology. She also shares her vision on what it takes to shape a software business that people keep talking about. Here are some of her quotes: My claim to fame is that I cracked this code in the retina, so the transformation mathematically from images to the signals that leave the eye, and go to the brain, As soon as I did that, I realized immediately the application of it is that you can make an artificial retina that could restore sight to the blind. And then I was thinking, well, if I could make if that really were true, and I can make send the same signals to the brain, why couldn't I send it to a robot’s brain? So I quickly patented that and started a second company. During this interview, you will learn four things:

True value can arrive when we challenge ourselves to find innovative approaches that require exponentially less data

That often technology is not the issue to drive meaningful change, but skepticism, fear, and narrow mindedness - and how to go about that

The lessons to be learned on how to go about funding and taking the Venture Capital route

The big lessons around having grid and perseverance to succeed

For more information about the guest from this week:

Sheila Nirenberg

Website Nirenberg Neuroscience

Website Bionic Sight

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to create top-performing sales teams that live and breath their sales ambition - because they're highly motivated and their natural competitive instinct is supercharged. My guest is Sindre Haaland, Founder and CEO of SalesScreen. Sindre is the CEO & Founder of SalesScreen. Born and raised in Norway, but today lives in Brooklyn, NY. He believes that the success of every company is a result of their combined talent. That even the leading products and services fall short if the people behind them can’t perform at their very best. That sparked the big idea behind SalesScreen. A tool that turns the process of selling into a team effort, combining individual motivational instruments with cultural aspects and a winning mentality. In short, SalesScreen transforms the challenging work of sales into a professional, motivating and exciting game. A game where all your employees will have fun whilst competing amongst each other for the top-position! This inspired me, and hence I invited Sindre to my podcast. We explore his journey as a tech entrepreneur. What he did wrong, that caused him to waste a full year. What it takes to break new ground in a highly competitive space like Sales Automation. We discuss why humanizing software (rather than automation alone) is key to delivering remarkable impact. Lastly, Sindre shares his experience about the importance of embracing emotion as a way to stand out in the market. Here are some of his quotes: At our first client, I remember one guy there, he took up the mobile phone application, went to the middle of off the sales floor, kind of demanded attention of everyone, and then he hits "sale." Then all the TV screens lit up with Eye of the Tiger playing. Everyone was just going crazy, the energy was so good. We were like, "Okay, we found something here." And look and behold, a week later, this executive from a large insurance chain in Europe called because she had visited this particular call center and seeing the energy for herself. She said "I'm not sure what this product is called or if you're the right one, but we want to buy. We want this for our sales teams as well. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why making people love what they do rather than just like it can mean the difference between success and failure. A massive innovation opportunity

The journey to create a product that has a wow-effect that's too compelling to ignore

How to break new ground and defend your price tag when you're selling something people aren't necessarily looking for

Why investing in amazing people who have relevant experience and have done it before is the best thing you can do as an entrepreneur.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Sindre Haaland

Website SalesScreen

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable creative thinkers and storytellers to create content people actually want to read. My guest is Ryo Chiba, Co-founder, and CEO of Topic. Ryo started his first business in 2012 at USC. While in college, he co-founded a marketing technology company called TINT which he grew to 40 full-time employees, millions in annual recurring revenue, and 1000+ customers in 172 countries. In 2018 we sold the company to Filestack. Today he's working on his next venture, Topic, which he co-founded in 2019. Their mission: Helping organizations produce better content. This inspired me, and hence I invited Ryo to my podcast. We explore what's broken in content creation and how current solutions are obsessed with metrics and creating more content, not content that people want to read and engage with. We also dig into the key learnings Ryo took away from his entrepreneurial journey, why he stopped obsessing about the competition, and what's required to create a business that can accelerate growth based on word-of-mouth. Here are some of his quotes: We were working on a Pinterest clone because social media and visual social media were a big trend at the time. However, we struggled to gain users, pivoted to turn it into a b2b product, and we almost ran out of cash. But then, with about two months of runway left, we were looking for some way to create a sustainable business. I'd self-learned SEO and sort of taught myself how to produce content. And we ended up taking that business and growing it and bootstrapping it to around 40 employees and hundreds of customers. And we were able to do that all through our SEO program and the content that we were producing. What I found during that journey was that the actual act of scaling up content is extremely challenging, even for highly technical and analytical people. So you can imagine how much more difficult it is for people who don't have that kind of mindset, who are more creative thinkers and storytellers. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why building relationships with your competitors can be extremely handy as you evolve your venture

Why being supercritical with yourself on 'who's it for' i.e., which persona to become your ultimate ambassador is critical to securing product-market fit and creating momentum

Why, even if you're loaded with funding, you should keep a bootstrappers mindset and be disciplined and legitimate about deploying them

How it's possible to operate in a highly competitive space and still find space to succeed and stand out.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ryo Chiba

Website Topic

Free Content Tools by Topic

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Ideal Blog Post Length Calculator

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give marketers the freedom to leverage the combined power of direct and digital marketing while removing the compromises. And my guest is Dennis Kelly, CEO of Postalytics Dennis is a serial entrepreneur. He started off as a sales guy, spent time building products, and running data centers. Late 90's he co-founded Anyday.com which was sold to Palm in 2000. This immersed him into the world of wireless. After leaving Palm he co-founded Adjoin to tackle some challenging Webservice management problems. He sold this company to Computer Associates, to then become the CEO of Adesso Systems, an enterprise mobility software company. In 2006 he became the co-owner of Wireless City - a chain of 37 Verizon Wireless stores. He sold this company to Go Wireless in October 2011. From there he switched his focus to researching startup ideas, angel investing, and helping local startups with strategy & advice. This led him to become the CEO of Boingnet, a software platform helping direct mailers generate personalized, multi-channel campaigns across mail, web, and email channels. This is where he saw a big disconnect in the market between direct and digital marketing, and that sparked the idea behind Postalytics of which he's now the CEO As digital marketing channels get more crowded, and marketers are all using the same playbook, they’re increasingly looking for new ways to put their messages directly into the hands of their audiences. That's why they are giving direct mail another look. The problem is that the direct mail industry hasn’t kept up with changes in technology. It feels very…1990’s - it's slow, costly, disconnected from the marketing technology stack, and impossible to track. That's what Postalytics solves. This inspired me, and hence I invited Dennis to my podcast. We explore the opportunity for value creation by blending the online- with the offline marketing world, and how this can create a 1+1=3 concept because you're combining unique strengths into one. We also address the lessons Dennis learned to create growth and momentum in B2B technology, and what it takes to build a great software business that customers just keep talking about. Here are some of his quotes: We started having some brands come to us and say, "Hey, I just invested in Salesforce, you guys are living in this kind of a hybrid between digital and direct. Can you help us deploy direct mail more efficiently, more quickly, as a part of our Salesforce as a part of our HubSpot?" And it took a few of those conversations, let's realize there's a bigger opportunity out here to take some of this measurement and analytic work that we've done and to solve a problem that is far more pervasive and has a much bigger scope. That was happening in 2015, and 2016, and we spent about a year just heads down building Postalytics. And now Postalytics is our primary focus. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why limiting your focus on a highly specific audience is essential to maximize buzz and fuel the growth and momentum of your software business

The positive things that happen when you decide sales is actually part of your onboarding process

Why killing something early is often the best move - and what early signs you should be highly sensitive to

Why the goal of a startup should be to create a great business instead of focusing on a great exit

For more information about the guest from this week:

Dennis Kelly

Website Postalytics

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to take our personal growth to new levels in a way that's not only fun and easy to accomplish, but also highly accessible and affordable. My guest is Elena Agaragimova, Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Bessern Elena is both an entrepreneur as well as an engaging skilled trainer and talent development specialist. She is known for her ability to drive change within individuals and organizations that are looking to reach their potential and maintain their competitive edge in the business world. She has started her career in higher education but then shifted towards corporate learning and talent acquisition in the last few years of her career, providing talent onboarding and development to multi-nationals across the MENA region. Elena has a strong passion for L&D, promoting creative and engaging workplaces, and all about optimizing performance through the development of others with a keen interest in neuroscience. In 2019 she co-founded Bessern - and is on a mission to fast-track behavior change and disrupt the way people learn. They believe the future of learning is individualized and that learning is about action and consistency. Change is not easy for most of us; unless we create consistent routines (micro-actions) so that change does not depend on our motivation This inspired me, and hence I invited Elena to my podcast. We explore what's broken when it comes to the traditional approach to Learning & Development. We dig into how people learn, and how technology can help people learn more, faster, and with more joy by taking a radically different approach. We discussed their journey from idea to go-to-market and how this could be done in a way that was financially attractive. Beyond that, we explore how they overcame one of their biggest challenges to creating app-stickiness - a critical ingredient to their growth strategy. Here are some of her quotes: Being self funded, b2c is a very expensive market, a very saturated market. To spend the kind of marketing that you need to get noticed in a b2c market is very high. We purposely tried to avoid investments for as long as possible. So we said; "How can we make/create a product and how can we test it in a way that makes sense for us financially?" What we know and what we practice is that at the end of the day, it's about creating processes. Just like when you're building a startup - you're going through that agile methodology, where you're just continuously experimenting, like the lean methodology for startups. And we apply the same for the personal growth, whether it's leadership development, etcetera. So it became more interesting for organizations, and we already had the network. So it was a much easier market entry for us to be honest with you. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How you can deliver transformative change to any industry even if it has not changed in decades

How, by offering a solution that's delivered through a blend of both technology and people can give you a highly defensible advantage.

That stickiness grows once individual users start to realize they get nuggets of value that they'd miss if they were gone

That creating new products to take to market can accelerate if you're architecting for reusability

For more information about the guest from this week:

Elena Agaragimova

Website Bessern

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the virtual experiences we have today into near-live experiences. My guest is Sean Heiney, Founder and COO at SignalWire. Sean is an experienced entrepreneur and product marketing/management start-up executive with extensive expertise in SaaS, network security, communication, and VOIP. He has 18 years of startup experience as a serial entrepreneur. In the early 2000s, Sean formed and built Periscan, a pioneer SaaS-managed security software company specializing in VISA/Mastercard PCI Compliance. The company got acquired by Catbird Networks in 2006. Sean then led, developed, launched, and marketed new products at Barracuda Networks to over $300M in revenue and IPO. In December 2017 he co-founded SignalWire. He drives strategy and business around the SignalWire products and services as well as the FreeSWITCH open-source project. SignalWire has, in the meantime, become the technology backbone of modern communications applications like Amazon, Netflix, and Zoom. Their mission is a simple one: To empower you to build whatever you can imagine utilizing software-defined telecom capabilities. SignalWire wants its customers to do one thing: To focus on their ideas instead of worrying about developing, scaling, maintaining, and of course, overpaying for complex communications technology and services. This inspired me, and hence I invited Sean to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the telecom industry and what’s kept it behind for so long. We also discuss why the video communication tools we’ve become use to like Zoom and Teams are very degrading, demoralizing or even soul-sucking. Sean elaborates on ‘what can be’ – that it’s up to our own imagination to create the experiences we hope for, and how they are growing a global community of developers from the grass-roots up to enable this. He finishes by sharing his believes about what it takes to build a software business people keep talking about. Here are some of his quotes: Everything we're doing with our tools, we're enabling developers to do. We don't claim that we're gonna have the best ideas around the best way. But we know that the world's changing, and the current video and audio products that we're left to collaborate with our soul-sucking. And what we hope to do is enable the next developers, the next product builders: “hey, you don't have to worry about the technology on the audio-video side. SignalWire has that taken care of. I have to just think about the interface, how I'm going to creatively interact with people using this new technology and make something more human than the current options.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

That business resilience can be hidden in simple things – like productizing elements that underpin the power of your own infrastructure

That to build virtual experiences people keep talking about is about understanding the essence of what people truly value from the non-virtual experiences

How giving away some of your product can help you build a vending-machine for growth, and give you the platform for true leverage

Why it’s key to break-away from the pack i.e. have an x-factor, and how that can be achieved with very simple, but very lucrative ideas.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Sean Heiney

SignalWire Website

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give under-represented groups a fair opportunity in the workplace while helping businesses attract 70% more diverse talent and twice the relevant talent, in half the time. My guest is Helen McGuire, Co-founder, and CEO of Diversely. Helen is a champion of under-represented groups. She’s an international speaker on the topics of diversity, equality, and inclusion and has meanwhile become an award-winning entrepreneur in the diversity space. She founded the first women’s careers platform in the Middle East – Hopscotch.work – in 2016, which grew to a worldwide community of over 80k working with businesses like Facebook, Mastercard, and Nestle. Still, she experienced frustration with the lack of impact of its in-person business model and the fact that 75% of businesses say they are committed to improving diversity, yet just 8% have the tools in place to measure hiring improvement; This led her to found Diversely in 2020 together with her co-founder Hayley Bakker. The vision for the company is clear and compelling: A global workplace that’s freed from bias for all those from under-represented groups – not just women. Their mission: to provide an integrated solution to the issues around diverse hiring. This inspired me, and hence I invited Helen to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the workplace when it comes to hiring the best people for the job, and how this bias is actually impacting the performance potential of many businesses around the world. We discuss Diversely’s approach to solving this massive global problem at the very core, and what obstacles they had to overcome to ensure a rapid go-to-market. Here are some of her quotes: You don't see representation of real-life within those offices in those boardrooms, or those shop floors, or those restaurants or wherever it might be, you're not seeing a genuine representation of even the customers or the clients that you're trying to serve. And that really puts you on the back foot in terms of attracting the right employees to your business, but also in terms of being able to serve those people in the best way you could possibly serve. And if you don't have the perspective of 50% of the population where women are concerned, or 20% of the population where disabled people are concerned? Or whatever the percentage population is of your specific race and ethnicities in the location that you are, then how are you really understanding what your client or your customer wants? And are you actually limiting your sales revenue because of that? During this interview, you will learn four things:

That teams that are slightly uncomfortable with each other, come up with much better solutions.

How starting with solving the essence of the problem, not aiming to reinvent the wheel, and changing behavior in that very moment can spark momentum

How pricing can be used as a lever to get to market quickly

Why taking a rebellious mindset and looking at the problem from a completely different perspective is the recipe to create something remarkable (and not burn out along the way)

For more information about the guest from this week:

Helen McGuire

Website Diversely

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help creative people know upfront whether their Creative will work – and with that produce work that has an exponentially bigger impact. My guest is Coen Olde Olthof, CEO of Alpha.One Coen started his career at KPMG in information risk management. He then moved to Getronics, where he became responsible for digital identify management and later on IT Services Sales. When Getronics got acquired by KPN, the largest Telco in the Netherlands he was asked to lead the process to turn KPN into an online organization. Shortly after that he added Marketing to his portfolio as well. Today he’s Ranked as a one of the top 10 Marketeers in the Netherlands and the CEO of Alpha.One. Alpha.One a fast-growing consumer neuroscience company that’s on a mission to ‘Helping good companies make better decisions.’ Coen has a fascination for decision architecture. What drives people in their day-to-day choices? And how can we use neuroscience to decode this. Together with a team of scientist he analyses the brains’ reaction to content to predict market level outcomes. And that inspired me, and hence I invited Coen to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the creative media & marketing landscape. We discuss why the traditional approaches don’t work, and why it’s not technology but and open mindset that prevent the route to success. Coen shares fascinating wisdom about what drives the behavioral change that lead to adoption and more sales. He also explains how exponential thinking helped them create the remarkable solution they have today. Here are some of his quotes: “I was brought up with an understanding that if your NPS scores are higher, people are more likely to buy from you or more likely to stay. If you look at the research, that's not the case. People that give you high NPS still are not likely to buy more. The only thing that you can really measure from that measurement is that if you have a very low NPS, that's a solid basis for people going away. Byron Sharp, an Australian Professor of Marketing, who looked at 10s and 10s of years of data, concluded that if you have a product that is physically available, and mentally available, you will do very well. Those are very data driven, solid insights that most of the marketers should know, but not all of them do” During this interview, you will learn four things:

How driving momentum is highly dependent on your ability to hit the right nerve i.e. creating positive tension and desire with the right people

Why making things memorable is essential to influence behavioral change

How exponential thinking puts you in the right mind-set to create transformational change in a market.

That if your customer doesn’t say ‘Exactly’ you won’t have a deal. And that’s all about finding the unfair thing that hurts your customer most.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Coen Olde Olthof

Company Website Alpha.One

Platform website: Expoze.io

Coen’s Ted Talk

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that enables small & medium businesses around the world escape the chaos of managing their software subscriptions. My guest is Gordian Braun, CEO and Co-founder of onetool Gordian is bilingual, analytical, and a highly creative leader experienced in entrepreneurship & innovation. He’s got a strong passion for product marketing, performance marketing, product management & development, and business development. He started his career as a financial analyst, and quickly after that became the co-founder of a music record label startup in 2010. In 2015 he co-founded his second startup, Locana. He went back into the financial world in by joining G51 Amplify Venture Capital, after which he became the director of growth and business acceleration at CleverShuttle in 2017. In 2019, he then co-founded onetool – where he acts as CEO. onetool is on a mission to solve the daily chaos and outrageous fees small & medium sized businesses encountering when it comes to managing SaaS subscriptions, software usage and access rights. This inspired me, and hence I invited Gordian to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the SaaS market when it comes to managing subscriptions, usage and access. The sheer simplicity of adopting SaaS solutions is growing the problem every day. We discuss what’s missing, and what’s required to solve the problem. We dig deep on what it took to create a solution that stands out from the pack, and what mindset tech-entrepreneurs need to embrace to shape a software business that creates products their customers cannot live without. Here are some of his quotes: The first strategic choice that we had to do is: “Do we do long sales cycles with a lot of consulting effort, or do we do, what I call, funnel automation?” A lot of people will say, especially in the VC industry, if you are a b2b Enterprise product, then do Enterprise Sales. Whereas we decided to do the opposite – saying “No, we want the more customer centric approach around this. We want to make it so easy that people can start using the whole thing in 10 minutes.” That's obviously a very challenging decision. Because on the one side, you spend endless hours optimizing your product, and you cannot really sell something if it's not perfect. On the other side, you have the highest demands on yourself, and you know what you would like to be using, rather than what our competition is offering. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why approaching things differently gives you powers that are hard to beat by competitors

That becoming a great entrepreneur is about shipping fast (not perfect), being open minded and don’t worry too much.

That just because you spend five years on something, trying to make it perfect, doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect eventually

Why it’s essential for every CEO to not have one mentor, but to surround themselves with a lot of the right people around key aspect

For more information about the guest from this week:

Gordian Braun

Website onetool

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the way we experience commuting for all of us. My guest is Ryan Green, Co-Founder and CEO Gridwise. Ryan is a driven, self-starter with a passion for building businesses that positively impact the lives of millions. He co-founded his first business, FXConnection back in 2012. FXConnection was a platform that provided tools to educate people on the Forex Markets, and connects them to trading coaches. He then joined PNC in FX Sales and trading, after which he co-founded Gridwise in June 2016 to turn an idea that sparked during his time at the US Navy into reality. Their mission: To impact the global society by improving the way people and goods move in cities. How? By creating a smarter mobility grid that empowers on-demand drivers, cities, and mobility stakeholders to plan ahead by understanding transit patterns across the major service providers in real-time. This inspired me, and hence I invited Ryan to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in mobility, and all the problems that lead to. We then dive into his founder story, what sparked the big idea, and how persistence helped Ryan succeed when no one believed in his idea upfront. We discuss his extremely lean approach to innovation and what he believes is required to build a software business your customers just keep talking about. Here are some of his quotes: What was really important was – and I think a constant battle for people who are starting out a new concept but also just people at different stages of growing a product in launching new features - is always taking initially a minimal and iterative approach to product development. We started with an email that we manually produced every week and a text message service that was us manually typing alerts to drivers. There's no automation to it at the start. And we did things that didn't scale. But it allowed us to prove out, and just save a lot of time and a lot of money by being able to learn from our users, before we built something that nobody wants. And so I think that was that approach and that mindset, we applied to the first concept, and then the next version of the app, and the next version, we just continued to maintain that mentality. And I believe that really led to our success and enabled us to grow Gridwise to what it is today. During this interview, you will learn three things: 1) How taking an abundance approach to problem-solving can help you make an impact on a global scale 2) That just because people don’t believe in your idea at the start doesn’t mean it has legs. Just start – start small, validate, iterate and evolve your vision from there. 3) Why our assumptions are sometimes totally off – and that can stop us from achieving our biggest breakthroughs in creating value 4) How giving something of value away can help you unlock and accelerate much larger value monetization opportunities. For more information about the guest from this week: · Ryan Green · Website Gridwise See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give every business the intelligence to anticipate hacker attacks before they happen. My guest is Karim Hijazi, Founder and CEO of Prevailion Karim is a cybersecurity veteran who has worked closely with the US intelligence community for many years. He’s been at the forefront of attacker counterintelligence and infiltration research for the last decade, developing new ways for security teams to clandestinely monitor hackers and anticipate attacks before they happen. His previous startup, Unveillance, was acquired by Mandiant (now FireEye) in 2012. Karim noticed a vulnerability in the way businesses have begun to rely on their third-party partners. The size of a business’ perimeter had increased along with the size of their third-party ecosystem, and there was no clear way to monitor that vast new space. That inspired the start of Prevailion. Prevailion envisions a world in which the adversary no longer has the benefit of stealth and surprise, but is instead openly tracked and monitored through a real-time intelligence platform that all companies and organizations have access to. Through clear visibility and real-time tracking, we can turn the tables on threat actors and give network defenders the upper hand. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Karim to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the market of cyber crime protection. Why the typical reactive approach of traditional solutions is more a hinder than a help – and why to really tackle this problem we have to approach it by taking an outside-in perspective. We discuss the challenges of solving this problem – not only technically, but most of all also commercially, since so much is in changing perspectives and behaviours. You’ll be inspired with some fresh thinking and true entrepreneurial mindset. Here are some of his quotes: What makes us uniquely different is that instead of looking at the victim organizations, and determining, by way of investigations and looking through their data to see if they have anything that can be considered malicious, we actually chase down the adversary back to your point about that we look for the infrastructure that these criminals setup. Those servers are intended to be the equivalency of what would be like a dumping zone or drop zone for something. That dumpster is effectively the equivalency of what we're looking for online to infiltrate and sit and wait to see what actually gets dumped there. And we do this without the adversaries understanding of that. So what's really powerful about that is that because it's digital, everyone that gets impacted by these adversaries all communicate to that digital dumpster, and we are able to see who's victimized by it, just like the adversary can see. So our perspective is that of the adversary. And that does exactly highlights the fact that the security technologies in these organizations may or may not be working. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How creative spirit combined with highly technical science skills can give you an advantage that’s hard to beat

Why instead of creating solutions that are about repairing something that’s broken, we should aim our efforts at taking out the root cause.

That we’re too focused on communicating how we help reduce cost, while we can easily flip the narrative around how our solutions accelerate growth

How to create critical mass by changing behaviour of people

For more information about the guest from this week:

Karim Hijazi

Website Prevailion

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to make difficult conversations about money, that little bit easier. My guest is Cormac O’Neill, CEO of Webio. Cormac is an experienced business leader with extensive hands-on experience of multiple aspects of growing profitable businesses. He led myTravelGuide from start-up to €15m turnover in the period ’99 to 2011. He then moved to Voice Sage to establish them as the UKs leading omni-channel customer contact provider. He loves to inspire and motivate people and teams, challenging, supporting and mentoring them to reach higher than they thought possible. Beyond that, he’s passionate about Retail and Sales including effective Customer Communications, the Customer Journey and the Sales Process. He understands the impact that financial wellbeing can have on a person’s mental health, as an entrepreneur he’s had had his fair share of financial challenges. That inspired him, Paul Sweeney and Mark Oppermann to co-found Webio in 2016. Webio is on a mission to make those difficult conversations about money that little bit easier for everyone concerned. That inspired me, and hence I invited Cormac to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the Credit Collection space and why traditional methods just drop in effectiveness. We discuss how taking a different perspective on the problem can fix this – and what the critical ingredients are to stand out, and deliver a remarkable impact for both your customers, and their customers. Last but not least we discuss how to stay resilient and come out stronger from crisis situations and why success starts by making tough decisions to say goodbye to groups of customers. Here are some of his quotes: What our customers have seen, and something we've seen ourselves from having experience in the industry is that traditional methods of how these companies communicate are just not effective anymore. And to solve a problem, you must be able to have a conversation. Communication is fundamentally key here to solve the financial difficulties. So, historically, debt collection agencies or collections departments would use the telephone to try and contact their customers. And unfortunately, as an engagement tool, the engagement rates have been declining on telephone over the last number of years because it's stressful talking about money. Sometimes asynchronous conversations are better than real time conversations. Sometimes people need that little bit of breathing space between their answers. So, the first thing you're doing is you're increasing the engagement rate. Once you got engagement, then you've got opportunity to solve the problem. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How thinking in micro-steps can help your customers make massive-steps forward in progress as a result of changing behaviour

Why the problem you’re solving often isn’t so much about improving what your customers do, but how they feel doing it: The relief of stress, anxiety, frustration,..

Why asynchronous conversations often result in better (data) quality, engagement and outcome than real-time conversations – especially if it’s about stressful topics

Why you shouldn’t second guess your customers – get your product into their hands as early as possible and let them tell you (even if you think it’s far from ready)

For more information about the guest from this week:

Cormac O’Neill

Website Webio

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to get all of us closer to professionals we value. My guest is Ashley Friedlein, CEO and Founder of Guild Ashley is one of the most influential and connected figures in digital and marketing. As one of the 100+ recommendations for him on LinkedIn reads, “If Ashley doesn’t know it – it ain’t worth knowing.” He’s the author of two best-selling books on digital. A columnist, commentator and blogger, he speaks worldwide on digital and marketing trends and best practice. Ashley is involved in a number of digital businesses and ventures as investor, adviser, mentor and operationally. He believes the world deserves a new kind of digital communications platform and hence founded Guild, a messaging platform for professional groups, networks and communities.. The purpose behind the company is bring people together for professional good. It’s a technology business, but it cares most about human behaviours and the power of connecting people to collaborate and do good things together. And that inspired me, and hence I invited Ashley to my podcast. We explore how technology can help in creating more meaningful connections around professional use cases, and how there’s room for new players, even in a market that densely populated. Asley shares his wisdom around where he puts his focus in building a remarkable software business, what it takes to grow by word-of-mouth and create virality. We also dig into the potential pitfalls to avoid in growing your start-up, especially when venture capital steps in. Here are some of his quotes: Obviously we want and we'll need growth. We want quality and value more than quantity. We don't need massive volumes of usage to drive an ad funded revenue model, because ours isn't an ad funded revenue model. But we, if we're going up against the WhatsApp and LinkedIn and things, ultimately we do need to get engagement, even habits. There is a network effect thing that the more people are on Guild, in many ways, the more valuable it becomes. And if your contacts or professional contacts and your most valued professional contacts are all on Guild, that builds massive defensibility against other competitors or future competitors. We experienced that the other way around, like when you're going up against WhatsApp and stuff, it can be hard cause some people say ‘Yes, I'm just used to using that and yes, yours is better, but I still can't be bothered to switch.’ So you know, we do need the growth but I need to try and not sacrifice quality at the same time. So, what we're trying to achieve I call various things but intimacy at scale. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How you can create remarkable products by not only solving a specific problem – but also cater to a human need or desire

Different insights how to think about creating a viral effect with your product

Why big impact is often created by being relentlessly focused on the adding incremental improvements all the time

How to go about spending (VC) money in a phase where you haven’t reached product market fit yet

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ashley Friedlein

Website Guild

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the potential to prevent well over half a billion females on this planet suffering from mental health problems. My guest is Michel Valstar, CEO BlueSkeye AI Michel Valstar is a visionary scientist and new-found entrepreneur. He’s the founder and Co-CEO of BlueSkeye AI, and remains a part-time professor at the University of Nottingham, where he also is the deputy-director of the Biomedical Research Centre’s Mental Health and Technology programme. Having worked for 15 years on computer vision and machine learning for facial expression analysis, Valstar now wants to see his ground-breaking research turned into real products to improve the lives of people. He is particularly interested in solving the problem of self-management of mental health using technology that runs privately on people’s own hardware. This inspired me, and hence I invited Michel to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the world of treating Mental Health. We discuss why this domain is still in the dark ages and what can be done with technology to take it into the 21st century and make a meaningful impact. We explore what it takes to build solutions people in different demographics actually love to use day to day – and build a trustworthy relationship with. We also discuss how take on this massive global problem, with a very small team, while being resourceful and profitable very early on in the journey. Here are some of his quotes: With blue sky, we really wanted to grab a big problem and try to solve it, not just conceptually, but all the way through to implementing it, validating it, making it self-sustaining. Making it actually value generating in the end. And in perinatal mental health, roughly half of the people on this planet will give birth to a child at some point. And 10 to 20% of those women will suffer, unfortunately, from poor mental health. These are extremely large numbers. We hope to help a very large percentage of these people. But even if we could only help 10% of the people that suffer from this is still a massive contribution to humanity. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why creating something for everyone will end up pleasing no one

How you can speed up time to market by working with partners that break your stuff

How leveraging one product category can become the funding source for realizing your big vision

Why the two core selection criteria for picking your projects should be: Alignment with vision and employee motivation

For more information about the guest from this week:

Michel Valstar,

Website BlueSkeye AI

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This podcast interview focuses on the mindset and approach to shaping a software business that successfully plays the infinite game. My guest is Chairman and CEO of Sensory Todd has broad business and general management experience. He's got a Stanford MBA with technical roots and is a founder, co-founder, or early management team of 3 successful venture-backed high-tech silicon valley startups. Each startup has been involved in audio, music, and speech & AI technologies for consumer electronics markets, including toys, musical instruments, Bluetooth headsets, mobile phones, voice assistants, smart devices, or IoT. He founded Sensory with the mission to enable people to communicate with consumer electronics as we communicate with each other. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Todd to my podcast. We explore their journey as a pioneer in neural networks and how they transformed from inventing everything in house to leveraging the open-source eco-system in a way that strengthened their advantage. We also discuss their drive towards embracing deep fusion – blending different technologies to create exponentially more value. Last but not least, Todd shares his wisdom around building a software business that thrives long-term. Here are some of his quotes: When you have really smart PhDs from the top schools that have strong egos, sometimes, the not invented here syndrome exists with a lot of our customers and within sensory itself. And to get people that are really smart and really capable, and tell them: 'let's not do it ourselves, let's use what somebody else has done,' that can be challenging. When we move to the cloud, we started using open-source acoustic models, but with our own in-house language models There are some advantages to being small. We can move faster, and it's easier for us to integrate different technologies because we don't have these giant groups that are in separate silos. So, for example, we talked about deep fusion of face and voice. Well, it's not like Google and Facebook, and Apple aren't doing voice and face, but they have them in different silos. So, kind of combining them isn't as easy as for a company like sensory. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why focus on solving the hard thing first can give you instant profitability

How blending technology enables you to grow a position of advantage while creating impact previously believed unattainable for your customers

Their secrets in obtaining highly valuable feedback from their customers

How to shape a software business that your best people don't ever want to leave

For more information about the guest from this week:

Todd Mozer

Website Sensory

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give everyone of us the opportunity to deliver our best work by controlling our work-environment. My guest is Benjamin Carew, Co-founder and CEO of Othership Ben started his career as an engineer, working on electric and special vehicles for Ford, Ricardo and Nissan. He then led a team driving digital transformation at Ford, before moving to BP as a Digital Program lead. Ben is passionate that the best commute is no commute. His ambition is to break down borders by making it possible for anyone to work from anywhere. That’s how he started Othership. It’s is a membership for people who want to work the other way. It’s built around the believe in a new world of work that revolves around you. That adapts to your needs, and allows you to pursue the work you want to do, wherever you are. Where working for yourself doesn’t have to mean working by yourself. And where fulfilling work is a fundamental right, not a rare luxury. Othership was founded to spark a global flo-working™ revolution. Inspiring people to adopt a new way of working controlled by them. This inspired me, and hence I invited Ben to my podcast. We explore how the world has changed with regards to the way we do work. We dig into the role of the workspace – and what important values it drives that we too often ignore. We discuss how critical it is (for creating traction) truly understand what users care about – and what drives their use-case. And last but not least we discuss Benjamin’s secrets to build a software business people keep talking about. Here are some of his quotes: The way that we try to deliver value is to constantly seek for feedback and use our own service as well. So we live the life that we do. So we work from our spaces, if I'm not working from my spaces, then would I want to be paying that membership. If the answer is no, why am I not working from that space? Why am I not doing that phone calls from a space? Why am I not having a meeting from that space? It’s just accepting that that's our place in this point is to take the pain away from building that relationship, building that connection, finding that right space. It's just our responsibility day in day out to do that. And that's why we will do better than everyone else. Because our first point in is to just make sure that it does add value to you. And then I will worry about making money During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why often what customers buy from you is not at all what you instinctively think it is

That technically your product fits many people – but to thrive is to get really specific on their exact use case – and exceed expectations there

That to grow a position of advantage is to challenge your business by aiming to become your own best customer

That if your customers aren’t talking about you – ask them why. They’ll tell you.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Benjamin Carew

Othership Website

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This podcast interview focuses on the approach to product innovation to grow remarkable momentum in enterprise software by creating a swell that keeps building because of bottom-up user demand. My guest is Rick Hall, CEO of Aginity Rick Hall is a software entrepreneur focused on the analytics market. He has led the development of over a dozen software products and taken several companies from the early stage to an eventual sale. He founded Kairn Corporation in 2018 to help organizations, plan and implement intelligent products and systems. Together with his co-founders he have defined a "Pathway to Intelligent Systems." to guide companies on their journey. In support of this journey they begun to invest in companies that will simplify the process of building and implementing analytical programs. That has led to the purchase of Aginity in March of 2020 where Rick has taken over the CEO role as a result. Aginity was an early innovator in Analytics Management. They are on a mission reinventing the Analytics Engine Room and with that do with the challenges of complex architectures which are dependent on highly skilled engineers, frequently cost millions of dollars, and are not flexible to move at the pace of business. This inspired me, and hence I invited Rick to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the world of Enterprise Analytics and why the millions and millions of investments underdeliver. We dig into the effects of switching to a product-led growth approach, and how creating a community of fans helps drive multiple X growth with a minimal marketing budget. Last but not least we talk about the secrets to staying resourceful – and resilient for anything that’s next to come. Here are some of his quotes: I think the three key areas of a SaaS company are Sales, Marketing, and Product and Engineering. Product and Engineering is a natural tension. So, I always say that if the two heads of those two groups don't kind of love each other and hate each other, then there's something wrong. Because product is about the idea of anything that I could do - big ideas. And engineering is about the world of the possible. And there's a tension built in there. And then sales is the third piece of that, because sales and marketing is about the demands of the customer. And so, putting the three things together in a world of what I like to think of as constructive conflict is really, really key. I think that is probably one of the most important elements of success for a company.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

That real value unlocks when you realize it’s not about solving a users’ task in isolation, but about how they effectively collaborate with the business

How introducing a freemium model is not about giving away your software, but about creating software that users love

How to convince even the most stubborn C-level decision makers about the value of your product even if they’d never use it

Why to succeed in SaaS is about constantly evolving the interplay between a big vision and what people can actually achieve on a stretched goal.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Rick Hall

Aginity Website

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This podcast interview focuses what product innovation should be really all about and how complacency can kick-in silently and give you a slap in the face. My guest is Mike Seidle, Co-founder and CTO at PivotCX Mike Seidle is an technology entrepreneur based in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is a man of many talents with an entrepreneurial mindset. In his past, he founded White River Technology Group, Indy Associates, Professional Blog Services, and Virtual Payment Systems. Today he’s the CTO at PivotCX – a company that’s on a mission to help companies respond to every job candidate in seconds. The result: Recruitment teams will be able to handle 4-6x current candidate volume, improve hire quality and most importantly, deliver an award-winning candidate experiences This inspired me, and hence I invited Mike to my podcast. We explore the journey they’ve been through and how Covid became their wake-up moment. We discuss the big lessons learned in bringing their solution to market and what it means and requires creating solutions that customers not only need – but also want – a solution that grows in value as things get tough. Here are some of his quotes: The hardest thing in all of this was that we held on to what we were doing originally for too long. We did our first little foray into doing chat, in 2018. And had we been paying attention to that, we could have made the pivot that we ended up making because we got an extreme slap in the face from the market with COVID. If we had been listening, I almost hate to say this, and I hope none of my investors are listening. But if we had heard that from the market two, three years ago, it's almost frightening to think about how successful this would already be. What I did learn from all this is probably the best way to be prepared, is to really focus on making sure what you're doing is business critical. If you're doing something that's valuable, it will become more valuable. If you're doing something that's extra, it will be extra when things are lean and probably get cut. During this interview, you will learn four things:

The importance to start paying attention to the early signals from customers that you are on the wrong track instead of listening to your own stories

How shifting focus from selling “cost savings” to “giving your customers a position of advantage in the eyes of their customers” can be the difference from having no traction to winning 8 out 10 deals

Why we often think we are smarter than everybody else – and why that doesn’t help at all

How small ideas can mean the difference between having 10 users and 10000 – and how to find them.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Mike Seidle

Website PivotCX

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give every brand a wealth of opportunities to grow trust with their customers. My guest is Boaz Grinvald, CEO of Revuze Boaz is a serial entrepreneur, and this is the 5th company he’s managing. He loves building businesses and solving real-world problems. His background is in computer science, started his career in building out technology products but was always drawn to the business side. Today he’s the CEO of Revuze. They realized many analytical solutions on the market focus on what/when/how much consumers buy. However, 97% of consumers will walk away from a purchase to buy something else, and brands don’t know why. So this is Revuze’s mission to solve. This inspired me, and hence I invited Boaz to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the world of understanding customer and consumer buying behaviour. We also talk about how to grow momentum by taking a counter intuitive approach to your Go-to-Market. And beyond that we discuss Boaz secrets to building a remarkable software business – and the lessons that he learned doing so. Here are some of his quotes: I once had a boss that said: ‘One man with conviction can make a difference’ Until you get to hundreds of people, one man with conviction is the core of everything. I love the fact that you can create a business out of no business. And suddenly there's dozens of families that make a living off the business. To me, I think that's a big part of the magic. And obviously, the other part is changing the lives of the customers. When you hear customers that tell you that they get the job done within days that before took them maybe six months. That's like music. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why your SaaS solution shouldn’t give insights to users on ‘What’ happened, but that it’s in the ‘Why it happened’ where real value unlocks

That your value should not be about making business more efficient – but to provide them with a position of advantage

Why so many SaaS businesses undermine their potential by hanging on to business principles that are serve them more than their customers.

Why we’re often too late in making the right personnel decisions – leaving the wrong people in the wrong place for too long and how no one wins doing so

For more information about the guest from this week:

Boaz Grinvald

Website Revuze

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This podcast interview focuses on the story behind Pollfish – and their approach to reinvent market research for a new era by shortening cycle times to get faster, high-quality feedback from customers. My guest is John Papadakis, Founder and CEO at Pollfish John started his career as an Android developer. He’s passionate about platforms and businesses that scale and has always had a particular focus on the mobile domain. In 2011 he co-founded Pajap, a service which allowed to create native Android applications, that didn’t need update or installation thereby combining the best of native app world and web app world In 2013 he founded Pollfish, a platform that provides brands a revolutionary way to learn, communicate and interact with existing and prospective customers. That inspired me, and hence I invited John to my podcast. We explore their journey to create a new category and the challenges to grow customer trust by establishing a large enough audience of close to a billion consumers . We also discuss his secrets of growing the Pollfish business – and how simplification and trust in people have been a great asset in that. Here are some of his quotes: Essentially Pollfish started because we had apps, and we want to monetize them. But advertising didn't work for our apps. And we were thinking: ‘There must be a better way to monetize those apps, and that way to be less intrusive since we don't want to spam our users.’ So, we created the Pollfish library first, and we saw that people responded to surveys within the app. In a few days, we had hundreds of thousands of people. So, the company started from a need to monetize, and from the opportunity that the mobile app ecosystem (in 2013) was a new distribution channel for market research. It's a two-sided marketplace: you need supply and demand. And you've got to have both. So, we started with the supply, focus there for a couple of years, and then we launched Pollfish as it is today to solve the father decision making problem. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why – if you want to boost momentum - it’s key to focus your go-to-market on your core strengths and true values – and avoid anything that’s outside of that scope

How smart packaging can enable you to change perception and with that open complete new market opportunities

Why your customers don't want to worry about ‘figuring your messaging out’. They want it simple – so simple they can share it with their boss.

Why throwing way an impressive KPI sheet and focus on just 2 numbers gave focus and boosted creativity amongst all staff

For more information about the guest from this week:

John Papadakis

Website Pollfish

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help us create the critical connections that can transform their world. My guest is Stephen Choi, Co-founder and CEO of Hi Right Now He started his career in investment banking, then quickly started his entrepreneurial journey by co-founding Moxy Media Group in 2009 and Lets Branch in 2017. A surprising detail about Stephen is that he’s never lived anywhere for longer than 3 years. This nomadic experience taught him how to quickly make friends wherever I went. At the same time, floating around from place to place meant he struggled with keeping his friendships. This let him to co-found Vuybe in 2019 and Hi Right Now in 2020. Hi Right Now is on a mission to empower humanity to form deep meaningful connections. When COVID swept the world, we entered a new era of work – an era where remote work has become ubiquitous. And with the majority of the workforce working remotely, people are feeling lonely, disconnected, and having a hard time communicaing freely. That’s what Hi Right Now about to change. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Stephen to my podcast. We explore one of the new challenges that have become more apparent during the pandemic: Building meaningful connections. We discuss why this is so important for human beings and why current technology options available aren’t a real help. We dig into how, by introducing a different approach, we can not only take the problem away, but also deliver a range of unexpected benefits for both individuals as the organization they work for. Here are some of his quotes: I just experienced this rapid-fire transitionary period: Graduating from this program, than trying to pursue this entrepreneurial venture and then trying to fundraise and everything. So, I need a lot of connections, I need a lot of help and I'm just trying to navigate all these things. So, how do I meet these people that I want to meet. Surely there are entrepreneurs and start-up founders that have walked the same type of journey that have gone down the similar a similar path. There was a huge problem: People belong into multiple online and offline communities, yet it’s still incredibly difficult for you to meet people in a fun and consistent way. Number two: with the progression of the pandemic, social distancing has made it incredibly difficult for you to meet new people. And then the last thing is that networking is just stressful and awkward and solace sometimes During this interview, you will learn four things:

How value can be unlocked by ignoring current connections and relations, breaking down barriers, and introducing serendipity

That you can create virality around your software by making people the stars inside your product

Why the most remarkable ideas for innovation are often right in front of you – just be willing to see that what’s normal to you isn’t necessarily normal for others.

That measuring your success by the level of impact you make on the world isn’t about numbers – but about stories. Stories that spread.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Stephen Choi

Website Hi Right Now

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to let every employee have its fair share in the capital in our society. My guest is Quintus Willemse, Co-founder, and CEO of The Share Council Quintus is on a mission. Every day he is solving societal problems with technology and entrepreneurship. This mission started in 2014 as a long journey to change the world with the use of technology. To change how people work together and the working conditions, change how life and work are perceived, improve education and knowledge spread, improve the equal division of capital, and prepare the world for the next generation of technology and innovation. This is inspired me, and hence I invited Quintus to my podcast. We explore what's wrong in society when it comes to the capital divide. We talk about the biggest bureaucratical hurdles and how we can leverage technology to overcome that. We talk about the importance of big vision thinking when drawing the right people in – people who share the belief – and help spark the momentum. Lastly, we discuss some of his big entrepreneurial lessons learned. Here are some of his quotes: One of the things I stumbled upon along the way was the enormous divide in the capital in our society. Just the example of Europe, 64% of the capital in Europe is in the hands of 10% of the population. The reason that the divide is there is that the return on capital is higher than economic growth. So my salary will never keep up with the speed at which there's a return on capital. If you can leverage that, if you can get more people the leverage of capital, one of the forms is having savings account fine. Another form is having a share. About five years ago, I ran into that and wanted to make everybody co-owner. And I figured out it's pretty difficult in the Netherlands to make someone co-owner of your business. I had a company of about five employees, and to make them co-owner, the first bill I was looking at was between eight and 10,000 euros. This is more or less a smack in the face for any entrepreneur, any good willing entrepreneur who wants to give employees this opportunity.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

That some of the most remarkable software businesses start because they were bold enough to solve the problem that was in the way of their own success

How to spark momentum by having a sensitive eye for the most critical (and often illogical) roadblocks to be removed

Having a strong vision and believing in what you do will act as the magnet to get the right people to join you on that journey.

That as an entrepreneur, you better be prepared you will make all the big mistakes at the same time – And surround yourself with the right people to protect you.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Quintus Willemse

The Share Council Website

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This podcast interview focuses on the essence of the book ‘The Wicked Company’ and my guest is Markus Kirsch, FRSA, Author & Founder The Wicked Company. Marcus is a .com veteran with nearly two decades of award-winning, international and integrated design and technology project experience. A Royal College of Art alumni and ex-MIT Media Lab Europe researcher, Marcus Kirsch has worked as a transformation, service design, and innovation specialist. With project experience for companies like British Telecom, GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft, McDonald's, Nationwide, Nissan, Science Museum, P&G, Telekom Italia, and many others, he believes that we need a new narrative, mindset, and way of working to align ourselves with what society needs today. As he states: We live in an era of wicked problems. Problems that continue to evolve and morph beyond your solutions even as you form them. The ways that always worked to solve problems, doesn’t work anymore. The days of tame problems—mass production, building bridges, solving for x —are behind us, but we’re still designing companies to solve those tame problems. As a consequence, 70% of digital transformations are failing (McKinsey). Marcus Kirsch is on a mission to change all that. This inspired me, and hence I invited Marcus to my podcast. We explore how the nature of problems are changing from tame problems into wicked problems, and what this means to the mindsets, organizations and cultures we need to develop to succeed. We also address how our measures should change and how qualitative measures become essential in the process. Last but not least we talk about what Tech-Entrepreneurs need to do differently to drive the transformation and unlock new margin-boosting sources of value. Here are some of his quotes: The big thing to realize is that we're living in an era of problem evolution, not a technology revolution. We have organizations who have spent a lot of time creating solutions, without having reviewed what the actual problem is. We know that some problems have changed, because technology has entered our life. Technology has to some extent changed our behavior the way we are connected around the globe. And that has led to a type or characteristics of problems to grow and evolve around us, without organizations or people being able to identify those characteristics. And because we haven't identified it, I think that's why we're failing a lot. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why it’s key to fall in love with the problem, not the product

Why the better way to look at finding solutions it in aiming for effectiveness (i.e impact) rather than efficiency

That we have to develop an idea about sustainable failure – to learn faster and grow your innovation muscle better, quicker and more effective

Why it is key to embrace emotion as a skill to truly understand what the problem really looks like.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Markus Kirsch

The Wicked Company

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to shape working environments that increase our productivity and wellness. My guest is Tim Panagos, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Microshare Tim is a technology executive with 20 years of experience in Enterprise Software. He’s a change agent and a vision setter who’s thrilled by building and sees the wisdom in maintaining. He believes that technology is a weapon for strategic competitive advantage, and is most productive when he can team with a business partner who shares his big ideas He was most recently Chief Architect of Accenture’s global Business Process Management (BPM) practice leading architecture innovation. Prior to that, Tim was CTO at Knowledge Rules, a global consulting start-up and held multiple engineering leadership roles at Pegasystems (PEGA). He holds a Masters in the Management of Technology from MIT and studied Computer Science at UNH. In 2013 he co-founded Microshare™, where today he’s in charge of strategic product vision and the implementation of it. Microshare is all about squeezing more value from more data. The focus has been on harnessing and sharing previously hidden insights on client operations. This unveils vast cost-savings opportunities and delivers new metrics on occupant wellness, building performance and sustainability – and enables the businesses to deliver novel business models that will create new industries and disrupt existing. That inspired me, and hence I invited Tim to my Podcast. We explore how businesses are challenged to make the right and best decisions how to deploy the space they own or occupy, and how COVID has made that challenge worse. We address what opportunity we have in taking employee wellness and productivity to the next level when we bring in meaningful and live data from sensors into the picture. Beyond that we talk about what it takes to build a software business that create solutions that not only has an edge, but also keeps it. Here are some of his quotes: When I was leaving Accenture what I was being getting to see were that there were patterns in how these very large projects, 50 million hundred million dollar a year projects that were being executed, were combining technologies that I felt were ripe to be harvested and democratized. And so being a systems thinker, I began to kind of visualize how we could take and boil these will large projects down and create building blocks that would allow more people to take advantage of them. People who didn't have the budget or the risk profile necessary to launch a $50 million Accenture project to apply these things. How would we kind of redesign and reconceived these technologies to make it more broadly applicable? During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to create solutions to aid decision making in areas where there’s a lot of human bias, emotional tension or invisible behaviour.

How removing friction in the adoption and decision/buying process of enterprise solutions helps drive momentum

How data-privacy can become your key differentiator if you think about it differently

How you can grow faster and bigger by focusing with dedication on a smaller, less educated, and narrower defined market

For more information about the guest from this week:

Tim Panagos

Website Microshare

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This podcast interview focuses on what secrets investors are looking for in B2B SaaS companies. My guest is Akeel Jabber, Investment Director and GP at HoriZen Capital Akeel is an expert in growth marketing strategy and business operations. He’s also an engineer who was previously a partner and operations director at Wired investors, a micro private equity firm focused on digital asset acquisitions and has been involved in over 15 company acquisitions. Today he’s a general partner and Investment Director at HoriZen Capital, an investment firm that invests and acquires SaaS companies over $500k in ARR. He’s also the host of the SaaS District podcast where he interviews entrepreneurs and investors on topics such as leadership, B2B sales, growth marketing, innovation, scaling, funding and M&A. The combination intrigued me, and hence I invited Akeel to my podcast. We explore what’s essential to make the ‘marriage’ between a start-up and investor magic. What do investors look for, what do they value and care about and what turns them off. Besides that we discuss (through the eyes of an investor) what it takes to build a remarkable software business. Here are some of his quotes: When you're building a company, try to think outside the box, and be so good they can't ignore you. There's kind of two kind of trends that I found with how people stumble upon starting to their company Number one, you have the people who just know it from the beginning: I'm an entrepreneur. I have to build something.And then once I build the next one, I go to the next one, and it's just in my DNA. And then there's the other side, that people don't think about it. They're stuck into a problem that they never even thought to monetize or build as a solution. So, they just build a solution, because they're creators The moral of the story is like, it doesn't matter. You don't have to be a born entrepreneur think that it's built into you, you just have to be able to look around for a problem to solve. If you feel you can solve it, take that courage, take that step, I think you have nothing to lose, you'd be surprised with yourself. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That it doesn’t matter how you start and build your SaaS business. The power is in starting. Ideas are cheap. The value is in bringing it alive

Why you should avoid fitting into the norm – build your business the way you want to build it.

That your ability to have customers stick around for the long-term is more important than growing fast.

That we tend to be proud in saying we’re doing ABCDEFG – but focus is king. It’s more important to showcase how you do 1 thing extremely well.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Akeel Jabber

Website HoriZen Capital

SaaS District Podcast

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to change the way that marketers create. My guest is R.J. Talyor, CEO and Founder of Pattern89 R.J. has been a B2B software entrepreneur for well over 15 years. He fulfilled various roles ranging from strategist, director Product Marketing and VP of Mobile Products at ExactTarget, became VP of Messaging Products at Salesforce, and served as the VP of Product Management at Geofeedia. He’s recognized as one of the Indianapolis business Journal’s 40 Under 40. In 2016 he founded Pattern89. With this company he’s on a mission is to inspire creativity – and to build something that will change marketing forever. Their strong believe is that AI will make brands, agencies, and marketers more creative, and more human in an increasingly automated world. This inspired me, and hence I invited R.J. to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in marketing – especially on the creative side. We discuss how marketing is becoming more and more metrics driven, while we still make creative decisions based on gut-feel (often by the highest paid person in the room). We also dig into what it takes to build a remarkable software business – creating software that’s extremely sticky – software that people want to use. Here are some of his quotes: Marketers spend a ton of time on audience development, on reach, on frequency. Everyone talks about journeys, but they don't talk about creative. What I saw was that there's a better way to create what images or videos or copy that you see, and machine learning provides marketers with tools to allow them to do that, like never before. So, the big problem is how do we get more efficient at the creative process, without asking marketers to act more like machines? What they want to do is understand if their idea is going to work or not. And so marketers are kind of trained themselves into machines to try to compute that when we should say: “Hey, no, no human marketer, go create something else. You're the creator, you're the idea person, you're the idea. Machine machines can come up with ideas, let the machines simulator validate what's gonna work, and you human, you do what humans can do best.” During this interview, you will learn four things:

That very often stickiness of your applications increase not by building a better User Interface to perform a task, but by making it magically happen

How you can help your customers make a difference is by avoiding the ‘highest paid person in the room’ to feel inclined to make a decision

Why your future success and momentum can be hidden in killing your darlings i.e., get rid of those things you’re just hooked to.

How Data-Coop across your customers can shift from a nice to have into your primary selling point

For more information about the guest from this week:

R.J. Talyor

Website Pattern89

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to engage your support team and empower them to do their best work. My guest is Justin Winter, Co-founder and CEO of Boostopia. He has been an advisor to over a dozen companies and acted in a consulting capacity with over 150+ consumer brands and technology companies across areas of growth, retention, product, and operations. Justin studied for his Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing from Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA. In 2010 he co-founded Diamond Candles, the fastest growing and largest online home fragrance brand in the world. He lead the company as the CEO for 5 years. In that process he became frustrated with the solutions available to him to deliver customer support that his customers loved. So he decided to set out to assemble a team to lead to build what he wish he would have had during his tenure there. This became the spark that started Boostopia of which Justin is the the Co-founder and CEO. Boostopia is a technology company that helps B2C companies decrease the number of tickets they get, discover ways to efficiently manage support issues, and transform support into a new revenue generating channel. This inspired me, and hence I invited Justin to my podcast. We explore why bad customer support still exists and why the current approach of focusing on the support agent is not enough to solve it. We also discuss the opportunities to turn the support department from a cost-centre into a profit-centre, and the opportunity to increase the wage of support team members by a mere 50% as a consequence of that. Here are some of his quotes: We fundamentally believe that the way to create better customer experiences isn't by getting the latest and greatest fancy ticketing system. It's really about engaging your support team that you have and empowering them to do their best work. Why does customer support, from our perspective as a consumer, why is it so horrible? We all hate talking to customer support. We have lots of frustrating experiences. So, we fundamentally believe that the reason why bad customer support still exists. It's not because companies don't know that that's happening. It's because they don't have an underlying attribution model for understanding how those bad experiences lead to them making less money. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to spark momentum by overwhelming your users with opportunity i.e. give them a clear picture of the value they are creating with your product

How to find balance in your investment between ‘selling what you got’ versus making ‘the next big thing.’

Why companies that bet on product-led growth are proportionally better rewarded than those that are sales led.

Why you’d drive more value for your customers by instead of helping them be more efficient, help them eliminate the underlying problem all together.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Justin Winter

Website Boostopia

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help marketers to build the meaningful relationships with the right companies. My guest is Riaz Kanani, Founder and CEO of Radiate B2B. Riaz is a mix of marketer, technologist and entrepreneur who worked with cutting edge technologies throughout his career, whether it be the nascent flash/java video space in the early 2000s to combining email, mobile and social media marketing technologies in 2008. Throughout it all, he’s used data as the backbone behind these technologies to better understand how people behave and use these new approaches. In that journey he founded 6 companies and worked for IBM, Lyris, Alchemy Worx and Profusion. He’s also a mentor at Techstars. Today he’s helping to build a better way to do B2B Marketing that increases both average contract values and the speed of closing contracts. And this resonated with me, and hence I invited Riaz to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in marketing automation and why the answer is in choosing a different approach, not in more tools. We also discuss what it takes to succeed in B2B software, and what decisions and mindsets are fundamental to stand out. Here are some of his quotes: It became really clear when talking to those companies that we've become in the b2b or business marketing space, very reliant on content and events to drive lead acquisition, nurturing, email marketing obviously as well. Basically, we were all reliant on exactly the same things, and b2b marketing would become homogenous. And the only way to stand out was really to be doing better creative. And I think that's a marketer’s worst nightmare. I felt that there had to be a better way. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that if you were building a marketing automation company today, you wouldn't build a platform that looked anything like the marketing automation platforms that exist today. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That there’s no nice handbook that tells you exactly what’s going to happen with your software business: so, to succeed it’s your duty to hire people that can think on their feet

Why your marketing will become exponentially better if you start thinking about the world as being a list of companies that you build relationships with

How defensible differentiation can be created by blending a strong product with an irresistible business model.

That your decision how to position yourselves in a space can create a significant problem around your messaging

For more information about the guest from this week:

Riaz Kanani

Website Radiate B2B

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to radically evolve the way people search and transact property. My guest is Bobby Bryant, Founder and CEO of Doss. Bobby has been in real estate for 20 years. He began his journey in the mortgage business. In 2008, he took one year off to relentlessly study and understand the collective real estate industry, what happened, and what's to come. That sparked the idea to found DOSS. DOSS is on a mission to develop the best technology to make homeownership in America more affordable. This inspired me, and hence I invited Bobby to be a guest on my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the Real Estate industry when it comes to finding and buying properties. We dig into the opportunity to create a win-win approach i.e. a world where nobody has to lose, and how technology and data has a fundamental roll in realizing this. Finally we discuss what it takes to build a software business people would miss if it was gone. Here are some of his quotes: Every industry in the country has become more automated and economical. If you think about the promise of technology it was to do two things. The promise of technology was to save us time and money. So, in real estate, when you think of all of the technological advancements of today, yet the cost of transact real estate hadn't changed. The biggest issue for a lot of people is the barrier of entry of costs to get into a home. Or a seller who has a million-dollar house and to give away $60,000 of their equity. How can we be in 2020 charging the same fee that we charged in the early 1900s? The real estate industry struggles with a win-win. Why does somebody have to lose in this equation?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How a position of advantage can be created if we think about win-win i.e. provide unique value to both parties at the table – not just one.

Why instead of talking like a rocket scientist you should soften your message and talk like a truck driver

Why the companies of the future are going to be the companies that figure out how to make people feel good, and feel good about themselves

Why you have to be prepared to pay attention for continuous evolution.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Bobby Bryan

Website Doss

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This podcast interview focuses on a discussion around the essence of the book ‘The Innovation Ultimatum – how 6 technologies reshape every business in the 2020s. My guest is Steve Brown, Author and Founder of Possibility & Purpose. Steve Brown is a futurist, author, entrepreneur, and advisor with over 30 years of experience in high tech. Prior to building his own consulting business, he was Intel’s Chief Evangelist and worked in Intel Labs as a futurist, where he imagined and built plans for a world 5, 10, and 15 years in the future. After leaving Intel in 2016, Steve built his own company, Possibility and Purpose LLC, which helps businesses to be more innovative, more resilient, and more profitable. In 2018 he co-founded The Provenance Chain Network, an open standards approach to bringing transparency to global commerce. In 2020, he published his latest book, “The Innovation Ultimatum: How six strategic technologies will reshape every business in the 2020s” This inspired me, and hence I invited Steve to my podcast. We explore why the gap between those that embrace the new technologies and those that don’t is going to dramatically widen. Why it’s about agency taking responsibility and decide you’re going to participate in building the future that defines the winners. We also address what’s qualities leaders are required to develop to lead and be remarkable doing so. Here are some of his quotes: There are two pieces to the innovation ultimatum, there's one that's sort of more obvious on the surface, which is the competitive imperative, which is kind of the stick The gap between those that embrace technology, and those that don't, has always been there, but that gap is going to widen dramatically in the next decade The other side of the innovation ultimatum is the moral obligation for us as individuals and as companies to do the right thing and to create value for humans and to solve human problems. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That you should ask yourself two questions. What's the future we want to build? And what's the future we want to avoid?

That to be great a leader in the 2020s you should be equipped to ask the right questions, become very clear eyed and understand the application of these technologies

Why the smartest companies are thinking five or six steps ahead and then they work their way back to a starting point.

That too much of the ‘innovation’ we put out is still about boosting productivity and efficiency, and that in doing so, we’re leaving so much on the table that we risk irrelevancy.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Steve Brown

Website

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to empowers internet users and content creators with the tools to build a safer and more trustworthy internet. My guest is Sebastiaan van der Lans, Founder and CEO of WordProof and Chairman of Trusted Web Foundation Sebastiaan van der Lans has a big heart for open source. In 2006 he co-founded Amsterdam’s first WordPress agency ‘Van Ons’, which is a leading digital agency now, serving over 100M page views a year. Sebastiaan has a strong passion for improving the playing fields of publishing, SEO, and e-commerce. In 2019, Sebastiaan founded WordProof with which he’s on a mission to restoring trust on the internet. This inspired me, and hence I invited Sebastiaan to my podcast. We explore what’s underpinning the fact the internet is broken when it comes to trust and how this is undermining our progress. We also address how to get a movement going in a situation that’s characterized by multiple ‘chicken & egg’ dilemmas. Finally, we discuss the mindset and approach required to achieve results that have remarkable impact for everyone around the globe. Here are some of his quotes: Even though the Internet has brought us so many great things, it has a deep-rooted issue. And that's what it's trustworthiness. And therefore, all sorts of obnoxious human behaviour, like theft and manipulation and fraud thrive. Normally in society, we have systems in place to make sure that those obnoxious behaviors don't thrive. But on the internet, trust simply isn't part of the internet's DNA. And that goes back to society. So what we say is: “To save the world, we need to fix the internet, we need to make trust part of the internet's DNA.” That's what we aim for. And Wordproof is a Time Stamping tool to achieve the mission of the trusted web. In a few years from now, if you don't timestamp your information, you’ll be considered a fraud. What are you hiding from? During this interview, you will learn four things:

That just because technology isn’t scalable or mature enough is no reason to not embrace it.

How to solve a business model challenge where the audience that benefits most are not the one that will pay for it.

Why it requires to declare war on a specific problem to create solutions that are remarkable

Why spending 1000 hours on a 1-minute pitch pays off

For more information about the guest from this week:

Sebastiaan van der Lans

Website WordProof

Website The Trusted Web

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that enables us to rediscover the places and the people that make the area we live in or visit unique. My guest is Tom Charman, Co-founder and CEO of Nava For the last decade, he founded, been involved in, and scaled high-growth consumer-facing products that aim to solve questions relating to understanding and predicting human behavior through data. He’s a fan of lean startup methodology and spend most of his day building products. Tom gave a TEDx on A.I. and quantum computing, advised corporates on data privacy/security, and UK and EU parliaments on data and innovation. He co-founded NAVA in 2017 around the vision to connect people together through food. Their mission to realize this through creating immersive city experiences across Europe by helping locals better understand what’s going on around them. UNWTO recognised NAVA as one of the world’s most disruptive tourism startups. This resonated with me, and hence I invited Tom to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the process of restaurants and venue reviews and how this is not only impacting us as consumers, but also many business owners – simply because their ‘larger peers’ have an unfair competitive advantage. We discuss how to solve both the B2C and the B2B challenge with smart technology, and how to do this in a way that fuels itself by designing for virality. Here are some of his quotes: When you look for, say, a restaurant or a place to visit on Google, the kind of the general feeling is: ‘if it's above four stars, it's worth going to.’ But actually today, most restaurants about four stars. So how do you pick out a restaurant that's 4.3 versus a restaurant that's 4.4. And at the end of the day, that’s ignoring the kind of things that come with it like boosted posts and information to try and manipulate reviews. The general feeling here is this is a system that's flawed and fundamentally broken. The whole independent market of local restaurants, local bars, independently own places, it's such a disjointed and fragmented market, which makes it hellishly difficult to actually work. But if you get something like this working, what you're doing here is creating a global platform for independent venues to actually compete against the Starbucks, the McDonald's the all of the other big chains that are out there - giving them a level playing field. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That too many business software companies say they are talking to customers, but miserably fail to do so.

Why we should make it the standard rule to consume less data instead of more (without compromising quality)

Why too many features can become your biggest problem and what to do about it

How rapid +50% growth isn’t always an indicator you got product market fit

For more information about the guest from this week:

Tom Charman

Website

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to avoid people that get paralyzed from having to start their lives over. My guest is Mark Daniels, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Mark Daniel was born and raised in Pensacola. He injured his spine almost 13 years ago and have been using a wheelchair since. In 2010, Mark was asked to assist IHMC with evaluating their first powered exoskeleton, and he kept this involvement since. He has now joined IHMC as a full time research intern to work on the design, fabrication, and testing of the exoskeleton for the Cybathlon. Mark anticipates the Cybathlon to make a huge stride in technology and awareness to improve quality of life for those with loss of mobility due to injury or illness across the world. "Every day I am confronted with the reality that I am paralyzed. Every day I face this reality to find comfort in my abilities and not anger in my disability – we all have disabilities and I encourage everyone to live unrestrained.” This inspired me, and hence I invited Mark to my podcast. We explore the world of Exoskeleton, the major advances over the last 10 years and how the blend of hardware, software and active user involvement has been fundamental to this. We discuss what the innovation should be really all about, how to accelerate it, and what mental obstacles one has to overcome to come out as a winner. Here are some of his quotes: I look at everything that we're doing here at IHMC and all the other exoskeletons, and the other technology that is giving mobility back to people with disabilities. I look at all of this as hopefully, that 18 year old kid that I was. An accident will happen to him, and he will get paralyzed. And some of the technology that I'm working on or helping to push or develop will be what he's given whenever he has the same problem that I did. And he'll go back to the same job that he had and he won't have to start his life over. We notice who makes strides in the market, and who wins in that market. And it's the people that pay attention to the feedback of their end user. And the way to do that is to get somebody that's gonna want your technology and then give them a reason to want it. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why it is key to create solutions that smartly balance working with you, as much as for you

That users have alternatives – sometimes radically different from what you offer. And to make them want to change you have to deliver a shift in value.

Why it is key to not argue with a user whether what they want is a good idea or not.

That art and technology are not that different – and that’s where the opportunity hides

For more information about the guest from this week:

Mark Daniels

Website IHMC

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the sales & marketing space that has the power to increase sales productivity by over 80%, and my guest is Ilan Kasan, Co-founder and CEO of Exceed.ai. Ilan is an accomplished product leader with proven successes in driving product, user experience, strategy and execution and building products users and enterprises love such as Webex. He has deep expertise in mobile, web, & application software & SaaS products, and built an 18 year career in general management and product management for leading global technology companies including , Cisco, WebEx, Comeet and others. Ilan has been an earlier guest on my podcast. Our first interview was back in February 2019. Lots has happened since, and what triggered me to get him back on the podcast is to hear his story about how the market has changed, how he orchestrated his organization for growth, what he’s changed to survive the pandemic, and what lessons he learned in this process. Here are some of his quotes: We learned a lot. And the biggest change: we know very well who is not our customer. We have Product Market Fit. We know that we solve a real problem. We know who we should sell to you. But we hadn’t figured out the Go to Market Fit. The Go to Market fit is one of the balance between product, sales and marketing to help us sell the product. Another way of looking at it is that's a good Go to Market fit is: If your understand how your customers buy. Your Go to Market has to fit the way they buy and not the way you sell. By listening to this interview, you will learn four things:

How to move from product market fit to Go-To-Market fit

Why it’s liberating to say no to prospects

That products don’t only need to do functionally what it says it does – more importantly - It needs to do it in a way it delights customers

Why it’s not enough to just have a good story and a good message

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ilan Kasan

Website

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power transform education by taking out bias. My guest is Claudia Rademaker, Co-founder Dugga Claudia has worked internationally with start-ups, scale-ups and international business development in various industries. She’s worked as Assistant Professor at Stockholm School of Economics and Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University. She did her doctoral thesis within consumer media behavior and communication effectiveness. After her dissertation, she was awarded the prestigious Wallander stipend from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius foundation, Handelsbanken. Her work in education inspired the foundation of Dugga in March 2015. Their mission: In every school, each child deserves equal opportunities and needs to be given the right to quality education.” This inspired me, and hence I invited Claudia to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in today’s education system – where every single day individual students get still graded on other things than their actual performance. We assess where the problems originate from and how, by breaking the norms transformational value can be created – and what’s required to do that in a way that people keep talking about. Here are some of her quotes: The passion is that you want to make a difference. My personal mission is that I want to make a difference in education. Help young individuals or pupils to obtain equal opportunities to learn and grow. We want to create solutions for teachers to obtain a better, but also a more honest and unbiased understanding of the skills, knowledge, and abilities of their students. No one should be graded based on his or her last name, skin color, or in class behavior. More importantly, no one with a special need should have less opportunities to learn and grow. One in five has some form of special need. If you think about that, if we stand still by that fact, then it is just unbelievable that we have come this far. I mean, can you then imagine the need in just one classroom? And this can be made possible with modern technology and pedagogy During this interview, you will learn four things:

What value we can unlock when we take bias out of the process.

Why actively seeking to break the norms makes it so much easier to create something remarkable

How, by ‘Thinking out Loud’ can help winthe heart of your most difficult and stubborn users and unlock your tipping point

Why every team member should feel like a VIP for end-results

For more information about the guest from this week:

Claudia Rademaker

Website

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable wholesale and manufacturing organizations to a build the same kind of relationships online as they’ve always done offline. My guest is Michiel Schipperus, CEO Sana Commerce Michiel has been working in e-commerce since 1999 when he joined ISM eGroup. In the years following he consulted with many distributors and manufacturers on how to successfully set up an online sales channel. These lessons learned from more than 100 B2B e-commerce cases were used to develop the Sana Commerce concept. In 2011 Sana was founded. Since then Michiel is pursuing two missions simultaneously: 1. Helping companies worldwide achieve e-commerce success 2. Building a company culture people love and that enables them to be their best selves. This inspired me, and hence I invited Michiel to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the market for e-commerce and why so many companies don’t achieve the e-commerce success they hope for. We dig deeper into the question what needs to be done differently from a product strategy standpoint to solve this global challenge. Lastly we discuss Michiel’s standpoint on what’s required to build a software business that turns customers into advocates in a way that’s highly scalable. Here are some of his quotes: We learned 10 years ago that that B2B was very different from B2C. The problem for these companies if they have this very special unique relationship with their customers and they put in place a B2C ecommerce platform, is that this platform is not supporting the nature of their relationships. They run into all kinds of issues with their customers. They don't see the adoption that they would like, because these customers, they go online, they try to order but they do not see the information that they're looking for, or the information is inaccurate. So, they will not use the ecommerce platform anymore. They'll just pick up the phone and revert back to their old way of working. If they're not able to make this transition with them, and service these customers online the same way to have been doing offline, well, that will definitely damage their business. During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why what customers say they need, is often not what they want. And getting this wrong could severely undermine your competitiveness.

That value differentiation starts with your foundation – and done well helps you can escape the competition on feature

Why you have to be more strategic earlier in your journey – to avoid things just ‘happen to you’ - especially around your value proposition.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Michiel Schipperus

Sana Commerce

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give every one of us the luxury of financial freedom. My guest is Sam Abrika, Co-founder and CEO of Cash Coach. He’s an engineer, contrarian, ex-banker, and now gamifying personal finance. After he achieved his Master of Science at the Paris Sud University and MBA, he started his career as a Risk & Analytics consultant at IBM. Sam then moved to PWC, followed by UBS where he became Head of EMEA Liquidity and Funding Risk. Finally he moved to Mitsubishi UFG Securities where he designed new liquidity analytics which allowed to save $1Bn liquidity. He then co-founded Cash Coach, a company that’s on a mission to gamify personal finance and make the world better at managing money and more fun for the millennial generation. This inspired me, and hence I invited Sam to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the consumer world when it comes to financial health – and how most consumer technology companies are designing to make this worse, not better. We dig into why there are not incentives to fix this, and what innovation opportunity that really brings. We also address why having a solution is not enough – and that changing user behavior is possibly the biggest challenge to crack. Lastly we explore what’s required to build a software business that’s worth making a remark about. Here are some of his quotes: The big idea is in nowadays in our economy, you either be in debt or wealth. And unfortunately, no education or university, no one is telling that to people. It doesn't tell them how to manage their money, how to live their life financially free. And actually, it's even quite the opposite. The whole financial industry and the consumerism machine is trying to push people to consumerism for so that they buy stuff they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like. We want to reverse that trend. We want people to feel actually rewarded when they have good behaviours; when they're saving; when they're building their wealth; when they're achieving financial freedom. So the big idea is to make it a game. And we want people to compete against themselves, against the friend, to being better at saving. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That a lot of innovation can be found by doing the opposite of what the industry aims to achieve

That making black and white choices is key, even if that means you’re going side track millions and millions of users

Why going for some ‘extremely happy’ users is so much more valuable than to have everybody lukewarm

How to uncover opportunities people don’t even know they have a problem around

For more information about the guest from this week:

Sam Abrika

Cashcoach.io

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to make artificial intelligence accessible to any business. My guest is Dr. Tom Heseltine, CEO of Aurora AI Tom has been with Aurora for over 15 years, becoming CEO in 2016 and guiding Aurora’s transition from a face-rec centric company to a successful AI specialist. He has a deeply technical background, he mentors and tutors Aurora’s Core Technology team of PhDs in solving the most difficult challenges He has a PhD in Biometric Face Recognition from the University of York, UK, following his first-class honours degree in Computer Science. Tom introduced Deep Learning and AI to Aurora’s technology portfolio, establishing Aurora’s AI Framework and instigating a step-change in face recognition accuracy. This evolution is now creating a revolution in how some of the most complex and specific challenges are solved in record time. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Tom to my podcast. We explore why the accessibility to AI is still so limited and why the results are often far from what’s expected. We discuss the options to address this – and how this both a technological as well as a business problem. Finally we discuss Tom’s point of view and experience to create a remarkable software business. Here are some of his quotes: Solving problems. It's coming up with an idea, testing a hypothesis, creating a system that puts that into practice, and then particularly seeing it being used and doing good. That's what really drives me, I want to see good ideas, being used to solve really challenging problems. It's to make artificial intelligence accessible to any business AI needs no introduction these days. It really is fantastically powerful. But it's difficult to get right. It's expensive, and it requires real expertise. A lot of people are trying it and failing. And what we're trying to do is provide application specific API's designed for a business built to specific precise requirements by a team of experts, and seeing that right through to deployment. And we're trying to do that for companies that are otherwise missing out. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How you can accelerate adoption of your software products by going beyond the feature /function challenge

How by bringing different disciplines together you can crack the formula to produce something exceptional

That being remarkable starts with having courage, courage to adopt and change, step into the unknown and get out of your comfort zone

That solving narrow and highly specific problems will be the key to create broadscale momentum

For more information about the guest from this week:

Dr. Tom Heseltine

Aurora AI

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to protect each of us from wasting our life by being trapped in the wrong job within the wrong company. My guest is Nina Alag Suri, founder and CEO of X0pa. Nina is a geek at heart and an entrepreneur by choice. She grew up in India, close to Mumbai, the financial capital. She worked for large companies such as ICL and Steria but was always determined to be an entrepreneur. In 1997 she started her first company in India - in HR Consulting, which she expanded across three regions - Europe, Asia Pac, and North America. She was voted Female Business Personality of the year Singapore, The European Consultancy of the year, European World Finance- Entrepreneur of the Year, and the list goes on. Three years ago, she thought it's time to disrupt and pivot her own business before somebody else would disrupt it. That's how X0PA was formed. X0PA is on a mission to change the art of hiring and make sure that everybody is in the right space, in the right company, the right role in the right team. This inspired me, and hence I invited Nina to my podcast. We explore how, even in today's highly automated world, people still get hired for the wrong reasons - and what's the cause of this. We address the complexity of the problem and that it goes far beyond just fixing inefficiencies. We also explore the big lessons Nina learned on her entrepreneurial journey and what's required to create software products customers don't want to live without. Here are some of her quotes: I studied engineering started my career as a in a tech role. And I said, Oh, my God, this is totally not for me, people is what excited me, you know, dealing with different people, diversity of people, the you know, the different colours of people. And I wanted to be in a people business The biggest thing that really kind of spoke to me was about the subjectivity in the in the nature of hiring, you know, we've had Industrial Revolution 1, 2, 3, 4 come and go. But hiring has still been a very, very subjective process. It leads to human bias human errors. These biases tend to kind of screen people out, rather than screen people in. And I thought it would be great to use technology to make something which is very objective, very fair. And most importantly, it finds the best match between employer and an employee. You spent a fair bit of your time, in fact, the majority of your time at work. And if you are not in the right place, and the right job, you know, you're wasting your life. By listening to this podcast, you will learn three things:

That real value is delivered if we move from solving 'what is' to solving 'what might be'.

How solving the recruitment problem in finding the perfect fit in relevance, future loyalty, and future performance provides an approach many software solutions could benefit from.

Why software companies are better of when tech-entrepreneurs apply an 'all voices are heard' approach.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Nina Alag Suri

Website

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help let us live the lives we want, without killing our planet. My guest is Terry Swack, CEO of Sustainable Minds. Terry is an Internet and environmental entrepreneur, pioneer in customer experience strategy and thought leader in the product sustainability software industry. Her career has focused on making complex ideas and technologies useful, usable and desirable. She started her first company, TSDesign, in 1994: an Internet strategy and product design firm that lead the industry in user experience design. It was acquired by Razorfish in 1999. In 2002 she became VP Customer Experience & founding member of StillSecure, a network security software startup where she brought 3 best-in-class products to market in 18 months In 2005 she founded the Beam, a venture-backed Web 2.0 marketplace to power the emerging demand for cleaner & greener products and services Finally, in 2007 she founded Sustainable Minds a company that’s mission is to operationalize environmental performance into mainstream product development and manufacturing in an accessible, empowering and credible way. Sustainable Minds’ Eco-concept + LCA Software was the 1st cloud tool for product manufacturers to design greener products has been used in industry and higher education in 90+ countries. This resonated with me, and hence I invited Terry to my podcast. We explore the massive challenge we have at hand to make the world more sustainable. We discuss how technology can help accelerate solving this problem and what’s needed to leverage the impact of technology to its max. How we can create growth by consuming less, and what mindset we should obtain to create solutions people will embrace and talk about. Here are some of her quotes: There is the opportunity for economies and businesses to grow, and there's a different way to do it. Because if growth is still driven by consumption, the way most economies function, and especially first world economies, it's all about consumption and more. But innovation through improving environmental performance and also now material health is going to mean less consumption due to developing product service systems, using fewer raw materials, circular economy, all the things that people haven't yet waded into in a mainstream way, will become the way. People all over the planet want to live the way people live in a first world economy. For that to happen we’d need 5 plantets to support the carrying capacity of today's population and the rate at which it's growing,. During this interview, you will learn three things:

To create meaningful change you have to help people to think differently before they can act differently

How to start and accelerate company growth when the main thing you solve isn’t even ‘cool’ yet

Why companies that measure (and not think differently) will only deliver incremental impact

Remarkable software is created when you focus on creating something very specific people can use instead of something that everybody can use.

For more information about the guest of this week:

Terry Swack

Sustainable Minds

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to turn "dead air" into actionable intelligence, helping Retailers, Healthcare, and Hospitality facilities improve on-site experiences and the health of their businesses. My guest is Van West, Founder and CEO of Vocalytics. Van is an accomplished strategic business development and marketing executive with 15 years’ experience leading teams in startup to Fortune 500 environments. He has a product-minded entrepreneurial approach with focus on strategy, growth, and product and is passionate about digital engagement to creatively exploit revenue opportunities. He co-founded GiftyOne in 2013, was Director of Channel Marketing for Lookout Mobile Security, SVP of Marketing at Oomba, first hire & VP of Global Business Development at VMAXX as well as Chief Strategy Officer at Reality Smash. Besides that, he’s a guest lecturer at the University of California, Irvine. In November 2019 he founded Vocalytics, an enterprise-grade voice and sound analytics platform built for the physical world. It’s on a mission to improve enterprise performance, associate engagement, and customer experience - all through the power of voice and sound. That inspired me, and hence I invited Van to my podcast. We explore why so many enterprises today are unaware of the context and triggers impacting human behavior of their people and customers – and how that is leading to compromise in experience, loyalty and the performance of their business. We address what can be done about that, but also dig into the big lessons learned in bringing such products to market in a time where everything we have become so used to changed. Van shares his insights behind the choices he made to deliberately not enter the obvious, high-growth categories in the market. Here are some of his quotes: Understanding the best practices of your top performers and deploying that knowledge at scale is really that's ultimately been our play. We've also recognized that in the COVID world that we're living in, there's less in person exchanges occurring and those that do occur are less face to face. With all the traction and all the momentum that we've built understanding at this point in time, we now have to start building towards what that new normal is and recognizing that. So my little sister has a highly compromised immune system, severely compromised immune system. And we built a technology to listen in the physical worlds. Coughing is the number one way to COVID spreads. So rather than filtering out the background noise, let's lean into it to differentiate our product beyond COVID towards this new normal, while also we can help and serve the general population, whether it's returned to work, returned to campus, or returned to the physical worlds for in-person interactions. We want to keep everyone safe. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to get things off the ground faster, and with more impact by listening to your customers with intent.

The essentials to carve out a space that you cannot only be successful in, but actually dominate

Why time is the most important resource for start-ups – and how to utilize that optimally

How to create velocity by ensuring every member of the team is committed to the journey ahead and enabling them to shine.

For more information about the guest of this week:

Van West

Vocalytics

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that gives SMBs a position of advantage by leveraging technology typically only available to the Enterprise. My guest is Matthew Schmidt, Founder and CEO of Peoplelogic.ai Matthew is and experienced entrepreneur and operator with a history of building and launching products and growing businesses. Early in his career he led DZone’s media business unit, responsible for DZone.com, a popular website and publisher for the global software developer community. He was the architect behind its community platform, AnswerHub, and attracted a global audience of millions of technology professionals. Today he’s the CEO of Peoplelogic.ai, a startup that’s on a mission to make growth scalable. Peoplelogic is an AI-augmented mission control for SMB teams. It monitors, alerts, and predicts outcomes around immediate risks and opportunities within a business so they can focus where it counts and get ahead of problems before it sinks them. This resonated with me, and hence I invited Matthew to my podcast. We explore the challenges SMB organizations have due to the lack of information and insight– and how easily the get off track as a consequence (especially when they grow). Many can’t anticipate the big waves that can take them out, let alone take advantage of opportunities before the competition does. We also dig into the key question of what’s required to build a remarkable software business and keep living up to that.

Here are some of his quotes: What I set out to solve originally with Peoplelogic was really: How do we make better managers? How do we use technology and data to be able to augment our managers on their way to better understanding their people and to help them maintain growth and be able to not slip, and fall, or trip over their shoelaces as the company's growing. We come from selling enterprise software, but the businesses that we ran, were high growth startups. And to be successful, a lot of things have to happen correctly along the way. There are so many opportunities for failure. What we saw was that if you can stop even 20% of those from happening, or from having a big impact on your team, or getting you off track, you're going to be that much more successful. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why technology is only a piece of what makes your company successful.

How to thrive if you’re launching your new product at the start of the world’s largest pandemic we can remember

How to carve out your own blue ocean by democratizing technology typically only available to the enterprise

Why you should avoid comparing your company to others

For more information about the guest of this week:

Matthew Schmidt

Peoplelogic.ai

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to drive growth without having to rely on expensive ad campaigns. My guest is Adam Benzecrit, Co-founder at inflo.Ai. Adam has worked in a number of startups and high growth companies for nearly a decade. In 2013 he co-founded inflo.Ai, a London-based technology company that’s on a mission to help overstretched in-house marketing teams, business owners and SMEs to find their voice and grow online. When they saw thousands of companies simply didn’t have the resources to create highly effective blog content and therefore had rely on expensive paid ad campaigns and SEO agency retainers, they had to step in and solve it. How? By helping their clients tell great stories with the power of artificial intelligence and making content creation and blogging simple, fast and affordable on at the same time. This inspired me, and hence I invited Adam to my podcast. We explore why producing great content is so tough and why so many businesses continue to underutilize their expertise to drive engagement. We also address what’s required to stand out in your market and become the go-to-player. Last but not least we dig into the things to do as leaders to create a software business customers keep talking about. Here are some of his quotes: Our journey started with the creation in 2015, around a sports news app. When we got off the ground, we started to get thousands of users, and then ran into an accelerator, which introduced us to lots of different companies. And they introduced us to brands, a lot of bookmakers. What we were trying to do then, the start of our journey, was we were trying to influence bookmakers to advertise on our product. We learned and realize there was an opportunity much bigger than that. They were more interested in how we got content in our own app, and wanted to do that for themselves to drive digital engagement to their products and services. T that was the big lightbulb moment for us is forget the b2c route. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How to carve out your own category and find a playing field where you are can become the go-to player.

Why it’s so important to reflect and dig deep on the business you are really in. Only that understanding makes saying ‘no’ easier and give you the resourcefulness to remain making a difference

What strategies to put in place to continue to have the cashflow runway to execute and deliver upon the mission.

Why you should treat your client like a partner, and a partner like your client.

For more information about the guest of this week:

Adam Benzecrit

inflo.Ai

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help digital marketers prove and improve the impact they can make in content marketing and accelerate revenue on the back of it. My guest is Avishai Sharon, Co-Founder and CEO of Trendemon He has over 15 years of experience in product design and management, UI/UX, web and mobile applications, entrepreneurship and startups. In 2005 he founded a digital marketing agency that helped B2B companies build and execute digital marketing strategies. He is also a Captain in the Israeli Air Force and an avid extreme sports enthusiast. Today he’s CEO and Co-founder at Trendemon, a revenue acceleration SaaS platform which helps B2B companies close more deals from their content marketing efforts and assets. It does this by empowering marketers to prove and improve their content’s impact. This resonated with me, and hence I invited Avishai to my podcast. We explore the disconnect in what marketers do and the direct impact that has on business performance. Why it takes a different way of thinking to solve this challenge – as focusing on increasing traffic is not the answer. And last but not least we discuss what it takes to build a software businesspeople just keep talking about. Here are some of his quotes: I was working at a marketing agency. A big challenge that I was running into those days was how do I prove to my customers, companies that were paying substantial amounts, that the work that we were doing, the effort that we were putting in, was actually impacting their bottom line. That disconnect between work that's being done and the inability or the challenge of proving it was what got me started Trendemon The main opportunity that we see here is that most marketers, especially in content, are storytellers. And I think that we're not seeing technology as a way to replace storytelling. Storytelling is a very human and delicate and sophisticated capability. We want to empower them with data that gives them the ability to validate their work with results, and help them show unequivocally how content, blog posts, videos have been created, help the company close more deals. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That we often focus optimizing our software products too much on making doing the work easier, rather than to do that work with more impact.

How being deliberate about how to stay as independent as possible through your products strategy choices will bring opportunities you might not expect

That to spur creativity and curiosity you have to create probing challenges

Why you should plan for your inflection points – those momentum building events that you can leverage to get to the next stage.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give everyone of us a better understand of what our customers really want. My guest is Frank Schneider, CEO at Speakeasy AI. Frank consulted and led teams providing various SaaS and AI solutions for contact centers and B2B. He’s a former officer and VP of Sales, Marketing and Customer Success at Creative Virtual USA. During his tenure, Creative Virtual USA grew revenue over 300% and became the leader in Fortune 500 enterprise virtual assistant deployments. Today he’s the CEO at Speakeasy AI. He and his team are on a mission to make it easier for businesses to understand and respond to their customers’ needs in voice with the help of AI. This put them on the pioneers’ path to provide in-the-moment insights into understanding customers' intents, needs and outcomes. And this resonated with me, and hence I invited Frank to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in todays chatbot driven economy – and how this leads to more automation, but not to better customer value and relationships. We also address the dilemmas customer have with a ‘rip and replace’ strategy vs one where they can evolve their investments. Last but not least we discuss some critical ingredients to building a remarkable software business. Here are some of his quotes: In any organizational structure, it's servant leadership that allows for success to be possible when you can put the needs of others in front of yourself. The aha moment that we found is that customers, when they come and try to interact with a brand, they want information or help easily. They want it to be sort of done in a way that doesn't take much effort for them. And they want it done quickly and whenever they want it. And those are the issues that have gone on in servicing customers, for long before AI was in place. We want to start with listening to your customers. And the piece of technology that we have a patent pending for is called speech to intent. In order to understand a customer and also leverage your other investments, we need intelligence on the line at the moment you say hello. As soon as you start speaking to us, we're not listening to just transcribe and send somewhere. We're listening to start to derive what that intent is from the beginning, and then send the intent to a place to fulfil the need. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why the essence to turn customers into fans is not so much in listening what they say they need, but understanding intent i.e. what they really want

How embracing and leveraging ‘what’s there’ – be the orchestrator - can accelerate your growth and stickiness i.e. enabling your customer to leap without having to reinvent everything

How defensible differentiation can be created by not betting on a technology difference, but on a methodology difference.

That the trick to getting customers to actually use your solution and increase the ‘love curve’ is in earning their trust, and creating wins

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to empower organizations to deliver remarkable impact by creating game-changing teams and cultures. My guest is Nathan Ott, Co-founder and Chief Polisher at The GC Index Nathan has over 20 years of experience working with business leaders to get the best from their talent. He is the co-author of two studies: The DNA Of A Game Changer and The DNA Of A Game-Changing Team and published ‘Coaching Me, Coaching You’. Today he is the vision and driving force behind The GC Index. He has a fundamental belief that everyone can make an impact in their world and has created a global community of GC Partners and GCologists. They are working globally with a diverse range of commercial and non-profit organisations, and help their clients understand how their employees can make an impact and helps leaders create game-changing teams and cultures. The GC Index framework is disrupting the way people manage talent. It’s not only being used to help individuals be the very best they can be but it is liberating organisations to embed their diversity and innovation initiatives to impact tangible business outcomes. And that inspired me, and hence I invited Nathan to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the world of managing talent. Too often we look for someone’s personality and academic background, rather than connecting people to business outcomes, and in particular, what type of outcomes people can have maximum impact. We also dive into ways how we can fix this challenge and deliver remarkable impact by blending people and technology in the right way. Here are some of his quotes: A lot of organizations would come to us and say: “We need some people to make a change.” We would sit down with them and use their traditional frameworks for assessing these people. And then they would say to us, these senior leaders: “Just get me some people that ‘get it’.” That started me thinking of what is this thing that everyone can recognize, but can't explain? The things that the business leaders were describing to us was something different. They wanted people that were different to what they were getting. And so, we termed those individuals game changers. The GC index got formed as a language and a framework for impact. So it’s a piece of software that aligns people's impacts to business outcomes and roles. And that's when the magic really started to happen. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That too often we focus our software solutions on optimizing the impact of an individual doing a specific task, without looking at the exponential leverage they can create in a setting with the right people around them.

Why it’s key to make the distinction between innovation and invention – as a software business you need to find the right balance in order to stay relevant in your category.

Why alignment and collaboration are key to create breakthroughs – and how to orchestrate that by addressing the tensions in the boundaries

How one solution can be marketed through multiple business models concurrently

For more information about the guest of this week:

Nathan Ott

The Game Changing Index

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has power to make field engineers far more productive, and give the companies they work for new ways to retain and grow their competitive edge. My guest is Sam Waicberg, Co-founder and CEO CareAr. Sam Waicberg is an entrepreneurial business leader passionate about building brands that scale. His expertise: driving and inspiring high performing teams, game changing solutions, positioning strategies, innovative partnerships, ecosystems, and communities that create network effects and growth. Throughout his career he’s held senior roles in sales at Oracle, Blue Martini, Aspect Software, Ascendent Systems, Envox, Fluency Voice Technology, Genband, and Vidyo. He’s recognized for strategic out-of-the-box approaches for developing and executing corporate and go-to-market plans, thought leadership, and creating long-term meaningful relationships. In December or 2018 he co-founded CareAR, an Augmented Reality platform for smart services. Their mission: Making expertise accessible anywhere and instantly. This triggered me, and hence I invited Sam to my podcast. We explore the challenges faced in the field services market and how technology can help transform productivity, quality of work, and overall profitability. Beyond that we dig into a much larger problem that the services industry is facing as a whole: the rapidly decreasing workforce, and what challenges that gives entrepreneurs to retain tribal knowledge and their competitive edge. Here are some of his quotes: Innovation is something that constantly drives us. We think about the art of what's possible all the time. And we don't think too much about limitations and barriers. We saw a gap in the market and the other is a is something that evolved The simplest issue was applying what we see in telehealth when we see a long-distance learning to field service, getting a remote expert to assist the field tech on site to do a visual consult to solve the problem while they're out there. The big problem permeated as we started getting in there and talking to more C level people. 70% of their organization's most valuable assets, employees, are leaving over the next 5 to 10 years. All the knowledge goes out the door with that. So, the C-levels really are thinking, this is what keeps them up at night, about ‘What can I do to retain this tribal knowledge? What can I do to transfer this knowledge to other new individuals coming into the organizations in a way where I can accelerate the pace of that and retain my competitive edge?’ During this interview, you will learn four things:

How you can drive transformative value by bridging the gap between consumer applications and the enterprise workflow

That instead of constantly worrying about the catching up you have to do, focus your roadmap on the question: “How do you want to be the favourite?”

That the opportunity to create unique value is often hidden in developing an eye for rapidly developing issues that can become a catalyst for transformation

How to take friction for adoption out by not only focusing on the user experience, but also on the business model

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to create expert networks which promote thought leadership, increase revenue, and build engagement and trust. My guest is Charles Thiede, Co-founder and CEO Zapnito Charles who was born in the USA, studied at the San Francisco State University and achieved a Bachelor of Arts degree in Design and Industry. His previous roles have included the Interim Chief Product Officer and Digital Systems Director at Nature Publishing Group, Chief Technology Officer and Group Operations Director at Informa and Product Manager at Blue Shield of California. He has also acted as a Mentor for Women Who Tech. Today he is the CEO and Co-Founder of London-based, Zapnito, a Software as a Service (SaaS) knowledge-sharing and expert community platform. Zapnito helps event organizers, expert networks, membership and subscription businesses to deliver expertise on‐demand and to build sustainable communities. And this resonated with me, and hence I invited Charles to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge that the noise on the internet is just getting louder and louder. It’s harder to have a voice. It’s harder to create and share collective knowledge and intelligence. And it’s harder to create trusted places. We discuss why it’s so key to bring that original premise of the internet back in order to solve the new challenges ahead of us, deliver remarkable value, and create sustainable advantage on the back of that. Here are some of his quotes: I was very much impacted by a talk, I heard from a guy named Gerd Leonhard who’s futurist. And I was seeing social media creating a lot of noise out there. This is back in 2010/2011. And it was bothering me. The noise was getting heavier and heavier. And so, one of the things that was bothering me in that model is this idea of trusted collective intelligence being lost in that noise. And actually, at that time, I was working for a trusted business information company. And they were really struggling with this new paradigm. And I thought, well, in the heart of what they’re doing is about trust collective intelligence, but the way they’re delivering it is totally old school and archaic. So, the big idea was to help return the internet back to its original premise, which was around collective intelligence from experts sharing with each other. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How the power of communities can help to push boundaries and avoid the risk of so-called echo chambers.

Why trust, quality and diversity are essential ingredients for success in creating expert communities that have staying power

How switching your approach from being a vitamin to being a painkiller can become the tipping point for your software business

How having a sense of humour and fun helps you get through tough times in a much easier way.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform our society from being very transactional into very empathetic. My guest is Rana Gujral, CEO Behavioral Signals Rana Gujral is an entrepreneur, speaker, and investor. He founded TiZE, a cloud software for specialty chemicals in 2014. He was recruited to be a part of the core turnaround team for Cricut Inc. where he built a first of its kind product for the DIY community and helped turn bankruptcy to profitability within a span of 2 years. Rana also held leadership positions at Logitech S.A. and Kronos Inc., where he was responsible for the development of best-in-class products generating billions in revenue and contributed towards several award-winning engineering innovations. He has been awarded the ‘Entrepreneur of the Month’ by CIO Magazine and the ‘US China Pioneer’ Award by IEIE. He has been listed among 8 A.I. Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2019 by INC Magazine and Top 10 Entrepreneurs to follow in 2017 by Huffington Post. Today he is the CEO of Behavioral Signals, an enterprise software company that delivers a robust and fast evolving emotion AI engine that introduces emotional intelligence into speech recognition technology. And this triggered me, and hence I invited him to my podcast. We explore the challenge with today’s voice technology and what has kept it from reaching its true potential. We discuss a variety of use cases that will create transformative experiences and impact when some of the limitations are taken away. Not only for us individuals, but also the level of business and society at large. Here are some of his quotes: Behavioral Signals was really driven from this sort of really intrinsic desire to improve voice communications and take it to the next level, whether it's communication happening between two humans or whether it's communication happening between a machine or a human. This is the best utopian experience that matches our human interests. And that's led to the whole voice first design movement. The whole promise was that we are going to take this to the next level, which means we're going to talk to our devices and devices are going to communicate back to us, as humans do. We could use those experiences to replace some of those elements in our livelihoods, and use those as companions. But that hasn't happened. That is why we are actually very rude to voice assistance in general, because we feel that they're beneath us, not because it's a machine, we know it's a machine, of course, it's not a human. But we also feel that, hey, it doesn't have the basic capability to understand how I feel. So, our mission is to really take that interaction to the next level. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That solving critical problems is often not about following the right process, but connecting people that are on the same wavelength

Why the secret behind growing momentum behind the adaption of your application is in making it human and empathetic

How you can exponential grow the impact your solution can create for your customers by capturing intent, rather than the transaction

How imagination and your ability to connect the dots into a vision are essential skills to create a remarkable software business

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This podcast interview focuses on technology and process that brings people together to deliver transformative impact. My guest is Greg Silverman, CEO of Concentric Market Since 2010, he has been the CEO of Concentric, a enterprise decision support platform that improves your strategic planning process and your forecasting capabilities. Previously, he was Global Managing Director, Analytics and Valuation, for Interbrand, where he designed the current version of their Brand Valuation methodology and led their global consulting practice. He has also worked in manufacturing, franchising, and retail. Greg received his BBA in Marketing and Retail from the University of Georgia and his MBA in Management from the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. He is author of the book, Turning Complexity into Strategic Advantage and published the Interbrand Top 100 Brands Report. Being an avid reader of the Interbrand brand report, this triggered me – and hence I invited Greg to my Podcast. We explore how brands deliver revenue and value, and how a lot of intangible and hard to observe components influence how they remain relevant in a market. We dig into the key role people play in all of this, and what role technology should play to beyond just automation.

Here are some of his quotes: On what makes them remarkable: Being a human in this day and age is hard. We have to just see people for their strengths and the fact that none of us are complete enough. And it's been the mission of the company actually to augment people's intelligence to help them be better people, enrich them. Regarding the impact they have: There's still domain expertise. And that matters. You need inspiration. You need creativity. You need to understand the zeitgeist, and having quantifiable tools that help you understand the forward impact of that, has really been our mission. About their offering, Greg says: ‘Can I forecast the future better than 50%?’ For our forecasts on a weekly basis, the standard we're held to is 95% accuracy. And that doesn't matter if that's weeks in advance, months in advance, and sometimes years in advance -- that has to be the standard because the only way you'll believe a predictive or prescriptive analytics is if it forecasts properly. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That you know your software platform is ready to scale when people come to you saying ‘It’s time to fire us because the software is doing everything’

Why when your software is making accurate predictions, you are only halfway in terms of the value you can deliver to your customers

That: integrity is not not stealing from your neighbour. It's having a vision and sticking to it when the world doesn't want you to.

That everyone in your company at some point will have to face the fear of failure, but more importantly, face the fear of success.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to take our ability to effectively communicate to the next level. My guest is Scott Sandland, Co-founder and CEO of Cyrano AI Scott is among the most well-known hypnotherapists on earth and an accomplished innovator and entrepreneur. He has been actively involved in the development and customization of multiple software platforms focused on continued education and professional networking for over a decade. Scott has 20 years of experience helping clients by using strategic questions and pattern recognition to understand and influence subconscious decision-making processes. Cyrano is built on the idea that these soft skills are inherently teachable, and that doing so will improve human:computer interaction at scale. Applying that knowledge and experience into a neural network to help more people is his driving passion. This inspired me, and hence I invited Scott to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in way we use technology to communicate – and how that is inhibiting us to get global problems (such as teen suicide) under control or effectively transmit our ideas. We also dig into the art of preparing the market to adopt transformative technology and what the secrets to create a software business people keep talking about. Here are some of his quotes: One of the main driving points in the thesis of our company is, most AI tech is about generating correct responses, not a meaningful communication. A long-standing tenet of mine is the second most valuable thing in the known universe is effective communication. The first is oceans made out of water. We spent a lot of time looking for that. But the second most valuable thing is effectively communicating our ideas. The most human thing there is talking well, and the fact that for maybe the second time in human history, our defining technology, since the printing press, this era is defined by the ability to transmit ideas better than ever before. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Too often we focus the software we build on improving rather than prevention. What if we do the opposite?

How to overcome the hurdle of getting people to adopt solutions that deliver results that by far exceed their wildest expectations

How to build brand trust and create desire in a market where you are unknown and have no credibility

How creating an emotional, visceral vision for the future will help you overcome the difficult periods you’ll to face on your company’s journey.

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This podcast interview focuses on what it takes to create innovation that drives positive change. My guest is Neil Sahota, IBM Master Inventor, United Nations (UN) AI subject matter expert, and Professor at UC Irvine. With 20+ years of business experience, Neil works to inspire clients and business partners to foster innovation and develop next generation products/solutions powered by AI. Neil's work experience spans multiple industries including legal services, healthcare, life sciences, retail, travel and transportation, energy and utilities, automotive, telecommunications, media/communication, and government. Moreover, he is one of the few people selected for IBM's Corporate Service Corps leadership program that pairs leaders with NGOs to perform community-driven economic development projects. In addition, Neil partners with entrepreneurs to define their products, establish their target markets, and structure their companies. He is a member of several investor groups like the Tech Coast Angels and assists startups with investor funding. Neil also serves as a judge in various startup competitions and mentor in several incubator/accelerator programs and is the author of ‘Owning the AI Revolution.’ I invited Neil to my podcast because of his drive to create meaningful change and social impact through innovation. We explore the myths around making money and creating social good. We dig into the need to change behaviour and remove resistance as a critical component of the innovation process in order to drive the impact and adoption we hope for. And we discuss the fine line around being successful and taking enough risk. Here are some of his quotes: “If you're not trying to disrupt yourself or your organization, someone else will. And I think there's just a lot of opportunities out there. But we're used to thinking about improvement, how do we make something faster, cheaper, less errors, rather than be more transformative and say: ‘How can I actually do this differently?’ We live in a dynamic world, things are always changing, new capabilities are always coming out. How can I do something like different? That's what really drives me.” During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why companies that drive positive social impact perform fundamentally better than the ones that don’t

Why solving a big problem with your software is only one aspect to success and momentum. It’s ability to change behaviour, buy-in and mindset is the other critical part.

How we can deliver more success in driving change is by helping people ask a better first question.

That you don’t always want to be a 100% successful. If you’re 100% successful, you’re actually not taking enough risk

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power show what people really think and feel so we can create experiences that matter. My guest is Paul Zak, CEO of Immersion. Paul is a scientist, entrepreneur and author of several books. His newest book is "Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High Performance Companies." Paul’s two decades of research have taken him from the Pentagon to Fortune 50 boardrooms to the rain forest of Papua New Guinea. All this in a quest to understand the neuroscience of human connection, human happiness, and effective teamwork. His academic lab and companies he has started develop and deploy neuroscience technologies to solve real problems faced by real people. Paul is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He has degrees in mathematics and economics from San Diego State University, a Ph.D. in economics from University of Pennsylvania, and post-doctoral training in neuroimaging from Harvard. In 2017 he founded Immersion which is on a mission to build a platform that would democratize neuroscience and make everyone of us look like a hero. That inspired me, and hence I invited Paul to my podcast. We explore why so many resources and efforts are wasted because of the challenges we face in understanding what people really think and feel. We discuss what can be when we use technology to augment people in understanding these experiences and how that helps to create better products, better services and high-performing organizations. Here are some of his quotes: 80% of movies out of Hollywood lose money. Last year, Netflix spent almost $10 billion, creating content that did not hit strong enough to warrant a second season. So how do we not know at this stage of humanity if a movie is going to be great or not, or if a series on Netflix will be great or not. That's a lot of effort put into content that isn't creating real value for humans. It's a lot of wasted energy and focus. What we've done is we created technology, a small wearable, like an apple watch or Samsung (although we can take signal from all those things), and understand what your brain really loves and what frustrates you, and do that with really high frequency. You can see exactly what brains are doing in real time. So, you can pivot, you can audit what you've done in the past, and you can create higher impact experiences. During this interview, you will learn three things:

How to create better products and experiences if we stop asking, and instead using technology to get unbiased feedback from people.

What exponential impacts we can create when we not only know what people really care about, but actually be equipped to adjust instantly to give them experiences they really care about

Why more data is not always better to create results that impact.

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This podcast interview focuses on the heroics and entrepreneurship we have witnessed in the past three months of the pandemic. My guest is Vinnie Mirchandani. Vinnie has become a regular guest on my podcast. In fact, it was only 7 months ago where we discussed ‘a decade in review’. He’s the founder of Deal Architect - a Technology strategy and negotiation firm listed as a leading "boutique" by the Black Book of Outsourcing. Earlier in his career he had various technology consulting roles at PwC in the US, Europe and Asia, and worked as an industry analyst at Gartner. He wrote various books about the evolution and future of enterprise software, amongst which Silicon Collar, The New Polymath, The New Technology Elite and SAP Nation 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. Other than that he’s an inspiring blogger and always curious about innovation. In fact, he’s recently conducted close to 50 interviews with entrepreneurs and change-makers from around the world about how they stepped up to make a difference in the global pandemic. I had the honor to be featured in one these interviews as well where I shared various examples from different industries and countries. And that’s exactly that triggered me to invite him again to my podcast. We explore some of the most inspiring examples Vinnie uncovered and what we can learn from this in terms of leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship, and our ability to drive meaningful change. Here are some of his quotes: As the pandemic was starting to hit the US, we had heard about some of the innovations in Asia and Europe. We were starting to hear about US healthcare heroics, in the media, but I was also starting to hear of a lot of business heroics. Either scaling up or scaling down or innovating quickly or pivoting quickly, has required heroics. I was so glad to talk to these executives because the media is not giving them much attention. The media is so focused on the negative stories that unfortunately, these business executives are not getting enough attention. I wanted to get their word out on all the things that they're doing which deserve to be saluted. During this interview, you will learn three things:

How to pivot 180 degree overnight and turn a 90% drop in revenue back into growth again.

That the art of creating momentum is about two things: relevancy and creating a sense of urgency. Let’s not forget this after the pandemic – it’s what marketing should be all about. The key is to not just try and keep selling what you had in the bag in January. The world has turned upside down since.

That opportunities for innovation are plentiful, and every executive everywhere needs help We just need to establish an eye for it and be willing to work with them.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable us to achieve results and grow in ways we’d not be able to achieve on our own. My guest is Gina Bianchini, CEO of Mighthy Networks. Gina Bianchini is an American entrepreneur and investor. Before Mighty Networks, she was CEO of Ning, which she co-founded with Marc Andreessen. Under her leadership, Ning grew to 100 million people in 300,000 active social networks across subcultures, professional networks, entertainment, politics, and education. In addition to Mighty Networks, Gina serves as a board director of TEGNA a $3 billion broadcast and digital media company, and served as a board director of Scripps Networks, an $12 billion public company which owns HGTV, The Food Network, and The Travel Channel that merged with Discovery Communications in 2018. Gina has been featured on the cover of Fortune and Fast Company and in Wired, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, and The New York Times. She has appeared on Charlie Rose, CNBC, and CNN. She grew up in Cupertino, California, graduated with honors from Stanford University, started her career in the nascent High Technology Group at Goldman, Sachs & Co., and received her M.B.A from Stanford Business School. Her mission at Mighty Networks is to usher in a new era of creative business built on community. And that inspired me, and hence I invited her to my podcast. We explore the challenge in the market where the world seems to be more targeting audiences, rather than creating communities. We dig deeper into the opportunity for any business to enable your customers to reach much bigger goals and stretch in ways that just are not possible operating on their own. Here are some of her quotes: When we see people who are successful in bringing people together and creating just an important experience in their lives, mastering something interesting, mastering something important together, it's incredibly gratifying. What makes what we do so much fun is that it really is who we are as people to want to come together and software and digital technologies have such power to connect. But you know, so far they've been used in many cases to create even more isolation. The best way to navigate uncertainty and rapidly changing environments is through being a member of a community, but again, not an audience, a community. That we're all sharing and contributing our stories, our experiences, and our ideas. And when we can do that, we get to make the rules together. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That people don’t really need more stuff – but absolutely need more connection, and more opportunities to learn and get better.

How, by creating an online community you not only help your customers, but it also enables you to be much more tuned in with them to get feedback, learn,… and ideas

How building communities as a software business enables you to be more ambitious

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform how we manage and deliver projects. My guest is Gregory Stoos, CEO of Planless. Gregory has over 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship and managing positions. Besides founding Planless, he also co-founded Apperativ, a new generation software development company. Prior to that he’s been responsible for building top-level and disruptive products in the technology world or the marketing and advertising space. The red-thread throughout his career has been ‘projects’. No matter if he worked for a creative agency or a technology company, managing and planning projects was front and center. And that sparked the big idea behind his latest company Planless, which he founded September 2017. Planless is on a mission to help project teams focus on working the plan, instead of planning the work. And this inspired me, and hence invited Gregory to my podcast. We explore the productivity issue so many project teams suffer from around the world and that results in not being able to deliver work on time, or not at the expected quality. We discuss what’s broken, and why rethinking how we manage projects is the only way to break free from this problem. Here are some of his quotes: The big idea is that project management tools are all more or less the same. And there is one big issue in actual solutions is that planning work, allocating resources and managing people's workloads is still done manually in all these tools and is very time consuming and very inefficient. I'd like to say that planning is humanly impossible. Basically, it is teams executing the work that self-organize themselves, and lose a lot of time doing it. And most of the time, we see that they are not capable of delivering work on time or not with the quality that was expected. In this particular industry, everybody thinks really a lot about return on investment, right? That's the main focus about hiring marketing agencies. You want to invest a dollar and get three, four or five out. The thing is, what about the ROI of people? What if you could just increase your productivity by 30, 40, or 50%? During this interview, you will learn four things:

How we can deliver more transformative change by stepping away from the problem, see the big picture and then rethink the foundational concepts

Why agile is both a blessing and a curse

That too often it’s not the technology that’s the issue to create value and momentum, it’s mindset and behaviour of people.

Why we should aim to get attention from the market before they can get the product. It validates whether you are on to something big and with that everyone benefits.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around voice automation that has the power to connect with your customers in seconds. My guest is Ricardo Garcia-Amaya, Co-founder and CEO of VOIQ. Ricardo is a YCombinator alumnus and was recently recognized as a Silicon Valley Top Diverse Tech 40 Under 40. He has an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business, and an undergraduate degree in Politics from NYU. Ricardo is an Aspen Institute Innovator Fellow as well as an NYU Stern Berkley Center for Innovation fellow. In 2017 he founded VOIQ. VOIQ empowers companies to use human-like AI VoiceBots for highly personalized conversations with their customers and prospects over the phone. This triggered me, and hence I invited Ricardo to my podcast. We explore the power of actually speaking with people, but how cost and scale challenges hold us back from maximizing its use. We then dive into how to overcome this challenge, what use-cases are ideally suited and what needs to be done differently to execute in a remarkable way. Here are some of his quotes: I helped a friend run for mayor Providence, Rhode Island, the capital of the state of Rhode Island. And I helped them set up the technology specifically for his campaign in terms of virtual call centres. So how to get people out to vote, how to on the fundraising side as well, in that, looking at that technology at that time, I realized that nothing has changed in 10 years. So I said, you know, this is really this technology needs a big shift. The origination part of the idea was just how difficult it is. Triggered by the fact that in a political campaign you need volunteers, you need to source volunteers to make calls on behalf of the candidate. Why is it so human capital intensive to carry out these simple calls? So, how can we create these small conversations and gather answer specific questions through the phone? That's what sparked the process of creating VOIQ. During this interview, you will learn three things:

How you can transform a service that’s not been changed in decades by combining ideas from different industries.

How can you keep increasing scale and quality by creating an automated loop of listening, learning and optimizing.

How to stay relevant in a world where the half-time of your product is months not years.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give us memorable experiences without having to give up our privacy. My guest is Ofer Tziperman, CEO Anagog He has 20 years’ experience as an entrepreneur and leader of High Tech private and public companies. He served as the CEO of OTI, a leading developer of NFC-based payment solutions and as the CEO of Parx, a provider of on-street parking payment solutions. In 2000 Ofer co-founded LocatioNet Systems, a pioneer in the Location-Based Services market. In 2001 the World Economic Forum awarded him in Davos as ‘Technology Pioneer’. Ofer has an LLB Law degree from Tel-Aviv University. Today Ofer leverages his technology and management experience to drive Anagog’s long term success. Anagog is the developer of JedAI - a patented edge-AI technology that solves the conflicting dilemma of deeply understanding your customers behaviour, create moments of surprise and delight, all without harming their privacy. This inspired me, and hence I invited Ofer to my podcast. We explore the ever growing need for better experiences and the problems this creates around our privacy: everything we do is tracked and stored somewhere without being in control of it. We discuss the technology answers to this so that we can have the best of all worlds: Better experiences, more surprise and delight, without sharing anything. We also dig into how remarkable products often are the result of many pivots – and what leaders need to do different in order to succeed. Here are some of his quotes: ‘Everybody trying to understand us, based on our online or digital life. And while 80% of the time we're actually spending in the real world. And we have full life in the real world. But it looks like the new technology is only trying to focus on what we are doing online. It looks like everybody in the attempt of trying to understand us in a more personal way. They forgot that we have private Life. We all feel a little bit uncomfortable with the question: “what exactly does Google know about me, or Apple, or Facebook? And at some point, some of us actually gave up. We are actually trying to roll it back and to say, “guys, there is an option that only our phone will know everything about you, and it will never leave your phone.” So, in a way, we try to change everything upside down.’ During this interview, you will learn four things:

That a major opportunity to truly understand your ideal customer is found in understanding what they do ‘off-line’

Why transformation starts when we ask ourselves propelling questions that combine both a bold aspiration with a significant constraint

How we can make our solutions memorable by focusing less on fixing gaps, and more on creating peaks i.e. moments of surprise and delight.

That opportunity starts when you manage to do something which is very difficult i.e. when others are not able to do that.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable business around the globe to leverage the world-changing potential of their data. My guest is Herman Heyns, CEO of Anmut Herman is an experienced professional with nearly 30 years experience in Finance, Technology, Data & Analytics and Value Management. He was a former lead partner at Accenture, KPMG and EY. In 2018, he founded Anmut together with Professor Andy Neely, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Cambridge University. The company was started to solve a big problem. They saw the world-changing potential of data being lost because most organisations don’t understand the real value of it. They set up Anmut to value data. They do so by translating the intangible idea of data into an asset business can better manage and with that earn higher returns on their data investments and ultimately drive more change. Doing so, Anmut democratises the value of data, for all those businesses that aren’t Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Netflix or Microsoft. This inspired me, and hence I invited Herman to my podcast. We explore the opportunity many organizations leave unexplored by not treating their data like they treat their physical or financial assets. We dig into why that is the case and what we can do about it to create a sizable advantage. We also discuss Herman’s POV and experience in what it takes to create a software business worth making a remark about. Here are some of his quotes: How we do business can be a lot more gracious. How we solve business problems can be a lot more elegant and actually better for all stakeholders, not just for the investor. Thinking differently about how we solve business problems has, can create an enormous amount of value. It became apparent to me that the vast majority of organizations talk about data being very important, but they don't actually look at it as an asset. In other words, they don't apply the same disciplines, they were to their physical or financial assets. Because they're not actually putting the performance measures in place to look at the data as an asset and reward people for looking at it responsibly, they miss an enormous amount of their value potential. For some companies the value of their data is more than 50% of the total value of the company. So not looking at that asset you’re leaving an enormous amount of value on the table. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That we leave lot of value locked up because we don’t use the power of technology enough to enable our customers to connect the dots

How we can help our customers create transformative change by helping them to make small changes to the human behaviour of their employees

Why our potential as a software business is often undermined because we don’t fully understand ourselves what value we deliver to our customers

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help us all feel 'in our zone' more quickly at work. My guest is Dr. Shama Rahman, CEO of NeuroCreate Dr. Shama Rahman is an accomplished musician, vocalist, songwriter, with a PhD in philosophy, neuroscience and complexity. In December 2017 she founded Neurocreate – a startup at the junction of AI, Neuroscience and cognition. It was founded around the vision that peak performance is not just for highly trained elites, but within reach for all of us. It’s on a mission to creating a positive and symbiotic relationship with technology which enables us to be more mentally productive, creative, and flexible. This inspired me, and hence I invited Shama to my podcast. I think we can all agree that soft skills such as creativity and problem solving are becoming more and more important today. That’s a blessing if those skills come natural to you – but what if they don’t. As such we explore how technology can help and give us all that advantage. We discuss the journey from the moment that sparked the idea for this innovation, and the lessons learned along the way. Here are some of her quotes: We are trying to get you to this peak performance mental state code flow, but by training you to think more creatively. We're doing this using a mixture of AI, because of its ability to be interactive, and obviously the pattern detection that it has, but in a very symbiotic design that actually encompasses the neuroscience of creativity. I don't think anybody is not creative. I think everybody's creative. I think it's just a skill. Or another way of putting it: it's a muscle that you use. It's all like practices, tools, techniques. And so all we're doing is we're digitizing things that people are doing already, but in a way where the AI allows you to look at things beyond your normal perspectives During this interview, you will learn three things:

How real value can be created by removing people’s blind spots and unconscious biases.

Why 70% of innovation fails because we’re prototyping the wrong thing – we’re barking down the wrong tree

That you can create compelling advantage – advantage people talk about by going specific and niche i.e. knowing exactly for who’s it for, and what’s it for.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enables banks of any size grow meaningful and trust-led relationships with their customers in a world that’s increasingly digital. My guest is Zor Gorelov, Co-founder and CEO of Kasisto Zor Gorelov has over 20 years of experience in the software industry. He was the co-founder and CEO of SpeechCycle, a market leader in cloud-based contact center optimization solutions for the telco market. SpeechCycle was acquired by Synchronoss Technologies (SNCR). Before that, Zor founded and ran BuzzCompany.com, a provider of enterprise collaboration and messaging software, which was acquired by Multex.com (MLTX). He has held multiple engineering and product management positions at Microsoft and Computron Software. His interest in speech and natural language technologies dates back to the early 90’s when he worked at Bell Labs. And this is where his latest company comes in: Kasisto. The company was founded around the mission to create technology that gives financial institutions the power to produce Humanizing Digital Experiences that build valuable relationships. This triggered me, and hence I invited Zor to my podcast. We explore the challenges banks face as their relationship with their customers becomes very transactional and what needs to be done differently to continue to grow valuable and engaging relationships. We also discuss Zor’s vision to create a software business that’s worth making a remark about. Here are some of his quotes: Our long-term belief that the conversational user interface is the most natural, most intuitive way for consumers to interact with computers. The vision of the company is to be able to enable better financial decision making using conversational AI. The idea is to democratize financial services. And make sure that everybody gets the best possible advice. We believe it is so important because as consumers shift to digital, the relationship between banks and their customers become very transactional. People go in and check their balances, pay their bill, look up some transactions, and then they move on. And the whole concept about, humanizing that experience is to add intelligent conversational systems that can help the consumers better understand and better manage their money, but also help banks better engage those users on the channels as well. During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why designing our software solutions for trust is underrated – consequently more often than not, trust erodes, rather than increases.

How we can create human/machine combos that deliver value larger than the sum of its components.

That true value is not coming from replacing an old function with a new gimmick. It comes from creating net new experiences – enabling things that users are not able to do already.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that is transforming the way we rent residential property by shifting the focus to the needs of the tenant, not the agent. My guest is Mayank Mathur, CEO of Avasa.ai Mayank Mathur is a technology entrepreneur with over 15 years experience in the industry. He co-founded a capital markets technology startup in India, developing trading platforms and blockchain solutions for brokers, banks, exchanges, and other financial institutions based globally. Mayank is an ex-Technology banker having spent about 9 years advising global technology companies on M&A, and equity / debt fund raising. His current PropTech venture in London (UK) is focused on simplifying the home search experience for residential tenants. The way he’s doing this inspired me, hence I invited him to be a guest on my podcast: We explore how and why process of renting real estate has effectively not changed in the last 100 years – and what enormous waste, stress and financial drain this leads to for everyone in the process – and even beyond. We discuss how Mayank is creating a new category and what his view on what it takes to become a remarkable software business. Here are some of his quotes: The big idea is that tenants, residential tenants today are wasting a lot of time and energy on home search. We want to reduce that time to less than 10 hours, make sure that all of these tenants are super relaxed during that process after they are starting a new chapter in their life. It has to come in a very relaxed manner rather than them being hassled about it or them being totally stressed out about it. Historically, there has been no player in the market that looks after the interests of the residential tenants We choose a business model which is centered around: How do we ensure we earn some money working with the tenants, but we don't want to completely or at all displace the other side of the equation because there is an important role that estate agents play. The estate agents actually absolutely love us. They basically like us because a we bring what's called in the industry as hot leads. During this interview, you will learn four things:

How you can identify underserved markets and create a new category by analysing existing markets and approach the problem from the ‘other end’

How to stick to your guns and play the infinite game in the early stage of your business when short-term ‘low-hanging fruit’ type opportunities are luring.

How to create a well-functioning funnel by giving partners what you have in abundance – creating win-win situations.

That innovating the business model is probably even more important than innovating the product.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to solve the demand/supply gap in the accounting industry. My guest is Enrico Palmerino, CEO of Botkeeper. Enrico’s background has been in automation, decision trees, and accounting with a triple major from Babson College in Quantitative Methods, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management. While in college he co-founded ThinkLite which automated lighting analysis, design, and manufacturing. ThinkLite grew from dorm room to 46 on Inc's 500 List. A a result of that, Enrico was ranked 2nd among America's Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25 by Bloomberg Businessweek. After successfully exiting ThinkLite, he invested in a small accounting firm, joining as the company's Managing Director, and helped grow it from 7 to 40 people in the 3 years. Beyond this he advises, consults and invests in several startups. Botkeeper caught my eye by its claim to create the future of bookkeeping, and this triggered me to invite Enrico to my podcast. We explore what’s inhibiting the accounting industry to transform, and why the combo of blending tech and people in the right way is the secret to a better future. We also discuss Enrico’s vision to what it takes to build a remarkable software business. Here are some of his quotes: There are two big problems that we're trying to solve in the accounting space: The one being, just there's a major shortage of people to do the work. The huge supply demand gap and by the numbers, at least in the US, you got exponentially more businesses forming year over year. And then if that wasn't bad enough, the other challenge you have is in many industries there's been this over amplification of all these little micro niche apps for the accounting sector. All those apps don't talk to each other, which means more siloed data sets that require more manual entry, and an unpleasant experience. So the big problem we're trying to solve is two things. It's, how do we automate as much of the basic pre accounting or compliance accounting and bookkeeping work? And then how do we consolidate the app stack [to] free up the limited supply of accountants that are out there, to do more critical thinking, consulting, advisory, and complex accounting. During this interview, you will learn three things:

How, by looking at the big picture “app-stack” of our ideal customers we can find major opportunities for remarkable productivity improvements

That to solve the shrinking workforce problem we see in many industries we need to approach the problem from a different angle to really solve it.

How to orchestrate 3x growth in a market of “Late Adopters” by creating a pull effect.

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This podcast interview focuses on how to architect a tech-company that delivers sustainable transformative impact to its customers, society and the business at large. My guest is Hugo Spowers, Chief engineer and founder of Riversimple. Hugo is an Oxford University trained engineer and entrepreneur. His first business was in motorsport, designing and building racing cars and restoring historic racing cars. He left motorsport for environmental reasons and set up OScar Automotive in 2001 (which became Riversimple in 2007) on the basis that a step change in automotive technology is both essential and possible. Hugo is responsible for all technical aspects of the cars and for the architecture of the business itself. He is considered a thought leader on the Circular Economy. At the Real Innovation Awards in October 2019 hosted by the London Business School, Hugo was awarded the George Bernard Shaw Unreasonable Person Award “for someone who has shown enormous tenacity and stubbornness in pursuing an idea despite the difficulties encountered along the way”. This inspired me, and hence I invited Hugo to my podcast. We explore what it takes to drive remarkable transformation in a market through technology and how it is possible to design a business that delivers environmental, social as well as financial returns without it being in conflict. Here are some of his quotes: “I'm interested in the big picture because that's where I think the real breakthroughs lie. I set the company up to really make a step change in the environmental impact of personal transport. I assumed that the future for environmentally sustainable cars was better batteries, and that requires big budgets, big labs, basic science, not my sort of field at all. And after about six months, I found out about hydrogen fuel cells. And I realized that the breakthrough is hydrogen fuel cells was not through making better fuel cells. The breakthrough is in building a different sort of car.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to unlock the hidden value inside unstructured data and with that take grow the value we can deliver. My guest is Adam Carte, CEO of Luminoso Adam previously served in a number of C-level positions. As the CEO of Cadre Proppants, a mining company, where he doubled revenues doubled. As the COO of Niotan, Inc. a chemical manufacturer. And as the CFO of The Trigen Companies, an energy company, where he led the turnaround and doubled profits, and doubled its equity value in less than three years. He also has been an Operating Partner to Denham Capital Management, and a founding member and Partner of Fairlead Advisors. At Fairlead, Adam has led negotiations for acquisitions, divestitures, equity and debt financings, strategic partnerships, licensing agreements, and company restructurings for over 20 different companies across a broad range of industries. Today Adam is the CEO of Luminoso, where he leads the company’s efforts in building products that turn conversational text data into business-critical insights. This triggered me and led me to invite Adam to be a guest on my podcast. We explore the opportunities that arise when you look at the abundance of unstructured data we have at our disposal, but hardly get value from. We dig into the inhibitors to unlock that value and how, by democratizing it, this allows companies of any size to explore value scenarios previously unattainable. Here are some of his quotes: The challenge that we faced early on was: Unstructured text is everywhere. Unstructured text is in everything that humans do. Usually it’s survey data or customer tickets, and they [businesses] need some way to analyze it and they don't have it. The traditional way to solve that problem would be to go find a sophisticated data science team, build a supervised model, which takes a number of months. And then you can start to get insights from that data. But most people don't have that sort of time.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why it’s key to start paying attention the fact the real gold in your business software solution is the data, not the process or the transactions you manage

That just because getting answers from data is complex doesn’t mean it needs to be the job of data-scientists. What if you’d democratized that thought and start addressing a much larger audience?

How to stand out in a dense market which is loaded with hype – How do you cut through the noise and reasonate?

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This podcast interview focuses on the art of product innovation and my guest is Dr. Teresa Jurgens Kowal, author of The Innovation Anwer Book and president of Global NP Solutions. Teresa is a strategic innovation provider. She is an accomplished visionary and results-oriented professional with extensive industry experience from creative research to effective portfolio management through stream-lined new product development processes. Prior to founding Global NP Solutions, Dr. Jurgens-Kowal acquired over 12 years of experience in leadership and management positions with ExxonMobil Chemical Company and a total of 16 years as a practicing Chemical Engineer. She has extensive experience leading successful teams, managing the product development life cycle, and defining the portfolio strategy. Our joint passion for innovation and new product development let me to invite Teresa to my podcast. We explore the misconceptions about innovation, why many organizations are challenged to deliver innovation worth making a remark about, and what to do to remove the roadblocks. Here are some of her quotes: The word innovation is largely overused. And my personal definition of innovation is bringing something new to customers that deliver value to them. And that might be new technology. It might be an old technology introduced to a new market, or it might be a different combination of things. All of that starts with having a strategy. And there are several levels to strategy. Most organizations, companies, firms have a corporate strategy, which is tied around growth goals, geographical expansion, those kind of things. 60 to 70% of CEOs put innovation as a top five priority. On the flip side, 60 to 70% of CEOs do not think that their organizations are innovative During this interview, you will learn three things:

That innovation is not defined by what you think, but by what your customers experience

Why our obsession with our direct competition is causing the biggest conflict in the potential success of innovation.

How one can avoid being disrupted by paying close attention to what’s going on in tangential industries as much as your own industry.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to takes our ability to make critical decisions to a completely new level. My guest is Graham Mills, Co-founder and Managing Director of techspert.io. Graham is a scientist by training. He completed his PhD in pancreatic cancer chemoresistance at the University of Cambridge, having further worked scientifically in R&D at Genentech and Avidity Biosciences. His commercial experience comes from roles in venture capital at both Abingworth and Johnson & Johnson’s corporate venture fund, all of which preceded his most entrepreneurial endeavours, both as co-founder of smoking cessation startup Abdicare, followed by Biotechspert, which has evolved today into techspert.io. techspert.io was born out of the frustration with the challenges in connecting to the right experts at the right time. Current solutions on the market have evolved based on decades old principles, closed networks and manual subjective matching - which make it error-prone, biased, slow and highly costly. techspert.io was founded to solve this – and their approach inspired me, hence I invited Graham to my podcast. We explore what why our ability to make better more informed decisions on the topics that really matter needs a complete overhaul, and how this can spark competitive advantage. We also dig deeper into the question: What’s the secret to create a remarkable software business. Here are some of his quotes: “We were setup about three years ago, really recognizing that, first of all knowledge, in many ways is how companies stay competitive and make some of the most important decisions around the world today, really access to high quality knowledge on demand. Yet, while we realized a huge importance of this knowledge exchange and access, the way through which companies were identifying and accessing it felt like it was designed in the 90s and remained there. The way people currently go about solving these issues is one, they ask someone in their company, and if not, then they either pay a lot to a consultancy to go away and do an eight week project, or they just Google it. The challenges when you're Googling, the information you look at it's probably because someone is paid to be the top of Google SEO and that's not necessarily the right insight for your type of product and your type of company. During this interview, you will learn three things:

How one way to grow value and defensible differentiation is to focus on quality and objectivity over volume and bias.

Why focusing on playing the infinite game is going to bring you further than trying to win the short-term game.

That growing your empathy skill is key to deliver remarkable value – not only understanding the ‘pain point’, but also deeply understand how your customer feels, what they care about, and what powers they have to deal with.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the way executive assistants can support their executives through courageous help and ambitious growth like never before. My guest is Paige McPheely, Co-founder and CEO of Base. In 2013 she co-founded 33Vincent, an executive assistant service that matches busy executives with experienced and top-quality EAs. As the company grew, she got frustrated that there were no tools built for the unique workflow of EAs. That’s where she started to imagine how much more impactful a talented EA could be with the right setup. This led her to found Base in 2018, with the goal of solving this problem for EAs everywhere. This inspired me, and hence I invited Paige to my podcast. We explore the challenge executives and their assistants face to optimally work together: inadequate technology, manual processes, communication inefficiencies, competing priorities, and so on. Here are some of her quotes: We were seeing more and more frequently that entrepreneurs and people even in large businesses didn't necessarily want someone sitting outside of their office. They just needed some fractional, very focused support. We began to run into a series of roadblocks for a number of different reasons. But I'd trace it all back to the fact that there's no standard, either definition, or process on how to become an executive assistant, and how to work with an executive assistant. We think of assistance as this luxury. That you can only work with an assistant once you've achieved a certain level in your career. So, our big idea behind that is to completely debunk that. That if you are a high performer of any capacity, you have to have at least some access to an assistant.. We actually believe it helps us to go faster. It's increasing our velocity, and it's maximizing our impact. During this interview, you will learn three things:

How you can create your own category and transform decades old approaches by taking a 30000 ft view and ask some critical (but simple) questions

That you have an opportunity to create your own ground swell, by leveraging abundance

Why the way you make a difference is not a matter of working harder, but by understanding your super powers and use those smarter.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to achieve 9+ satisfaction rating with any of your customers. My guest is Roland Hallebeek, CEO of Scotty Technologies. Roland has been in communication all his life. He was the vice president of Telecom and Media at Capgemini (2001-2011), headed up various data driven start-up initiatives between 2013 and 2016, led European AI Customer Engagement Management at IPsoft (2017), and ran the Global Digital & Cognitive AI centre at EPAM systems (2018). In 2018 he founded both Cognitive affairs and Scotty Technologies two companies centered around the same mission to take Customer Contact Automation to the next level by making it simpler, smoother, more scalable, highly predictable from a cost perspective, and most of all – more human. This triggered me, hence I invited Roland to be a guest on my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the world of Digital Transformation, why many companies focus on solving the wrong problem, and what could be an alternative way to approach it in order to get far better results for both the customer as well as the business. We also explore Rolands’s approach to building a remarkable software business. Here are some of his quotes: “People are talking about digital transformation, customer journeys, customer experiences. All big words, big projects and initiatives, but very often not very clearly defined in so what does it do for your customers or how do your customers behave? We saw many initiatives where people were focusing on chatbots, so automating chats. What we also saw is that a lot of the voice so people calling was being outsourced to low cost countries or to overflow parties. So basically, moving away from your core processes in your company. But if you look at the numbers in Western Europe, your see that less than 5% of all customer contacts is actually chat, and voice is actually way over 50%. So, way over 50% you outsource, you giveaway to other parties to handle it for you, and all those efforts on chats is basically solving less than 5% of the complexity and volume….” During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why it’s critical to take a big picture view and challenge yourself whether the problem you solve with your software business is the most valuable problem, and not just an interesting problem.

Why very often you get exponentially better results if you aim for a symbioses of humans and 60-80% automation, rather than plane 100% automation.

That remarkable things happen when you start off with a clear vision, hire a team of linchpins – people that can deliver 10x – and then organize around a framework focused on value and defensible differentiation.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the way we can mobilize and leverage the power of advocates, and my guest is Mark Organ, Founder and Executive Chairman at Influitive. Mark is an entrepreneurial go-to-market specialist; a CEO with a focus on sales, marketing and business development. His greatest professional passions include creating new billion-dollar categories in technology and developing new leaders. Today he’s helping CEOs achieve their full potential in their businesses and their lives. Mark founded 6 companies, amongst which Eloqua (acquired by Oracle), raised more than 15 rounds of financing, helped a lot of people realize their dreams, and got specialized in creating cultures that are a competitive advantage. He’s also the author of the book “The Messenger is the Message.” In September 2010 he founded Influitive based on the idea that the most successful sales and marketing comes from advocates. That inspired me, and hence I invited Mark to my podcast. We explore the challenge many software businesses have in getting customers to reference them, how that’s driving everyone crazy, and what needs to change approach-wise, to solve that. We also dig deep into Mark’s experience in creating new categories that deliver remarkable impact. Here are some of his quotes: “What I realized, working at Eloqua, was how important it was to have your customers doing more of the work for you, more of the sales and marketing work especially. When you have multiple referrals and references and case studies and all these things, the sales cycle would go down by like +90%. We'd have these deals closing in four days, instead of the usual four months, because there's a ton of advocacy over it. Sales cycle is critical. Where most of the cash flow is tied up in a software company is in ‘people who are not able to make a decision.’ And the best way to get people to make a decision is to surround them with great relevant people who are all saying how great a company is, how great the product is, and how great the people are.”

During this interview, you will learn three things:

How the best innovation is created if you embrace curiosity and dare to bring in ideas and people from totally different domains

Why you should fall in love with your target market, instead of your product, in order to create an impact that turns customers into advocates.

That focusing your time on turning your advocates into superheroes is the secret that will ultimately turn you into a superhero.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that transforms the way businesses can leverage messaging to make communication with customers more meaningful. My guest is Rebecca Clyde, Co-founder and CEO of Botco.ai Rebecca is an entrepreneur pioneering AI-driven chatbot technology. She’s recognized as "35 Entrepreneurs 35 and Younger" by the Arizona Republic and named Most Admired Leader by the Phoenix Business Journal in 2018. Most of her career she’s been in marketing where she drove business growth through creative and innovative communication strategies. Her skills lie in recognizing market trends, multi-cultural nuances and uncovering customer needs. This sparked the idea to co-found Botco.ai. Botco.ai is founded on the idea that brands are leaving money on the table through their inability to avoid significant time delays in answering questions from prospective customers. As businesses we haven’t figured out how to make ourselves accessible through messaging in a way that’s meaningful and that can scale. This triggered me, and hence I invited Rebecca to my podcast. We discuss the effects of the growing mismatch in what customers have come to expect, and what businesses are able to provide when it comes to the way we communicate. We also discuss the journey Rebecca went through from idea to driving remarkable results – and the lessons she learned along the way. Here are some of her quotes: We've moved into this on demand economy. Everything has become instant, and 24/7. Unfortunately, businesses have struggled to really keep up with that on-demand experience that customers expect today. If you look at the buyer journey […] you may have questions along the way as you're trying to ask questions. And today, it's very slow to get those answers, you're going to be playing phone tag, you're going to be emailing back and forth to get those answers and probably feeling very frustrated by the time you get all the information you need to make a decision. This is no longer acceptable for customers. 73% of customers require, and this is for business and consumer buyers, instant engagement in order to make a buying decision about your company. And if you can't instantly answer them, they will go to whoever else has the fastest answer. During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why true impact is created if, with your solution, you can redefine the tech/human symbiosis i.e. the different role humans can play in the process to create value.

What benefits you’ll get if you thoroughly test the viability of your idea before writing a line of code.

The momentum that sparks once you make bets on being highly specialized and focus on the ‘non-obvious’ (underserved) markets.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to grow customer trust by bridging the growing gap between the online and offline world. My guest is Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca. Gregg is a seasoned SaaS executive with a passion for building and bringing to market products in emerging categories. He led Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s social marketing product line, where he integrated $1 billion of M&A investments into the Salesforce product portfolio. Prior to that he drove product strategy and development for Salesforce Chatter, helping define the category of enterprise social networking. Earlier in his career, Gregg was a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and worked in sales, marketing and product roles at several startups. He graduated from Stanford University and holds a Master’s degree from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. Gregg joined Invoca as CEO in 2017 and under his leadership, the company has experienced multiple X growth. In 2019, The Software Report ranked Gregg to be #3 on the list of Top 25 Growth Leaders. Meanwhile Invoca won multiple industry awards such as “Best Call Tracking Platform Award”, “Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award”, and the “Hot Vendor Award” in conversational intelligence. This triggered me, and hence I invited Gregg to my podcast. (Note: we recorded this podcast in February 2020, just as the Coronavirus pandemic was starting to sweep through Europe and North America.) We explore the growing challenge for many brands to live up to their customers’ expectations and grow trust in a world that’s increasingly digital, but where human interaction is a critical component as well. We also discuss Gregg’s experiences in successfully scaling his company while growing their ability to help their customers make a meaningful difference. Here are some of his quotes: The problem with more complex products and services is oftentimes people start the purchase journey in digital, but they end up getting consultative advice as part of the buying process. The problem for a marketer is: once you escalate out of the digital channel to these human to human conversational channels, typically marketers haven't been able to understand the impact of their marketing investments on that human to human conversation. As I like to say: if you have your best friend, and you tell them all your secrets and the things that you're really worried about in life, and then two weeks later, they show up, and they don't remember any of that information, they're probably not going to be your best friend for very long. So really, what we do from a technology point of view is trying to help bridge that gap between what happens in the digital world and then what happens in the conversational interactions between a consumer and the representatives of a brand. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That a critical to way to look at you company is not only how you are solving a meaningful problem for your customers, but also how your customers perceive you as a company.

How to accelerate momentum by smartly adjusting make, buy partner decisions based on different market conditions and where you are in your product market fit life-cycle

How to use communication as a weapon to grow alignment, motivation and trust inside your business. Mastering this will give you surprising insights and levels of engagement.

That the biggest tailwind you can have is with customers that are excited about what you have done for them and their business.

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This podcast interview focuses on the need to clearly define Artificial Intelligence so we can use it to its full potential in our strides to improve the well-being of people. My guest is Prof. Dr. Dagmar Monett, Professor of Computer Science, Berlin School of Economics and Law. Professor Dagmar Monett has more than 30 years of research and teaching experience. She’s the co-Founder of the Artificial General Intelligence Sentinel Initiative, AGISI.org, which is "dedicated to understanding intelligence in order to build beneficial AI and risk/benefit analysis tools to monitor the social and economic consequences of AI to help improve the well-being of all humanity." She’s also the co-Founder of the Competence Center Digitalization at the Berlin School of Economics and Law. At this moment she’s focusing on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Software Engineering methods and techniques, and Computer Science education. The mission behind AGISI.org is this: ‘To make giant leaps in Artificial Intelligence research in order to change the world for the better.’ That triggered me, and hence I invited Professor Monett to my podcast. We explore why it is so key to have clear definitions for Artificial Intelligence – and how that helps drive the innovation we are hoping for. Here are some of her quotes: We were seeing that people were concerned about how defining AI is essential for bringing in the field forward, but also why we don't have a definition till now where everybody agrees upon. There is a lot that we unconsciously assume about defining concepts that people don't understand well. So our goal is to bring clarity and understanding in this area and specially in defining artificial intelligence. We want to understand intelligence better in order to advance humanity … using intelligent algorithms, intelligent systems, intelligence programs better may be dependent on that. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

Why you should be clear from the start how you’re using AI so that you don’t compromise ethics around security or privacy

That trust should be earned and that starts with good products, good behavior, good communication, and good interaction

Why it is important to not only have a solid understanding of AI on the development side, but equally important to have it on the business side

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to unlock the potential of people with physical challenges and enable them to be active in society. My guest is David Hojah, President, co-founder and CTO of Loro His background is in medical devices, engineering, and healthcare innovation. He is passionate about empowering people with physical challenges to live independently and making a great social impact. David has invented and developed many medical devices, such as adjustable dental instruments, wheelchairs that convert into a walker, a medical drone for emergencies, and a medical app tracking health for people with chronic diseases. He also built an autonomous personal transporter for wheelchair users that can convert any manual wheelchair into an electric wheelchair. Loro is David's third company. He has received awards, nomination, and news coverage from organizations including MIT, Harvard University, MIT Hacking Medicine, ALSA, Harvard Innovation Lab, Fit4Start in Luxembourg, Microsoft Imagine Cup, and TechCrunch. Loro is an AI-powered smart, personalized companion for wheelchair users to navigate safely and to communicate efficiently. A person with physical challenges can’t interact with the world the same way as the able, but there’s no reason we can’t use tech to close that gap. That inspired me, and hence I invited David to my podcast. We explore the challenges of creating solutions that are life changing – what mindset do you need, what’s the secret sauce to such approach, how do you make critical decisions, how to make tangible progress and create something remarkable. Here are some of his quotes: I got inspired by Stephen Hawking. He inspired me both personally and professionally. I do believe there are many people like Stephen Hawking out there. They're just missing accessible technology to be the next Hawking. To be the next engineer, designer, whatever they want to be. They're brilliant, they're intelligent, they're very, very smart, but the only problem: they're stuck in their body, they cannot move their body, they cannot talk. Their mind is like, with the whole universe, they can do many things. The only challenge is; if we unlock their potential, so they can talk, they can communicate first, then they can do many things with their ability. Then we can move on to another level: How to make them more independent. How to make them more engaged and help them to be employed. We want those people to be active in society. To be engaged. To do more, not just for them, but for everyone.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That there’s no lack of good ideas – what separates you in doing something remarkable is in turning these ideas into solutions that matter.

Why it’s critical to get crystal clear on the real problem and what’s it value proposition. If you don’t get this right you won’t survive for long.

How to remove bias – ways to seek the truth – finding out what’s right and what’s wrong. Doing your homework here paves the path for your success.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to amplify the impact humans can make by a factor 10. My guest is Ajeet Kushwaha, Co-founder and CTO/CPO of Seekify Ajeet is a serial entrepreneur but started his career as a software engineer. In 2010 he co-founded his first company HealthChakra.com, a saas based practice management platform for doctors. In 2011 he cofounded HealthKart, and in 2012 1MG. In 2015 he built ‘Joe Hukum’, a chatbot SaaS platform, that was acquired by Freshworks in 2017 where he then became the Director of Product Management. In the middle of 2019 he then founded Seekify - a Customer Experience Automation Platform, helps businesses deliver wow customer experience by automating it without losing the human touch. And this triggered me, hence I invited Ajeet to my podcast. We explore the opportunity we have to enable humans to 10x the impact they can make if we go beyond the notion of just ‘automation’. We also discuss Ajeet’s perspective on what it takes to create a remarkable software business. I personally believe in the compounding effect as to how we can keep getting better incrementally every day. I believe very fundamentally that a healthy competition is always when you compete with yourself and not to the world, because then you have the possibility to the best in the world While working at Freshbooks (a business software company), we realized that how only automation or how only human intervention cannot lead to a better experience. All these things needs to operate in tandem, hand in hand. That thought led to the case: Can we bring something in this in the scene where we empower these customer facing teams to deliver a better customer experience by bringing automation together. Can we create an intersection of these and make sure that automation is enabling, augmenting human in a way, that they can deliver the customer experience, which a customer really is looking for. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That too often our solutions are reactive to how people want them to work. But what if we make them much more like a GPS – with self-healing characteristics based on what’s actually happening

How momentum is created by being very picky about selecting your customers

Why the biggest impact is made when you take the mindset that every problem comes with a solution. It’s that determination that helps us win the biggest battles.

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This podcast interview focuses on the big idea behind Cognism, a sales acceleration platform, and the lessons tech-entrepreneur James Isilay learned on his journey of delivering remarkable impact with his business. James Isilay is the co-founder and CEO of Cognism, one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the UK. Last year, Cognism grew from $2.5M to $7M in ARR and was voted by LinkedIn as one of the UK’s Top 25 Startups. He’s an inspirational and enterprising businessman, who approaches work with unrivalled technical and organisational skills, perseverance, precision and total dedication. Before founding Cognism, James was employed as an Algorithmic Trader at Axpo Group and as a Quantitative/Technical Analyst at EGL Trading. James has a Masters in Engineering in Information Systems Engineering from Imperial College London. He is an expert in lead generation, sales management and alpha discovery using algorithmic technologies, natural language processing and machine learning. What triggered me to invite James to my podcast is their story to accelerate sales by enriching prospect data with critical event data. We explore what’s broken in B2B sales and the new ways to solve the problem. We explore the lessons learned by James starting and scaling his tech-start-up, and what decisions helped him to realize the impact they’re creating today. Here are some of his quotes: The biggest thing that causes failure in a lot of companies is just poor sales process and bad sales process. Sales is actually your first problem as a CEO that you need to address and get right. And then, when you got that right, then you've got time to get your other bits right. But if you get sales wrong, you don't really have much of a chance. People waste a lot of people time pulling leads off LinkedIn, putting them through several tools to build a data set that then is not very highly responsive to outreach. So you waste, you burn time across the whole process. Whereas, if you can just get that list built correctly and efficiently and then engage that list in an effective sales cadence and get a high response, then you're saving time across every aspect and you're getting a better outcome on the actual new business that you're generating. That's pretty much the majority of the battle. During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why it’s important to not only solve a highly valuable problem, but also pay attention to how urgent/critical this is to your ideal customer.

Why, the moment you have success, you need to continuously keep thinking about how you upgrade ‘the system’ – nothing is static

How to go about collecting feedback – and why it’s key to get that from real customers, those who are completely neutral and honest to tell you what works…and what sucks.

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This podcast interview focuses on a key aspect to drive product innovation and that is mastering human centered design. My guest is Brian T. O’Neill, founder and principal of Designing for Analytics. Brian T. O'Neill is a designer, advisor, and founder of Designing for Analytics, an independent consultancy which helps organizations design innovate innovative products powered by data science and analytics. For over 20 years, he has worked with companies including DellEMC, Global Strategy Group, Tripadvisor, Fidelity, JP Morgan Chase, ETrade and several SAAS startups. He has spoken internationally, giving talks at O'Reilly Strata, Enterprise Data World, the International Institute for Analytics Symposium, Predictive Analytics World, and Boston College. Brian also hosts the 5-star podcast, Experiencing Data, where he reveals the strategies and activities that product, data science and analytics leaders are using to deliver valuable experiences around data. In addition to consulting, Brian is also a professional percussionist and has performed at Carnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center. What triggered me to invite Brian to my podcast was one of his quotes about the fact that 85% of AI, analytics, and big data projects fail. That’s why we explore why this is the case, and what needs to be done different in order to be successful – creating software products that people find worth making a remark about. Here are some of his quotes: I started to see really, really bad survey results over 10 plus years. What I'm specifically talking about here is the success rate for delivering data projects. The theme here is the success rate on launching successful data initiatives hovered around 10 to 25%. So that means there’s failure rates up in the 75% plus. My general feeling was: There's a lack of a focus on the human aspect of analytics and data science projects and products right now. We're trying to use the data science and analytics hammer, and we're looking for stuff to hit. But no one's really aware why do we need holes? Who needs a hole? And where do they need the hole? Instead, it's just hit nails wherever we can and hope that someone maybe needs a hole there. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That a first step in succeeding data projects is to stop forgetting about the value of fun and engaging with people.

Why it is key to define the owner of value creation in your team – i.e. someone that owns the problem and the accountability for analytics and data science solutions to product value.

That we have lost the humanity aspect in solution design – and a way to fix that and get some real wins is to spend time developing soft skills

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to change the way life-science companies run clinical trials and thereby save both lives and billions of dollars. My guest is Kim Walpole, Co-founder and CEO of Trials.ai. Kim is an organizational development and management consultant, skilled in helping individuals; groups and organizations increase their effectiveness. Her work with companies like Pfizer, Merck, Wyeth Ayerst, Orbital Sciences and Homeland Security gives her a unique perspective on leadership development, strategy and organizational growth. Throughout her career she founded multiple companies: Optimum Training & Consulting in 2004, Wembli in September of 2011, and in 2016 her 3rd company, Trials.ai, after her best friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died waiting for a promising treatment. What began as a passion project has turned into a mission-driven, venture-backed startup that is turning the clinical trials ecosystem on its head. Kim is on a mission to build AI enabled technology to help research organizations optimize clinical trial protocols for speed and success – because patients don’t have time to wait. And that inspired me, hence I invited her to my podcast. We explore the big problem around planning and executing clinical trials and how, by blending technology and people in the right way, major breakthroughs can be created. During our conversation we uncover a number of important lessons to accelerate innovation at large. Here are some of her quotes: We are on a mission to get treatments to patients faster. We do that by leveraging artificial intelligence to optimize clinical trial protocols. What we're doing is essentially developing technology that really brilliant research teams can use to construct their protocols from the ground up. A major problem for life science companies, is that almost 50% of their clinical trials are failing because of poorly designed protocols. What ends up happening is that billions of dollars get squandered in preventable mistakes. I had spent over 12 years consulting and pharma biotech companies, and loved my work. And then, about four years ago, my best friend Paul was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. That was that wake-up moment for me where I realized: ‘Okay, why are we continuing to approach this process in such a traditional, manual way? Why are we not using technologies to make this smarter, faster, easier?’ By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

That it’s helpful to make a broken process more efficient, but even more valuable if you fix the root cause.

That falling in love with the big idea can grow blind spots and bias inside your organization. That’s dangerous. As such it’s critical to build your secret weapon: a culture of insatiable curiosity. Don’t get married to the way you are thinking about things today.

Why instead of asking yourself: ‘Are we doing this the right way’, you’re better of asking ‘Are we doing things the best way’ – and then look 5 years down the line, trying to predict where your industry is going.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to make B2B sales 10 times more effective. My guest is Lucas Pedretti, Co-founder and CEO of Qymatix Lucas is a self-proclaimed innovator with an MBA and 20 years’ experience in international management, business administration, and marketing of technological products. He’s worked for companies like Festo, Belden Inc. and Omron Electronics. Besides being passionate about sales, he’s an avid traveler and a Social Media aficionado. He strongly believes that “In the near future, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be the decisive factor in medium-sized companies to remain competitive.” And that put him on a mission to make a dent in the world – and specifically the world of B2B sales by augmenting sales leaders around the world to sell more, faster And this triggered me, hence I invited Lucas to my Podcast. We explore the sizeable problem many B2B sales leaders are struggling with and how this can be resolved with technology in ways that provide exponential results. We discuss the role of AI to augment people, and not to automate them out of a job. Last but not least we discuss Lucas’ take on what traits are essential to create a remarkable software business. Here are some of his quotes: The vision is that B2B sales is still done by people, by humans. It is still done very ineffectively, and it can be 10 to 20 times much more effective if they use new technologies. I identified the problem 20 years ago and the problem is still there. But now that technology has advanced, it has moved. My vision is to bring this technology to the people that are struggling in sales. Most of the critical sales negotiations are value driven. You still need people to communicate with each other to understand the need and the problem of each other. They're very, very ineffective. They are mainly intuition driven, or they run from one urgency into the next one. They cannot really focus on what brings most for their company. And as you say, it's a one to one plus three. So it's humans working with technology. The technology alone, it's only half of the solution. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That we should not underestimate how long it takes to create a business out of a good idea. That you need grid – grid to stay there for a long time to build something of value.

That it is critical to develop courage to quickly pull through on the things that are right for the business even if this means saying goodbye to ideas, people or key investments that at one point in time seemed the right thing.

Why you shouldn’t fall in love with the product or the vision – fall in love with the problem – a problem you’re passionate about solving.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help any marketer hit the right nerve with their ideal customers by making every word resonate. My guest is Jonathan T. Mall, CEO of Neuro Flash After his studies in the Netherlands and the UK he was seduced by the opportunity to optimize consumer experience using machine learning and led the Science team in a IBM Big Data Venture. He got obsessed with understanding how people think. Because the better we understand how and what people think, the better we can understand ourselves and communicate effectively with others. This was the spark to make him found Neuro Flash, a marketing intelligence institute, using Big Data and Neuromarketing to understand, predict and influence how people react to persuasive content. And this inspired me, hence I invited Jonathan to my podcast. We explore the big problem in the market to make meaningful connections with those we aim to serve. We also discuss how technology can be used to not only create short-term impact, but more importantly help companies build the foundation for the long-run. Last but not least we discuss what it takes to be remarkable at what you do as a business software company.

Here are some of his quotes: We use machines to predict what people think about words, sentences or images. And well, with that, with that power, you can obviously communicate extremely effectively because we can ensure that every word, every sentence, every image is expressing exactly what you want to express to sell your product, to motivate yourself, to tell you stories for anything regarding marketing. So, we don't need to ask people anymore about what they think. We can all use the machines to predict what people think. That's really the opportunity. During this interview, you will learn three things:

What value we can unlock when we focus on technology to democratize highly scarce experts – enabling any companies of any size to compete with the biggest brands out there.

That being successful in marketing is not about how many people you reach, but how many people you make believe

Why it’s important to have the courage to not do things

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You are about to listen to a very special edition of my podcast – edition #100. And what a moment to have this coincide with the launch of my new book ‘The Remarkable Effect.’ I wrote this book specifically for you - tech-entrepreneurs-on-a-mission, and the leaders in your marketing, product and sales team that help you in shaping the software business you’ve always aspired to run: Remarkable and Impactful. For me, remarkable is more than just a word. It’s a vision. It’s the art to create meaningful impact to prospects and customers. Impact that’s worth making a remark about. Something they would miss is it was gone. Being remarkable is something that I believe every company can achieve. In this special episode, I share the back-story of my book and the stories that inspired it. I’ll reveal the ten traits I’ve identified that define a remarkable software company. I will also explain how, by stacking those traits behind each other, it will not only help you stand out in your category but also create clear leverage of value, exponential value, not just incremental – hence ‘The Remarkable Effect.’ Enjoy! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Remarkable Effect: The Essential Book for Tech-Entrepreneurs-on-a-Mission

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This podcast interview focuses on the technology advancements of the last decade and in particular how enterprise software vendors can capture a bigger opportunity. My guest is Vinnie Mirchandani Vinnie is the founder of Deal Architect - a Technology strategy and negotiation firm listed as a leading "boutique" by the Black Book of Outsourcing. Vinnie also founded IQ4hire, a projects marketplace and Jetstream Group, a sourcing advisory firm. Earlier in his career he had various technology consulting roles at PwC (now IBM) in the US, Europe and Asia, and worked as an industry analyst at Gartner. He wrote various books about the evolution and future of the enterprise software, amongst which Silicon Collar, The New Polymath, The New Technology Elite and SAP Nation 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. Other than he’s an inspiring blogger – and exactly that triggered me to invite him again to my podcast. We explore his blog ‘A Decade-end review: Enterprise Applications have NOT eaten the world’ and dig deeper on the question: what can we learn from the past decade and how should we use that knowledge to capitalize on it in the next decade.

Here are some of his quotes: It's kind of fascinating to look at the 10 years how much optimism there was around SaaS, in the beginning of the decade, how SaaS has done and where things have not improved. If you go back to Marc Andreessen, he wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal earlier in the decade where he said, we have enough technology we have enough you know, we have enough where software can transform industries, software. He basically said software is going to eat the world. Over and over again, what I saw was, many new markets emerged or grew or transformed. But the software vendors either completely missed it, or they were at the edge of it and didn't really do much. To get into other categories you have to keep evolving. You can't just expect your licenses and subscriptions to keep helping you grow. If you define a market too narrowly, then you start looking at your competition very narrowly. And you miss the big markets around it. During this interview, you will learn four things:

Revisit the concept of Addressable markets – is it really what you think it is, or is it actually holding you back from thinking bigger?

Don’t only hire technology visionaries – start hiring functional visionaries as well. It’s the tension between the two that will help you break new grounds

The biggest opportunities in the next few years will be in verticals - operational areas - and in geographic expansion. After 20 years of cloud applications, it is amazing how many industries and countries have so little choice

Stop looking at just your immediate competition. The biggest risks, but also the biggest growth, come out from left field.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help Not for Profits raise more donations and achieve their cause faster. My guest is David Semerad, CEO of Kindest. David is a driven entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience in the software development field. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in information technology from the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. He also studied at Technische Universitat Munchen in Germany and Universidad de Malaga in Spain and is a member of the Forbes Agency Council as well as the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC). In 2004 he co-founded STRV, a one-stop mobile app and web development shop working with top-tier startups and brands. In addition to STRV has spun off several companies. The Game, acquired by Spark Networks in 2014, followed by Surge, the world’s 3rd largest gay social network (3M+ users) and one of the world’s fastest food delivery startups Ordr. David’s work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired and TechCrunch. What triggered me to invite David to my podcast was his most recent startup Kindest. Kindest and here is why: Just as nonprofits rely on the generosity of their donors, Kindest business model relies on optional tips. It’s what allows Kindest to remain completely free for all nonprofits that need them. In our podcast interview we explore the underserved market for small and medium sized Not for Profits and how the basic needs of donors – transparency - are even today still not met. We also discuss Kindest business model, and how exactly that business model gives them the ultimate incentive to do exactly the right thing for their ideal customer. And this pays off. Here are some of his quotes: There is a huge opportunity to bring something extremely, intuitive, simple and effective in the hands of nonprofits, because right now all the tools available there are focused on large nonprofit organizations that have big teams in house. But actually, the fun fact is that there is 1.5 million nonprofits in the US, and 92% of them are actually small to medium size. And no one is focused on those 92% of nonprofits They don't have a marketing expert in house. They don't have an engineer in house and there is no tools available for them. So we decided to jump into the space. We basically build a solution that is extremely easy, effective, and also free to help all their fundraising and donor management needs. Whereas we don't charge any monthly or annual fees. We don't take any cut on donations and everything is just directly going to nonprofit. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That creating a cool-looking app doesn’t always mean it will take off. If people are not waking up in the middle of the night around the idea of your solution, it likely doesn’t solve a valuable and urgent problem.

That momentum starts when you’ve created a solution that gives your users their focus back and allows them to do what they are good at.

Why its key to avoid conflict of interest by aligning your mission and your business model. If the two are optimally aligned it will create your flywheel.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to provide both individuals and brands their unique vocal personality – so they can be heard. My guest is Rupal Patel, Founder and CEO of VocalID INC Rupal is an internationally renowned speech scientist. She was named a Voice Visionary in 2019 by Voicebot and listed amongst the 50 most creative in business by FastCompany, Rupal is a sought-after public speaker on the future of voice AI. Her work has been featured on TED, NPR, BBC, Wall Street Journal, and more. She holds two patents, a degree in Psychology from the University of Calgary, a Masters and Ph.D. in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Toronto, with post-doctoral studies in speech acoustics at MIT. VocaliD, a voice AI company that creates unique synthetic voices. VocalID was founded on the believe that every individual should have a unique voice, regardless of their vocal ability. This triggered me, hence I invited Rupal to my podcast. We explore the wealth of opportunity of voice technology – not only for those that have lost their ability to speak, but also to give a voice to brands and to the all products we use on a day to day basis. Here are some of her quotes: We believe that vocal identity is such an important part of someone's personality of how they think of themselves, whether that's an individual or whether that is a company or an organization. The voice is really metaphorically and sometimes figuratively part of their identity. Our social mission behind what we do at vocal ID is to give voice to those who are underheard or not heard, because they have some kind of a speech disability. Voice is so connected to individuality, that if everything sounded the same, it also means that they all have the same value proposition, or they all have the same kind of roots. The ultimate kind of application is not where we become dependent on the technology but that the technology really facilitates interaction between humans. What I mean by that is if the technology is really helping us connect to individuals in ways that are meaningful, then it's done its job. During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why voice is still so underutilized as a mechanism to connect and interact with the users of our products

How voice can help take adoption of your product to new levels by its ability to create a unique bond with users, build trust and change behavior.

That you role as a product owner is not to reinvent everything – sometimes you are way better of using readily available components and understand their value proposition in context of what you are trying to achieve.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to revolutionize the way markers communicate with their audience. My guest is Joe Urban, Co-founder of Vennli Joe is a core marketing faculty member in Notre Dame’s MBA program and past Associate Dean of the Mendoza College of Business with numerous publication credits related to customer decision making and growth strategy. In 2010, Joe Urbany co-wrote a book entitled ‘Grow by Focusing on What Matters: Competitive Strategy in 3-circles.’ The premise of the book is that growth and competitive advantage are about effective positioning. The model facilitates speed of understanding and action by focusing strategic attention on what impacts customer decisions. It has been applied in over 1500 projects in the Graduate Business Masters Programs at Notre Dame and it’s the model that led to founding Vennli in 2013. Vennli brings the model to life through the use of collaborative technology and by providing a platform that delivers customer choice analytics and makes an already intuitive process even more accelerated and streamlined. Being a marketer by heart, this triggered me, and hence invited Joe to my podcast. We explore why marketers experience so many issues in increasing the performance of their content. We address why it’s not the lack of technology that sits in the way, but the approach we take to creating the content. And that’s a relatively easy thing to fix. Here are some of his quotes: … many, if not most, companies make decisions about strategy and tactics that don't fully account for the views and the perceptions of the people who determine their success, and that is: Customers. We tend to operate on the basis of past knowledge and our best intuition about what it is the customers value. What we found over and over, and really this came out of my executive MBA teaching in a big way: There were significant gaps between what businesspeople were thinking or predicted and then what customers actually said. And when you close those gaps and make decisions that better align with customers, the impact can be enormous No one is immune from this … we get enamored with our inventions. Often the coolest inventions today are technical in nature. It's much more difficult to translate a technology into a validated product that really solves a problem for somebody.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why starting with the big idea and a crystal value proposition is not only going to help marketing perform better, but everyone and everything else in your organization – simply from the power of alignment

How rethinking who’s our real competitor is not only going to increase urgency and improve win-rates, but also fine-tune the value of our product investment

What value we can unlock when our solutions provide new insights – and AHA moments. And how this could rewire how an organization thinks and acts.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to build high-performing teams and bring out the very best in people. My guest is Stephen Lowisz. Stephen M. Lowisz is a Fortune 500 consultant, serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker and coach who generated his first $1 million in revenue at 19. As the Director of Performance Solutions at Qualigence, he uses his expertise to grow and scale technology companies around the globe. Qualigence combines the people analytics technology with consulting to optimize talent at leading organizations. The aim: build high-performing team. He’s an official member of the Forbes Business Development and Sales council.

I got intrigued by the approach Qualigence takes to talent optimization and scaling – hence I invited Stephen to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the process of hiring people, why there’s an 80% chance of getting it wrong, and what needs to change in order to get it right, while optimizing the performance of the workforce you already have.. Here are some of his quotes: At Qualigence as a whole, historically was a talent acquisition consulting shop. We've been hiring and helping people build out their teams for 20 years. Now what? How do we reduce churn? How do we get the best out of the people that we're bringing on board? How do we optimize the team and make sure everyone is performing to the best of their ability, just like we expect from our technology? So the main problem is, think about when you buy Salesforce. You're going to optimize it until it's perfect for your business objectives, You're going to customize the hell out of it. You're going to have a whole lot of fun doing so. But when we go hire people, we put I'm on the shelf and we do nothing.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why technology should not be focused on getting the most out of people, but instead getting the best out of them.

How we can create exponential impact by combining the three T’s: Tactics, Talent and Technology

Why CEO’s need a mindset change around what drives growth.

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This podcast interview focuses on driving product innovation by applying the concepts of Radical Product Thinking and my guest is Radhika Dutt, Co-founder of the Radical Product Thinking movement Radhika is a product development executive and entrepreneur. She participated in 4 exits, 2 of which were companies she founded. She’s a global citizen having lived or worked on 4 continents - speaks 9 languages and has an engineering background from MIT. She is the author of the Radical Product blog which is also the name of her movement of leaders creating vision-driven change. Radical Product Thinking is a systematic approach for cultivating change-makers in our organizations and building world-changing products. And this triggered me, hence I invited Radhika to my podcast. We explore some of the common mistakes made in product management and software development and discuss how Radical Product Thinking can be the recipe for any software company to become remarkable at what they do, and thereby deliver an impact never held possible before. Here are some of her quotes: When I was building my own startups, I made many mistakes. And I learned from these mistakes. I also worked at companies where they were making similar mistakes. Rarely, there were companies that weren't making these mistakes. We have come to believe that the way you build products is just to iteration: try something, try something else. And that's really how you build products. And what was driving me was, it doesn't have to be that way. Because what happens is you keep pivoting, and you lose momentum along the way. So, it doesn't have to be that way. Or can we build products that are successful more systematically. And that's how radical product came into being. Radical product thinking means that you can think of anything as your product, that your product is really a mechanism to create change. And so, whatever change you're trying to bring about in the world, you can build a product that is engineering that change. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That iteration is a very good concept in software development, as long as you know what your north star is.

Why product market fit is not the holy grale. The big question is if that product market fit is creating the change you intended to create. If not – question your vision

How focusing your solution on someone rather than everyone is going to give you the focus to deliver real impact

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This podcast interview focuses on the essence of the book “The AI Republic: Building the Nexus Between Humans and Intelligent Automation. My guest is one of the authors, Mark Esposito. He is a Co-founder of Nexus FrontierTech, a leading global firm providing AI solutions to a variety of clients across industries, sectors, and regions. In 2016 he was listed on the Radar of Thinkers50, as one of the 30 most prominent business thinkers on the rise, globally. Mark has worked as Professor of Business & Economics at Hult International Business School and at Thunderbird Global School of Management at Arizona State University and as Fellow at the Judge Business School in the UK, as part of the Circular Economy Center. He has developed and conducted courses in Business, Government & Society & Economic Strategy and Competitiveness for Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education. Mark also served as Institutes Council Co-Leader at the Microeconomics of Competitiveness program (MOC) at the Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness, at Harvard Business School under the mentorship of Professor Michael E. Porter. I interviewed Mark for the first time in episode 22 of my podcast. We then focused on his best-selling book ‘Understanding How the Future Unfolds’. Today we discuss his new book ‘The AI Republic’ and explore the changes that are required to build a position of advantage by blending humans and tech in a relevant way. Here are some of his quotes: There is a whole degree of misinformation about AI out there. Especially from a business perspective of b2b, where we're trying to make clients. Regardless of how educated they were, I think they were heavily influenced by what they were hearing. The more you work with AI scientists the least they call it intelligence. They call it everything but AI. I said: ‘why is there's such a big gap between what the scientists who develop this technology talk about and what everybody else describes?’ And so, the AI Republic is really the effort to create this relationship between what we think that technology is and can do, which is by itself is a phenomenal advance in our technologies, and the misinformation that I think we're currently have so that we can empower more and more people, first of all to know, and once they know, they can make a deliberate decision whether they need it or whether they actually they just need some good form of either automation or digital transformation. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That to succeed with AI we have to get the entire organization engaged – not only IT. Understand i needs to be part of the core strategy and that it’s a collaborative long-term process, not a one-off thing.

Why the question is never ‘how do humans compare with machines?’, but instead ‘How do I integrate technology in jobs that currently exist or can exist?’ and ‘How do I empower this to become a form of excellence’

That getting started is a lot about recognizing where your business model is generating a friction with where the market is going – and from there determining where technology can help you.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to revolutionize employee experience, boost business performance and solve an immense social problem at the same time. My guest is Claire Schmidt, Founder and CEO of Allvoices Claire Schmidt spend the majority of her career in technology for social good. She helped found and lead Thorn: The Digital Defenders of Children, a nonprofit organization which deploys technology in innovative ways to fight child sex trafficking. During her five years at Thorn, Claire ran all programmatic work, spoke at the White House, the State Department, and Stanford University, and led a task force of more than 30 major technology companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft. She also led social impact at Thrive Market, an e-commerce company focused on making healthy food accessible and affordable. Last but not least she served as Vice President of Technology and Innovation at 20th Century Fox. Claire graduated from Stanford with a degree in Economics in 2006. She was the curator and vice-curator of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Los Angeles, and in 2015 won a Mic50 award for her work at Thorn End of 2017 she founded AllVoices, a tool that enables anyone to anonymously report workplace issues directly to leadership. This triggered me, and hence I invited Claire to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in today’s workplace due to the absence of tools like AllVoices, and how filling that gap will not only solve an enormous social problem, but also creates the potential to take employee engagement to a totally different level – with all the positive side-effects flowing from that. Here are some of her quotes: I have spent the majority of my career working in technology and specifically technology for social good. While I did that, I really saw for the first time, that technology does have a huge role to play in solving social problems. I was most recently a vice president of technology and innovation at 20th Century Fox. And while I was there, I read Susan Fowler’s blog post about her experience at Uber. For me, that was sort of a wakeup call about the modern day reality of the workplace. When I looked at the data, I found that 75% of people who experience harassment in the workplace, never reported it. So in that case, companies also don't have the information they need to solve the problem, help the employee find resolutions and take action. This seemed like a huge mismatch to me – something that was really worth putting in the time and energy to try and solve and address it.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That a big source of innovation can be inspired by critically looking at what’s holding us back – particularly in areas that fire up fear and uncertainty in people.

How to scale the sales of your solution when you are dealing with the weird conflict that the companies that need your solution most are the most scared to implement it.

Why keeping your sensors out for ‘events’ in the market. This could well be the spark of your next big thing – just like the Me-Too Movement did for AllVoices.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to scale the impact of content strategists and content writers by a factor 10. My guest is Aki Balogh, Co-founder and CEO of MarketMuse Aki is a software developer and VC with a focus on AI. Prior to founding MarketMuse, he held sales and marketing roles at InfiniDB, evangelized Big Data as an investment focus for OpenView Venture Partners, designed Decision Support Systems as a management consultant, and worked as a software engineer. Aki holds three pending patents in semantic analysis. MarketMuse is a SaaS platform that lets marketers execute scalable demand generation campaigns through AI-driven content. The promise: realize 2-3X gains in productivity and 2X-6X improvements in search traffic within the first 6 months. This triggered me, and hence I invited Aki to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the market of content development and digital advertising: The cost of customer acquisition is consistently going up on every single paid channel – and as such it’s not sustainable to keep throwing more ads at people without getting better results. Something has to change. Here are some of his quotes: I love the idea of teaching people information and not just blasting them with different types of ads. It maps to how people use the internet. What's the first thing you do when you want to buy something, you start googling it, you're researching it, reading about it, you're educating yourself. So, when searchers find your content, they're actually getting a lot of, what I think of as, information value out of it, and that's essentially what our platform helps you do. A content strategist or content writer with our data is twice or three times more productive right off the bat. And the content that they write is twice to six times on average, more performant on search. So, you drive two to six times more leads with the same content because the content is that much better. It speeds them up. It drastically improved the ROI on a human, but it doesn't replace the human

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That a lot of challenges in business software can be solved by giving people context rather than just information. Information without context isn’t actionable and hence doesn’t drive business value.

Why a lot of customers stay where they are because too many business software solutions on the market (start-up and traditional) fail to deliver the so-called ‘10x shift in value’. The financial and reputational risk to move or migrate is therefore simply too high.

Why every tech companies should have an abominable ‘No-Man’ that would just says: ‘Nope, Nope, No, No. It’s ‘No’ with a corollary: it's no, but prove me wrong, show me business justification.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that enables banks to grow faster by making communication with their customers easier, faster and more secure. My guest is Victor Fredung, CEO of Shufti Pro Victor Fredung, has many years in the payments field and has founded several successful fin-tech companies such as Ogion Consulting, GiroSwift LTD, Zensed and Stafftimer. Owning and operating several payment companies gave Victor a great insight into the troubles that a lot of Financial Services /FinTech companies are facing and what needs to be built to solve them. Our interview will focus on his work as CEO of ID Verification company Shufti Pro, a platform that enables banks and FinTech companies to expand their business safely by enabling them to verify 7 Billion people living on the planet, with 99.6% precision. This triggered me, and hence I invited Victor to my podcast. We explore the challenges that a lack of identity verification options creates for banks and FinTech’s. We then discuss Shufti Pro’s approach to fix this by taking a counter intuitive – but very effective approach. Here are some of his quotes: Identity verification has been existing in Europe and in the US for quite some time. But still, some parts of the world it is still not really covered when it comes to verifying individuals. The technology hasn't really been in that place as of late, but a in the past few years this technology has been exploding in those areas as well. So that's why we feel it's important to include every country in the world. What actually happens [not covering different regions] is that companies exclude those regions as well. They can't really do business with particular clients from different region. They try to exclude them and only focus on the countries which they're actually accepted in. When we tried our competitors, we experienced very unsuccessful results. We basically had huge customer drops in terms of verifying their identities and the delays it took for verifying them. To be honest, it pissed us off a little bit, because we started losing more and more customers. So, we basically decided: ‘Hey, let's do something about it’. During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why focusing on the solving a universal problem enables you to remain flexible and expand your business dramatically over time

That to create defensible differentiation you have to be prepared to take a contrarian approach in solving the complete problem

How devotion and hard work will always pay off and eventually turn customers into fans. Once this happens and they start talking about it to each other you’ll outgrow every competitor in your industry

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to democratize possibly the most mature business software category of all: ERP. My guest is Jon Ruby, CEO of Jonar. Jon is a rare person who thrives at the intersection of business challenges, technology and people. As opposed to most, he relishes the opportunities that uncertainty provides. While working successfully in a variety of industries, he has always tried to learn from each and carry those lessons forward. Jon’s philosophy for both technology and business is guided by the belief that just because something has been done a certain way in the past is never a reason to keep doing it that way in the future. As such, he is constantly challenging the status quo to find better and more powerful ways to drive business forward. This is what inspired me, hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the Enterprise Resource Planning category and what could be for innovators if the category was democratized. We also address what’s keeping the industry behind, what could be done to change that, and how this could result in the ability to deliver remarkable impact. Here are some of his quotes: We're looking at a ‘value first’ ‘concept first’, which means: just because something needs to be powerful, doesn't mean it needs to be hard to use. So, it's pretty straightforward to come up with a complicated solution for a complicated problem. To find a simple and elegant solution to a complicated problem is a lot harder to do. And when you try and even succeed a little bit, some exciting things happen. So, we applied this concept to ERP, probably if not the biggest than one of the biggest software packages out there. It's massively powerful. It's very expensive. It has benefits such as reducing costs or increasing market opportunity. But it's terrible as a whole within the market. It's just awful. The big idea was that we, as this little company, would be able to change this multi-hundred-billion dollar market from the ground up, start from scratch, and make a real change in what is possibly the biggest behemoth a software market. During this interview, you will learn three things:

That the number one tool in building software is not 3GLs, Databases or Platforms – the number one tools is people, and their perceptions

Why you should aim high and end up with a situation where your biggest sales obstacle is: people believing that what you offer ‘is too good to be true’

How to build a culture of curiosity – a team that constantly renews itself and push the boundaries of what’s possible.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around personalization that drives desired engagement and desired conversion. My guest is Stefan Eyram, Chief Revenue Officer at Youneeq Since 2000 Stefan has worked with top brands across a broad cross-section of industries to successfully deliver Cloud and SaaS solutions that achieve KPIs and deliver ROI. From marketing technology, to big data, analytics, AI and personalization, Stefan has helped customers achieve measurable results from their marketing, digital, data and cloud investments. Stefan was the first international employee at ExactTarget (prior to IPO and subsequent acquisition by Salesforce.com) and launched their Canadian presence. He is a regular industry speaker often called upon to speak about online marketing, relationship and lifecycle marketing, email marketing and other topics. I got triggered by Youneeq’s down to earth approach to driving revenue through engagement, hence I invited Steven to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the market with regards to helping SMBs taking advantage of the power of AI to grow fast and now. Here are some of his quotes: We could all agree that we're in the customer experience and the customer engagement economy. Regardless of the age group and demographic you're reaching out to, at least North America and Europe, the majority of companies are doing well are the ones that are delivering the better customer experience. And that covers all channels and such but online is growing. If it isn't the most important channel for a company it is going to become the most important channel. What's the opportunity? What's the value? By delivering a more relevant experience, we are driving a lot more desired engagement, because we can use real time analytics to actually optimize the experience. And so, what happens is we can drive the desired engagement automatically. That will drive the desired conversions or micro conversions. And then ultimately, that drives the KPIs that are important. During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why tech-vendors should challenge their solution whether it impacts the 1 or 2 most important KPIs of their ideal customers, and then go over and beyond to exceed expectations in terms of how they deliver that impact

That creating highly sophisticated solutions doesn’t mean it has to be complex and time-consuming to implement it and start driving value.

That positioning is not a thing for just marketing – it’s possibly the most strategic instrument you have to align every aspect of your business around the growth you aspire and end up having customers saying: I'm glad you sold me this.

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This podcast interview focuses on how competitive advantage is shifting in an age of automation. My guest is Josh Entsminger, Senior Fellow at Ecole des Ponts Business School in Paris. He’s an applied researcher in international affairs and the fourth industrial revolution, working on the global governance of technology. Josh serves as a fellow at the Public Tech Lab at IE's School of Global and Public Affairs, working on next generation public services. He also recently served as a research contributor to the Future of Production Initiative at the World Economic Forum. His work as a senior fellow at Ecole Des Ponts Business School connects him to the Center for Policy and Competitiveness, a think tank affiliated with the Microeconomics of Competitiveness network of Professor Michael E. Porter at Harvard Business School. His work there focuses on the shifting nature of competitive advantage in a world where AI and other 4th industrial Revolution technologies make their inroads. This triggered me, hence I invited Josh to my podcast. We discuss the how these technologies rapidly erode the position of advantage many companies used to have. We also discuss how AI is becoming a platform race, and how having access to the right data is rather than the right algorithms, is becoming the critical factor to create a position of advantage. Here are some of his quotes: I'm particularly focused on the governance of technology in the politics of technology. My background is heavily on government and policy and moving into the commercialization and understanding of what makes a company successful: what are the trends that are driving the viability of competitive advantage It's becoming increasingly hard for me to distinguish what's a technology company and what's not a technology company, The biggest issue I see is something that I'm calling competitive democratization. This is a drive from some of the big companies to open up access for AI solutions through AI as a service. The thing that worries me is that the means of accessing these technologies is increasingly being controlled or dominated by a few cloud service providers.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That defensible differentiation is growing with your ability to create data dominance around a particular area

Why the battle of business software will be won by those that will master scale over scope

That the opportunity is exponential for those software companies that can anticipate how we’ll restructure our understanding of what is a firm, what is a career, and what is a job.

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This podcast interview focuses on the fuel that drives today’s product innovation: Data. My guest is Auren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph Auren is an American entrepreneur, angel investor and author. He founded his first company, Kyber Systems, in his junior year at UC Berkeley, as a way to pay for school. He sold that company in 1997. From there he founded BridgePath (sold in 2002), became the chairman of Stonebrick Group, cofounded Rapleaf in 2006 and left in 2012 to run the Rapleaf spinoff called LifeRamp, which became the largest middleware company that connects marketing applications. In 2014 he sold his company to Acxiom for $310 million. Auren is an angel investor in over 120 technology companies. He holds a B.S.E. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the UC Berkeley. It’s the story behind his next venture SafeGraph that became the trigger for this podcast. Safegraph was founded to democratize access to data – in particular to help unlock innovation. That inspired me, and hence I invited Auren to my podcast. We explore why data – or better the lack of it – is becoming the roadblock for innovation. We also address the biggest challenge around data – it’s accuracy, and what it takes for companies to deliver ‘the perfect data’ Here are some of his quotes: One of my big passions is about democratizing access to data. Thus far, data has been a real gate to innovation. And folks who are data rich can innovate. But for most innovators, they don't have access to data and that really hampers innovation. And I'd like to see a world where the data itself is not a gate to innovation, but ingenuity is the core gauge for innovation. If we don't democratize access to data, we're going to have much less innovation in the future. Democratizing access to data will both increase the amount of innovation and also disperse more widely the winners from the innovation.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That to become the go-to-source for innovation you have to build your entire company around a core theme – and that becomes your focus to be the best and stay the best

Why it it’s key to understand your role in the value chain – are you a ‘solver’ or an ‘enabler’. This defines your value

Why you should treat every employee as a Warren Buffet – a Capital Alligator – Their goal should be to spend money to get leverage – for themselves, their team, the total business.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to democratize the skills of great leaders and make every one of us more productive. My guest is Omar Tawakol. Omar Tawakol is Chief Executive Officer of Voicea which was recently acquired by Cisco. Prior to Voicea, Omar Tawakol was the founder and CEO of BlueKai which was the leading Data Exchange and Data Management Platform company in the marketing industry. Oracle acquired BlueKai in 2014. At Oracle, Omar was the SVP & GM of the Oracle Data Cloud (ODC). The ODC pioneered the Data-as-a-Service category and was used by 97 of the top 100 US brands to create a 360o view of their customers across all channels. Omar earned an MS in CS from Stanford (BS, MIT) where he researched and published work on AI agents. Their promise: “Voicea transforms your meetings into time well spent”. This inspired me, hence I invited Omar to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in our busy business life that are increasingly loaded with meetings, and what can be if technology and people blend in the right way. Here are some of his quotes: I was running the Oracle Data Cloud after Oracle acquired my company BlueKai. I'd meet with some great leaders like Satya at Microsoft, of course, Larry Ellison, sir Martin Sorrell, just great business leaders. What struck me when I'd meet them is that they'd be in a meeting with me completely focused on our conversation. They didn't have their laptop open so that they could take notes and then get distracted. They weren't looking at their phone, they were looking at me. And when they left the meeting, there was an email with a follow up, and you realize, of course, they have a staff around them. That's helping them, but they also had some excellent skills themselves. And so, given how much time we spend in meetings, it's one of the largest time sinks of all knowledge workers, I saw that there was an opportunity really to help democratize the skills of these great executives. During this interview, you will learn four things:

That a new generation of applications is arising around the concept of a Voice First UI – and that this could open up a wealth of innovation opportunities for you

Why the best way to solve a problem is often to do the very opposite of peoples’ natural reaction. Voicea for example transforms habits such as the fear of missing out to the joy of missing out.

How big impact is created by looking for areas where you can have a position of data advantage or ideally data dominance.

Why you should aim to embed elements of virality in your solution – elements that people talk about, and create desire amongst others.

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This podcast interview focuses on what’s real and not real in the world of AI, and my guest is Daniel Faggella, founder and CEO of Emerj AI Research Called upon by organizations like the World Bank, the United Nations, INTERPOL, and global pharmaceutical and banking companies, Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella helps business and government leaders navigate the competitive landscape of AI capabilities, and build strategies that win. His company, Emerj, helps governments and enterprises reduce risk and maximize the bottom-line impact of artificial intelligence capabilities. They map the capability-space of AI across major sectors (banking, pharma, retail, etcetera), helping leaders see what's possible, what's working i.e., where’s real ROI and traction, and what to do about it. Being an active reader of his weekly update on the world of AI and got inspired by Daniels down to earth and challenger view on the topic. This is why I invited him to my podcast. We explore the challenges in adoption of AI in the market and what’s the deeper causes behind that. We also address the approach business leaders need to follow, and the VC mindset they need to embrace, in order to avoid the challenges. Here are some of his quotes: I was getting out of grad school at U-Pen, it became pretty obvious that a lot of these corollaries with neuroscience with cognitive science around how we learn, we're being experimented with and explored in machines. By the time I got out, I sort of realized that, should this trend continue, this is going to be some really wacky wild future we're headed into in 20 years, if AI continues to be able to do what it could do in vision. So, I decided I should get dedicated to this stuff and understand its impact for humanity in the long term. Everybody, I think, usually expects me to be the hype, man of AI, you know, talk about how awesome and transformative things are. And certainly in the long haul, I think that we're in for a pretty wild ride. I think that probably in the next 40 years, we'll see post human intelligence potentially. Right now, it's a lot of struggle to be honest with you. So, most AI, you know, quote, unquote, kind of AI innovation efforts within the enterprise, are really at a pilot level at a proof of concept level. And if we look at a space like banking or insurance, is it safe to say that most of these pOcT fail rather than win. There are very serious major challenges During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why, in order to create sustainable competitive advantage, data-dominance is the foundation to strive for

That succeeding in AI requires you to step out of the sand-box, and stress test your application with your feed in the mud, and overcome the real-world data challenges

Why solving a big problem with your solution is not enough. Getting a deep understanding of the objectives and objections that move the needle in the hearts of the people that need to buy from you is what’s required as well.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation focuses on the blended power of humans and AI to get clear answers to how their business or even the world might evolve years ahead of us. My guest is Bulent Ozel, Co-founder and CEO of LucidMinds Bulent is data science consultant, researcher and lecturer. He likes building bridges between business, technology, science, and policy making. He is a hands-on software architect and enjoys coding. He has provided data-driven business consultancy and services for over 10 years, and these experiences have lead the foundation of Lucidminds.ai. Bulent has published more than 50 peer-reviewed and citation indexed articles. The thing that triggered me to invite Bulent for my podcast is their creation of an agent-based simulation engine - presumably the most advanced and complex simulation model for macroeconomic systems. It enables researchers and policymakers to collaborate on creating insights and clear answers on complex policy questions like green finance, housing market regulations, and exit or entry policies for economic unions similar to Eurozone. We explore the challenges around creating solutions that are required to look 10, 20, or even 30 years into the future and the ways to overcome such challenges Here are some of his quotes: There's a possibility to solve or approach the way we use emerging technology, which means we can have control over AI. It's just a technology, nothing different than a wheel. How we are going to use the wheel depends on the choices we make. If we don't look into how things are suggested, how AI has been developed, that can go out of control. We want to be able to work on limited incomplete data sets. More importantly: if you don't have complete information […] you need the input of human and usually human domain experts are the best decision makers. The problem is how can get humans in involved in the process. Humans can always have be better choice maker, they have more insights, the algorithm can have certain bias that the human can overcome, or for other practical reasons, there might not be enough data set that is using to train the algorithm. During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why having a lack of information doesn’t have to be a problem to support complex business decision making

How creating combos of humans and AI can give businesses of all sizes insights that can be turned into clear competitive advantage

That using gamification frameworks inside your solution can help users solve complex problems together.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in HR that has the power to inspire growth and ignite culture. My guest is Ronni Zehavi, CEO of Hibob Ronni has over 25 years of experience in multinational, hi-tech companies. Prior to setting up hibob, he was an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Silicon Valley based Bessemer Venture Partners. He's the strategic advisor and co-founder of Team8 Cyber Security, a powerhouse developing disruptive tech in the cyber security space. Ronni was also the co-founder and CEO of Cotendo, a content delivery network which in 2012, just four years after it was founded, was acquired by Akamai in a $300m. Ronni has a BA in History and Educational Management from Tel Aviv University, and a MA in Organisational Sociology from Bar-Ilan University. I’ve got intrigued by the big idea behind Hibob and in particular it’s fresh approach to HR to manage the typical employee of today, and hence I invited Ronni to my podcast. We explore what’s broken around the approach of the HR systems we have become used to over the past decades and why that approach won’t work any longer if you want to grow your business and the impact of today’s workforce. Here are some of his quotes: ‘The shift that we are tracking right now, this is the opportunity: There's a new type of employee and a new type of relationship between employers and employee. This will drive this market going forward. They are bringing a new mindset, new values, and new behavior that did not exist before. It will change completely the way people work. So, we think the future, it requires a new approach, a new architecture that will be in line with those ongoing changes. We believe the future is all about system of relationship. So, the focus is the employee. The focus is the tribe - the employee and the team, the small groups within the company. The notion of ‘We Are One Big Family of 800 employees’ is fake news It's all about the small teams and the tribe.’

During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why creating a clear vision about the change you want to make to the world is essential to making the right product decisions

That to leverage your success it’s essential to get very clear ‘who’s it for’, and ‘who’s it not for’

And that maximum value is created if you home in on the unique DNA of your customer with your solution i.e. strengthen their core strengths.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to accelerate sales cycle and reduce the costs of customer acquisition. My guest is Olin Hyde, CEO of Leadcrunch. He wrote his first line of code at age 12 on a home-built computer. Since then, he has started eight companies. Today he’s the CEO at LeadCrunch, a B2B lookalike marketing platform that uses artificial intelligence to find your ideal customer targets audience and then engage them with your content to accelerate the sales process. Olin is one of the principal architects of the company’s DeepFind™ machine learning platform, the secret behind its success. Olin is also an investor and advisor at Bruvida, advisor and shareholder at UpCycle and Company, and Investor at Ginger Shots. Prior to this, he was a business advisor at Connect and was VP, Business Development at Ai One, Inc. He holds a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies in Mathematics, Economics, and Marketing from Miami University (Ohio) and a Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture-based Enterprise Systems Engineering from UC San Diego. The promise of Leadcrunch is compelling: Get artificial intelligence. Just pay for leads. Get higher Conversions, more pipeline and happier sales people. This triggered me, hence I invited Olin to my podcast. We explore how the process of targeting leads is broken in most businesses and why this can’t be solved by people alone. Beyond that we discuss the power of building defensible differentiation – and how this results into a sustainable win-win for both your customers and you as a technology provider Here are some of his quotes: ‘I’d like to leave this earth better than I found it. So, I really like to find big problems that really help people live better lives. A very idealistic way to look at it is technology that enables the human spirit. The problem we solve is that targeting, in other words, how to pick your next target for your marketing or your sales is actually very broken. The symptom of that is that sales, people usually hate the leads that are given to them by marketing. I know personally how incredibly difficult it is to find the right audience to market to. And then how do we engage that audience on the path for them to become a customer. So that’s the problem we’re solving. Our customers consider our technology to be their unfair advantage. Our revenues have grown 20% per month, for two and a half years. That’s an indication that technology works.’ During this interview, you will learn three things:

That by focusing your business on a valuable outcome will help to unlock markets you possibly didn’t even consider

Why focusing your efforts on business model innovation will give you the fastest route to defensible differentiation.

How giving your customers something they can’t live without is your secret to unlock double digit monthly growth.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation with Audio Intelligence that has the power to impact human wellbeing on a global scale. My guest is Dagmar Schuller, Co-founder and CEO of AudEERING Dagmar has conducted applied research in the field of AI, machine learning and big data for more than a decade. Her passion is to bring trendsetting ideas into real-life concepts, thus enabling businesses to intelligently enhance their products and processes and – ultimately – personal lifestyles. At audEERING she shapes the strategy, business development and operations. With a lot of passion and dedication she led audEERING from a startup to a multi-million company. Prior to her work as CEO of audEERING, Dagmar was working as Management Consultant for Ernst & Young in Vienna and New York, as CFO of a New Media company, and as Senior Vice President for an international investment of Hubert Burda Media. She studied Economics and Business Administration at the Wirtschaftsuniversität in Vienna, International Management & Marketing, Finance and Information Technology at the University of New York, as well as Law at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in München. I got triggered by the big idea behind audEERING, and hence I invited Dagmar to my podcast. We explore the opportunity that’s created when AI and Audio are blended into common solutions and introduced to everyday situations. We also discuss what it takes to turn ideas into remarkable solutions and what this requires in terms of mindset and leadership approach. Here are some of her quotes: “In the 80s and early 90s, when we were teenagers, there was one series that we really found quite fascinating, which was Knight Rider starring David Hasselhoff. It wasn't actually David Hasselhoff, I have to admit, but the car, KITT, which was so intelligent, that we always thought: ‘That would be really, really great, it would be so great to talk to a machine and the machine really understanding what you want, and really recognizing what you want, it would help so much, and it could be used in so many things.’ So, we got inspired and thought ‘Is there a possibility to make this type of fiction reality.” “So, that is actually what's driving us - making the fiction reality but in a very positive way; How can we utilize those fictions, those ideas? How can we innovate ourselves, move forward, improve what we have, and avoid negativity?”

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How a user with a critical or even negative attitude can be turned into an advocate when technology becomes a true companion.

Why in order to be successful in the mass market you have to put the money where your mouth is and convince your most critical audience: yourself

How you can create exponential scale by betting on an ‘embed’ strategy – but for that you have to be very clear what you stand for.

That true value is created when you take a holistic view on the problem: not only finding the needle in the haystack – but also figuring out how it arrived there in the first place.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around customer support that has the power to 10x your ticket response times. My guest is Rob May, Co-founder and CEO of Talla. Rob has a background in engineering, business development, and management and holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a MBA from the University of Kentucky. In October 2008, he co-founded and became CEO of Backupify which provided a secure second copy of cloud data. Their clients included companies like Salesforce, Google apps, and more. Backupify was acquired by Datto in December 2014 and Rob became the SVP of business development overseeing the Backupify's integration after the acquisition. In August 2015, May co-founded and became CEO of Talla which develops machine intelligence, virtual assistants, and conversation UI/UX for enterprises. In addition, Talla is launching a decentralised bot registration and marketplace platform, BotChain. When I learned about the positive impact Talla’s has on support organizations I instantly invited Rob for my podcast. We explore his views on what’s broken in market for ‘search’ and how that’s actually leading to unwanted behavior. We also address his learnings on technology adoption, and why this is not only of fundamental importance to increased user productivity, but also to keep your solutions always in sync with the reality of the business. Here are some of his quotes: Talla is in the customer support automation space. And what we do is we take your, not just your ticketing data, but your actual support content, we ingest it and understand it. The biggest thing that we see in our customers, and the reason that they do this is, you know, hiring is a is a challenge right now, at least, you know, here in the US, the labor market is pretty tight. And so we've sold to a lot of very high growth tech companies who need to hire 150 support reps this year, and they just can't. So they're looking for ways for how they make their existing support reps more productive. And we know that, you know, with Talla that can be anywhere from sort of 20 to 60% productivity increased, depending on the nature of their business. During this interview, you will learn three things:

How you can kill two birds with one stone by adopting a UX/UI driven way of thinking about Machine Learning

Why succeeding with AI is not so much about segmenting the market by traditional demographics but more one of addressing the right mindset.

How to make solid progress by following a ‘test and invest’ approach.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that’s transforming impact marketers can make in cross-channel marketing scenarios. My guest is Vijay Chittoor, Co-founder and CEO of Blueshift. Vijay has a wealth of experience in AI, marketing technology and e-commerce domains. He was an early team member and the director of product management at Kosmix which was acquired by Walmart to become WalmartLabs. In 2010 he co-founded Mertado and led it as the CEO for two years until it was acquired by Groupon and became Groupon Goods. This prepared him for his new venture, Blueshift, which he co-founded in 2014. Vijay is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s MBA Program. He also holds Bachelor’s and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Blueshift enables B2C marketers to automate segment-of-one marketing on every channel. They’re on a mission to put AI in the Hands of Every Marketer. This triggered me, hence I invited Vijay to my podcast. We explore the transformation of digital marketing, and the scaled revenue opportunities that now provides to companies of all sizes. We also discuss how AI is enabling marketers to reclaim their creative and strategic role again, and create a flywheel of value that’s pretty hard to stop once in motion. Here are some of his quotes: Every few years a technology matures to a point when non-technical people can start using it, and when that happens that unlocks a lot of enterprise value What's happening is that you and I, as consumers, we are interacting with all these brands on digital and mobile and social. And when we do that, we are leaving behind 1000 times more data than we used to leave behind 10 years ago. With all the data we're leaving behind marketers, and brands now for the first time have a way of understanding us as the dynamic individuals that we've always been. Doing that is exciting, but it's also challenging, because dealing with thousand times more data, dealing with 10 to 15 times more channels, that is very difficult for marketers. Obviously, humans are not best equipped to operate at that scale. Humans are created for guiding how the engagement should be driven, how that engagement should be humanized. Where the machine can really come in is to help the human marketer become excellent at that scale of decision making and make each decision truly intelligent. That's what we do with the Blueshift platform. During this interview, you will learn three things:

How thinking differently about key customer challenges allows you to build solutions that have transformative impact because of their simplicity.

That AI alone is not the solution – the synergy really kicks in when humans and AI systems are working well together and even impress the customers’ customers

That to deliver remarkable solutions you have to stay true to your vision – no matter how enticing the short term opportunity is.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to intelligently help the telco win the fight against fraud and revenue leakage. My guest is Rui Paiva, CEO of Wedo Technologies. Prior to co-founding WeDo Technologies in 2001, Rui Paiva was System Information Director and Deputy of Optimus Communications’ Executive Committee. Before that, Rui was the Consultancy Director at Hewlett Packard Portugal, following a career at Telecel, which then became Vodafone Portugal, heading up their Infrastructure, Operations and Help Desk Department. in 2010 Rui won the Best Leaders Award for Wedo Technologies, and In 2017 he received the Tech Personality of the Year Award by Exame Informática He is an experienced Board Member with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. A strong business development professional skilled in Business Process, Marketing Management, Negotiation, Business Planning, and Requirements Analysis. He holds a post-graduate degree in Management and Administration from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, as well as a BSc in Applied Mathematics The potential behind the problem Wedo is solving triggered me, hence I invited Rui to my podcast. We explore the growing challenges companies in the Telco industry face around revenue leakage and fraud and how their platform approach is enabling the business to stay in control. We also explore the magic behind Wedo’s ability to constantly stay relevant as a business software vendor in an industry that’s changing at the speed of light. Here are some of his quotes: On my last job was being the CIO of a telco company. One of the things that we faced at that time was, we have the main building blocks, which are typically the ERP, the billing system, the CRM. But all the additional tools that are in the middle of that normally they have to be developed from scratch in each of the implementations in each of the operators. That takes time. That means the cost of maintaining and support and evolve. All of that was a nightmare. We created a technology, Raid, to validate all the integration between different applications and guarantee that the customer at the end of the day they are not losing money, which means that without having more sales or being efficient, they can improve the bottom line directly. During this interview, you will learn three things:

How to stay relevant with a platform approach – both in terms of its’ ability to meet constantly evolving industry requirements as well as being industry agnostic to scale out.

Why a customer-cooperation-strategy is a very effective approach to win the hearts of 80% of the market, and never lose a customer ever.

What are the 8 secrets for a software business to stay as relevant and as fresh as the moment you were founded – in Wedo’s case – 18 years ago.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around AI that has the power to adjust at the pace of business. My guest is Zehra Cataltepe, Co-founder and CEO of Tazi.AI Zehra co-founded tazi.ai together with her husband Tanju, and their focus was to develop continuously learning machine learning solutions for the banking, insurance and telco industries. Besides her role as CEO she’s also a professor at Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Computer and Informatics. Zehra received her Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology in Computer Science. She has more than 20 years of both industry and academia experience in Machine Learning, and in that period, she delivered 21 patents and over 80 publications on the theory of machine learning and its applications in finance, health, energy and transportation. Tazi was recently selected by Garner as May 2019 ‘Cool Vendor in AI Core Technologies’. Tazi’s products are changing the way AI is used in business – keeping business in the driver’s seat with an automated Machine Learning platform that continuously learns and adapts to new circumstances. This triggered me, hence I invited Zehra to my podcast. We explore the challenges with today’s AI and machine learning technologies in rapidly changing business circumstances. We then discuss what’s required to get AI right – both at the side of the vendor and readiness level and mindset at the customer side. Here are some of her quotes: ‘What drives me personally, is a dream of making AI usable by everyone. Democratizing it so that it becomes a useful technology like automobiles or electricity. When you consider business processes, life always changes. So, you know, as an insurance company, for example, your products that you offer to your customers, your customers ability, or incentive to buy from you, your competitors’ behavior, the regulations, all of these change in time. So, you have to keep adopting whatever you were doing to new changing conditions. You cannot just have one machine learning model or one rule set, which just learned what to do, and keep doing that forever. You need AI which can continuously learn, we can continuously adopt.’

During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why it’s key to micro-segment your customers if you aim to deliver remarkable value

How designing for scale helps both your own organization as well as your customers

That taking a platform approach can turn customers into fans by allowing them to solve unusual problems

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in Recruitment and my guest is Nachi Junankar, CEO of Avrio He’s got a passion for building long-lasting companies that build amazing technologies that change the world. He’s been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, and in that period founded five companies. It all started with Live Wire, where he successfully imagined and built an enterprise apps company before it was fashionable to do so. His second company, Retail IQ brought him into the optimization space, and specifically real time price and offer optimization. It’s this knowledge of optimization and matching that’s part of the secret behind Avrio. Built on the thesis "Let humans do what they are best at and machines do what they are good at,” Avrio built an AI platform that uses machine intelligence to bring people and companies together way before there’s real urgency. Avrio strongly believes the hiring process is broken. With increasingly limited resources and an increasingly competitive market for talent, recruiting is harder than ever. That’s what Avrio is set out to solve. That inspired me, hence I invited Nachi to my podcast. We explore why the hiring process is broken and what challenges that brings to both employer and future employees. We then discuss the details behind the fresh approach Avrio is taking by turning a very reactive process into a pro-active process – and what benefits that provides to everyone involved. Here are some of his quotes: The premise of Avrio is to significantly accelerate the hiring cycle. So, when there is a crunch in the kinds of numbers of jobs available, that people would be able to move around a little faster so that they're not that poorly affected by it. The thing is not that there's not going to be enough jobs. There’s not going to be enough jobs all the time The hiring cycle right now is six to nine months, which is just ridiculous. Our vision really is to be predictive about where somebody is going in their career and their career path and where companies are going; into new markets, into new industries and having new kinds of jobs available We would really like to be able to match people six months before they have to look for a job and, and start the conversation.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That true value is created when you choose not to further improve a traditional process, but instead approach the problem from the other end of the spectrum and turn something that’s reactive into something pro-active.

Why the value of AI and Humans is not an either or. Combining the two forces in areas such as recruitment creates beyond expected results

How to create solutions that help your customers grow, and make them more money at the same time.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around water transportation that has the solve some significant climate change issues. My guest is Jean Francois Barsoum, Canadian Leader, Smart Cities, Water and Transportation at IBM. Since joining IBM, Jean-François Barsoum has provided strategy advice to a diverse set of clients: financial institutions, higher education, professional associations, pharmaceutical companies and telecoms. He has also been invited to speak at conferences on the subjects of innovation, smarter transportation and climate change on four continents. For the past decade, Jean-François has participated in numerous conferences on water and environmental management, and led IBM's ties with some related research organisations and NGOs. He helped develop some core smarter cities concepts and has deepened IBM's involvement with several North American cities as a result. He is among the few Canadians trained by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Al Gore, and regularly presents the material seen in the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ -- and subsequent scientific updates -- to audiences across Canada. He is on the board of the Climate Reality Project and of the Canadian Water Network, and is a member of the David Suzuki Foundation's steering committee. He is also a member of the Intelligent Transportation Experts' Committee, a forum initiated by the Quebec Association of Transportation (AQTr). When I learned about Jean Francois’ ideas on how to utilize technology to solve some of our largest global challenges I instantly invited him to my podcast. We explore the size of the challenge and how, by using various technological layers together, we start to reimagine transportation the way we have come to know it. We also address the need for organizations at both public and private level to work closely together to maximize the potential of the impact. Here are some of his quotes: What started it all was really a concern around environmental issues The problem is so bad that in some urban areas, if you take a look at cities that were especially growing after the Second World War, so many of the North American cities, the space that is dedicated to cars is about two thirds of the surface area of the city. So we dedicate twice as much room to our cars as we do to ourselves. And that is clearly not a sustainable or even preferable thing to do financially. So there's clearly a need to improve that. And I think that that's where the interest of autonomous cars is. Even assuming each individual car is not shared by multiple families at once, or multiple people at once, you could still reduce the number of cars by about a third just by sharing the existing cars that we have now. And if the cars are autonomous, and could move from one place of the city to another, to correspond to demand, it's quite possible, you could reduce the number of cars required by 80%.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That to create large scale change you have to think global, but implement local

Why it’s in the benefit of everyone if we remove the silo thinking in our business – not only in transportation, but universally

How the change we hope for can only happen if we succeed in changing behavior. Our easy options need to be replaced by even easier alternatives. That’s clear room for innovation.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that boosts the return on investment of our advertising by turning every ad into an ethical one, and my guest is Amy Williams, Co-Founder and CEO of Good Loop. Amy is an active member of the Women in Tech and Tech For Good communities. She was recently named by Forbes as one of the 30 Under 30 most influential people in media & marketing and has recently been listed in The Drum Digerati as one of the 100 outstanding individuals excelling in the UK digital industry. Amy has worked in the advertising sector all her career. At the age of 15 she first stepped into an advertising agency. She cut her teeth at one of the world's largest advertising agencies where she worked on everything from global TV ads to scrappy social campaigns. During this time she realised that it’s really difficult for brands to get their message in front of their audience in a cost-effective and positive way. The more she learned about the industry the more she started to see a disconnect between brands and the people they were trying to talk to. Too often the transaction between advertiser and viewer is at best impersonal and at worst unpleasant. As ad blocker downloads continue to rise and quality journalism continues to suffer the consequences, she sensed that it was time for a more positive solution. That's why she founded the ethical video advertising platform, Good-Loop. This inspired me, hence I invited Amy to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the advertising industry and why current approaches to get the maximum number of eyeballs for the minimum possible cost will only make things worse, not better. We dive into the concept behind Good-Loop, and how it’s found an ingenious way to connect people, brands and publishers in more meaningful, and consequently more effective way that’s creating a winning case for everyone involved. Here are some of his quotes: The big idea behind my business is that your time, your attention and your data, all of these things online, they are valuable to someone. They're valuable to advertisers. And so, we want to basically harness that value and use it to make the world a better place. The reason I called it Good Loop actually was, I was thinking about this idea of creating a virtuous cycle: Advertising is such a big business and it funds the free internet. But it's something that people inherently resent. There's a huge erosion of public trust around advertising online. It’s illustrated by how many people use ad-blockers. Hundreds of millions use ad blockers, and then it kind of leaves you the question: ‘How are we going to keep the internet free if we can't find a way for advertising to be perceived more positively?’ So, we're on a mission to make ethical advertising the new normal. And that means that whenever you see an ad online, it shouldn't be something you block, it should be something that you're pleased to see because it means that the world is being made a better place. During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why, in order to create breakthrough innovation, it’s key to frame the problem in the correct way i.e. name the true villain in your story

How, by making your solution outcome oriented, or in other words only make customers pay for success, you can create an offer that’s a no-brainer for every stakeholder to get involved in

Why, by simply starting, you will be 10 times further ahead than most people who just talk about an idea, but hope for all stars to align.

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This podcast interview focuses on the responsibility for all of us to ensure the AI’s we invest in are ethical and deliver explainable, transparent output. My guest is Vikram Modgil, founder of TheGoodAI.org Throughout his career Vikram has helped his clients succeed in achieving their goals by truly leveraging the power of data that they already own using Machine Learning. To do so, he’s built an ecosystem company - Pi Square – that consists of employees, associates & partners located in US, Europe & India. Prior to founding Pi Square, Vikram was part of multiple successful startups and wore many hats including business portfolio management, consulting and delivery of AI services. Recently he founded “TheGoodAI.org” in Seattle, which brings together groups of professionals & leaders from business, non-profit, education, legal, and technology backgrounds with the mission to empower every human to contribute by spreading awareness, facilitating engagement and inspiring actions towards ethical aspects of AI. And this triggered me, hence I invited Vikram to my podcast. We explore the reasons why ethical AI is so important to sustain a world we like to live and work in. We also discuss the various aspects of ethical AI and what we can do as individuals, groups or organizations to ensure we get what we want and hope for. Here are some of his quotes: “There are some unnecessary, or unconscious biases that come into our businesses. They creep in. And if you're not conscious, if you're not alert, they can impact lives. That is something that should not happen. So, with that thought, knowledge and understanding, I wanted to contribute back and I started looking for forums where I could get involved. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything, which was exactly what I wanted this to become. Normally, everybody is hesitant on starting something like this on their own, because it takes a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of people. I wanted to challenge that thinking and start something which is focused on helping one person at a time. And even if two people showed up, that would be a success. The three big things that we want to empower people to do are: create awareness, engagement and actions around the ethics and biases of AI and trustworthiness of AI. Being in Seattle is a is a very huge advantage for us. If we could influence Seattle, we can influence the whole world”

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That in order to encourage innovative ideas from within your organization on areas where AI could deliver impact, simply stick to 4 basic rules: It has to deliv ver a shift in value, be feasible, scalable and responsible.

Why the quality of your ideas for innovation will increase significantly once you ensure diversity in the room to look at the problem through different lenses

That it’s every software vendors responsibility to raise some very tough questions whether their AI technology is ethical, explainable and transparent – It all starts by doing the right thing – and that can be very profitable.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation focused on democratizing access to AI across industries that haven’t got the connections and salary budgets of the Tech Giants. My guest is Naomi Goldapple, Head of product for transportation and logistics at Element AI. Naomi’s career combines technology and business consultancy and entrepreneurship. Her specialties are Business & growth strategies, product commercialization and marketing plans. She has an International MBA, specializing in developing markets in Latin America, from the Schulich School of Business as well as a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University. She was the Director e-business for Royal LePage Commercial, one of Canada’s largest commercial real estate companies. She started up and ran Maman, bébé et café inc., which won various awards, and worked at ModelCom, using her expertise to help technology entrepreneurs with strategy and financing. She was the VP Business Development at Nexalogy, responsible for commercializing the suite of products, forging channel partnerships and growing the sales. Nexalogy developed a next generation software for mining, cleaning and analyzing unstructured data with powerful data sculpting capabilities. And this experience has led to her current venture as Program Director with Element AI, an innovative model that works with and creates companies that are leveraging artifical intelligence. The goal is to spin out hundreds on AI-first companies in Canada over the next 5 years. This triggered me, hence I invited Naomi to my podcast. We explore how the momentum around AI is picking up fast, but how various industries experience significant challenges to get access to AI talent, and in line with that, solutions. We discuss how Element AI is solving this issue, and how this helps chronically understaffed industries and attack large global problems such as safety and climate change. Here are some of her quotes: “The big idea behind the company, if I had to sum it up in one word, is really to democratize the access to AI. One of the issues that is happening right now is many people are getting excited about AI, however, there really isn't enough talent out there. They're usually courted away very quickly by the tech giants. The manufacturing industry, insurance, other industries that are not one of the tech giants, they really don't have access to this talent. So, our role was really to concentrate in some of those verticals, build products specifically for them and kind of allow them to leverage these technologies to really improve their businesses.”

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That significant value can be delivered to the quality of human work by using AI to eliminate Dull, Dangerous and Dirty work

Why it is key to first learn about the impact AI can deliver, rather than to regulate it upfront

How the sum of the parts will be far greater when every organization takes an active approach to share its data with its peers

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This podcast interview focuses on [product innovation] that has the power to [xxxx], and my guest is Sachin Duggal, CEO of Engineer.ai. Sachin Dev Duggal is an innovator, serial entrepreneur, and an advocate of enterprise software that touches lives and benefits the world at large. His profile is an unusual mix of experiences & serendipity. Sachin started his public foray very early in life. At the age of 12 he went on stage in front of 1200 people and the world media to demand something be done about the state of the environment. He worked for the United Nations and helped write the declaration of youth rights before he completed his first degree from Imperial College. At the age of 15 he co-founded nivio with a view to disrupt the old compute model. Four years later, nivio was selected as a technology pioneer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where at the same time he made history in being the youngest attendees. Sachin’s an avid and recent believer of Vipassana and that life is a zero-sum game – so its essential to spend our time giving; this is one of the main reasons he and his partner put aside stock in all major businesses to their foundation that’s on their 100x50 mission i.e. educate 100m kids in 50 years. He’s been awarded MIT TR 35 Indian Innovator of the Year, the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Leader of Tomorrow, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist, the BBC Young Asian achiever of the Year and UNEP Global 500 Youth Award. His aim is to build technology that simplifies the lives of every day users and increases the penetration of information technology to those who do not have it today. And that’s what Engineer.ai is all about. Engineer.ai is on a mission to democratize software development. Their promise ‘Together we bring your idea to life. Twice as fast. 1/3 the cost. Enterprise grade.’ That intrigued me, and hence I invited Sachin to my podcast. We explore the state of the market in which technology is often not delivering on its promise. Beyond that we address why the traditional approach to starting and delivering software projects is broken, and how a new, fresh approach, could transform things for the better, not only for large enterprises but also the small business owner. Here are some of his quotes: “One of the things that I'm driven by every day is the ability for technology to transform people's lives. We're in a world today where a lot of folks feel somewhat disenfranchised by the technology promise, something that was meant to help them grow, help them make more money, help them have more time at home. And instead, it's done, in many cases, the opposite. We think that there's a really strong opportunity to transform how software is built. We're moving from a world where software means working with a cottage industry, where everything is slow, requires traditional know-how, is inefficient, and super risky. And so, there's often a tradeoff that we see in our customers between the fear of being irrelevant, then they come up with an idea, and then it's basically the fear of failure. Until they cross the line of fear, they're not really building or moving ahead. And really, that's the problem we're solving”

During this interview, you will learn three things:

How traditionally unserved markets can be unlocked by eliminating conventions and traditional barriers, and beyond that, think exponential

That segmenting the market by need, rather than size or segment, opens up new ways to create differentiation

That to create momentum you have to exceed expectations, not meet expectations. So instead of delivering on-time on-budget, start delivering ahead of time, and ahead of budget.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around seemingly ‘ignored’ areas of data, and my guest is Danny Goh. Danny is a serial entrepreneur and an early stage investor. He is the General Partner of G&H Ventures fund, which invests in early-stage start-ups primarily in Southeast Asia. G&H Ventures has invested in more than 20 portfolios in deep tech and is building its third fund to help start-ups into the growth stage. He has also co-founded Innovatube Frontier Labs (IFL), which later merged with Nexus. Innovatube is a technology group that operates an R&D lab in software and AI developments and acts as an incubator to foster the local start-up community in Southeast Asia. It has a team of researchers and engineers to develop cutting-edge deep technology to help start-ups and enterprises bolster their operational capabilities. Danny currently serves as an Entrepreneurship Expert at the Said Business School, University of Oxford and is also an appointed Fellow at the Center for Policy and Competitiveness at the École des Ponts Business School. He is an advisor and judge to several technology start-ups and accelerators including Microsoft Accelerator, Startupbootcamp IoT, and LBS Launchpad. Danny serves as a visiting lecturer at various universities in Europe and he is a speaker at various conferences including TEDx and World Economic Forum. Last but not least he’s the Founder and CEO of Nexus FrontierTech, an AI research firm that easily integrates AI into organisations’ processes by using natural language processing to transform idle information into structured data, enabling them to run better, leaner, and faster. And that promise intrigued me, hence I invited Danny to my podcast. We explore the enormous value opportunity that millions of organizations leave untouched around unstructured data simply because the ‘can’t manage it’. We also explore Danny’s vision on how the world is changing from an app-centric world into a skill-centric world and how that will influence the way we can create solutions going forward. Here are some of his quotes: One key area that has been helping clients the most, which is to actually help clients to manage their data in a better way. And the biggest problem is, they don't know how to manage those data. And when I say those data, they are like, maybe PDF, graphics, and so on. Those data are not really useful. And what we did, we created the engines, the machine learning engines, to read those documents, and then extract it out. And then human can use all their analytical skills and statistical models to create something out of it. The advantage that we give to them, is they’re one step ahead of their competitors. That to the client is unimaginable before The efficiencies and the accuracies that we bring to them allows them to imagine a lot more. It allows them to create more business opportunities. When they have a new tool that suddenly upgrades their level to the next level, then suddenly they know they can go beyond their limits.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That incredible innovation opportunity is often right in front of us, we are just too busy or too ignorant to see it

How ‘skills’ will be the answer to making AI and Machine Learning more accessible and change the way we’re creating solutions

Why, in order to be successful, you have to stay persistent and remove the temptations to drift away from your vision

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This podcast interview focuses on a product innovation that has the power to radically change the way recruitment is done. My guest is Tulika Tripathi, Founder and CEO of Snaphunt. Tulika has been in the recruitment space for almost two decades and has worked across many countries. She’s worked as a Managing Director for Michael Page in Singapore where she was responsible for South East Asia. Later on, she took on the responsibility for Michael Page’s entry strategy into India as well as setting up and growing its Indian operations.

In 2013 she took on the MD role at Hudson, where she led their recruitment business across Asia. And in February 2017 she founded Snaphunt.

It was the big idea behind Snaphunt that triggered me, hence I invited Tulika to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the recruitment industry and how that is slowing down complete sectors. We then discuss how, by taking a radically different approach to the problem, hiring cost can be reduced by up to 99% and hiring speed increased by at least 30% Here are some of her quotes: The best way to describe Snaphunt is this: Snaphunt is a specialist recruitment agency, with no human recruiter. What I realized over the course of my career is that recruitment hadn't changed much in the last 20 years. I just realized over time that there was a way to leverage technology to do the same thing in a much more effective way. I saw this trend, and I felt rather than trying to reshape an existing business model to meet this, there was a phenomenal opportunity to create a new category of recruiting solutions from scratch. I didn't want to be the person who said, I also had this idea a few years ago, but I didn't do it. So I've done it, because it needs to be made. So I'm disintermediated the whole thing.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That by taking a platform approach you can deliver unexpected shifts in value for your customers.

How elegance and simplicity always wins – and that this requires you to cut everything away that seems ‘cool’.

Why you should be open to agree on the outcomes you want, rather than being fixed to how you think you are going to get there.

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This podcast interview focuses on the power of entity resolution, and how this powerful technology has the ability to give any organization a competitive advantage. My guest is Jeff Jonas, Founder and CEO of Senzing. Jeff Jonas is an acclaimed data scientist. He is at the forefront of solving some of the world’s most complex business and big data problems for governments and organizations in a variety of industries. A former IBM fellow, Jeff is the leading creator of entity resolution systems. National Geographic recognized him as the Wizard of Big Data, and today numerous organizations rely on his systems to extract useful intelligence from tsunamis of data. He has tackled many high-profile challenges, including identifying potential terrorists, detecting fraudulent behavior in casinos, connecting loved ones after a natural disaster, and modernizing voter registration systems. Jeff is a three-time entrepreneur and sold his last company to IBM in 2005. Jonas is a highly sought-after speaker. He regularly meets with government leaders, industry executives and think tanks around the globe about innovation, national security and privacy. In 2016, Jonas founded Senzing, based on a one-of-a-kind IBM spinout of the G2 technology. His team and patent portfolio – and was founded on the vision to revolutionize and democratize entity resolution. The story behind Senzing inspired me, hence I invited Jeff to my podcast. In the podcast, we explore the power behind entity resolution as the fuel to create the most advanced fraud detection, scoring, recommendation or intelligence systems. We also address the need to democratize this type of technology, so that it can be of benefit to anyone anywhere. And last but not least, we address what’s required to create solutions that people want to tell others about.

Here are some of Jeff’s notable quotes: “I became particularly focused, well really obsessed, with this thing called entity resolution, which is technology that figures out when two people are the same. It's a hard problem for folks, and when you can solve that well, you can solve all kinds of problems and create all kinds of competitive advantage. But if you look at these solutions, they primarily require experts to make them operate. They're pretty darn expensive, the good stuff’s at least a million. So, the big idea is to democratize that. Not just to help the big elite organizations understand who-is-who in their data, but what about the small nonprofit who just got duplicates in their Christmas mailing list? What about them? That's the big idea. If you can take 10 x out of the complexity of getting it going, then why not take 10 x out of the price? So, when you change simplicity that much, and you change cost that much, it opens the door to being able to democratize something.”

During this interview, we hope you’ll learn these three things:

Why you should sometimes bite the bullet to make the hard parts work in order to create real shifts in value

That with today’s technology there’s a multitude of opportunities to democratize capabilities that up to now were only available to the elite

What the ingredients are to create the solutions that turn customers into evangelists

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the enterprise business software that has the power to turn average companies into disrupters in their category. My guest is Frederic Laluyaux, President and CEO of Aera Technology. He’s got more than 20 years of experience as a leader in the Enterprise Performance Management sector. Fred has built his career focusing on providing solutions that help organizations worldwide achieve financial and business excellence. Fred started his career in the area of CPM, otherwise known as Corporate Performance Management, leading ALG‘s global operations until it was acquired by Business Objects. When Business Object was acquired by SAP he acted as the SVP and GM for SAP Applications for EPM, GRC, and Finance Line of Business. He then became the President and CEO of Anaplan which he led for over 3 years. That’s where he joined Aera Technology. I got intrigued by the promise of Aera Technology – being the company building the cognitive technology enabling the Self-Driving Enterprise – hence I invited Fred to my podcast. We explore how a variety of industries around the world are being disrupted, and why many traditional business software solutions are not up to par anymore. We discuss why many businesses need a different breed of solutions to rethink everything they do in order to thrive, not just survive in their market. Here are some of his quotes: I remember writing this paper one night, I worked all night on what is the next big wave post transaction automation. So basically, the massive wave of globalization fueled by the relational database and the ERP layer. The next big idea is how do we tackle the big pyramid that sits on top of those ERP systems. The question that I was asking myself is: Why do companies grow so deep, so fat, when they grow big? How are our decisions being made? So I’ve been thinking about this for a long, long time, and really being convinced that the next topic would be delayerisation, organization getting flatter, more nuclear, as opposed to these big, rigid pyramids. For that you need to enable decisions to be closer to the point of impact. For that you need to enable people to measure in real time the impact of the decisions that they have to take. There is a whole logical flow.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why the way to survive as a business software vendor is to aim your product strategy at solutions that allow your customers to do things differently, rather than do the things that have not changed for decades a bit better.

How solutions that are connected outside-and-in, always on, thinking, learning and autonomous in their behavior will create the winners of tomorrow

To become remarkable as a software business you have to surround yourself with people that are not attached to the traditional way of doing

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help marketers become best in class in marketing, and my guest is Parry Malm, Co-founder and CEO of Phrasee Phrasee uses AI to power email subject lines, Facebook and Instagram ads, and push notifications that outperform copy written by humans. Some of their global clients include Virgin, Domino’s, and The Times. Phrasee won 2017’s Most Innovative AI Company by CB Insights, and was one of the first AI companies in the world to implement an AI ethics policy. Parry is a well-known digital marketing dude and an unconventional thinker. He has worked with countless brands and media outlets to help them optimise their online results, and is one of the world’s leading experts on email marketing. He started his career coding middleware for CRM software, then sent out millions of emails for global brands, before running the strategy department for an ESP. He holds a BBA in Marketing & Statistics. It was indeed the unconventional approach Phrasee is putting across that triggered me, hence I invited Parry to my podcast. We explore how he and his team have created a new category, something that ‘experts’ in the market perceived to be impossible. We talk about how Phrasee’s solution is creating a win-win for digital marketers and the business they represent, and what was required to achieve the level of impact they are creating. Here are some of his quotes: To synthesize our big idea into one statement is, we believe that marketers can use technology to produce better copy than they had done previously. So what we have now is a very advanced deep learning system that can predict the efficacy of language before it's sent out. So, would you mind those two technologies, what you got is the most luminous copywriter on the planet who can create more copy then 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters, with the best predictor of effective copy in the world? What that means is our customers get a small amount of very effective copy every time they log into our platform. So, what we're actually doing is, we're alleviating the least favorite task, which humans are not well suited to, just because we get sort of desensitized or we just sort of get bored of doing the same thing over and over. So, we take away that burden, and we let humans focus on the copy that humans are good at.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

How, with the right mindset and persistence, you can do what’s never been done before and succeed

Why it can be a blessing to finish second in a pitching contest – and as such have to hustle to win real customers and build a product which has wide appeal

Why creating Human/Machine combo’s ultimately delivers more value than the sum of its components

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the Utility industry, and my guest is Abhay Gupta, CEO of Bidgely. Abhay founded Bidgely, with the mission of leveraging data to transform the utility industry. Today, Bidgely is very well positioned with the technology and knowhow to not only help the utility industry go to market quicker, but also how to optimize their customer engagements. As the CEO of Bidgely, Abhay has led the company from concept to market leadership. Prior to Bidgely, Abhay worked at a combination of energy and technology companies including Grid Net, Echelon and Sun Microsystems. He holds a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, a Master of Science from University of Southern California and M.B.A. from Santa Clara University. It was the big idea behind Bidgely and the fact some of their customers decided to mention it in their television campaigns that led me to invite Abhay to my podcast. We explore the challenges the utility industry is facing on three levels: Their infrastructure, their operation and their customers. We dive deep into the opportunity that’s ahead of us, and why this can only be solved with the support of the latest technologies. Here are some of his quotes: I ended up in product management and building smart meters for the energy industry somehow in my career. And we were building smart meters, we realized all this data that is produced by smart meters has so much potential. It's just not being used for its potential. So, we identified this opportunity to disrupt the decision-making process and the whole opportunity energy industry because if you look at the retail, internet, medical, any of the industry the data is used for so much and so much personalization. So much of value creation. The energy industry is lagging behind massively. The utility industry has not changed for decades. The primary business for most of the utilities in the world has been about how to keep the lights on, how to build power plants, how to keep the distribution and transmission of the energy correctly happening. This is the opportunity for the utility and energy industry to completely change and morph themselves into something, what I call at par with the Google and Amazon of the world. During this interview, you will learn three things:

How a byproduct of your core innovation could end up giving your customer the ultimate point of differentiation

How to make strategic decisions in situations where there are multiple solid routes to solving a problem

How focusing on customer experience can result in radical cuts in internal operational cost at the same time.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the marketing arena, and my guest is Paul Roetzer, Founder of the Marketing AI Institute. Paul Roetzer is also the founder and CEO of PR 20/20. He is the author of The Marketing Performance Blueprint and The Marketing Agency Blueprint, and creator of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON). Paul is an international keynote speaker on the topics marketing talent, technology, strategy and artificial intelligence. He’s a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, and he has consulted for hundreds of organizations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. I’ve been following Pauls work for a while and got triggered by his efforts to educate marketing professionals on what to anticipate now that AI is entering the marketing space. This is why I invited him to my podcast. We explore how the marketing space is changing due to the capabilities of AI, where the changes are most profound today. Based on that insight we discuss a range of approaches for Marketers to prepare themselves. Here are some of his quotes: I believe the industry is just going to transform like, nothing we've ever seen before. If you think about what email and mobile and the internet itself did, I truly believe AI is going to dwarf that. It's just going to transform everything in the next decade, and that includes career paths, and what we're teaching at university. The great irony of marketing automation is that it's manual. So if you're using a marketing automation platform, CRM platform, you as the humans set all the rules of what it does. When AI really gets into the picture and is infused in everything we do, it starts doing that. It starts learning and it never forgets. If you think about the ability we have now to manipulate behavior, to play with emotions, to use fear to trigger actions.And we're doing that with very basic level technology. Now, when that technology is 10 times more powerful or 100 times more powerful, there's very real concerns that you use those tools to do evil instead of good, and it might not be intentional. It could spiral out of control.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why we have to be more pro-active in understanding the impact of AI on our jobs and the impact we can make on the business

That every marketeer can benefit from AI today, and it’s our responsibility to explore those opportunities

That as an industry we have to drive the conversation to steer the effect AI could or should have on jobs, education and the humanization of our brands

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the ERP space, and my guest is Vinnie Mirchandani Vinnie is the founder of Deal Architect - a Technology strategy and negotiation firm listed as a leading "boutique" by the Black Book of Outsourcing. Vinnie also founded IQ4hire, a projects marketplace and Jetstream Group, a sourcing advisory firm. Earlier in his career he had various technology consulting roles at PwC (now IBM) in the US, Europe and Asia, and worked as an industry analyst at Gartner. He wrote various books about the evolution and future of the enterprise software, amongst which Silicon Collar, The New Polymath and The New Technology Elite. His latest book is SAP Nation 3.0, and this triggered me to invite Vinnie again to my podcast. We explore the changes in the ERP landscape over the last 5 years, in particular amongst the big 3 – SAP, Oracle and Workday. We explore why after 20 years of ERP in the cloud today there’s still not enough traction.

Here are some of his quotes: “In the last five years, two things have changed. One is SAP has been a product launch machine. I mean, they have launched more products than any other I would say technology vendor. The other thing I saw pleasantly with SAP was how much more open they were this time. One of the disappointing things about cloud has been, you know, it's 20 years old now. NetSuite was born in 98, Salesforce was born in 99. But if you do a breakdown by global world region, by industry, by business process, only about 20% is filled. So, the vendor community hasn’t delivered enough. And on the other hand, the buyer community has been very slow to adopt it. I raised an alarm. I go, this is scary guys. After 20 years, both the buyers and the vendors are just not moving. Something's not right.”

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why it’s key for ERP vendors to not just modernize the technology. Modernize the business processes.

That a big opportunity is left virtually untouched and that is: leveraging the biggest benefit of the cloud: Data, and utilize that to introduce real value shifts

Why it’s key to wake up and realize it’s urgent after 20 years to start moving ‘by-standards’ i.e. ERP legacy customers.

Why systems integrators should start to apply machine learning and automation to their own business. Stop just selling bodies, and leverage the learnings and data from millions of CRM and ERP projects to make these projects faster, cheaper and a lot less risky

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to deliver upon the promise of self-healing-systems. My guest is Mohit Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of Opas AI Mohit has spent the last decade working on wide variety of interesting problems in Infrastructure, Big Data, and ML. He has run and managed infrastructure at massive scale and felt the pain of operating them first hand. This pain combined with his experience in Big Data and ML led to the incubation of Opas AI. Before founding Opas AI, Mohit has held multiple roles at BloomReach, Groupon, Google, and Amazon. He has a Bachelor in CS from IIT Kharagpur and Masters from UCDavis. The vision behind Opas AI me to invite Mohit to my podcast: to create a single solution that can find, diagnose and fix even the most complex performance and availability problems in your applications and infrastructure. We explore the fact that today’s applications and infrastructure have evolved far faster than the technology used to measure and manage them. We dive into the challenges that this provides to IT teams as they drown under the weight of too many tools, too many dashboards and too many meaningless alerts, and most importantly, how technology such as AI and Machine Learning can help remove these challenges and risks for good. Here are some of his quotes: “We are in this journey of building self-healing systems. It doesn't matter what kind of IT systems you're running. The cost of failure has been growing higher and higher. There was one thing in early 2000 if Amazon site was down for 15 minutes probably wouldn't turn up on New York Times homepage. However, a few minutes outage on your site [today] can become a massive PR issue. And the cost is not only the lost revenue. That's definitely something that you see right away but the bigger cost is in the negative PR. And God save you if you are providing service to other SAAS providers. We can win customers. We can buy contracts. But buying credibility, winning credibility is a long-term process. You may be doing very well for the last five years; a two-hour outage will basically wipe out that credibility.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

What are the key ingredients that are required to build self-healing systems

What the art of listening to customers really means – the key is not to hear what they are saying, but to understand what they are meaning

That you should be problem focused, not solution focused to become truly successful

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This podcast interview focuses on the power of curiosity in innovation and my guest is Dr. Diane Hamilton, author of ‘Cracking the Curiosity Code’ She has contagious passion for improving interpersonal communication. In addition to being a nationally syndicated radio host, award-winning speaker, author, and educator, Dr. Hamilton is a thought leader in the fields of leadership, sales, marketing, management, engagement, personality, curiosity, and motivation. To help improve relationships in the workplace — and performance as a result — Dr. Hamilton draws on her decades of work experience in software, computers, corporate training, pharmaceuticals, real estate, mortgage lending, social media, education, and publishing. She’s a sought-after expert in emotional intelligence, and her research has been published widely in peer-reviewed journals. She is the creator of the Curiosity Code Index® and the author of four books sold worldwide: Cracking the Curiosity Code, The Online Student’s User Manual, How to Reinvent Your Career, and It’s Not You, It’s Your Personality. Her book regarding personalities was required reading at an Arizona-based university, where she was also nominated for an honorary doctorate in addition to her traditionally-obtained Ph.D. in Business Management. The release of her latest book ‘Cracking the Curiosity Code’ triggered me to invite Diane to my podcast. We explore why curiosity is such a key trait to develop in relation to innovation and dealing with top business issues. We do a deep dive on the four factors that impact curiosity, and what to do to start growing the curiosity level inside your organization. Here are some of her quotes: “I first started writing the book because I was very interested in what kept people from being curious. I really found four factors impacted curiosity which were Fear, Assumption, Technology and Environment. My hope was to help individuals and organizations to develop what I think is a such a key trait. It's the spark that leads to motivation and to drive and for you to get anywhere with communication, critical thinking, leadership, creativity, teamwork, engagement, you name all the top issues that leadership struggles with. Once you're able to get all those factors in line and then once your innovative you're productive and you know everybody's engaged, it kind of solves all the problems and so that's what I thought was so fascinating. What I was trying to do was just kind of figure out what's the spark behind it all that's that we could fix and, and that's what I kept coming back to was improving curiosity.” During this interview, you will learn three things:

That what made you successful in the past, isn’t likely going to help you survive in the future – And growing your curiosity index is the key to your success

Why you have to watch out to avoid aimless curiosity in your organization, and what to do about it

That, a critical way to grow a culture of curiosity starts when top management shows they way – they need to walk the talk.

Get related ideas from a few blogs

Why your product roadmap fails to deliver remarkable value

How to stay relevant in your category?

Are you in the comfort zone, or where the magic happens?

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the impact Marketers can make by generating more leads, of higher quality, with less effort. My guest is Yonatan Snir, Co-founder and CEO of CliClap, an AI Powered autonomous lead generation and qualification solution He is an expert in data driven marketing with over 16 years of experience, helping organizations utilize technologies to improve business performance. In 2016, he founded CliClap together with Arie Zaks, who now acts as their CTO. Prior to CliClap he opened a marketing agency, focused on helping brands transform their marketing operations into a data driven organization. And before that, he served as the Director of Global Marketing Operations at NICE Systems. It was this big idea behind CliClap’s product that triggered me to invite Yonatan to my podcast. We explore why so after so many years of marketing automation the tools we use still suggest visitors to our website the wrong topics of conversation (which is awkward) or ask people for their commitment way before the time is right (which is annoying and pushy). We then address how technology such as AI is offering us a completely different approach to the challenge, one that delivers results almost too good to be true. Here are some of his quotes: “We have a lot of traffic on the website that's not converting today, and many tools and many new tactics are being used to try and fix that. But eventually, we see that only friction converts. The numbers the benchmarks that are stated today by Forrester, Marketing Sherpa and other research, is that we looked at talking about 2 to 4% converting to leads, and only half percent is converted to opportunities. The reason for that, at least from what we found, is that on B2B you give the same experience to everyone. The fact is, it's not a one size fits all. A lot of people are being missed out, because they're not used to getting this kind of experience in today's world, where everything is becoming much more simple in our consumer head. So, the idea is to try and understand for each visitor when, and what's the next best thing. And when it's ready, ready to stick and move to the next level of engagement. Not too soon, not too late.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

How, by staying curious and challenging the established and accepted ways of doing, it is possible to deliver remarkable impact

How in a crowded, red-ocean market, it is very possible to get customers to shift from a competitive solution to yours by having clear differentiation.

Why the traditional cloud solutions for marketing have been focused on the wrong metrics of delivering scale and quantity (i.e. output), where the real impact is created when you focus your product strategy on quality (i.e. outcomes).

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform how the enterprise does business. My guest is Heidi Messer, Chairman and Co-founder of Collective[i] Heidi has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the digital economy since the commercialization of the Internet. She is the Co-founder and CEO of World Evolved, a platform for global investment and expansion. She is one of the founding members of the Zokei Network, a global network devoted to encourage innovation across art, science, business and technology. In addition, she is an active angel investor in and advises numerous startups. Prior to Collective, Heidi and her brother, Stephen Messer, co-founded LinkShare Corporation, which is host to one of the world’s largest online affiliate networks representing some of the largest and fast-growing publishers and merchants on the web. The company is widely considered to be a pioneer in the world of digital advertising. Heidi is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world and universities on entrepreneurship, digital marketing and advertising, business intelligence and the Future of Internet services. She has been cited in various publications including, The New York Times, Inc. Magazine, and The Nikkei. She has received several honors including being selected as one of 2012’s 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs. The mission behind Collective[i] is to remove uncertainty and inefficiency around how B2B companies generate revenue through their sales organizations. They do so by using AI to remove tasks, identify important social connections and guide sales professionals to the activities that will yield the highest ROI. This approach often gets them referred to as the “Waze for sales” – And this triggered me to invite Heidi to my podcast We explore why today’s salesforce is wasting 70% of their time on non-revenue generating activities, and why, in order to solve that challenge, you need to go beyond automation. As such we explore how the combination of network-based technology, community-sourced and proprietary data in combination with AI/ML enables to predict buying patterns and provide levels of visibility and actionability previously unattainable for sales teams Here are some of her quotes: “My co-founder and I got together and said: “What is the next big opportunity?” after watching the marketing world transform, and we saw on the enterprise side and the revenue management side, specifically sales, as being the next big thing. That’s what led us to found a Collective[i], which is short for collective intelligence.” “The entire enterprise will be transformed using a combination of data networks and artificial intelligence. And when I say transformation, what I mean is not automation. I think that's a common misconception. Instead, what we looked at is; Where areas where humans are underutilized? Where are areas where their jobs have become something other than what they were originally intended? And for us, we looked at revenue and in particular sales organizations as a ripe place for this, where this technology could completely reorganize and allow human beings to shine and show their true talents.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

Why taking a network approach to creating insights has the power to solve some of our most valuable challenges

How, by using AI as a guide, we can raise the potential to increase both the value humans produce as well as the way they value their work.

Why being a fast-follower doesn’t work with AI, because the advantages are so far superior.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the Procure-to-Pay space. My guest is David Griffiths, CEO of FISCAL Technologies, a leading provider of forensic solutions that empower procure-to-pay (P2P) teams across the globe to protect organizational spend. David has 20 years’ experience in growing technology organizations and has spent the last 15 years working with hundreds of Accounts Payable teams to help protect their corporate spend by preventing fraud and reducing risk. Prior to becoming the CEO of Fiscal Technologies, David was Head of Marketing for Bottomline Technologies, and Commercial Director for European Internet Technologies, a supplier of e-business solutions. David holds an MBA and Honours Degree in Business & Accounting. What triggered me to invite David to my podcast was his vision to enable the finance function to prevent high risk transactions from creating reputational damage and become more proactive at the same time in optimizing performance. We explore the fact we are living in a world where Risk & Fraud are increasing rather than reducing. We discuss why current solutions on the market appear to be so inadequate. How that results in reputational damage, leakage of working capital and underperforming financial performance. And finally, how technology such as AI can be used to deliver remarkable impact. Here are some of his quotes: The whole Procure-to-Pay space is dominated by hundreds of different technology vendors and really sit in two core areas. Firstly, around procurement and automating the whole procurement process and driving purchase order compliance and POS and three-way matching, and then the other side is about managing invoices and paying those invoices. There's a lot of technologies around automation. The more feedback we received, and the more research we did, we realized there was nothing to oversee all these different technologies to look at fraud and risk. We found that three-way matching doesn’t work. It hasn't evolved over the last 40 years. So our big idea was to provide oversight to this process, as a lot of organizations now are really exposed to unprecedented levels of risk and fraud. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

As the velocity of our world increases and our options to get work done enriches as technology evolves, we are creating new foundation for fraud and risk to grow exponentially.

That the value of AI is not only to give insights to identify fraud and risk, but possibly more important to also reveal totally new patterns that allow us to prevent these challenges all together.

That a lot of value is destroyed due to inertia in the market – the self-believe that ‘everything is under control’ – and that’s not only in the Procure-to-Pay scene. It’s universal.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around marketing automation that has the power to transform the way can turn customers into buyers by using the power of content personalization, and my guest is Jon Shalowitz, CEO of LiftIgniter Jon brings a wealth of experience in building innovative, fast-growth companies. He was CEO at XDN where he transitioned the company into a category leader for application delivery services and led the company to a successful acquisition by Fortinet. He then co-founded CloudUP Networks and led the company as CEO to capture a critical part of the cloud data management market. He then became the CEO of Badgeville, a leader in Enterprise Gamification that got acquired in July 2016 by CallidusCloud, where in turn he created a new division to address the $20B Customer Experience (CX) market. CallidusCloud got acquired by SAP in august 2017, from where Jon moved into an interim CEO role at SnapRoute with the prime objective to re-focus the business. In April 2018 he then became CEO of LiftIgniter – a Series A stage startup that helps B2C and B2B companies optimize their Web-based and app-based customer experiences in real-time. The way LiftIgniter does this intrigued me, hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore the challenges marketers have these days in meeting the expectations of their prospects and customers in the digital world we live in, while at the same ensure we are 100% compliant with data privacy regulations like GDPR. It has become impossible to keep up with manual segmentation and tagging as we all expect our suppliers to give us a personalized experience based on our behaviors – in real time. Here are some of his quotes: “I truly think that the marketing stack is in a position to move from evolutionary change that we had with marketing automation, to now something revolutionary with AI and machine learning. The big idea is that customer interactions, customer experience, digital customer experience need to be number one real time, need to pick up on signals in real time. And, related to that, need to be behavioral based, or need to understand your behavior in the moment, or the users’ behavior in the moment, versus the traditional way of tracking and segmenting and really focusing on who you are. It's what you are, what you're doing what you're interested in, in the moment, not who you are, and what you've clicked on at 10 other sites where you came to me”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

How you can leverage your 1st party data effectively and drive the best possible Customer Experience.

That true breakthroughs in technology can only be achieved by taking a distance from the conventional ways of doing things. Too often we get too engaged with improvement on improvement on improvement, where we should really start with a clean sheet

Why as a CEO it’s your duty to gear your company at the most valuable challenge of your ideal customer, not the most interesting challenge. You need to apply a level of adaptability, and with that you’ll turn customers into fans

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the sales execution space that has the power to help companies gain 99% accuracy in their sales cycles, hence achieve big leaps in productivity, and my guest is Dr. Cindy Gordon, Co-founder and CEO of SalesChoice, an AI SaaS Predictive and Prescriptive Guiding Selling Company. Cincy is an expert in SaaS, AI, business innovation, early-stage software commercialization & sales /marketing practices. She has held senior leadership and partnership roles in global B2B Enterprises, including: Accenture, Xerox, Citicorp and Nortel Networks. In addition, Cindy has also been a founder, VC, and an angel in emerging software companies. She is recognized for her innovation and thought leadership, has written over 13 books, and won numerous awards. Cindy’s passion is the constant pursuit of sustainable innovation and the creation of differentiated experiences to make our world an incredible place. That’s what triggered me, hence I invited her to my podcast. We explore the large-scale challenges sales professionals have in making their targets. The fact that 30% of sales professionals suffer from attention deficit disorder, and that attention span has dropped 50% over the past 10 years are likely making this worse than better. AI is coming to the rescue here. It’s interesting how Cindy defines it: AI is not then new energy, it’s the new oxygen – we have to breath it to be able to do things we’ve never held possible. Here are some of her quotes: “What drives me day to day is probably just ensuring that what is possible is real, and giving people the confidence that they could actually mobilize the change. It's all about building the confidence to just simply be, enjoy, and make it happen. Too often, we get paralyzed. And I think with the speed that has accelerated in businesses worldwide, people need to make more choices about where they're spending their time and what they're working on, The roots of the company are very much focused on that specific problem. The problem is that 30 to 60% of sales professionals don't make their sales plan targets or quotas in the b2b market segment. The speed acceleration or the age of distraction dynamics, b2b sales professionals have one of the hardest jobs in the world because of the noise factor. So that's the backdrop and we thought the thesis was: “Could AI, with predictive analytics and other AI methods, absorb all the historical dynamics of a firm and actually guide them?” During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why it’s key to always look for audit trails once you add AI to your solution – Someone needs to be accountable for the predictions. And if you can’t stand in for it, the legal issues will be pretty significant

That the new way to deliver your solutions is not to give your users individual insights, but rather universal intelligence of all ‘the moves’. This will enable them to add even more value.

That one of your responsibilities and opportunities as a vendor is to ensure the data keeps improving – that bias isn’t there – and that your predictions are transparent

Everyone knows that to succeed you have to stay focused. Possibly more important is to stay curious. To be looking around the corner for the market dynamics and the edge plays. Leave yourself and your people time to pause, reflect and time to think.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the sales & marketing space that has the power to increase sales productivity by over 80%, and my guest is Ilan Kasan, Co-founder and CEO of Exceed.ai. Ilan has built an 18-year career in general management and product management for leading global technology companies including, Cisco, WebEx, Comeet and others. During this time, he’s proven to be a successful product leader with a track record in product, user experience, sales, marketing and building products users and enterprises love. September 2016 he co-founded Exceed.ai around the believe that sales reps time is precious and shouldn’t be wasted on menial, error-prone tasks. As such they developed an AI Sales Assistant that automatically contacts and engages every lead in a personalized and timely manner in order to qualify and book meetings directly on the reps calendar – allowing the reps to be laser focus on high priority prospects. This triggered me, and hence I invited Ilan to my podcast. We explore the challenges every sales person has in performing in their job and how the bulk of their time is spent on tasks that doesn’t use their competence in the optimal way. We also assess why a combo of Sales + AI delivers better results than simply trying to replace Sales with AI. Here are some of his quotes: “I was exposed to what I would say, the middle of the funnel, how difficult it is to manage a huge stream of leads. I saw how much time reps are spending in qualifying, getting back and trying to set appointments, talking to the wrong people. How much leads that marketing created, nobody actually does anything with them, or follows up one. So I understood that there is a real problem here that is not necessarily related to the size of the company, but rather the nature of the business. The problem is that when you get all those leads at the top of the funnel, you get a lot of noise. It takes a lot of time to work through all the leads and filter out the noise, it’s a very manual process. And we said, okay, this is repetitive, it repeats itself. So let's find a way to automate it.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

That to stand out in your market you have to deliver value beyond what ‘the others’ are delivering. Going the extra mile pays off – and sometimes this means pivoting your business

That the value is in the data – and often the data is not there – meaning you have to find clever ways to gather it. This way you are not building a product, but a platform that gets smarter and smarter with every interaction.

How your biggest competitor is often ‘doing nothing’ because of inertia or simply being sceptical (or fearful). The ultimate way out is positioning.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform how we hire and manage talent going forward, and my guest is Caitlin MacGregor Caitlin is the CEO and Co-founder of Plum. After being President/Director of two startups, Caitlin founded Plum in order to transform talent processes to prepare business owners, like herself, for the future of work. Shortly after that Plum was awarded 2015 Gold Stevie International Business Award for best new product or service of the year. The company was also selected as one of the top 10 businesses led by women by Springboard Enterprises NYC. Plum's mission is to help companies hire, grow, and retain top talent with the power of AI and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. By measuring talents such as leadership, innovation, communication, and more, Plum hosts the single largest database for quantifying human potential at every stage of the employee journey – from predicting successful hires, to informing professional development, strategic workforce planning, and high-potential capability. This inspired me, hence I invited Caitlin to my podcast. We explore the challenges in the talent acquisition and talent management space, and why so many companies are challenged with hiring top-talent. We also discuss how the changes in the marketplace require a different approach to hiring, reskilling and redeploying talent – and why assessing where someone went to school or previously worked are not the things to look for. Here are some of his quotes: “Some of the statistics say that, you know, it's a 5050 chance of hiring the right person. a lot of companies don't have 50% turnover. So a lot of the times what happens is that they're putting up with mediocre people maybe 20% of their organization are top performers. But if you understand what makes a top performer, a top performer and you can quantify that you can actually change that ratio so that you can get more people that that meet that criteria. It's really understanding that every single person has the potential to be a top performer, just not in every role, that that each person has a unique set of talents that makes them a top performer. So it's really about how do you figure out what makes somebody exceptional, and then figure out the jobs that will allow them to succeed.”

During this interview, you will learn three things:

How looking for scarcity can you help uncover hidden market gems that you can open by democratizing access

That to maximize your success as a software business it’s key to align every aspect – all the way from product strategy, to marketing, to Sales, to Service

How new business ideas are born by looking with a fresh eye at what it takes to avoid costly investment decisions.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the financial market place that has the power to transform the way we know it in two ways: 1) Avoid disruptive shifts in financial market mood by predicting subtle changes in perception bias 2) increase shareholder value and impact by offering a new framework of decision-making such that early insights into market dislocations and even market crashes can be timely converted into new and persistent high-impact alpha opportunity centres My guest here today is Efrem Hoffman. Efrem Hoffman is the CEO, Founding Architect, and Thought-Leader of RunningAlpha., an independent Canadian Innovation Think-Tank, headquartered in Toronto. As stated on his website, he is employing patented and proprietary insights at the intersection of physics and finance to exploit market uncertainty for competitive advantage. He is a thought-leader in Smart-Data Analysis Architecture and developer of Quantum-Behavioral Trading Machines; Efrem has 145 citations and multiple info-tech patents referenced in patents granted to Fortune 500 Companies & Research Think-Tanks. His vision is rethinking the way we can collaborate with nature in order to better exploit uncertainty. With that in mind he’s developing solutions that help investors build intelligent portfolios and see investment opportunities before they arrive and get noticed; From there he helps them navigate around value traps to ensure they maximize the value of their portfolio. This inspired me, hence I invited Efrem to my podcast. We explore the challenges and risks of today’s financial market and how technology can help investors gain early access to opportunities previously only discoverable by the Wall Street influencers. Here are some of Efrems’ quotes: “My passion has always been about understanding the physics that underlies very unusual events I did a thesis, which was basically on applying vision techniques in three dimensional radar in order to use AI in a more constructive way, where humans don't make assumptions about what's actually happening in the surroundings I patented technology and there was a couple people one from the University of Manitoba some of the professor's there that noticed that some of the applications of that AI approach that was used for atmosphere Tornado prediction could be applied to the financial markets and understanding you know extreme behavior and what causes it to take shape during manias and panics I'm most proud of actually being able to make predictions of it in very narrow windows and, and persistent windows for when market crashes are likely to take place, so that I could actually protect investors portfolios during those events” During this interview, you will learn three things: 1) Why the best decisions can only be made when bias and sentiment are taken out of the equation – this is a clear area for technology to play a significant role 2) That the solutions we create gain in value exponentially when they not only predict a certain high risk event accurately, but also provide the ingredients to prevent it all together 3) How to find new sources for innovation by searching for use cases that are driven by extreme uncertainty. Tackling uncertainty can turn into clear competitive advantage. If you want to learn more about Running Alpha’s latest product “Capital Market Trends,” visit CapitalMarketTrends (use promo code: xIqpTTo2, to get a +55% discount on this monthly subscription service for up to 12 months; Coupon Expires March 22nd/2019; you can cancel at any time without getting charged for the following month). Disclaimer: This is strictly for educational and informational purposes – and only reflects the output of Running Alpha’s Market Intelligence. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This podcast interview focuses on product strategy principles that, if applied, have the power to deliver transformative innovation with triple digit ROI. My guest is Richard Boyd, CEO at Tanjo.AI Over the last twenty-six years Richard has led or helped create some of the most innovative game technology companies in the industry. He has served as a game technology consultant for a wide variety of industries including energy, healthcare, education and motion pictures. At Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin he created and led a group of innovative engineers and designers across all mission areas called Virtual World Labs. Richard joined Lockheed Martin in 2007 with the acquisition of 3Dsolve, a North Carolina-based computer game technology firm where he was founder and CEO. Prior to that, Richard was CEO of 3dVillage.com, which was acquired in 2001. 3dVillage was a spin out of Virtus Corporation, where he served for a decade on the executive management team that created several pioneering computer gaming companies including Red Storm Entertainment, with author Tom Clancy; iRock Entertainment with Ozzy Osbourne; and Timeline Computer Entertainment, with author Michael Crichton. Today he’s the CEO of Tanjo.AI, whose mantra is “improving businesses, industries, and people’s lives by bringing machine learning and automation to the world.” This triggered me, hence I invited Richard to my podcast. We discuss how a pragmatic approach to solve every day problems can result in transformative impact. We, too, often don’t realize the solution is right in front of our eyes, and the technology is already there to solve it. Or, as William Gibson once quoted: “The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.” Here are some of his quotes: “The sort of thing that drives me is bringing technologies to bear on problems to solve them in ways that humans alone cannot. it's looking at whatever activity you're engaged in, and trying to figure out, what should humans be doing with our effort and our attention? And what should we be turning over to machines? The answer to that question changes almost every year, almost every month now, Organizations who understand that, and figure that out, will prevail. And those who don't, not only won't be competitive anymore, but they'll appear to be handicapped very soon. If you can do something one time and have it not only pay 10x return on investment, but have that return be an annuity... something you're going to get every single year... the earlier you do that, the more effective and competitive you're going to be. That's why everyone should be waking up and looking at this carefully. You cannot afford not to look at machine learning” By listening to this podcast you will learn three things:

The key to machine learning innovation is to not overthink or over reach. Don’t paralyze yourself with endless research with uncertain outcomes, but instead be pragmatic. Look for proven applications with low risk -the low hanging fruit problems unique to your industry, that have a certain outcome, can be applied immediately, and scale radically i.e. can bring a lot of positive impact to many people very quickly

Every organization has big data today. But it is a big leap from big data to information (data that has been organized) and an even bigger leap from information to Intelligence (information that has been computed so humans can act upon it) Machine learning is uniquely designed to help your organization make these leaps.

The next century is about simulation. So, those who become adept at harnessing data intelligence to predict the future and be prepared for it, those companies will prevail.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to 10x the impact financial auditors can make, and my guest is Robin Grosset, CTO at MindBridge Ai. Robin has a track record as an entrepreneur having worked in and founded successful software startups. This resulted in him joining IBM in 2008 through the acquisition of Cognos, where he was appointed IBM Distinguished Engineer. He has over 20 years commercial experience in the field of Business Analytics. He was formerly the technical lead and chief architect for Watson Analytics, a ground breaking cognitive analytics system. Robin holds many patents in the areas of analytics, data processing and security. Today he leads the development of the next generation MindBridge Ai Auditor that helps professionals detect and prevent financial anomalies, including fraud. He’s created a vision around Human Centric AI, and shared that vision recently at TEDxOttawa. This triggered me, hence I invited Robin to my podcast. We explore the challenges in the financial auditing practice, and how, even after decades of automation, much of the practice is still very manual and sample based, leaving huge opportunities for fraud. Beyond that we discuss why a human/machine approach will always provide the optimal combination to create exponential impact. Here are some of his quotes: T “The existing ways that people were analyzing or auditing financial transactions were inadequate. So typically they would use rules based systems to do this. With the rules based system, you're only going to catch something, you're going to find something that you anticipate So, you have to imagine the circumstance to find the rule and then it will work it will never find anything you don't anticipate. We think it's a significant problem in the world. There's a group called the ACFE, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and they estimate the amount of fraud, misconduct, irregularities that are caught each year. They say that that's about $200 billion a year. But they also estimate the amount we don't find. So, these are not detected by any method we have today. And that amount is about somewhere north of $3 trillion per year. So, if you put that number in perspective, that's a little under $500 for every person on the planet”

During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why human-centric AI is the key to take the impact and insight of virtually any solution to a different level

How to overcome inertia for AI driven innovation, especially in an industry that’s sceptical by design

That to truly disrupt an industry you need to avoid looking at the conventions and existing standards

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around competitive and market intelligence, and my guest is Jonah Lopin, Co-founder and CEO of Crayon, a market intelligence software company based in Boston. Jonah started his career as a strategy & operations Consultant at Deloitte where he led projects for Fortune 500 clients in the Manufacturing, Consumer Business and Healthcare industries. After that he worked at eBay and UNICEF. In 2007 he joined Hubspot as the 6th employee, and served as Vice President of Customer Operations as they grew from 0 to 50M$. In 2012 he co-founded M80 Labs Inc, and from there he co-founded Crayon to solve the problem virtually any business suffers from: a lack of competitive and market intelligence. This triggered me, hence I invited Jonah to my podcast. We explore the challenges many organizations face in making informed decisions based on market intelligence that’s often incomplete, dated or completely absent. We also review the flaws in the business software industry in providing solutions to the wrong problem. Here are some of his quotes: “The belief behind the business where we believe strongly is that businesses should be as good at understanding and acting on everything happening outside the four walls of the business as they are at understanding and acting on all of their internal data When it comes to these, like fundamental questions about your market, and your competitive set, and your brand, and your customers, and what's happening outside the four walls, the business, many companies just have never had a good way to get insights there. Marketing's not about arts and crafts anymore. And it's about data and science. And that was really true. But we never helped our customers apply that data driven execution to what was happening outside the four walls of the business. And so, you know, we would help our customers generate tons of sales leads, but we never helped our customers figure out how do you close those.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

That the opportunities to create new categories are for grabs, as long as you ask the right questions

That too build a credible software business you need to move far beyond ‘the Shiny Object’ syndrome and solve the ‘complete problem’.

How persistence to stay laser focused, stay in the fight, and making progress each and every day will be paid with remarkable results

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This podcast interview focuses on the product innovation that has the power to transform the advertising industry and the way marketers can make a remarkable impact, and my guest is Peyman Nilforoush. Peyman is the CEO and CoFounder of inPowered, which is the AI-driven content amplification platform of choice for the world’s largest brands. inPowered has been named the 2018 OMMA awards finalist for Artificial Intelligence and Native Advertising, the best content amplification platform by Digiday and one of the top tech marketing companies to watch by VentureBeat. Peyman along with his brother Pirouz previously founded NetShelter in 1999, which became the world’s largest technology property on the web before being acquired by Ziff Davis in 2013.The company’s fast growth earned numerous distinctions in the Inc 500|1000, Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Profit 100 and the San Francisco Business Times Fast 100. He’s a visionary tech and media entrepreneur who has been a featured TV guest on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo, BNN and quoted regularly in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and was named to the 2010 Who’s Who in Business Publishing by BtoBOnline’s Media Business Magazine. He was also a recipient of Profit 100’s Young Entrepreneur Award for being the youngest CEO on the Profit 100 list of fastest growing companies in 2009. The claim on the InPowered website states this: “We help brands discover and amplify credible, trusted content so that they can contribute to a more informed marketplace.” This triggered me, hence I invited Peyman to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the advertising industry, and how this is resulting in single-sided benefits for only the advertising platforms. We then dive into an approach that’s not only transforms the way we’ll advertise in the future, but also the way we have to step-up our marketing game in general. Here are some of his quotes: What we saw in the journey leading up to imPowered was essentially interruptive advertising not working. You're looking at point 0.05 percent, not 0.5 percent, not 5%. 0.05 percent click through rate on a banner ad on average. And that's after using tons of technology and targeting and everything that you can imagine. This is not about technology. This is not about targeting, it's not about audience or any of that. It's really about the form, which is when you're interrupting somebody, they simply don’t want to engage. They simply tune out. There's got to be a way to do this in a much more consumer friendly way. In a way that it actually adds value to the consumer. So, what if, instead of putting banner out and interrupt their experience, we actually turned articles reviews, blog posts, any kind of contents, into an ad, and we got them to read that content? I did it as an experiment and ended up delivering a 65% increase in consideration. it just blew every single advertising they had ever done. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

Why, If you want to deliver real impact you’d better do away with the conventional wisdom, and approach the problem from the opposite direction

That to truly disrupt a market you not only need to have excellent product, but also a revolutionary business model. Shifting from consumption to outcome based charging for example

How it’s not only possible to deliver remarkable impact with a solution, but also create many new jobs.

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This podcast interview focuses on the impact of product innovation on our society and in particular our changing role in that society, and my guest is Brett Frischmann, author of the book Reengineering Humanity, which was recently selected by The Guardian as one of the Best Books of 2018. Brett is the Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics, at Villanova University. In this role, he promotes cross-campus research, programming, and collaboration; fosters high-visibility academic pursuits at the national and international levels; and positions Villanova as a thought leader and innovator at the intersection of law, business and economics. Brett’s work has appeared in leading scholarly publications, including Columbia Law Review, Journal of Institutional Economics, and Review of Law and Economics. His research spans various disciplines and topics: infrastructure, knowledge commons, and techno-social engineering of humans (i.e. the relationships between the techno-social world and humanity). This is what the scope of his latest book Reengineering Humanity is all about. And that triggered me, hence I invited Brett to my podcast. We explore the evolving impact of product innovation and technology and the influence this has on us in our day to day professional life. We discuss examples of how we engineer ourselves, and how we are engineered by others. In particularly the latter can become a risk to all of us. Therefore we should ensure that the focus shifts to making humans better and more valuable, rather than using smart technology to actually make the user dumber. Here are some of his quotes: “Humans have always developed tools and technologies. They often augment who we are, enable us to grow, develop, pursue our passions, and develop capabilities. The big idea is that we're on a slippery slope path toward a world in which more and more of our lives, of who we are and who we can be as individuals and collectively is managed and governed by supposedly smart techno‑social systems. The idea that one of the most important constitutional questions in a lower case C sense for us to be considering in the 21st century is how are we going to sustain our freedom to be off? To be free from the engineered influence of others. We're building the world for our children, for future generations. Sometimes, we don't stop to think about whether we're happy about the world we're building and why we're building it a certain way as opposed to another way.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

That we need to be very considerate about the type of solutions we’re building and why we’re building them in a certain way. Humanity’s techno-social dilemma is already large enough.

Why the real value of the technology potential is in Human Augmentation – i.e. becoming better – but only if that’s in the light of who we want to be, how we can remain to have choices and be different.

That we should challenge ourselves whenever we use the word ‘smart’ in relation to our product innovation and solutions – How is it smarter? What benefits does it give, and to whom? Too often it’s the user that’s made dumber….

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to dramatically increase the productivity of sales people, and my guest is Mike Schneider, CEO and co-founder of First, a data science company that helps real estate agents win more business by focusing their time on the right relationships across their network. Prior to starting First, Mike worked with a private equity firm working on pipeline deals and doing financial and market due diligence. It’s from working in this space that got Mike fascinated with the world of AI and Machine learning – which is exactly why he left the VC world, to start First. Their claim “Fundamentally changing how service providers find their next customer”, triggered me, hence I invited Mike to my podcast. We explore what’s required to differentiate in the world of Real Estate, and the reasons why top agents are missing two third of the deals from people they already know. From here we discuss what’s required to transform the impact agents can make and how the combo of intelligence augmentation and human connection make an unbeatable combination. Here are some of his quotes: “I became fascinated by this combination of vertically targeted software and machine learning platforms that could, you know, power previously unimaginable products. The big idea here is that in this industry, an industry where most business over 75% of business comes through relational connection, we actually have the opportunity to target people's outreach and their time. So when you're in a service business where you are, what I would call an undifferentiated service provider, your connections matter and your time is the most limited thing in terms of generating business. And so, the big idea is that we actually know who is most likely to sell. Thanks to a lot of the models we've built. We also know that you, as a service provider, as a real estate agent, have an incredibly valuable asset in your network. And we know how likely those people are to work with you based on their relationship with you. And so the combination of those two things means we can make your time 10 times more productive in terms of who you should be talking to today.”

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That in order to formulate your V1 version it’s critical to do deep customer discovery, thereby looking beyond the known conventions and patterns. It’s not so much about what’s predictable, but more about what’s unpredictable

Why providing all the answers to the problem with your product is often only half the solution; changing behavior is the other half – that’s where the real impact is made

That creating a compelling vision is key to stay focused, stay on track and deliver impact – so much that it could lead to products so valuable that your customers don’t want to talk to anyone about it because it has become the secret to their success.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to solve the challenge of financial crime, and my guest is Vishal Marria, CEO of Quantexa Vishal is a globally recognised leader in solving financial crime and surveillance challenges. He is accomplished at building teams and helping clients to use innovative data analytics for their financial crime challenges. He served as Executive Director at EY, he led major programs at international banks including global Anti Financial Crime technology strategy, data-driven remediation and end to end reviews of strategy and policy. He was instrumental in directing and building the Detica NetReveal business globally. In 2016, he founded Quantexa to solve some of the biggest challenges in financial crime, customer insight and data analytics. His goal is to enable organizations to rethink the way they understand their customers using a wider context. This inspired me, hence I invited Vishal to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge of financial crime, and how addressing and solving exactly that challenge can result in insights that can actually result in top-line gains.

Here are some of his quotes: “One of the most growing challenges I continually heard from clients was, you know, we've, we've got all of this data rubbish, Inherently there are challenges within that data around truly understanding a customer and the underlying trends, transactions, relationships. I want the world to think of context, just like human behavior, any decision we make in our brain we are building with context So, the big idea is about building context and being able to do it real time dynamically. We have to combine human intelligence with artificial intelligence. Because if you look at your credit risk officer, that credit risk officer has so much information and trends in his or her head that the machine will never know. So, we need to get to is allowing the data to drive any abnormal predictive nature. But combining that with the years of experience that the human has.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

Why contextual insight is the essential ingredient to make powerful decisions – not only by top leaders, but by anyone in the business

How the biggest impact is created by combining the experience of domain experts with power of AI

Why taking an open eco-system approach with any solution will bring value greater than the sum of its components.

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This podcast interview focuses on the future of work and the increasingly important role AI plays in our business life. My guest is Alexandra Levit, Author of the book Humanity Works – Merging technology and people for the workforce of the future. Alexandra is an American writer, consultant, speaker, workplace expert and futurist. She has written six career advice books and was formerly a nationally syndicated career columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In the last several years, she has conducted proprietary research on the future of work, technology adoption, the millennial generation, gender differences and bias, and the skills gap. In 2017, she became a partner at organizational development firm PeopleResults. Her goal is to prepare organizations and their employees to be competitive and marketable in the future business world. This triggered me, hence I invited Alexandra to my podcast. We explore how the workplace is changing with the future of work, and how this is reshaping our role as business professionals, and what we, people, need to do now in order to create a future in which we can play an even more valuable role. Here are some of his quotes: We're looking at there is the rise of what I call human machine of hybrid teams. I do think everyone needs to be prepared, though, that humans will need to work seamlessly with machines. The critical role that we're going to play is that there's no replacing human beings when it comes to certain traits, like interpersonal sensitivity, and empathy and judgment, and intuition and creativity So what humans need to be doing is looking for ways to add that value in any job that you have, and see the writing on the wall, not bury your head in the sand with respect to what aspects are legitimately going to be automated and look to add value in different ways. My fear is not that people lose their jobs, as I said, my fears that people will not be able to adapt to the new types of roles that they're, they're going to have. How can I continue to add value. And this is a skill set, that's kind of rare, and everybody needs to develop. I think the passive attitude is really destructive. We want to be active and recognize the future is not something that happens to us. It's something that we create.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That most value will be created once humans and machines start working as hybrid teams

Why every single one of us has to act now to improve our human relationship skills

And why beyond that we have to master the way we do personal branding and self-marketing.

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This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the education sector and my guest is Federico Frattini. Federico is a Full Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Honorary Researcher at the Lancaster University Management School (UK). His research area is innovation and technology management. On these topics, he has written more than 200 books and papers published in conference proceedings and leading international journals such as Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Academy of Management Perspectives, California Management Review, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and many others. In 2013, he was nominated among the top 50 authors of innovation and technology management worldwide by IAMOT, the International Association for Management of Technology. In my hunt for compelling stories for my podcast I stumbled upon an article regarding the launch of Flexa, an AI powered personalized continuous learning platform that was developed under the leadership of Federico. This triggered me, hence invited him to my podcast. During our interview we explore the changes in the market place, and how this is putting more and more pressure on the education system and the students they serve. The goal should not be just to successfully graduate, but to actually be employable after you graduate. This changes the requirement 180 degrees on how students, employers and university’s communicate and collaborate together. Here are some of his quotes: “FLEXA is many things, actually. We can call it a personalized continuous learning platform which is designed for our students. The basic idea is to give our students exactly the knowledge they need to achieve their career goals faster and to make them more employable. It's something that represents a big change in the traditional business model of a business school or of a university. We're not doing that by using only our knowledge, our courses, our programs, but integrating into FLEXA contents, expertise, events coming from any angle in the world. Through FLEXA, we will bring to our student exactly the piece of knowledge they need, when they need it to achieve their career goals fastest. FLEXA exemplifies our view as a school about what is the real value of artificial intelligence, which is not, of course, substituting human knowledge but is amplifying the abilities of people.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

Why it’s so key to take an outside-in approach to arrive at solutions that have transformative impact.

That the only way to keep up with the pace of change is radically shorten connections and eliminate noise

How it’s possible to drive radical innovation in sectors that are known for their bureaucracy and barriers to making progress.

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The theme of this podcast is product innovation, and in particular how the combination of AI and people can create value beyond the sum of its components. My guest on this week’ podcast is Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous.AI Louis is a technologist, prolific inventor, entrepreneur, and writer. He attended Stanford University, where he earned his bachelors, masters, and PhD degrees. His doctoral work focused on robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, and human-computer interaction, and resulted in the Virtual fixtures system for the U.S. Air Force, the first immersive Augmented Reality system ever built. In 2014, he founded Unanimous A.I., an artificial intelligence company that enables human groups to amplify their collective brainpower by forming real-time "hive minds" modeled after natural swarms. Unanimous AI became well known in 2016 when its Artificial Swarm Intelligence technology (Swarm AI) made a series of accurate predictions about world events, including predicting the Academy Awards, the Kentucky Derby, the Super Bowl, and the rise of Donald Trump. This triggered me, hence I invited Louis to my podcast. We explore product innovation concept of swarm intelligence, and how this fills an important gap in the evolution of AI. Here are some of his quotes: “We amplify the intelligence of human groups by connecting people together in real time, using AI algorithms to enable them to make more accurate forecasts, more precise predictions, better assessments, judgments and decisions. We use AI to turn network groups of people into artificial experts that can act as a superintelligence. There's actually a scientific name for that, called Swarm Intelligence. In nature, Swarm Intelligence is the reason why birds flock, fish school, and bees swarm. The inspiration for me was to say, "Well, if birds, and bees, and fish can get smarter together, why can't people do it?" The results that we started getting even early on were remarkable, that we could take a group of people and make them so much more accurate by connecting them together.” By listening to this podcast, you will learn three things:

How big business problems can be solved instantly by leveraging the knowledge and wisdom of groups of people in combination with AI

Why we’ve underutilized the power of collaboration up to now, and how swarm intelligence takes it to the next level

That we’re just scratching the surface with regards to how we can amplify human abilities – a mega opportunity for everyone.

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In this podcast I’ll focus on product innovation in the Higher Education space and my guest is Ray Blackwood, Vice President of Product Management at Campus Management Corp Ray is a futurist who is passionate about technology, business intelligence and leadership. He’s in particular passionate about solving problems in higher education through technology. As he puts it on his LinkedIn profile: “I invent solutions that run colleges”. Ray received his undergraduate degrees from the University of Advancing Technology in Multimedia and Digital Animation and Production and his Master In Business Administration and Technology Management from the University of Phoenix. In my hunt for compelling stories about the value we can unlock when technology and people blend in the right way, I stumbled upon Campus Management’s new product: Occupation Insight. It’s promise: “How institutions can better align academic programs and student skills with industry needs”. This triggered me, hence I invited Ray to my podcast. We explore the big changes in the education space, where the focus is now shifting from graduation to employability as the ultimate outcome. We discuss product innovation approaches on how technology can play a meaningful role to help students stay on the optimal path to achieve their aspirations in a world where teachers are a scarce resource. Here are some of his quotes: “It's hard for students to choose the right thing or we have so much advisement to coach the student. That it can be overwhelming I wanted to know what I was going to learn in a class more than what classes I needed to take. How cool would it be if I was a student, and I was sitting there and I just wasn't being told what to take because I needed a certain number of credit, but I could actually see what skills am I going to learn and what careers could I be interested in while I'm in school and be thinking about that." Technology is changing so rapidly. What you're going to learn in the classroom your freshman year might even be irrelevant by the time you graduate. The skill that technologists need to learn is not the technology itself, but it's how to learn. It's how to solve problems and how to think.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

Why the challenge is not to solve the problem at hand, but to prevent it all together

How you can create larger impact and circumvent scarcity by changing behavior – and one thing to do that is to inspire curiosity.

What mindset you should create as a business software vendor to transform and accelerate your success.

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The focus on this weeks’ podcast is product innovation in the area of recruitment, and my guest is Ashutosh Garg, CEO of Eightfold.ai – a company that has the idea and potential to transform the way we’ll look at recruitment forever. Eightfold has recently been designated by Gartner as a cool vendor for human capital management in Talent Acquisition. This is what happens if you build your company around a strong vision – remarkable things will happen. Ashutosh understands this like no one else. He is a true guru of all things AI, with 10 years of information retrieval, machine learning and search experience. Previously, he was Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of BloomReach. Prior to that, he was at IBM research. He is also a prolific publisher/inventor, with a book on machine learning, 30+ papers, and 50+ patents. Ashutosh holds a Bachelor of Tech from IIT-Delhi and a PhD from University of Illinois UC. He has won numerous awards, including best thesis award at IIT Delhi, IBM Fellowship and outstanding researcher award at UIUC. What triggered me to invite Ashutosh was the phrase on their website: “Uncovering the Future Potential of Talent”. The company was founded around the believe employment is the backbone of our society and everyone deserves the right job. What Ashutosh and his team realized is that up to today you get the job based on who you might know and not what you are capable of doing. Eightfold is solving this problem and thereby changing the paradigm by intelligently augmenting the recruiter as well as the applicant. Here are some of his quotes “when people are looking for a job, they are not switching the job to do the same thing they have been doing. But they want to do something more, something different, they want to grow in their career. And through AI, what we can do today is we can predict what someone is likely to do next in their career. This helps us understand who will be a good fit for this role in which organization. And then we connect people to those opportunities. So, we've changed the paradigm: Instead of people applying for a job we go and recommend them: John and Lisa, these are the three jobs in our company that our most relevant to you. If you're only looking to hire people, based on what they have done, not what they are capable of doing? Losing value proposition. Everyone deserves the opportunity and we want to enable that in people.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

That a lot of value potential in any solution is locked up because we neglect to connect the dots between various data points.

How you can change the paradigm with your solution by doing the opposite of the norm

Why business could run a lot better if we take the bias out of decision making.

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This focus of this weeks´ podcast is product strategy, and in particular what we can do to not only make jobs more productive, but also more enjoyable. I discuss this with my guest Olaf Groth. He’s is a professor, adviser and executive for the evolving global innovation economy with 20 years of experience in corporations, consulting firms and academia. He has helped build new ventures and change management initiatives for employers and clients in energy, technology, telecommunications, aerospace and transportation sectors in 30+ countries. The topic of his book triggered me, hence I invited Olaf to my podcast. Here are some of his quotes: “We believe that AI is here to stay, and that we as human beings, and certainly we, as business decision makers need to get used to what we call symbiotic intelligence. So symbiotic intelligence between humans and machines. We have an opportunity here to shape these jobs such that they are not more not just more productive, but also much more enjoyable We should get engaged and shape it and not over regulate too early, but rather say: in a perfect world, what would that world look like? And what do we need to do to get there. What the work is that is being done, where the value is being added, and then try to understand where humans and machines could collaborate much more elegantly, and in a much more integrated fashion. We will find out as humans, that there is so much more fun to be had, once we get used to this transition, right? The real fun is when we, as humans, see images of what we want evolving, emerging from the current picture.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

Why a design goal for solution should not just be increased productivity, but more importantly how it shapes a more enjoyable work experience.

That to create the solutions of the future you should anticipate the job profiles of the future

Why choosing augmentation over automation will give you golden opportunities to deliver not only unique value for your customers, but also the highest adoption rates.

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The guest on this weeks podcast is Dr. Levanon, Chief Science Officer at Beyond Verbal, and we discuss the product innovation that´s going on in the area of voice recognition. Dr. Levanon has multiple degrees in Physics, Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research from the Hebrew University and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. This multi-disciplinary background is the fuel behind various breakthroughs in the field of Emotions Analytics. At Beyond Verbal he’s responsible for the core research team and its scientific discoveries. In that role they developed technology that can not only understand the clicks, typed texts, speech or touch, but also how they feel and what they mean. I got triggered by the phrase on their website “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”, hence I invited Dr. Levanon to my podcast. I really wanted to know how this technology can intelligently augment people in various industries to deliver remarkable impact. As such we discuss how voice analysis can be used to impact one’s health and wellbeing, but also how the same technology can for example help marketers improve the relationship with customers by obtaining a deeper understanding what they really mean. Here are some of his quotes: The idea is the voice is telling us a lot about our self. We have recognized until now many mental problems and diseases through the voice. Now I understand that through the voice I can recognize your wellbeing. Our wellbeing can be recognized through the health status, but also through the emotional status. Therefore, the idea was, "How shall we improve your wellbeing, to understanding both sides of you?" it's not only that, how I can improve the relationship between a company and its clients, or its employees, We can look at every inch of the organization as a group of people in what gets the results, the achievements, is the spirit, the group spirit. When somebody is fighting the other, the results will be very problematic. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

How to add new levels of differentiation to your company/solution: emotions drive everything we do, yet voice-driven emotions analytics remains the most important, unexplored interface today.

How, by applying voice analytics, you could change the performance of any role.

Why analyzing voice could have a large impact on society (and thus your customers) because of its ability to solve the problem of skills shortage.

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This podcast is focused on product innovation in the water infrastructure sector, and my guest this week is Doug Hatler, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Fracta. Beyond sales and marketing Doug brings many years of experience as a management consultant, environmental regulatory specialist, and as a civil/environmental engineer. He is a published industry expert and featured speaker on the Environment, Sustainability, Compliance and Risk. He earned a Bacherlor’s Degree in Environmental Science and an MBA from Rutgers University. He earned an Master’s Degree in Environmental Engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. I got intrigued by the headline on Fracta’s website: Bringing Artificial Intelligence to infrastructure to solve a $1 trillion problem”. This is why invited Doug to my podcast. We explore the growing issue of aging water infrastructure and why a conventional approach is not going help. We discuss how technology such as AI is used to augment engineers, and how that human/machine combination brings exponential impact by preventing the waste of precious time, money, and water. Here are a couple of quotes from him: We are looking to digitally transform and revolutionize how the water industry is looking at water mains, looking at condition assessments. Any asset is designed to work a number of years and then you may get some extra time out of it, but eventually, it has to be replaced. That's what happening now. The rough numbers are a million dollars a mile to replace a mile of pipe, so you're looking at about a trillion dollars. Some cities are ahead of it, some cities are behind. On average, most cities are somewhere between a quarter to a half a percent, maybe six tenths of a percent so they're pushing to get up. The struggle they have is we have a very, very wide socioeconomic and demographic spectrum. Anything you going to do is going to put pressure on the ratepayers to pay higher rates We're at a point where we can't shy away from it. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

That you should always keep challenging your approach – your initial idea might be the most obvious, but looking at the desired outcome in different ways might give you better routes to success – if so, be ready to pivot.

Why it is important to always keep looking around you for alternative market you could deliver value – there might one that’s easier to enter and own right in front of you

How one of the largest roadblock to get a solution market can be inertia - especially in industries that have been working in a similar way for decades

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This podcast is about product strategy and my guest on the podcast is Nadia Muller, Founder and CEO or iThrive, a personal coach on your smartphone that helps you to transform counterproductive habits on order to thrive. It’s a common fact healthy and happy employees are generally more productive, but many people still experience stress and burnout issues. This is what iThrive is designed to transform, and doing so it promises to increase productivity at work with 400% This triggered me, hence I invited Nadia to my podcast. We explore what it means to make people thrive and how technology can play a fundamental role in that transformation. We thereby discuss what is required to win the hearts of the user by creating a solution they trust and actually want to use on a day to day basis. Here are some of her quotes: Thriving means that people are strong, they're successful, they're healthy, they're imbalanced The idea is to help people to move towards secure attachment, towards that's thriving, towards the balance. When you look at longitudinal studies that have been studying people for a long time seeing how they're changing their behavior, it is this that actually only 10 percent of the time we succeed on our own. People that were able to succeed they had either coach or a supportive partner or they had a mentor or something else that was really strong supporting figure in their life. That's basically what we are aiming to do with Jean and doing it on a really low entry barrier ways. Everywhere available, 24/7, it doesn't cost much when an employee is happy, less sick the productivity goes up. It has a positive effect on the entire team which again inspires higher productivity is on you. It's just amazing what happens in an organization when you have thriving people. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things

That a strong way to grow adoption of your solutions is to understand what makes the user tick – what motivates them.

How real value can be created by not just focusing on getting things fixed, but to actually focus on changing the underlying behaviors that cause the issue in the first place

That your business gets really convincing for a customer when you’re able to convince them about the upside your solution will bring them beyond the notion of just cost reduction

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How Marketeers can deliver remarkable impact through Product Innovation with AI An interview with Dan Mallin, co-founder and CEO of Equals3 This interview focuses on the product innovation opportunity for the marketing community, and my guest on the podcast is Dan Mallin, co-founder and CEO of Equals3. For nearly 20 years, he has established a solid track record in creating, growing and transforming businesses, ranging from technology services, sales, marketing and business development. Dan has twice been recognized as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, he is a finalist for the MHTA Tekne award and he has been recognized by the Business Journal as one of 40 Under 40. On my hunt for compelling stories that demonstrate the value we can create when technology augments the unique strength of people I stumbled up Equals3 – and as the name reveals – their mantra is: Better than the individual and better than the machine, are the two together. You + Lucy = 3 And this intrigued me, hence invited Dan to my podcast. During our interview we explore the day to day challenges of CMOs and marketeers with regards to analysing and reporting on market data to drive segmentation and positioning decisions and how this can be addressed with product innovation. We discuss how technology such as AI can help to not only speed up this process exponentially, but actually help to take outcomes to complete new levels of impact by revealing new insights, enabling marketeers to ask different and better questions, lowering Cost Per Action (CPA) and even guiding them communicate more clearly. That’s pure competitive advantage. Here are some of Dan’s quotes: “Equals3 is all about augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence in the concept of 1+1=3 or you+Lucy=3. Lucy makes you better than she would be alone and better than you would be alone Lucy is an answer engine, not a search engine It gives access to places in the corporation where data exists. If I have to spend a hundred, two hundred hours doing something to get the analysis that I need to get to, and that can be multiple people but the equivalent of that, or if I can do it in four hours or five minutes, what is that speed worth to the organization? If your competition is doing it and you're not, then they'll be able to move faster, market faster, may react to whatever you're doing, understand things and deliver in a superior way.” By listening to this podcast, you will learn three things:

How exponential value can be created by going beyond ‘just’ automation and embrace intelligence augmentation for any use case

Why the way to explore innovation opportunities is not about optimizing the process as such, but to find ways to eliminate the process all together to shift the focus to what really matters

And why investing in machine learning is not about value creation today, but even more about value creation tomorrow by using all new insights to just get better and better

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The focus of this podcast is product innovation and my guest is Rob Bromage, CEO of IntelliHR. Rob is the founder and CEO of intelliHR – an Australian HR technology business developing and marketing a next-generation people management Platform which is stocklisted on the ASX index. Before he became the CEO of IntelliHR he ran APRG - a Human Capital Management Consulting organization. He also founded Resource Partners – an investment organisation for the incubation and development of Intellectual Property in the Human Resources Sector. As you can guess his passion is people, performance and enabling technologies. Rob believes people are an organisations greatest asset and there is a great opportunity for every business to leverage this valuable and powerful driver for economic success. This triggered me, hence I invited Rob to my podcast. We explore the secrets of driving performance through people in order to become a high-performance organization. We dive into the role of disruptive technologies such as predictive analytics and natural language processing, and how these tools can raise performance and engagement. Here are some of Rob’s quotes: I think fundamentally, a lot of leaders don't necessarily have the information or the tools that they need to look after their staff. I think a lot of businesses exactly that, they think that the way we get performance is from top down, but it's really about empowering people bottom up. if you focus on connecting staff with their leaders and improving their conversations, really creating meaningful conversations and supporting them to be aligned around expectations, then you're just going to naturally create a circle of understanding HR, in my opinion, is the best place, function, role in any organization to impact performance They really should be involved in connecting the customer strategy with the people's strategy or the people strategy with the customer strategy. If they're spending their time on administrative or compliance tasks, they are wasted asset in my opinion. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

How old traditional processes (such as for example applicant tracking) can be disrupted by re-imagining it with the concepts and technologies from other processes around us.

Why HR and People management is not about software, but about creating meaningful outcomes that change behaviour and impact on culture

That in order to drive significant increase in performance and people engagement, a core design goal should be to make solutions addictive.

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My guest on this weeks podcast is Danny Saksenberg, Co-founder / CEO Emerge He started his career as an actuary at Deloitte and then started to immerse himself into the world of machine learning and AI. He was part of the team at Jemstep.com to build one of the first and leading robo-advisors for the Financial Services industry. In 2012 he founded Emerge together with Laurence Rau. Emerge helps companies to make money from operations by making them super-efficient and improving customer experience. To accomplish this Emerge works in partnership with the world’s largest and most trusted consulting companies, software giants and directly with corporates to develop constantly-learning, operational solutions to valuable and consequential problems. He refers to himself as passionate about thinking differently and unlocking potential. In his words “I am always looking for more problems” This triggered me, hence I invited Danny to my podcast We explore what’s required for AI and Machine Learning to reach their full potential in solutions; Data is just a part of that puzzle. We review the difference in impact between solutions that improve efficiency and solutions that improve experience. And last but not least we address how the outcomes of AI will reveal new insights, help transform thinking inside organizations, and in turn inspire the creation of new processes and procedures. Here are some of his quotes: “people are spending a lot of time focusing on interesting problems and not so much on valuable problems. we genuinely believe that the solutions to the world's biggest problems are in data and there aren't enough people tackling that properly What gets people excited is that you identify a problem that is hurting their business or an opportunity and you develop a solution that takes advantage of that. What we're finding is that we're able to get machines to do things that far exceed what humans can do. But where humans become much more useful is where we can get them to be strategic in terms of working out where they would like the machines to be deployed We're getting businesses starting to ask more of the right questions. Identify the bottlenecks in their business and focus on that. I think ultimately it boils down to what can you do to serve the public better? The more value you add to them or to more people, the better your business will do.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

That to solve the world’s biggest problems and build the most impactful solutions for the future we need to develop multi-disciplinary people who blend expertise in AI and business.

Why it’s critical to view your customers as partners (not as clients) in order to create meaningful and lasting impact

How by building solutions that go beyond ‘just insight’, but instead also actively help ‘solve’ the problem by changing behaviour, you can grow value exponentially.

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My guest on the podcast is Paul Teshima, CEO and Co-founder of Nudge.AI He is the CEO and Co-founder of Nudge.ai, a relationship intelligence platform that augments sales professionals around the world to access new accounts, analyze deal risk, and measure account health. He is a successful technology executive who has run Services, Customer Success, Account Management, Support and Product Management teams. Earlier in his career, Paul was part of Eloqua’s executive team, and helped lead the company from $0 to over $100 million in revenue, then through IPO and a successful acquisition by Oracle. The big idea behind Nudge is ‘Your Network is Your Net Worth’. That triggered me, hence I invited Paul to my podcast. During our interview we explore how technology such as AI can play a significant role to increase the impact sale people can make by intelligently augmenting them, and how it can augment sales management by making CRM data smarter to optimize forecast predictions and their ability to coach their team. Last but not least, we address why today’s generation CRM tools are inadequate especially around its core principle, the ‘R’ of Relationship. Here are some of his quotes: The big idea is that your network is your net worth If you're going to be successful in sales moving forward, you have to value relationships. You have to build them and grow them over time. You have to use your network as a way to differentiate yourself against other sellers going for the same business Nudge, fundamentally, calculates the strength of relationships that you have we can be smart about the things we recommend you do on a daybyday basis. we take that layer of what we call relationship intelligence. Who knows who and how well. The system helps them bring those two data points together so you get the best use of your company's network to get you into deals. We're seeing companies generate hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of pipeline very quickly because of that

During this interview, you will learn three things:

How big impact can be created by rethinking business software’s ability to change behaviour of users

Why it’s key to not only understand the breath of our networks, but more importantly the strength of each connection within it.

That’s success is not so much about the problem you solve, but more about the size of the problem you solve. If you want to create big impact, tackle a big problem.

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My guest on the podcast is Toby Allen, founder of Jobs in XR. He’s a hololens producer at Microsoft, the founder, and CEO of TACON, a technology management consultancy and the founder of Jobs in XR, the first and only jobs portal for all digital realities. I got in touch with Toby via a comment on one of my earlier podcasts with Dr. Terence Tse. Being an innovative product expert that brings ideas to life using of Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality – he teased us with the potential of bringing Hololens and AI together to deliver remarkable impact That triggered me, hence I invited Toby to my podcast. We explore the benefits of an increasing hands-free world, how the combination of new technology platforms such as block-chain, AI and augmented reality have the potential of transforming complete industries, and how we should use that opportunity to think big to create new solutions that are both fun to use, and remarkable in their impact. Here are some of Toby’s quotes "There are three key things I'm fundamentally excited by. First of all is mixed reality. I think the ability to visualize your worlds in a hands-free capacity, augment it with holograms, and information and view that information in a new way is absolutely incredible. To get that, there's a real drive to understand AI and the power of information that you can have. There's also just blockchain is a very nice interesting way of creating a trust and an authenticity in the data. Those three are the perfect combination. There's going to be a very interesting shift in the industry and in professional business as to how those three key technologies are going to integrate within businesses That could lead to results that we've never seen before." During this interview, you will learn three things:

Why the current generation of solutions is still distracting us too way much – and how by avoiding this distraction we could literally save lives

How blending new technologies can help us in much smarter ways to actually avoid errors, problems, and waste

What opportunity we can create if we start using technology to change behaviors and impact by augmenting people in contextually relevant ways.

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My guest on the podcast is Stephen Browning, Interim Challenge Director Next Generation Services at Innovate UK He holds an MBA from Imperial College and a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Engineering. He spent nearly 20 years working for Philips Semiconductors and NXP where he held various software engineering, project management and business management roles. During this time, he formed close collaborations between customers and supplier to deliver open R&D programmes. Today he’s is leading the Next Generation Services programme as part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. This programme is aimed at supporting the transformation of the UK’s Accountancy, Insurance and Legal Services sectors by the responsible use of AI and data. This inspired me, hence I invited Stephen to my podcast. We explore the approach and urgency to transform the 3 very traditional industries. We address the opportunity this creates and why it’s required to take a broader perspective than simply ‘technology’. Here are some of Stephen’s quotes: Role is to support industry to innovate and, thus, support economic growth for the country. The basic idea of the program is that artificial intelligence and the increasingly soft data will transform every sector of the economy. We were trying to look at areas where the UK had a particular strength, but where there was a risk of AI and data coming in, disrupting that, and meaning that the UK's, its own strength would diminish somehow. Ultimately, we have to drive the economic race. We want to make sure that that economic race happens as much as possible in a way that it's going to help people rather than just be a complete replacement. We are very much looking at that human plus machine approach. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1) Why doing things better and faster is not enough to create transformative change and protect competitiveness 2) How technology can be a lever to significantly expand market opportunity by addressing non-customers 3) What’s required to concur inertia in a company/sector to remain relevant. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast is this week is Lisa Xiong, Senior Research Associate at the Center for Policy & Competitiveness at Ecole Des Ponts Business School in Paris Her research domain is Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Competitiveness, and at this moment she’s working on a comparative study between European companies and culture with Chinese Companies and culture. This triggered me, and hence I invited Lisa to my podcast. We’re exploring the differences between China and the ‘western world’ with regards to the approach towards the topics mentioned. We discuss what China is doing differently to speed up innovation, how they successfully encourage people to start their own business rather than take a ‘wait and see’ approach when they are automated out of a process, and how this could turn out into a very beneficial cultural difference to prevent us from getting a ‘Universal Basic Income’ Here are some quotes from Lisa: What we see now is that China definitely has taken a different approach than traditional American approach or a little bit conservative European approach If we play the game according to someone else rules, one way or another it's difficult to catch up. I would like to focus on three keywords when I'm explaining this. One is innovation, the second one is entrepreneurship, and the third one which would be the leading result of competitiveness as a nation. What I see in China is that in 2015, we create called mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation initiative or campaign by our premier, Mr. Li Keqjang The whole culture of being innovative and entrepreneurial is out there. … because we're latecomers, therefore we can shortcuts. We don't have to go through those obstacles and difficulties. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

How you can protect innovation in downturns by creating ‘an invisible protection shelter’

Why investing in incubator programs fuelled with students are great ways to accelerate innovation

That motivating and recognizing people are critical and very effective tools to scale success.

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My guest on the podcast is Patrik Berglund, co-founder and CEO of Oslo-based Xeneta, a company that’s created a price comparison platform for containerized freight in order to transform the way the shipping and logistics industry are buying and selling. Patrick is a logistics and tech-enthusiast and possesses a true passion for modernizing business processes related to logistics procurement and the supply chain. His experience came from working several years at Kuehne + Nagel and from his work as Co-Founder of Nordilog, a logistics consultancy firm. Xeneta was founded in 2012 and has grown in the meantime to be the top worldwide source to compare shipping rates against the market average, market highs and lows. The way Xeneta has achieved this is through the concepts of crowd-sourcing, thereby turning negotiation powers from sellers to buyers, hence transforming the way the industry operates. This inspired me, hence I invited Patrik to my podcast. We explore what it requires to completely turn the dynamics of a market –turning the power from the supply side to the buy side – and beyond that giving both sides exponential value back in return. In the light of this we discuss the role of creating momentum, the essence of data, and the impact technology can make. Here are some of Patric’s quotes: To make a very long, complex story short, both of us found it very tricky too, peculiar and inefficient that so many container boxes delivering 70 percent of global trade were traded, bought, and sold with almost no visibility, almost no transparency as it became technologically possible to make it transparent, the incentives for doing so haven't been there. it's two problems. There's a lack of transparency in the market that's highly volatile. Secondly, the way they're buying and selling is absolutely crazy inefficient. In order to solve anything about the second problem, we have to provide visibility and transparency. What we're doing is that we're delivering data and insights that allows them to reflect and think differently. The biggest thing is that a lot of our customers will see now over the next couple of years, is that transition of being an online information platform, to also allowing them to change the way they buy and sell.

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

How solving massive market problems can be achieved by looking in the other direction

Why even with the most advanced technologies available a lack of something as simple as relevant data can break all your ambitions

That overcoming inertia can be the biggest hurdle to introduce the most brilliant products into the market

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My guest on the podcast is Ying Chen, Head of Product Marketing at Pega Systems She’s acting as the Head of Product Marketing for Pega’s platform for Digital Transformation. In this role she’s leading strategy, positioning, and go to market. She joined Pega in 2015 with more than 10 years of software product management experience in various Fortune 500 organizations and VC-backed startups. What triggered me to invite Ying to my podcast was the story around the Pega Platform – and in particular how it helps the world’s leading brands achieve breakthrough business results by using the latest technologies to augment people. During our interview we explore how value potential increases once you start looking beyond just automation. How by improving employee experience every company can and will improve customer experience, and why much of the value can be achieved by understanding and then removing intended and unintended obstacles. Here are some of Ying’s quotes: “At Pega, we are extremely practical, and ask our customers in terms of how that technology should be used to truly transform It's all about making sure that you have improved employee experience that will lead to greater customer satisfaction. Where we're coming from...we think more about the point that you raise, which is, how can artificial intelligence improve the human experience? For us, what has changed the game, especially on this operational improvement side of the business, is this concept we call Workforce Intelligence Are they able to focus on the production work that you want them to focus? What is getting in the way of that focus? The impact that it has is tremendous. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1) How you can dramatically improve the value of your solution by not just focusing on the current action, but actually on the next best action 2) That applying AI and robots can be extremely beneficial for uncovering patterns in user behaviour 3) Why it’s more beneficial to focus your effort at business model innovation, rather than process optimization in isolation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast is Anastasia Georgievskaya, General Manager at Youth Laboratories. She’s the co-founder and General Manager at Youth Laboratories, a company developing tools to study aging and discover effective anti-aging interventions using advances in machine vision and artificial intelligence. Anastasia has a degree in bioengineering and bioinformatics from the Moscow State University. She won numerous math and bioinformatics competitions and successfully volunteered for some of the most prestigious companies in aging research including Insilico Medicine, which I interviewed earlier on this podcast about its product innovations. She helped develop an app for tracking age-related facial changes and was one of the driving forces to organize the first beauty competition judged by the robot jury, Beauty.AI. This inspired me – not because of the topic – but because of the transformational effects technologies such as AI are starting to have on our day to day life. What triggers me is what we could learn from examples like this to inspire other forms of value creation. Hence I invited Anastacia to my podcast. We explore the value of her company’s product innovation beyond the point of beauty. What lessons have been learned, what are the essentials to get right, and is the potential for society at large. Here are some of Anastasia’s quotes. The company's story started with the Beauty.AI contest, and then...It's a beauty competition judged by Artificial Intelligence, the first one in the world. We believe that tracking your skin health and the biomarkers that can be seen on your face is very relevant because images are a very cheap source of data and it's very affordable. If you want to track the skin condition and track the dynamics, you need to make sure you can track its in‑dynamics algorithms can adjust to your baseline, and then you would be able to track the effects of different changes on your skin. For example, your nutrition, your lifestyle, amount of sleep, weather, sports, only you can understand what's the most beneficial lifestyle for you. It's very well‑aligned to the trend of personalization During this interview, you will learn three things:

That AI will change our approach to many questions – and as such spark new ideas for creating value we currently don’t have an idea about

Why collaboration is key to not only accelerate the innovation process but more importantly, give you insights to increase the value you offer with your solution

How involving skeptics increase the relevancy and simplicity of your solution.

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My guest on the podcast is Tom Pennings, Founder and CEO of Onsophic He’s what he calls a highly technical entrepreneur, technology enthusiast and business networker. He’s worked for Borland, EVS, Google and Apple. Inspired by bringing data to the learning process, he and his co-founder Ian Hart assembled a team on two continents to connect digital transformation and assisted intelligence. This was the start of Onsophic. Unlike many Learning Management systems on the market Onsophic is about intelligently guiding every single employee in a company to optimize learning effectiveness and achieve their business objectives, rather than just delivering the training material and process. In doing so it not only increases the performance of global enterprises but also accelerates their human potential. This inspired me, hence I invited Tom to my podcast. During our interview we’ll explore how the education process is broken and how that creates a gap between HR and the business objectives any organization has. We also address what questions business leaders should really ask, and what mindset they should embrace to succeed with Digital Transformation, customer centricity, risk and compliance and learning 4.0. Here are some of Tom’s quotes: We bridge the gap between HR and the business objectives by correlating training with on‑the‑job performance. There's 536 different LMS solutions out there. What that really is, is I would say ‑‑ and this not meant negative ‑‑ it is a content delivery…. facilitating the delivery process The challenges is, our opinion, not with the delivery process. It is about guiding each and every individual. Ultimately, Onsophic's goal is accelerating the human potential. The biggest win is acceleration of their human potential, but also in time. Very many CEOs underestimate the value of the people in their company It's really the people that drives a company. It's really important to make sure that you make strategic decisions on making the cake, getting the most out of these people I'm not talking about getting more performance out of them by implementing rules to make them work harder. No, it's about making, really, the work lighter on your human potential and get the most out of it. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1) That the best results are achieved when process, people and intelligence augmentation blend in the right way 2) That we have to increment the skills and capabilities of the workforce while we are bringing in new tools and technologies into the workplace 3) That gut-feel is often a very good guide to follow in order to pivot the trajectory of your business – and that spending time on assembling a team with the same believes and passion is essential to scale the horsepower behind your business. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast is Christian Guttmann, Global Head of Artificial Intelligence, and Chief AI Scientist at Tieto. He’s responsible for strategy and execution of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in order to create high-impact AI systems and products, patents and scientific publications. Christian has progressed Artificial Intelligence for over 25 years and is contributing to its evolution from both a business as well as an academic perspective. He has led innovation teams at BT, IBM, HP, successful startups and top-ranked universities. His drive is to advance AI technology, science and business to new heights for societal prosperity in teams of bright and passionate minds. This triggered me, hence I invited Christian to be a guest on my podcast. During our interview, we explore the ways technologies such as AI and Machine learning can have an exponential impact on our healthcare system – how it not only helps with reduction of cost but more importantly, how it can help to remove frustrating bottlenecks and increase the quality of life for many more people. Here are some of Christian’s quotes: I was very fascinated with building something that has an intelligent capacity, something that has the cognitive ability to understand the world around us. I've also been doing research in this area, looking at predicting and preempting certain events that may happen with patients that have several comorbidities, for example, that have chronic conditions. The big deal, really, the bottom line is it saves lives. It augments the healthcare system. It helps doctors as well as patients and, in fact, also the executives of, let's say, clinics and hospitals in ways to understand data and the patient journey in a very different way. It's also clear that you have a clear benefit to patients and you have the reduction of costs, for example, in hospitals, or you reduce queuing lines and so on for elective surgeries and so on. I love this combination. I think that it's increased evidence, also, that you have these combined teams of an AI and a doctor, for example. You just gain a lot. By listening to this podcast, you will learn three things:

What to do different these days to ensure the best possible outcome of your solution

Why technologies such as AI and Machine learning require us to give a broader consideration to our solution – think for example about the societal issues it can create

And how solving big problems with AI is not always a matter of focusing on data, but often one of figuring out the framework.

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My guest on the podcast is Tim Willis, CFO and Head of Growth at Aerobotics, an AI startup from South Africa. He’s charged with growing Aerobotics in non-core markets, as well as its global expansion efforts. He’s built his financial management expertise at both Deloitte and Uber, where he led its Analytics & Strategy Central Operations Team for the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA). During this podcast interview we explore how technology can add significant value by augmenting farmers across the world to increase their yields, while becoming more efficient at the same time. We’ll also look into the wider value implications this can have across the supply chain, and how other, non-farming related industries, can be served uniquely as a by-product of the intelligence gained. Here are some of Tim’s quotes: Aerobotics effectively takes aerial images of mainly agricultural areas. We collect those images using drones and satellites and potentially even aeroplanes.

Farmers have a real struggle in terms of managing their overall farm…. …you're looking at farms that are hundreds of hectares big, and some farmers can't get through their entire farm in three days… If they don't have technology, they have to basically walk around or drive around their farm trying to identify areas that could be potentially mismanaged, and employ large scouting teams to work in their farm. With our technology, they're able to basically manage their farm from their office.

If we look at the overall picture in the world, obviously food's going to be a scarce resource, and I don't think we're going to solve that by ourselves, but we're definitely going to be a player in the combination of solutions that solves that problem. By listening to this podcast you will learn three things: 1) Why focusing on outcomes, not outputs is the secret to creating a sustainable business 2) How focusing on just a thin slice of the market is key to dominate it profitably 3) That less is always more – in other words you’ll always have 100 to 200 things you’d like or think you have to do with your software, but identifying the 10 that will truly move the needle is the most critical thing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast this week is Mark Esposito, Professor of Business and Economics at Harvard University & Co-Founder at Nexus Frontier Tech Mark Esposito is a professor of Business and Economics, teaching at Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education, and serving as an Institutes Council co-leader at the Microeconomics of Competitiveness program at Harvard Business School. He also holds professorships at Hult International Business School and IE Business School in Paris In 2016, he was appointed as Research Fellow at the Circular Economy Research Initiative at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. Esposito was appointed a fellow of the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai in 2017 and as a global expert for the World Economic Forum. Mark was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award in 2017 because of his work around the DRIVE framework which he co-created together with Terence Tse which I interviewed in one of my earlier podcasts. I personally met Mark at the Future of Business forum in Paris where we both spoke, and have I read their book myself in the meantime. The framework it provides inspired me, hence I invited Mark to my podcast. During our interview, we explore the DRIVE framework and in particular how it helps organizations of all sizes to reveal the critical insights to shape their future proactively and find new unexploited markets. Here are some of his quotes: “DRIVE is a framework of what we call the future trajectories, things that we think will happen for a fact that will have an impact on major socio‑economic systems. Rather than thinking about the future as being this futuristic scenario far away from us, we try to determine what the future will look like, which gave the title to the book, by understanding the present. ..it's merely to understand how to position themselves in the next few years. For me, more than a competitive advantage is a position in advantage. They are proactively creating the future they want to have. …as much as you benchmark most disruption doesn't happen from your own industry. It happens from outside of your own field of vision DRIVE is a way to engage you with multiple factors. Some of them might be what we call no market factors, factors that are not currently in your business model.” During this interview, you will learn three things:

What questions to raise in order to constantly and optimally position my company for advantage?

Why it’s key to develop a strategic insight capability in-house rather than rely on external consultants

And why you’ll create more value by making your products compatible and combinable.

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My guest on the podcast is Dmitri Matskevich, Co-founder and CEO at DBrain, a San Francisco based AI startup. Dmitri is a serial entrepreneur, and a data geek. He found human-generated data is more important than algorithms for AI solutions, and here’s where he found a large gap in the market. This led him to co-found Dbrain, the first community owned platform on blockchain for training Artificial Intelligence. It connects the exploding AI demand on human-labelled data with the abundant global supply of online workers. In doing so it provides potentially +2B unbanked people an opportunity to raise their standard of living and become a part of global financial system due to a blockchain cross-border reach. This inspired me, hence I invited Dmitri to be a guest on my podcast. We explore his vision of making humans great again, what the key ingredients are to do so, how this can be accelerated, and how this can help distribute wealth from high-income countries to countries with low-income. Here are some of his quotes: “In order to understand how create artificial intelligence, you need to understand how brain works and vice versa. If we want to make artificial intelligence more scalable to democratize AI for broader use for a lot of business, we want to solve this problem of custom data for every use case. Basically, the goal of this project is to de-brain from the distributed brain. …we came to an idea that we need to create this platform for humans to be engaged in training AI. It's not about some high‑paid data scientist mostly. It could be almost anybody with some skills which you have just from evolution

…everybody thought that AI can make life miserable and eliminate a lot of jobs. What I see right now that it can assist in a lot of jobs. At the same way, it can create a lot of jobs. However, without humans, without human knowledge, it's nothing” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1) How to identify disruptive ideas by connecting the dots between challenges of seemingly not obviously connect stakeholders 2) Why developing a crowd-mindset is not only critical to create scale and speed, but also to creating complete new markets. 3) how to overcome some large-scale obstacles in an elegant and smart way. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast is week is Skyler Place, Chief Behavioral Science Officer at Cogito Corporation in Boston. He is a computational social scientist with an entrepreneurial mindset. At Cogito he leads the company's efforts to combine behavioral science and artificial intelligence to create more emotionally intelligent humans. As you can imagine, this inspired me, and hence I invited Skyler to my podcast. We explore how technology such as AI can increase the quality of conversations people can have with each other, and how this is driving remarkable impact for organizations, their employees and their customers. Here are some of Skyler’s quotes: “The big idea behind Cogito is that we can use modern artificial intelligence to create tools that can help improve humanity. To help improve how people communicate with one another. We can help people be their best selves. We've built a platform that can listen to conversations and help individuals understand how they can speak differently in order to have better conversations. In order to retain and grow their customer base, the quality of the conversation between the employees of the organization, the call center agents, and the customers calling in has become a critical way to build a lifetime value or to build a lifelong customer. There's so much value for this approach to improve all different aspects of the human experience. We continue to focus on opportunities that allow us to have the most positive impact on society.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1) Why focusing on ‘moments of truth’ is what ultimately defines success or failure – and therefore can become your core differentiator. 2) What’s required to develop software solutions that will actually be voted the most favorite product by its users 3) How exploring ‘non-customers’ can create complete new unexplored markets for you See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast this week is Ryan Falkenberg, Co-founder, and Co-CEO of CLEVVA, a South African Augmented AI company that leverages digital intelligence to empower, not simply replace people. Ryan has always been fascinated by what makes people tick, and what makes them perform optimally. He’s been frustrated at the slow pace of change when it comes to education and learning. To address that he created a learning consultancy, Hi-Performance Learning, that aimed to push the boundaries of organizational learning through e-learning, gamification and expert systems. To then remove the constraints by tech. bandwidth he founded CUDA Technologies. Yet no matter how they optimized formal learning, a core problem remained. People still had to memorize and repeat complex decision formula in a world that was accelerating. It was time for a complete rethink. This was the starting point for CLEVVA The big idea behind CLEVVA inspired me, hence I invited Ryan to my podcast. During our interview, we explore how we can use technology to boost the differentiation factor of people. How we can relieve them from the stress of making mistakes and the consequences that often has – and instead take the weight of their shoulders to let them truly focus what they love doing and where they add the most value. Here are some of Ryan’s quotes: "Human beings are currently trapped in the role of robots” "How do we humanize our workforces? How do we make them powerful as opposed to making them robotic?" Our challenge ‑‑ and I think it's a global issue ‑‑ is that, in schools, we essentially teach young people a couple of mental skill sets. The whole journey of teaching people to replicate, teaching people to memorize and teaching people to comply was something that was very powerful in the industrial era. Currently, human beings are not differentiators. They're a scale problem The volume of human resources that are underutilized is enormous. I realized I can get you doing stuff which would normally take me two or three years. You can get it in a matter of weeks. That becomes very exciting for companies, but it also becomes exciting for the individuals because they really start differentiating themselves. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1) That to deliver remarkable impact with your solution you have to understand the granular truth of where you solution hits the ground, and then work backwards to remove all barriers 2) What the key ingredients are to maximize the impact technologies such as AI can make in unlocking Human potential 3) Why it is key to blend your solution with the operating systems your users are working with all day long.

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My guest on the podcast this week is AJ Abdallat, founder and CEO of Beyond Limits He’s is on a mission to make life better for all of us by changing the landscape of artificial intelligence so that it can achieve its unfulfilled potential. He’s a serial entrepreneur with more than 19 years of experience of bringing high-tech start-up’s to fruition, specializing in artificial intelligence, reasoning systems, and smart sensors. He founded Beyond Limits in 2014 to drive new innovation and IP by commercializing AI programs from the NASA Deep Space program to solve challenging problems for companies on Earth. The company's technology is an evolutionary leap beyond conventional AI to a human-like ability to perceive, understand, correlate, learn, teach, reason, and solve problems faster than conventional AI solutions. In other words, their solutions can magnify human talent, enabling people to apply their attention, experience, and their passions to solving problems that truly matter. This inspired me, in particular to understand how their products could help to solve the challenge of capturing and scaling unique skills and expertise, in a world where the working population is shrinking rapidly. Hence, I invited AJ to my podcast. Here are some of his quotes: “What we're trying to do with Beyond Limits, we feel that those same conditions and problems that exist in space, we can apply those to some of those complex problems here on earth, in energy healthcare. We're captioning that human knowledge in AI in what we call cognitive agents. We're actually are taking the knowledge of a highly skilled individual and scaling that across the organization where We're allowing less skilled individual to be able to utilize that. …in the space business, you really have very experienced and seasoned scientists. A lot of them they love their job. Quite of them are close to retirement. You really want to capture that knowledge and experience, and you can transfer that to the younger generation. This is where we believe there is a significant collaboration between man and machine to do that.” By listening to this podcast, you will you will learn three things: 1) That a key element to crack for AI to be truly valuable in dynamic situations is to deal with situations where the data does not exist, is missing, or corrupt. 2) Why we need to focus more on solving the growing human intelligence scarcity challenge that many organizations face (which goes beyond just freeing existing capacity from non-value adding repetitive tasks) 3) Why every company will fare well by making a conscious decision to focus on those complex, harsh, zero tolerance problems where it can make a unique impact. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast this week is Tomas Ratia Garcia Oliveros, Co-founder, and CEO of Frase, a Boston based AI startup with a big mission: to help you research faster. Tomas did his master at Harvard and became very interested in publishing and research. As an outcome of the Harvard Innovation Lab, he founded Folio, a digital publishing platform for open-access academic journals which he ran for 2 years. After that, he founded Dat Ventures, a Soft-landing accelerator program for international startups aiming to break into the US. His passion for research and technology drove him to establish another startup around the big idea to transform the way people write and research. This was the start of Frase. The story behind Frase intrigued me, as this is could fundamentally change the way marketers from all around the world approach their digital content strategy. Hence, I invited him to my podcast. During our interview, we explore the big idea behind Frase, but more importantly what is required to deliver remarkable impact and arrive at a product that has the potential to transform an industry. Here are some of his quotes: "...me and my partner were wondering, how will AI change the way people write and research? an AI agent that can understand the writer and try to build on the knowledge of the continues understanding of someone writing and use that knowledge to do research and help the writer augment their research capacity. That whole process of having to sort through results, click on all the results, then go through all the steps and go back to the word processor. That's what I consider to be one of the most inefficient processes on the Internet. the main problems we try to solve, which is cutting down the research process so that people can focus on the creative and start the excite of writing. Some of these people don't even use Google anymore. The idea of having a research for writing in one place seems to be very valuable for the type of user who is actually making a living out of producing unique content which is a big market." By listening to this interview you will learn three things: 1) In order to deliver products with remarkable impact, what do you prioritize? 2) What are some of the biggest challenges to anticipate, 3) and why engaging with the market prior to launching is key to success. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast this week is Adam Martel, CEO of Gravyty During his career, Adam founded three companies and had a diverse and eclectic background in advertising, public relations, journalism and collegiate athletic coaching. His passion, however, is with fundraising. Being a seasoned major gifts fundraiser himself, he has gained a deep and personal understanding of the challenges that all nonprofit organizations face while trying to raise money to support their causes. Solving these challenges is his mission – hence he founded Gravyty, a Boston-based artificial intelligence company developing products to revolutionize frontline fundraising at nonprofit organizations. During our interview, we explore how to unlock potential beyond the value conventional business software provides us, what drives the opportunity, and what mindset is required to uncover and create completely new markets. Here are some quotes from Adam: “…we found that because we were using the CRM as the primary tool for fundraising, it was limiting the number of donors that I could get to. The thesis was that if you could have your technology learn you instead of you learning your technology, we could change the way that frontline fundraisers and sales folks interact with their tools. The tools could actually help them and be a multiplier for their efforts in building relationships. That's really where we started. We've come a long way since then but the thesis is still the same. Blackbaud, Salesforce, Ellucian and Community Brands, they're all selling databases. They're all selling the cup that holds the water, but nobody's doing anything with the water itself. We think that our work in artificial intelligence is going to define the next 5 to 10 years of what happens in fundraising in non‑profit organizations This isn't about Gravyty, it's about our customers. It's about the wonderful work that our customers are doing. If we can accelerate cancer research, if we can help eradicate HIV, if we can change the world and help these organizations change the world, it's our job to do that. They don't need to fit into us, we need to accelerate them”. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1) That for AI to reach its full potential it requires to change behaviors, not just provide insights 2) That looking for abundance can provide the key to introduce transformative change 3) Why UI-less experiences are the enabler for people to become far more powerful

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My guest on the podcast this week is Susanne Baars, Founder of the Global Human Genome Foundation and CEO of Social Genomics Susanne is known as the Dutch DNA Queen. She’s a woman on a mission which is to create Universal Access to Genomic Knowledge for every human on our planet. Susanne is an exponential tech innovator and genetic expert. In the past ten years, she became to realize that no single person owns their DNA – the material that makes us who we are. The same material that empowers us to solve the world’s most deadliest diseases. Because of this she founded the Global Human Genome Foundation, a moonshot initiative to provide the world population the key to their DNA and enable them to share data with scientists around the world. During this interview we focus on the big idea behind Susanne’s mission and explore what’s required to deliver exponential value – The mindset, what to look for, what questions to answer, how to start, the key choices you need to make, and what people or partners to gather around you… Here are some of Susanne’s quotes: “For me, it's a global mission to make genomic knowledge available for every person on earth. every year millions of people are dying because of a lack of access to available data. I think that's just not right, and we should do something with this. It's to dare to think big. It's knowing what you know, the unique knowledge that can make a change in the world, and to be able to think differently. Not linear or locally, but try to think, "How would I like to see the future?" It's usually the biggest world problems that end up with the best business models. Follow your dream, follow your heart, and the best thing will happen to you.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1) That innovation is not always about creating technology yourself, but more about leveraging available technology in creative ways to deliver remarkable impact 2) How a bold vision can work as a lever to accelerate execution 3) And why focusing on problems is not always the best way to uncover untapped potential See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast this week is Ivo Totev, Chief Marketing Officer of Cloud ERP at SAP He is a seasoned marketing veteran with more than 25 years of experience in the IT industry. In his current role at SAP, he’s responsible for defining marketing strategy and vision for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Business ByDesign, and SAP Business One. Prior to his role at SAP, Ivo was the CMO of Unit4 Group and served as CMO and Head of Cloud Business at Software AG. During our interview we explore the changing nature and role of business software in today’s society and what needs to be done to ensure we maximize the impact we can gain from it. Here are some of Ivo’s quotes: “Business software is the foundation of changing over business models that we see around the worlds." "This is the backbone of driving our whole economy worldwide." " With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, deep machine learning, now we're getting into a phase where business software actually understands what I am up to, and can proactively help me." "This is so revolutionary. This changes so much that, I'm sure in 10 years, we'll be looking back and saying, "Well, you know, the Internet was a great foundation and cloud was also a great foundational element in their first generations, but none of those technologies or movements really changed the way we see business software as much as this latest revolution," "As responsible people living in our society, we need to make sure that we create technologies and solutions, and drive a discussion into society in a way that, in the end, people looking back at this year will say, "It was disruptive, it changed the life of many people. It changed the lifes of many, many more people to the positive." By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1) How, by leveraging various technology components, you can change the nature of decades old-application concepts - even ERP. 2) Why we should strive to make business applications completely ‘hands-free’ 3) And why every entrepreneur should put serious time aside to rethink its business model See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast this week is Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine On a day to day basis, Alex is the CEO of Insilico Medicine (www.insilico.com), which is focused exclusively on developing and applying deep learning methods to drug discovery. It’s probably the largest next-gen AI and bioinformatics company in the world focusing exclusively on aging and age-related diseases. Alex is also the director of the Biogerontology Research Foundation and the founder of the International Aging Research Portfolio. He heads the laboratory of regenerative medicine at the Center for Pediatric Hematology-Oncology and Immunology and is the adjunct professor at the Buck Institute for Research in Aging in Novato, California and the international adjunct professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. As an anti-aging expert, he is convinced that even people past their 70s, who are in good health, should set their longevity expectations to live past 150. It is a realistic goal considering the current longevity records and progress in technology. Stretching longevity expectations may help delay or reverse the psychological aging. This inspired me to invite Alex to my podcast, to explore how technology can be used to accelerate progress in this field, how it can augment researchers around the world to create breakthroughs that will ultimately increase longevity for all of us. We discuss the big idea behind his company to extend healthy productive longevity, first by understanding the size of the challenge, from there exploring how technology can help to address the challenge, and if applied the right way, the magnitude of the impact it could create. Here are some quotes: “Aging is one of the major challenges that humanity is facing today. The population has tripled over the past 70 years, and the population also got older.” “We need to identify new ways to keep people in their optimal healthy state for as long as possible, just to ensure that the economy remains intact.” “There is lots and lots of data available for aging research, but AI takes it to the next level. It basically accelerates everything. Think about this as a carriage versus Formula 1.” “If you are pursuing aging research and you find a way to extend the life of everybody on the planet by one year, you generate seven billion, well, seven‑and‑a‑half billion, quality-adjusted life years. That is really the scale we're talking about." By listening to this podcast you will learn the following: 1) Why the best innovations start with the end goal in mind 2) How, by clearly defining your Business Model upfront, you can avoid delays and unpleasant surprises 3) Why data privacy is becoming a critical aspect of innovation success. 4) And why it’s key to surround yourself with like-minded people who share the same passion, and are not just in for the money.

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My guest on this week’s podcast is Dr. Terence Tse. He’s an Associate Professor of Finance at the London campus of ESCP Europe Business School and a co-founder and managing director of Nexus Frontier Tech: An AI Studio, which customises artificial intelligence products for its clients to build up new capabilities to attain unfair business advantage. He is consulting to the EU and UN, and provides regularl commentaries on the latest current affairs, market developments, education, artificial intelligence and blockchain in many outlets including the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Economist, CNBC, Les Echos, the World Economic Forum and the Harvard Business Review. He has also appeared on radio and television shows on China’s CCTV, Channel 2 of Greece, France 24, Japan’s NHK and Radio România Cultural. Last but not least, he’s the co-author of the best seller “Understanding How the Future Unfolds” which introduced the framework DRIVE to Harness the Power of Today's Megatrends. His rich and interesting background was exactly the reason I invited Terence to my podcast – to get his views as an educator and entrepreneur how technology can make a positive impact on people in society – and what needs to be done to get this right. We discuss how technology is fundamentally changing the nature of work and what this means to people in terms of our future role, and the skills and attitude we need to have to thrive. Here are some quotes: “I think in the future what we will be seeing is that lots and lots of people will be taking on gig econ, different gigs to make up a portfolio rather than working with someone. ..there will be more and more people needing to do different things at the same time, which in turn, changes the skill sets that is required. ..even though technologies can do a lot of things ‑‑ you can automate things ‑‑ a lot of the time, you can only automate up to a certain point, where you would then need to have human to actually step in. ..there's no way in heaven that machines will basically replace human, because everything is basically human problems, as you can see, and machines don't do problem‑solvings. ..everyone, regardless of which country you're from, have almost the same access to the same type of technologies. The difference between different people would be who they are. How you actually distinguish yourself would basically depend on how motivated you are to learn new things.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1. Why we need to transform the way we think about how our workforce can add most value, particularly in combo with AI 2. What to do to ensure AI lives up to its true potential 3. How and where to apply AI in your business if you are starting first time See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on this weeks’ podcast is Christian Kromme, Author of “Humanification – go digital, stay human” He’s a visionary thinker, futurist keynote speaker, and author. Christian was an innovative tech-entrepreneur for 15 years until he discovered the DNA behind disruptive innovation and how to use this to predict the next big wave of technological disruption. Now he’s is one of the most in-demand futurist keynote speakers, speaking in front of tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, business leaders and policymakers about the radical impact of disruptive technologies on humans and organizations. In today’s podcast, we explore the key question – how we can go digital and stay human. How should we apply technology so that it strengthens the unique characteristics of people to deliver remarkable value. Here are some of Christians quotes: “I was a tech entrepreneur in tech business, software business until I discovered the DNA behind disruptive innovation, how to predict disruptive innovation, and how to predict, basically, the next big wave of technological disruption. I really think that there is a bright future in front of us, but we have to align with nature again. Together, we can do more. We are wiser. We are smarter. We are more creative by sharing our thoughts, our ideas. I think that our future is there where we are connected as one's species and solve problems on a global scale, like foods, diseases and stuff, and solve the problems as a network of humans, like one organism. I think people will be pushed to their purpose, to be the fullest what they can be. …what you see is that artificial intelligence, or machine learning, or deep learning enables technology to disappear, to make it invisible. If things become invisible, especially technology, then they start to have the biggest impact.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1. How can we anticipate disruption before it happens? 2. How can we turn disruption & change into opportunity and advantage? 3. How by reimagining things on a humanity scale, we will be capable of solving the world’s biggest problems in a very short amount of time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on this weeks’ podcast is David Lavenda, co-founder and vice-president of product strategy and marketing at Harmon.ie He’s a veteran high-tech marketing and product strategy executive. He’s a regular contributor to Fast Company and CMSwire, Financial Times, Business Week, Entrepreneur and other leading press outlets. David has recently completed a graduate degree in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), investigating how information overload in organizations has evolved since the introduction of email. And Information overload is exactly the issue Harmon.ie is addressing. Harmon.ie believes that technology needs to serve humanity. In today’s ‘app economy,’ information workers access countless business apps daily to get work done. And that’s distracting. Because people don’t think in terms of apps – they think about topics like customers, products, and projects. Harmon.ie was founded to solve this. That intrigued me, hence I invited David for my podcast. We explore the key question how we can humanize technology to empower people and their ability to work together in a world where information overload is the norm. Here are some of David’s quotes: “..we've become overwhelmed with technology. A lot of the Silicon Valley culture that's driving technology looks at technology for technology's sake. The information is just coming fast and furious at people. It becomes extremely difficult for people to be able to focus on what they really care about, which are things like customers, prospects, projects, and services. ..we see that productivity is actually going down to a large degree because people are confused and overwhelmed and very difficult for them to see the information. ..A lot of the promise of the introduction of technology to boost productivity is not been realized, and that's the opportunity. The opportunity here is a quantum leap in how people interact with technology. ..Giving me that insight to move quickly isn't making me more productive by doing the task faster, but it is allowing me to actually see the big picture and take advantage of the opportunity.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: 1. Why ISVs should make a considered effort to apply technology not just for technology's sake if they want their solutions to provide quantum impact. 2. Why the potential is really to take a new approach to how people interact with technology. 3. Why vendors have to participate in a multi-vendor / multi-cloud world in order to stay relevant See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on this weeks' podcast is Dustin Haisler, Chief Innovation Officer at e.Republic, a California-based state, and local government media and research company. As the former Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Assistant City Manager for the City of Manor in Texas, Dustin quickly built a track record and reputation as an early innovator in civic tech. He pioneered government use of commercial technologies not before used in the public sector, was named a Government Technology Top 25 Doer, Dreamer and Driver in 2009, and his work has been featured in Wired, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, Inc. and the Today Show on NBC. Dustin continues to work with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, academia, and non-profits across the globe on innovation and engagement strategies. I invited Dustin to my podcast to get his perspective on the unique opportunity public servants have to write new Chapters if technology and people blend in the right way. During this interview, you will learn three things: 1) What governments can & must to do grow value exponentially 2) The opportunity that arises when governments tap into the cognitive surplus – the excess capacity that’s available outside their physical organization 3) And why it’s key to empower their employees to help drive the change that needs to be done See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast is Dr. Nadine Hachach Haram, Co-Founder of Proximie, NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Fellow, and TED speaker. She’s is a curious surgeon with a passion for technology and innovation — and a desire to make a difference in the world. This drove her to co-found Proximie, an augmented reality platform that allows doctors to virtually transport themselves into any operating room, anywhere in the world, to visually and practically interact in an operation from start to finish. Proximie aims to provide safe, accessible and cost-effective surgery to every patient around the world. I really got inspired by the big idea behind Proximie after seeing Nadine’s TED talk in December. I believe this is a very compelling showcase of how technology can be used to augment the unique strength of humans, to deliver remarkable value. Hence, I invited Nadine to share her story in this podcast. During our interview, you will learn three things: 1) How, by focusing on key pain points, technology can solve problems of global scale 2) What’s required to ensure solutions deliver transformative impact 3) And why it’s key to think exponentially See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on this weeks' podcast is Andreas Cleve, CEO of Corti.AI, a start-up from Copenhagen that delivers technology that enables humans to do more. Their mission is dear to my heart: They imagine a future where all medical professionals can be augmented by artificial intelligence to better diagnose patients, reduce uncertainty, and eliminate fatal errors. Andreas leads a team of multidisciplinary experts from organizations such as NASA, Apple, and IBM Watson to build powerful intelligence augmentation software for the next generation of healthcare providers. Their first product: Corti, a digital assistant that leverages deep learning to help medical personnel make critical decisions in the heat of the moment. It's this product I wanted to learn more about, hence it became the topic of this podcast. During this interview, you will learn three things: 1) What it requires to create human/machine combos that can produce exponential value 2) Why more value comes from going deep, rather than broad 3) Why smart execution is even more important than the original smart idea to make it obtainable and accessible to the people who need it most. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on this weeks' podcast is David Hofferberth, Founder and Managing Director of Service Performance Insight. He is the founder and managing director of Service Performance Insight, a global research, consulting and training organization dedicated to helping professional service organizations (PSOs) make quantum improvements in productivity and profit. David has championed solutions for the professional services sector for over twenty years and provided guidance for hundreds of Independent Software Vendors. In addition to that his ongoing work with business and technology media enables his clients to remain informed and in front of the buying public. David regularly consults with Professional Services Organizations and financial institutions around the world and he is also the primary architect of the Professional Services Maturity™ Model, a strategic planning and management framework that's grown into the industry-leading performance improvement tool used by over 6,000 service and project-oriented organizations to chart their course to service excellence. During this interview, you will learn three things: 1) What PSOs should do stay ahead of the game 2) How PSOs should change to not be disrupted 3) And where they should focus their IT investments to maximize impact See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on this week's podcast is Leif Anderson, Vice President & Chief Strategy Officer at Augsburg University. He leads institutional planning and effectiveness at Augsburg University in order to realize the college's vision through the implementation of the Augsburg2019 strategic plan. The University is based in the heart of Minneapolis and has built a strong academic reputation in the liberal arts and professional studies since 1869. It offers undergraduate and graduate degrees to more than 3,500 diverse students and educates them to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers, and responsible leaders. During this interview we'll specifically focus on the vision that's been set out by Augsburg University president Paul Pribbenow. He challenges higher education to change its focus from students being "college ready," to institutions being "student ready." At the same time, Pribbenow is bringing new clarity to Augsburg's value proposition - what he calls a "three dimensional" education. In listening to this podcast, you will learn 3 things: 1)how these important concepts are being equipped at Augsburg 2)What's driving this change 3)How technology can Universities help to succeed See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on this weeks' podcast is Holger Mueller - VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research In his day to day job as a VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research he is covering Next Generation Apps, Human Capital Management and the Future of work, and provides strategy and counsel to clients. Prior to joining Constellation Research, Holger was, amongst others, VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, and chief Application Architect with SAP where he worked on strategic projects and next generation product capabilities in the Office of the Chairman for Hasso Plattner. Holger started his career with Kiefer & Veittinger, which he helped grow from a startup to Europe's largest CRM vendor from 1995 onwards. In this podcast Holger and I discuss the opportunity that is being presented by the current cocktail of technologies that's coming together. During this interview, you will learn three things: 1)What we can learn from Japan about our own future 2)How AI will impact decision making, and why it is key for people to stay involved 3)And what CEO's should do to ensure their company stays relevant. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast is John Heintz, CEO at Aptage. Aptage is a start-up from Austin Texas, that's building forecasting tools for agile teams by using past performance and team experience to understand and predict the likelihood of success. Project success is critical for project-driven organizations, be it in IT, Engineering, Construction or, for example, Not for Profit. Aptage inspired me because of their approach. They chose to use artificial intelligence to augment the unique strengths of project managers, thereby creating the potential to take project success rates to completely new levels, giving project-intensive organizations a new competitive advantage. During this interview, you will learn three things: 1) How the unique strengths of people in project-centric organizations can be augmented with technology to help increase project success 2) How AI can help Project driven organizations identify uncertainties and predict the risk that could imply 3) What Aptage learned from delivering technology powered by AI See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast is Vinnie Mirchandani He's the author of Silicon Collar, founder of Deal Architect, a former technology industry analyst (with Gartner) and outsourcing executive (with PwC), and last but not least entrepreneur. He is a thought leader on trends in software, outsourcing and offshoring. I talked with Vinnie on the way we should perceive technology impact on people in the foreseeable future. During this interview, you will learn three things: 1)Why it's better to start new initiatives with an augmentation mentality, not a replacement mentality 2)Why traditional thinking around labor is not going to work 3)Why we should be rethinking every business process with automation as a frontend See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My guest on the podcast is Maurizio Vecchione, Executive Vice President for Global Good and Research at Intellectual Ventures. In his day to day job, Maurizio is working for Intellectual Ventures where he’s overseeing Global Good LLC, an evergreen fund created by Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures, The fund is focused on inventions and innovation for the millions of people in the developing world that suffer and die each year from causes that humanity has the scientific and technical ability to solve. During this interview, you will learn three things: 1) Why Maurizio believes the idea that all next‑gen things happen in places like Silicon Valley, is fundamentally flawed 2) How catalytic invention can be the approach to accelerate change, action, and impact – not just for the developing world, but across the board 3) Three practical criteria to embrace in the process of innovation See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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