The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

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

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to scale the impact of content strategists and content writers by a factor 10. My guest is Aki Balogh, Co-founder and CEO of MarketMuse Aki is a software developer and VC with a focus on AI. Prior to founding MarketMuse, he held sales and marketing roles at InfiniDB, evangelized Big Data as an investment focus for OpenView Venture Partners, designed Decision Support Systems as a management consultant, and worked as a software engineer. Aki holds three pending patents in semantic analysis. MarketMuse is a SaaS platform that lets marketers execute scalable demand generation campaigns through AI-driven content. The promise: realize 2-3X gains in productivity and 2X-6X improvements in search traffic within the first 6 months. This triggered me, and hence I invited Aki to my podcast.  We explore what’s broken in the market of content development and digital advertising: The cost of customer acquisition is consistently going up on every single paid channel – and as such it’s not sustainable to keep throwing more ads at people without getting better results. Something has to change.  Here are some of his quotes: I love the idea of teaching people information and not just blasting them with different types of ads. It maps to how people use the internet. What's the first thing you do when you want to buy something, you start googling it, you're researching it, reading about it, you're educating yourself. So, when searchers find your content, they're actually getting a lot of, what I think of as, information value out of it, and that's essentially what our platform helps you do. A content strategist or content writer with our data is twice or three times more productive right off the bat. And the content that they write is twice to six times on average, more performant on search.  So, you drive two to six times more leads with the same content because the content is that much better. It speeds them up. It drastically improved the ROI on a human, but it doesn't replace the human During this interview, you will learn three things: That a lot of challenges in business software can be solved by giving people context rather than just information. Information without context isn’t actionable and hence doesn’t drive business value. Why a lot of customers stay where they are because too many business software solutions on the market (start-up and traditional) fail to deliver the so-called ‘10x shift in value’. The financial and reputational risk to move or migrate is therefore simply too high. Why every tech companies should have an abominable ‘No-Man’ that would just says: ‘Nope, Nope, No, No. It’s ‘No’ with a corollary: it's no, but prove me wrong, show me business justification. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to democratize possibly the most mature business software category of all: ERP. My guest is Jon Ruby, CEO of Jonar. Jon is a rare person who thrives at the intersection of business challenges, technology and people. As opposed to most, he relishes the opportunities that uncertainty provides. While working successfully in a variety of industries, he has always tried to learn from each and carry those lessons forward. Jon’s philosophy for both technology and business is guided by the belief that just because something has been done a certain way in the past is never a reason to keep doing it that way in the future. As such, he is constantly challenging the status quo to find better and more powerful ways to drive business forward. This is what inspired me, hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the Enterprise Resource Planning category and what could be for innovators if the category was democratized. We also address what’s keeping the industry behind, what could be done to change that, and how this could result in the ability to deliver remarkable impact. Here are some of his quotes: We're looking at a ‘value first’ ‘concept first’, which means: just because something needs to be powerful, doesn't mean it needs to be hard to use. So, it's pretty straightforward to come up with a complicated solution for a complicated problem. To find a simple and elegant solution to a complicated problem is a lot harder to do. And when you try and even succeed a little bit, some exciting things happen. So, we applied this concept to ERP, probably if not the biggest than one of the biggest software packages out there. It's massively powerful. It's very expensive. It has benefits such as reducing costs or increasing market opportunity. But it's terrible as a whole within the market. It's just awful. The big idea was that we, as this little company, would be able to change this multi-hundred-billion dollar market from the ground up, start from scratch, and make a real change in what is possibly the biggest behemoth a software market. During this interview, you will learn three things: That the number one tool in building software is not 3GLs, Databases or Platforms – the number one tools is people, and their perceptions  Why you should aim high and end up with a situation where your biggest sales obstacle is: people believing that what you offer ‘is too good to be true’ How to build a culture of curiosity – a team that constantly renews itself and push the boundaries of what’s possible. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around personalization that drives desired engagement and desired conversion. My guest is Stefan Eyram, Chief Revenue Officer at Youneeq Since 2000 Stefan has worked with top brands across a broad cross-section of industries to successfully deliver Cloud and SaaS solutions that achieve KPIs and deliver ROI. From marketing technology, to big data, analytics, AI and personalization, Stefan has helped customers achieve measurable results from their marketing, digital, data and cloud investments. Stefan was the first international employee at ExactTarget (prior to IPO and subsequent acquisition by Salesforce.com) and launched their Canadian presence.  He is a regular industry speaker often called upon to speak about online marketing, relationship and lifecycle marketing, email marketing and other topics. I got triggered by Youneeq’s down to earth approach to driving revenue through engagement, hence I invited Steven to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the market with regards to helping SMBs taking advantage of the power of AI to grow fast and now.  Here are some of his quotes: We could all agree that we're in the customer experience and the customer engagement economy. Regardless of the age group and demographic you're reaching out to, at least North America and Europe, the majority of companies are doing well are the ones that are delivering the better customer experience. And that covers all channels and such but online is growing. If it isn't the most important channel for a company it is going to become the most important channel. What's the opportunity? What's the value? By delivering a more relevant experience, we are driving a lot more desired engagement, because we can use real time analytics to actually optimize the experience. And so, what happens is we can drive the desired engagement automatically. That will drive the desired conversions or micro conversions. And then ultimately, that drives the KPIs that are important. During this interview, you will learn three things: Why tech-vendors should challenge their solution whether it impacts the 1 or 2 most important KPIs of their ideal customers, and then go over and beyond to exceed expectations in terms of how they deliver that impact That creating highly sophisticated solutions doesn’t mean it has to be complex and time-consuming to implement it and start driving value.  That positioning is not a thing for just marketing – it’s possibly the most strategic instrument you have to align every aspect of your business around the growth you aspire and end up having customers saying: I'm glad you sold me this. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on how competitive advantage is shifting in an age of automation. My guest is Josh Entsminger, Senior Fellow at Ecole des Ponts Business School in Paris. He’s an applied researcher in international affairs and the fourth industrial revolution, working on the global governance of technology. Josh serves as a fellow at the Public Tech Lab at IE's School of Global and Public Affairs, working on next generation public services. He also recently served as a research contributor to the Future of Production Initiative at the World Economic Forum. His work as a senior fellow at Ecole Des Ponts Business School connects him to the Center for Policy and Competitiveness, a think tank affiliated with the Microeconomics of Competitiveness network of Professor Michael E. Porter at Harvard Business School. His work there focuses on the shifting nature of competitive advantage in a world where AI and other 4th industrial Revolution technologies make their inroads.  This triggered me, hence I invited Josh to my podcast. We discuss the how these technologies rapidly erode the position of advantage many companies used to have. We also discuss how AI is becoming a platform race, and how having access to the right data is rather than the right algorithms, is becoming the critical factor to create a position of advantage. Here are some of his quotes: I'm particularly focused on the governance of technology in the politics of technology. My background is heavily on government and policy and moving into the commercialization and understanding of what makes a company successful: what are the trends that are driving the viability of competitive advantage It's becoming increasingly hard for me to distinguish what's a technology company and what's not a technology company, The biggest issue I see is something that I'm calling competitive democratization.  This is a drive from some of the big companies to open up access for AI solutions through AI as a service. The thing that worries me is that the means of accessing these technologies is increasingly being controlled or dominated by a few cloud service providers. During this interview, you will learn three things: That defensible differentiation is growing with your ability to create data dominance around a particular area Why the battle of business software will be won by those that will master scale over scope  That the opportunity is exponential for those software companies that can anticipate how we’ll restructure our understanding of what is a firm, what is a career, and what is a job. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on the fuel that drives today’s product innovation: Data. My guest is Auren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph Auren is an American entrepreneur, angel investor and author. He founded his first company, Kyber Systems, in his junior year at UC Berkeley, as a way to pay for school. He sold that company in 1997. From there he founded BridgePath (sold in 2002), became the chairman of Stonebrick Group, cofounded Rapleaf in 2006 and left in 2012 to run the Rapleaf spinoff called LifeRamp, which became the largest middleware company that connects marketing applications. In 2014 he sold his company to Acxiom for $310 million.  Auren is an angel investor in over 120 technology companies. He holds a B.S.E. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the UC Berkeley. It’s the story behind his next venture SafeGraph that became the trigger for this podcast. Safegraph was founded to democratize access to data – in particular to help unlock innovation. That inspired me, and hence I invited Auren to my podcast. We explore why data – or better the lack of it – is becoming the roadblock for innovation. We also address the biggest challenge around data – it’s accuracy, and what it takes for companies to deliver ‘the perfect data’ Here are some of his quotes: One of my big passions is about democratizing access to data. Thus far, data has been a real gate to innovation. And folks who are data rich can innovate. But for most innovators, they don't have access to data and that really hampers innovation.  And I'd like to see a world where the data itself is not a gate to innovation, but ingenuity is the core gauge for innovation. If we don't democratize access to data, we're going to have much less innovation in the future. Democratizing access to data will both increase the amount of innovation and also disperse more widely the winners from the innovation. During this interview, you will learn three things: That to become the go-to-source for innovation you have to build your entire company around a core theme – and that becomes your focus to be the best and stay the best Why it it’s key to understand your role in the value chain – are you a ‘solver’ or an ‘enabler’. This defines your value  Why you should treat every employee as a Warren Buffet – a Capital Alligator – Their goal should be to spend money to get leverage – for themselves, their team, the total business. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to democratize the skills of great leaders and make every one of us more productive. My guest is Omar Tawakol. Omar Tawakol is Chief Executive Officer of Voicea which was recently acquired by Cisco.  Prior to Voicea, Omar Tawakol was the founder and CEO of BlueKai which was the leading Data Exchange and Data Management Platform company in the marketing industry. Oracle acquired BlueKai in 2014. At Oracle, Omar was the SVP & GM of the Oracle Data Cloud (ODC). The ODC pioneered the Data-as-a-Service category and was used by 97 of the top 100 US brands to create a 360o view of their customers across all channels.  Omar earned an MS in CS from Stanford (BS, MIT) where he researched and published work on AI agents. Their promise: “Voicea transforms your meetings into time well spent”. This inspired me, hence I invited Omar to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in our busy business life that are increasingly loaded with meetings, and what can be if technology and people blend in the right way.  Here are some of his quotes: I was running the Oracle Data Cloud after Oracle acquired my company BlueKai. I'd meet with some great leaders like Satya at Microsoft, of course, Larry Ellison, sir Martin Sorrell, just great business leaders. What struck me when I'd meet them is that they'd be in a meeting with me completely focused on our conversation. They didn't have their laptop open so that they could take notes and then get distracted. They weren't looking at their phone, they were looking at me. And when they left the meeting, there was an email with a follow up, and you realize, of course, they have a staff around them. That's helping them, but they also had some excellent skills themselves. And so, given how much time we spend in meetings, it's one of the largest time sinks of all knowledge workers, I saw that there was an opportunity really to help democratize the skills of these great executives. During this interview, you will learn four things: That a new generation of applications is arising around the concept of a Voice First UI – and that this could open up a wealth of innovation opportunities for you Why the best way to solve a problem is often to do the very opposite of peoples’ natural reaction. Voicea for example transforms habits such as the fear of missing out to the joy of missing out. How big impact is created by looking for areas where you can have a position of data advantage or ideally data dominance. Why you should aim to embed elements of virality in your solution – elements that people talk about, and create desire amongst others. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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