The Orbit Shift Podcast: Recent Episodes
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TAM, technology, team, and timing. There are the four ‘Ts’ that Ankit Sarwahi, Managing Director of Middle East Venture Partners looks for in a startup when investing in them.
In our latest episode, we catch up with Ankit the MD of MEVP, one of the biggest venture capital firms in the MENA region whose portfolio companies include Anghami, Rain, and Nana Direct. Ankit talks to us about his early journey, the differences he sees in the Indian and Middle Eastern startup ecosystems, his four T’s of investing, how he communicates clearly with his founders, and his due diligence process before investing in companies.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Ankit is the Managing Director of Middle East Venture Partners where he leads investments in fintech, food tech, and e-commerce verticals. He serves on the board of various startups and advises them on fundraising, organizational talent building, and new market entry. Prior to this role, Ankit invested for VC funds in India. Ankit is an alumnus of ISB Hyderabad and SRCC.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Producer - Shashwath J
Host - Soumitra Deshpande
Audio Engineer - Arjun Pillai
In this episode we talk to Charlie Locke, sales leadership expert and Co-Founder of the SDR community, SDR Nation. We explore the key skills that SDRs need to succeed. When founders should hire SDRs, and how they can incentivize them to retain their top sales talent, and the ways in which the industry is changing. Charlie also breaks down the eight phases of cold calling and how SDR professionals can identify their weaknesses and put theory to practice to boost their conversions.
Listen in.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guests
Charlie Locke is a sales leadership expert with experience in various companies such as Salesforce, Adobe, and Shutterstock. In 2020, Charlie teamed up with community building expert Michael Gagliano to build the only dedicated community for Sales Development Reps in the world - SDR Nation
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast hosted by Founder Insititute; Ryan Micheletti, Head of Global Operations at Founder Institute talks to Lucas Fox, Head of Relationship Management, Brex, and Pradeep Rathinam, Chief Customer Officer, Freshworks about how founders can build a customer-centric startup.
They talk about how to define a customer-centric startup, the best practices of customer-centric startups, and how founders can listen to their customers without moving away from the ethos of their startups or the products that they're building.
Listen in.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guests
Lucas Fox - Lucas Fox was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, but spent his adolescence in Madrid, Spain, and London, UK.
In 2018 Lucas joined Brex, a >$7b startup reinventing the B2B financial services space. At Brex, Lucas helped start the recruiting team and scale the company, then he moved into a go-to-market role to lead the launch of Brex Cash, and most recently has built a Relationship Management team responsible for existing-customer revenue.
Pradeep Rathinam - Pradeep Rathinam is the Chief Customer Officer at Freshworks post-acquisition of AnsweriQ by Freshworks.
Pradeep was the Founder & CEO of AnswerIQ, a Seattle-based artificial intelligence company in the customer service automation space. Prior to AnswerIQ, Pradeep was the CEO of Aditi Technologies, a leading cloud services provider, and led the company to a successful sale to Symphony Teleca, a PE firm.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
"Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, but cash is king" is the mantra that Alex Theuma repeats to us when quizzed about some of the learnings he has had as the founder of SaaStock — one of the largest SaaS conferences in the world.
Join us as Alex talks to us about why building a community is important for startups. He also walks us through his career and how he grew a SaaS blog meet-up into the global conference SaaStock, some of the mistakes and learnings he made in his career, and how to build and scale a community.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Alex Theuma is the Founder & CEO of SaaStock a conference to help SaaS companies get traction, grow, and scale. Alex launched the conference in 2016, building on the popularity of his blog and podcast for SaaS founders and initial SaaS meetups in Dublin, London, and Berlin.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Revenue operations or RevOps is a key growth engine that a startup needs to put into place to become a scale up. The RevOps engine helps companies streamline their sales processes and their commission and incentives payouts. In this episode, we talk to Siva Rajamani the Founder and CEO of Everstage. Siva tells us about when startups should look to build a RevOps function, the talent that founders should look to hire for their RevOps teams, the key goals and metrics RevOps teams should track, and how the RevOps teams are evolving.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Siva Rajamani is the founder and CEO of Everstage, a no-code sales commissions automation platform. In a short span, several fast-growth companies and unicorns have adopted Everstage to motivate and drive the performance of their customer-facing teams. Previously, Siva ran the Revenue Operations globally for Freshworks and led a 25-member team.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
A lot is talked about fundraising and billion-dollar exits. But those are rare. How should startups get more realistic about building companies and look for meaningful exits? What’s the right way to approach an M&A so it makes sense both for the buyer and the seller?
In this episode, we unpack startup exits for founders with Andrew Gazdecki, the founder of startup acquisition marketplace MicroAcquire and Rowland Savage, VP of Corporate Development at Freshworks and the author of How to Stick the Landing: The M&A Handbook for Startups.
This episode was recorded live as part of our webinar series. To stay updated on our events, sign up here.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guests
Andrew Gazdecki - Andrew Gazdecki is a 4x founder with 3x exits, former CRO, and founder of MicroAcquire. Andrew has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, and prominent industry blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat.
Rowland Savage - Before becoming the VP of Corporate Development at Freshworks, Rowland worked at Atlassian, where he led several acquisitions as part of their M&A team. A recovering entrepreneur, Rowland previously founded two startups taking both from concept to paid deployment. Rowland has also previously worked for two Venture Capital funds and is the author of How to Stick the Landing: The M&A Handbook for Startups.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
With experience across multiple geographies including India and the US; and with experience across some of the biggest startups in the world including Uber and Airbnb, Carson Drake knows what it takes to build modern sales teams that grow revenue across different markets.
In this episode we talk to Carson about his journey, launching Uber Eats in India, building trust with partner vendors, and how he has acquired over 7000 customers with Firstbase.io, a startup that helps you set up your company in the US.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Over the last 8+ years, Carson Drake has spent time focused on operations strategy, scale, launch, and sales management/strategy at startups including Uber, Uber Eats, Airbnb, and other early-stage companies. Now, he has brought his operational mindset to building partnerships and BD at Firstbase.io, with an emphasis on identifying partnerships that drive recurring revenue and create solutions for their partners' customers.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Today companies not only want to focus on profitability but also create a positive social impact. With consumers identifying strongly with brands that are committed to the greater good, profitability and positive social impact have become intertwined.
In this episode, we speak to Rebekah Bastian, CEO, and Co-Founder of OwnTrail and an award-winning writer, who is a strong advocate of such an approach to company building. We talk about:
🚀Rebekah’s journey from Product Manager to VP of Product at Zillow
🚀Her new venture OwnTrail and the problem they’re looking to solve
🚀The benefits that diversity and inclusion bring to a startup
🚀The need for ‘tech mafias’ to refresh their networks
🚀How founders can track diversity and inclusion initiatives
🚀Building OwnTrail and how Rebekah approaches hiring
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Rebekah Bastian is an entrepreneur, award-winning writer, tech executive, and mentor. She is the CEO & Co-founder of OwnTrail and was previously vice president of product and vice president of community and culture at Zillow. Rebekah is the author of Blaze Your Own Trail, is a contributor to Forbes, and is a frequent speaker on social impact, career navigation, and building AuthenTech companies.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
When he was 18 years old, Iddo Gino founded RapidAPI, a platform that allowed users to find, connect and manage APIs. Today the platform is the largest API hub in the world, where almost 3 million developers can discover, test, and connect to thousands of APIs.
In this episode, we sit down with Iddo to talk about his journey into the world of programming, the importance of building a community, how he approaches VCs and manages relationships with them, and his thoughts on the developer economy and the growth of APIs.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Iddo Gino is the Founder and CEO of RapidAPI. Part of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, he's a 2017 Thiel Fellow. Previously, he was a Co-organizer of Hacking Gen Y. Iddo has been programming since he was a kid and continues to contribute to open-source projects. Originally from Haifa, Israel, Iddo is based in San Francisco, CA.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Pitch, plays, proof, and plans are the four Ps of product marketing that Kevin Murray, VP of Product Marketing at Freshworks uses to elevate a brand’s marketing.
In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast Kevin walks us through each of these four Ps and how companies can leverage them. He talks about how companies can perfect their pitch with the right messaging, how to set up plays with repeatable sales motions, how to build analyst relations and get proof in the marketplace and how to avoid random acts of marketing by having a comprehensive plan that brings all stakeholders together.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Kevin Murray joined Freshworks in June 2021 to lead the global product marketing team. Kevin joined Freshworks from Automation Anywhere, and prior to that, spent 5.5 years with ServiceNow from 2014-2020. Kevin has also led product marketing teams at top technology companies such as Symantec and VMware and has expertise in IT operations, security, and enterprise mobility.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Sara Varni has spent more than a decade scaling marketing organizations for various enterprise SaaS companies. Currently, as the chief marketing officer of cloud communications platform Twilio, she looks after all of marketing including growth, brand, and product marketing, public relations, developer relations, and events.
In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, she talks to us about the four horsemen of a marketing org - Inbound, outbound, sales reps, and partner organizations and how companies can leverage these pillars for hypergrowth. She also talks about building marketing channels and how to budget for them, how to get field marketing right, and how to create compelling customer stories.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Sara Varni is a creative marketing leader with a track record for driving awareness and demand for enterprise software products. She is currently the CMO of Twilio, an American cloud communications platform. Before Twilio, she spent a decade at Salesforce in various marketing roles, including SVP of marketing for Sales Cloud.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
As Co-Founder and Partner at Jjellyfish, a sales consultancy with experience guiding 120+ early-stage startups, Jen Abel has seen how early-stage sales teams can fail.
In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast Jen talks about why the onus lies with founders to make the early sales and get direct feedback from their customers about their product. She talks about the difference between a buyer and a user, how founders can hit the $1 million revenue mark, how to set up a sales team post the $1 million mark, how sales teams should go about prospecting, and how founders can convert a product-led growth engine to a top-down sales motion.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Jen Abel is the Co-founder and Partner at Jjellyfish, an NYC-headquartered sales consultancy that has supported 120+ early-stage B2B startups in finding product-market fit in the U.S. market. Jjellyfish has had the opportunity to support Founders at startups including Atlan, Mesh.ai, Factors, and partnering with various funds including Sequoia, Accel, Blume, and 3one4 capital.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
A founder is often someone who recognizes a gap in the market and looks to address this gap. Our latest guest is one such founder who has spotted a gap in professional social media networks and is looking to provide a solution to it.
As the founder of Polywork, Peter Johnston is looking to change the way professional social media networks operate. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, he talks to us about the problem with professional social media channels, how the idea of Polywork came about from his Google 20% project. His future plans for monetization of the platform, the importance of design for product and growth, his approach to hiring and dealing with hiring missteps, and his advice on fundraising.
Skip the waitlist to create your Polywork profile
Not Boring Newsletter by Packy McCormick
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Peter Johnston is the Founder of Polywork, a professional social network that is backed by a16z, Anthony Pompliano, and Alexis Ohanian amongst others. A designer by trade Peter has previously founded Kalo a freelancer management platform, before which he worked as a designer for Google.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
If you’re a founder and are wondering how to really get sales right, or if you’re a sales leader and want to figure out how to hire people, help them level up and really propel your company into the next orbit, you must listen to Joe Manuele, the SVP of Corporate and Business Development at cloud communications company Dialpad.
For several years now, Joe has had a ringside view of the transformation in the selling process. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we talk to him about his journey and the need to continuously evolve as a manager. The top traits and abilities he looks for in salespeople, the metrics with which to track a sales team, how companies can wed an inside sales motion along with a product-led growth motion, and the lessons learned from the acquisition of his previous company Highfive.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
To signup for Dialpad for Startups click here
About the Guest
Joe Manuele is Sr. Vice President Corporate and Business Development at Dialpad and former CEO of Highfive, which Diaplad acquired in August 2020. He has over 25 years of IT and communications experience in the enterprise and global carrier markets, gained at Avaya, Cisco, and Actelis Networks. Joe also served as Group Executive ̶ Communications at Dimension Data and NTT Global, where he was responsible for the $2 Bn UC and Collaboration business unit.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Launch, Lift, Locate, and Level Flight. These are the four stages that Ken Lundin, Founder of sales consultation group Ken Lundin & Associates, prescribes to early-stage startups to attain high growth.
On this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we caught up with the sales leader to talk about
🚀How the selling process, sales teams, and sales talent need to pivot during the pandemic and beyond
🚀Breaking down the sales alpha roadmap and the four stages of Launch, Lift, Locate, and Level Flight
🚀Building a sales team and the Key Performance Indicators to set for sales teams
🚀How founders can design successful incentive programs for sales reps
🚀How startups can align sales, marketing, and product
🚀How founders should go about building an outbound engine
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Ken Lundin, founder of Ken Lundin & Associates, has a unique perspective on thriving during unpredictable times. After learning in 2011 that his family home had been sold on the market, Ken had to start again, working his way up from a mid-level sales position to achieving the role of SVP of Sales within two years. With his impressive sales knowledge and his determined outlook on life, Ken quickly became a consultant, bringing his successful business acumen to other companies who are looking to excel during the COVID era and beyond.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Marketing has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. Today data empowers marketers to understand where their dollars are going and what their return on investment is. Heather Zynczak, a board member at DemandBase and ex-CMO of Pluralsight, has had a firsthand view of this change in the field.
In this episode, she talks to us about the changes in marketing trends and how startups need to react to them. Why she thinks the way Account-Based Management is defined is problematic and how companies can get ABM right. Heather also talks about how she led product-led growth at Pluralsight and why companies should not have to choose between sales and product-led growth.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Heather Zynczak has spent the last 25+ years in marketing, product, and revenue leadership positions at some of the world’s most successful tech companies. Heather spent 4+ years as CMO of Pluralsight, where she was responsible for all aspects of marketing and digital revenue. During her tenure there, the company grew B2B revenue by over 50% year-over-year, growing revenue to almost half a billion and enabling the company to IPO in 2018.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Dave Kellogg, known as the ‘Yoda of SaaS metrics,’ is our latest guest on The Orbit Shift Podcast. We talk to the SaaS veteran about
🚀The two essential SaaS metrics - ARR and ARR growth
🚀The importance of picking a big enough TAM
🚀Importance of measuring NDR
🚀CAC vs NDR, when to use what
🚀The limitations of an NPS
🚀Why startups shouldn’t become metric slaves
This episode was recorded live at SaasBoomi’s annual event.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Dave Kellogg is an advisor, independent board member, consultant, and blogger at www.kellblog.com. In 2019, he was named to the Top 5 Most Respected Leaders in SaaS by the 15,000 attendees of SaaStr. He brings a balanced and uncommon perspective to enterprise software challenges, having 10+ years experience at each of the CEO, CMO, and board levels across ten different companies ranging in size from $0 to over $1B in revenues.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
With Melissa Sargeant, the chief marketing officer of email marketing company Litmus, we explore the role of a chief marketing officer, how they’re hired, why they last the least in the c-suite, and e-mail marketing, one of the most powerful channels for marketers.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, and activity capture) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Melissa Sargeant is the CMO of email marketing company Litmus. She has more than 20 years of experience in various marketing leadership roles. She was previously the CMO of SugarCRM, ChannelAdvisor, and the Senior Director of Product Marketing at CA Technologies.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
When you sell subscriptions to a SaaS product that needs to be renewed frequently, it is necessary to prove the value of your product to customers every day. This not only prevents them from churning but also eventually makes them evangelists for your product. This is the essence of value SaaS.
In our latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we talk to Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, the Managing Partner at SaaS accelerator Upekkha about value SaaS.
We discuss how founders, can cut through the noise and build a sustainable SaaS company including how to find early adopters, which customers to target, how to position and build a website, and how to have successful fundraises.
Listen in.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Prasanna Krishnamoorthy is a partner at Upekkha, where he works with founders to build capital-efficient Value SaaS businesses. He is a full-stack growth driver who has coached more than a hundred entrepreneurs during his time at Upekkha, Microsoft Accelerator, and iKen. While working with these entrepreneurs, Prasanna has created frameworks for early-stage founders to accelerate growth predictably, scalably, and profitably. Prasanna was part of two B2B startups between 2005-2012 and also worked at Amazon, Microsoft, and Tejas Networks. He has a Master's Degree in Telecommunications from the University of Texas, Dallas, and a Bachelor's Degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from CEG, Chennai.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Founders are often in the trenches when it comes to fund-raising, making new hires, and driving their company’s growth. What often goes under the radar however is how founders can navigate their way through a board room. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we talk to Cindy Padnos, a VC with 25 years of experience in the tech industry who sits on the board of six companies. We talk about
🚀What is the profile of an ideal chairperson
🚀When should founders get an independent board member
🚀How to deal with conflicts in the boardroom
🚀How to compensate board members
🚀The key ingredients for a good relationship between board members
🚀How to evolve a board over time
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Leveraging 25 years of high-tech industry experience, Cindy Padnos is the founder and Managing Partner of Illuminate Ventures. She focuses primarily on the Enterprise/B2B cloud and mobile computing sectors, with a particular emphasis on SaaS applications and platforms, solutions leveraging data for business impact, and new business models that accelerate customer acquisition. Cindy serves as a board director for Bid Ops, BrightEdge, CafeX, Hoopla Software, nFlux, and Pex.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we look at how to position a product or brand in a market. We’re joined by April Dunford, a leader in the field of positioning. April has positioned and launched 16 products across her 25 years in marketing.
April talks to us about how what we think as positioning is actually what we do after we have identified positioning, how to identify bad positioning, the power of setting context, and how to layer trends on your positioning to supercharge your marketing RoI.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
April Dunford is a consultant and author who helps companies make complicated products easy for customers to understand and love. She is a globally recognized expert in Positioning, having launched 16 products across her 25-year career running marketing, product, and sales teams at a series of successful startups. She is the author of the best-selling book Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning, so Customers Get it, Buy it, Love it.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
With 25 years of Human Resources and Talent Management experience, Andrew Bartlow is a veteran people officer. In his latest avatar as an author, he attempts to distill his 25 years of experience into his latest book ‘Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High-Growth Organizations’.
We caught up with the founder to talk about
🚀Blitz-scaling and its drawbacks
🚀The two types of founders; the mule-drivers and the prophets
🚀Hiring new leaders and how to attract talent to an organization
🚀How to structure an employee equity ownership plan
🚀The need to re-think OKR’s
🚀Building the people function and hitting the ‘Dunbar Number’
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Andrew Bartlow has 25 years of Human Resources and Talent Management experience at organizations across a wide spectrum of sizes, maturity stages, and industries. He is the co-author of “Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High Growth Organizations”. Andrew leads Series B Consulting, which helps businesses articulate their people strategy and accelerate their growth while navigating rapid change. He also founded the People Leader Accelerator, which is the preeminent development program for startup HR leaders. He’s worked with clients like Masterclass and many others to help them overcome obstacles in a hyper-growth phase.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
More than half a dozen Indian tech companies, including Zomato, Paytm, Flipkart, InMobi, Nykaa, and PolicyBazaar, have said they are likely to go public this year. This is obviously a big milestone for India's tech ecosystem, which has seen very few public offerings in the past. What has changed, and why are Indian companies talking about going for an IPO now?
In this special, we pick up a hot topic from the world of startups and help you parse it with the help of top experts. In today's episode, we take a look at India's IPO boom with Gopal Jain, the co-founder of private equity firm Gaja Capital; Karthik Reddy, the co-founder of Blume Ventures and Madhav Chanchani, the Editor-in-Chief of TheCaptable. We'll try to answer questions such as why now and how will this play out?
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Several top companies today are product-led companies. This includes the likes of Atlassian, Slack, Zoom, and Freshworks. What does it really mean to be a product-led company? Does product-led growth work for all startups? How do you design your outbound sales motion if you started with a product-led, inbound growth strategy? In today's episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, Stacey Epstein, the Chief Marketing Officer of Freshworks Inc. answers all these questions and more. Stacey joined Freshworks in March to lead the company's marketing organization. She oversees growth marketing, product marketing, branding, corporate marketing, communications, and analyst/ public relations at Freshworks.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Stacey Epstein is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Freshworks Inc. She leads our global marketing organization including Growth Marketing, Product Marketing, Branding, Corporate Marketing, Communications, and Analyst/Public Relations. Stacey brings more than 25 years of industry experience in growing iconic SaaS brands like SuccessFactors and ServiceMax through hyper-growth, acquisitions, and IPOs. Most recently, she was CMO and Chief Customer Experience Officer at ServiceMax - a position she returned to when Zinc, where she was CEO, was acquired by ServiceMax in 2019.
Before Zinc, Stacey was CMO at ServiceMax, where she joined the founding team and led the marketing function through six years of triple-digit growth. She also was head of marketing at SuccessFactors for six years and was instrumental in the company's IPO in 2007, as well as its acquisition by SAP later. She currently serves on the board for Litmus and CircleCi. She’s also a prolific author and is a fierce advocate for women in the workplace.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
On this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we zoom in on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region with Hasan Haider, Founder and Managing Partner of (Plus)+VC. MENA is a region with one of the fastest-growing startup ecosystems in the world today, and with blockbuster deals like Careem’s exit to Uber, the region is poised for a take-off. We speak to Hasan on the evolution of the startup ecosystem in the region, the sectors lacking in the region today, what he looks for in founders as a VC, and what his funding process looks like.
Listen In.
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About the Guest
Hasan Haider is the Founder and Managing Partner of +VC. An early-stage venture capital firm focused on the MENA region. Hasan was previously Managing Partner, MENA at 500 Startups and led the firms’ growth in the MENA region over the last five years, turning 500 Startups into the most active VC fund in the MENA region, raising and deploying the 500 Falcons fund, building partnerships and running programs in the region to help build the regional ecosystem. Hasan has invested in more than 180 startups in the region over the last ten years.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
With over 500 million registered learners, 40 million active users, and $190 million in revenues (2020), Duolingo is one of the most successful consumer apps out there.
The app, which helps millions of users learn new languages, did all this in just under 10 years. From being one of the first apps to use gamification, and entering popular culture through its quirky notification copy, Duolingo is an app that has carved a unique voice for itself.
Gina Gotthilf, who led international growth as well as marketing at the startup has an insider's view on how they pulled it off. In the latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we unpack Duolingo’s marketing strategy with Gina.
The former VP of Marketing at the language learning app talks to us about her journey, the experiments that she’s run as part of Duolingo. Gina also talks to us about how she’s looking to build her latest venture Latitud, which helps founders from Latin America build world-class products.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Gina is the Co-founder and COO of Latitud, a platform created to help 10X the number of successful startups in Latin America over the next decade. Previously, she led growth and marketing at Duolingo, from 3 to 200 million users, worked on a US presidential campaign, and led Latin America growth at Tumblr. Gina was born in Brazil, studied philosophy and neuroscience at Brandeis University, and had the honor of presenting to former President Obama, at the White House.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
In November 2020, PhonePe had about 250 million registered users. In the next six months, the company added 50 million more, taking the total count to 300 million users. With over 125 million monthly active users and transactions worth over $390 billion (May 2021) happening over its platforms, PhonePe is the largest payments company in India. The company has set an ambitious target of getting to 500 million Indians by 2023, which is nearly half the country’s population.
With such a large user base, every new product and feature needs to be well thought through. How does PhonePe approach product management and prioritize building the right features? How does it balance agility and still get scale right? In this episode, Vishal Gupta, the head of products at PhonePe, dives deep into these questions.
Tune in.
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About the Guest
Vishal Gupta heads Product at PhonePe. Before PhonePe, Vishal was Director - Product Management at Flipkart, where he led Flipkart money and payments. Before that, he was GM for returns at Flipkart and was also instrumental in delivering the supply chain product. Vishal has built and scaled products at leading organizations such as Pine Labs, AOL & Schlumberger. He has 21 years of industry exposure in telecom, retail, e-commerce, social & payments. Vishal holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Pune and is also an alumnus of IIM Bangalore’s Executive General Management Programme.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Matt Blumberg is the author of Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams. Matt led his first startup, Return Path, an email marketing company, to $100 mn in revenue and a successful exit in 2019. He is now building Bolster, an on-demand executive talent marketplace for startups. On the latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we caught up with the New York Based entrepreneur to discuss his latest book, Startup CXO.
We talked about:
🚀Matt’s journey and what he’s looking to solve with Bolster
🚀Considerations when exiting a startup
🚀The first CXO a founder should hire
🚀When to hire a CFO and what are their functions
🚀Aligning the CMO and CRO teams
🚀Aligning the CPO/CTO and CRO teams
🚀The role of a CHRO in building and scaling culture
🚀What an ideal COO looks like
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Matt Blumberg is the author of Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, a highly influential book embraced by entrepreneurs, CEOs, founders, and board of directors in the entrepreneurial ecosystem that was an outgrowth of his blog, StartupCEO.com. In 1999 he founded Return Path, an innovative email marketing company, and helped grow it to $100mm in revenues and a successful exit in a strategic sale to Validity in 2019. Along with a number of his colleagues from Return Path, Matt started Bolster in 2020, a company focused on helping startups and scaleups grow, develop, and scale their leadership teams and boards.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
As the Founder & CEO of Kovai.co Saravana Kumar has bucked every trend that a start-up playbook advises you to do. He is a solo entrepreneur, his company is based out of Coimbatore, a town in Southern India, and his product is sold exclusively to enterprise customers.
Yet, he has scaled his organization to $10 million in revenue with a total of 0 dollars in funding. In the latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we caught up with the entrepreneur to learn more about his journey and about how he sells to enterprise customers, builds trust among prospects, moved from a single product to a multi-product company, and how he learns on the job and fixes skill gaps within himself and with the larger team.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Saravana Kumar, a renowned software entrepreneur and Chief Executive Officer of Kovai.co, founded Kovai.co in 2010 to help enterprises address the challenges in their BizTalk environments. His decade of experience as a BizTalk consultant motivated him to create Kovai. co’s flagship product - BizTalk36o-to, to reach 1000+ enterprise customers worldwide. Before launching Kovai.co, Saravana worked in the U.K. as a Microsoft BizTalk Consultant. In 2007, for his immense contribution, Microsoft awarded him the Most Valuable Professional (MVP), which he continues to hold to date.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Every once in a while, it’s important for us to zoom out a little to see the big picture. So we took a little break from the practical aspects of company building on this episode to talk about the future.
How is the future changing with AI and the internet? What does this mean for entrepreneurs looking to create lasting companies?
These are the questions that we look to answer on the latest episode of the podcast with David Weinberger, renowned Harvard Business School researcher, technologist, philosopher, and the author of Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We're Thriving in a New World of Possibility.
David talks to us about how the way founders build products has fundamentally changed with the Minimum Viable Product. Butterfly effects on the internet, the hidden biases in artificial intelligence, and why we should be concerned about it.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
In books, talks, articles, David Weinberger, Ph.D., explores the effect of technology — especially the Internet and AI — on our lives, businesses, and ideas. He was recently a writer-in-residence for two years at Google AI and has been a long-time affiliate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He has been a philosophy professor, strategic marketing consultant, co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and a fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center and the U.S. State Department.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Our latest guest is the co-founder of Talkdesk, one of Portugal’s first unicorns. She is also a venture capitalist at Indico Capital Partners and was recognized in the Forbes “30 under 30” in 2016. Meet Cristina Fonseca, the Portuguese entrepreneur who is now looking to re-imagine customer experience in her latest startup Cleverly.ai.
In the latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we talk to Cristina about her journey building her previous startup, Talkdesk. What she looks for in a startup as a venture capitalist with Indico Capital Partners and about all things hiring, including how she sets up processes to hire recruits, collaborate with other department heads, give feedback, and fix recruiting errors without burning bridges.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Cristina Fonseca is an expert in Artificial Intelligence technologies. She is currently the co-founder and CEO of Cleverly.ai, an AI platform that makes customer service teams more efficient across multiple channels. Cristina is on the Singularity University Faculty as an expert in Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship. She is also an investor, Partner at Indico Capital, and tech entrepreneur. She co-founded Talkdesk, an early Portuguese unicorn that made Cristina recognized as “30 under 30” by Forbes in 2016.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Koray Bahar is one of the most prolific entrepreneurs to come out of the MENA region. A computer engineer by profession, Koray joined Foriba in 2001. He helped the company establish itself as a leading player in e-invoicing, scaling it from $2 million to $14 million in revenue, entering eight new countries, and a successful acquisition by global tax software provider Sovos.
In the latest episode of the podcast, Koray talks to us about:
🚀His entrepreneurial journey
🚀How to have a successful exit from a startup
🚀His latest venture, fintech company Figopara
🚀How to scale culture in an organization
🚀The right time to raise funds in a startup
🚀What he looks for in startups as an angel investor
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Koray Bahar is the Co-Founder & CEO of Figopara, a leading Turkish FinTech company aiming to help companies solve working capital constraints. Figopara was founded in 2016. Its investors include Revo Capital, International Finance Corporation, and Endeavor Catalyst. Koray was previously the general director and partner of Foriba. He scaled the company from 35 to 220 employees, $2 million to $14 million in revenue, from 30 to 15,000 customers, and it entered the markets of 8 different countries. Koray is an active angel investor. He also creates content regarding entrepreneurship and technology on www.yollarda.tv.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
How do you create engaging content and gives your startup a great return on investment in an increasingly competitive marketplace?
Today generating content that is engaging and has high visibility is an integral part of a brand's inbound marketing strategy. In this episode, Steph Smith, the head of Trends at The Hustle, a newsletter with over a million readers, breaks down essential content strategy for startups. She talks about how brands should set up their content strategy, how to differentiate in the market, find a niche, set up their SEO process, master distribution, set goals, and measure success. Whether you’re an independent blogger, startup, or a team within a larger organization this episode will help you plan and scale your content strategy.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Steph has been working remotely for over three years as a growth marketer, writer, and indie maker. She spent three years at Toptal (most recently leading their Publications team) and is now the Head of Trends at the Hustle (acquired by HubSpot). She is a self-taught developer that has built multiple projects, including some that have topped Product Hunt, leading to a nomination for Maker of the Year in 2018. She also has a personal blog that has been read by over half a million people, touching on topics including remote work, productivity, and tech. She is the author of Doing Content Right.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
The Three-Box solution posits that every project that your organization executes can be put into one of three boxes. Box one manages the present and focuses on the customers that you serve today. Box two selectively forgets the past and contains projects that do not fit into the company’s vision for the future. And Box three is about creating the future by taking into considerations innovations and technological disruptions. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, Manish Tangri unpacks the Three-Box Solution. He discusses how leaders can apply this solution to their startups and established businesses so that their companies are future-proofed and protected from disruptions.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Manish Tangri is the author of HBR Press' book, The Three Box Solution Playbook: Tools and Tactics for Creating Your Company's Strategy. Manish has spent more than fifteen years executing entrepreneurial innovation activities in Fortune 500 organizations such as Microsoft and Intel. These experiences, which include recognizing external trends and nonlinear shifts and amplifying them so that organizations can effectively create their future was critical in developing the playbook.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Max Rofagha is building the largest and most engaged finance community at Finimize, a UK-based startup media platform that envisions a world where you don’t need a financial advisor. Max talks to us about leveraging the power of community by driving up Net Promotor Scores (NPS), increasing retention, and enabling user-generated content. He also explains his philosophy of “hire slow, fire fast” and talks about how he organically created the world’s largest financial gathering through the Finimize newsletter.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Max is the founder of Finimize, the world’s largest and most engaged finance community. Before Finimize, Max co-founded an e-commerce startup with 200 employees (backed by Lakestar) and sold it in 2015. He also mentors at Techstars and Startup Bootcamp and was named one of Forbes "30 under 30" for 2016.
Follow Max on Twitter @wholeearthweb
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
We’ve had several venture capital investors on this podcast. But Loyal VC certainly stands out.
The Toronto-based firm operates a global startup index fund with over 130 investments across more than 30 countries. It is designed to minimize systemic bias in the investment process, unlocking greater returns.
Its diverse portfolio of founders, of whom currently over 30% are women CEOs and almost 30% are from emerging markets, includes 80% social impact entrepreneurs who leverage technology to address one or more of the United Nations sustainable development goals.
In this episode, Kamal Hassan, the founding partner at Loyal VC talks to us about how they actively eliminate bias in investing.
Listen in.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here **to check eligibility.
About the Guest**
Kamal Hassan's passion is entrepreneurship. Now, he helps others succeed. Loyal VC is the culmination of the past 20 years of his career, combining Founder Institute deal flow, Incmind software to manage the portfolio, and years of experience in supporting entrepreneurs and living their life.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Rajiv Srivatsa co-founded Urban Ladder, a top online furniture brand in 2012. With over 5000 designs across 35 categories such as living, dining, bedroom, study, and decor, Urban Ladder was established as an online-first brand. The company went on to become one of the most loved brands in India and was sold to Reliance in November 2020.
Srivatsa now leads global venture capital firm Antler in India. The firm has plans to invest in over 150 early-stage startups over four years. In this episode, Rajiv talks to us about product-market fit, early-stage fundraising, the professional growth of a founder, and more.
You can follow Rajiv on Twitter.
Reference to the minimum viable product meme was from Henrik Kniberg's blog.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Rajiv Srivatsa has 18+ years of experience in building scalable products and companies across B2C commerce, B2C tech, mobile and supply chain. He Co-founded Urban Ladder and helped build it towards becoming the #1 omnichannel brand for furniture in India. He currently leads the deployment and operations of global early-stage VC firm Antler in India.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Andrew Gazdecki’s entrepreneurial journey started right out of college when the serial bootstrapper founded Bizness Apps a low code DIY mobile app builder that enabled small businesses to create, edit and manage mobile apps online. Over eight years he led the startup from 0 to $10 million+ ARR right up to a successful acquisition. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast Andrew talks to us about his latest venture MicroAcquire, a startup up acquisition marketplace. Andrew talks about how minimum your MVP needs to be, the advantages of bootstrapping, how he builds in public, and tips based on his experience for a successful exit of your startup.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Andrew Gazdecki is a 4x founder with 3x exits, former CRO, and founder of MicroAcquire. Gazdecki has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, and Entrepreneur Magazine, as well as prominent industry blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
How do you scale your startup from three to thirty to three hundred people without losing sight of your company’s culture, values, and mission? When do you bring in specialists, put in processes at your startup?
In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast HR leader and CHRO of Freshworks Suman Gopalan talks about how a company can scale its people function, how to set up an HR function from scratch and scale it as your company scales, how to avoid conflicts between new recruits and the old guard, and how to retain your company's culture and manage employees in a remote post-pandemic workplace.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Suman Gopalan is the Chief Human Resource Officer of Freshworks. She has more than two decades of experience in various human resource functions. She spent ten years in various HR roles including Executive Director HR at Dell. She was also the Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at The Nielsen Company. Suman has graduated from XLRI, Jamshedpur with an MBA in Human Resources Management.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Wen Johanna Flower joined Crowdstrike in late 2014, cybersecurity was a growing field with a large number of vendors supplying solutions to enterprises. Worldwide spending on information security was expected to grow 4.7% to $75 billion in 2015, according to Gartner.
Dozens of companies with competing products were in the market. Through her six-year career at the company, Johanna successfully led Crowdstrike’s marketing organization to differentiate the product, launch outside the United States and cross over $700 million Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) all the way to a successful Initial Public Offering in 2019.
In this episode, the marketing leader takes us through her journey at Crowdstrike and explains how to build a world-class marketing org that can take a company public.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Johanna Flower has been leading global teams and growing companies for the past 20+ years. Most recently, Johanna served as CrowdStrike’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) – leading all elements of global Marketing at CrowdStrike including directing the brand, corporate communications, go-to-market strategies, and demand generation from 2014 to 2020. Johanna played a critical role in CrowdStrike’s initial public offering (IPO), largely hailed as one of the most successful cybersecurity IPOs in history. Prior to joining CrowdStrike, Johanna held the role of SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Websense, Inc. (now Forcepoint LLC).
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Digital transformation is a much-abused word in corporate circles. When traditional companies try it, they cut costs, they start experimentation and they set up outposts in Silicon Valley. But none of these approaches works well, according to Sunil Gupta, the author of the book Driving Digital Strategy, and professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.
In this episode, Gupta unpacks the framework of digital transformation that he’s come up with after studying over 150 companies for more than a decade. Gupta, who is also a board member at US Foods, a $24 billion food distribution company, also talks about getting startup strategy right.
Listen in.
To celebrate crossing 25 episodes we are giving away fifty copies of the book Driving Digital Strategy by Sunil Gupta. To take part in the book giveaway tell us what you liked about this episode on Twitter or LinkedIn using #theobitshiftpodcast and tagging us on @therealjpk and @guptsunil
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Sunil Gupta is the Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration and co-chair of the executive program on Driving Digital Strategy at Harvard Business School. He served as the head of the Marketing Unit from 2008-2013 and was the Chair of the General Management Program from 2013-2019. Sunil has published three books and over 110 articles, book chapters, cases, and notes on these topics. His research has been well recognized and his articles have won several national and international awards. Sunil is an advisor to several startup firms and serves on the board of US Foods. As a business expert, Sunil has frequently appeared on several national and international radio and television programs, such as CBS, CNN, NPR, and BBC, and has been quoted in Forbes, The Fast Company, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Sunil holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
As a founder, you might think that an investor has bought into your mission because they have ‘put their money where their mouth is’. However, Ritesh Banglani, Co-founder of Stellaris Ventures contends that this is not enough and that a startup can be destroyed if there isn’t a fit between the founder and the venture capitalist.
In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast Ritesh breaks down how to choose the right VC for your startup, what red flags you need to look out for when you are in conversation with VCs, how to tell if your VC has conviction in your mission, does it make a difference if you get a senior partner or a junior partner, how long your fundraise should take and much more.
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This episode was originally recorded as a Linkedin live webinar. To stay in touch with our programs and to receive regular updates sign up for our newsletter.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Ritesh Banglani is the Co-Founder of Stellaris Ventures. At Stellaris, he invests in technology companies in Healthcare, Travel, and Financial Services. He has a strong interest in companies solving uniquely Indian problems, especially those applying new technologies to their industry for the first time. Prior to Stellaris, Ritesh was a Partner at Helion, where he invested in companies like Taxiforsure, Lifecell, and Trulymadly. Before he moved to venture capital in 2007, he was a product manager for online and mobile consumer products.
The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Paul Yacoubian is easily one of the most interesting entrepreneurs to watch out for. In the last four months, his startup, copy.ai has gone from $0 to $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
Much of the company's early success comes from its ‘Build in public.’ In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we bring you a conversation with Paul on how to build in public.
Paul shared some of the tactics that have worked for him. But more importantly, this episode is for you to get a sense of what it means to really build your startup in public.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Paul is the founder of copy.ai, an artificial intelligence-based marketing platform that uses GPT-3 to help marketers and entrepreneurs create the marketing copy they need to grow their businesses. Paul is on a mission to seek out, support, and inspire people to turn their entrepreneurial dreams into a reality and change the world for the better. As a key part of this mission, Paul has been building his company in public on Twitter.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Serial entrepreneur and Product School CEO, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia reckons that a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) can be as small as creating a store on Amazon or even as minimum as a tweet. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast the product leader deep dives into how you can test your idea in the market without a product, the different approaches you can take to develop an MVP, how to identify product-market-fit, responsibilities of a product manager, hiring a product manager and the trends shaping product management.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia is the Founder and CEO of Product School, the global leader in product management training with a community of over one million product professionals. Product School instructors are real-world Product Leaders working at top companies including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
In the last 10 years or so, Freshworks has scaled from zero to hundreds of millions in recurring revenue and is among the few product companies from India that have managed to do that. At Freshworks, we aim to give back as much as we can. Because we've had plenty of help getting here. To that end, we said a few months ago, that we'll start talking about how we built Freshworks and open up our playbook to other startups. This episode with Arun Pattabhiraman, the Chief Growth Officer at Freshworks is one such attempt.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here **to check eligibility.
About the GuestArun runs the revenue marketing and sales development functions at Freshworks globally. He was previously head of marketing at Hotstar, and before that, the chief marketing officer at InMobi. He has built and scaled teams that have delivered growth at some of the fastest-growing companies.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
A few years ago, the Plantix app would have been the stuff of science fiction. All you have to do is take an image of a plant that’s sick and the app identifies the disease and recommends the treatment to cure the plant. But now it's a reality. The app has helped more than one million small-scale farmers improve productivity. On the latest episode of the podcast, we sit down with Simone Strey the Founder and CEO of Plantix, and talk about her journey from a researcher to an entrepreneur; how she built Plantix: what metrics she tracks to scale the app; how she’s looking to monetize the platform; the company's strategy to hire; and how she approached investors to fund a pre-revenue organization.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Simone Strey is the Founder and CEO of Plantix. During her Ph.D. in Brazil, she and her husband Robert Strey worked with farmers in the Amazon. Here the idea was born to train machine learning algorithms to become digital plant experts. Plantix is an app that allows users to take an image of crop diseases on their smartphone and then diagnose the ailments and prescribes the remedy for the plant. More than 30% of the worldwide harvest is lost due to plant diseases and pests - Plantix is there to change this. Simone studied Geography and Botany in Hannover, Germany.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
It's not very often that you have a venture investor at the peak of his career in Silicon Valley coming back to India. But Hemant Mohapatra did. In India, he's an investor at venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. He's already backed several entrepreneurs and built a reputation for himself as a thoughtful investor. In this episode of the podcast, Mohapatra tells us why he is bullish about the Indian startup ecosystem, the metrics he looks at when evaluating a startup, what red flags he looks for in a pitch deck, what qualities he looks for in early employees and why he always hires for skill rather than passion.
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Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Hemant is a Partner with Lightspeed India, a global VC firm. Prior to Lightspeed, he was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a VC firm based in Silicon Valley and an investor in Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, and more. He joined a16z after 5 years at Google doing strategic partnership deals and investments. Before a16z and Google, Hemant was an Engineer at AMD, a microprocessor firm. He has a bachelor's and a couple of master's degrees in engineering, computer sciences, and business spread across India, the USA, and the UK.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Anthony Rose is a serial disrupter. He first disrupted file sharing with his application Kazaa. He then disrupted streaming with the launch of the BBC iPlayer. And he is now looking to disrupt the legal industry with his legal tech platform SeedLegals. We spoke to the entrepreneur about the road he took to achieve product-market fit, how cash-strapped early-stage entrepreneurs can persuade talent to join them, the biggest learnings of his career, how founders can integrate customer feedback to their company, and his marketing strategies.
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Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Anthony Rose is the Founder & CEO of SeedLegals, a new legal tech platform that lets startups and investors complete the legal work needed to build, grow and fund their business, at a fraction of the cost of using a law firm. Previously, Anthony co-founded Beamly, a social and content network for television, which was acquired by Coty in 2015. Known as “The man behind BBC iPlayer”, Anthony ran the iPlayer and other BBC services from 2007 to 2010, taking the iPlayer from pre-launch to major success story. Anthony’s patent portfolio includes patents for distributed online rewards, content discovery, and interactive television.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
In a world flooded with content, how do you stand out as a digital media company? How do you then build this community up to 90 million readers? How do you grow profitably?
The answer has a lot to do with community. And of course, content and commerce.
In the first episode of our second season Dhimant Parekh, Founder of the Indian digital-media platform ‘The Better India’ talks to us about how he married content, commerce, and community to build his company.
He talks about
🚀 His early journey and the inspiration to build The Better India
🚀 What he looks for in early-stage hiring
🚀 Cracking his first corporate client
🚀 Starting The Better Home and scaling the business
🚀 How founders should manage personal finances
🚀 His lessons from fund-raising
Listen in.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Dhimant Parekh is an impact entrepreneur. He built and grew The Better India, a social and environmental impact-focused digital platform with a reader base of 90 million. He then built India’s first e-commerce marketplace for sustainable products to connect MSMEs to conscious customers. Most recently he launched India’s only DTC subscription box of sustainable products called ‘The Better Home’.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
This week we bring you a special episode that's all about hiring for startups. It's the last episode of this year and we've been busy lining up guests for the next season. In the last four months, we've had 16 guests on the show and we asked many of them about how they look at hiring.
This episode features Cal Henderson, the co-founder of Slack, investor and advisor Elad Gil, Rahul Chari, the co-founder of India's largest payments company, Tyler Sloat, the Chief Financial Officer of Freshworks, Yamini Bhat, the co-founder of Vymo, Jose Morales, the Chief Revenue Officer of Freshworks and a few others.
We talked about hiring engineering talent, product managers, sales leaders, chief financial officers, and so on.
Check out the Freshworks for Startups program, where we give out $10,000 worth of free credits to startups that are looking to engage with their customers better. We also have white-glove onboarding, mentorship, and resources for startups that are part of the program.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
A few weeks ago when we recorded this podcast, Aditya Kothari's startup was at 25 million users. Now it's at 42 million. That's the speed at which Chingari, the short video app is growing. In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, Aditya talks to us about the startups that didn't grow and failed, raising funds, and how they're scaling the short video app Chingari.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Aditya Kothari has been an active entrepreneur for the last 11 years, with ventures in customized events, e-commerce, and visitor management. He has also been proactively involved in other startup stories like Bounce, Getlinks (a Thailand-based recruitment venture), and Rapidbox. He is currently the Co-Founder of Chingari an Indian video-sharing app.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
When Yamini Bhat was a consultant at McKinsey & Company she helped companies transform their sales process. It was here that she saw salespeople were using CRMs merely as a customer database and not making the most use of them. This led to a gap in companies knowing what led to results and what didn’t. This is where her idea of starting Vymo a personal sales assistant that sits on top of the CRM came from. Vymo now helps 60+ enterprise customers and 125,000 sales reps crush their targets!
In our latest episode, the SaaS founder speaks to us about
🚀How she achieved product-market-fit
🚀Hiring her first employee and how she sets up her team to complement founder skills
🚀Achieving success marketing at events and bouncing back from COVID
🚀Managing customer churn through customer success
🚀Empowering senior leaders and setting up rules of governance
🚀Her fund-raising journey
🚀The power of saying no and not counting certain wins as momentum
Listen In.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Yamini is the Co-Founder and CEO of Vymo, which offers a Sales Excellence Cloud that is used by leading Financial Institutions across the World. She was, previously, Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, where she specialized in Marketing Strategy and Sales & Distribution. Yamini is a recognized thought leader in Digital Transformation and is passionate about data-driven growth.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Our latest episode is a fireside chat between Armando Mann, Chief Business Officer at Hopin, and Elad Gil, entrepreneur, investor, and author. Elad walks us through how he sees companies coming out of the pandemic, the offensive and defensive moves a startup can take to protect themselves from uncertainties that arise during a pandemic, how companies can leverage the pandemic to recruit the best talent, explore new opportunities in mergers and acquisitions and go after enterprise clients. The future of remote work, the urgent needs, and problems startups are not addressing, what new technology Elad is most excited about, and much more.
Listen in.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Elad Gil is an entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Checkr, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, and Wish. He is co-founder and chairman at Color Genomics and its former CEO. Previously, Gil was VP of corporate strategy at Twitter after it acquired his firm Mixer Labs, and he was Google’s original product manager for Google Mobile Maps.
About the Host
Armando Mann is Chief Business Officer at Hopin, the leading platform for virtual events where you can host a 50 person meetup or a 50,000 person conference. He is also a global investor in SaaS startups such as Carta, Blend, and Freshworks. Armando launched and led go to market for Dropbox for Business. Before that, he built the sales teams for various Google emerging businesses, including Google Offers and AdWords Express. Armando holds an Industrial Engineering degree from ITBA and a Master in Business Administration from the Harvard Business School, where he graduated as a Baker Scholar.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK**
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Intuition, analytics, and research are the three pillars that you should rely on when you make a product decision according to product leader Ravi Mehta.
We had a chance to sit down and go in-depth with Ravi Mehta, former chief product officer at Tinder, and several other top tech companies including Facebook and Microsoft.
In this conversation, we talk about his journey as a product manager, his learnings from his days at Facebook, TripAdvisor, and later Tinder.
We also took on questions like:
🚀What's the right time for a startup to hire a product manager?
🚀What do peak product managers look like?
🚀How do you build products for Gen Z?
🚀Making startups antifragile.
And much more. Listen in.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Ravi Mehta is a consumer tech leader who has built and scaled consumer tech products that have impacted millions of people’s lives and scaled teams to meet the challenge. Most recently, he was the Chief Product Officer at Tinder, he has previously held product roles at Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Microsoft Xbox.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
As a startup founder, you must have gone through your fair share of sales playbooks, all claiming that they contain the ‘secret sauce’ to generate more leads and close more deals. This episode with sales leader Jose Morales is not that. In this episode, we explore the nuances of building a modern sales team — when to build one, how to build one, and how to set it up for success.
“Your customer looks at your sales rep as a trusted advisor. Someone that really understands their needs,” says Jose, the chief revenue officer at Freshworks.
Jose, who comes with an extensive track record of sales across the spectrum of startups — from the small company to the global giant — also covers how to scale modern sales teams, his sales philosophy, and several other questions that will help startups build an efficient sales organization.
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Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Jose Morales is the Chief Revenue Officer at Freshworks. He joined Freshworks from Atlassian, where he spent the last 10 years leading the field operations organization which included direct sales, partner programs, services, and other key GTM functions. The organization included teams supporting and driving the self-serve business to field sales organizations closing seven-figure deals in the global 2000. Jose joined Atlassian when they were less than $100M in revenue and helped grow them to over $1.8B in annual run rate. During that time he built teams in many countries including the US, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines. Prior to Atlassian, he held other go-to-market roles with leading Silicon Valley software companies.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Startups that have a subscription model are valued a lot more than startups that have to repeatedly sell to their customers. This is why publicly-listed Netflix or privately held Notion, and many others are valued at a premium.
Even traditional businesses have started to see this trend and are now building their own subscription businesses. But what is it that makes them successful? Why do they tend to do better than traditional companies?
In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we bring you a conversation with Robbie Kellman Baxter, one of the most prominent thinkers in the field of the membership economy.
Robbie, whose clients include companies like Netflix, Fitbit, Microsoft, and several others, talks to us about how startups should go about designing their membership models to unlock value for customers and shareholders.
We spoke to Robbie about
🚀how a startup can discover their forever promise
🚀how a company can pivot to a subscription model by identifying their forever promise
🚀how startups can manage churn without hiding the cancel button
🚀the importance of a customer success team
🚀why more and more companies are shifting to a membership model
🚀how a membership model benefits the company and how it benefits the consumer
Listen in.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the GuestRobbie Kellman Baxter is the founder of Peninsula Strategies LLC, a management consulting firm. She is also the author of The Membership Economy and The Forever Transaction and hosts the podcast Subscription Stories. Robbie has more than 20 years of experience providing strategic business advice to major organizations, including Netflix, Fitbit, Microsoft, and Consumer Reports. She has been focused on subscription and growth strategies for the past decade. Baxter has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. She earned her MBA from the Stanford GSB and graduated with honors from Harvard College.
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Robbie Kellman Baxter Official Site.
Additional Goodies for our listeners from Robbie.
Listen to Robbie’s Podcast Subscription Stories: True Tales from the Trenches
Buy The Forever Transaction book by Robbie Kellman Baxter
Buy Membership Economy book by Robbie Kellman Baxter
Free Download of a chapter from The Forever Transaction by Robbie Kellman Baxter
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Twenty years ago, Cal Henderson was working in London while Stewart Butterfield was making a game called Game Neverending. Henderson, a big fan of the game, broke into the email server to join the internal mailing list of Butterfield’s 4 person company. Eventually, Cal convinced Butterfield to hire him. The game was not going anywhere, so they started focusing on a side project which eventually became Flickr and eventually sold to Yahoo in 2005. The two founders went back to building another gaming company called Glitch. That didn’t do well either. Another side project, that helped Glitch manage their remote teams now became the core product. They called it Slack. And the rest is history. Today Slack has a market cap of almost $15 billion. In the quarter ended April 2020, it pulled in over $200 million in revenues, growing at 49% compared to the year-ago quarter, with a gross margin of 87.3% and a stellar net retention rate of 132%.
This episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast brings you a fireside chat between Cal Henderson and Girish Mathrubootham. The two talked about
🚀Achieving Product-market fit
🚀Convincing others to use Slack
🚀Growing beyond the original product-market fit
🚀The #2 reason why startups fail
🚀Success comes from failure
🚀Giving away your lego blocks
🚀Go from sprinting to running a marathon
🚀Stress and the role of leaders
🚀Succeeding in the post-Covid world
This episode was originally recorded as part of the AgainstAllOdds startup summit conducted by Freshworks for Startups.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Cal Henderson is the co-founder and CTO of Slack. Previously, Cal built and led the engineering teams at Flickr, until its acquisition by Yahoo. An experienced technology leader and a popular speaker on engineering scalability, he authored the best-selling O’Reilly Media book Building Scalable Websites. Cal was also a pioneer in the use of web APIs and created the basis for OAuth and oEmbed, now used by YouTube, Twitter and many others. He has a Bachelor of Computer Science and has received an Honorary Doctorate from Birmingham City University. He now resides in San Francisco.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
On Monday, payments startup PhonePe said that it has crossed 250 million registered users with over 100 million monthly active users. The Bengaluru headquartered startup became one of India's biggest payments startup in a short span of six years.
PhonePe's co-founder and chief technology officer Rahul Chari spoke to Vinod Chandramouli of Freshworks about how the company stays focused and sticks to the mission even when there are distractions. Chari, who was earlier a top engineering leader at Flipkart, also talks about the lessons from his career.
He also discussed
🚀 How startups can bounce back from the Covid-19 pandemic and settle tech debt
🚀The biggest learnings from his career
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Compressing learning cycles
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Lessons from Flipkart’s first ‘Big Billion Day Sale’
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Continuous platformization to avoid growth hack hell
🚀The next phase of growth at PhonePe
🚀 Balancing agility and compliance using a core system and peripheral system model
This episode was originally recorded as part of the AgainstAllOdds startup summit conducted by Freshworks for Startups.
Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.
About the Guest
Rahul is the co-founder and CTO at PhonePe. He is a serial entrepreneur in the consumer internet space and has built PhonePe into one of India’s fastest-growing and largest fintech companies. He comes with over two decades of experience in the consumer internet and enterprise software space. He has strong experience in building world-class tech platforms for web-scale, continuously scaling systems to deal with hyper-growth, and evolving the processes and practices to meet the demands of a fast-growing organization.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
As the engineering leader at Freshworks, STS Prasad plays an integral role in the development of the Freshworks suite of products. In the latest episode of the podcast, we talk to him about engineering at startups. We covered
🚀How founders should go about hiring engineers for their teams
🚀 What should the role of the early engineer at startups be
🚀 How to identify the right tech co-founder
🚀 How Freshworks remains an eternal startup using the 'Freshwave Model'
🚀 Retaining the startup culture even as you scale
Enjoy the show!
About the Guest
STS Prasad has been an entrepreneur, a top engineer who transitioned to manage several engineering teams, and one of the most successful engineering leaders at Freshworks. After graduating from IIT- Madras and acquiring his master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, he started his career at HCL, became a chief architect of Junglee (acquired by Amazon), and later he headed up Walmart Labs. STS Prasad also served as the CTO of Aventeon, a mobile enterprise solution startup that he founded. He is currently the SVP of Engineering at Freshworks Inc.
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Our latest guest is Ranjeet Pratap Singh the co-founder and CEO of Indian language storytelling platform Pratilipi. Ranjeet walks us through how frustrated by the lack of access to Hindi literature he built Pratilipi, much before the concept of Next Billion Users became mainstream. He talks to us about how he built his team and scaled the platform to over 20 million monthly users, the lessons he learned from raising funds, and his future strategies to monetize his platform.
About the Guest
Ranjeet Pratap Singh is the co-founder and CEO of the Indian language storytelling platform Pratilipi. Pratilipi has over 2.5 million stories published by more than 240,000 writers in 12 languages and over 20 million Monthly Active Users.
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Register as part of the Freshworks for Startups Programme
The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
As a new immigrant Gopi Rangan’s American Dream was nearly cut short by a car accident. Fortunately for the ace investor, he was insured, shielding him from the financial burden he would have to undergo. This incident is ingrained into Gopi as the founding partner of Sure Ventures where he invests in insuretech companies. On this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast Gopi talks to us about who he invests in and how he identifies these ‘agents of change’, what he looks for in pitch decks, why he loves typos in pitch decks, when a startup founder should look to raise capital from institutional investors, how founders can create great teams and when they should hire lovable fools and when they should hire the competent jerks.
About the Guest
Gopi Rangan is the Founding Partner at Sure Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley. He invests with the mission to enable peace of mind for all. His main areas of focus are seed-stage startups in the insurance, aging care, mental health, wealth management, and related sectors in the United States. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD.
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Listen to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur Podcast by Gopi Rangan
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Continuing our series of talks from our recently concluded AgainstAllOdds startup summit we have with us, Shellye Archambeau. In this episode, Shellye talks to Preethy Padmanabhan of Freshworks, on her journey to become one of Silicon Valley’s first female African American CEOs and recounts how she transformed MetricStream from being a Silicon Valley ‘problem child’ to a sustainable multi-million dollar business. She talks about how founders can balance short-term interests and long-term desire to build sustainable companies, how they can bring in more diversity and inclusivity to their businesses, and what the business can gain from this, the dangers of falling in love with your product, and much more.
About the Guest
Shellye Archambeau is one of Silicon Valley's first female African American CEOs. Formerly an executive at IBM and CMO at two public companies, Archambeau was recruited to be the CEO of a then-struggling Silicon Valley startup, which is now MetricStream, a recognized global leader in governance, risk, and compliance software solutions. She currently serves as a Fortune 500 board member and holds board seats at Verizon, Nordstrom, Roper Technologies, and Okta. Her debut book, Unapologetically Ambitious: Take Risks, Break Barriers, and Create Success on Your Own Terms will be launched on October 6, 2020, with Grand Central Publishing.
Preethy Padmanabhan is the Head of Platform Product Marketing at Freshworks. Prior to joining Freshworks, Preethy was the VP of Marketing at Panzura. She is also an angel investment partner with SV2, Portfolia, and a Board Member for CortexBCI. She served in various non-profit boards focused on economic empowerment, women, children, and education. She also held positions in marketing, sales, and engineering across Nutanix, Dell, and Cisco.
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Shellye Archambeau Official Website
Buy Unapologetically Ambitious by Shellye Archambeau
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The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
‘’Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, but cash is king’’ is the mantra that Alex Theuma repeats to us when quizzed about some of the learnings he has had as the founder of SaaStock — one of the largest SaaS conferences in the world. Join us for another episode as Alex talks to us about why building a community is important for startups. In this episode, he also walks us through his career and how he grew a SaaS blog meet-up into the global conference SaaStock, some of the mistakes and learnings he made in his career, how to build a community, and the big trends that he anticipates in the future for the SaaS industry.
About the Guest
Alex Theuma is the Founder & CEO of SaaStock a conference to help SaaS companies get traction, grow, and scale. Alex launched the conference in 2016, building on the popularity of his blog and podcast for SaaS founders and initial SaaS meetups in Dublin, London, and Berlin.
Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast Register as part of the Freshworks for Startups Programme **The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian**
Today we have a special episode for you. As part of AgainstAllOdds, our startup summit, we had the chance to sit down with Virginia Sharma, Vice President of Brand Solutions at JioSaavn, the largest streaming platform for South Asian music and audio entertainment. Virginia walked us through the founding and development of the Saavn app, how they combine data and art to make decisions at Saavn, her forecast for podcasts, the value of “edutainment” and the reason why AR Rahman collaborated with U2 shortly before the bands’ debut performance in India.
About the Guest
Virginia Sharma is the Vice President of Brand Solution at JioSaavn, the largest streaming platform for South Asian music and audio entertainment. She spearheads the company’s global digital ad monetization efforts across platforms and is responsible for driving adoption to JioSaavn’s advertising solutions for brands. Having worked in the U.S., Singapore, Japan, and India, Virginia brings a global perspective to the digital entertainment company. Virginia has over 20 years of experience in leading marketing and sales teams.
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Register as part of the Freshworks for Startups Programme
The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
Used to be that we subscribed to newspapers, magazines, and gym memberships. But these days, every business is trying to become a subscription service. Movies, music, transportation, groceries, fashion, lawn maintenance, and the list of subscription businesses in our lives go on.
Why is that? What is it about the subscription economy that makes it a superior business model? And what are the nuances of building a subscription business? In today’s episode Tyler Sloat, the Chief Financial Officer at Freshworks decodes the subscription model for us. We also dive deep into the business of software as a services model.
As the former CFO at Zuora, a pioneering enterprise software company that manages subscription payments for businesses, Tyler is an expert on the subject. Tune in as he breaks down the building blocks of a subscription-based company, the metrics that you need to keep track of as a startup founder, the importance of the Rule of 40, and the role of the CFO in a startup. If you’re a part of a SaaS organization or a business that relies on monthly recurring payments we promise you that this is an episode that you do not want to miss out on.
About the Guest
Tyler Sloat has more than twenty-five years of experience in finance and operations roles for SaaS, software, and hardware technology companies varying in size from start-up to Fortune 500. Sloat served as Chief Financial Officer at Zuora Inc. for nearly 10 years, guiding the subscription payments leader from start-up through a successful public listing and subsequent quarters as a public company. In that role, he helped the company grow annual recurring revenue ~20x, raised over $200 mn in capital, and at times managed all G&A, commercial sales, technical operations, and sales operations. Before Zuora Sloat was the Chief Financial Officer for Obopay, where he was integral in raising well over $100M in investment and strategic capital, forming global commercial relationships with the likes of Nokia, MasterCard, and Societe Generale, and deploying Obopay's mobile payment service in four countries spanning three continents. Tyler joined Freshworks as CFO in 2020. At Freshworks, Tyler’s role involves maintaining sustainable growth across its customer segments and overseeing all the Accounting, Finance, Legal and IT functions.
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Register as part of the Freshworks for Startups Programme
The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian
On this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we sit down with Alex Lazarow, venture capitalist and author of Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs from Delhi to Detroit Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley. Alex walks us through how startups outside Silicon Valley in what he calls ‘the frontier’ are innovating, what they are doing differently, and what other startups from Silicon Valley and beyond can learn from these frontier companies. He tells us why founders should build camels instead of unicorns, how to create A-teams, his long-term and midterm forecasts for venture capital during the Covid-19 pandemic, and much more.
About the Guest
Alexandre Lazarow has worked at the intersection of investing, innovation, and economic development across the public, private, and social sectors for more than a decade.
He is a venture capitalist with Cathay Innovation, a global investment firm, with over $3 billion in assets, and offices across the world. He is also an Adjunct Professor with the Middlebury Institute for International Studies MBA program, where he teaches entrepreneurship.
Previously, Alex worked with Omidyar Network, a global early-stage investing platform that has invested over a billion dollars in hundreds of startups.
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Alexandre Lazarow Official Website
Buy Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs--from Delhi to Detroit--Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley on Harvard Book Review Official Website
Register as part of the Freshworks for Startups Programme
The Orbit Shift Podcast is Powered by Freshworks Inc. a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK
Assistant Producer - Shashwath J
Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian