The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in HR that has the power to inspire growth and ignite culture. My guest is Ronni Zehavi, CEO of Hibob Ronni has over 25 years of experience in multinational, hi-tech companies. Prior to setting up hibob, he was an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Silicon Valley based Bessemer Venture Partners. He's the strategic advisor and co-founder of Team8 Cyber Security, a powerhouse developing disruptive tech in the cyber security space. Ronni was also the co-founder and CEO of Cotendo, a content delivery network which in 2012, just four years after it was founded, was acquired by Akamai in a $300m.  Ronni has a BA in History and Educational Management from Tel Aviv University, and a MA in Organisational Sociology from Bar-Ilan University.  I’ve got intrigued by the big idea behind Hibob and in particular it’s fresh approach to HR to manage the typical employee of today, and hence I invited Ronni to my podcast. We explore what’s broken around the approach of the HR systems we have become used to over the past decades and why that approach won’t work any longer if you want to grow your business and the impact of today’s workforce.  Here are some of his quotes: ‘The shift that we are tracking right now, this is the opportunity: There's a new type of employee and a new type of relationship between employers and employee. This will drive this market going forward. They are bringing a new mindset, new values, and new behavior that did not exist before. It will change completely the way people work. So, we think the future, it requires a new approach, a new architecture that will be in line with those ongoing changes. We believe the future is all about system of relationship. So, the focus is the employee. The focus is the tribe - the employee and the team, the small groups within the company. The notion of ‘We Are One Big Family of 800 employees’ is fake news It's all about the small teams and the tribe.’ During this interview, you will learn three things: Why creating a clear vision about the change you want to make to the world is essential to making the right product decisions That to leverage your success it’s essential to get very clear ‘who’s it for’, and ‘who’s it not for’ And that maximum value is created if you home in on the unique DNA of your customer with your solution i.e. strengthen their core strengths. 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 accelerate sales cycle and reduce the costs of customer acquisition. My guest is Olin Hyde, CEO of Leadcrunch. He wrote his first line of code at age 12 on a home-built computer. Since then, he has started eight companies. Today he’s the CEO at LeadCrunch, a B2B lookalike marketing platform that uses artificial intelligence to find your ideal customer targets audience and then engage them with your content to accelerate the sales process. Olin is one of the principal architects of the company’s DeepFind™ machine learning platform, the secret behind its success. Olin is also an investor and advisor at Bruvida, advisor and shareholder at UpCycle and Company, and Investor at Ginger Shots. Prior to this, he was a business advisor at Connect and was VP, Business Development at Ai One, Inc. He holds a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies in Mathematics, Economics, and Marketing from Miami University (Ohio) and a Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture-based Enterprise Systems Engineering from UC San Diego. The promise of Leadcrunch is compelling: Get artificial intelligence. Just pay for leads. Get higher Conversions, more pipeline and happier sales people. This triggered me, hence I invited Olin to my podcast. We explore how the process of targeting leads is broken in most businesses and why this can’t be solved by people alone. Beyond that we discuss the power of building defensible differentiation – and how this results into a sustainable win-win for both your customers and you as a technology provider Here are some of his quotes: ‘I’d like to leave this earth better than I found it. So, I really like to find big problems that really help people live better lives. A very idealistic way to look at it is technology that enables the human spirit. The problem we solve is that targeting, in other words, how to pick your next target for your marketing or your sales is actually very broken. The symptom of that is that sales, people usually hate the leads that are given to them by marketing. I know personally how incredibly difficult it is to find the right audience to market to. And then how do we engage that audience on the path for them to become a customer. So that’s the problem we’re solving. Our customers consider our technology to be their unfair advantage. Our revenues have grown 20% per month, for two and a half years. That’s an indication that technology works.’ During this interview, you will learn three things: That by focusing your business on a valuable outcome will help to unlock markets you possibly didn’t even consider Why focusing your efforts on business model innovation will give you the fastest route to defensible differentiation. How giving your customers something they can’t live without is your secret to unlock double digit monthly growth. 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 with Audio Intelligence that has the power to impact human wellbeing on a global scale. My guest is Dagmar Schuller, Co-founder and CEO of AudEERING Dagmar has conducted applied research in the field of AI, machine learning and big data for more than a decade. Her passion is to bring trendsetting ideas into real-life concepts, thus enabling businesses to intelligently enhance their products and processes and – ultimately – personal lifestyles. At audEERING she shapes the strategy, business development and operations. With a lot of passion and dedication she led audEERING from a startup to a multi-million company. Prior to her work as CEO of audEERING, Dagmar was working as Management Consultant for Ernst & Young in Vienna and New York, as CFO of a New Media company, and as Senior Vice President for an international investment of Hubert Burda Media. She studied Economics and Business Administration at the Wirtschaftsuniversität in Vienna, International Management & Marketing, Finance and Information Technology at the University of New York, as well as Law at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in München. I got triggered by the big idea behind audEERING, and hence I invited Dagmar to my podcast. We explore the opportunity that’s created when AI and Audio are blended into common solutions and introduced to everyday situations. We also discuss what it takes to turn ideas into remarkable solutions and what this requires in terms of mindset and leadership approach. Here are some of her quotes: “In the 80s and early 90s, when we were teenagers, there was one series that we really found quite fascinating, which was Knight Rider starring David Hasselhoff. It wasn't actually David Hasselhoff, I have to admit, but the car, KITT, which was so intelligent, that we always thought: ‘That would be really, really great, it would be so great to talk to a machine and the machine really understanding what you want, and really recognizing what you want, it would help so much, and it could be used in so many things.’ So, we got inspired and thought ‘Is there a possibility to make this type of fiction reality.” “So, that is actually what's driving us - making the fiction reality but in a very positive way; How can we utilize those fictions, those ideas? How can we innovate ourselves, move forward, improve what we have, and avoid negativity?” During this interview, you will learn four things: How a user with a critical or even negative attitude can be turned into an advocate when technology becomes a true companion. Why in order to be successful in the mass market you have to put the money where your mouth is and convince your most critical audience: yourself How you can create exponential scale by betting on an ‘embed’ strategy – but for that you have to be very clear what you stand for. That true value is created when you take a holistic view on the problem: not only finding the needle in the haystack – but also figuring out how it arrived there in the first place. 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 customer support that has the power to 10x your ticket response times. My guest is Rob May, Co-founder and CEO of Talla. Rob has a background in engineering, business development, and management and holds a Bachelor of Science  in Electrical Engineering and a MBA from the University of Kentucky. In October 2008, he co-founded and became CEO of Backupify which provided a secure second copy of cloud data. Their clients included companies like Salesforce, Google apps, and more. Backupify was acquired by Datto in December 2014 and Rob became the SVP of business development overseeing the Backupify's integration after the acquisition. In August 2015, May co-founded and became CEO of Talla which develops machine intelligence, virtual assistants, and conversation UI/UX for enterprises. In addition, Talla is launching a decentralised bot registration and marketplace platform, BotChain. When I learned about the positive impact Talla’s has on support organizations I instantly invited Rob for my podcast. We explore his views on what’s broken in market for ‘search’ and how that’s actually leading to unwanted behavior. We also address his learnings on technology adoption, and why this is not only of fundamental importance to increased user productivity, but also to keep your solutions always in sync with the reality of the business. Here are some of his quotes: Talla is in the customer support automation space. And what we do is we take your, not just your ticketing data, but your actual support content, we ingest it and understand it. The biggest thing that we see in our customers, and the reason that they do this is, you know, hiring is a is a challenge right now, at least, you know, here in the US, the labor market is pretty tight. And so we've sold to a lot of very high growth tech companies who need to hire 150 support reps this year, and they just can't. So they're looking for ways for how they make their existing support reps more productive. And we know that, you know, with Talla that can be anywhere from sort of 20 to 60% productivity increased, depending on the nature of their business. During this interview, you will learn three things: How you can kill two birds with one stone by adopting a UX/UI driven way of thinking about Machine Learning Why succeeding with AI is not so much about segmenting the market by traditional demographics but more one of addressing the right mindset. How to make solid progress by following a ‘test and invest’ approach.  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’s transforming impact marketers can make in cross-channel marketing scenarios. My guest is Vijay Chittoor, Co-founder and CEO of Blueshift.   Vijay has a wealth of experience in AI, marketing technology and e-commerce domains. He was an early team member and the director of product management at Kosmix which was acquired by Walmart to become WalmartLabs. In 2010 he co-founded Mertado and led it as the CEO for two years until it was acquired by Groupon and became Groupon Goods. This prepared him for his new venture, Blueshift, which he co-founded in 2014.   Vijay is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s MBA Program. He also holds Bachelor’s and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.   Blueshift enables B2C marketers to automate segment-of-one marketing on every channel. They’re on a mission to put AI in the Hands of Every Marketer.   This triggered me, hence I invited Vijay to my podcast. We explore the transformation of digital marketing, and the scaled revenue opportunities that now provides to companies of all sizes. We also discuss how AI is enabling marketers to reclaim their creative and strategic role again, and create a flywheel of value that’s pretty hard to stop once in motion.   Here are some of his quotes: Every few years a technology matures to a point when non-technical people can start using it, and when that happens that unlocks a lot of enterprise value   What's happening is that you and I, as consumers, we are interacting with all these brands on digital and mobile and social. And when we do that, we are leaving behind 1000 times more data than we used to leave behind 10 years ago.   With all the data we're leaving behind marketers, and brands now for the first time have a way of understanding us as the dynamic individuals that we've always been. Doing that is exciting, but it's also challenging, because dealing with thousand times more data, dealing with 10 to 15 times more channels, that is very difficult for marketers.   Obviously, humans are not best equipped to operate at that scale. Humans are created for guiding how the engagement should be driven, how that engagement should be humanized. Where the machine can really come in is to help the human marketer become excellent at that scale of decision making and make each decision truly intelligent. That's what we do with the Blueshift platform.   During this interview, you will learn three things: How thinking differently about key customer challenges allows you to build solutions that have transformative impact because of their simplicity. That AI alone is not the solution – the synergy really kicks in when humans and AI systems are working well together and even impress the customers’ customers That to deliver remarkable solutions you have to stay true to your vision – no matter how enticing the short term opportunity is.     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 intelligently help the telco win the fight against fraud and revenue leakage. My guest is Rui Paiva, CEO of Wedo Technologies. Prior to co-founding WeDo Technologies in 2001, Rui Paiva was System Information Director and Deputy of Optimus Communications’ Executive Committee. Before that, Rui was the Consultancy Director at Hewlett Packard Portugal, following a career at Telecel, which then became Vodafone Portugal, heading up their Infrastructure, Operations and Help Desk Department. in 2010 Rui won the Best Leaders Award for Wedo Technologies, and In 2017 he received the Tech Personality of the Year Award by Exame Informática He is an experienced Board Member with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. A strong business development professional skilled in Business Process, Marketing Management, Negotiation, Business Planning, and Requirements Analysis. He holds a post-graduate degree in Management and Administration from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, as well as a BSc in Applied Mathematics The potential behind the problem Wedo is solving triggered me, hence I invited Rui to my podcast. We explore the growing challenges companies in the Telco industry face around revenue leakage and fraud and how their platform approach is enabling the business to stay in control. We also explore the magic behind Wedo’s ability to constantly stay relevant as a business software vendor in an industry that’s changing at the speed of light. Here are some of his quotes: On my last job was being the CIO of a telco company. One of the things that we faced at that time was, we have the main building blocks, which are typically the ERP, the billing system, the CRM. But all the additional tools that are in the middle of that normally they have to be developed from scratch in each of the implementations in each of the operators. That takes time. That means the cost of maintaining and support and evolve. All of that was a nightmare. We created a technology, Raid, to validate all the integration between different applications and guarantee that the customer at the end of the day they are not losing money, which means that without having more sales or being efficient, they can improve the bottom line directly. During this interview, you will learn three things: How to stay relevant with a platform approach – both in terms of its’ ability to meet constantly evolving industry requirements as well as being industry agnostic to scale out. Why a customer-cooperation-strategy is a very effective approach to win the hearts of 80% of the market, and never lose a customer ever. What are the 8 secrets for a software business to stay as relevant and as fresh as the moment you were founded – in Wedo’s case – 18 years ago. 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 AI that has the power to adjust at the pace of business. My guest is Zehra Cataltepe, Co-founder and CEO of Tazi.AI Zehra co-founded tazi.ai together with her husband Tanju, and their focus was to develop continuously learning machine learning solutions for the banking, insurance and telco industries. Besides her role as CEO she’s also a professor at Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Computer and Informatics.  Zehra received her Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology in Computer Science. She has more than 20 years of both industry and academia experience in Machine Learning, and in that period, she delivered 21 patents and over 80 publications on the theory of machine learning and its applications in finance, health, energy and transportation. Tazi was recently selected by Garner as May 2019 ‘Cool Vendor in AI Core Technologies’. Tazi’s products are changing the way AI is used in business – keeping business in the driver’s seat with an automated Machine Learning platform that continuously learns and adapts to new circumstances. This triggered me, hence I invited Zehra to my podcast. We explore the challenges with today’s AI and machine learning technologies in rapidly changing business circumstances. We then discuss what’s required to get AI right – both at the side of the vendor and readiness level and mindset at the customer side.  Here are some of her quotes: ‘What drives me personally, is a dream of making AI usable by everyone. Democratizing it so that it becomes a useful technology like automobiles or electricity. When you consider business processes, life always changes. So, you know, as an insurance company, for example, your products that you offer to your customers, your customers ability, or incentive to buy from you, your competitors’ behavior, the regulations, all of these change in time. So, you have to keep adopting whatever you were doing to new changing conditions. You cannot just have one machine learning model or one rule set, which just learned what to do, and keep doing that forever.  You need AI which can continuously learn, we can continuously adopt.’ During this interview, you will learn three things: Why it’s key to micro-segment your customers if you aim to deliver remarkable value How designing for scale helps both your own organization as well as your customers That taking a platform approach can turn customers into fans by allowing them to solve unusual problems 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 in Recruitment and my guest is Nachi Junankar, CEO of Avrio He’s got a passion for building long-lasting companies that build amazing technologies that change the world. He’s been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, and in that period founded five companies. It all started with Live Wire, where he successfully imagined and built an enterprise apps company before it was fashionable to do so.  His second company, Retail IQ brought him into the optimization space, and specifically real time price and offer optimization. It’s this knowledge of optimization and matching that’s part of the secret behind Avrio.  Built on the thesis "Let humans do what they are best at and machines do what they are good at,” Avrio built an AI platform that uses machine intelligence to bring people and companies together way before there’s real urgency. Avrio strongly believes the hiring process is broken. With increasingly limited resources and an increasingly competitive market for talent, recruiting is harder than ever. That’s what Avrio is set out to solve.  That inspired me, hence I invited Nachi to my podcast. We explore why the hiring process is broken and what challenges that brings to both employer and future employees. We then discuss the details behind the fresh approach Avrio is taking by turning a very reactive process into a pro-active process – and what benefits that provides to everyone involved.  Here are some of his quotes: The premise of Avrio is to significantly accelerate the hiring cycle. So, when there is a crunch in the kinds of numbers of jobs available, that people would be able to move around a little faster so that they're not that poorly affected by it. The thing is not that there's not going to be enough jobs. There’s not going to be enough jobs all the time The hiring cycle right now is six to nine months, which is just ridiculous. Our vision really is to be predictive about where somebody is going in their career and their career path and where companies are going; into new markets, into new industries and having new kinds of jobs available We would really like to be able to match people six months before they have to look for a job and, and start the conversation. During this interview, you will learn three things: That true value is created when you choose not to further improve a traditional process, but instead approach the problem from the other end of the spectrum and turn something that’s reactive into something pro-active. Why the value of AI and Humans is not an either or. Combining the two forces in areas such as recruitment creates beyond expected results How to create solutions that help your customers grow, and make them more money at the same time. 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 water transportation that has the solve some significant climate change issues. My guest is Jean Francois Barsoum, Canadian Leader, Smart Cities, Water and Transportation at IBM. Since joining IBM, Jean-François Barsoum has provided strategy advice to a diverse set of clients: financial institutions, higher education, professional associations, pharmaceutical companies and telecoms. He has also been invited to speak at conferences on the subjects of innovation, smarter transportation and climate change on four continents. For the past decade, Jean-François has participated in numerous conferences on water and environmental management, and led IBM's ties with some related research organisations and NGOs. He helped develop some core smarter cities concepts and has deepened IBM's involvement with several North American cities as a result. He is among the few Canadians trained by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Al Gore, and regularly presents the material seen in the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ -- and subsequent scientific updates -- to audiences across Canada. He is on the board of the Climate Reality Project and of the Canadian Water Network, and is a member of the David Suzuki Foundation's steering committee. He is also a member of the Intelligent Transportation Experts' Committee, a forum initiated by the Quebec Association of Transportation (AQTr). When I learned about Jean Francois’ ideas on how to utilize technology to solve some of our largest global challenges I instantly invited him to my podcast. We explore the size of the challenge and how, by using various technological layers together, we start to reimagine transportation the way we have come to know it. We also address the need for organizations at both public and private level to work closely together to maximize the potential of the impact. Here are some of his quotes: What started it all was really a concern around environmental issues The problem is so bad that in some urban areas, if you take a look at cities that were especially growing after the Second World War, so many of the North American cities, the space that is dedicated to cars is about two thirds of the surface area of the city. So we dedicate twice as much room to our cars as we do to ourselves. And that is clearly not a sustainable or even preferable thing to do financially. So there's clearly a need to improve that. And I think that that's where the interest of autonomous cars is.  Even assuming each individual car is not shared by multiple families at once, or multiple people at once, you could still reduce the number of cars by about a third just by sharing the existing cars that we have now.  And if the cars are autonomous, and could move from one place of the city to another, to correspond to demand, it's quite possible, you could reduce the number of cars required by 80%. During this interview, you will learn three things: That to create large scale change you have to think global, but implement local Why it’s in the benefit of everyone if we remove the silo thinking in our business – not only in transportation, but universally How the change we hope for can only happen if we succeed in changing behavior. Our easy options need to be replaced by even easier alternatives. That’s clear room for innovation.  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 boosts the return on investment of our advertising by turning every ad into an ethical one, and my guest is Amy Williams, Co-Founder and CEO of Good Loop. Amy is an active member of the Women in Tech and Tech For Good communities. She was recently named by Forbes as one of the 30 Under 30 most influential people in media & marketing and has recently been listed in The Drum Digerati as one of the 100 outstanding individuals excelling in the UK digital industry. Amy has worked in the advertising sector all her career. At the age of 15 she first stepped into an advertising agency. She cut her teeth at one of the world's largest advertising agencies where she worked on everything from global TV ads to scrappy social campaigns. During this time she realised that it’s really difficult for brands to get their message in front of their audience in a cost-effective and positive way.  The more she learned about the industry the more she started to see a disconnect between brands and the people they were trying to talk to. Too often the transaction between advertiser and viewer is at best impersonal and at worst unpleasant. As ad blocker downloads continue to rise and quality journalism continues to suffer the consequences, she sensed that it was time for a more positive solution. That's why she founded the ethical video advertising platform, Good-Loop. This inspired me, hence I invited Amy to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the advertising industry and why current approaches to get the maximum number of eyeballs for the minimum possible cost will only make things worse, not better.  We dive into the concept behind Good-Loop, and how it’s found an ingenious way to connect people, brands and publishers in more meaningful, and consequently more effective way that’s creating a winning case for everyone involved.  Here are some of his quotes: The big idea behind my business is that your time, your attention and your data, all of these things online, they are valuable to someone. They're valuable to advertisers. And so, we want to basically harness that value and use it to make the world a better place. The reason I called it Good Loop actually was, I was thinking about this idea of creating a virtuous cycle: Advertising is such a big business and it funds the free internet. But it's something that people inherently resent. There's a huge erosion of public trust around advertising online. It’s illustrated by how many people use ad-blockers. Hundreds of millions use ad blockers, and then it kind of leaves you the question: ‘How are we going to keep the internet free if we can't find a way for advertising to be perceived more positively?’ So, we're on a mission to make ethical advertising the new normal. And that means that whenever you see an ad online, it shouldn't be something you block, it should be something that you're pleased to see because it means that the world is being made a better place. During this interview, you will learn three things: Why, in order to create breakthrough innovation, it’s key to frame the problem in the correct way i.e. name the true villain in your story How, by making your solution outcome oriented, or in other words only make customers pay for success, you can create an offer that’s a no-brainer for every stakeholder to get involved in Why, by simply starting, you will be 10 times further ahead than most people who just talk about an idea, but hope for all stars to align. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices