The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

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 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 has on support organizations, I instantly invited Rob to 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 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 about addressing the right mindset.How to make solid progress by following a ‘test and invest’ approach.

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 it 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 valueWhat'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 a 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 a 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’ customersThat to deliver remarkable solutions you have to stay true to your vision – no matter how enticing the short-term opportunity is.

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 MathematicsThe 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:One of my last jobs 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, is 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.

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.AIZehra 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 adapting 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, which can continuously adapt.’During this interview, you will learn three things:Why it’s key to micro-segment your customers if you aim to deliver remarkable valueHow designing for scale helps both your own organization as well as your customersThat taking a platform approach can turn customers into fans by allowing them to solve unusual problems

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in Recruitment and my guest is Nachi Junankar, CEO of AvrioHe’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 proactive 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 timeThe 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 availableWe 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 proactive.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.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around water transportation that has the power to 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-François’ 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 levels 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 issuesThe 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.

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 a more meaningful and, consequently, more effective way that’s creating a winning case for everyone involved.Here are some of her 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.

This podcast interview focuses on the responsibility for all of us to ensure the AIs we invest in are ethical and deliver explainable, transparent output. My guest is Vikram Modgil, founder of TheGoodAI.orgThroughout his career, Vikram has helped his clients succeed in achieving their goals by truly leveraging the power of data that they already own using Machine Learning. To do so, he’s built an ecosystem company - Pi Square – that consists of employees, associates & partners located in the US, Europe & India.Prior to founding Pi Square, Vikram was part of multiple successful startups and wore many hats, including business portfolio management, consulting and delivery of AI services.Recently, he founded “TheGoodAI.org” in Seattle, which brings together groups of professionals & leaders from business, non-profit, education, legal, and technology backgrounds with the mission to empower every human to contribute by spreading awareness, facilitating engagement and inspiring actions towards ethical aspects of AI.And this triggered me, hence I invited Vikram to my podcast. We explore the reasons why ethical AI is so important to sustain a world we like to live and work in. We also discuss the various aspects of ethical AI and what we can do as individuals, groups or organizations to ensure we get what we want and hope for.Here are some of his quotes:“There are some unnecessary, or unconscious biases that come into our businesses. They creep in. And if you're not conscious, if you're not alert, they can impact lives.That is something that should not happen.So, with that thought, knowledge and understanding, I wanted to contribute back and I started looking for forums where I could get involved. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything, which was exactly what I wanted this to become.Normally, everybody is hesitant on starting something like this on their own, because it takes a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of people.I wanted to challenge that thinking and start something which is focused on helping one person at a time. And even if two people showed up, that would be a success.The three big things that we want to empower people to do are: create awareness, engagement and actions around the ethics and biases of AI and trustworthiness of AI.Being in Seattle is a is a very huge advantage for us. If we could influence Seattle, we can influence the whole world”During this interview, you will learn three things:That in order to encourage innovative ideas from within your organization on areas where AI could deliver impact, simply stick to 4 basic rules: It has to deliver a shift in value, be feasible, scalable, and responsible.Why the quality of your ideas for innovation will increase significantly once you ensure diversity in the room to look at the problem through different lensesThat it’s every software vendor's responsibility to raise some very tough questions whether their AI technology is ethical, explainable and transparent – It all starts by doing the right thing – and that can be very profitable.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation focused on democratizing access to AI across industries that haven’t got the connections and salary budgets of the Tech Giants. My guest is Naomi Goldapple, Head of Product for transportation and logistics at Element AI.Naomi’s career combines technology and business consultancy and entrepreneurship. Her specialties are Business & growth strategies, product commercialization and marketing plans. She has an International MBA, specializing in developing markets in Latin America, from the Schulich School of Business, as well as a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University.She was the Director of e-business for Royal LePage Commercial, one of Canada’s largest commercial real estate companies.She started up and ran Maman, bébé et café inc., which won various awards, and worked at ModelCom, using her expertise to help technology entrepreneurs with strategy and financing.She was the VP Business Development at Nexalogy, responsible for commercializing the suite of products, forging channel partnerships and growing the sales. Nexalogy developed a next-generation software for mining, cleaning and analyzing unstructured data with powerful data sculpting capabilities.And this experience has led to her current venture as Program Director with Element AI, an innovative model that works with and creates companies that are leveraging artificial intelligence. The goal is to spin out hundreds of AI-first companies in Canada over the next 5 years.This triggered me, hence I invited Naomi to my podcast. We explore how the momentum around AI is picking up fast, but how various industries experience significant challenges to get access to AI talent, and in line with that, solutions. We discuss how Element AI is solving this issue, and how this helps chronically understaffed industries and attack large global problems such as safety and climate change.Here are some of her quotes:“The big idea behind the company, if I had to sum it up in one word, is really to democratize the access to AI.One of the issues that is happening right now is that many people are getting excited about AI; however, there really isn't enough talent out there.They're usually courted away very quickly by the tech giants.The manufacturing industry, insurance, other industries that are not one of the tech giants, they really don't have access to this talent.So, our role was really to concentrate in some of those verticals, build products specifically for them and kind of allow them to leverage these technologies to really improve their businesses.”During this interview, you will learn three things:That significant value can be delivered to the quality of human work by using AI to eliminate Dull, Dangerous and Dirty workWhy it is key to first learn about the impact AI can deliver, rather than to regulate it upfrontHow the sum of the parts will be far greater when every organization takes an active approach to share its data with its peers

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to democratize software development, and my guest is Sachin Duggal, CEO of Engineer.ai.Sachin Dev Duggal is an innovator, serial entrepreneur, and an advocate of enterprise software that touches lives and benefits the world at large.His profile is an unusual mix of experiences & serendipity. Sachin started his public foray very early in life. At the age of 12, he went on stage in front of 1200 people and the world media to demand something be done about the state of the environment. He worked for the United Nations and helped write the declaration of youth rights before he completed his first degree from Imperial College. At the age of 15, he co-founded nivio with a view to disrupt the old compute model. Four years later, nivio was selected as a technology pioneer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where at the same time he made history in being the youngest attendees.Sachin’s an avid and recent believer of Vipassana and that life is a zero-sum game – so it's essential to spend our time giving; this is one of the main reasons he and his partner put aside stock in all major businesses to their foundation that’s on their 100x50 mission, i.e., educate 100m kids in 50 years.He’s been awarded MIT TR 35 Indian Innovator of the Year, the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Leader of Tomorrow, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist, the BBC Young Asian achiever of the Year and UNEP Global 500 Youth Award.His aim is to build technology that simplifies the lives of everyday users and increases the penetration of information technology to those who do not have it today. And that’s what Engineer.ai is all about. Engineer.ai is on a mission to democratize software development. Their promise ‘Together we bring your idea to life. Twice as fast. 1/3 the cost. Enterprise-grade.’That intrigued me, and hence I invited Sachin to my podcast. We explore the state of the market in which technology is often not delivering on its promise. Beyond that, we address why the traditional approach to starting and delivering software projects is broken, and how a new, fresh approach could transform things for the better, not only for large enterprises but also the small business owner.Here are some of his quotes:“One of the things that I'm driven by every day is the ability for technology to transform people's lives.We're in a world today where a lot of folks feel somewhat disenfranchised by the technology promise, something that was meant to help them grow, help them make more money, help them have more time at home. And instead, it's done, in many cases, the opposite.We think that there's a really strong opportunity to transform how software is built.There's often a tradeoff that we see in our customers between the fear of being irrelevant, then they come up with an idea, and then it's basically the fear of failure.Until they cross the line of fear, they're not really building or moving ahead.And really, that's the problem we're solving.”During this interview, you will learn three things:How traditionally unserved markets can be unlocked by eliminating conventions and traditional barriers, and beyond that, think exponentialThat segmenting the market by need, rather than size or segment, opens up new ways to create differentiationThat to create momentum you have to exceed expectations, not meet expectations. So instead of delivering on-time on-budget, start delivering ahead of time, and ahead of budget.