Laks is the co-founder and former CTO of Zenefits. Since the company's founding in 2013, Laks has led and helped expand Zenefits' business, which serves tens of thousands of companies. Prior to Zenefits, Laks served as a software engineer at SigFig and as a project leader at D. E. Shaw & Co.

Keith Krach has served as chairman of the board of DocuSign since 2009. Krach started his career at General Motors, becoming the youngest vice-president at age 26. He later co-founded B2B commerce pioneer Ariba; took the firm public in 2000. By the end of his tenure, Ariba had reached $34 billion in market capitalization.

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Tony Ball is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) Business Unit at Entrust Datacard. He joined the company in 2016 to provide leadership, global strategy and innovation for the access control and authentication solution segments. Ball has deep industry knowledge and previously served as president of IAM for HID Global. He has held executive roles at HID, Gemalto and Schlumberger Technologies where he began his career with over 20 years in multiple leadership roles across the globe. Ball studied finance and business at Bournemouth University and completed the International Institute for Management Development executive leadership program.

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Mr. Roth leads Dignity Health’s innovation efforts, which seek to create and test novel services, programs, partnerships, and/or technologies from within and outside of healthcare- that challenge the status quo and have the potential to reduce the cost of care, improve quality, and/or increase access to services. Working in concert with Dignity Health employees and physicians, Mr. Roth works to anticipate emerging trends and technologies with the goal of incubating, studying, and scaling efforts to improve care.

Mr. Roth holds a Masters degree in Healthcare Administration from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelors degree in Public Health from West Chester University.

Mr. Roth regularly advises venture capital organizations and co-manages Dignity Healths Strategic Investment Fund.

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As Senior Vice President of Product and Design at Upwork, Hayden leads the product and design teams and oversees the company’s product across desktop, web and mobile. She is an expert in product strategy, innovation and fast-paced execution and revels in breaking new ground on challenges at the intersection of product management, product design and business management. She leads a team of 30+ product managers and designers in developing a product that enables freelancers and clients around the globe to work together in a new model that is radically changing the hiring and job-finding paradigm from a chore into a delightful and instantaneous experience. Learn more about her perspective by viewing a recent article she wrote on Medium about how businesses can outsmart the talent war by tapping into the independent workforce online. Hayden holds an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University.

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Trey is the Global Chief Product Officer for Mood Media, a leading in-store media specialist that uses a mix of music, visual and mobile solutions to help its clients communicate with customers and drive incremental sales in retail establishments. Trey brings 12+ years experience in technology development and professional services at both large and small companies. Prior to Mood Media, Trey worked in a variety of product management and professional service roles at companies like Accenture and eBay.

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Our Guest

Trey is the Chief Product Officer for Mood, a leading in-store media specialist that uses a mix of music, visual and mobile solutions to help its clients communicate with customers and drive incremental sales in retail establishments. Trey brings 12+ years experience in technology development and professional services at both large and small companies. Prior to Mood Media, Trey worked in a variety of product management and professional service roles at companies like Accenture and eBay.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Trey is most passionate about solving the retail challenge today with technology. This entails figuring out how to engage with consumers in a meaningful way – how you do that in the most efficient way, how you create that connection, and how you use technology, most specifically mobile technology..
When he was a kid, Trey wanted to be a National Geographic journalist and go take pictures around the world and write stories. He realized when he was in college that this may not be able to get him money, so he got a degree in Finance. He started his career at Accenture where he got to learn software development process to solve business problems.
Trey joined Mood Media as a consultant to help with device strategies but ultimately joined full time as a technical product manager. They take content -- whether its video or audio-- curate it and deliver it to lots of different systems and his role was to figure out the platform component of it all. In the last couple of years, he focused more on being on the shadows and internally-facing to support what’s in the market and take ownership of the product.
As a kid, looking back, it was all about telling stories for Trey. He loved to write and take pictures and ultimately, that is telling stories and he shares that it’s the same now in the media company; it is still just about trying to tell stories. But what gets him excited is using all these technologies to create that story, that experience.
Mood is the world’s largest in store media solutions company whose goal is to create greater emotional connections between the brands and the consumers. They do this by using sight (video digital signage), sound (audio, music), scent, and social and mobile components.
Mood had recently done a visually stimulating study entitled “The State of Brick and Mortar in 2017” which embodies a lot of the company’s learnings. What interested him most is the data showing that people want assistants so we need to augment technology so that associates will be provided with better tools.
Trey’s biggest learning lessons include not looking outward as much as they needed to which resulted to development of products which were simply wrong. They learned the hard way that if they wanted to develop something new, they have to have conversations with consumers.
Network connectivity was also one of the bigger challenges that they had to overcome and speed, supporting different devices and platforms are things which they are trying to hone in on.

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Oji Udezue is the head of product for Atlassian's communications products, which just launched its first new product since IPO: Atlassian Stride. A product veteran with past roles at Microsoft, Bridgewater Associates, Spiceworks and his own startup, InterMingl, Oji is passionate about bringing new scalable products and ideas into the world. He mentors startups with a focus on companies with diverse founders, and drives startup investments in Africa as a passion project. His ultimate goal is productizing functional telepathy but for now will settle for transforming how teams and the people in them, communicate and process social data at work.

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Our Guest

Jeetu Patel is Chief Product Officer at Box. He leads the company's overall product and platform strategy, driving Box’s long-term roadmap and vision for cloud content management in the enterprise. Previously, as Chief Strategy Officer and SVP of Platform at Box, Jeetu led the creation of the Box Platform business unit, overseeing product strategy, marketing and developer relations. He grew the team from a nascent product to a revenue generating business line and key element on Box’s overall suite of offerings. He also led corporate development & M&A strategy as well as Box for Industries.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

The thing that drives Jeetu more than anything else is the extent of impact of his ideas and projects that he had done. People spend a lot of time at work and their team’s mission is to ensure that people’s lives at work get better –there’s less friction, teams are more productive and dreams get attained.
Jeetu grew up in India and come over to the US at 19. They were wealthy before but his family had gone through hard times. America has given him a break and with the help of mentors, he had the realization that whatever he has his mind on, can come to pass. These experiences had molded his way of thinking and drive him to look for the following characteristics in people that create a level of tenacity and success: a degree of curiosity of how things work, the ability to drill things down to the core and the most important of all of them, a hunger to fuel the passion.
Box is a content manager company whose mission is to power how the world works together. Everything they do is around content: managing content, how content participate in business workflows, how you share it, how you collaborate around it, how you secure it, how you get value from your content. This started with a problem of taking large files and transferring them from one person to another as they are working on projects. Their solution was a system in the cloud which allows people to seamlessly share and collaborate and over time they delivered and built it to the enterprise.
Box has a three-phased approach on problems:
First phase is where they incubate an idea. The goal during this phase is to identify a problem that’s big enough to solve and come up with a solution that is meaningfully differentiated in the market. After this, you maniacally focus on the product market fit.
The second phase is identifying a repeatable selling motion, and once this is established, begin to scale. Don’t try to scale prematurely, that is for phase three.
Get your product market fit first, get those flagship 10 customers, identify the successful, get a repeatable selling motion then scale. Don’t do it until then.
In finding talent, you have to have a good mix of people who has experience and the right potential. You can’t just have people who are high on experience because as you get more experience, you become a liability as you often get overly prejudice in your views and your experience of your past. You will then have to spend time unlearning the patterns of your past. So ensure that you are hiring people who are extremely capable and have experience in the right areas but do not over index on experience only as a fresh mind can challenge the status quo much more so that someone who is already tainted on how things work. Also, keep the size of the team small as they will spend their time actually doing the work done and not coordinating things.
Jeetu also differentiated power users and marginal users and advised to focus on the latter so you can go out and drive growth. You have to deeply understand what the marginal user wants and how that might be very different from what the power users want, and you have to make trade off exercises between the two. When you are going out to determine market fit, look at your power users. But once you get past product market fit and grow you user base, make sure there is heavy emphasis placed on the marginal users and the way you build out their capabilities.
Jeetu also shares one of the powerful concepts that their organization has constructed which they have been doing to more and more of their teams. They brand this with a code name PEAPOD: Product Manager, Engineering, Analytics, Program Management, Online Growth and Design.

Quotes

When that lightbulb goes off, a world of possibilities opens up for you. It’s just a matter of ‘Oh, now, I can decide to do anything that I want to do because as long as I want it badly enough, I can go get it”.
Failure wasn’t an option.
Great leaders tend to be simplifiers. They drill down things to its core essence.
The three things that I look for the most from the people that I hire: Are they hungry? Are they curious? Can they distill it down to moments of clarity which create tremendous amount of inspiration for people?
Come up with a solution that is meaningfully differentiated in the market. Do not have a solution that is 20% better than someone else has. If it’s not at least 10x better than what is available in the market, the chances of people moving to that solution is slim.
One of our cardinal rules that we use internally that is very counter intuitive is, start by doing something that don’t scale so that you can sustainably scale.
Don’t try to scale something prematurely.
The quality of the problem that you end up picking is directly proportionate to the success that you are going to have in solving that problem. The harder the problem, the higher the likelihood that you will succeed.
As you get more experienced, one of the things that become a liability is that often times, you get overly prejudiced in your views and your experience of your past.
The best work gets done when you have a small team.
The single most important thing that you need to have is hunger. If you got the right level of hunger, you can move mountains.

Rapid Fire Questions

What is your definition of innovation?

Innovation is building something that’s ten times better than what’s available in the market.

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why?

One of the people I work for once said to me, “Strategy is super important but I’d rather take a mediocre strategy with excellent execution rather than an excellent strategy with a mediocre execution.” So, I would go as far as 70% to 30%.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far?

Don’t overcharge for your product. Leave some on the table and give customers more value than what you have actually charged for. This keeps that customers coming back.

Don’t hire people who are not hungry. You won’t win.

What is your favorite business book?

The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

What is your favorite app?

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Our Guest

Nate Fortin has served as the Vice President of Design at Evernote since November 2015, where he leads the team responsible for delivering user interface designs, providing user experience education, driving seamless experiences across product lines and supporting design thought leadership and execution company wide.

Before joining Evernote, Nate was a Senior Director at Motorola Mobile Devices in Sunnyvale, California, where he drove user-centered design practices, high quality design execution and cross-functional design management through the conceptualization and creation of innovative and compelling experiences for Motorola mobile devices such as the widely acclaimed DROID™ by Motorola and the Moto X family of smartphones, as well as the Moto 360 smartwatch. Prior to that, he was the founding Director of the Visual Interaction Design & Branding practice at Cooper, the pioneering user experience design and strategy firm.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Design from the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Nate has a fascination for digital product and digital design and how this intersects with making things to solve problems. He grew up in a small town where it’s mostly trees and John Deere tractors and his love for design started with his interest in art. He did not see a career path in art but he saw one in graphic design. He went on and learned the basics and soon enough, the small town boy became immersed in the digital industry.
During his time in Motorola, he became involved in big projects such as developing the droid experience and bringing it to the masses; and Moto X which was a shift in philosophy at that time as to how we thought of the mobile device.
What captured Nate’s interest in Evernote is his belief that Evernote’s vision is powerful. How to extend the brain to work smarter and succeed in a world where information is the epicenter of everything we do, this challenge is what excited Nate and got him here.
Evernote, at its heart, is a product which allows you to create, capture, nurture, and turns your ideas into action. The problem that it is trying to solve is the idea of information overload and our inability to tackle this problem on our own so that we feel more organized, productive, and ultimately, successful. They serve about 220 million users all around the world.
Their team is responsible for all the product experience in Evernote. To accomplish their mission, they have to be where ideas and information are and they are very platform agnostic. Mobile is the game changer for them and when he joined the team, the first thing he looked at was mobile experience, particularly in iOS. He wanted to make the product more accessible to more people so they started talking to people who used the product and from there, developed hypothesis on how they can improve. They go in with a hypothesis but they focus and observe with the goal of proving themselves wrong rather than finding data to support their notion. You have to commit to this as Nate shares that this is the key to the process. This led to a series of experiments and a lot of learning experience for him and the team. Outcomes from this included a dramatic shift in engagement to the content and they considered this as a great gain.
The nature of mobile is changing and becoming broader. There are new inputs and products coming into the market for voice and host of internet of things products, for example. This makes mobile ubiquitous and this changes the game. The development in mobile is exciting for Nate as she shares that this is an authentic way to further their mission to bring people back to being in control over the information and ideas in their lives.

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Our Guest

Stephanie Tilenius is the Founder and CEO of Vida Health, a next-generation digital therapeutic and health coaching platform for chronic physical and mental health conditions deployed at Fortune 500 companies, large national payers and providers. Prior to starting Vida, Tilenius was with Kleiner Perkins Canfield & Byers, where she worked primarily with late-stage KPCB portfolio companies, with an emphasis on companies in the Digital Growth Fund. While at Kleiner, Stephanie invested in Nextdoor and MyFitnessPal. Prior to Kleiner, Stephanie was at Google, where she was vice president of global commerce and payments, helping build and launch new products and platforms including Google Wallet, Google Shopping and Google Express. Prior to joining Google, she was at eBay and PayPal for nine years, and in her last role was SVP of eBay.com and global product where she helped lead the eBay Marketplace turnaround. Prior to eBay, Stephanie was VP of Merchant Services at PayPal where she built the off-eBay PayPal business from the ground up into a multi-billion business. A co-founder of PlanetRx.com, she has also worked at Intel, AOL and Firefly. Stephanie sits on the public boards of Coach Inc. and Seagate Technology.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Stephanie is passionate in making an impact in other people’s lives and doing the things that matter. Everything that she had done in her career had affected millions of people and improved lives and now in Vida, she is focusing on health care and eradicating chronic conditions, which is a real problem in the country.
She had worked with eBay, Google and PayPal and her experience in building products and platforms from the ground up and reimagining how things are done during her time with these companies had helped her in her current work in healthcare, which, in some ways, is one of the last industries to adopt consumer-facing technology.
Vida is an app service for managing your health. They match you to a coach, a nurse or a health expert, and a digital therapy program, to work in the area that you are most concerned in. They cover both mental and physical conditions and programs focus on concerns such as diabetes, hypertension, weight loss, and smoking. They use machine learning to personalize your programs to help you succeed.
Stephanie shares an example of a mobile experience of one of their customers, Jenny, which led to great results. Jenny is a 49-year old, mom of three who lost 80 lbs. in 8 months. She had diabetes, cholesterol and hypertension and found profound benefits from Vida.
The new movement today is that health care is being self-care. People are now trying to track their behavior in a more holistic way than they have done in the past and this is very beneficial compared to the traditional way wherein you only get one reading per year during an annual physical exam.
Vida is connected to the most popular wearables and anything out there which will enable you to monitor your health. They connect to other apps as well so they can integrate your data into one place for your coach to see. The benefit of this is for your coach to personalize your experience and help you achieve your goals by knowing everything you are doing. This day-to-day insight helps people make the right behavior change and make decisions.
Pure execution and scale, just like other companies, are one of Vida’s challenges. Things get more complicated as they scale so they continue to get customer feedback – from onboarding, retention, engagement with their coaches and programs, the use of different features inside the app – and just continue to iterate. They note that they should be mindful of population profiles and their use of the app.
Building a two-sided market place is always complicated and one things that has been tough for Vida is balancing the supply and demand. In addition to this, they have to have tools for both their users and coaches so this is twice the work versus other apps.

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Our Guest

Lisa Schneider is Chief Digital Officer at Merriam-Webster, where she is focused on strategy, product & content development, technology, and user experience. A lifelong word nerd who understands why words matter, she is thrilled to bring Merriam-Webster’s mission to life across all devices and screen sizes, anytime, anywhere.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Lisa is most passionate about problem-solving and collaboration. Problem-solving is finding out a way on how to make something better for someone and this can include the usual challenges that a project manager encounters such as finding a technical solution or solving a UX problem but can also encompass solutions for opportunities found within the organization. Collaboration is what makes problem-solving possible. This means including people, being able to recognize when a good idea comes along, having diverse teams, and we combine these, you will be able to come up with good solutions as well as support people.
She was a huge bookworm and could not believe that she will be given a degree from doing what she likes, which was reading books and writing about them, so she jokes that this was the reason why she pursued having a BA in Literature. This curiosity and openness to learning was what enabled her to look at things in a different way and to transition to being the current Chief Digital Officer at Merriam-Webster.
Merriam-Webster, as many people know, is a dictionary company but not a lot knows that they have a robust digital footprint. They have about 300 million page use a month and most of this are from mobile. Definitions continue to be their core product but they have redefined their mission to better reflect who they are and why they do what they do. Their mission now is to propagate their rationale of the English language and to help people better understand language so they can better understand and communicate with the world.
How do words make their way to the dictionary? Lisa emphasizes that as Chief Digital Officer at Merriam-Webster, she cannot get a word into the dictionary. There are rules and they are descriptive not prescriptive. They do not sit around and decide if a word is good enough or what it should mean, it is not a judgment call. They describe a language is actually used and to do that they follow evidence and have rules that a word has to have widespread, sustained, meaningful and organic used. They collect citations and these are considered data. Merriam-Webster has been data driven for almost 200 years.
In the past when they were just putting out prints in hard copies, they do not have data on how their dictionaries are being used. Now that they are online, they are now able to track usage – what words are being looked at, when and how often. They did a complete website redesign which was more responsive, has more features, just something where people can go to have a good experience. They also worked in unlocking the company’s cultural personality which was inherent to the team members as well as focused on their trend watch feature to get real time insights on what’s hot and what’s not. This led to Merriam-Webster’s effective mobile presence.
With their new engine in place, their social media following grew to a fun number – highly organic and very engaged. It is a vanity KPI which they celebrate but it is really important to understand what really will impact the business. They value clicks to their website or the build-up of the habit of preferring and trusting Merriam versus other content when doing searches as this creates a virtual cycle with search engines. This is where the real ROI is and they are watching these numbers.

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Our Guest

Charlie Cole joined TUMI in 2015 as the Company’s Chief Digital Officer. In this role, Mr. Cole is responsible for overseeing and developing the brands’ national and international e-commerce and digital platforms. Since Samsonite’s acquisition of Tumi in 2016, Charlie has also taken the role of Global Chief eCommerce Officer for Samsonite Corporation – which includes oversight of global strategy for brands such as Samsonite, American Tourister, Hartmann, Gregory, High Sierra and others.

Mr. Cole brings a mix of entrepreneurial and institutional knowledge to the Company with success in both fields, and a focus on creating structures to empower creativity driven by energy and objectivity. Prior to joining TUMI, Mr. Cole held various leadership positions, including serving as CEO of The Line, and head of e-commerce for Lucky Brand and Schiff Nutrition, the largest acquisition of a VMS company in the history of Wall Street.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

The thing that gets Charlie excited is when you enable people who think very differently to align in solving a problem. Your teams are only as good as how you can get people to think creatively, technically and analytically. The best teams have a way in getting the best out of each other while still encouraging those divergent ideas. Being the person in the center of this dynamics is what gets him excited in a day to day basis.
Charlie has always been good with numbers and had a type A personality, a combination which he considered dangerous. He can look back on instances wherein he was the problem which caused the dynamics not to develop. He learned that overpowering people with just one area of expertise (in his case, analytics), will not arrive with the best answer. His arrogance drove him, broke him but ultimately, humbled him.
TUMI makes the best products in the world. It is their job to help people perfect their journey whether it is across the world or from your house to subway to office. They make products across this ecosystem. They are known for their luggage but they also make amazing backpacks and electronics. They are the leader in premium travel equipment.
As Chief Digital Officer in TUMI, his team is assigned in online merchandising technology, operations, marketing and wholesale. If you are touching TUMI, the brand, in a digital sphere, then they are probably in the nexus of that.
Two years ago, TUMI’s margins were really low so they took a look at the data which they had a ton of (30 – 40 years’ worth); they went back to the roots on why their customers fell in love with them in the first place, what drove their product value, and what caused that momentum which drove them to where they were before they took the downward turn so that they could incorporate some of these thinking and ideology into the digital shift that they were gearing into.
The bigger formula which led to a lot of TUMI’s success included understanding the device, the marketing medium and the visit. From here, they segmented and personalized to get into deeper ways to connect with their users. Charlie also talked about their three core buckets: messaging, attribution and performance which are derived from understanding the bigger customer journey.
Charlie shares that what sets TUMI apart is their ability to be generative creative through the brilliant minds that they have. This does not exist in computers yet and technology is not yet close to replacing yet. Iteration is the easy part because technology has given us unimaginable ways of reiterating and optimizing.

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Our Guest

Jason Wolf is AVP and Global Head of Experience Design, author, Apple ‘think different’ producer, worked with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Hasso Plattner & Vishal Sikka. Practice lead at IDEO, old-School employee of Macromind (later Marcomedia) makers of director and flash technology. Authored first books on shockwave technology. Design thinking strategist and innovation change agent. Father of 3, Maker, film maker and over all artist.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Anything from the creative aspects of art is what inspires Jason. He draws a lot of his inspiration from films, television, books, other authors, and websites -- anything out there from the abstract to the total tangible. He loves to consume that, makes sense out of it and use it in his everyday work to give people things that they have never seen before and make their lives more interesting.
Art has always been something which has interested Jason, whether this is doodling or scribbling at 6 years old to water color paintings. He found that the reaction that he would get from others is what drives him to do this.
In the 90s, he found himself in his cubicle observing how hundreds of employees were so out of touch while they are working towards one goal. He thought, if he was the owner of the company, he would ensure interaction amongst employee and with customers to drive innovation. He would create a culture where everyone is on a level playing field. This will snowball to happier employees who can laugh and joke about things which can spawn to a more comfortable, creative environment.
Jason looks at a career in three phases: when you first join a company, when you are cruising along or in cruise control and when you feel like you are winding down. He shares that at one point, when he would feel that he will not be staying with the company much longer, he would become a rebel. This would either accelerate the speed of him leaving the company or people will turn around and say that it was cool and he gets promoted. His realization from this is that he should’ve expressed himself from the get go. But to those who want to do this, you need to note that this has a lot to do with the management so feel out the environment that you are in and explore their receptiveness prior. There is no company which do not want to be innovative; they just need to understand the reasoning behind the first couple of steps that you are taking. This is the key so show them.
Jason shares that he embodies design thinking. You will know that you do too if you are still thinking about design even if you are no longer at work. You can walk into a restaurant and just see a Push/Pull sign but with no handle and go, ‘Who designed this?’ This is important because to help a company innovate or change is to be the change. You have to embody or imbue this energy yourself.
To incorporate design thinking in your company, have different entry points to make it really easy for people in whatever level to get into this. Then run this through a lean method approach to measure learning to ensure that you meet whatever outcome you want it to have. Continue what works and get rid of those which do not. Adapt the technique of incremental fusion of design thinking as well where you would start small to get buy ins, continue building rapport, and have the fusion continue to gain momentum as it gets those successes. There are also specific items which a company should have to promote design thinking so ensure that you work in the background to provide these resources to make this successful. There is no company out there that this design thinking process can’t help innovate on. This is not just for technology or programmers only so this means that if you see problems in the world, you can fix those problems.

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Meet Our Guest:

As the VP of Innovation Labs, Linda Tong is focused on building out the vision and strategy for AppD Labs, the innovation center of AppDynamics. Prior to this role, she combined her love of product development and football as the VP of Product and Innovation for the NFL, managing the product vision for the owned and operated digital properties across all 32 clubs and the league. Linda was also an original team member at Google (Chrome and Android) where she helped launch and shape the developer ecosystem for the Android OS.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Linda finds constantly challenging herself fun. This means finding new problems to solve, new ways to push herself in new directions and new technologies to explore. She is super curious and loves learning so what’s great about her profession is that she can do all of these in her role as VP of Innovation Labs. It has always been core to her that when she sees things, she would push herself to look at the pieces around her and think about how to reimagine, reorganize and restructure them and unlock new value.
A big part of her responsibilities in AppDynamics are focused on thinking about the future of the company. She thinks about the unique spaces that AppDynamics is in and how do they start innovation within the organization to unlock new opportunities which are adjacent to their product line and the industry that AppDynamics would be a good fit for. She also heads their product experience team which thinks about how they can bring the best experience to their customer as they evolve through time.
AppDynamics is an amazing tool which crosses the entire technology sack to give you insights on how your digital products are performing. It gives you visibility into the entire complex ecosystem of apps and ties the connection of that performance back to your business so you can be more insightful about how your digital products are doing. It makes you continue to make smart decisions around operating them.
Linda’s team focuses on the customer experience side of product development. They partner closely with product management and engineering to understand the new products and features which they want to expose and for what customers. They help design and develop these and constantly iterate to continue to create value for their customers are they go forward.
Their task is two-fold: thinking about their user and thinking about the right approach to product development. When you build products, it’s a massive hierarchy of product need so it’s all about understanding a problem and really defining that so you define a value that you want to unlock. Their team is focused on understanding what that problem is and they call it utility. This is their core and they focus their first round of product development surrounding this. Once they move up this hierarchy of need, they then ask how they would iterate after unlocking this utility so they can improve functionality. Once they nail down this to things, they move up to start unlocking the why so they can keep their customers engaged and build a longer relationship with them to get more value.
A challenge in AppDynamics is that they are helping companies through their digital transformation so they should be able to run their agent or have visibility into thousands of different technology stacks to be able to give them insights into it. This can be super process complex but their output should be really simple to understand.
Being acquired by Cisco, building collaboration and empathy is something which can prove to be a challenge so they came up with Think Factories. These includes identifying problems and cross functional teams, bringing them into a room, defining these problems and identifying solutions. This fosters camaraderie and builds relationships and ultimately transforms an organization. Coming up with these Think Factories entails getting buy in from every level – this is the key.
Linda shares that measuring success is really difficult in terms of innovation because a lot of times, you get 95% fails and 5% success (if you are lucky). It’s all about failing fast, learning from every single experience and trying not to make the same mistakes more than once. Success has to be redefined in a different way.

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Our Guest

Vaibhav Vohra is the Head of Product Management for SAP Digital Interconnect IBU Group. He has launched award winning marketing products at SAP. Prior to SAP, he designed satellites and took on other challenges in Aerospace.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Vaibhav has a passion from taking things from laboratory to launch whether it’s a diamond-coated cutting tool or doing a spinal cord injury research for a new treatment. Bringing this lab eureka moment to something that’s commercially viable has become a great passion of his and this is what motivated him all these years. He is also a big fan of deconstructing products like chefs do to food so he loves reducing the clutter to the noise. The unrelenting focus to the problem is something that he is really passionate about and he believes that failure is just a rite of passage.
In this day and age where care is defined as financial benefits, what if care is using a mobile device to provide this duty that employers need to carry so we can get responses in just minutes? Mobile is the future of work; it can be the tool which can help employees be better taken care of. SAP is primed to do this around the world for various industries.
SAP is one of the largest software companies and much of their growth is due to the cloud. Vaibhav is part of the group called SAP Digital Interconnect which helps enterprises run better through rich, mobile experiences. It’s the last mile connecting mobile apps, processes and people.
The SAP Digital Interconnect team focuses on the next line of business applications. They are trying to solve how people want to be connected to and what context are they in and to determine this, communications is the operative word to be able to potentially change a brand or a business. You have to have conversations with your customers and the differentiator between listening and hearing is understanding.
The product that they are currently working on which enables better experience is SAP People Connect 365. This system aims to bring in HR and Risk Content data and create content workflows to help enterprises reach their employees in the moment of need.
Vaibhav shares that they found that 90% of the APIs fail in their enterprise initiatives but the 10% which succeeds gets exponential growth. He suggested three major things in able to achieve success: APIs should to be simple to understand; mobile developers should connect with others through repositories and communities and build efficient process; and technology independence. The result of these three would be programmable digital interfaces which will take over the world.
Products can always be made better as it is an everlasting approach. From a tactical level, think of ways how to expand such as including customers in the design process, personalization and thinking of user experience versus UI.

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Our Guest

Jonathon Hensley is CEO of Emerge Interactive, a digital experience company, where he works with clients to transform business strategies, user needs and new technologies into valuable products and experiences.

An accomplished writer and speaker, Jonathon has lectured on topics such as the connected consumer’s impact on business, creating value through data-driven experiences, and user-centric approaches to innovation. In 2012 he was recognized in the Portland Business Journal’s “40 under 40” as one of Portland’s emerging professional and community leaders.

Under Jonathon’s stewardship Emerge Interactive has committed to a simple philosophy: The relationship between Emerge and its clients should exist to create real and lasting value. To change the conversation. To move people to action. To inspire and motivate a team to focus on what matters.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

2:55: Emerge Interactive is a digital experience company which focuses on high-value digital experience on new opportunities and solving high-value user experience challenges. A lot of companies are struggling with digital modernization and there is a void in the marketplace of firms with expertise and experience to solve these challenges -- this is the void which Emerge Interactive fills. Mobile First is an extension of this as this podcast is a platform which aims to dig into what’s happening on this front.

4:52: With 20 years of experience in helping clients create digital experiences, the main friction area which Jonathon sees in not having a co-creative approach in companies is the fact that many businesses do not start as a digital business. The challenge is coming in with just one set of expertise and integrating digital to be part of the core.

6:00: Co-creation is the idea of going beyond collaboration. Instead of working as separate team, you have to work as a single team unified with a common purpose. Co-creation is a methodology to support this. You combine the expertise of people across the business and the experiences of your customers and bring these all to the forefront of the process to quickly and effectively get to the most important needs of the business.

8:43: Some of the Jonathon’s takeaways from our first 50 episodes are:

The spot-on idea that an employee experience is an enabler to the customer experience. Internal transformation can be very difficult but nothing can be more powerful in delivering an amazing customer experience.
The reaffirmation that ideas are powerful but what it really comes down to is the ability to execute. This is the make or break in an organization.
The ability to build great teams is fundamental to success. Get the right people on the right seats with the right expertise to get you where you need to be as a business.
The uniform understanding with our guests that it is critical for businesses to understand their data. Thinking of data as service -- looking at how they move from upstream and downstream -- through the organization is becoming essential.

14:41: Jonathon shares what we can expect from the show moving forward: guests bringing in perspective, best in class tactics, strategies which are taking place, and how they are driving change and innovation in their organization. Beyond sharing experiences and insights, we will unpack to everyone what co-creation is to solve all the problems out there which we are trying to solve.

20:14: Inspired by our guests’ reiteration of the importance of having a great vision and an actionable plan to get there, Jonathon shares that they are working on a product vision and planning checklist which listeners can use as a great resource. On top of this, they will also be releasing an eBook specific on how to make a business case for your mobile initiative in understanding what problems and friction points you are solving for and what kind of impact it will have in the organization.

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Our Guest

Kevin is Chief Digital and Innovation Officer and a member of the global Executive Board for HH Global. He is responsible for technology, driving innovation, digital brand control programs, and digital strategy for HH Global. Kevin is also responsible for two HH Global Financial Services customers and digital transformation projects for HH Global’s client base. Kevin moderates the HH Global innovations group, HH Labs, which he formed in 2009, as well as being the Executive Board sponsor for HH Global’s Sustainability and corporate social responsibility programmes.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

The things that gets Kevin most out of bed everyday morning is the disruption that we are seeing in technology and how this can fire and streamline processes with clients and make solutions better. There’s just so much stuff you can do which will make things better and this gives him so many opportunities to do great things.
Technology is one of Kevin’s passions and where you can see something which can make a process efficient, add value or can improve an experience, you have to seize that – and that is what Kevin is currently doing.
HH Global is a global marketing execution company. They are in the outsourcing business and they support their clients below their creative master agencies. Typically, big brands have a master agency which creates conceptual items and HH Global is there to help execute that. They do this across three core channels: marketing print, secondary packaging, and cross-creative production. They save their clients’ money and simplify workflows.
As Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Kevin was originally focused on all things digital until they have formed an innovation group called HH Labs. It gained so much traction and interest from clients that he was asked to focus more on this. His role now is to talk to clients how to disrupt and improve what they are doing and add to their business more than those three core channels to advance them to get ahead of the curve in their particular sector.
HH Labs goes out and finds various solutions and what sprung this investment and what caused it to grow to what it is now is the passion of people who have day jobs in their business. Nearly 25% of their workforce are members of the community and effectively are digital talent scouts who are either listening to their clients for what is keeping them awake and feed this back to the group; or they are actively looking in trade shows, listening to podcasts, or subscribing in digital newsletters. They get fired up by all of this as this gives another dimension to their job and their role, and ultimately, they find it satisfying to help solve a problem for a client.
Some of the cool things they are doing right now surround digital signage and proximity and point of sale. It’s like a mash up of clever Google technology at traditional point of sale and proximity beaconing. An example of this would be a case study of Coca Cola ads in a mall where it will show you customize ads as you walk through. It uses mobile handset data to serve customize ads so as you walk down the aisle it will recognize that you are male, location, buying habits, your last interaction with Coke, etc. and it will serve an ad which is contextual to you.

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Our Guest

Jeanniey is Mercer’s Global Chief Marketing Officer, focused on building a more agile and transparent marketing operation accountable for driving revenue growth through demand creation and strong brand reputation. She believes in leveraging innovative and digital initiatives to help achieve her goals, and her background in education fuels her passion to inspire both consumers and the teams she works with.

Prior to her role at Mercer, Jeanniey was Head of Marketing and Growth for Barnes & Noble, where she drove the transformation of the NOOK business from hardware to app based. Her previous experience includes launching the world’s first digital newsstand for Zinio, growing the business to more than 20 million active consumers. She also launched and ran the global Digital Dialogue business for Ogilvy and Grey Direct’s Global Email Marketing business, establishing the world’s first email marketing practice inside an advertising agency.

Jeanniey holds a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Pittsburgh. A recognized “Woman in Business” and an entrepreneur, she has authored three books and launched five companies, including Ringblingz and the Email Experience Council. Jeanniey was recently named Networker of the Year by the Internet Marketing Association and is the Chairwoman of their Women’s Leadership Group. She also serves on the board of MarketingEDGE and as an advisor for select high-potential start-ups.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Jeanniey shares that she is at her happiest when she inspires people. She enjoys teaching new tricks and help people in general thereby she constantly finds innovative ways to do this. She mentions about a story when she was in 7th grade when she pitched the idea to create homemade fortune cookies for a bake sale. It was a smashing success (and a grand team effort) which revealed her entrepreneurial approach.
Jeanniey shares how she loves problem-solving, looking at ways she can bring improvement, making people happy, reach an end goal or changing the world for the better. She is also a very practical person and is always excited in getting involved in anything new. This speaks as to why she had five businesses in the past.
Mercer makes a difference in the lives of more than 110 million people every day by advancing their health, wealth and careers. This focus creates more secure and rewarding futures for their clients and their employees — whether designing affordable health plans, assuring income for retirement, or aligning workers with workforce needs. They are like the Intel Inside of HR companies. It is a phenomenal company in terms of impact as it drives organizations to provide employees a better life.
Jeanniey is Mercer’s Global Chief Marketing Officer and her job focuses on two areas: increasing brand visibility and driving growth. They market themselves as strategic partners to their clients rather than a vendor or a solutions provider. Part of her role is to look at possibilities of digital transformations in marketing. They look at how they can integrate digital strategies, best practices and the coolest initiatives they see into what they are doing in a daily basis and how it can impact user experience.
Their focus for growth for product and services is in user experience and how it is happening in all relevant channels. What they are seeing making a bigger impact is understanding user journey and how it starts the search for answers in those various channels.
Time is currently their only challenge right now as they are now on their last five months in putting all of their initiatives together. They are now analyzing impacts and after that, they’ll go back to their CEO to share the results and see how they can leverage on this data for their growth.
A few months ago, they had launched a new initiative called Mercer Digital where they are marrying all the incredible insights that they have in the people side of their house with consulting services and everything related to HR, technology and the future of work. They are creating an ecosystem which places companies ahead of the curve as far as solutions are concerned.

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Our Guest

As CMO at Art.com, Sullivan-Cross oversees all marketing, communications, and analytics initiatives for the company, working to position Art.com as a prominent lifestyle brand in the e-commerce space, while creating an engaging narrative to inspire consumers to make a personal connection to art. Prior to Art.com, Sullivan-Cross was Vice President, Growth at Pandora where she strengthened the Pandora brand and developed marketing programs that contribute to the company’s active user and revenue growth, as well as its customer retention gains. With over 20 years marketing experience, she is an innovative data-driven marketer with a track record building and growing businesses at companies such as Lucasfilm, Warner Bros., Dictionary.com, Evite, Billboard and Adweek.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Lisa loves the combination of art and marketing, forging new grounds and marketing a product that she is passionate about. This is why she had worked in the movies or music because if it is not something that she can connect to or have an impact on, she will find it difficult to market.
Lisa started out her college career in business but she shifted to communications about halfway through as she felt that a career with the latter is more in line with her passions. She then set her sights on advertising and marketing and started her career on the ad agency side for a start-up. She handled Amazon as her account for three years and learned from the company’s data-centric approach. She then moved to the client side because of her love for data.
Lisa joined Newline and Warner Bros. then made her way to Lucasfilm by cold calling their Head of Digital for about 15 times to pitch him the idea about having an e-commerce division. She took a risk in joining as a contractor but it paid off. She then made her way to Pandora as she was attracted in starting the growth discipline from scratch as they didn’t have anyone in the company in the growth role.
Performance marketing can also be called direct response marketing so you have strict KPIs that you are working under. In here, everything needs to be evaluated on return on ad spend and ultimately, LTV. In brand marketing, KPIs are different as you are trying to change hearts and minds. Increase in brand awareness, preference for the brand so that people will ultimately use the product. These two are both equally important and they work together.
In Pandora, Lisa helped set up the infrastructure to help track and measure all their marketing activities. They had high level business goals so they set specific KPIs to each piece of what they did. 80% of the usage was on mobile app and, since this was 4 years ago, the biggest marketing challenge was tracking view through and click conversion all the way through to LTV.
Art.com aims to make art accessible to everyone and they are doing this by transforming the way the world discovers art. There are lots of pain points in choosing an art piece and bringing it home so they are working on alleviating this. Help people express themselves and connect to others and as CMO, her main focus is to diversify their performance marketing channels to attract higher value customers. Their biggest constraint in this area was their lack of focus in mobile and right now, that is where they are establishing their presence as their customers are in mobile. They have been able to optimize mobile experience and inject growth mentality to the team.

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As Senior Vice President of Presence and Commerce at GoDaddy, Lauren Antonoff oversees the development and operations of our website builder and e-commerce solutions for small business around the world.

Prior to GoDaddy, Lauren spent eighteen years at Microsoft, where she was most recently Director of Program Management for SharePoint, leading the effort to make the SharePoint a tool that people love to use to get work done. Her leadership was instrumental in building one of the most successful products and businesses at Microsoft, and helping SharePoint navigate the shift to the cloud.

While at Microsoft, she founded the Step Up Program, designed to increase the number of women in senior management roles by helping women become stronger candidates for these roles. Lauren studied Rhetoric and Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Lauren has surprised herself when she ended up in software as she thought she was going to be a civil rights lawyer. But as she thought about the problems that we encounter in technology, she felt that she can make the world a better place if she can solve these problems so people can use technology to get things done in their lives. She attributes her attitude of going out there in the world, taking on the challenges as you can and fight for the things you believe in to her mother, fighting for what was right.
As Senior Vice President of Presence & Commerce at GoDaddy, the job was supposedly pretty straightforward: they help people make websites. But when she got there, it was way more than that. The group had a whole portfolio of tools designed to help customers establish their businesses online. Website builder, online store, SEO products, listings product, etc. Immediately she learned the disparate teams were stretched too thin. A key change she implemented was to address the platform it as a singular customer experience rather than a portfolio of products. One experience which helps people get online and create a holistic experience to guide them through their journey.
GoDaddy is known for domains but they are more than that. They can present a whole range of solutions that they are likely looking for and this is what they are trying to showcase in their project, GoCentral. It’s a suite of capabilities which include a website, but just as importantly, also the things which come after making a website: managing your social profiles, engaging customers through email marketing and the whole nine yards.
Bringing individual pieces which are currently in silos to work in concert together is one of the challenges that their company is currently facing and making use of data to understand what is working and what’s not is key. If you can use data to measure whether something is effective, you have the most powerful tool.
How do you know which hypothesis to prioritize, how do you know which one is worth testing or not? You can use inputs to get ideas and use an agile methodology which is hyper targeted and placed in a controlled testing environment before rippling it out to other areas and environments. Dip your toe in the water and if it works, double down on it.

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Our Guest

Ben Parr is the author of the best-selling book Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention-- named the top marketing book of 2015 by Strategy+Business Magazine and Small Business Trends. He is Co-Founder and CMO of Octane AI, the CRM for Messenger marketing. He sits on the board of directors of Samasource, the global non-profit dedicated to impact sourcing and giving work and is a member of the advisory board of Lufthansa Airlines. Previously, Parr was a venture capitalist, a columnist and commentator at CNET, and Co-Editor and Editor-at-Large of Mashable. He is a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Ben is passionate about two aspects: solving a complex problem which he has not solved before and creating a scalable solution to that problem. He believes it’s never enough to just solve a problem then move on, what excites him is scaling the solution to the entire planet. He started with this inclination in college and this got crystalized when he became an editor in Mashable. He believes that he has the ability, thus, the responsibility to change the world for the better. It’s part of the reason why he does a lot of the things he does.

From editor to VC, to being an author and starting a company, he shares that the rudimentary skillsets needed in each of these roles are the same. It is the switching that’s hard because people can be super focused in one thing and be great at that but when you change roles, your primary focus will shift and you need to exercise those muscles that you have not flexed that much.

Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention is a book that Ben has written and he shares that it is a deep dive into the psychology and science of attention. He wrote it because lots of companies come to him for him when it comes to items such as press, marketing, user acquisition that he realized all these areas fall around the same thing, which is attention. Thereby, going deeper in this subject could be helpful. He went through years of research, interviewed about 50 experts to understand the key things which trigger attention, the seven stages of attention and how to capture attention in each of those stages.

The seven stages of attention go in the order of how early in the stages of attention they happen:

1 - Automaticity – automatic sensations and how certain colors captivate our attention automatically versus others.

2 - Framing – we use framing to decide which things to pay attention to or not.

3 - Disruption – we pay attention to the things which violate our expectations of the world.

4 - Reward – certain types of rewards and the way they are delivered change the way we behave.

5 - Mysteries – the right kind of storytelling captivate our attention for a lot of psychological reasons.

6 - Acknowledgment – we pay attention to the people and things which pay attention to us and provide us validation, empathy and understanding.

7 - Reputation – triggers our attention based on reputable sources of information, the power of experts, and the power of the crowd.

About Octane AI: Messenger marketing is the new email marketing. Billions of people used messaging apps and if you need to reach the younger demographic, you need a software which could communicate to build campaigns to reach this audience to do all that but it is yet to exist. This is where Octane AI comes in. It’s built as a CRM using bots and AI in order to automatically communicate with customers starting with Facebook Messenger and eventually to other platforms. Their target market is companies and brands which are already established. Octane AI can be used for awareness but it is especially ideal for lead generation and conversation. Their biggest challenge right now is writing content for conversation. Writing for newsletters or blogs is one thing but writing content for conversation is another. It’s different and you have to script out what you are going to say and what you want your audience to respond. Once you get the hang of it, the possibilities open up so it’s a new thing that we have to learn.

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Seasons Hospice & Palliative Care engenders hope in the lives of its patients and their family members. A community-based organization, Seasons Hopsice is on an ongoing mission to find creative solutions which add quality to life. Through the firm belief that individuals and families are the experts in their own care, we focus on the patient and family experience and empowerment.

Our Guest

Balu Natarajan, M.D. is a graduate of Northwestern University Medical School and has been the Chief Medical Officer of Seasons Hospice since 2005. He served in various capacities for Seasons from 2000 until 2005, including holding the position of Medical Director of the Illinois program.

Board-certified in internal medicine, hospice and palliative care, and sports medicine, Dr. Natarajan has authored book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals. He has also lectured across the United States and around the world, including at the Annual Meeting of the American College of Physicians. He won the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in 1985.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Dr. Natarajan loves helping people and he learned early in his career that he is one of those physicians who can inspire other physicians to be better or to improve their workday to be able to do more for people. His current role in Seasons Hospice allows him to support 4700 patients a day through hundreds of physicians, hospice aids, social workers, nurses, chaplains and other team members who work together.
He loved technology as he was growing up and thought he would be doing computer or software work. When he was 16, he went to a science show and one of the sessions featured a cardiologist who passed around an artificial heart after talking to them about it. He was hooked to science the moment he held that heart in his hand.
His accidental journey to Hospice started when he needed a job for a year when his wife needed to go somewhere for school. He became a hospitalist for a year taking care of hospitalized in patients. He found himself referring patients to Hospice then did a talk one night during a team meeting, and it involved from there.
Hospice is based in Chicago, Illinois and had just turned 20 years old. They are a joint commissioned Medicare certified hospice and their job is to take care of patients with life expectancy of 6 months or less. They are the largest employer of music therapists across the country and have a foundation which supports their patients non-medical needs. The communities they serve are generally urban and sub-urban markets. They serve 4700 patients a day in 29 cities from coast to coast.
Dr. Natarajan’s focus is patient experience and he has all the support of all the doctors as well as the Nursing and Education and Quality Support of Care departments. His team takes this incredibly seriously and what they have been working on right now is getting the right person to the right patient at the right time, given the backdrop of short length of stay. Basically, this pertains to how they can serve to those who are acutely in need who just came into the program, and at the same time, getting to the people that they have been taken care of for months now. It’s not an easy thing to do and they are hoping that technology can have a huge impact on their ability to do this.
He believes that the areas where technology can really make an impact on in their field is acuity scale, patient perceptions and developing a tool which can take all the triages and determine which patients need to be prioritized overlaid with geography.
The challenges they are encountering right now in applying technology include connectivity (which is the biggest), rules and regulations which clarify which is a visit or not, and other logistical, legal and technological barriers.

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VMware delivers digital transformation by starting from the outside, in. Starts with your customer then with your strengths. Think about these two, listen and open your mind so you can find opportunities and think about new ways to deliver strategic outcomes.

Our Guest

Robin Matlock joined VMware in July 2009 and serves as senior vice president and chief marketing officer. Bringing more than 25 years of marketing experience in the enterprise software and services sector, Matlock is playing a leadership role in positioning VMware as a market leader in Mobile Cloud. As CMO, Matlock is a key member of VMware’s Executive Leadership team responsible for leading all aspects of the Global Marketing organization, which includes Corporate Marketing, Partner, Segment and Field Marketing.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

As a marketer, Robin believes that it’s all about your personal brand. At an early age, she had already figured out that you have to differentiate yourself. Case at hand was the time when she ran for student council despite the fact that nobody knew her because she was new. She broke out from the rest by doing a skit, which nobody ever did during those days, and she ended up winning. If you want to stand out from the crowd, she learned that you have to be courageous and do something a little different. All these braveness came from her mom as she loved the stage and encouraged her to be bold and creative.
In her heart of hearts, Robin is a business person. She loves the dimensions and complexities of growing a business and she finds marketing as a culmination of all the input and how you formulate a strategy basing on these. If you are not grounded in the business, you can be creative and cool but you will not be relevant.
Robin started with Sales but segued into business development. From there, she went on to product management and then into the traditional broad-based marketing.
VMware is an enterprise software company focused on large companies deliver IT services extremely efficiently. There are three big themes that they are focused on: cloud computing; mobility; and risk, reputation and security. VMware empowers IT organizations to help cause digital transformations by severing complexities of physical hardware, software and application environments and make it almost push-button simple.
Digital transformation is not just a marketing ploy. It is very real and is happening right underneath our feet. Take Uber and Airbnb, for example – the concept of building a completely new industry using software is disrupting entire industries by thinking experience through software. This is digital transformation and in order to make this happen, you have to have the thirst and curiosity to transform, in general. Waiting for another person to figure it out is a sure way for you to be obsolete five years from now. You must think about how technologies change your business model as we are all impacted.
Bringing about digital transformation in your business, you need to start from the outside in. It starts with your customer then with your strengths. Think about these two, listen and open your mind so you can find opportunities and think about new ways on how to go about this.

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Our Guest

Mike Fletcher is the General Manager of InComm Digital Solutions, leading a team of 140 employees who are focused on providing digital and physical gift card fulfillment and services for InComm’s mobile, incentive, reward and e-commerce partners. InComm Digital Solutions powers digital and physical gift cards services for hundreds of leading bands in North America and abroad.

Prior to his role at InComm, Mike was co-Founder and CMO of Giftango. Giftango was a pioneer of digital gift cards and developed the industry leading digital gifting platform for the incentive, loyalty, reward and mobile application industries and served customers in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia. Giftango was acquired by InComm in December 2012. Prior to Giftango, Mike was COO of Point West Credit Union. He spent time analyzing mobile payment initiatives on behalf of the Credit Union industry as part of the Filene i3 program.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Mike loves learning and new challenges and one of the things which excite him is complex problems and the end-to-end process of those complex problems. The notion of seeing an opportunity to fix something and improve lives or processes; and putting together a vision, chasing after it and taking it to fruition is something of interest to him. He also loves growth so it is exciting for him to work with bright people and help them in their professional growth. Customer experience and making lives better through the things that they are working on is definitely also among the list of his passions.
Mike has shown entrepreneurial skills as early as 12 years old when he mowed lawns and discovered the need for marketing. At the age of 16, he started a company pulling out carpets and prepping floors, which led to a slightly more complex process of the business after that. The understanding of the importance of how each facet of the task tie up together and how, if they work together, it will all end right, fascinated him ever since.
He started out his career in the Athletics Department at Portland State University and moved on to Operations because of his interest in customer experience. From here, he stepped into the Credit Union space and was also talked into joining a start-up called Giftango. This was his entry into the Financial / Technology sector where he learned more about technology. Giftango was acquired by InComm back in 2012 and this is where he is today.
InComm is the technology and the distribution company behind gift cards. When you walk up and take a gift card off of a rack from a store, it doesn’t have any value on it yet. It will only have one once you pay for it and it gets swiped at the point of sale. InComm is both the distribution marketing and the technology company which makes all these stuff work. They have 500k points of distribution and have tremendous global reach with over 35 countries on the physical side. Now, think of this same concept except that it’s in a digital space – whether it’s an app, a website, or some kind of digital consumer experience such as redeeming your points gained from credit cards. This, now, is InComm Digital.
InComm Digital’s primary product is their API (application program interface). Their customers build their own tools or user interface and through their API, they can communicate with InComm and ask them to create a specific action.
They are growing very rapidly and scalability is one of the things that they are focusing on. Because of the different models that they serve, there are always new opportunities on the ways they can help refine the tools to solve business problems. One of the things that they are excited about in line with company growth is the open loop side of the business which means Visa, MasterCard, and American Express-type of gift cards which can be sold digital for a variety of reasons. It’s not a mature process as of yet but they are spending a tremendous time surrounding this project.

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Our Guest

It’s no accident Katharine found her way to Ruby. Her career has focused on working for companies that value and support human connections, including roles in product management at Ancestry.com and AAA. Her desire to restore the human connection in our increasingly technological world comes with a top-notch pedigree, including a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Oxford University. She brings the perfect combination of passion and experience to lead the evolution of Ruby’s product and service.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Katharine has worked with technology for most of her career and is fascinated with the challenge of taking technology, which is usually a way of taking the human element out of processes and experiences, into something that we can use to smartly expand the reach of meaningful human connection as opposed to completely eliminating them.
Her passion for technology is has evolved from an early start in childhood, and has always been interested in computers and future tech. Her father, a computer engineer, always had the latest equipment at home. She followed that passion by taking Computer Science, then becoming a software engineer at Hewlett Packard. Now, he is keenly interested in how we can use technology to shape customer experience and broaden connections between people.
Katharine is keenly interested in the decision-making process inside organizations -- which drove her to attain her Masters in Business Administration. During her stay at Oxford with students of different nationalities, she learned how to manage business at an international scale. Fascinated by observing trends in different countries, she sought to understand how technology is used in different countries. So much of this is driven by culture and for her, this was the turning point in discovering her passion for understanding how factors such as people and the culture impact how systems, technologies, products, and services are being developed.
Ruby Receptionists is a remote service which provides personalized live, virtual receptionist services to thousands of small businesses throughout North America including Canada and a few in Puerto Rico. As these are real people answer the phones, this allows them to make great impressions and allow these small businesses never to miss a call. Their data show that 60% – 70% of callers hang up if they get a voicemail greeting or not get a live person or having a human being pick up the phone really helps businesses grow and capture these opportunities.
The secret to their success boils down to hiring the right people for the job. What their co-founder quickly learned: the culture where your employees work has a direct impact on how they deliver service to their customers. Due to this, they have a line of recognition programs and activities designed to ensure that this motivation is maintained by putting them in an environment where happiness is fostered and where they are encouraged to grow and thrive.
Ruby has grown from 200 employees to 400+ in the last two years and some the challenges that they are facing right now are those things which actually worked for them when they were smaller. Some of their processes are no longer scaling and are getting brittle so their focus for their organization this year and the next is upgrading their systems and figuring out how to integrate them.
Ruby launched a mobile app but it did not deliver the desired outcome and went defunct. As an industry leader, Ruby’s primary focus is to improve customer-facing applications and create a seamless experience. They are also completely re-architecting their back end such as moving things to the cloud. Kath believes that with the new customer-facing website plus the new mobile app, they can really go deep on the customer journey and will see how pieces interact with each other to allow them to deliver more value.

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Peter is a well-known industry expert in eCommerce and omnichannel technology, having previously held the role of Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research where he spent 5 years leading Forrester’s global research on digital commerce technologies, helping to challenge the thinking and lead change for eCommerce executives undertaking major digital transformation and commerce technology programs. Today, Peter leads corporate strategy and business development for Magento.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Peter is passionate about digital disruptions so he gets excited if he has opportunities to deliver innovations that completely disrupt the way we do things. It’s all about making life simpler, removing friction, and making experiences seamless and intuitive as there are still a lot of day-to-day things which we really do not need to go through. What gets him up in the morning is thinking of new ways to leverage technology to make lives more efficient.
Peter had a Bachelor’s Degree in Manufacturing, Engineering, and Control Systems so he left the university thinking that he wanted to be a mechanical or manufacturing engineer and build things. However when he walked through the Ford plants, it became clear that manufacturing wasn’t for him. E-commerce was emerging and Peter involved himself into a big, high profile project at Ford to attempt to sell cars online. This took him out of the factory, and prompted him to learn to code.
Joining Forrester was game-changing for Peter and for his career as it got him into a unique position to do research. For him, it was a privilege and a unique opportunity to have conversations with senior leaders and to be able to try to predict where things are going, drive insights and make recommendations to these leaders.
Magento is a global market leader in the enterprise e-commerce platform with over a quarter of million merchants globally to power their e-commerce sites. The platform transacts over $100B annually and a fun place to be because of their diverse, global clients. As VP Strategy at Magento Commerce, Peter is focused on the key technologies that will change the way consumers shop and interact.
Peter believes that mobile has probably been the single most disruptive thing that has happened in the industry and where we are today is a transformational shift. We are now rapidly moving beyond mobile first to mobile only. With the right mobile experience, it will be far easier to shop in a mobile device than a laptop or a desktop so we can rapidly going to a world where the vast majority of e-commerce transactions are done through a mobile device.
In his research, Peter shares that innovations that we should expect includes having a better ‘check out’ experience wherein we do not need to key in credit card information to complete a purchase because of digital wallets, Apple Pay, multiple payment options, or use of finger print or digital identity. The navigation of moving to pages will also move to become voice-based or maybe even, making a purchase may just be as simple as a thought – a thought will trigger a delivery at our doors two hours later. These examples are a bit far-fetched -- but we may be closer to it than we know.
Accepting the fact that we are moving to a mobile-only world is a must so when you must think about the investments that you are going to make in the coming months, it should all be focused on how do you get to mobile only. You need to look at the ways that you are interfacing with your customers and rank them on how you compared to a mobile experience. Make sure that you are obsessing about the reality that we are rapidly moving towards a mobile-only world so if your desktop site does things which your mobile sites are not, you are in the wrong place as it should be the other way around.

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Our Guest

Paolo Bergamo became a visiting professor at UCLA (EE dept) in 2002. He worked in the group of Leonard Kleinrock, the “father of the internet” who built the first three ARPANET nodes. Paolo then left Academia to join a mobile technology startup, called Sendia, based in Santa Monica, CA. Sendia became the first Salesforce acquisition in 2006. Since then Paolo has been the lead of mobile products for Salesforce. In 2008, the Salesforce Mobile app was the first business app ever in the iPhone App Stores. He’s currently SVP for Salesforce1 and Mobile, defining the mobile strategy and leading mobile product management.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

A combination of events and items shaped Paolo’s interest around communications and drove him towards mobile: as a young student he considered himself more of a mathematician until a teacher pointed out he was an engineer. His father working in the telco industry for 35 years in Italy, and Paolo was always obsessed with bundling and hiding all the different wires sticking out from his computers. This led him to explore mobile and wireless at an early age and encouraged an educational and career in electronics. He was very much inspired by his experience learning from Leonard Kleinrock - literally the father of the internet.
After two years in UCLA, he learned that he really enjoyed research, teaching and loved to be around young people who are passionate and want to learn. However, academic research was a little too lengthy, and provided almost no opportunity to productize inventions. In order to fulfill his calling as an engineer, he knew he needed to take an idea and actually get it out in front of people - get feedback from actual users and consumers.
The opportunity to join Sendia, a start-up building business tools for early-era mobile phones. They wanted to translate the most important business tools into mobile. The first web services started appearing in back end systems, like Salesforce. We built a middle layer between the web services API and the mobile phone. They built the apps for a mobile phone highly optimized for offline data communications.
It was a success, they were acquired by Salesforce and he became a product manager. In 2007, when the App Store was launched for 3rd party developers, Salesforce Mobile app caught Steve Jobs’ eye and Sendia received a phone call. It was a success once more and people started trusting him to manage the mobile strategies, product and platform more and more. Paolo shares that with all this he believes that rethinking mobile is the key to innovation.
Paolo talks about Salesforce’s legacy as one of the companies which built the cloud. They help customers to do business in a whole new way and enables companies to be smarter and more efficient. He believes that the mission of any large enterprise is to go back to the era where the quality of customer service is no less than excellent and they aim that they will be the platform which will enable businesses to do this.
As SVP of Mobile in Salesforce1, he is moving the needle towards their goal by mobilizing data, business processes and collaboration. They also have optimized applications, like Wave, should businesses need to slice and dice data. They are also enabling customers to build their own applications for their own customers through mobile platforms and SDKs. They have a low code, no code mantra wherein every time they build a piece of code or functionally, anyone can build an application in a visual way. All these applications are all connected as they are not stand alone applications and this is where he comes in as a product manager.
Discover the critical challenges they are facing include tactically deciding which devices that they will support out of the box and which ones to delegate to partners; the challenge of making it really easy for an intelligent admin to orchestrate events from multiple systems and channels in line with their low code, no code mantra; and having a center to cater all systems.

Rapid Fire Questions

What is your definition of innovation?

Innovation is anything that freezes us from the mundane tasks and gives us back the time to do what we want.

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why?

30% idea and 70% execution. When you do things right and you execute well, you are going to be in a good position to give people your strategy in the moment in which your idea is not successful.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far?

Adapting. What took you here will not take you there. You need to keep challenging yourself to scale and be less of a control freak.

What is your favorite business book?

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

Escape Velocity by Geoffrey Moore

What is your favorite digital resource?

Mobile First

Freakonomics

The Rubin Report

What is your favorite app and why?

Slack

Fitbit

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As Chief Digital Officer, Peter Grambs is responsible for the all the digital initiatives at Marlabs, including the Digital practice which covers AI, IoT, Big Data, and Salesforce.com. This includes new business development and marketing as well as delivery assurance and support. Main focus areas include supporting the digital enterprise, digital transformation, and helping Marlabs’ clients achieve greater business value through the emerging digital technologies.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

What makes Peter go is helping his customers, delivering something which will help their business, leveraging on technology and putting together the puzzle which makes up people, process and technology to come up with a solution which will make their clients business better. At the end of the day, it excites him to see this happen.
Peter grew up in the Washington area and went to law school with the intent to enter politics but during the time that he was working in Congress for a Congressman, he realized that what they were doing wasn’t all that great to the point that he was asked to do things which he shouldn’t be doing. He left this for a more ethical job and went to business school, majoring in Finance. Influenced by his father, he then found his passion in technology through their boutique IT company.
Peter had always liked being in the lead area of technology as he believes that digital is simply exploding in our economy right now. It is a perfect storm (in a good way) with big data in one hand and the technology on the other. In the past, people look at data as a tactical nuisance which is difficult to manage but now they realize that it is a strategic asset and has great benefits when you analyze and unlock its value.
Use cases abound and are all around us. In retail, it’s understanding customer experience and what the customer is interested in, so that you can start predicting patterns and have productive conversations with them. These can also be used in financial services, fraud detection, geographic behavior, in medicine, entertainment, auto manufacturing – just about in any facet of the business, big data can be leveraged to start making better decisions to make great customer experience. It’s all about collecting the data so you can start applying the higher level analytics and IA to it.
In terms of application, some firms have been able to apply big data analytics affectively but for a large part, people are just beginning to understand the opportunity that is out there. It going to be pervasive that data is attainable and is not hard to implement because we are getting more practitioners in the industry and this will be a core service in the business.
Marlabs is currently working on MAdvisor, their AI platform that pulls together the pieces of the puzzle which include algorithms and big data intake in a relatively short amount of time to produce useful information from used cases. It will enable them to, in a couple of weeks, show a client insights which are locked up in their data.

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Dr. Nayyar currently serves as the Chief Healthcare & Innovation Officer for TopLine MD and Femwell Group Health, Inc., one of the largest management services organizations in the state of Florida. She is also the host of "Topline MD TV," Florida's newest medical digital news channel. She has been named one of the "Top 26 smartest people in Health IT" by Becker's Report and ranked one of the "Top 25 Minority Healthcare Executives" by Modern Healthcare. Med City News recognized her as one of the Top 12 Powerful Women Voices in Healthcare Innovation and on Twitter.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Geeta shares that there is so much to be passionate about and for her, she believes that there are lots of solutions in healthcare and medicine but oftentimes, it’s the process which hampers care. With this, she aims to improve the process in able from people to deliver the actual health care part. She further shares that she went to medical school to make a difference but as she went over her career, she saw so much dysfunction on the processes – policies, administration, medical and legal issues, technology – and made a switch to make an impact not just one-on-one with patients but to expound this globally through process improvement.
Femwell Group Health is a management services organization in South Florida which manages the back office of about 500 physicians. Geeta finds her work gratifying as she can really make decisions which can scale and finds it exciting to see what our technologies can do from a business and administration side, reaching patients who we cannot normally do.
As the Chief Healthcare & Innovation Officer for Femwell Group Health, she manages their marketing brand called Topline MD which represents the 500+ doctors and pushes the needle in terms of social media. They also work in providing data to their doctors as well as to their patients to give them a snapshot of their performance to result in better outcomes and providing them all the tools that they need.
What drove them to come up with Topline MD is the realization that a lot of people do not know how to do marketing and the fact that every consumer is out there in social media. Transparency is also one of their motivations as bringing their physicians in their programs can give people insights on the personalities of the doctors before they come in to see them. Many patients also forget what their physicians tell them when they leave the office so they created a library in YouTube so that they can get hold of information from their doctors. It is important to meet consumers where they are at so Topline MD is there attempt in doing that.
Coming up with their editorial calendar involves a combination of working with their physicians on what they want to see and actively soliciting feedback from patients and social media.
The surprise and delight in doing Topline MD is finding out that their docs are mostly camera shy – would rather do multiple surgeries than be behind a camera; all their learnings about how to engage consumers on social media; the welcome that they got from the community which included being invited to other shows; and having a deeper respect in SEO and how it works.
Geeta is excited about patient engagement as the future and the great outcomes that it can bring. She shares though that the big limitation for innovation is regulation. Take telemedicine, for example, there is a risk for exposure and we need to figure out reimbursement as well.

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David Linthicum is an SVP at Cloud Technology Partners, and was just named the #1 cloud influencer via a recent major report by Apollo Research. David is a cloud computing thought leader, executive, consultant, author, and speaker. He has been a CTO five times for both public and private companies, and a CEO three times in the last 25 years. Few individuals are true giants of cloud computing, but David's achievements, reputation, and stellar leadership has earned him a lofty position within the industry. It's not just that he is a top thought leader in the cloud computing universe, but he is often the visionary that the wider media invites to offer its readers, listeners, and viewers a peek inside the technology that is reshaping businesses every day. With more than 13 books on computing, more than 5,000 published articles, more than 500 conference presentations, and numerous appearances on radio and TV programs, David has spent the last 20 years leading, showing, and teaching businesses how to use resources more productively and innovate constantly. He has expanded the vision of both startups and established corporations as to what is possible and achievable.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

David’s lifelong passion is to help drive the ability for us to effectively and efficiently use software and hardware by getting the government and companies to utilize these resources in better ways. His perspective was shaped by his experiences of being brought up all over the world and spending most of it in Hawaii. He lived his life in military bases and had seen firsthand how they do things very efficiently and this impacted his perspective on how he uses resources.
David is a programmer by trade and as he got into organizations, he was tapped and pushed to lead the technologists. He took these roles early on in his career and got the chance to manage people and learn from his mistakes – including those with many zeros in the end. The biggest pivot of his career was the time when he became CTO of SAGA Software as this was his real, official CTO role. He was now responsible for a lot of things and it was a lot of burden and stress for a 30+ person but this was how he grew his career.
Cloud Technology Partners is a consulting organization with the ability to do specialized projects to work with companies to enable them to leverage technology better. He works in the digital enabling team where they help people get over the impediments of moving to the cloud. They are growing in leaps and bounds – he started in the company with 10 people and now, they have grown to over 200.
David shares how they help clients leverage technology better by coming in and working with them in their journey in moving to the cloud. This includes triaging their existing applications, setting up the migration factory, and rewriting applications to work with the platform that they are moving into.
How do you prioritize? You do it to align with the business. You ask what has to occur, the money you can spend, what are the objectives and the impact to moving to the cloud and how you measure success. From here, you decide which to prioritize in terms of what applications to move, databases which need to be migrated and transformed, additional technology that needs to be layered in and all that.
Security is the obstacle that comes up most often that cloud computing has the greatest impact on because for clients, their data is sacred that it needs to stay within company premises. But the biggest opportunity that cloud computing can actually offer is also security. You move to the cloud where advance security encryption are in place so your information is typically more secure than where it came from. Agility is also one of the advantages as you can build and process things more quickly without going through cycles and cycles of software and hardware buys.
Mobile needs to be ubiquitous in terms of the ability to develop applications that are customer facing and has to be systemic with most of the clouds out there. All of the major cloud providers have mobile-based platforms and thousands of technologies and companies out there have mobile-based computing. The cloud is usually where the action occurs and everything else we carry just becomes terminals. So when David develops something, he ensures that it has a mobile component and that it can communicate to different platforms…all these things have to be built in.

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Brian Ahier is a nationally known worker in digital health with a focus on health data exchange, use and analytics. He is the Digital Health Evangelist at Aetna working in their Medicity business. He specializes in digital health, EHR, health information exchange, population health management, and IT infrastructure to support new payment and care delivery models.

Brian sits on the Consumer Technology Task Force, a Joint Collaboration of the Health IT Policy and Standards Committees which makes recommendations and provides insight on ONC/HHS projects and initiatives with a consumer focus to ensure the person remains at the center, engaging the experience and feedback of both patients and providers.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Brian had always been a technologist and had always believed that the internet will be huge. He shares to us a time when his mom had Alzheimer’s and they had been frustrated in the way the data about her health was presented over to him and his siblings via fax machines. The quality of care and the outcome was not good, the information to make good decisions was not there and it had caused a lot of stress and money to the family until their mom passed away. He was angry at the health system and wondered why the health care system is so uncoordinated if the technology is there to help out. That is when he decided that he will participate and make a difference.

The goal is to keep people out of the hospital so Brian shares that we should look at lesser beds and not building new hospital wings (except if it’s for a pediatric cancer or something we need). These hospital beds will no longer be necessary, sort of an exponential decline, as the exponential growth will be brought about by technology caring for people in the community. Computers are now accessible everywhere instead of just in one main frame and a mobile phone has more computing power than computers just 10 years ago.

Brian shares that we are in the inflection point of the exponential curve of information technology so you have to think mobile first. If you look at the price point of a computer, the processing speeds continue to increase and other data points towards validating this fact.

Anyone who tries to improve health care has to recognize the exponential growth factor. Look at the emerging trends and technologies so that, three or five years from now, you can accurately forecast where you are going to be in terms of technology capabilities.

Health care, at its core, is humans caring for other humans so it has to be local and community-oriented. It is local more than anything because if you have a relationship with somebody, it is much easier to build in behavioral modifications. You have to tap in to the people who care about the individual – these are the people who love you, your church group, people you play bridge with, etc.

Everybody talks about gaps in health care and its true but we should realize that gaps in data are the ones that lead to gaps in care. That is why it is really vital that we get all the health information to the right person to the right place at the right time so we can provide the best care possible.

Brian shares his secret to success: learning more from his failures rather than his success.

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Rohit Tripathi is Global Vice President and GM, heading Cloud Solutions and Go-to-Market for SAP Mobile Services, and brings with him over 18 years of experience in software and business operations. Previously, Rohit held various leadership positions at SAP in the area of technology and products. Prior to joining SAP, Rohit was with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) where he was involved in advising senior executives of Fortune 500 companies on business strategy and operations. Rohit holds an MBA with high honors from University of Chicago, M.S. in Engineering from Iowa State University and B.Tech. in engineering from IIT Kanpur, India. He has also been elected to various honor societies in the field of business and engineering.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Rohit believes that one needs passions in few dimensions so there should be one in the professional context and in the personal context. For the former, he is passionate about bringing to life new capabilities which help businesses and individuals become successful in their roles and in their journeys. For his personal passions, he divides this into two elements: long distance running and red wine.

The pivots made in his career were not planned and executed deliberately. He started with Trinity Consultants, which gave him a foothold and understanding on how businesses work, and then moved on to i2 Technologies where he had a phenomenal work experience. After this, his desire to grow led him back to Chicago for his MBA which opened doors to The Boston Consulting Group, which was focused on strategic and operational consulting. This allowed him to grown and gain experience rapidly but his interest in the industrial and tech industry led him to SAP.

Consulting is looking at processes and capabilities to see how we can improve and enhance and Rohit’s desire was to look at tools on how this can come to pass. It was this desire which led him from Trinity to i2 – to get more focused on products.

As GM & Head of Products at SAP, his focus is all about enriching customer experience with their scalable interconnectivity. They leverage on their ability to reach globally over 99.03% of the world’s mobile consumers and subscribers in over 200+ countries for their team to work on value add industry and LOB offerings on top of this interconnectivity. The one challenge which they tackle more is the fact that a lot of businesses, in implementing solutions, often want the end-to-end capability.

Rohit’s team is currently working on the newest offering of SAP People Connect 365, an exciting one which you can learn more on once they release more information on their Twitter account.

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Katrina Craigwell is VP, Global Marketing Innovation at GE Digital, where she leads brand and digital marketing for the new business unit. Her team is responsible for driving innovative storytelling and generating commercial impact for GE Digital across visual and digital mediums. Prior to that, Craigwell was Director of Global Content & Programming for GE Corporate, where she spearheaded new programs at the intersection of technology and brand, including GE’s work on Instagram, YouTube and across virtual reality platforms.

Prior to GE, she was Associate Director at social media agency Attention, working with clients including CNN, HLN, WE tv, A&E and The Guardian. Craigwell began her career in public relations at the Independent Film Channel, working on some of IFC's first social media campaigns.

She was named to Adweek’s Most Influential Women in Marketing and Media in 2016 and Young Influentials and Creative 100 in 2015, Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Marketing & Advertising in 2014, and AdAge's Creativity 50 in 2012.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Katrina came from Canada and went to New York right off college as she wanted to work in television. She was very interested in media and had been in the city for more than a decade now. She is passionate about the way information flows over the net and the value that we can drive out of that. On the human side, she passionate about diversity and leadership and how much it serves as all.

As a 10-year-old, Katrina was always been a sci-fi nut so she has dreamt of creating things which never existed before. She was very curious about the future and just how far we, and the technology we built can, get. The older she gets, the more she appreciates the impact that she is creating.

She started as a marketing intern at The Independent Film Channel in their video department so departing for GE seemed to be a very different side. As she understood what GE does though, she realized that it was a very good playground as the brand has so many rich stories to tell. About a year ago, she joined their software business (GE Digital) dedicated to the internet industrial of things. There is an opportunity here to build your brand and talk about what you are doing.

Katrina’s focus is building the connection between brand and business becoming more and more tangible. She also constantly thinks about brand strategy and how they can continue to evolve GE, who is known and trusted for industrial work, to be a brand viewed as digital as well. Getting this right and delivering on this is really essential so the look at the data and think about the customer first.

Mobile, for Katrina, is another way which we can think about utility and which forces us to stop bad behavior. So when she thinks about connection and connectivity, she aims for the results which it should garner: to be faster, to be more efficient, and be more productive.

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Jeff serves as CMO for Yext, the company that puts business on the map with the award-winning Yext Knowledge Engine. Prior to joining Yext, Jeff served as Vice President of Marketing Insights for Salesforce and ExactTarget where he built the content marketing and thought-leadership teams.

Jeff’s first book, AUDIENCE: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers (Wiley 2014), has been lauded by marketers and executives alike as a must-read for those interested in the rise of proprietary audience development as a core marketing responsibility. A Clevelander now working in NYC, he continues to bask in the afterglow of the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA Championship.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Jeff is passionate about, foremost, his family and friends; and after that, learning about growing and challenging himself. He is a communicator at heart but went to law school and at the end, realized that reliving the worst moments of people’s lives was not his cup of tea. He quickly gravitated towards the internet and before he knows it, his marketing materials are syndicated in his company in a national level. He was tapped to do paid search advertising and had a blog, about bacon, which drove about seven figures of revenue. He forged partnership with ExactTarget before joining Yext.

He developed the knack for marketing because of the different skillset he gained from being pushed out to the audience at an early age. Being placed in a position where you are nervous in front of strangers forces you to think on your feet and drives you to empathize with your audience. He had also delved in different things to test his creativity, such as sketch comedy, which gained him the skill of being able to quickly assess a situation; hone in on what’s important, funny and meaningful; and then figure out how to turn and communicate that into something of value.

Jeff’s main focus, as a CEO, is growth and managing towards it. Hiring and managing internal teams, empowering his team to make decisions and execute campaigns and projects, creating opportunities and paving career paths, and instituting internal events where they bring in thought leaders and influencers to motivate their teams are things which he continuously work on.

Together with HR, he works on implementing initiatives which drive culture change and celebrate people through Yext Talks and other engagement activities for different resource groups, which how their marketing team gives value to their organization. These are usually low cost but bring pride to their team.

The challenge that they find as of this time is nurturing talent. You will see a wide gap between the students out of marketing school and the cream rises up to the top very quickly. In a market like New York, there is too much competition for creative talent and the challenge in attracting talents is a real one.

Jeff shares that AI and machine learning are freight trains which are bearing down in many industries and people are viewing them with mixed emotions: excitement and trepidation. For Jeff though, he looks at this with a sense of excitement and exploration and with an understanding that these concepts must be built upon accurate information and deep knowledge. Their vision is being that source of truth for data needed for these technologies.

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Billy Collins jumped at the opportunity to join the SoapBox team to continue building on all of their success. The brand mission, high quality products, startup culture and impressive team made it exciting for him to join SoapBox on their journey to create a movement behind the SoapBox brand. Here, he leads the marketing team, working to raise awareness of their high quality natural product line that makes an impact in our world with every purchase.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Billy is most passionate about having the ability to meet someone and solve their problem, and amazed at how powerful changing someone can be. He is fascinated by humans and helping them benefit from changing their habits to a more effective one will ultimately grow the business. He didn’t know much about the business world before and he didn’t want to do investing or consulting so he took a job in HR because he liked people. He thought of communicating, interacting, motivating, and leadership combined with understanding on how to make an investment profitable is what fueled his passion for what he does.

Johnson and Johnson was a good environment for Billy as they have a culture of collaboration, respect of opinions and thinking out loud. It was also a healthcare company where you can help other people’s lives and has a credo about making decisions prioritizing customer welfare – all these made J&J very appealing to Billy hence his transition.

As an associate brand manager, he did a lot of execution and worked in the beauty industry. It built his foundation of knowledge on how things worked. His next role was being a Global Marketing Manager where he broadened his sights to a larger audience. What caused him to move to SoapBox was hearing insights from Gary Vaynerchuk which made him ponder on the next steps in his career. To be able to take his training and experience from J&J and the impact that he can make to people in joining SoapBox made it a pretty easy decision to move.

Inside the SoapBox Story: In 2010 founder David Simnick set out to make the best soap in every way when he was inspired to start SoapBox after joining a USAID contractor post college. There he realized that hygiene aid wasn’t being implemented to its fullest potential and wasn’t being paired with an essential item - soap. Dave made the first batch of soap in his college apartment kitchen while still at American University. Six years later our products are available in Wal-Mart, Target and many other retailers across the nation. Even more impressive SoapBox has donated over one million bars in the US & abroad to those who otherwise would go without access to this basic need.

Billy is working on rebranding their new packaging as it wasn’t as effective the efficacy of the product. They are now working with a design agency and being very thoughtful about the process. Their packaging should reflect the effectivity of their product. The second piece that he is working on is marketing their product online more effectively. They are looking at an approach where they will create a lot of different content and this needs to be served to the right audience.

As SoapBox is more than just a personal care product, Billy shares that they are running HopeCode, a way to show consumers exactly how their purchases are helping others. The goal is to provide authenticity and transparency of their aid mission to their consumers.

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Ran is Happify’s Chief Data-Scientist. He is an entrepreneur, author, coach, and TEDx speaker. Ran’s debut book: Ride of Your Life – a Coast to Coast Guide to Finding Inner Peace describes his 6,000 mile solo motorcycle ride of from NY to California, meeting with Phil Zimbardo, Deepak Chopra, and others.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Ran is excited about the opportunity in technology to make people’s lives better. He is mostly passionate about this -- making the most advance technology to deliver a more meaning, fuller life. As soon as he saw the overlap between psychology and technology, he left IBM and this had been his passion since then. These two disciplines made him realize that he can make a profound impact in individuals and an opportunity to intervene and create something transformative.

When he turned forty, Ran took off in a motorcycle and drove from New York to California. He was on the road for five weeks and he made lots of stops along the way. During this time, he interviewed a lot of people and eventually published his first book about it called Ride of Your Life. A lot of transformation happened which led him to negotiate the sale of his company while he was on the road and where he came back as a chief scientist for bLife.

When he was introduced to the folks at Happify, he realized that they were way ahead of the curve. It was very close to what he had envisioned building and the built a natural connection. He became the Chief Data Science Officer and has been nothing but happy since he joined as he knows they are building something very unique.

Happify is a set of tools, activities, games, mediation, etc. packaged in an app and a website. Designed to make you happier, you can chose the activity fit for you which can reduce your stress, find your calling or develop you more. It will take you to a sequence of activities catered to your goal and is package in a way that is very rich and can transform your life.

Looking at the whole domain of transforming people’s lives through technology and psychology, what Ran views as a possible hurdle is the fact that people’s psychology is not observable, so to speak.

Ran shares the complexity of the data they are gathering and he describes it as intimate and rich. When people come to the app or the site, they are asked to write the things that they are grateful for or their goals or their challenges and all of these are indicative of their psychological states.

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Jack is Vice President and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Digital Trends with focus on Brand & Social Media marketing strategies. A visionary entrepreneur and thought leader with a passion for startups, leadership & technology, Jack has had multiple exits as co-founder & CTO of several companies.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Jack is passionate about tech, leadership and innovation. It lies in tech in general but he is very much into anything else new and innovative.

Jack’s adventures started when he is just months old when his family left Vietnam as refugees in a boat. En route, they were robbed by pirates and he got kidnapped. His story led him to Portland, Oregon where his father became an entrepreneur and allowed him to see how businesses are run even as a child. He interacted with customers at the early age of 6 and created opportunities for the business which led him to deviate from the path that his parents had set out for him. He founded a start-up company, grew a business and had the chance to invest in other companies.

He started his journey with Digital Trends when he met the founders of the company. With his passion in tech, he found his way in as a mentor and he later on became involved as in Brand & Social Media.

Jack role is the one assessment of the business as far as opportunities are concerned. This includes having their writers’ amazing content get to the right eyes, and as many eyes as he can, for example.

Jack shares that engaging with your audience is a big deal so they work on responding to them as much as they can and finding out what they are really interested in. They use social media, like Twitter polls, Instagram and Facebook, to create conversations and allow people to express themselves.

Facebook is the best platform for engagement as users can engage within comments, they can choose a range of reactions for posts, and it allows them to have the discussions that the company needs.

Jack would love to see the advancement of robotics and artificial intelligence but he also finds it scary what could happen. He thinks that we are not quite there yet but companies are learning from the different AI tools and assistants.

Data gathering tools, such as geolocation, is very important in our mobile society and we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of what that data can do for us.

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Rick co-founded MINDBODY, Inc in his garage in 2001, and today serves as their CEO and principal visionary. MINDBODY is leveraging technology to improve the wellness of people around the world. Their cloud based software powers over 60,000 wellness businesses in over 130 countries, and connects over 300,000 wellness practitioners with millions of people who are seeking to live healthier, happier lives.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Rick is passionate about helping people realize their dreams and live healthy, happy and productive lives. As CEO & Co-Founder, he emphasizes that the core values are the guiding light for MINDBODY. He spends a lot of time ensuring that they keep their values fresh. They also make sure that they evolve by understanding what is going on in the industry they serve.

A day in the life of Rick involves direct leadership either with individuals or different teams in the company. They always need to be reminded on their ‘why’ so communication is essential.

Their company doubles in size every year but the biggest hurdle for them to grow even more is their ability to deliver exceptional customer experience to every new customer that adapts their platform.

Their transition to mobile was huge and the hardest part of all was having a giant set of database so they need to reengineer most of their codes so they could surface their functionality to any device. This is where majority of their energy was spent in when they transitioned over and was a hefty undertaking as they were servicing about 10k clients at this time.

To allow them to customize and make changes, they are continuously studying and interacting with customers. This includes AB testing, usability studies and prototyping. Just like other great changes, they have experienced those which were triggered by a crisis. For them, there were two – that their was not a lot to their usability to be desired and, as far as going from waterfall to agile, was that the release built time were getting longer and longer due to the additional functionalities that they were adding. In dealing with culture change, they got connected with Jared Spool and they brought him into the organization for engagement and learning methodologies such as observational research which aligned perfectly with design thinking. Simultaneously, they sent themselves to school to learn how to be scrum masters and product owners to understand the different stakeholders in an agile scrum. This was adopted from CEO down to team members.

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Jordan Epstein is CEO and Founder at Stroll Health, a company that delivers an app for ambulatory and primary care to physicians’ offices that enables clinicians to make personalized value-based referrals. Epstein went to Carleton College for his BA in Geology.

He is experienced in business intelligence and SaaS leader, with expertise in design, development, and production of enterprise big data applications across industries. Past Fortune 500 clients include Kaiser Permanente, United Healthcare, Delta Airlines, and Chase.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

There are so many problems in health care and so many ways to improve and what Jordan finds cool about all of this is the fact that anyone can do something about it. He sees a two-fold problem: first, that the cure doesn’t exist and second, that it exists but the patient’s don’t know that it does. This is where he comes in and this is what his passion is all about: he wants to get people to the care that is accessible and affordable, every time.

As a Jewish kid who grew up with a hunger to help people, Jordan tried being a mathematician, a scientist, a geologist but still found them wanting as they do not touch lives as directly as he wanted it to be. He took the leap, quit his job, and was in the middle of nowhere and for some reason, he decided to work in a software company and got rejected to all of them – 100% rejection. But he persisted and from there, he got connected in health care, Stroll was born and the rest is history.

In pitching, talk to investors and paint them a picture of the current nightmare that people have to go through then tell them that you are attempting to accomplish. If they advise you to try something simpler, do a full stop and tell them that you have already done it. It is important to have your data all lined up to be able to speak intelligently about what you are trying to present.

Raising money is the main thing that Jordan is focusing on at this juncture and after this, he is out to prove the technology. He sees a lot of opportunity and he is looking at building distribution partners on his way to solving the problem that he sees.

Healthcare is tough and for them to raise capital, Jordan shares that you can start by identifying your targets well. After that, read an article that they wrote, say something insightful, follow up, and get them in an in-person meeting.

The future of Stroll including seamless patient, doctor and back office experiences and the pieces that they are working on at this time.

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Rand Fishkin uses the ludicrous title, Wizard of Moz. He's founder and former CEO of Moz, board member at presentation software startup Haiku Deck, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an unsaveable addict of all things content, search, & social on the web, from his multiple blogs to Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a shared Instagram account. In his miniscule spare time, he likes to galavant around the world with Geraldine and then read about it on her superbly enjoyable travel blog. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Helping people succeed in their professional careers and entrepreneurial ventures is and has been Rand’s passion. This calling was inspired because he was an accidental entrepreneur himself and really got his hands dirty in the SEO world before it snowballed into something. The philosophy of helping people without asking for return has built up a lot of goodwill and thereby has been instrumental in building their business and their overall success. Rand discusses a Twitter quote, ‘The best way to sell something – don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect and trust of those who might buy.’ Start-ups inherit the strengths and weaknesses of their founders and Rand’s opportunities are software engineering and technical operations. He feels that Moz had inherited this and is the core of what holds them back in terms of scaling. Rand gets transparent and shares his combination for disaster: relying on personal intuition and sense of the market, getting khaki and greedy and getting a lot of funding. He further shares his broken theories and his realization that they do not have to lead the market; they just need to follow where it goes. Their philosophical approach to pivot towards focusing on the ‘now’ and the story behind one of Moz’s most successful launch ever. About his experience when they did a CEO Swap for week and how this gave him the insights what SEO world was like, what consultants were dealing with, how their processes were working, and what their struggles were. How the fact that there is no product fit in SEO, there is just the constant pursuit drives them to constantly practice; and how he sees the future and what he thinks is next; and his thoughts about the challenges in standing out from the entire noisy crowd. The things that Moz, and Rand personally, are working on as of this time including building a better system of keyword research through URLs, the Moz bar, investing in a fund called Backstage Capital, writing a book around transparency and veering away from the mistakes that conventional startup wisdom biases us towards.

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Known for her belief in enhancing company culture to get powerful results through content marketing, Krista helped make Block Imaging a digital leader in the medical imaging space. Her work has been recognized by Social Media Examiner, {grow}, Ragan’s Health Care Communications and the Mayo Clinic’s Social Media Health Network.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Krista’s mission of humanizing and democratizing brands was only awakened a couple of years back but it was spawned by wanting to balance results and relationships in business. She is a family person and doing business with people thousands miles away made her want to earn relationships from afar. This led to the things that she put in place in their marketing department She got married shortly after college and they moved to Michigan so her husband can start graduate school there. Her degree was in History and English but they just started with doing odd jobs at that time. She interviewed to be a receptionist at Block Imaging and didn’t even get the job. After six months, she applied again and was hired as a temp employee. From there, she got to know the business, gradually asked for more challenges tasks, and became proactive in finding needs to be resolved. She slowly expanded what she needed to take on and finally grew a Marketing Department. When she first came in, Krista saw a lot of hurdles and things to work on in their company’s website, especially in gaining more web traffic so she shares her inbound strategies which led their leads to jump from 10 leads / month to 880 leads / month in the course of 3 years. She also shares the pros and cons of managing from home. Krista shares what Block Imaging is and her tactics and best practices which enabled them to scale and get through hurdles: Be able to fully extract the metrics and data so that you have the ability to understand what’s happening and what you are doing, take control of your properties so you can leverage on these information and have the ability to act agilely and quickly to get through it and, democratize your ability to market. Krista walks us through how she is using digital to inform and engage customers and how mobile has shifted the way she designs her strategies. She also shares their undertaking in going mobile friendly and their line of thinking when it comes to prioritizing which ones to work on first. Krista wrote a piece about Block Imaging and their case studies in Marcus Sheridan’s book, They Ask You Answer, so check it out!

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Sethu Meenakshisundaram is President of SAP Mobile Services (Sybase 365), the global leader in enabling mobile interconnect, mobile engagement and mobile insight services for mobile operators, financial institutions and enterprises. With more than 25 years of experience in enterprise products and business, Sethu spent the majority of his career at Sybase as Chief Product Officer, building world-class OLTP and OLAP database systems that powers majority of the trading systems in capital markets.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Sethu starts the show off with his mantra: “I want to make complex things simple, and simple things automatic” and what inspired him to chase this passion. Sethu has a mindset that failure is always an option, and it is not a failure but is actually a step towards growth. Coming from a huge family and with simple beginnings, he shares how trials and tribulations had helped him grow and why Kung Fu Panda is one of his heroes. Sethu has 250 warriors with different passions but works for a collective purpose. He shares that things will always be stressful but they are always happy and have inner peace. Sethu also talks about their business model, the power of their reach, why nobody can beat them and about an interesting little island call Kiribati. He explains why hyper connectivity is critical to the world’s mobile subscribers and the thing to focus on more than things such as VR. He elaborates that this is because of how the technology can help make people lives better by helping them in managing their money better, for example, thereby bringing in more value. Interesting topics he had heard during last year’s Mobile World Congress including drone technology and AI but he shares his slight disappointment as well due to the fact that it did not bring big impacts to developing countries. Seamless payment services, education through connectivity would have been great items for the Mobile World Congress to meet their social responsibility. Bringing people and technology together and IOT virtualizing all network operations coupled with the gamut of solutions that their SAP platform brings.

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Scott Lennartz is an experienced marketing professional, leader, and accomplished yogi. Whether growing a Silicon Valley business to multi-billion dollar run rates, revamping a local yoga studio to better serve the Portland community, or balancing a handstand in the early morning, Scott has successfully navigated a variety of challenges both large and small.

Scott has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics, a Master of Business Administration, and is a Yoga Alliance E-RYT 500. He is currently the owner of Yoga Bhoga in Portland, Oregon, as well as the Vice President Marketing and Business Development at Voicebox Industries.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Scott’s passion in putting his energy to things which make a change or makes an impact. His focus on outcomes was brought about by his craving of seeing results from decisions he had made after working with different types of companies. About his interest in technology since he was a kid, how things like coding gets him stoked and his smart decision when he went from Cisco rather than pets.com up to the time he left Cisco and joined Voicebox. What Voicebox is all about, how it works in a seamless way that makes users feels good, how they use the technology to tailor-fit or make a unique experience for users before and after the event and why it is essential to get rid of all the confusion by designing your products to be very intuitive. Scott discusses why they went for being mobile responsive but have not decided to invest in a mobile app. He shares that in their opinion, downloading an app will be a negative experience for their user and would contradict to their goal of having Voicebox to be as simple and fun as possible. The hurdles that they are experiencing such as internal growth, developing talent and raising capital for expansion. How they get input and feedback from customers through pop ups where you can enter a text message in your phone and it will pop up in the big screen. It’s fun and gets people to engage in more ways. The cool project that they are working on right now: Roulette, a feature where you can go to a page and spin to get random songs for you to sing. If you want to keep tabs on the things that Voicebox is working on, go to http://vbsongs.com/.

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Ken Herron is a cool hunter for new ideas, strategies, and technologies to increase the value of world-class brands. A global marketing alchemist, he unleashes peoples' creativity to use technology to develop stronger emotional connections between companies and their customers to drive revenue and market share.

Ken has rapidly grown revenues for multiple early- and mid-stage startup companies. He has held executive marketing and sales leadership positions for multiple SaaS enterprises including Purple Communications, SocialGrow, and Online Buddies; and held product leadership roles with Avaya, Lucent Technologies, and AT&T.

A graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business' Marketing Management Program, Ken earned his Master's degree in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and his Bachelor's degree in International Economics and German from Drew University.

Ranked the #2 Chief Marketing Officer on Twitter worldwide by "Social Media Marketing Magazine", Ken is a frequent author and popular speaker on leveraging technology for marketing, and the leading practices to engage enterprise and consumer brands' customers online.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Ken starts off with how his passion of helping people put pieces together and have aha moments for themselves is derived from being an educator. He expounds on how he was molded and energized by being forced into new situations and by change. He shares his interest in being in a role where he can affect the most change and how this led to the journey he has so far. From being with large corporations where he felt he had very small impact, he moved to smaller organizations where he can have greater responsibilities and greater impact to both business and people he works with. How empowering it can be to have tools available at your fingertips to have an idea published and communicated directly; and whether or not it is more advantageous to have an entourage of designers, etc. to present presentations for you. What Unified Inbox is, some items which needs awareness from their users and non-costumers and the many way that their brilliant technology can make our lives way easier and improve the quality of our lives. How they are looking at improving their product in line with the current technology and especially for mobile; how they are making their content as accessible to as many markets as possible; and the processes they have in place to ensure they are keeping up with the trends. Check out the coolest project they had just finished by going to demo.unifiedinbox.com, log in and passwords are: uib. You can find the Unification Engine Project that they had just put up in their website. You can play with the tool by yourselves. You can find a virtual kitchen, virtual street scene, virtual factory, etc. and you can send messages using your own cellphone using your own network. Go and set your thermometer or turn on your vacuum cleaner..for real!

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Nic is currently the GM for Adidas Group North America Direct-to-Consumer. A veteran in the retail industry, Nic has been with the brand almost 8 years and has held roles of increasing responsibility during his tenure. He is highly knowledgeable about the sporting goods industry and is best known for the turnaround of a bankrupt brick and mortar business, making it one of our most profitable channels year over year.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Why Nic is most passionate about the aspect of helping people achieve their goals and how this drive started. He shared how this value was embedded to him when he was a kid and stuck until he is 44. The underlying trend from his career transitions -- from Hollywood Entertainment Corporation to Target to Adidas -- and the secret sauce of how he managed to balance relationships and business. Nic goes through the process in identifying a person’s personal goals and how you can align it with company’s values starting with being a great listener, asking the appropriate questions and reading people’s non-verbal cues. Nic’s main focus items in his role as GM for Adidas Group North America including creating the vision and cultivating the culture within the organization (The Brand Guardian). The unique things that he is doing for the organization which makes him an outlier emphasizing on how he is flipping the traditional paradigm upside down in terms of the importance of roles. How Adidas transitioned to mobile and how mobile turned their world around especially with how information is passed on with lighting speed. The biggest hurdles that Nic is trying to overcome with the transformation that is happening in the industry and why innovation is a core ability that companies should have in order to cope up with all the changes. The initial pain points in the world of Direct-to-Consumer: being average in demand fulfillment, below average in mobile and below average in terms of connectivity to the ecosystem. How they are keeping themselves up to date with the evolving technology such as creating a newsroom with skilled individual tracking sites, buzz words and the works; and developing apps for music to make the consumers become part of the brand and help them move the brand forward. Nick believes that the future of mobile is already here and he expounds on what he thinks will come next.

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Robert is a startup enthusiast with a passion for technologies that make the world more connected, efficient and sustainable. He is currently Founder & CEO at Workframe, where he's focused on leveraging technology to reduce the cost, time and effort required to design and build an inspiring workplace. Robert previously served as Director, Business Operations & Insights at Intent Media, where he owned business analytics, FP&A and sales operations; earlier in his career, he also worked in venture capital and investment banking. He completed his MBA at the Yale School of Management and holds an MPhil in International Relations from Oxford University.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

We learn about what gets Robert up in the morning every day and his core of excitement; and the path he took to get to Workframe starting from Deloitte, Credit Suisse, SJF Ventures to Intent Media. He also shared why he ventured into commercial interior design and how it paved the way to his transition to Workframe.

An overview of Workframe and what they do and why technology is a key piece of their being and a key piece of why they were able to scale.

How they structure deals and the pricing models and methodology they use; and what they are focusing on right now to get traction.

Strategies in testing the market including being aggressive in testing the market and the next steps to take towards expansion.

The most recent hurdles that they have overcame which led them to scale and tactics they employed to get through them including building a core team of people to give them the credibility that they needed to be successful.

The current challenges that Workframe is facing and what they are doing to address that.

How mobile can go in and completely change the way the industry works because it can bring about better decision-making, better outcomes, reduces a ton of friction in the process, drives efficiency which drives cost down = the outcome is better all around.

With the advancement of digital, Robert enumerates the things that he is particularly excited about surrounding all the opportunity it can open up to; and which one he feels will happening anytime soon.

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Maria Seidman is the CEO and co-founder of Yapp, an award-winning platform where anyone can create and instantly publish a mobile application for your event, group, or promotion. Before founding Yapp in 2011, she ran mobile for Warner Bros. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children, one of which was born while launching Yapp. She is passionate about women in technology, mobile trends, media, and entrepreneurship. Seidman was named Entrepreneur Magazine's Emerging Entrepreneur of 2014.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Maria starts off with how her frustration of not being able to know to code paved the way to her passion in making software that users love to use to enhance their lives. About a women’s retreat that inspired her to create Yapp, at what point she decided that it was worth the investment and the process she went through in creating the app from validation to looking for a technical co-founder. Maria walks us through her choice of approach and steps she took from conception of idea to coming up with a prototype. The timelines and phases Yapp went through and some of the mistakes that they have learned the hard way. She also shares that, if she can start all over again, she would start on the mobile side and emphasize user testing and market research before building a single line of code. Solve the problem really well for a specific user and start from that → Why Maria’s advice can save you tons of time, money and effort. The transition she went through from working in an organization as global as Warner Brothers, the hustle she needed to employ when running her own start-up company and the pros and cons that went with the change. The initial hurdles they had encountered before they gained traction such as building their reputation and finding early adopters; and even the current ones now that they have scaled. The steps they implemented to get through their challenges and the iterations they did to optimize adoptions including efficient prioritization. She also talks about scaling customer acquisition and the roadmap for Yapp. Yapp’s ideal audience and the coolest things that they are working on right now.

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Kristoffer is a brand evangelist with solid expertise in visual design. He is a multi-disciplinary brand strategist with an international experience in content development for consumer experiences and brand positioning. He designed for brands like IKEA, H&M, Brooks Brothers, Lagos, Luxotica, Bloomingdales, David Yurman, Bjorn Borg, and Oakley.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Getting to know Kristoffer as a dad of two, how he shifted interest dramatically, him being a passionate runner and biker and why he loves sports which forces you to get out of your comfort zone. He also shares how his upbringing and his sightseeing tours to churches during his early age relates to his current profession. The characteristics of the company that he goes for and how he views brand experience: having the will to adapt to change and knowing who you are. What he thinks is his strongest point and how he mends brands which had lost their purpose. Kristoffer gives detailed examples on how he focuses on a certain brand’s opportunities, does his magic and ignites them again. He also discusses creating sub-brands without the risk of fragmentation, how to succeed using this strategy and names companies who had done this successfully. Why he thinks that some big brands, such as IKEA, can take stupid steps and gives scenarios supporting his opinion. His thoughts on how digital can and cannot be useful depending on how you utilize it. Kristoffer also shares his strong belief why we have to stop thinking mobile as a revolution and in contrast, just think about it as a different vehicle. He throws in examples of how you can misuse this channel but also featured small brands that had excellently used digital: Black Sheep Cycling, Rapha, and I Love Ugly. What he thinks is the next disruptor in retail and where he thinks the future lays in brand experience: how far can you customize a product from the consumer from the get go.

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Mike McGuire is the Vice President of Research in Gartner for Marketing Leaders which specializes in mobile marketing, guiding digital marketers on how context, community, location and time converge on a consumer's mobile device to change the relationship between customers, prospects and brands. He is responsible for the mobile marketing research agenda and also covers the online music segment specifically, digital distribution and also looks after Gartner’s coverage of legal and regulatory issues that affect media companies.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: 01:12: As VP of Research, Mike enumerates the areas he focuses on in the mobile marketing agenda. This includes their marketing team’s dedication on mobile marketing research. In here, they zoom in on the breadth and depth of the tools and techniques which are important to mobile marketing. 02:55: Mike’s definition of how context, community, location and time are changing the relationship between the consumer and the brands. He also provides examples of how you can now do fine-grained distinctions from the cues derived from data gathered by mobile technology and change user experience leverage on this information. 06:46: With the massive push towards mobile, we discuss where a brand can start and how they can pull in contextual data to use for a certain return to justify investment. 13:51: If there is an opportunity for unique mobile engagement but a company that missed the boat in terms of being mobile first, should the company start with being mobile responsive/mobile friendly or invest more in mobile engagement? Mike devotes time in discussing why, since becoming a mobile responsive site isn’t a flip of a switch; the next big investment of a company should be towards being one. 21:09: The exciting things which Mike thinks are coming next including the extreme line of convenience which voice interfaces and the notion of virtual private assistants can possibly bring. We add in the positive and potential negative of VPAs and how it will affect brands and products.

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Ariel Avila started his career in Wall Street as an investment banking analyst at JP Morgan in the retail and consumer bank. He then joined JP Morgan’s equity research practice before attending Harvard Business School. The then joined Sears and later on, Trunk Club. He is focused on developing and executing strategic, operational and growth initiative. He currently lives in Chicago, speaks English and Spanish, is a runner and enjoys travelling.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Ariel shares how he enjoys travelling, in fact, he has been to about 30 countries and his recent trips where Hungary, Austria, Budapest and Vienna. He also loves eating out and discovering new places, is planning to do his first marathon, and is passionate about mentoring and teaching people. Ariel started in college as a Political Science major but learned that it was not a practical route. Investment banking caught his attention as it sets a foundation of a career and you get to develop a rigorous analytical skill set. There are also lots of opportunities in this field as you get to work with smart, talented individuals; and get lots of responsibilities at early age. He was assigned in the consumer retail group and tis sparked his interest in retail. What his role entails and about his focus on two areas: rolling out test concepts for the brick and mortar side of the business and the alterations group. He adds how he keeps the business going, monitors demand and supply, and keeps an eye on their KPIs. How forecasting needs makes them successful and allows them to scale, their rigorous process to onboard tailors, how they source tailors and some of their challenges in hiring. Their peaks and valleys and sales patterns for Trunk Club; the hurdles and bottlenecks they experience especially in the people side – stylist to serve customers; and the concepts they are currently introducing to meet their goals in improving customer experience. How their back end operations work; and how they ensure that customers enjoy cohesive brand experience while providing individualized service at the same time. How mobile impacts Trunk Club customer experience and the initiatives they rolled out -- such as messaging, digitizing their tailoring tickets -- which enhanced responsiveness and engagement and introduced innovations to an old industry. Ariel shares Trunk Club’s differences, similarities and edge compared to its competitors.

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A former magazine editor with a focus on the outdoor and sports industry, Kyle has successfully merged design, sales and best practice into his ecommerce career. His knowledge of the space and how it relates to ecommerce is unparalleled, working with companies like Dr Martens, Chrome Industries, KEEN, Nau, Xterra Wetsuits, Retül, Ski Racing, Rudy Project, SKORA Running, Blue Seventy Wetsuits, Nuun, Endurance Conspiracy, Inside Triathlon and Carmichael Training Systems, among others.

His specialties of both on- and off-site optimization, plus his digital marketing and A/B testing acumen is the basis of how he builds teams focused on a "test, learn, repeat" philosophy. Kyle is also an expert email marketer and has had many campaigns on Campaign Monitor's annual Top 100 list. He has led teams by collaborating with buyers and merchandisers, producers and marketing specialists, site managers (domestic, European and Asian), and analysts to fulfill an overarching global digital/ecommerce strategy.

As a Magento expert, he was also a 2012 Webby Award honoree for Best Practices. He is a noted speaker on oft-controversial topics on the direction of ecommerce.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Starting off in magazine because of his love for storytelling, Kyle shares what drove his fascination in writing and his adventures brought about by being a writer who elaborates on things. About his mentor, Dave, and how he drove him to cut his teeth in analytics, forced him to read stats, get out of his comfort zone and inspired him to innovate. How abstract thinking and thinking about the big picture is pivotal to success in the ecommerce industry. What drew him to transition to the brand side and how it can sometimes be challenging more than others. A story about what led him to Dr Martens and what he enjoys most working in there. His roles, responsibilities and what he focuses on in line with his role as Vice President for Global Digital at Dr Martens. Kyle expounds on the three things for a business to be successful and which will set a foundation for growth: great consumer experience, have your SEO dialed, and your email system. What they are doing to segment and tailor fit experiences and resources that he finds useful.

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Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

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Our Guest Julia Kaplan brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in product development, delivery and innovation. She is responsible for driving ThredUP product and user experience. She started her career as a software engineer in financial services and then moved on to work in technology for companies in healthcare, e-commerce, advertising, and media. Prior to joining thredUP, Julia held product leadership roles at @WalmartLabs, Kosmix, and Yahoo! Julia earned an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Julia was born and raised in Eastern Europe and it took three months for her family to move to the US before collapse of Soviet Union in 1989. She shares how she did not speak a word of English when she arrived, how she worked to put herself through college, choosing Berkeley on price, how the educational system differs in the West and how, through it all, everything was still a rewarding experience. While she worked as a software engineer, Julia became interested in venture capitalism so she set her sights on entrepreneurial strategy and finance after school. Despite this, she ended up enrolling in product management, which she did not regret. Julia’s journey started with Visa followed by becoming a certified trainer for Microsoft where she taught people who wanted to learn web development when it was very new before. She then worked with Ford where she got exposed to product management. This is where she got the bug and decided to pursue her MBA. After business school, she came back to California to work for Visa as a contractor and in Yahoo where she took care of the platform side and eventually moved to the media side during the latter years. She joined Kosmix in 2010 where her team became WalmartLabs when it was acquired. Her core responsibilities as a VP of Product at ThredUP involves managing a small but dynamic team. Their tasks revolve around product culture and they maintain a very strong discipline around user research and user testing. They reiterate a lot and are pursuing the mobile first approach in line with their focus on amazing customer experience mainly through product findability. Julia gives us examples to show how her team uses research, user testing and iteration on one of their two-week engineering sprints. She shares take aways, challenges and unexpected surprises which can arise from this cycle. We learn about the key things that happened when they transitioned to mobile responsive and invested in mobile apps. Julia also shares why how ThredUP uses qualitative and quantitative data from user research and what KPIs they look at for the data to drive iterations.

Rapid Fire Questions

What is your definition of innovation? Innovation is thinking of things – may it be technology or process or something else – and applying this in a new way to create better customer experiences or better way to solve customer problems.

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? I agree with the quote that an idea without execution is just a hallucination. Great ideas with bad execution are not going to succeed. Ideas are important but I’ll put more emphasis on execution. I would say 20% - 80%.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? Customers are going to go for better pastures. If somebody else gives them better experience, better price, better assortment…they are going to go there. So it’s very important to stay on top of things, to innovate and always listen to your customers.

What is your favorite business book? Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan The Membership Economy by Robbie Baxter

What is your favorite digital resource? Marvel UserTesting.com Looker

What is your favorite app and why? Uber Houzz

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? We are about to launch a beta of a new app that some people will call comparative shopping but it’s more than that. It will inspire consumers to think 2nd hand first.

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Our Guest Aki Iido is the Head of Mobile at Zappos Family of Companies. He holds lead link roles to the mobile and engineering circles, as well as a CTO role.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Getting to know Aki’s background from being originally from Japan but born in Guatemala, having a Japanese dad and a mom from Central America. He also shares going to college in the US, getting a job in LinkExchange which was acquired by Microsoft, and his initial hesitations in joining Zappos. How Aki was led by his roommate, who was then a Computer Science major, to the engineering space. The pivots and transitions that he made when he worked in Zappos and some challenging things that they had encountered such as learning new systems and tools, and doing some back end work such as developing workhouses systems. Coming from this, Aki then shares the take aways that he learned from all the experience in modernizing the supply chain. How it is working the full gamut of the business from the internal to consumer-facing facets of the business. The big things that are prohibiting scaling in mobile and how he takes advantage of the new agonies and leverage on these experiences. The exciting aspects in working in the mobile team and the pros and cons in developing in two platforms, Android and iOS. Aki shares the biggest ability that you should have get the biggest return such as the need to look at the data, understanding where the user need is by reviewing your web server logs (how many visitors are checking your site is, what mobile devices do they use and what platform are they in) and using these to improve your user experience and make your decisions. Looking at data and seeing that most of the traffic is coming from mobile, Aki suggests what experiences retail should be natively building for a better web experience and how you should go about planning your strategy to have the least investment impact.

Rapid Fire Questions

What is your definition of innovation? Always look ahead. Embrace and drive change. Never be scared and try to have fun.

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? If the execution is terrible, no matter how good your idea is, that’s not going to help you. Execution is 99% and 1% is idea.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? Apart from learning and solving problems, working with folks who are passionate in what they do, that’s when you see great things happen.

What is your favorite business book? Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

What is your favorite digital resource? Safari Books iTunes

What is your favorite app and why? Zappos Apple TV app

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? We are excited about all of our apps as we are making big investments and changes in this area so check out Zappos mobile.

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Our Guest Luvleen Sidhu is the Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder of the BankMobile Foundation. She's been recognized in the industry, including being named one of Bank Innovation’s Top 10 ‘Innovators to Watch’ worldwide in 2016; the Lehigh Valley Business Women of Influence - Woman to Watch Honoree in 2016; a winner of New York Business Journal's Women of Influence Awards in 2016; one of Auto Finance News’ ‘10 Executives to Watch in Auto Finance’ in 2015; and one of Bank Innovation’s ‘2015 Innovators to Watch.’

She holds an MBA from The Wharton School and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Government from Harvard.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Luvleen shares how her desire to have a positive impact to the society drove her to find ways to explore means of doing so. Government is a good vehicle to serve as a catalyst to change but she later found out that a combination of business and exponential growth in technology can positivity impact -- from local to global – people’s lives. She had always been drawn to leadership roles and this was the start on how this father-daughter duo disrupted the mobile banking industry. Learning how working in Lehman Brothers and her exposure in Wharton stirred up the entrepreneurial bug in her. Business school had provided Luvleen exposure in case study methods analyzing how start-ups address unmet needs and this inspired and started her entrepreneurial journey. From a corporate job in investment banking to financial services consulting, Luvleen took the leap to working full time in BankMobile and was successful. She shares how they did this by starting with the non-subjective things such as looking at the market and their current behavior like interacting with their banks via mobile; identifying the opportunities the current banking model; and instituting the BOYB concept to grow and scale exponentially. Luvleen shares it is good to have a goal in mind work towards that goal but it is also essential to have the flexibility to pivot and experiment. From testers and concepts, she mentions that they got to their first milestones through marketing innovations such as digital advertising, word of mouth, PR and content development. About her book, ‘Why Can’t Banks Be As Easy As Uber?’, her motivation in getting it out and how it is an extension of her passion to get the community to be aware of the gaps in the current system and how they can look forward to a more futuristic banking. About their College BankMobilist Program, a nationwide campus ambassador program where they run workshops and seminars to educate students to make the best financial decisions in their lives. Luvleen shares details on this program which is a means of how to spread financial education across America and an extension of her passion to the education realm. How mobile has allowed them to scale, enable their mission and improve banking experience through things like biometrics and geolocation. Their main focus in BankMobile: make banking as effortless as possible and add value to consumers moment by moment by utilizing what technologies are out there to proactively identify the current market hurdles for banking to be more than just money management to help people in a day-to-day basis. How the elections impact the mobile banking market and Luvleen’s hopes in the coming administration. The things she is excited about in the future of mobile banking with the technology that we have in our fingertips which is untapped by the banking industry.

Rapid Fire Questions

What is your definition of innovation? Innovation has two components: First, the product should be more affordable, easier to use, has a model that should be sustainable and overall, should be a better product than one that currently exists in the market. And, no matter how good a product is, if you do not have customer acquisition and retention strategy, it does not matter at the end of the day. Your innovation has to have these to be a disruptor.

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? The ideal situation is that you have a good idea and execute well but no one has ever been successful with a great idea and lousy execution. I think a mediocre idea with excellent execution will lead to great success so I would say 80%-85% execution, 15%-20% idea.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? It comes down to always having a clear vision on where you want to go then have a strategy in achieving this vision. But my biggest learning is that you should be open to the fact that that strategy and vision should be open to change and you have to be flexible and open-minded because without this, you can lose an opportunity of where you want to go.

What is your favorite business book? The Third Wave by Steve Case

What is your favorite digital resource? TechCrunch Engadget Tech section of the New York Times

What is your favorite app and why? WeeChat

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? We are rolling out the next innovation of the BankMobile app coming out on December 8th with the most exponentially better user experience that I’m so excited in bringing to the market.

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Our Guest Dan Armstrong is the Chief Digital Officer at BankMobile, America’s first fee- free mobile first bank. With mobile banking and financial services, telecommunications and technology projects in 40+ countries, Dan brings unique expertise in developing new products, technologies and distribution strategies that accurately match technology with consumers’ needs. For the past 20 years, Dan has worked in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America start-ups, mobile banking/payments, instant-account opening and correspondent banking, telecommunications, NFC, cards, alliances, regulatory, feasibility and automation programs.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Getting to know Daniel more including his travels, e-telco projects and his learnings regarding the ubiquity of mobile around the world after being in many other continents. As takeaways from trying things out from the rest of the world, Dan shares the bigger things and functionalities that we should bring back. Dan’s observations of countries who are early adopters of technology vis-à-vis the user behavior that they are exhibiting. Dan’s background from having a degree in Philosophy, his real first job as a museum and exhibit designer for an architecture company and how this line of work did him well during his transition to designing websites. He also shares how he transitioned to banking and when the realization that having a mobile services package can very impactful to a lot of markets came about; and the different, interesting ways of how to get people to get a bank account from country to country. The main things that Dan is currently facing and the solutions that he feels would be a great fit to the market. This includes innovating by setting up an entire software services division with his CTO; white labelling by establishing a platform which can be sold to other channels which can be rebranded and repositioned; and doing what they do best: controlling experiences and enabling capabilities without necessarily conquering the world with your own brand. With all the new ways that they are working on in entering the platform, we inquire if Dan notices any user fragmentation and if they have plans to centralize these channels into one platform; plus what their core model differentiator is compared to others in the market. Where he sees the mobile banking will be in the near future and the interesting things that may come about.

Rapid Fire Questions

What is your definition of innovation? Innovation is a good term but is overused these days. I like the term partnership better – a lot of suppliers and vendors call their customers ‘partners’. Real innovation is doing something that fundamentally takes a step forward or sideways and not just incremental capabilities or UI…I want to take innovation at a higher standard.

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? I believe that the key is really execution. Execute in a way that is so much more unique and attractive to people as execution is the trick to success. In our market, it’s all execution so it’s probably its 80% execution and 20% ideas.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? One size fits all is certainly not the way this world functions. Look at each market differently and it’s dynamics.

What is your favorite business book? The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction by David Quammen

What is your favorite digital resource? TechCrunch Krebs on Security

What is your favorite app and why? Communications apps such as WhatsApp

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? We are involved in the working on the patent on the UI of our new app which will change a number of things that mobile banking has never done before.

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Our Guest Diane Loviglio is the Co-Founder & CEO of Boon + Gable whose vision is to make shopping less time-intensive and more enjoyable. Boon + Gable sends a personal stylist to your home with clothes from brick and mortar retailers. The stylist advises what best fits for you and you pay only for what you keep. When not being a CEO, she can often be found in her favorite pair of AG jeans and playing with her 2-year-old daughter.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Diane shares how Boon + Gable was born from a personal pain point, her background in architecture and her hobbies which include trying new recipes out, staircase walks in San Francisco, and exploring cities. Why Boon + Gable means ‘a favor to your home’ and why Diane choose this name for the company. What inspired Diane to transition from architecture to start up, her frustrations about the way she shopped before, and how she came up with the current model of their company. Diane introduces Clark, the company’s algorithm and how he interprets data; where and when your stylists come into play; and the oath which comes with signing up. Their strategies in driving ratings up and getting to their current Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 85% ; and where they are getting their consumer insights to get them to understand their customers more. How they figure out what to bring during their first and succeeding customer visits and their unique mobile-only model. Why she decided to go with a mobile-only approach; things that they are working on such a shortening sign up flows and tweaks in in-person visits; and her visions for Boon + Gable to take the business further.

Rapid Fire Questions

What is your definition of innovation? Innovation is doing things differently but not just for the sake of doing thing differently. It’s doing things differently so you can save the resource or create one.

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? Totally execution. It’s like 1% idea and 99% execution. You can sketch up as many ideas as you want but execution is where the rubber meets the road, that’s the hard part. It’s where the nitty-gritty details are, it’s what makes or breaks the service.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? Being a founder and being able to grow a team, my biggest learning lesson is understanding the motivation of your team mates. It helps everyone align themselves.

What is your favorite business book? Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work by Dan Roam

What is your favorite digital resource? Google

What is your favorite app and why? Instagram and Tumblr

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? We’re bringing on some large retail partners which means that our catalog will triple our current 46k.

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Our Guest

Joshua Behar, Junior Director of Marketing for the brand, Ike Behar Apparel and Design, has worked in the company since the age of 15 and currently, is responsible in allocating ad dollars to create comprehensive marketing strategies in order to maximize brand exposure, awareness, and ROI. He also developed numerous corporate and promotional partnerships to promote brand awareness. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: All about Josh: from starting the job at a young age, his reverence for his grandfather who started the company, and how he got into digital marketing. When and why he pivoted towards new media and content marketing, and how being part of Gen Y gave him a fresh perspective to move towards implementation and adoption of modern methodologies in the seasoned company. How he drew their company, which is not too susceptible to change, to embrace and transition to the new concepts he had introduced and see the value of technology and his ideas. About the first campaigns that he built that proved return on investments, the KPIs that he associated revenue with and tools he used in tracking metrics. How he leveled up his next campaigns where he tried other different ways to sell and engage to the customers, all the while still capturing essential business KPIs. The other channels that he expanded on and how he went about achieving these milestones. How long it took for the company to transition and reframe their perspective towards the needing to make the shift. Josh shares how creating one uniform feeling across their social spaces can get your customers to take action and the value their brand got from their partnerships with Boyz II Men and the Dallas Cowboys. The digital infrastructures they had in place to land the partnerships that they had. Other technology which enabled their success besides social media, digital advertising and e-commerce. Rapid Fire Questions Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? Even if you have the best idea but can’t show people how to engage with you, the idea will mean nothing. If you have a crappy idea and it is executed really well, it is still a crappy idea. So it’s 50 / 50 for me. What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? In execution, you got to handle your end. In retail, it’s so easy for people to find options so you need to have your message on point. There are so many easy things that can go out of your control so those which are, you have to handle properly. What is your favorite business book? Who Moved My Cheese Money Ball by Michael Lewis What is your favorite mobile app resource? Google Display Network and Google Analytics What is your favorite app and why? Prime Now What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? Modernizing our digital custom experience. We want to bring the feeling of coming into a tailor shop over to the web and to mobile.

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Our Guest Daniel is a designer with nine years of professional experience, focused on creating memorable, cutting edge web experiences. Daniel has worked in print and web for both product companies as well as in client services— serving such clients as ID90T, The National Geographic Society, Starbucks, Freeman, ComData, Nintendo, and Funimation. He is currently Vinli's EVP of Experience, leading all design and front-end development for the connected car company. Daniel is responsible for ensuring a consistent experience across the entire Vinli ecosystem.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Getting to know Daniel more from his passion for technology and products up to their interesting version of pillow talk. How a pirated copy of Dreamweaver and Photoshop and the necessity of promoting a band led and inspired Daniel to pursue web design and development at the age of 14. The reasons on what drove him to transition from client services to the world of product and the challenges -- such as safety and the phase of how infrastructure moves together with ideas -- that he has encountered now that he is in product design and how these obstacles had helped him grow. Daniel expounds on why it’s taking so long for tech and infrastructure to advance to allow the speed of adoption and gives examples such as its application in the auto industry. The biggest changes he has experienced so far which opened up the way he thinks about mobile including the growing consumer demands for applications for their car and the fact that the shift towards digital is now much faster than anyone would expect. The new approaches in technology that he anticipates will come next for mobile and automotive such as radical advances in automobile apps, connectivity in cars, transparency from automakers and connection of cars to outside sources for data gathering.

Rapid Fire Questions

What is your definition of innovation? Doing significant things that no one thinks they need.

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? Act from thought should quickly follow. Ideas are great and great ideas are even better but you are not going to know if it’s a great idea until you try to do it. The best way to do it is just try it and try it the best way you can. 40% Idea, 60% execution.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? The first idea is probably not the best one. If you think you have a great idea, there’s probably a better one. Keep working on it and don’t be afraid of failing.

What is your favorite business book? The Hard Thing About Hard Things

What is your favorite digital resource? A List Apart

What is your favorite app and why? Two Dots

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? First is our connective service shop launch, which will change the way people get their cars serviced. Second is our connective dealership program which is such a shift from the way that car dealerships manage their inventory and how customers buy and own cars.

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Our Guest Joe Blecha is the Global Director for Product Development at Stance Socks whose cause is to make a product as imaginative, as expressive and uncommonly cool as the people who wear it. Joe has over 16 years of experience the field of outer wear and has worked with companies like Nike, DC and Burton. He has worked for projects for the US Olympics Snowboarding team and mini clothing collections like the Nike SB and Jordan, to name a few.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Getting to know Joe, what keeps him busy, and about his love for surfing, snowboarding, meditation and yoga. How his passion for outdoor clothing had budded from his love for individual sports and how these sports, which he started enjoying at a young age, had appealed to him tremendously and made him decide that this is what he wanted to do with his life. Joe also shares how he came to join the industry and his interesting beginnings. His journey in product development starting from gaining insights from customer feedback, coming up with ideas to make the product better, looking at possibilities and testing them out, arriving with a product, up until getting it out there for consumer validation. Reasons why he made the transition from working in Nike to joining a start-up including the advantages of being hands on with your product, innovation, the wider reach you get from a smaller group and growth. As Global Director for Product Development, Joe shares how he makes his impact through technology and creation of new processes. Technologies that he sees which enable process changes and which impacts supply chains. The attributes that Stance imbibes which allows it to scale; such a having a forward-thinking mentality and the ability to grow supply chains and produce committed supplies. What Joe thinks the company should focus more on: consumer experience, modernizing the supply chain by working inside out or focusing on digital products and systems? Channels that they have in place to measure how consumers get introduced to Stance; their spending habits; and comparing and contrasting results of various marketing campaigns. How they incorporate an approach which is a balance of art and science to come up with fresh ideas to improve customer experience; the timelines in implementing these; and the some of the limiting factors that they encounter during the process. Joe shares an internal initiative -- the Idea Innovation Hopper – how it’s structured and how it works; and how he sees mobile integrated in this process. The future of product development in Joe’s perspective, how mobile plays into it and where Stance is going to make that leap.

Rapid Fire Questions Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? The execution is slightly more important than the idea. Everybody can have a great idea but being able to execute on it is more important. It’s 60 – 40 for me.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? Be passionate in what you do and embrace adversity.

What is your favorite business book? Autobiography of Elon Musk Shoe Dog Crucial Conversations

What is your favorite digital resource? Ted Talks

What is your favorite app and why? Insight Timer Headspace YogaGlo

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? We are the official on-field sock provider of the MLB.

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Our Guest Mina Aiken is the Director of Customer Experience at Taylor Stitch where she focuses on creating the most humanized online shopping experience possible. She oversees all e-commerce, customer service and logistics. She believes that educating your customer and telling your brand story in an inclusive way makes a happier individual and a lifetime value customer.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Getting to know Mina and how much she loves what she is doing, her favorite hobby during her free time: designing wedding invitations, and how it was like growing up in sunny Florida. How she came to be an ambassador for customer experience and hospitality at a young age initially because of her first job being in the restaurant industry and how her love for talking to adults and working with this crowd grew naturally. She also shared how her passion for provenance and to share the story behind a product or service to gain someone’s trust and how that led her to the field of brand development. What led her to take on the lead role in Taylor Stitch’s Customer Experience department, how she got hired, how the company grew after she joined and the things that she, and her team, focuses on a day to day basis. Attributes which make Mina effective in her role and some scenarios she had encountered wherein the customer was the one who gave them something that she didn’t know they wanted. The biggest changes in the industry that she had experienced so far including going digital and managing the e-commerce experience. She expands that customers nowadays expect to get something they want in a very timely manner, the increasing demand to interact with someone human when they have a question and making an interaction personal to someone who is on the other side of the globe. The omni-channels that Mina thinks are the key to retail and the importance in delivering consistent messages across channels, establishing trust and making the customer feel that they are connected to the brand at all times. Pain points the she sees in the industry, which needs to be addressed from the back end to the customer-facing sides such as Returns and Exchanges. In her perspective, how the major uptake in mobile influences the industry including the amazing things it has done in the field of retail, opening brands up to millions of potential customers, tracking, and the creation of completion which pushes for better customer experience. How social media, such as Instagram, can help humanize your brand and what she thinks about Snap Chat Periscope. Mina shares how she is most excited see how mobile experiences can be improved as better mobile technology can mean better shopping experience. On the business side, she continues how eager she is to see how technology will develop real time analytics for ongoing sales and customer engagement.

Rapid Fire Questions Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? You start with a great idea but to give that idea real shape, you got to hustle. People will then see how clear your idea is, what you are doing to perpetuate that and they want to be with your team, then some real muscle can push your idea forward. An idea is nothing without that muscle behind it and blind execution is just a waste of time but an idea has to come first. 60% for idea and 40% for execution.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? Listen to your customers. They will tell you everything that you need to know about what they want.

What is your favorite business book? Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

What is your favorite digital resource? Google Search Engine

What is your favorite app and why? VSCO

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? We are currently building a community of Taylor Stitch influencers. It’s in the early stages and will start to take some shape this summer.

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Scott Emmons is the Head of Digital Innovation Lab for the Neiman Marcus Group. Scott built the Neiman Marcus Group Innovation Lab, also known as iLab, and is responsible for leading the organization in evaluating, designing, testing and piloting cutting-edge technologies and applications for luxury retail.

Scott is working on BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) initiatives, as well as Wi-Fi/Local and Wide Area Network infrastructures, mobility, and digital signage initiatives. These innovation projects include the amazing MemoMi Memory Mirror, beautiful 4K touch table look-books, beacon enabled holiday passes, intelligent mobile phone charging stations and gorgeous digital directories for Bergdorf Goodman.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with our guest:

Getting to know Scott --- what usually consumes his day and how a Harley Davison and a pool fills the little free time he has left from time to time.

From starting out as a contractor, to becoming an associate and then an Enterprise Architect, Scott shares the path that led him to head the Digital Innovation Lab at Neiman Marcus.

Scott shares how exposure, being a nerd, his love of having a good problem and being an early adapter had inspired him to be in field of innovation.

The biggest challenge he is seeing in the retail industry: understanding what the next generation of customer looks like and their preferences and trying to build something for them.

Giving the sales associates iPhones and how this huge change of strategy impacted their business as communications improved between associate and customer transforming interactions. Scott also discusses why they opted for iOS rather than Android.

Scott’s definition of an omni-channel approach which is basically, not thinking about individual channels but where the customer is at and where the customer wants to be, and then providing that channel.

The channels where the biggest of their revenues come from and the pain points which Scott feels that the industry is having challenges catching up to.

Innovation is important and Scott emphasizes how equally important it is to collaborate with his associates across the business and get out of the store to see what the customer is doing versus staying in the lab to provide the solution for the real customer problems.

His advice for those who are thinking of moving to digital adoption and the initial actions that they should focus their early efforts on.

Why Scott thinks that augment and virtual reality is the most realistic next hot thing and how it integrates and ties in the field of retail.

The processes they go through, from funneling of idea to requesting funding for full roll out, in implementing innovative experiments and projects and the metrics associated for them to gauge ROI. Scott’s projected breakthroughs and the things he thinks have promising potentials.

Rapid Fire Questions:

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? I would not put more emphasis on either but the idea has to be good to be worth doing and the execution has to be flawless. It has to be a 50/50 weight for this to work in my world.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? What the customer wants is what’s the most important thing and the only way you are going to learn that is to get out in the stores and interact with the customers and associates.

What is your favorite business book? Innovation Engine by Jatin Desai

What is your favorite mobile app resource? Flipboard

What is your favorite app and why? Quartz

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? You’ll know about it in six weeks or so.

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Joanna Herrick started in the men’s clothing industry over 12 years ago, primarily in custom clothing. She joined Trunk Club in 2013, heading Operations in men’s custom clothing division. During that time, they have grown to be the 2nd largest custom retailer of men’s clothing in the country, using technology to combine a modern interactive experience with this old world craft.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with our guest:

How Joanna picked up tips and tricks through her early experience in the clothing retail industry which gave her knowledge on both frontend and back end processes in this field and bring this expertise to Trunk Club.

From being a French horn player, Joanna shares how she got led to this industry through Craigslist and how she continues to hone her craft especially that the company continues to scale positively. With Trunk Club’s speedy expansion, the company grew from 3 people to 18 employees pretty quickly and Joanna tells us how Trunk Club was able to scale this fast, the changes they did to keep up with the rapid growth, and how she, herself, had evolved in able to meet demands. The priorities within their internal and external Operations team which Joanna needs to drive to ensure logistics in both sides work as they should.

From websites to word of mouth, Joanna shares how customers find Trunk Club and how engagement is applied in the end-to-end process of their customer’s journey.

We find out what makes Joanna great at the what she does, including maintaining about 20-30 customers of her own so she can experience firsthand whatever it is that they are building or putting in place. In building a digital space, what do you integrate first and build early on? Joanna shares the answer to this is being cognizant on where digital makes sense and where customers need human connection. Use technology and going digital to drive sales but do not take the personal aspect out of it.

How Trunk Club gets to know their customers from onboarding to post- sign up; how their technology processes gathered data to arrive with the items to pack inside the ‘trunk’ of the customer; and how their app bring custom clothing to another level.

Their hurdles and areas of improvement, where they are focusing on to make the next big enhancements in the clothing industry; and where they want Trunk Club to be to be ready for the next big growth. How mobile has affected their approach the digital infrastructure for their supply chain; how their app helps aggregate problems; and the process which takes place in their company to ensure that changes are made timely so they progress at the right pace.

Joanna shares future enhancements and trends that she is foreseeing including the concept of visualization, and talks about the danger of going digital but losing the romance of custom and what makes it work.

Rapid Fire Questions:

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? Execution, for sure. We sit in rooms brainstorming all day but if it doesn’t work well and it doesn’t improve things for our team members, then it doesn’t really matter. No ideas are important because it keeps things fresh and it allows improvement but at the end of the day, it has to work in order to impact your business. Execution is 75%.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? Never get super attached to your work, just get attached to what works.

What is your favorite business book? The Tipping Point

What is your favorite digital resource? Our tech team is my favorite digital resource.

What is your favorite app and why? HauteLook

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? The communications process I talked to you about and making it visual and seamless. It’s the enhanced Trunk Club version of the Domino’s pizza delivery.

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Our guest for this episode is Nick Shah, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer at Ampush. Prior to Ampush, Nick worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley in New York and Mumbai advising a range of deals, from IPOs to mergers, in the media and telecom industries. Nick graduated from The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with a dual concentration in Finance and Operations, and Information Management. Nick can be found playing basketball, participating in dance-offs, fearing bicycles, loving all things India, cheering for the Detroit Pistons, and always being positive. He was born and raised outside of Detroit, Michigan.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our Guest:

Getting to know Nick professionally and personally from his rich childhood, his interest in basketball, being a rebel, to becoming an eventual entrepreneur.
Nick shares details of his story on what led him to deviate from the family’s expectation of him becoming a doctor and how he pursued business and finance with his co-founders.
How being friends with his Ampush co-founders since high school helped in his success and why he feels that building long-standing relationships is an essential facet in your journey as an entrepreneur.
What prompted his transition from finance to advertising and how it was like for them quitting their jobs during the recession and building their company during challenging times. Nick also shares obstacles and lessons gained along the way including analysis paralysis and underestimating the work it took to put things into place; and the wins they have celebrated which caused them to pivot.
An introduction to their company, Ampush, their objectives and what their teams do. He also talks about how they worked with the Dollar Shave Club and their initial hesitations in taking them on as a customer. - Nick shared strategies they have employed specifically for the Dollar Shave Club which helped them grow and achieve a 6-7 figure/month spend, including starting with insights gained that the bottom-line issue was customer service innovation and planning awareness campaigns from there.
Learning the things that Ampush had done for the Dollar Shave Club through Facebook advertising which allowed them to reach their targeted demographics and most importantly, to convert them.
What Nick thinks of the current situation of mobile advertising, the opportunities he sees in the current trends and how he foresees the industry will evolve into.
Nick shares his opinion on what he thinks will happen if Facebook fails to acquire other social networks to reach the younger demographic and the potential risks the company may face.

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Our guest for this episode is Dominique Essig, Chief Experience Office of Bonobos. Dominique is responsible for leading and overseeing the Product Management/UX, Technology (Engineering, IT, and Data Science), Customer Service (their Ninjas), and Ecommerce Operations teams in the company. She brings more than 16 years of online experience for both online and global product management, customer experience operations and software development.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our Guest:

From originally becoming a lawyer, Dominique shares at what point in her life she became interested in Customer Experience and how she became fascinated and fell in love with the art and science of the whole customer journey. - Where she first sank her teeth in e-commerce and what led her to become the Chief Experience Officer at Bonobos instead of anywhere else.
The things that make her great at what she does: her robust experience in e-commerce, her passion in this business, her desire to constantly learn and be around people who are smarter than her, her tenacity, and her focus.
Dominique shares the biggest change in this industry that she has experienced: the shift of focus back towards building of customer relationships. She also adds in Bonobos’ strategies which are geared towards reaching their customers’ sweet spot, what inspired them to do these and how they transitioned to these models.
The process they went through – from analysis of demand, testing the model to validation of the experience -- to arrive with their solution to put up guide shops for Bonobos customers.
The impact of guide shops in their business in terms of customer acquisition, financials and growth in their e-commerce presence. - Technologies and tools they have used for their guide shops and the positive effects of the usage to the guides and to the business.
Bonobos’ key metrics, how they utilize different channels to personalize customer experience, how their customer journey looks like, and the things that they do not shy away from in the name of customer satisfaction.
Pain points that Dominique see in their organization and the industry in general, the activities she does to identify these points of friction and her approach to close the process -- from receiving of feedback to implementing solutions -- off. - The threshold of feedback to compel their team to move towards initiating action.
How the mobile industry influenced their way of thinking and their company strategies.

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Ali Wing is the Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Digital Channels at Maurices. Ali started her career with NIKE in marketing (NIKE women and sport casual) and later moved into corporate development (NIKE and NIKE International). From creating brand, marketing and digital strategies for venture capital–backed multichannel retail concepts like Gazoontite to founding and launching Giggle, a multichannel retailer, wholesaler and licenser of baby products, Ali’s passion and legacy is brand building and innovation.

Here are the highlights of the conversation with our Guest:

Ali gives us a peek of her life from getting used to a new city, growing up as a small-town kid among nine other siblings, how she accidently fell in love with brand, brand strategy and brand development, and how she got introduced to Nike.
The memory that fueled her passion for connecting with the customer and the strategies they had employed to arrive with the most effective first women’s campaign such as journey mapping and recognizing when you have made a mistake
How Ali’s personality and her skill set play in coming up with her perspectives to arrive with the right marketing plan for her target markets; and how she drives the balance of having an art/math mentality.
What inspired Giggle and its genesis. Ali shares details on how she had gained a unique perspective when growing up and how this led her to tap data and analytics for insights to bring Giggle into fruition.
How she took Giggle from concept to scale; and her big wins including being born omni-channel, rolling out the retail side of the company a year before the crash, being able to filter market feedback and learning that everything takes work and takes time.
The things she finds hard to implement in being an omni-channel in bigger companies and the overarching complexities that she has to deal with among the issues she is brought in the solve.
Ali explains why research and customer journey mapping are among her top priorities when she is brought in to intervene; and gives examples why balancing innovation and removal of friction points are equally important in staying in the game.
Where they are focusing their attention on in terms of digital channels to ensure they are making their impact: mobile first. Ali shares how their forecasts were blown away by how quickly consumers had switched to mobile and how it is becoming clear that an increasing number of consumers are no longer investing in desktops.
How Ali sees mobile evolving and how it changes their business processes. She also discusses the impact of geo fencing and the value of the data it brings in.

Rapid Fire Questions:

How would you define innovation? - It’s leveraging creativity, technology and teams to solve problems that, at the end of the day, the consumers tell you with their wallet.

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? - Execution is everything. Innovation, as a concept, is less about an idea and more about a philosophy and execution is where you bring it to life. Most initial ideas are wrong, they just put you on the map but the question is how you execution to find the right point in the map. So I’ll give you 99% to 1% going towards execution.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? - You cannot take for granted the change is hard for some people so I remind myself to help people move to the process for this evolution.

What is your favorite business book? - Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands by Marty Neumeier - Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

What is your favorite mobile app resource? - Scott Galloway

What is your favorite app and why? - Sephora - FreshDirect

What is the coolest thing that you are working on right now that you want everyone to know about? - Our discovery platform gets data from our customers to find out how they came to us – offline or online – but they have to become a customer first for me to see their data so there is a gap there. We are doing beta testing to start mapping identities so we solve this.

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