The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the financial market place that has the power to transform the way we know it in two ways: 1)   Avoid disruptive shifts in financial market mood by predicting subtle changes in perception bias 2)   increase shareholder value and impact by offering a new framework of decision-making such that early insights into market dislocations and even market crashes can be timely converted into new and persistent high-impact alpha opportunity centres My guest here today is Efrem Hoffman.   Efrem Hoffman is the CEO, Founding Architect, and Thought-Leader of RunningAlpha., an independent Canadian Innovation Think-Tank, headquartered in Toronto. As stated on his website, he is employing patented and proprietary insights at the intersection of physics and finance to exploit market uncertainty for competitive advantage.   He is a thought-leader in Smart-Data Analysis Architecture and developer of Quantum-Behavioral Trading Machines; Efrem has 145 citations and multiple info-tech patents referenced in patents granted to Fortune 500 Companies & Research Think-Tanks.   His vision is rethinking the way we can collaborate with nature in order to better exploit uncertainty. With that in mind he’s developing solutions that help investors build intelligent portfolios and see investment opportunities before they arrive and get noticed; From there he helps them navigate around value traps to ensure they maximize the value of their portfolio. This inspired me, hence I invited Efrem to my podcast. We explore the challenges and risks of today’s financial market and how technology can help investors gain early access to opportunities previously only discoverable by the Wall Street influencers.   Here are some of Efrems’ quotes: “My passion has always been about understanding the physics that underlies very unusual events I did a thesis, which was basically on applying vision techniques in three dimensional radar in order to use AI in a more constructive way, where humans don't make assumptions about what's actually happening in the surroundings I patented technology and there was a couple people one from the University of Manitoba some of the professor's there that noticed that some of the applications of that AI approach that was used for atmosphere Tornado prediction could be applied to the financial markets and understanding you know extreme behavior and what causes it to take shape during manias and panics I'm most proud of actually being able to make predictions of it in very narrow windows and, and persistent windows for when market crashes are likely to take place, so that I could actually protect investors portfolios during those events”   During this interview, you will learn three things: 1)   Why the best decisions can only be made when bias and sentiment are taken out of the equation – this is a clear area for technology to play a significant role 2)   That the solutions we create gain in value exponentially when they not only predict a certain high risk event accurately, but also provide the ingredients to prevent it all together 3)   How to find new sources for innovation by searching for use cases that are driven by extreme uncertainty. Tackling uncertainty can turn into clear competitive advantage.   If you want to learn more about Running Alpha’s latest product “Capital Market Trends,” visit CapitalMarketTrends (use promo code: xIqpTTo2, to get a +55% discount on this monthly subscription service for up to 12 months; Coupon Expires March 22nd/2019; you can cancel at any time without getting charged for the following month). Disclaimer: This is strictly for educational and informational purposes – and only reflects the output of Running Alpha’s Market Intelligence.    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 strategy principles that, if applied, have the power to deliver transformative innovation with triple digit ROI. My guest is Richard Boyd, CEO at Tanjo.AI   Over the last twenty-six years Richard has led or helped create some of the most innovative game technology companies in the industry. He has served as a game technology consultant for a wide variety of industries including energy, healthcare, education and motion pictures. At Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin he created and led a group of innovative engineers and designers across all mission areas called Virtual World Labs. Richard joined Lockheed Martin in 2007 with the acquisition of 3Dsolve, a North Carolina-based computer game technology firm where he was founder and CEO.   Prior to that, Richard was CEO of 3dVillage.com, which was acquired in 2001. 3dVillage was a spin out of Virtus Corporation, where he served for a decade on the executive management team that created several pioneering computer gaming companies including Red Storm Entertainment, with author Tom Clancy; iRock Entertainment with Ozzy Osbourne; and Timeline Computer Entertainment, with author Michael Crichton.   Today he’s the CEO of Tanjo.AI, whose mantra is “improving businesses, industries, and people’s lives by bringing machine learning and automation to the world.” This triggered me, hence I invited Richard to my podcast. We discuss how a pragmatic approach to solve every day problems can result in transformative impact. We, too, often don’t realize the solution is right in front of our eyes, and the technology is already there to solve it.   Or, as William Gibson once quoted: “The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.”   Here are some of his quotes: “The sort of thing that drives me is bringing technologies to bear on problems to solve them in ways that humans alone cannot. it's looking at whatever activity you're engaged in, and trying to figure out, what should humans be doing with our effort and our attention? And what should we be turning over to machines? The answer to that question changes almost every year, almost every month now, Organizations who understand that, and figure that out, will prevail. And those who don't, not only won't be competitive anymore, but they'll appear to be handicapped very soon. If you can do something one time and have it not only pay 10x return on investment, but have that return be an annuity... something you're going to get every single year... the earlier you do that, the more effective and competitive you're going to be. That's why everyone should be waking up and looking at this carefully. You cannot afford not to look at machine learning”     By listening to this podcast you will learn three things:   The key to machine learning innovation is to not overthink or over reach. Don’t paralyze yourself with endless research with uncertain outcomes, but instead be pragmatic. Look for proven applications with low risk -the low hanging fruit problems unique to your industry, that have a certain outcome, can be applied immediately, and scale radically i.e. can bring a lot of positive impact to many people very quickly Every organization has big data today. But it is a big leap from big data to information (data that has been organized) and an even bigger leap from information to Intelligence (information that has been computed so humans can act upon it) Machine learning is uniquely designed to help your organization make these leaps. The next century is about simulation. So, those who become adept at harnessing data intelligence to predict the future and be prepared for it, those companies will prevail.     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 10x the impact financial auditors can make, and my guest is Robin Grosset, CTO at MindBridge Ai. Robin has a track record as an entrepreneur having worked in and founded successful software startups. This resulted in him joining IBM in 2008 through the acquisition of Cognos, where he was appointed IBM Distinguished Engineer. He has over 20 years commercial experience in the field of Business Analytics. He was formerly the technical lead and chief architect for Watson Analytics, a ground breaking cognitive analytics system. Robin holds many patents in the areas of analytics, data processing and security.  Today he leads the development of the next generation MindBridge Ai Auditor that helps professionals detect and prevent financial anomalies, including fraud. He’s created a vision around Human Centric AI, and shared that vision recently at TEDxOttawa. This triggered me, hence I invited Robin to my podcast. We explore the challenges in the financial auditing practice, and how, even after decades of automation, much of the practice is still very manual and sample based, leaving huge opportunities for fraud. Beyond that we discuss why a human/machine approach will always provide the optimal combination to create exponential impact.  Here are some of his quotes: T “The existing ways that people were analyzing or auditing financial transactions were inadequate. So typically they would use rules based systems to do this. With the rules based system, you're only going to catch something, you're going to find something that you anticipate So, you have to imagine the circumstance to find the rule and then it will work it will never find anything you don't anticipate. We think it's a significant problem in the world. There's a group called the ACFE, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and they estimate the amount of fraud, misconduct, irregularities that are caught each year. They say that that's about $200 billion a year. But they also estimate the amount we don't find. So, these are not detected by any method we have today. And that amount is about somewhere north of $3 trillion per year. So, if you put that number in perspective, that's a little under $500 for every person on the planet” During this interview, you will learn three things: Why human-centric AI is the key to take the impact and insight of virtually any solution to a different level How to overcome inertia for AI driven innovation, especially in an industry that’s sceptical by design That to truly disrupt an industry you need to avoid looking at the conventions and existing standards 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 competitive and market intelligence, and my guest is Jonah Lopin, Co-founder and CEO of Crayon, a market intelligence software company based in Boston.  Jonah started his career as a strategy & operations Consultant at Deloitte where he led projects for Fortune 500 clients in the Manufacturing, Consumer Business and Healthcare industries. After that he worked at eBay and UNICEF.  In 2007 he joined Hubspot as the 6th employee, and served as Vice President of Customer Operations as they grew from 0 to 50M$. In 2012 he co-founded M80 Labs Inc, and from there he co-founded Crayon to solve the problem virtually any business suffers from: a lack of competitive and market intelligence. This triggered me, hence I invited Jonah to my podcast. We explore the challenges many organizations face in making informed decisions based on market intelligence that’s often incomplete, dated or completely absent. We also review the flaws in the business software industry in providing solutions to the wrong problem. Here are some of his quotes: “The belief behind the business where we believe strongly is that businesses should be as good at understanding and acting on everything happening outside the four walls of the business as they are at understanding and acting on all of their internal data When it comes to these, like fundamental questions about your market, and your competitive set, and your brand, and your customers, and what's happening outside the four walls, the business, many companies just have never had a good way to get insights there. Marketing's not about arts and crafts anymore. And it's about data and science. And that was really true. But we never helped our customers apply that data driven execution to what was happening outside the four walls of the business. And so, you know, we would help our customers generate tons of sales leads, but we never helped our customers figure out how do you close those.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: That the opportunities to create new categories are for grabs, as long as you ask the right questions That too build a credible software business you need to move far beyond ‘the Shiny Object’ syndrome and solve the ‘complete problem’.  How persistence to stay laser focused, stay in the fight, and making progress each and every day will be paid with remarkable results 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 product innovation that has the power to transform the advertising industry and the way marketers can make a remarkable impact, and my guest is Peyman Nilforoush. Peyman is the CEO and CoFounder of inPowered, which is the AI-driven content amplification platform of choice for the world’s largest brands. inPowered has been named the 2018 OMMA awards finalist for Artificial Intelligence and Native Advertising, the best content amplification platform by Digiday and one of the top tech marketing companies to watch by VentureBeat. Peyman along with his brother Pirouz previously founded NetShelter in 1999, which became the world’s largest technology property on the web before being acquired by Ziff Davis in 2013.The company’s fast growth earned numerous distinctions in the Inc 500|1000, Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Profit 100 and the San Francisco Business Times Fast 100. He’s a visionary tech and media entrepreneur who has been a featured TV guest on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo, BNN and quoted regularly in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and was named to the 2010 Who’s Who in Business Publishing by BtoBOnline’s Media Business Magazine. He was also a recipient of Profit 100’s Young Entrepreneur Award for being the youngest CEO on the Profit 100 list of fastest growing companies in 2009. The claim on the InPowered website states this: “We help brands discover and amplify credible, trusted content so that they can contribute to a more informed marketplace.” This triggered me, hence I invited Peyman to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the advertising industry, and how this is resulting in single-sided benefits for only the advertising platforms. We then dive into an approach that’s not only transforms the way we’ll advertise in the future, but also the way we have to step-up our marketing game in general. Here are some of his quotes: What we saw in the journey leading up to imPowered was essentially interruptive advertising not working. You're looking at point 0.05 percent, not 0.5 percent, not 5%. 0.05 percent click through rate on a banner ad on average. And that's after using tons of technology and targeting and everything that you can imagine. This is not about technology. This is not about targeting, it's not about audience or any of that. It's really about the form, which is when you're interrupting somebody, they simply don’t want to engage. They simply tune out. There's got to be a way to do this in a much more consumer friendly way. In a way that it actually adds value to the consumer. So, what if, instead of putting banner out and interrupt their experience, we actually turned articles reviews, blog posts, any kind of contents, into an ad, and we got them to read that content? I did it as an experiment and ended up delivering a 65% increase in consideration. it just blew every single advertising they had ever done. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: Why, If you want to deliver real impact you’d better do away with the conventional wisdom, and approach the problem from the opposite direction That to truly disrupt a market you not only need to have excellent product, but also a revolutionary business model. Shifting from consumption to outcome based charging for example How it’s not only possible to deliver remarkable impact with a solution, but also create many new jobs. 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 impact of product innovation on our society and in particular our changing role in that society, and my guest is Brett Frischmann, author of the book Reengineering Humanity, which was recently selected by The Guardian as one of the Best Books of 2018. Brett is the Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics, at Villanova University. In this role, he promotes cross-campus research, programming, and collaboration; fosters high-visibility academic pursuits at the national and international levels; and positions Villanova as a thought leader and innovator at the intersection of law, business and economics. Brett’s work has appeared in leading scholarly publications, including Columbia Law Review, Journal of Institutional Economics, and Review of Law and Economics. His research spans various disciplines and topics: infrastructure, knowledge commons, and techno-social engineering of humans (i.e. the relationships between the techno-social world and humanity).  This is what the scope of his latest book Reengineering Humanity is all about. And that triggered me, hence I invited Brett to my podcast. We explore the evolving impact of product innovation and technology and the influence this has on us in our day to day professional life. We discuss examples of how we engineer ourselves, and how we are engineered by others. In particularly the latter can become a risk to all of us. Therefore we should ensure that the focus shifts to making humans better and more valuable, rather than using smart technology to actually make the user dumber. Here are some of his quotes: “Humans have always developed tools and technologies. They often augment who we are, enable us to grow, develop, pursue our passions, and develop capabilities.  The big idea is that we're on a slippery slope path toward a world in which more and more of our lives, of who we are and who we can be as individuals and collectively is managed and governed by supposedly smart techno‑social systems. The idea that one of the most important constitutional questions in a lower case C sense for us to be considering in the 21st century is how are we going to sustain our freedom to be off? To be free from the engineered influence of others. We're building the world for our children, for future generations. Sometimes, we don't stop to think about whether we're happy about the world we're building and why we're building it a certain way as opposed to another way.”   By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: That we need to be very considerate about the type of solutions we’re building and why we’re building them in a certain way. Humanity’s techno-social dilemma is already large enough. Why the real value of the technology potential is in Human Augmentation – i.e. becoming better – but only if that’s in the light of who we want to be, how we can remain to have choices and be different. That we should challenge ourselves whenever we use the word ‘smart’ in relation to our product innovation and solutions – How is it smarter? What benefits does it give, and to whom? Too often it’s the user that’s made dumber…. 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 dramatically increase the productivity of sales people, and my guest is Mike Schneider, CEO and co-founder of First, a data science company that helps real estate agents win more business by focusing their time on the right relationships across their network. Prior to starting First, Mike worked with a private equity firm working on pipeline deals and doing financial and market due diligence. It’s from working in this space that got Mike fascinated with the world of AI and Machine learning – which is exactly why he left the VC world, to start First. Their claim “Fundamentally changing how service providers find their next customer”, triggered me, hence I invited Mike to my podcast. We explore what’s required to differentiate in the world of Real Estate, and the reasons why top agents are missing two third of the deals from people they already know. From here we discuss what’s required to transform the impact agents can make and how the combo of intelligence augmentation and human connection make an unbeatable combination. Here are some of his quotes: “I became fascinated by this combination of vertically targeted software and machine learning platforms that could, you know, power previously unimaginable products. The big idea here is that in this industry, an industry where most business over 75% of business comes through relational connection, we actually have the opportunity to target people's outreach and their time. So when you're in a service business where you are, what I would call an undifferentiated service provider, your connections matter and your time is the most limited thing in terms of generating business. And so, the big idea is that we actually know who is most likely to sell. Thanks to a lot of the models we've built. We also know that you, as a service provider, as a real estate agent, have an incredibly valuable asset in your network. And we know how likely those people are to work with you based on their relationship with you. And so the combination of those two things means we can make your time 10 times more productive in terms of who you should be talking to today.” During this interview, you will learn three things: That in order to formulate your V1 version it’s critical to do deep customer discovery, thereby looking beyond the known conventions and patterns. It’s not so much about what’s predictable, but more about what’s unpredictable Why providing all the answers to the problem with your product is often only half the solution; changing behavior is the other half – that’s where the real impact is made That creating a compelling vision is key to stay focused, stay on track and deliver impact – so much that it could lead to products so valuable that your customers don’t want to talk to anyone about it because it has become the secret to their success. 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 solve the challenge of financial crime, and my guest is Vishal Marria, CEO of Quantexa Vishal is a globally recognised leader in solving financial crime and surveillance challenges. He is accomplished at building teams and helping clients to use innovative data analytics for their financial crime challenges. He served as Executive Director at EY, he led major programs at international banks including global Anti Financial Crime technology strategy, data-driven remediation and end to end reviews of strategy and policy. He was instrumental in directing and building the Detica NetReveal business globally. In 2016, he founded Quantexa to solve some of the biggest challenges in financial crime, customer insight and data analytics. His goal is to enable organizations to rethink the way they understand their customers using a wider context. This inspired me, hence I invited Vishal to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge of financial crime, and how addressing and solving exactly that challenge can result in insights that can actually result in top-line gains. Here are some of his quotes: “One of the most growing challenges I continually heard from clients was, you know, we've, we've got all of this data rubbish, Inherently there are challenges within that data around truly understanding a customer and the underlying trends, transactions, relationships. I want the world to think of context, just like human behavior, any decision we make in our brain we are building with context So, the big idea is about building context and being able to do it real time dynamically. We have to combine human intelligence with artificial intelligence. Because if you look at your credit risk officer, that credit risk officer has so much information and trends in his or her head that the machine will never know. So, we need to get to is allowing the data to drive any abnormal predictive nature. But combining that with the years of experience that the human has.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: Why contextual insight is the essential ingredient to make powerful decisions – not only by top leaders, but by anyone in the business How the biggest impact is created by combining the experience of domain experts with power of AI Why taking an open eco-system approach with any solution will bring value greater than the sum of its components. 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 future of work and the increasingly important role AI plays in our business life. My guest is Alexandra Levit, Author of the book Humanity Works – Merging technology and people for the workforce of the future. Alexandra is an American writer, consultant, speaker, workplace expert and futurist. She has written six career advice books and was formerly a nationally syndicated career columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In the last several years, she has conducted proprietary research on the future of work, technology adoption, the millennial generation, gender differences and bias, and the skills gap. In 2017, she became a partner at organizational development firm PeopleResults. Her goal is to prepare organizations and their employees to be competitive and marketable in the future business world. This triggered me, hence I invited Alexandra to my podcast. We explore how the workplace is changing with the future of work, and how this is reshaping our role as business professionals, and what we, people, need to do now in order to create a future in which we can play an even more valuable role. Here are some of his quotes: We're looking at there is the rise of what I call human machine of hybrid teams. I do think everyone needs to be prepared, though, that humans will need to work seamlessly with machines. The critical role that we're going to play is that there's no replacing human beings when it comes to certain traits, like interpersonal sensitivity, and empathy and judgment, and intuition and creativity So what humans need to be doing is looking for ways to add that value in any job that you have, and see the writing on the wall, not bury your head in the sand with respect to what aspects are legitimately going to be automated and look to add value in different ways. My fear is not that people lose their jobs, as I said, my fears that people will not be able to adapt to the new types of roles that they're, they're going to have. How can I continue to add value. And this is a skill set, that's kind of rare, and everybody needs to develop. I think the passive attitude is really destructive. We want to be active and recognize the future is not something that happens to us. It's something that we create. During this interview, you will learn three things: That most value will be created once humans and machines start working as hybrid teams Why every single one of us has to act now to improve our human relationship skills And why beyond that we have to master the way we do personal branding and self-marketing. 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 transform the education sector and my guest is Federico Frattini. Federico is a Full Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Honorary Researcher at the Lancaster University Management School (UK). His research area is innovation and technology management. On these topics, he has written more than 200 books and papers published in conference proceedings and leading international journals such as Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Academy of Management Perspectives, California Management Review, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and many others. In 2013, he was nominated among the top 50 authors of innovation and technology management worldwide by IAMOT, the International Association for Management of Technology. In my hunt for compelling stories for my podcast I stumbled upon an article regarding the launch of Flexa, an AI powered personalized continuous learning platform that was developed under the leadership of Federico. This triggered me, hence invited him to my podcast. During our interview we explore the changes in the market place, and how this is putting more and more pressure on the education system and the students they serve. The goal should not be just to successfully graduate, but to actually be employable after you graduate. This changes the requirement 180 degrees on how students, employers and university’s communicate and collaborate together. Here are some of his quotes: “FLEXA is many things, actually. We can call it a personalized continuous learning platform which is designed for our students. The basic idea is to give our students exactly the knowledge they need to achieve their career goals faster and to make them more employable. It's something that represents a big change in the traditional business model of a business school or of a university. We're not doing that by using only our knowledge, our courses, our programs, but integrating into FLEXA contents, expertise, events coming from any angle in the world. Through FLEXA, we will bring to our student exactly the piece of knowledge they need, when they need it to achieve their career goals fastest. FLEXA exemplifies our view as a school about what is the real value of artificial intelligence, which is not, of course, substituting human knowledge but is amplifying the abilities of people.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: Why it’s so key to take an outside-in approach to arrive at solutions that have transformative impact. That the only way to keep up with the pace of change is radically shorten connections and eliminate noise How it’s possible to drive radical innovation in sectors that are known for their bureaucracy and barriers to making progress. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices