Venturi's Voice: Technology | Leadership | Staffing | Career | Innovation

Robert is the Founder of Kindaba and the CEO at HeySummit Ever since he was young Robert has enjoyed undertaking and building projects. He found creating new businesses and processes far more rewarding than working as a small cog in a large company. His passion for projects began after university. He started a non-profit project where he and 4 friends worked and lived in a converted school bus. They drove around America and made short documentary films about people doing good things in the country. He did this because he wanted a project that would throw him in the deep end of the working world and give him a whole bunch of skills that he could add to his CV. Such as large-scale logistics, planning, how to manage a team, and how to fundraise. After this Robert came back to the UK and started building software programs for a university for a few years. Kindaba started from a personal pain point which was the difficulty of communicating and sharing images with less tech-savvy family members. He started Kindaba in 2017 to solve this problem. Kindaba is a sharing platform for families. If Facebook isn’t private enough and Whatsapp is too noisy you can use Kindaba. There are no ads and no data selling. Its a privacy-conscious way of sharing baby photos etc.

Leon is the Founder and CPO/CSO at Elsewhen When he began his career Leon saw Software Engineering as a side-project. He finished an arts degree and started creating generative art using computers. This sparked his interest in software, he rejected an arts master and pivoted into a career where he could solve real-world problems. As a software engineer Leon wanted to bring together the disparate aspects of product development and business and let business owners gain more control of their product journey. So he started Elsewhen. Find out more about Elsewhen here: http://bit.ly/elsepod1

Nitzan is a Senior Salesforce Systems Manager & Information Security Lead at The Challenge Before working with Salesforce Nitzan worked as a software developer and project manager for various companies, including outdoor advertising, several software houses, and a stock market trading training company. Most of her career has been based around the database application space and that made the transition to Salesforce the most logical step. Nitzan started her Salesforce career volunteering for a charity. She was eager to work more closely with the platform and found a lot of support, knowledge, and careers advice in the Salesforce community. She’s also a mentor and came on the show to chat about her community work, volunteering and mentoring with Salesforce.

Chris is the VP of People & Culture at Zenjob Living in Berlin since 2012, Chris has seen the cities tech startup scene change massively. He moved with this wife to Berlin to get out of his comfort zone and hasn’t looked back since. He started his career at Soundcloud and this was where he cut his teeth in recruitment and HR. From there Chris moved N26 as their Director of Employee Experience before finally moving to Zenjob where he’s now the VP of people & culture.

Hansel is the VP of Engineering at Touch Surgery 5 billion people don’t have access to safe surgery. Changing that statistic is Touch Surgery’s mission. Hansel is helping the company achieve this goal through his role as the VP of Engineering. Hansel builds and trains teams of developers and provides them with everything they need to do their jobs. He leads an engineering team of 30+ people which is responsible for building scalable, automatically testable, and easily deployable platforms for surgical education and AI-driven analysis of surgical video.

Aris is the CEO & Co-Founder at Gutsy Ninja For the last 10 years, Aris has been working as an agile delivery manager. He especially enjoys contracting roles within organisations that help drive software delivery, assist and improve Agile processes and techniques such as Scrum Master and Agile Coaching initiatives. Having been convinced of the Agile mindset many years ago, Aris took the opportunity to investigate ways of bringing the customer's voice closer to the overall process. Gutsy Ninja is now helping companies understand their customers, increase conversion and find opportunities with our User Research consultancy.

Vlasios is the Chief Data Officer at Argus Media. With a Ph.D. in informatics, Vlasios started his career working in academia. His Ph.D. led him to specialise in managing data sets over geographical space and time. When he left university he worked on several consultancy projects and could boast that the UK government was a client. After this Vlasios spent some time setting up his own company where he successfully commercialised a lot of the research he did over his academic career. From there he worked in the banking sector where he set up a commercial banks data science capabilities and now he’s at Argus Media as their first Chief Data Officer.

Jason is the development manager at Connells Group Jason is a digital technology manager with over 10 years’ experience developing and delivering digital platforms. He’s delivered everything from simple PHP Facebook applications through to complex asset management systems on Umbraco. During his career, in addition to development and project delivery, he has built and managed digital teams of up to 15 people and worked with onshore and offshore external production houses. He’s introduced creative technology into the agencies he has joined, developed and implemented technical processes, and introduced agile ways of working.

Christian is the CTO at DCMN With 20+ as a software developer, Christian started coding when he was 16. Drawn to the allure of entrepreneur life he started his first company when he was 17. His company provided a hosting service to businesses. He found that this was a nice niche he could exploit at the time that paid for Christian’s studies. When he finished studying physics he started a second company in Berlin where he created a video recruiting interview software. After this, he worked at SAP for a while before starting yet another company dealing in mobile advertising. He sold that two years ago to DCMN which is where he’s serving as the CTO right now.

Sophie is the Managing Director at Mercedes-Benz.io Although Sophie isn’t a super technical individual (by her own admission) she has always worked in and managed IT teams. A self-professed Daimler child, she started her working life there as an intern then moved into a trainee position. From there, Sophie always found herself working in IT projects. For Sophie, IT is always one part of a larger project. She is equally comfortable in defining big system landscapes and a projects overall architecture as she is at integrating people and thinking creatively about projects.