Podcasts about actifio

Episode 360 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Mike Troiano, Partner at G20 Ventures. When I think of Mike, I think of a master marketer, a branding guru, and an amazing storyteller. As we start our conversation we discuss the importance of these traits as it relates to entrepreneurs. The importance of storytelling and brand building is often overlooked by entrepreneurs. Yet, it is such a critical part of a startup's success as a good story attracts customers, talent, and capital. If you haven't followed his blog, please make sure you check it out on Medium, as there are so many great pieces of advice to help you improve your skills in storytelling, creating a brand, and building a startup. He's one of the best. G20 Ventures is the capital partner that helps new businesses grow with smart money, great storytelling, and the right connections. The firm's sweet spot is mainly Series A investing in enterprise software companies. In this podcast, we cover: * Playing sports at Cornell and getting his career started in the marketing agency world, plus starting his own company which was acquired and went public. * The full lifecycle story of M-Qube which was acquired by VeriSign and all the details about how the company powered the voting for American Idol and the lucky case drawing for Deal or No Deal. * Launching a startup called MatchMine which was backed by the Kraft family and was building a personalization tech for consumers that ended up being too early for the market. * The story of Actifio and its copy data management solution which grew into unicorn status with backing from Tier A investors and was acquired by Google. * How a viral post on Medium started his journey into venture capital and joining G20 Ventures, where he was a founding member and LP. * Getting started as a VC and how he found his Zone of Genius, plus what he's targeting for investments. * The 5 phases of a career. * And so much more. Episode Sponsor: As a longtime champion of the local startup ecosystem, Silicon Valley Bank supports innovative companies with the solutions and financing they need through every stage of growth. With more than 1,500 bankers and relationship advisors, and $42B in loans as of Q2 2024 – SVB delivers the right people, service and resources to support your entire financial journey. Learn more at SVB.com.

This week Charli has Mike McClurg on the pod for some generational awesomeness!Mike McClurg is President of Load Controls, the leading provider of power sensors and controls to the fluid handling industry. Prior to Load Controls McClurg ran Velocity Sales for Actifio (acquired by Google) and was Global Vice President of Sales for IBM's Midmarket Sales organization. He previous had international sales management experience at EMC (acquired by Dell) and started his career in software development and product marketing.McClurg has been named a CRN ‘Channel Chief' four times. He has a BS in Engineering from Tufts University and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson College. Read up at EmpoweringPumps.com and stay tuned for more news about EPIC at the Colorado School of Mines Nov 12th and 13th.Find us @EmpoweringPumps on Facebook, LinkedIn,  Instagram and Twitter and using the hashtag #EmpoweringIndustryPodcast or via email podcast@empoweringpumps.com   

Ash Ashutosh is a serial entrepreneur and the Global Director of Solution Sales at Google. His data management startup, Actifio, achieved a valuation of over $1B and was acquired by Google in 2020. In this episode, Ash talks about anticipating and advancing alongside what he calls the waves of change, in reference to the surges in innovation and technology that occur over time. His entrepreneurial journey reflects those technology surges - he started out in the silicon industry, then moved on to data storage software development. His most recent startup, Actifio, was in the business of managing and securing data. Ash talks about how he had the opportunity to work with some of the largest organizations in the world to better protect and manage their data while at Actifio. At the end of the episode, third-year student Bianca Wisekal joins the conversation. She is an agribusiness management student who holds a leadership role within the Nittany Entrepreneur Society, Penn State's student entrepreneurship club. She is also an administrative operations intern within Invent Penn State, and she is a technician and lab monitor at OriginLabs, Invent Penn State's all-new fabrication space. She talks to Ash about how he stays motivated to keep innovating, as well as his predictions for where technology is heading.

In today's episode with Mike Troiano, Partner at G20 Ventures you will learn1. The major changes in marketing and why creative storytelling is becoming increasingly important in today's world.2. What makes a good company story and a step-by-step guide on how to master effective storytelling3. How to turn marketing and sales into a go-to-market team that drives your company's successAbout MikeMike is a successful venture capitalist who brings nearly 25 years of business management and marketing experience to help entrepreneurs. A graduate of Cornell and Harvard Business School, he spent his early career at leading global advertising agencies including McCann-Erickson and FCB. Later, Mike served as President of NASDAQ-listed systems integrator Primix, among others, and helped companies like m-Qube and Actifio to incredibly successful exits. Today, besides being a partner at G20 Venture, he is a TechStars mentor, podcast host and board member of Hometap and Hack Diversity. He is one of the top 1% most influential people on Twitter and one of the most popular writers on venture capital on Medium. In his spare time, he enjoys the outdoors, whether on the water in the summer or in the mountains in the winter.About G20 VenturesFounded in 2013, G20 Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Boston, MA. Backed by more than 20 of the Northeast's most successful entrepreneurs, the company provides early-traction capital to East Coast tech startups. They believe that good business is personal, which is reflected in their "Human Scale Venture Capital" approach to investing. G2 Ventures looks for great teams that have fallen in love with great problems and are at or near the inflection point of customer validation. Thereby, their focus lies not on optimizing transactions at the expense of relationships or on scaling their own business, but clearly on the growth of the companies they invest in, and the capital entrusted to them. Their portfolio includes successful tech companies such as Evergage, 128 Technology, CloudZero and Mulberry.About the host SammySammy is Managing Partner and founder of SAWOO. SAWOO helps companies with Social Marketing and Lead Generation to leverage the power of LinkedIn in a sustainable way. No spam, no bots, but building real Human 2 Human connections between you and your B2B buyers.Shownotes MikeFind Mike on LinkedIn(https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtroiano/)Connect with Mike via Twitter(https://twitter.com/miketrap?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)Check out Mike's blog and podcast(https://miketrap.medium.com/)(https://racket.com/miketrap)Mike's company G20 Ventures(https://www.g20vc.com/)Mike's favorite business book: Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy(https://www.amazon.com/Ogilvy-Advertising-David/dp/039472903X)Mike's favorite business leader: Steve Jobs and Scott Galloway, Clinical Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and founder of L2

With more than 30 years of enterprise technology industry experience, he has a track record of scaling both emerging and established companies for rapid global growth. As President of Actifio from February 2011 until May 2019, he helped drive this copy data management software pioneer to a unicorn valuation of $1.3 billion, more than 3,500 global customers, and a 50% CAGR. He co-developed the company's strategy and led sales, presales, channels, and OEM distribution, from pre-revenue to achieving high growth, positive cash flow, and global operations. Prior to Actifio, he served as the President of enterprise storage technology provider XIV, responsible for the company's business direction and go-to-market model, including sales, marketing, and global services operations. After XIV was acquired by IBM in 2008, he spent three years as Vice President of IBM Storage, generating more than $1 billion in total sales. He spent six years as CEO of CentrePath Network, and prior to that spent 12 years helping to grow EMC Corporation from $80 million to more than $10 billion in annual global sales, serving in several senior management positions culminating in Senior Vice President of Sales. He served on the boards of AppIQ until its acquisition by HP in 2005, and Diligent, a deduplication software pioneer acquired by IBM. He currently serves as chairman of the board of Weka.io, maker of a software-defined file system, and is a board member of Titus Software, a Blackstone portfolio company. He is active as a member of YPO (Young Presidents' Organization), and with his Alma Mater, Boston College. Join Randy Seidl and David Nour on this episode of the Sales Community Tech Sales Insights podcast with Jim Sullivan, President, and CEO of NWN Corporation. We turn the show notes from our podcasts into unique #TechSalesInsights position papers, so come join us in the Sales Community to learn more. Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

theCUBE Hosts Stu Miniman (@stu) and David Floyer share their analysis on Actifio Data Driven 2020To see more of our coverage of this show, please visit: https://www.thecube.net/actifio-data-driven-2020

Data Protection Gumbo presents our morning news digest with top stories in the industry for today.

Data Protection Gumbo presents our morning news digest with top stories in the industry for today.

Managing data and all the copies of data that an organization requires is a complicated process because most organizations manually create copies. The difficulty in managing copy data is only getting worse as organizations continue their transition to the cloud and start to leverage containers. Organizations need solutions to address today's copy data management challenges and to automate the creation and positioning of it. In this episode of Storage Intensity, George Crump sits down with Jason Brown, Director of Product Marketing with Actifio, to discuss the need for copy data and how Actifio's new release, Actifio 10c, sets a new standard in copy data management.

Welcome to Episode 83 of The VentureFizz Podcast, the flagship podcast from the leading authority for jobs & careers in the tech industry. For this episode of our podcast, I interviewed Ash Ashutosh, Founder and CEO at Actifio. Ash is someone who fully embodies what it means to be a serial entrepreneur. In addition to Actifio, he also founded Serano Systems as well as AppIQ, a data storage company that was acquired by HP in 2005. Actifio, his latest company, is the world's leading enterprise data-as-a-service platform. Powered by patented Virtual Data Pipeline™ technology, Actifio frees data from traditional infrastructure to accelerate adoption of hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability. Actifio is backed by some of the top venture capital firms in the industry and in case you didn't know, the company is one of the unicorns in the Boston tech scene with a valuation of over $1B. In this episode of our podcast, we cover lots of topics, like: -Ash's background growing up in India and migrating to the US. -His early career in the tech industry, including his time at StorageNetworks, an early cloud storage company. -The details of Serano Systems and AppIQ, the first two companies that he founded. -What he learned during the time he spent as a VC at Greylock. -The aha moment behind Actifio and all the details on the company, its technology, and the massive market opportunity. -Advice for founders raising early-stage capital. -His thoughts on sharing a company's valuation in the media after raising funding. -Plus, a lot more. Today's episode is sponsored by Pluralsight. It is amazing what machine learning can do. With mounds of data being harvested every day, there's so much we can learn and create. Pluralsight, the technology learning platform, is using this data for the good of tech professionals everywhere. Their AI helps you see what level your tech skills are at and recommends opportunities to keep learning. And they're looking for help to make their algorithms even smarter. If changing the way the world learns technology through the intersection of Design, Product, Data Science and Engineering is right up your alley, apply to work at Pluralsight. Want to work here? Visit pluralsight.com/venturefizz to learn more. Lastly, if you like the show, please remember to subscribe to and review us on iTunes, or your podcast player of choice!

On this episode, we dive into how Mike Troiano views the importance of brand. Mike, in addition to working for Coca Cola and Taco Bell, was able to grow Actifio's revenue 80% per year from 2012 to 2017 as CMO, elevating the company from an obscure technology to a unicorn.

Case Study - Actifio by Startup Secrets

Startup Secrets brings our set of case studies to you, in podcast form!

My guest today is Michael Troiano, a Harvard Business School graduate and former Chief Marketing Office of Actifio, a global enterprise data-as-a-service provider. He is currently venture capitalist based in Boston at G20 Ventures, and has nearly 25 years of executive leadership experience, working with name brand companies such as PepsiCo, Jiffylube, Ragu and Hewlett-Packard. In this episode we touch on his personal story and discuss why marketers should focus on marketing storytelling instead of optimization. We’re also going to go over a detailed step-by-step methodology on creating a story that people will actually connect with. Listen in as he shares valuable advice to new marketers, such as why they need to focus on finding a good boss instead of a good business. *** Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links

For the first Utterly Biased Podcast, Dennis Keohane sits down with Mike Troiano to talk about his move from CMO at Actifio to a VC at G20 Ventures, including his investment thesis and role of investors. Dennis also talks with Andy Palmer of Tamr who just took on the role of founder partner at Founder Collective.

My guest the week is venture capitalist and charter G20 Member Jeff McCarthy. Jeff’s a Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, focused mainly on materials. He played leadership roles at two early, successful companies within the North Bridge portfolio, Cadia Networks and New Oak Communications, where he was the CEO until that company was acquired by Nortel. Before joining New Oak, Jeff was Vice President of sales and business development at Cadia Networks, a developer of ATM concentrator products for the service provider marketplace, and held senior management positions at Wellfleet Communications, including Vice President of Carrier and Channel Operations. Jeff is a proud and active graduate of the Northeastern University School of Management, and serves as an advisor to the University. In this week’s second segment Jeff and will focus on a problem that seems like a great one until you have it, which is how to pick the right VC partner when you have more than one to choose from. Jeff will share thoughts on the importance of chemistry and vertical expertise, respond to my question about what’s different for female entrepreneurs, and compare funds specialized in individual stages of the venture journey with those that invest throughout it. As always, How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple. Here now, my conversation with G20 Member Jeff McCarthy...

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of "How Hard Can It Be"...Up close and personal with the real people behind the hits and misses in Boston's venture capital ​big time. My name is Bob Hower and I'm the Co-founder of G20 Ventures. You can​ ​​​follow me on Twitter at @bobthevc, and​ link to our Medium publication at G20vc.com. ​Each week we'll​ ​be ​getting​ to know one of the​ ​luminaries in our local startup community, and drill into a specific area of their​​ ​expertise for the benefit of other entrepreneurs and investors.​ My guest the week is the usual host of this podcast, my new partner Mike Troiano! Mike is a new venture capitalist who brings nearly 25 years of executive leadership and marketing experience to bear for entrepreneurs. He most recently served as the Chief Marketing Officer of Actifio, a global enterprise data-as-a-service provider he helped turn from an obscure virtualization technology into a venture capital "unicorn" valued at over $1.2 Billion. As CMO from 2012 to 2017, Mike helped grow revenue over 80% per year, creating the Copy Data Virtualization category while expanding the business into blue chip accounts across 37 countries. He spent his early career at top worldwide ad agencies including McCann-Erickson and FCB, and was named the founding CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Interactive in 1995. He later served as the president of NASDAQ-listed systems integrator Primix, and as General Manager of mobile content pioneer m-Qube from inception through one of the largest Boston-based venture capital exits of 2006. In this week’s second segment Mike and I talked about the importance of belonging, what makes him such an effective communicator, how he decided to become a VC and what it means to him to be a great one. We also discussed what all great entrepreneurs have in common with bruce Springsteen, something this Garden State native liked a lot. As always, How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.

My guest this week is ezCater Co-Founder and CEO Stefania Mallett. Stefania has spent over 25 years building and growing technology-enabled companies that solve real business problems. She co-founded and successfully sold InSite Marketing Technology to what is now KANA on NASDAQ, and prior to that led National Logistics Management (a broker for $225M in transportation services) to profitability for the first time in 4 years. As the COO of IntraNet (now ACI Worldwide,) Stefania revamped the firm and vaulted it to #1 in its market, a position it has maintained for 15+ years. What I find remarkable about Stefania is not only the depth of her competence but the breadth of her interests. A self-proclaimed “systems thinker” and engineer, she emerged from a difficult and non-traditional childhood determined to make sense of the world, proceeding through a hugely successful and entrepreneurial career to do exactly that through a series of executive management roles across a dizzying array of industries and company types. Far from the overly-intellectual engineer stereotype, though, she’s managed to remain a warm and insightful person who clearly cares deeply for the people she’s working with the build ezCater, a neat little company which itself has a story worth telling. We’ll spend our second segment doing just that, walking step by step through the unexpected yet highly typical twists and turns that characterized ezCater’s beginning, through the disciplined approach to management that’s created one of Boston’s most successful and thriving marketplace businesses. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.

My guest this week is Patrick Sweeney, an Olympic athlete turned technology entrepreneur turned full time adventurer. Patrick chases adventure for a living, propelled by a passion to help others do the same through corporate speaking engagements and network television appearances, plus an upcoming book in 2017. Patrick grew up a working class Irish kid outside of Boston, and was shaped by a dramatic life experience he’ll share in our talk. He finished 2nd in the 1996 Olympic trials rowing the single scull and won international races from Canada to Norway. After attending a top business school, he built multiple ground-breaking technology companies, earned six patents, wrote two award winning books and appeared on media outlets from CNN to Bloomberg, CNBC, and The New York Times. One day, though, while working the 80-hour weeks and living the intense life of an entrepreneurial leader, Patrick got a wake-up call in the form of a life-threatening illness. When he recovered, he took his first steps toward finding his own adventurer again, unlocking a passion and energy for life all too often lost in the pursuit of material wealth. Today Patrick’s focus is on breaking world records and embracing every day as if it were his last. In Feb 2015 he became the first person to bike to Everest Base Camp in Nepal, and has now become the first to attempt cycling the Seven Summits. His mission is to help millions around the world find their adventurer within, and our second segment today focuses on the process of overcoming fear that’s central to achieving that or any goal in life and in business. This conversation is a fascinating one about breaking through what he calls the “fear frontier,” covering ground from startups to parenting, the limiting functions of our lizard brains, and the journey to find the “genius” we all have at the intersection of our passion and our vocation. PLEASE take a minute to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, and consider giving us a quick, 5-star review on iTunes. It really helps spread the word and I would sincerely and personally appreciate it. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.

My guest this week is Matt Johnston, Chief Executive Officer of Mautic, the leader in open source marketing automation. Mautic makes it easy for you to put the right message in front of the right person at the right time, empowering enterprises and agencies with a flexible, open platform built for us by us. Before joining Mautic earlier this year Matt was the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Applause (formerly known as uTest). An integral part of Applause’s growth after joining in late 2008, Matt led that company’s marketing, community management, partner channel, and company strategy, helping it become one of Boston’s most highly regarded enterprise technology players. Before that he played a range of senior and strategic marketing roles at OnForce, Mimeo, and Herman Miller office furniture. Our second segment this week is a real treat for anyone interested in what it means to be a Chief Marketing Officer in 2017. Matt and I together have held just about every marketing role you can have, including the one at the top, and our conversation covered everything from the anxiety and stress of keeping up with the latest technology phenom du jour to the roots, current reality, and future of the latest and greatest Account Based Marketing (ABM) model. It’s always fun to trade war stories with another senior marketing guy, and you’ll be a fly on the wall for a conversation I know we both really enjoyed. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.

My guest this week is Pierre-Loic Assayag, the CEO and co-founder of Traackr, the world’s most powerful and effective influencer management platform. Traackr lets marketers scale their influencer marketing programs by focusing on the individual people with the greatest impact on their objectives. Their customers include Coca-Cola, HP, OpenTable, Capital One, Kiehls, Travelocity, SAP and Adidas. Half of the top 50 communications agencies today use Traackr to drive successful social programs and earn more attention by engaging with the right people, an amazing achievement for a company just in the process of raising its first round of institutional capital. A longtime mar-tech veteran, Pierre-Loic has deep expertise in advertising and marketing innovation across the digital space. After starting his career at P&G, Pierre-Loic became Peugeot-Citroen’s first Director of New Media heading up an international portfolio of information technology projects. He went on to join the frontlines of the Internet economy at places including Viant and Optaros, bringing blue chip customers the vision and execution they needed to survive and thrive in a media landscape transformed by the slow, painful death of traditional mass media. In our second segment we’ll talk about a subject near and dear to any entrepreneur’s heart, which is when to raise money. Traackr’s been remarkably capital efficient in the way it’s grown into a global company, and that’s because Pierre-Loic has some strong views on the relative importance of customer revenue and investor capital. He also has a very specific and I think pretty unique way of thinking about when to go raise money, a model based on aligning your interests with that of investors I think could save a lot of us a lot of heartache as we journey down the road. -- How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.

My guest this week is Eric Paley, Managing Partner of Founder Collective, an early stage fund begun by a team of entrepreneurs who themselves launched companies and led them through successful exits. Founder Collective is focused on helping the next generation of great entrepreneurs build important and lasting businesses through it’s refreshingly clear and often-stated mission, to be the most aligned fund for founders at the seed stage. Previously, Eric was the CEO and co-founder of Brontes, which was acquired by 3M in 2006. Founder Collective’s prescient investments in companies including Pill Pack, Seat Geek, the Trade Desk, Periscope, Buzz Feed, Hotel Tonight, and Uber have made it one of the most prominent seed stage funds in Boston and beyond. Fortune magazine’s influential Term Sheet recently identified Founder Collective as among a group of VC firms outside Silicon Valley who were moving investors beyond their strict belief in "the best and the rest" in venture, matching or beating the performance of the handful of storied West Coast firms to deliver some of the best performing funds of the past decade from firms that didn’t exist before the dot-com bubble. Our conversation on the importance of “founder friendliness” included Eric’s perspective on the challenges facing portfolio star Uber right now, an exchange I think our regular listeners will find particularly interesting. In our second segment Eric and I turned to what he calls The Idea Myth, the belief that every great company finds its genesis in some flash of inspiration born in the mind of some genius entrepreneur. The reality, and the core investment thesis of Eric’s firm, is that venture success tends to emerge from teams who deeply understand customer value creation, who have the talent and the will to persist in solving the the seemingly endless string of mundane challenges that must be overcome to will a successful company into existence from nothing. It’s a refreshing reminder of the importance of execution in a business that too often elevatea strategy above all else, and a view I very much share with him and his partners. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.

My guest this week is Yumin Choi, Managing Director of Bain Capital Ventures Healthcare team. Yumin joined Bain's Boston team last year after ten years culminating as a General Partner at HLM Venture Partners. At HLM he led a variety of investments across healthcare IT and services sectors, serving as board director for AbleTo, mPulse Mobile, Oceans Healthcare, Payspan (acquired by Primus Capital), Spinal Kinetics, and Vets First Choice. Yumin has a really interesting background... born in Seoul, South Korea, lived in Japan as a child and moved to Hawaii at age 10 where he attended the Punahou School, President Obama’s alma mater. He's an investor and mentor in several healthcare accelerators, including Blueprint Health, Healthbox, Startup Health, Rock Health, and 500 Startups. Yumin serves with me on the board of the New England Venture Capital Association, and on the board of overseers for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the oversight committee for Boston University’s Coulter Foundation. He also served as a lecturer in the Gordon Institute at Tufts University, where he taught entrepreneurial finance. I think my conversation with Yumin about the job of being a VC is probably the most illuminating I’ve had to date, focusing on the importance of building a network, looking for patterns in the dots of what can be hundreds of near misses and good ideas below the threshold of Yes, and staying open to opportunities regardless of their source or pedigree. Our second segment, though, is about the single event that probably shaped Yumin’s views on the value of healthcare innovation more than any other... his own diagnosis with cancer at age 31, and a subsequent treatment regime that - all by itself - almost killed him. This is not the usual blah blah about relationships in venture, folks, try as we always do to avoid that. My conversation with Yumin was about his journey to understand why what he was doing mattered, and I was inspired by him and his story in a way I hope you will be too. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.

This week's guest is Drift Co-Founder and CEO David Cancel. If you’ve ever landed on a web page and had a real person offer to help you find what you were looking for, there’s a decent chance Drift helped make it happen. Their mission is to “help businesses grow by delivering a better, personal experience across every conversation with their customers," and it’s a space David knows all too well. He’s spent his career building great products for marketers at companies he’s founded including Compete, Lookery, Ghostery, and Performable. He served as Chief Product Officer at HubSpot after it acquired Performable in 2011, and is widely credited as having re-architected both the product and the engineering team at that company prior to its wildly successful IPO in 2014. David’s active in the Boston tech community investing in and advising organizations like Charles River Ventures, Spark Capital, NextView, DormRoom Fund, EverTrue, Visible Measures, Yottaa, and HelpScout. You can and absolutely should catch his Podcast - Seeking Wisdom - which offers practical advice on health, wealth, life, and learning for fellow entrepreneurs. As you’ll hear in our conversation, David was born and raised in New York City and now lives in the Boston area with his wife and two kids. In this week’s second segment he and I talked about the process of developing products that win, which is so different from the mythology most startups are framed in after the fact. If you had to develop a person from scratch to drive that process, you’d be hard pressed to design a better fit than David, and we’ll dig into the relationship I’ve always found fascinating, between the person and the products they create. I’ve known David for a long time, and he’s not only one of the best product guys in Boston, but one of the most broadly read and genuinely thoughtful people in our community. I think you’re really going to enjoy our conversation, which drifts into the working class backgrounds that have shaped us both, the importance of family, and the unvarnished truth about what it takes to create something the world wants badly enough to pay for it. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.

If you liked this episode, we bet that you’ll love our blog content. blog.drift.com/#subscribe Subscribe to never miss a post & join the 20,000+ other pros committed to getting better every day. --- David calls Mike "The Godfather of Branding." And we've been talking a lot about brand lately, so we thought it would be fun to have Mike in the office at Drift and record a podcast. Mike's the CMO at Actifio, a venture capital "unicorn" (billion dollar valuation) and he spent his early career at top New York ad agencies on brands including Coca-Cola, AT&T, and Taco Bell. We also talked about reading, some of Mike's favorite books, the power of a good sales kickoff, and the role of marketing today (hint: it's to feed sales). PS. Here’s how you can support Seeking Wisdom if you’re a fan of the show: 1. Subscribe. 2. Leave us a five-star review. Here's how: bit.ly/5-Stars-Only. 3. Follow David (twitter.com/dcancel) and Dave (twitter.com/davegerhardt) on Twitter. 4. Learn more about Drift at Drift.com.

My guest this week is Kevin Bitterman, a Partner in Polaris Partners Boston office. Kevin joined Polaris in 2004 to focus on investments in healthcare, after playing a key role in getting Sirtris Pharmaceuticals off the ground while a graduate student at Harvard Medical School. What was that role? Well, it depends who you ask. When Kevin was asked by the Boston Business Journal he said, "I deserve next to no credit for the tremendous accomplishments they've had there." His team had a different view... "All you have to do is read Kevin’s Ph.D. dissertation," said lead investor Terry McGuire, "He was a co-discoverer of (Sirtris' science), and a big reason for their success." Sirtis was acquired by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC in 2008, for $720 million. Trust me when I tell you a VC who downplays their role in a startup’s success is the rarest of creatures indeed, and Kevin’s atypical humility is one of the things that’s made him a go-to guy on the Boston biotech scene. In his time at Polaris, Kevin also co-founded Genocea Biosciences (NASDAQ: GNCA) and was the founding CEO of Editas Medicine (NASDAQ: EDIT), Morphic Therapeutic and Visterra. He currently represents Polaris as a director of Editas Medicine, InSeal Medical, Genocea Biosciences, Kala Pharmaceuticals, Morphic Therapeutic, Neuronetics, Taris Biomedical and Vets First Choice. Kevin is also active in the local life science and healthcare start-up community, serving on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC) and with me as Board Chair of the New England Venture Capital Association (NEVCA). He has a BA, summa cum laude, from Rutgers University and a PhD in genetics at Harvard Medical School. In this week’s second segment Kevin and I talked about how cutting edge biotech companies like the one’s he’s been involved in get off the ground, how they emerge from our great universities to create companies that have collectively saved millions of lives. His answer is nothing like the way most people think of VC, and even different from the technology venture model some of us know so well. Kevin and I live in the same town in the Western suburbs and have even spent a few Dad’s weekends down in Mohegan Sun (which will NOT be discussed in this podcast.) I know him to be a family man of great kindness, talent, and intelligence, and it was a pleasure spending a little time to get under what makes him tick. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.

My guest this week is Brent Grinna, the Founder & CEO of EverTrue. EverTrue is a social donor management software platform that helps hundreds of higher education, independent school, and other non-profit fundraising organizations track and engage alumni and donors. EverTrue participated in TechStars and was selected as a winner of MassChallenge in 2011. Bain Capital Ventures is their lead investor today, and their partner institutions include household names like Amherst, Williams, Colgate, Brown, Boston University, Phillips Andover, and Phillips Exeter. The business was born after Brent - who’d been fast tracking as a venture capital and private equity investor - was asked to serve as an Alumni Volunteer for his undergraduate alma mater, Brown University. He found a system in desperate need of upgrade to 21st century technology and tactics, and set out to bring them to the education fundraising process he cared deeply about. The reason he cared so deeply was that access to higher education had changed the lives of both he and his brothers, who’d grown up on rural farmland in a far flung corner of Iowa. Football and smarts were Brent’s ticket to Brown, where he not only excelled academically but ended up Captain of the Varsity Football Team. After graduating he spent four years in finance at William Blair & Company and Madison Dearborn Partners, then earned his MBA with honors from Harvard Business School. In this week’s second segment Brent and I talked about the people stuff that almost always ends up being the primary focus of the CEO, at any stage of the business. I think other CEOs and those who aspire to be one will relate to both the insights and the struggles we both shared in this aspect of the job, if not to uncover all the answers then at least to commiserate on some of the harder questions. I consider Brent both a true friend and one of the most promising entrepreneurs in Boston, I think you’ll enjoy listening in on our conversation... especially if you don’t mind a couple Pats fans / ex-jocks taking apart the parallels of football and business. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

This week my guest is Jules Pieri, Co-Founder and CEO of the product launch platform The Grommet. The company’s Citizen Commerce™ movement is reshaping how consumer products get discovered, shared, and bought. Jules started her career as an industrial designer for technology companies and was subsequently a senior executive for large brands, such as Keds, Stride Rite, and Playskool. The Grommet is her third startup, following roles as VP at Design Continuum and President of Ziggs.com. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan and people tell her she is the first designer to graduate from Harvard Business School, where she is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence. Jules was named one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs in 2013. In June, 2014, she was invited to the White House Maker Faire to launch The Grommet Wholesale Platform, connecting Makers with Main Street Retailers. She writes a personal blog at jules.thegrommet.com, and the “CEO Unplugged” column on Inc.com. She posts as @julespieri on Twitter and Instagram. The title of our second segment this week is “Amazon Sucks.” To be honest, no one is more surprised to be writing those words than me, having been an Amazon customer since all they sold were books. To be honest I’ve LOVED Amazon for a long time. I respect their execution and how they take care of me as a customer, and it’s the default store in our household, which spends more than it probably should online. When I posted something to that effect on Facebook, though, my longtime friend Jules stepped in to set me straight, about the impact of Amazon’s policies related to pricing on fellow entrepreneurs. She has some very specific concerns about the way they’ve gone after counterfeiters in particular, and I have to say having spent some time with Jules that I now share them. If you’re skeptical, that’s great. Hear her out in our second segment today, and judge for yourself. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

This week my guest is Steve Kokinos, founder and CEO of Fuze, a unified communications platform that improves business productivity by integrating voice, video, and always-on collaboration into a global, cloud-based service and all-in-one app people actually want to use. Under Steve’s leadership, Fuze has become one of the hottest and most highly regarded startups in Boston, creating the Unified Communications as a Service market and transforming the way enterprises view communications as a key driver of business visibility, process improvement, and results. Before Fuze Steve was a founder of BladeLogic, a company he took public at $17/share before it was acquired by BMC software for $28, and WebYes, an early market leader in the Web hosting and application service provider business acquired by Breakaway Solutions in advance of their IPO in 1999. Steve is 3 for 3, folks, and we spent the first part of our conversation talking about what he’s learned along the way, from startup through product market fit and scale. In our second segment Steve and I discussed the proliferation of apps and fragmentation of communications channels that’s ironically making it harder for all of us - at work and at home - to connect with each other. Think about how many messaging and communications apps you have spread across your laptop, tablet, and smartphone right now, then about the big, dumb piece of plastic that’s probably sitting on your desk at work, and all time, energy and effort we’re all wasting trying and failing to get the right info in the right context to the right person right now. Fuze solves that problem in a rather elegant way, of course, but having spent the last decade or so reflecting on how to help people and companies communicate more effectively, Steve’s got some great insight on the problem, where we are in solving it, where we’ll go from here. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

This week my guest is fellow G20 member Craig Spitzer. Craig’s the CEO of a2c Boston, New York and Philadelphia, an IT consulting and staffing company he co-founded in 2007 with the mission of assisting clients who need new talent and technology to achieve their business objectives. Craig founded his first company — Alliance Consulting Group — in 1994, at the tender age 29. By 1999 ACG was ranked in the top ten of the Inc. 500, an honor it earned again the following year, becoming the only consulting firm ever to do so. Ernst & Young recognized Craig as their 2000 NYC Entrepreneur of the Year in Consulting and Outsourcing Services, and by age 36, he was recognized as one of Philadelphia’s top 3 CEOs under 40. ACG was sold to Safeguard Scientific in 2002, after growing to 720 employees and producing annual revenues of over $100 million. What makes Craig‘s story and life remarkable, though, is its sheer scope. He’s produced or co-produced three feature films; was a founding investor in businesses including two successful nightclubs, and sat as Director and Chairman for Halcyon Jets and on the Board of Trustees at the Kiski School, which he attended as a boy. Our conversation ranged from the streets of Pittsburgh to the beaches of St Barth’s, from the summit of Kilimanjaro to a pre New Year’s Eve party on the Octopus. He counts high school buddies and fraternity brothers among those closest to him, but maintains intimate friendships with people including Dick Vermeil, Michael Strahan, and Billy Bob Thornton. It’s a life touched by the triumph of a hugely successful business and the tragedy of 9/11, in vivid personal terms. It’s not an exaggeration to say our conversation was one of the most fascinating I’ve had so far, and I think you’re really going to enjoy it. Our second segment features Craig’s unique insight on the role of relationships in selling. As a student of enterprise selling myself I promise you this is a master class in the approaches and personal habits that lead to sales success. Relationships are at the core, of course, but Craig goes way beyond the usual blah-blah-blah to share his thoughts on the importance of being both interested in and interesting to the people you want to get to know better, and his secrets on how to seed, harvest and just enjoy the kinds of relationships that propel a business and a life forward. I really think you’re going to enjoy this one, don’t forget to tell your friends, subscribe, and rate us on whatever podcast app has my in your head right now. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

This week my guest is G20 member Dino Di Palma, who most recently served as the Chief Executive Officer of Benu Networks, a provider enterprise technology that allows network operators to dynamically and exponentially scale existing networks for better service agility and increased stickiness in the home and business. Prior to that he was the Chief Operating Officer at Acme Packet, a company he helped take public and eventually sell to Oracle in a transaction valued well over $2 Billion. Dino also served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Business Development at Acme Packet, and as Vice President of Sales and Business Development prior to that. Before Acme Packet Dino was the Vice President of International Business Development of SEMA/Priority Call, where he spent six years in systems engineering, sales, and business development. He holds a BA degree in Economics and Political Science and an MBA from McGill University and an MA degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Concordia University. Dino’s twice been the first guy on the ground to open up a new international territory, and we spent the second part of our conversation talking about what it takes to do so effectively. Our conversation included his single most important piece of advice when it comes to doing that right, thoughts on how to pick the right time and place to begin, and another 20 minutes of hands-on, practical thinking on the right way to take your business from the country it happens to be born in to those that might end up being critical to its growth, shaping both your product vision and the scale of your success. This is a topic I’m also passionate and have also learned a lot about during my time at Actifio, and I really hope anyone considering doing the same will listen in on what a couple of guys who’ve made all the big mistakes have to say about doing it right. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

This week's episode features my conversation with Sarah A. Downey, a Principal at Accomplice focused on venture investing in virtual and augmented reality and frontier tech. Before getting into venture she served as Director of Marketing at Ovuline, a women’s reproductive health startup making fertility and pregnancy mobile apps, and as Manager of Content and Communications at Abine, a consumer online privacy startup. She got her J.D. from the University of Connecticut School of Law, and a B.A. in Psychology from Hamilton College. Sarah’s pretty well known in VR circles as a contributing writer for UploadVR.com, and has been featured as a source in over 250 publications including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, CNET, and CNN. She’s a video gamer, weight lifter, and scifi fan, or as her Twitter bio says, a “17 year-old boy interests in the guise of an adult female.” Awesome. To me Sarah’s one of the more fascinating characters on the Boston venture scene these days, and what I most hoped to get out of our conversation was a better understanding of how a nice girl from Connecticut goes from being a lawyer to an inked up, cosplaying, video game fanatic helping to make sure Boston holds its spot at the virtual reality grown up table. I found my answer where she did; in the parking lot of a Barnes & Noble a few years back, where she decided to stop living the life other people expected her to live, and started to build a new one around the truth of who she was, what she wanted, and what she loved to do. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

This week we’re going to do something short and sweet, a Holiday Quickee coming in a little over 30 minutes. I think you'll really enjoy my conversation with G20 member Jim Herrnstein, one of the most brilliant yet humble people I’ve encountered in my travels. To say Jim’s not your typical entrepreneur would be a dramatic understatement... First off he has a PhD in astrophysics from Harvard, and in Astrophysics circles he is best known as part of the team that in 1995 used an $86 million radio telescope to find the first black hole hidden at the center of a galaxy. Rather than rest on his laurels as a tenured professor in some Ivy-covered sanctuary, Jim signed on to apply his remarkable skills in math and physics to one of the world’s most legendary quantitative hedge funds, Renaissance Technologies. But even that’s not the most interesting thing about Jim Herrnstein. In his spare time, Jim is the Chairman of of an organization called Pivot, whose mission is to create a model system of universal access to quality health care for Madagascar via comprehensive health system strengthening in a region near Ranomafana National Park. Why the hell Madagascar? Why should anyone who could do a guest cameo on Billions spend his time trying to save lives on an Island 8,600 miles from home? Those are the questions I asked Jim in the second segment of our interview, and a big part of the reason this particular conversation was so special to me, and something I wanted to share during this season of giving. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored as always by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

This week my guest is my longtime friend and co-conspirator Jim Crowley, who most recently served as CEO of Skyhook Wireless. Before that was the CEO and President of BuyWithMe, and before that of Turbine, a massive multi-player gaming company that was acquired by Warner Bros. in 2010. Jim and I worked closely together at m-Qube before that, where he was our Chief Operating Officer and ran our gateway business while I was the GM of mobile advertising and interactive TV. Jim actually started his career as an Attorney at Hale and Dorr, a Boston law firm, from 1992 to 1994. He holds a JD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and a BA in Economics and Philosophy from Connecticut College in 1986. In today’s second segment Jim and I will talk about the importance and the challenges of business model innovation, something that provides a threadline through his entire career, and a challenge facing more and more entrepreneurial leaders as the rate of change and innovation increases around the world. While this episode is on the long side I think you’ll enjoy hearing it as much as I enjoyed making it. It’s a chance to get to know someone I consider one of the finest people in the startup ecosystem, not only for his individual talents and track record but because of the values of team and family that, as you’ll hear for yourself, originate in a childhood spent right in the middle of a whole mess of Crowley brothers and sisters in a house where everybody was expected to do their part. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

This week my guest is Bill Wiberg, co-founder, General Partner, and spiritual guide of G20 Ventures. Bill is an accomplished executive and 14-year venture investor passionate about technical innovation, and helping entrepreneurs win. He has extensive operating experience, culminating in his role as the President of Lucent Technology’s $5 billion Cellular and PCS Wireless Networks division. Prior to that he held senior management positions in product development and marketing at AT&T, Bell Labs, and Lucent, and made the change to venture investing in 2000. Bill serves on the Boards of G20 portfolio companies Mautic and Siemplify. He remains a GP at Advanced Technology Ventures, and serves on the Boards of Great Point Energy, Rive Technology, Silicor Materials, Oasys Water and Aquion Energy. He earned an M.B.A. from Columbia University, an M.S. from Stanford University, and a B.S. from Cornell University. He and his wife and two daughters one of whom is also a recent graduate of Cornell - live in Wellesley. In today’s second segment I’ll ask Bill about the death of IT, exploring the implications of the rapid commoditization of the compute, networking, and storage technologies businesses large and small have used to differentiate themselves from competition for the last 60 years. We’ll explore what the coming generation of enterprise tech looks like from the centrality of enterprise data, AI, machine le arning and the evolution of voice technology from novelty to business value driver. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

If you are interested in marketing or learning about the real differences between gravy and marinara, this is the episode for you. We talked to Mike Troiano, the CMO at Actifio and a limited partner at G20 Ventures about all sorts of things (sauce and non-sauce related).  We did a live experiment trying to apply Mike's Magical Positioning Framework to our podcast.  Certainly, there are also games.  Enjoy. Also, please checkout http://www.givehope.us

Here's a special Mini Episode for you with the great Mike Troiano.  Mike is the CMO at Actifio and a limited partner at G20 Ventures.  Rather than describe it here, give a listen.  Mike talks about a new charity effort that he came up with called GiveHope.us - please check out the website. Adam, Matt, and a bunch of people in the local tech scene are already involved and you should be too. Stay tuned for the full conversation with Mike next week. Thanks for listening. givehope.us

This week my guest is Patrick MeLampy, co-founder of 128 Technology and that company’s Chief Operating Officer. With longtime partner Andy Ory, Patrick co-founded Acme Packet Inc. and served as its Chief Technology Officer, eventually taking the company public and selling to Oracle in a transaction valued at over $1.7 Billion. Patrick holds a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from Boston University. A great student of innovation, Patrick has accumulated 26 issued or pending patents, and has some very specific ideas to share on what keeps most people and companies from innovating, the subject of this week's second segment. ​ How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

This week my guest is Ram Sudireddy, pretty universally regarded as one of Boston's best engineers and entrepreneurs in the world of microprocessors. Starting as a UMass computer and electrical engineer, Ram realized his dream early to work at the legendary Bell Labs where he was the chief architect and lead designer for a number of highly complex ASICs. He left Bell Labs to found Siltek Corporation, which provided ATM and SONET design services for companies including Lucent, SGS Thomson, and Sun Microsystems. Through a series of successful acquisitions Ram ended up at Applied Micro, where he served as SVP, GM, and CTO managing a worldwide group of more than a thousand engineers. He founded Chil Semiconductor, acquired by International Rectifier in 2011 for 75 Million in cash. An active investor and angel, Ram also serves on the Dean's Council of the Harvard Divinity School. In Part II of our podcast this week we'll spend some time talking about Religion and Entrepreneurship, including Ram's thoughts on the role and importance of religious thinking and ethical responsibility for entrepreneurs. ​--​ How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ​of the Northeast's most accomplished ​entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.​..​​ ​People first. How Hard Can It Be is ​also ​sponsored by Actifio​. Actifio​ virtualizes​​ data ​the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ​to ​help customers enable the​ ​hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.​ ​Actifio​... ​Radically Simple.​

In this episode we talk to Mike Troiano, CMO at Actifio.

Our inaugural episode features my conversation with Bob Hower, Founding Partner of Boston-based G20 Ventures. Bob is a 13-year VC vet twice named to the Forbes "Midas List," having led investments in great ideas and great teams including Acme Packet (APKT, acquired by Oracle), AppIQ (acquired by HP), Channel Advisor (ECOM), Actifio, [x+1] (acquired by Rocket Fuel), Evergage and Fuze. Learn Bob's story growing up in New Jersey, why he loves Hamburger Helper, and his unlikely journey from pulling drywall to venture capital. This week's second segment features Bob's thoughts on the changing face of venture capital, the innovations driving it and the shifting landscape that led to the creation of G20 ventures.

In this episode, we talk with Ash Ashutosh (@ashashutosh), CEO of Actifio a copy data virtualization company. Howard met up with Ash at TechFieldDay11 (TFD11) a couple of weeks back and wanted another chance to talk with him.  Ash seems to have been around forever, the first time we met I was at a former employer and he … Continue reading "34: GreyBeards talk Copy Data Management with Ash Ashutosh, CEO Actifio"

In this episode, we talk with Ash Ashutosh (@ashashutosh), CEO of Actifio a copy data virtualization company. Howard met up with Ash at TechFieldDay11 (TFD11) a couple of weeks back and wanted another chance to talk with him.  Ash seems to have been around forever, the first time we met I was at a former employer and he … Continue reading "34: GreyBeards talk Copy Data Management with Ash Ashutosh, CEO Actifio"

In episode 21, The Gumbo interviews Abdul Altamimi, Founder/CTO to discuss how all data is not created equal and RestorePoint’s Data Profile methodology.

The first rule of branding is to nail down a solid story. But what if your story is extremely complicated and technical? That's the situation Mike Troiano walked into when he become the CMO of Actifio. His solution? Forget the technicalities - instead, pretend you're talking to a 12-year-old about what your company does. Mike also talks with us about some of the challenges he's run into and the specific growth tactics he's seen work along the way.

In the Thirteenth episode of Data Protection Gumbo, we introduce Brian Reagan with Actifio Inc.

It's not just the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon that lean on a massive and growing corpus of data, today every company is a data-driven company. In this world, access to data -- and how you manage it -- is what matters, says Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. In this segment of the pod, we get in the weeds with Ashutosh and a16z's Peter Levine on how this data-driven world is changing the technology infrastructure that is the engine behind it, and the companies that use it. Ashutosh and Levine also discuss ramping sales teams, going international, and what's driving the timing of IPOs – or really the lack of IPOs. Finally, Ashutosh offers his four-legged response to being referred to as a “unicorn.”