The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

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.

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 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 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.

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 lives. We discuss examples of how we engineer ourselves, and how we are engineered by others. In particular, 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…

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to dramatically increase the productivity of salespeople, 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 Mike became 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-thirds 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 connections, 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 staying focused, staying on track, and delivering 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.

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, and 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 contextSo, 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 the power of AI.Why taking an open eco-system approach with any solution will bring value greater than the sum of its components.

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, as 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 the 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, empathy and judgment, and intuition and creativitySo 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 fear is 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 teamsWhy every single one of us has to act now to improve our human relationship skillsAnd why beyond that we have to master the way we do personal branding and self-marketing.

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 I invited him to my podcast. During our interview, we explore the changes in the marketplace, 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 universities 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.

The theme of this podcast is product innovation, and in particular, how the combination of AI and people can create value beyond the sum of its components. My guest on this week’s podcast is Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous.AILouis is a technologist, prolific inventor, entrepreneur, and writer. He attended Stanford University, where he earned his bachelors, masters, and PhD degrees. His doctoral work focused on robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, and human-computer interaction, and resulted in the Virtual fixtures system for the U.S. Air Force, the first immersive Augmented Reality system ever built.In 2014, he founded Unanimous A.I., an artificial intelligence company that enables human groups to amplify their collective brainpower by forming real-time "hive minds" modeled after natural swarms. Unanimous AI became well known in 2016 when its Artificial Swarm Intelligence technology (Swarm AI) made a series of accurate predictions about world events, including predicting the Academy Awards, the Kentucky Derby, the Super Bowl, and the rise of Donald Trump.This triggered me, hence I invited Louis to my podcast. We explore product innovation concept of swarm intelligence, and how this fills an important gap in the evolution of AI.Here are some of his quotes:“We amplify the intelligence of human groups by connecting people together in real time, using AI algorithms to enable them to make more accurate forecasts, more precise predictions, better assessments, judgments and decisions.We use AI to turn network groups of people into artificial experts that can act as a superintelligence.There's actually a scientific name for that, called Swarm Intelligence.In nature, Swarm Intelligence is the reason why birds flock, fish school, and bees swarm.The inspiration for me was to say, "Well, if birds, and bees, and fish can get smarter together, why can't people do it?"The results that we started getting even early on were remarkable, that we could take a group of people and make them so much more accurate by connecting them together.”By listening to this podcast, you will learn three things:How big business problems can be solved instantly by leveraging the knowledge and wisdom of groups of people in combination with AI.Why we’ve underutilized the power of collaboration up to now, and how swarm intelligence takes it to the next level.That we’re just scratching the surface with regards to how we can amplify human abilities – a mega opportunity for everyone.

In this podcast, I’ll focus on product innovation in the Higher Education space, and my guest is Ray Blackwood, Vice President of Product Management at Campus Management CorpRay is a futurist who is passionate about technology, business intelligence and leadership. He’s particularly passionate about solving problems in higher education through technology. As he puts it on his LinkedIn profile: “I invent solutions that run colleges”.Ray received his undergraduate degrees from the University of Advancing Technology in Multimedia and Digital Animation and Production and his Master In Business Administration and Technology Management from the University of Phoenix.In my hunt for compelling stories about the value we can unlock when technology and people blend in the right way, I stumbled upon Campus Management’s new product: Occupation Insight. It’s promise: “How institutions can better align academic programs and student skills with industry needs”. This triggered me, hence I invited Ray to my podcast.We explore the big changes in the education space, where the focus is now shifting from graduation to employability as the ultimate outcome. We discuss product innovation approaches on how technology can play a meaningful role to help students stay on the optimal path to achieve their aspirations in a world where teachers are a scarce resource.Here are some of his quotes:“It's hard for students to choose the right thing, or we have so much advisement to coach the student that it can be overwhelming.I wanted to know what I was going to learn in a class more than what classes I needed to take.How cool would it be if I was a student, and I was sitting there and I just wasn't being told what to take because I needed a certain number of credits, but I could actually see what skills I'm going to learn and what careers could I be interested in while I'm in school and be thinking about that."Technology is changing so rapidly. What you're going to learn in the classroom your freshman year might even be irrelevant by the time you graduate. The skill that technologists need to learn is not the technology itself, but it's how to learn. It's how to solve problems and how to think.”By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:Why the challenge is not to solve the problem at hand, but to prevent it altogether.How you can create larger impact and circumvent scarcity by changing behavior – and one thing to do that is to inspire curiosity.What mindset you should create as a business software vendor to transform and accelerate your success.

The focus on this week’s podcast is product innovation in the area of recruitment, and my guest is Ashutosh Garg, CEO of Eightfold.ai – a company that has the idea and potential to transform the way we’ll look at recruitment forever.Eightfold has recently been designated by Gartner as a cool vendor for human capital management in Talent Acquisition. This is what happens if you build your company around a strong vision – remarkable things will happen. Ashutosh understands this like no one else.He is a true guru of all things AI, with 10 years of information retrieval, machine learning and search experience.Previously, he was Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of BloomReach. Prior to that, he was at IBM Research. He is also a prolific publisher/inventor, with a book on machine learning, 30+ papers, and 50+ patents.Ashutosh holds a Bachelor of Tech from IIT-Delhi and a PhD from University of Illinois UC.He has won numerous awards, including best thesis award at IIT Delhi, IBM Fellowship, and outstanding researcher award at UIUC.What triggered me to invite Ashutosh was the phrase on their website: “Uncovering the Future Potential of Talent”.The company was founded around the belief that employment is the backbone of our society and everyone deserves the right job. What Ashutosh and his team realized is that up to today, you get the job based on who you might know and not what you are capable of doing. Eightfold is solving this problem and thereby changing the paradigm by intelligently augmenting the recruiter as well as the applicant.Here are some of his quotes:“When people are looking for a job, they are not switching the job to do the same thing they have been doing. They want to do something more, something different, they want to grow in their career.And through AI, what we can do today is we can predict what someone is likely to do next in their career.This helps us understand who will be a good fit for this role in which organization. And then we connect people to those opportunities.So, we've changed the paradigm: Instead of people applying for a job we go and recommend them: John and Lisa, these are the three jobs in our company that our most relevant to you.If you're only looking to hire people, based on what they have done, not what they are capable of doing? Losing value proposition.Everyone deserves the opportunity and we want to enable that in people.”By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:That a lot of value potential in any solution is locked up because we neglect to connect the dots between various data points.How you can change the paradigm with your solution by doing the opposite of the norm.Why business could run a lot better if we take the bias out of decision-making.