The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

My guest on the podcast this week is Lisa Xiong, Senior Research Associate at the Center for Policy & Competitiveness at Ecole Des Ponts Business School in Paris. Her research domain is Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Competitiveness, and at this moment she’s working on a comparative study between European companies and culture with Chinese Companies and culture.This triggered me, and hence I invited Lisa to my podcast. We’re exploring the differences between China and the ‘western world’ with regards to the approach towards the topics mentioned. We discuss what China is doing differently to speed up innovation, how they successfully encourage people to start their own business rather than take a ‘wait and see’ approach when they are automated out of a process, and how this could turn out into a very beneficial cultural difference to prevent us from getting a ‘Universal Basic Income’.Here are some quotes from Lisa:What we see now is that China definitely has taken a different approach than traditional American approach or a little bit conservative European approachIf we play the game according to someone else's rules, one way or another, it's difficult to catch up.I would like to focus on three keywords when I'm explaining this. One is innovation, the second one is entrepreneurship, and the third one which would be the leading result of competitiveness as a nation.What I see in China is that in 2015, we created called mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation initiative or campaign by our premier, Mr. Li KeqiangThe whole culture of being innovative and entrepreneurial is out there.… because we're latecomers, therefore we can take shortcuts. We don't have to go through those obstacles and difficulties.By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:How you can protect innovation in downturns by creating ‘an invisible protection shelter’Why investing in incubator programs fuelled with students are great ways to accelerate innovationThat motivating and recognizing people are critical and very effective tools to scale success

The guest on my disruptive innovation podcast is Patrik Berglund, co-founder and CEO of Oslo-based Xeneta, a company that’s created a price comparison platform for containerized freight in order to transform the way the shipping and logistics industry are buying and selling. Patrick is a logistics and tech-enthusiast and possesses a true passion for modernizing business processes related to logistics procurement and the supply chain. His experience came from working several years at Kuehne + Nagel and from his work as Co-Founder of Nordilog, a logistics consultancy firm.Xeneta was founded in 2012 and has grown in the meantime to be the top worldwide source to compare shipping rates against the market average, market highs and lows. The way Xeneta has achieved this is through the concepts of crowd-sourcing, thereby turning negotiation powers from sellers to buyers, hence transforming the way the industry operates.This inspired me, hence I invited Patrik to my podcast. We explore what it requires to completely turn the dynamics of a market –turning the power from the supply side to the buy side – and beyond that, giving both sides exponential value back in return. In the light of this, we discuss the role of creating momentum, the essence of data, and the impact technology can make.Here are some of Patric’s quotes:To make a very long, complex story short, both of us found it very tricky too, peculiar and inefficient that so many container boxes delivering 70 percent of global trade were traded, bought, and sold with almost no visibility, almost no transparencyAs it became technologically possible to make it transparent, the incentives for doing so haven't been there.It's two problems. There's a lack of transparency in the market that's highly volatile. Secondly, the way they're buying and selling is absolutely crazy inefficient.In order to solve anything about the second problem, we have to provide visibility and transparency.What we're doing is that we're delivering data and insights that allows them to reflect and think differently.The biggest thing is that a lot of our customers will see now over the next couple of years, is that transition of being an online information platform, to also allowing them to change the way they buy and sell.By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:How solving massive market problems can be achieved by looking in the other directionWhy, even with the most advanced technologies available, a lack of something as simple as relevant data can break all your ambitionsThat overcoming inertia can be the biggest hurdle to introduce the most brilliant products into the market

My guest on the podcast is Ying Chen, Head of Product Marketing at Pegasystems. She’s acting as the Head of Product Marketing for Pegasystems platform for Digital Transformation. In this role, she’s leading product marketing strategy, positioning, and go-to-market. She joined Pegasystems in 2015 with more than 10 years of software product management experience in various Fortune 500 organizations and VC-backed startups.What triggered me to invite Ying to my podcast was the story around the Pegasystem Platform – and in particular, how it helps the world’s leading brands achieve breakthrough business results by using the latest technologies to augment people.During our interview, we explore how value potential increases once you start looking beyond just automation. How, by improving employee experience, every company can and will improve customer experience, and why much of the value can be achieved by understanding and then removing intended and unintended obstacles.The thing that triggered me most from my interview with Ying:“Organizations need to think from the place of what is the experience, the journey that you want to improve?Why did this trigger me? What's the bigger value here?Think about customer experience in the context of a call center. It’s about getting the right and relevant answers, empathy, and on-the-spot creativity to solve their case. All too often, organizations use technology to automate. But if your target is to increase customers experience, automation will only get you halfway.Pega Systems takes the concept of Workforce Intelligence – using artificial intelligence to look at the physical employee experience to support every aspect of the customer journey. Their approach is to measure and understand the intended or unintended obstacles that employees face in their day-to-day work environment, and with that knowledge guiding them with ‘next best action’ advise. This increases quality, but more importantly, it drives a strong employee experience which in turn leads to greater customer satisfaction and helps companies achieve business outcomes with precision.What’s the more significant question/opportunity that raises?Following the essence of the concepts discussed above, it's striking to realize how much time, effort and investment is still focused across the board on “automation” with the aim to do “more with less”.As Ying quoted rightly, “It’s not about how can I reduce the number of agents" – It’s about “how do I not make my customers wait”. That’s a subtle difference, but an important one. What we should strive for in developing any business software solution is “How does it contribute to growing the differentiating value your customers deliver to their customers?”Searching for the ideal ‘Human / Machine’ combinations will result in 1+1=3 outcomes. With that, everybody wins.By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:How you can dramatically improve the value of your solution by not just focusing on the current action, but actually on the next best action.That applying AI and robots can be extremely beneficial for uncovering patterns in user behavior.Why it’s more beneficial to focus your effort at business model innovation, rather than process optimization in isolation.

My guest on the podcast is Anastasia Georgievskaya, General Manager at Youth Laboratories. She’s the co-founder and General Manager at Youth Laboratories, a company developing tools to study aging and discover effective anti-aging interventions using advances in machine vision and artificial intelligence. Anastasia has a degree in bioengineering and bioinformatics from the Moscow State University. She won numerous math and bioinformatics competitions and successfully volunteered for some of the most prestigious companies in aging research, including Insilico Medicine, which I interviewed earlier on this podcast about its product innovations.She helped develop an app for tracking age-related facial changes and was one of the driving forces to organize the first beauty competition judged by the robot jury, Beauty.AI. This inspired me – not because of the topic – but because of the transformational effects technologies such as AI are starting to have on our day-to-day life. What triggers me is what we could learn from examples like this to inspire other forms of value creation. Hence, I invited Anastacia to my podcast. We explore the value of her company’s product innovation beyond the point of beauty. What lessons have been learned, what are the essentials to get right, and what is the potential for society at large?Here are some of Anastasia’s quotes.The company's story started with the Beauty.AI contest, and then...It's a beauty competition judged by Artificial Intelligence, the first one in the world.We believe that tracking your skin health and the biomarkers that can be seen on your face is very relevant because images are a very cheap source of data and it's very affordable. If you want to track the skin condition and track the dynamics, you need to make sure you can track its in‑dynamicsAlgorithms can adjust to your baseline, and then you would be able to track the effects of different changes on your skin. For example, your nutrition, your lifestyle, amount of sleep, weather, sports, only you can understand what's the most beneficial lifestyle for you.It's very well‑aligned to the trend of personalization During this interview, you will learn three things:That AI will change our approach to many questions – and as such spark new ideas for creating value we currently don’t have an idea aboutWhy collaboration is key to not only accelerate the innovation process but more importantly, give you insights to increase the value you offer with your solutionHow involving skeptics increase the relevancy and simplicity of your solution

My guest on the podcast is Tom Pennings, Founder and CEO of Onsophic. He’s what he calls a highly technical entrepreneur, technology enthusiast, and business networker. He’s worked for Borland, EVS, Google and Apple. Inspired by bringing data to the learning process, he and his co-founder Ian Hart assembled a team on two continents to connect digital transformation and assisted intelligence. This was the start of Onsophic.Unlike many Learning Management systems on the market, Onsophic is about intelligently guiding every single employee in a company to optimize learning effectiveness and achieve their business objectives, rather than just delivering the training material and process. In doing so, it not only increases the performance of global enterprises but also accelerates their human potential.This inspired me, hence I invited Tom to my podcast. During our interview, we’ll explore how the education process is broken and how that creates a gap between HR and the business objectives any organization has. We also address what questions business leaders should really ask, and what mindset they should embrace to succeed with Digital Transformation, customer centricity, risk and compliance, and learning 4.0. Here are some of Tom’s quotes:We bridge the gap between HR and the business objectives by correlating training with on‑the‑job performance. There are 536 different LMS solutions out there. What that really is, I would say ‑‑ and this not meant negative ‑‑ it is a content delivery… facilitating the delivery processThe challenges is, in our opinion, not with the delivery process. It is about guiding each and every individual.Ultimately, Onsophic's goal is accelerating the human potential. The biggest win is the acceleration of their human potential, but also in time.Many CEOs underestimate the value of the people in their companyIt's really the people that drive a company.It's really important to make sure that you make strategic decisions on making the cake, getting the most out of these peopleI'm not talking about getting more performance out of them by implementing rules to make them work harder. No, it's about making, really, the work lighter on your human potential and get the most out of it.By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:That the best results are achieved when process, people, and intelligence augmentation blend in the right way.That we have to increment the skills and capabilities of the workforce while we are bringing in new tools and technologies into the workplace.That gut-feel is often a very good guide to follow in order to pivot the trajectory of your business – and that spending time on assembling a team with the same beliefs and passion is essential to scale the horsepower behind your business.

My guest on the podcast is Christian Guttmann, Global Head of Artificial Intelligence, and Chief AI Scientist at Tieto. He’s responsible for product strategy and execution of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in order to create high-impact AI systems, product innovation, patents and scientific publications.Christian has progressed Artificial Intelligence for over 25 years and is contributing to its evolution from both a business as well as an academic perspective. He has led innovation teams at BT, IBM, HP, successful startups and top-ranked universities. His drive is to advance AI technology, science and business to new heights for societal prosperity in teams of bright and passionate minds.This triggered me, hence I invited Christian to be a guest on my podcast.During our interview, we explore the ways technologies such as AI and Machine learning can have an exponential impact on our healthcare system – how it not only helps with the reduction of cost but, more importantly, how it can help to remove frustrating bottlenecks and increase the quality of life for many more people. Here are some of Christian’s quotes:I was very fascinated with building something that has an intelligent capacity, something that has the cognitive ability to understand the world around us.I've also been doing research in this area, looking at predicting and preempting certain events that may happen with patients that have several comorbidities, for example, that have chronic conditions.The big deal, really, the bottom line is it saves lives. It augments the healthcare system. It helps doctors as well as patients and, in fact, also the executives of, let's say, clinics and hospitals in ways to understand data and the patient journey in a very different way.It's also clear that you have a clear benefit to patients and you have the reduction of costs, for example, in hospitals, or you reduce queuing lines and so on for elective surgeries and so on.I love this combination. I think that it's increased evidence, also, that you have these combined teams of an AI and a doctor, for example. You just gain a lot.By listening to this podcast, you will learn three things:What to do different around product innovation these days to ensure the best possible outcome of your solution.Why technologies such as AI and Machine learning require us to give a broader consideration to our solution – think for example about the societal issues it can create.And how solving big problems with AI is not always a matter of focusing on data, but often one of figuring out the framework.

The focus of this podcast is on product strategy, and my guest is Tim Willis, CFO and Head of Growth at Aerobotics, an AI startup from South Africa. He’s charged with growing Aerobotics in non-core markets, as well as its global expansion efforts. He’s built his financial management expertise at both Deloitte and Uber, where he led its Analytics & Strategy Central Operations Team for Europe, the Middle East & Africa (EMEA).During this podcast interview, we explore how technology can add significant value by augmenting farmers across the world to increase their yields while becoming more efficient at the same time.We’ll also look into the wider value implications this can have across the supply chain, and how other, non-farming related industries can be served uniquely as a by-product of the intelligence gained.The thing that triggered me most from my interview with Tim?“Our aim in the future is to actually be able to predict what your yield will be based off our images. If we can do that, then we have a lot of forward-looking information which is extremely useful, not only to farmers, but also to people down the value chain.”Why did this trigger me? What’s the bigger value I see?The value is in thinking in outcomes, not in outputs. Aerobotics started around the idea that “it was cool to fly a drone over a farm”, but realized quickly that “without the software to actually use, it was going to be difficult to commercialize.”In other words – they started with the ‘What’ (a more efficient way to spot yield issues, i.e., a photo), and realized it was answering the ‘Why’ that would lead them to create remarkable value (i.e., predict yield and help increase yield quality). This takes Aerobotics value towards farmers from 10% impact to potentially 10x impact – and more importantly, it created a by-product with which they (in the near future) can drive value to other markets as well: Providing qualitative insights to retail to help them anticipate issues in their supply chain planning weeks, if not months in advance, or providing key data to Insurance companies to help them create new disruptive business models to insure farmers based on adjusted risk-profiles, etc…By listening to this podcast, you will learn three things:Why focusing on outcomes, not outputs is the secret to creating a sustainable businessHow focusing on just a thin slice of the market is key to dominate it profitablyThat less is always more – in other words, you’ll always have 100 to 200 things you’d like or think you have to do with your software, but identifying the 10 that will truly move the needle is the most critical thing.

The focus of this week's podcast is business strategy, and my guest is Mark Esposito, Professor of Business and Economics at Harvard University & Co-Founder at Nexus Frontier Tech. Mark Esposito is a professor of Business and Economics, teaching at Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education, and serving as an Institutes Council co-leader at the Microeconomics of Competitiveness program at Harvard Business School. He also holds professorships at Hult International Business School and IE Business School in Madrid.In 2016, he was appointed as Research Fellow at the Circular Economy Research Initiative at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. Esposito was appointed a fellow of the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai in 2017 and as a global expert for the World Economic Forum.Mark was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award in 2017 because of his work around the DRIVE framework, which he co-created together with Terence Tse, whom I interviewed in one of my earlier podcasts.I personally met Mark at the Future of Business forum in Paris, where we both spoke, and I have read their book myself in the meantime.The framework it provides inspired me, hence I invited Mark to my podcast. During our interview, we explore the DRIVE framework and, in particular, how it helps organizations of all sizes to reveal the critical insights to shape their future proactively and find new unexploited markets.Here are some of his quotes:“DRIVE is a framework of what we call the future trajectories, things that we think will happen for a fact that will have an impact on major socio‑economic systems. Rather than thinking about the future as being this futuristic scenario far away from us, we try to determine what the future will look like, which gave the title to the book, by understanding the present. ..it's merely to understand how to position themselves in the next few years. For me, more than a competitive advantage is a position in advantage. They are proactively creating the future they want to have.…as much as you benchmark, most disruption doesn't happen from your own industry. It happens from outside of your own field of vision DRIVE is a way to engage you with multiple factors. Some of them might be what we call no market factors, factors that are not currently in your business model.”During this interview, you will learn three things:What questions to raise in order to constantly and optimally position my company for advantage?Why it’s key to develop a strategic insight capability in-house rather than rely on external consultantsAnd why you’ll create more value by making your products compatible and combinable

My guest on the podcast is Dmitri Matskevich, Co-founder and CEO at DBrain, a San Francisco-based AI startup.Dmitri is a serial entrepreneur and a data geek. He found that human-generated data is more important than algorithms for AI solutions, and here’s where he found a large gap in the market. This led him to co-found Dbrain, the first community-owned platform on blockchain for training Artificial Intelligence. It connects the exploding AI demand on human-labeled data with the abundant global supply of online workers. In doing so, it not only accelerates product innovation but also provides potentially +2B unbanked people an opportunity to raise their standard of living and become a part of the global financial system due to a blockchain cross-border reach.This inspired me, hence I invited Dmitri to be a guest on my podcast. We explore his vision of making humans great again, what the key ingredients are to do so, how this can be accelerated, and how this can help distribute wealth from high-income countries to countries with low income. Here are some of his quotes:“In order to understand how to create artificial intelligence, you need to understand how the brain works and vice versa.If we want to make artificial intelligence more scalable to democratize AI for broader use for a lot of businesses, we want to solve this problem of custom data for every use case.Basically, the goal of this project is to de-brain from the distributed brain.…we came to an idea that we need to create this platform for humans to be engaged in training AI. It's not about some high‑paid data scientist mostly. It could be almost anybody with some skills which you have just from evolution…everybody thought that AI can make life miserable and eliminate a lot of jobs. What I see right now that it can assist in a lot of jobs. In the same way, it can create a lot of jobs.However, without humans, without human knowledge, it's nothing.”By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:How to identify disruptive ideas by connecting the dots between challenges of seemingly not obviously connected stakeholders.Why developing a crowd-mindset is not only critical to creating scale and speed, but also to creating completely new markets.How to overcome some large-scale obstacles in an elegant and smart way.

My guest on the podcast is week is Skyler Place, Chief Behavioral Science Officer at Cogito Corporation in Boston.He is a computational social scientist with an entrepreneurial mindset. At Cogito, he leads the company's efforts to combine behavioral science and artificial intelligence to create more emotionally intelligent humans.As you can imagine, this inspired me, and hence I invited Skyler to my podcast.We explore how technology such as AI can increase the quality of conversations people can have with each other, and how this is driving remarkable impact for organizations, their employees, and their customers.Here are some of Skyler’s quotes:“The big idea behind Cogito is that we can use modern artificial intelligence to create tools that can help improve humanity. To help improve how people communicate with one another. We can help people be their best selves.We've built a platform that can listen to conversations and help individuals understand how they can speak differently in order to have better conversations.In order to retain and grow their customer base, the quality of the conversation between the employees of the organization, the call center agents, and the customers calling in has become a critical way to build a lifetime value or to build a lifelong customer.There's so much value for this approach to improve all different aspects of the human experience. We continue to focus on opportunities that allow us to have the most positive impact on society.”By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:Why focusing on ‘moments of truth’ is what ultimately defines success or failure – and therefore can become your core differentiator.What’s required to develop software solutions that will actually be voted the most favorite product by its users.How exploring ‘non-customers’ can create complete new unexplored markets for you.