The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on what it takes to create innovation that drives positive change. My guest is Neil Sahota, IBM Master Inventor, United Nations (UN) AI subject matter expert, and Professor at UC Irvine.With 20+ years of business experience, Neil works to inspire clients and business partners to foster innovation and develop next generation products/solutions powered by AI. Neil's work experience spans multiple industries including legal services, healthcare, life sciences, retail, travel and transportation, energy and utilities, automotive, telecommunications, media/communication, and government.Moreover, he is one of the few people selected for IBM's Corporate Service Corps leadership program that pairs leaders with NGOs to perform community-driven economic development projects.In addition, Neil partners with entrepreneurs to define their products, establish their target markets, and structure their companies. He is a member of several investor groups like the Tech Coast Angels and assists startups with investor funding. Neil also serves as a judge in various startup competitions and mentor in several incubator/accelerator programs and is the author of ‘Owning the AI Revolution.’I invited Neil to my podcast because of his drive to create meaningful change and social impact through innovation. We explore the myths around making money and creating social good. We dig into the need to change behaviour and remove resistance as a critical component of the innovation process in order to drive the impact and adoption we hope for. And we discuss the fine line around being successful and taking enough risk.Here are some of his quotes:“If you're not trying to disrupt yourself or your organization, someone else will. And I think there's just a lot of opportunities out there. But we're used to thinking about improvement, how do we make something faster, cheaper, less errors, rather than be more transformative and say: ‘How can I actually do this differently?’We live in a dynamic world, things are always changing, new capabilities are always coming out. How can I do something like different? That's what really drives me.”During this interview, you will learn four things:Why companies that drive positive social impact perform fundamentally better than the ones that don’tWhy solving a big problem with your software is only one aspect to success and momentum. It’s ability to change behaviour, buy-in and mindset is the other critical part.How we can deliver more success in driving change is by helping people ask a better first question.That you don’t always want to be a 100% successful. If you’re 100% successful, you’re actually not taking enough risk

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

This podcast interview focuses on the heroics and entrepreneurship we have witnessed in the past three months of the pandemic. My guest is Vinnie Mirchandani.Vinnie has become a regular guest on my podcast. In fact, it was only 7 months ago that we discussed ‘a decade in review’. He’s the founder of Deal Architect - a Technology strategy and negotiation firm listed as a leading "boutique" by the Black Book of Outsourcing. Earlier in his career, he had various technology consulting roles at PwC in the US, Europe and Asia, and worked as an industry analyst at Gartner.He wrote various books about the evolution and future of enterprise software, amongst which Silicon Collar, The New Polymath, The New Technology Elite, and SAP Nation 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. Other than that, he’s an inspiring blogger and is always curious about innovation. In fact, he’s recently conducted close to 50 interviews with entrepreneurs and change-makers from around the world about how they stepped up to make a difference in the global pandemic. I had the honor to be featured in one these interviews as well, where I shared various examples from different industries and countries.And that’s exactly what triggered me to invite him again to my podcast. We explore some of the most inspiring examples Vinnie uncovered and what we can learn from this in terms of leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship, and our ability to drive meaningful change.Here are some of his quotes:As the pandemic was starting to hit the US, we had heard about some of the innovations in Asia and Europe. We were starting to hear about US healthcare heroics, in the media, but I was also starting to hear of a lot of business heroics.Either scaling up or scaling down or innovating quickly or pivoting quickly, has required heroics. I was so glad to talk to these executives because the media is not giving them much attention. The media is so focused on the negative stories that unfortunately, these business executives are not getting enough attention. I wanted to get their word out on all the things that they're doing which deserve to be saluted.During this interview, you will learn three things:How to pivot 180 degree overnight and turn a 90% drop in revenue back into growth again.That the art of creating momentum is about two things: relevancy and creating a sense of urgency. Let’s not forget this after the pandemic – it’s what marketing should be all about. The key is to not just try and keep selling what you had in the bag in January. The world has turned upside down since.That opportunities for innovation are plentiful, and every executive everywhere needs help We just need to establish an eye for it and be willing to work with them.

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

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

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around voice automation that has the power to connect with your customers in seconds. My guest is Ricardo Garcia-Amaya, Co-founder and CEO of VOIQ.Ricardo is a YCombinator alumnus and was recently recognized as a Silicon Valley Top Diverse Tech 40 Under 40. He has an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business, and an undergraduate degree in Politics from NYU. Ricardo is an Aspen Institute Innovator Fellow as well as an NYU Stern Berkley Center for Innovation Fellow.In 2017, he founded VOIQ. VOIQ empowers companies to use human-like AI VoiceBots for highly personalized conversations with their customers and prospects over the phone.This triggered me, and hence I invited Ricardo to my podcast. We explore the power of actually speaking with people, but how cost and scale challenges hold us back from maximizing its use. We then dive into how to overcome this challenge, what use cases are ideally suited, and what needs to be done differently to execute in a remarkable way.Here are some of his quotes:I helped a friend run for mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, the capital of the state of Rhode Island. And I helped them set up the technology specifically for his campaign in terms of virtual call centres. So how to get people out to vote, how to on the fundraising side as well, in that, looking at that technology at that time, I realized that nothing has changed in 10 years. So I said, you know, this is really this technology needs a big shift.The origination part of the idea was just how difficult it is. Triggered by the fact that in a political campaign you need volunteers, you need to source volunteers to make calls on behalf of the candidate.Why is it so human capital intensive to carry out these simple calls?So, how can we create these small conversations and gather answer specific questions through the phone? That's what sparked the process of creating VOIQ.During this interview, you will learn three things:How you can transform a service that’s not been changed in decades by combining ideas from different industries.How can you keep increasing scale and quality by creating an automated loop of listening, learning and optimizing.How to stay relevant in a world where the half-time of your product is months, not years.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give us memorable experiences without having to give up our privacy. My guest is Ofer Tziperman, CEO of AnagogHe has 20 years’ experience as an entrepreneur and leader of High Tech private and public companies. He served as the CEO of OTI, a leading developer of NFC-based payment solutions and as the CEO of Parx, a provider of on-street parking payment solutions. In 2000, Ofer co-founded LocatioNet Systems, a pioneer in the Location-Based Services market. In 2001, the World Economic Forum awarded him in Davos as ‘Technology Pioneer’. Ofer has an LLB Law degree from Tel-Aviv University.Today, Ofer leverages his technology and management experience to drive Anagog’s long-term success. Anagog is the developer of JedAI - a patented edge-AI technology that solves the conflicting dilemma of deeply understanding your customers behaviour, create moments of surprise and delight, all without harming their privacy.This inspired me, and hence I invited Ofer to my podcast. We explore the ever-growing need for better experiences and the problems this creates around our privacy: everything we do is tracked and stored somewhere without being in control of it. We discuss the technology answers to this so that we can have the best of all worlds: Better experiences, more surprise and delight, without sharing anything. We also dig into how remarkable products often are the result of many pivots – and what leaders need to do different in order to succeed.Here are some of his quotes:‘Everybody is trying to understand us, based on our online or digital life. And while 80% of the time we're actually spending in the real world. And we have a full life in the real world. But it looks like the new technology is only trying to focus on what we are doing online.It looks like everybody in the attempt of trying to understand us in a more personal way. They forgot that we have private lives.We all feel a little bit uncomfortable with the question: “What exactly does Google know about me, or Apple, or Facebook?" And at some point, some of us actually gave up.We are actually trying to roll it back and to say, “guys, there is an option that only our phone will know everything about you, and it will never leave your phone.” So, in a way, we try to change everything upside down.’During this interview, you will learn four things:That a major opportunity to truly understand your ideal customer is found in understanding what they do ‘off-line’Why transformation starts when we ask ourselves propelling questions that combine both a bold aspiration with a significant constraintHow we can make our solutions memorable by focusing less on fixing gaps, and more on creating peaks, i.e., moments of surprise and delight.That opportunity starts when you manage to do something which is very difficult, i.e., when others are not able to do that.

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

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help us all feel 'in our zone' more quickly at work. My guest is Dr. Shama Rahman, CEO of NeuroCreate.Dr. Shama Rahman is an accomplished musician, vocalist, songwriter, with a PhD in philosophy, neuroscience and complexity. In December 2017, she founded Neurocreate – a startup at the junction of AI, Neuroscience and cognition. It was founded around the vision that peak performance is not just for highly trained elites, but within reach for all of us.It’s on a mission to create a positive and symbiotic relationship with technology which enables us to be more mentally productive, creative, and flexible.This inspired me, and hence I invited Shama to my podcast. I think we can all agree that soft skills such as creativity and problem-solving are becoming more and more important today. That’s a blessing if those skills come natural to you – but what if they don’t? As such, we explore how technology can help and give us all that advantage. We discuss the journey from the moment that sparked the idea for this innovation, and the lessons learned along the way.Here are some of her quotes:We are trying to get you to this peak performance mental state code flow, but by training you to think more creatively. We're doing this using a mixture of AI, because of its ability to be interactive, and obviously, the pattern detection that it has, but in a very symbiotic design that actually encompasses the neuroscience of creativity.I don't think anybody is not creative. I think everybody's creative. I think it's just a skill. Or another way of putting it: it's a muscle that you use. It's all like practices, tools, techniques. And so all we're doing is we're digitizing things that people are doing already, but in a way where the AI allows you to look at things beyond your normal perspectivesDuring this interview, you will learn three things:How real value can be created by removing people’s blind spots and unconscious biases.Why 70% of innovation fails because we’re prototyping the wrong thing – we’re barking down the wrong treeThat you can create compelling advantage – advantage people talk about by going specific and niche, i.e., knowing exactly who it's for, and what it’s for.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable banks of any size to grow meaningful and trust-led relationships with their customers in a world that’s increasingly digital. My guest is Zor Gorelov, Co-founder and CEO of KasistoZor Gorelov has over 20 years of experience in the software industry. He was the co-founder and CEO of SpeechCycle, a market leader in cloud-based contact center optimization solutions for the telco market. SpeechCycle was acquired by Synchronoss Technologies (SNCR). Before that, Zor founded and ran BuzzCompany.com, a provider of enterprise collaboration and messaging software, which was acquired by Multex.com (MLTX). He has held multiple engineering and product management positions at Microsoft and Computron Software. His interest in speech and natural language technologies dates back to the early 90s when he worked at Bell Labs.And this is where his latest company comes in: Kasisto. The company was founded around the mission to create technology that gives financial institutions the power to produce Humanizing Digital Experiences that build valuable relationships.This triggered me, and hence I invited Zor to my podcast. We explore the challenges banks face as their relationship with their customers becomes very transactional and what needs to be done differently to continue to grow valuable and engaging relationships. We also discuss Zor’s vision to create a software business that’s worth making a remark about.Here are some of his quotes:Our long-term belief is that the conversational user interface is the most natural, most intuitive way for consumers to interact with computers.The vision of the company is to be able to enable better financial decision-making using conversational AI. The idea is to democratize financial services. And make sure that everybody gets the best possible advice.We believe it is so important because as consumers shift to digital, the relationship between banks and their customers becomes very transactional. People go in and check their balances, pay their bill, look up some transactions, and then they move on. And the whole concept about, humanizing that experience is to add intelligent conversational systems that can help the consumers better understand and better manage their money, but also help banks better engage those users on the channels as well.During this interview, you will learn three things:Why designing our software solutions for trust is underrated – consequently, more often than not, trust erodes, rather than increases.How we can create human/machine combos that deliver value larger than the sum of its components.That true value is not coming from replacing an old function with a new gimmick. It comes from creating net new experiences – enabling things that users are not able to do already.For more information about the guest from this week:Zor GorelovWebsite: Kasisto