Podcasts about corp dev

Scott Clawson, CEO of Culligan International Scott Clawson turned Culligan from a legacy water treatment business into a $3.3 billion global platform operating in over 50 countries—powered by a programmatic M&A engine that has executed 300+ acquisitions. In this episode, he sits down with Kison to share exactly how that machine works. From beachside inspiration to building a decentralized deal engine, Scott walks us through his journey scaling Culligan's strategy with support from capital partners like Advent and BDT MSD. He breaks down how to structure pipeline teams, create incentive systems that align corporate and local interests, and keep integration from becoming a bottleneck. If you want a real-world blueprint for high-volume, globally scaled M&A that doesn't break the business—this episode delivers. Things you will learn: How to build and scale a decentralized M&A engine across geographies The critical role of strategic focus, pipeline ownership, and integration playbooks Why cultural alignment and seller trust drive long-term M&A success What to look for when choosing a private equity partner—and how they can unlock growth ________________________ Sponsored by DealRoom—where M&A chaos meets its match. Still stuck in spreadsheet hell? DealRoom helps corporate development teams take control—streamlining diligence, syncing integration, and eliminating the back-and-forth.

Henry Ward, CEO and Co-founder at Carta,   M&A has become a critical tool for companies to stay competitive in today's fast-changing market. But success in acquisitions now requires more than just speed—it demands a strategic approach that aligns with long-term goals and adapts to industry shifts.   In this episode of the M&A Science Podcast, Henry Ward, CEO and Co-founder of Carta, shares his insights on how businesses can refine their M&A strategies to thrive in an evolving corporate landscape.   Things you will learn: • Building the case for actionability • How to convince founders to sell • Valuing high-growth companies • Bounded vs. unbounded acquisitions • Balancing disciplined acquisitions with opportunistic ventures   ******************* This episode is sponsored by Grata. Grata is the leading platform for private market dealmaking. With innovative AI and diligence-grade data, Grata makes it easy to find and evaluate targets from the outside looking in. Win more with Grata.   This episode is also sponsored by DealRoom AI, the latest innovation from DealRoom designed specifically for M&A professionals. DealRoom AI automates the analysis and extraction of key information from due diligence documents, empowering teams to save up to 80% of their time on document analysis and focus on what really matters—closing the deal.  Ready to streamline your M&A process? Visit dealroom.net today.   ******************* Episode Timestamps 00:00 Intro 06:30 First failed acquisition story 09:13 Lessons learned during early deals 14:06 Building the case for actionability 16:31 Convincing founders to sell 26:06 Valuing high-growth companies 28:26 Bridging valuation gaps 31:48 Acquihires and product tuck-ins 35:39 Bounded vs. unbounded acquisitions 40:40 Lessons from unbounded M&A deals 44:22 Strategic capital allocation 46:33 Evaluating pipelines and allocating resources 48:10 How to make successful Corp Dev team and CEO relationships 50:25 Integration expectations from stakeholders 53:31 Thoughts on international expansion 56:02 Craziest thing in M&A

I spent some time with my friend Milind Shah, who leads Strategy and Digital Solutions at Elevance Health, and he drops wisdom and insights on the state of transformation in healthcare and the role of digital and AI. Take a listen, Milind blends business insights with technology applications and goes really deep in some areas! About Milind: Milind has been in the healthcare industry for over 15 years now and truly enjoys having the opportunity to be a part of having an impact on the industry and truly leaving a legacy. He currently leading up Strategy & Solutions for Carelon Digital Platforms, supporting the overall vision of transforming the company, with a focus on Digital products & solutions focusing on both the Member and Provider. He is responsible for partnering across the enterprise to define the overall Digital focus aligned to the Enterprise strategic priorities, driving Carelon growth/commercialization, and identifying acceleration opportunities through strategic partnerships, while also partnering with Corp Dev on M&A opportunities. A lot of his focus currently is partnering across the Enterprise on areas like transformation through AI and looking at opportunities to leverage the robust “ecosystem” that is being invested in to help accelerate impact at scale for Elevance Health. Throughout his career, Milind has built and led teams that focus on Transformation, Innovation, and Strategy with an emphasis on Growth Strategy, M&A, Post Merger Integration, and Disruptive/Exponential Product and he's had some great opportunities to do things like running Innovation Studios at Salesforce to being a part of the Senior Leadership team at Humana to help with several of their transformation initiatives as the company moved to focusing on their Growth Strategy.   Find him at: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milinds/

Explore the insightful podcast episode featuring Veena Lakkundi, SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development at Rockwell Automation. Discover her expertise in industrial innovation, digital transformation, and the future of the digital industry. Gain valuable insights into the key trends shaping the industry and learn how Rockwell Automation is enabling its customers and partners to lead the way.

Joe Metzger, Managing Director at 777 Partners Craving for fresh, actionable M&A insights? Dive into the M&A Science Fall Summit this Nov 8th! Unlock secrets on integration, valuations, talent retention, and more from top M&A minds. It's all the ‘how-tos' you need, and it's FREE! Secure your spot at mascience.com. Episode Timestamps 00:00 Intro 05:02 Transitioning from Corporate Development to Private Equity 08:59 Corporate Development role vs Private Equity role 12:10 Seeking employment opportunities 16:16 The efficient frontier concept 20:06 Are you happier in private equity than in corporate development? 24:17 How to negotiate employment offers 26:48 Other things to negotiate in employment agreements 30:47 How to land a PE role 33:34 Advice to those considering transitioning between Corp Dev and Private Equity 34:52 How to transition to a PE role from a VC and M&A role 36:03 Craziest thing in M&A  

All Paul Graham essay's, brought to life in audio format. This is a third party project, independent from Paul Graham, and produced by Wondercraft AI.

I would like to give a shout-out to Jeremy as I had an absolute blast visiting with him about Freyr Battery and their new U.S. division. My first interview with Tom Jensen, while he was at the headquarters in Norway, was an eye-opener. While we understand that renewables and a weak grid require storage for stabilization, I have not been a big fan due to the impact of the huge batteries on the environment as they are disposed of. Well, the new technology developed by Freyr Battery has fixed one of my biggest concerns, and in fact, almost every objection I have to large storage projects, Tom was able to address. So it made sense that we got an update from Jeremy as the new president of U.S. Operations. I mean it was a blast, as we got some great updates on the huge job numbers in the U.S., the use of the IRA, and coordinating investors for the U.S. market as well. As Freyr continues down the right road, please watch their new technology as they remain nimble enough to make the changes for the good of the environment and good-paying jobs. Thank you Jeremy for stopping by the podcast. Please let me know if you have any updates in the future that we need to know about. - Stu Please follow Jeremy Bezdek on his LinkedIn HERE.00:00 - Intro00:50 - Talks about Jeremy Bezdek`s Promotion and a little background about him01:33 - Tell us about the new plant that you're raising money for tell us about what's going on there04:11 - Talks about Freyr being able to recycle Batteries06:27 - Reusing what you got is kind of important for cost saving for investors.08:22 - The importance of the I.R.A. in looking at the storage to help offset that is what brought Freyr to the U.S.? Or what prompted Norway to get interested in the U.S. storage market?11:23 - How is the storage house for taking a look at energy security from either physical or even cyber-attacks? What do you guys got going on on the security front?13:43 - As an investor looking at storage, does the way the financial market in the U.S. for electric generation to consumers make it more attractive to battery storage?16:08 - Talks about energy storage and the importance of having a battery system as an insurance measure for ensuring a balanced and reliable energy supply.19:14 - How many years is an ROI on a storage unit if you're paying X number cents less on something like that when you're out there as the president of the U.S. for Freyr, do you get the ROI calculations out and get your crayon and your finance going there?21:49 - Do you guys have some stuff coming around the corner?25:18 - Talks about the Financial aspects on looking for investors and the tax advantage which is critical27:51 - So if there were 38 whatever site you had, what was the worst hotel you had to stay in while you were traveling around?29:57 - What is the first for the next quarter? What are your targets again for next year?32:15 - How are you going to be directed at the rest of the world? Because we talk to the U.S. Where are you going in the rest of the world with all this?34:36 - How do people get a hold of you?36:47 - Outro

Conor McKenna is a partner at LUMA Partners, the leading investment bank focused on digital media and marketing. They've led some of the most notable M&A transactions in the space. They're also famous for their LUMAscapes, which everyone from executives to students use to understand digital media and marketing ecosystems. At LUMA, Conor works across a range of focus areas including Ad Tech, CTV, and emerging trends in Commerce Media and Digital Audio. You can find Conor at: Twitter: @conorjmckenna LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conor-mckenna-7a079125/ LUMA Partners: https://lumapartners.com/  LUMA's 2023 State of Digital: https://lumapartners.com/presentations/state-of-digital-2023/  Use Bitcoin Video: https://lumapartners.com/funny-business/use-bitcoin/ 

David Hindley, VP of Corp Dev at Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK) This episode is sponsored by the M&A Science Academy, DealRoom, and FirmRoom.  To join our growing online community of M&A practitioners, visit https://www.mascience.com/academy. Don't forget to use the code “podcast” at checkout.  Ready to take your M&A to the next level with software made to manage each stage of the deal process? See how DealRoom can facilitate your next deal at https://www.dealroom.net. FirmRoom provides 80% cost savings over VDRs that bill by page and delivers a far better user experience to boot. Sign up in under 2 minutes by going to https://www.firmroom.com Episode Timestamps 00:00 Intro 05:00 The Evolution of M&A Functions 06:48 Deal experience as a Banker vs. Corp Dev 15:04 Leading an evolving M&A function 16:13 How the strategy evolved  18:07 Scoring opportunities 19:28 Speeding up the evolution for efficiency 21:31 Working with functional leads 22:29 Aligning the functions 24:10 Business Units 25:08 Corporate Development structure 27:57 Accountability 29:11 Working with integration folks 32:41 Evolution of the governance model 33:56 Success metrics 35:42 Retaining deal learnings 37:04 The hiring process 40:19 Lessons learned 41:26 Craziest thing in M&A  

Michael Farlekas is the CEO at E2open Have someone in mind that would be perfect to help build out a new on-demand talent service line at M&A Science? Reach out to Kison at kison@mascience.com   EPISODE TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Introduction 02:24 Background 04:58 14 transactions without a dedicated Corp Dev team 08:47 Networking and scoring the deals 14:34 The hunting part 20:45 Restructuring the business for faster integration 22:04 Approach to due diligence 24:10 Key things to look at pre and post-LOI 25:15 Considering the culture and the people aspect 27:34 Integration 30:20 Budgeting Integration cost 32:19 Go-to-Market Integration 34:14 Acquiring away from the core 36:13 Keys to success 37:38 Go-To-Market Framework 39:54 Advice for first-time acquirers 44:33 Craziest thing in M&A  

Diskutier mit uns & der Community auf Discord: https://discord.gg/9AyzUEWpgBAbonniere unsere wöchentlichen Espresso: https://futureweekly.substack.com/Schau dir den Podcast mit Video auf Youtube an: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAJ6dUsMbF8-PeQSdTMbgvgFolge uns auf Social Media:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/futureweekly/Twitter: https://twitter.com/future_weeklyLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/49159750/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/futureweekly --- Du hast Feedback, Ideen, Moonshots oder Predictions zu den heutigen Themen? Schick uns ein Soundbite an podcast@austrianstartups.com und werde ein Teil der nächsten Episode. ---Redaktion & Produktion: Maximilian Blazek, Alberto Wimmer, Lisa Denise Reiss, Maximilian Geyer, Tjaša Ornik---Musik (Intro/Outro): www.sebastianegger.com

3D and virtual reality have become the new trends in conducting business and providing experiences to people. The concept of metaverse is gaining momentum, however, holds a lot of misconceptions around it. What does a metaverse mean? What does it offer? We have your queries cleared in today's discussion with Alvin Wang Graylin. [00:36] - About Alvin Wang Graylin Alvin is the China President of HTC. He is the Global VP of corporate development at HTC. Alvin is also the President of VRVCA, and the vice-chairman of IVRA. He has been awarded, recognized, and felicitated several times. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tbcy/support

Veena Ramaswamy, Head of Corporate Development at Lemonade (NYSE: LMND)  Executing acquisitions without a dedicated function is highly inefficient and results in failed deals. Companies should not purely rely on inbound opportunities, and need strategic teams dedicated to sourcing deals.  In this episode of the M&A Science Podcast, Veena Ramaswamy, Head of Corporate Development at Lemonade, discusses how to create a corporate development function. Liked today's episode? Unlock over 60 courses taught by top-tier M&A practitioners by joining the M&A Science Academy. Use code “academy20%” on the sign-up page for a 20% discount, available on either monthly or annual plans. https://www.mascience.com/academy Want to learn about upcoming interviews, events, and industry trends? Sign up for our weekly newsletter. https://www.mascience.com/newsletter-signup  This episode is sponsored by the M&A Science Academy. Check out corporate training plans to connect your team with M&A knowledge straight from the best in the industry. They'll also gain access to the entire M&A Science community. For information on group plans, visit https://ma-science.webflow.io/podcast-commercial.

Corporate Development (Corp Dev) is the group at a corporation responsible for strategic decisions to grow and restructure its business, establish strategic partnerships, and/or achieve organizational excellence. The purpose of Corp Dev is to create opportunities for the company through actions such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A), divestitures, and deals that leverage the value of the company's business platform. There are several things that can be amazing about buying and selling companies: The potential for financial gain: Buying and selling companies can be a lucrative business, as successful transactions can result in significant financial returns for the parties involved. The opportunity for growth and expansion: Acquiring another company can provide a business with access to new markets, customers, products, and technologies, allowing it to expand and diversify its operations. The chance to create value: By identifying and executing on strategic acquisitions, corporate development professionals can help a company create value for its shareholders and stakeholders. The potential to make a positive impact: Buying and selling companies can also have a positive societal impact, as it can lead to the creation of new jobs and the transfer of resources and expertise to areas where they are needed. The thrill of the deal: The process of buying and selling companies can also be exciting and challenging, as it requires strategic thinking, negotiation skills, and the ability to navigate complex legal and regulatory environments. If you're interested in learning more, please subscribe and leave us a review, let us know how we can prepare better content for you and more intriguing discussions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Orthlieb, VP and Head of Corp Dev at LinkedIn The M&A can be highly inefficient, and inefficiency can lead to failed deals. However, some practitioners have figured out how to increase deal success using new work methods. For example, some practitioners have turned to Linkedin as a different way to approach deal origination.  In this episode of the M&A Science Podcast, Benjamin Orthlieb, Vice President and Head of Corporate Development at Linkedin, discusses Linkedin's bottoms-up deal origination model. Liked today's episode? Unlock over 60 courses taught by top-tier M&A practitioners by joining the M&A Science Academy. Use code “academy20%” on the sign-up page for a 20% discount, available on either monthly or annual plans. https://www.mascience.com/academy Want to learn about upcoming interviews, events, and industry trends? Sign up for our weekly newsletter. https://www.mascience.com/newsletter-signup  If you're a head of corporate development and looking to build up a world-class M&A team, reach out to me at kison@mascience.com. This episode is sponsored by DealRoom: faster diligence and integration in one combined process. See how DealRoom produces more value in less time by going to www.dealroom.net

Tanner Philp is the Head of Operations and Corporate Development at Code. Code is a not-for-profit organization building a new crypto wallet with Kin. Tanner has been involved with Kin since its inception. Prior to Code, Tanner was at Kik Inc., who helped launch Kin, and helped drive the evolution of the technology stack that Kin runs on today, going from Ethereum, to Stellar, to the Kin Blockchain, to Solana.In this conversation, we talk about Tanner's start as an early employee at Kik, growing Kik to 500 million users, the spark behind Kik points and the genesis of Kin. We talk about his early conversations with the Solana team, the process of identifying Solana as a viable blockchain for Kin and his early perspective on the introduction of fees for Solana. We then spend some time talking about Code, their joining of the Blockchain Association and his work with in-app buy module partners. Finally, we talk about his perspective on Kin becoming money.Relevant Links:https://www.getcode.com/https://twitter.com/getcodehttps://tannerphilp.com/crypto/https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/05/22/fed-up-with-its-fork-of-stellar-kin-is-looking-to-move-onto-solana/https://forums.solana.com/t/solana-outage-perspective-from-a-developer/2871Official Merch Store The official merch store of The Kin Show.

Sreepathy Viswanathan, Chief Corporate Development Officer, HGS Healthcare  (HGS.NS) An M&A transaction can be an expensive mistake, and you can waste a lot of time and money if you pursue a transaction without a solid M&A strategy.  On the other hand, a solid strategy allows you to pick the right targets and pursue them proactively.  In this episode of the M&A Science Podcast, Sreepathy Viswanathan, Chief Corporate Development Officer, HGS Healthcare, who has 25 years of experience in Corp Dev, talks about how to build a great M&A strategy.  Things you will learn in this episode: - The Importance of M&A strategy - How to shape your M&A strategy - The difference between M&A strategy and corporate strategy - The integration's role in strategy  - How relationships affect M&A deals To join our network of M&A practitioners and sign up for our newsletter, go to mascience.com.

If you're a parent, you've probably had this experience many times: Your young child has a high fever, and maybe a sore throat, but you don't know exactly what's wrong. Is it a bacterial infection, in which case an antibiotic might help? Or is it a viral infection, in which case, you just have to wait it out? The symptoms of bacterial and viral infections are often the same, and most of the time, even a doctor can't tell the difference. Viral infections are more common, but sometimes, the doctor will prescribe an antibiotic anyway, if only to help the parents feel like they're doing something to help. But what if doctors didn't have to guess anymore? What if there were a fast, easy blood test that a doctor could run in their own office to look for biomarkers that discriminate between bacterial and viral infections? Well, that's the seemingly simple problem that a company called MeMed has been working on solving for 13 years now. Recently MeMed's first testing product got approval from the FDA, and now the company is finally beginning to roll out it out commercially in the US. And here today to tell us more about how it got built, how artificial intelligence fits into this picture, and how rapid diagnosis could change the practice of medicine, is MeMed's co-founder and CEO, Eran Eden.Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.7. Once you've finished, select "Send" or "Save" in the top-right corner. 8. If you've never left a podcast review before, enter a nickname. Your nickname will be displayed next to any reviews you leave from here on out. 9. After selecting a nickname, tap OK. Your review may not be immediately visible.That's it! Thanks so much.TranscriptHarry Glorikian: Hello. I'm Harry Glorikian, and this is The Harry Glorikian Show, where we explore how technology is changing everything we know about healthcare.If you're a parent, you've probably had this experience many times: Your young child has a high fever, and maybe a sore throat, but you don't know exactly what's wrong. Is it a bacterial infection, in which case an antibiotic might help?Or is it a viral infection, in which case, you just have to wait it out?The symptoms of bacterial and viral infections are often the same, and most of the time, even a doctor can't tell the difference.Viral infections are more common, but sometimes, the doctor will prescribe an antibiotic anyway, if only to help the parents feel like they're doing something to help.But what if doctors didn't have to guess anymore? What if there were a fast, easy blood test that a doctor could run in their own office to look for biomarkers that discriminate between bacterial and viral infections?Well, that's the seemingly simple problem that a company called MeMed has been working on solving for 13 years now. Recently MeMed's first testing product got approval from the FDA, and now the company is finally beginning to roll out it out commercially in the US.And here today to tell us more about how it got built, how artificial intelligence fits into this picture, and how rapid diagnosis could change the practice of medicine, is MeMed's co-founder and CEO, Eran Eden.MeMed has a growing office in Boston, but I reached him at the company's first office in Haifa, Israel.Harry Glorikian: Eran, welcome to the show.Eran Eden: Thank you very much for having me.Harry Glorikian: It's great to have you here, I know that there's a significant time difference, so I appreciate like but it still looks like it's really bright and shiny out there right now. So what time is it in in Israel right now?Eran Eden: Five o'clock in the evening,Harry Glorikian: It's five o'clock. All right. Well, you guys have a lot more sun than we do anyway because we're in the middle of winter, but absolutely.Eran Eden: So this, here, is actually full of people as well. So yeah, you don't stop innovation as five o'clock in the evening.Harry Glorikian: So, you know, I was looking at your background and I mean, it's really it's interesting. It's diverse. You have a degree in biology, computer science, systems biology. You were first job was in computer vision data and analysis. But then all of a sudden you wound up starting a company that builds sensors and software for infectious disease. Like, how did you end up down this path, and do you feel like everything that you were doing until you got here was preparing you for it?Eran Eden: Well, I think... A great question. So I think, on the face of it, it obviously the background in data science, as you know, in molecular biology, obviously all of that relates to what we're doing is part of our day to day and it is a good starting point. But in reality, there's a very big gap between what I was trained to do and today, my every day, day to day activity. I would say that probably the most important training that I got during my days at the Weizmann Institute has got less to do with differential equations or molecular biology, and it was more about a story that my mentor, Professor Uri Alon, told me when I was three years into the PhD, about three years into the PhD, he asked me, Am I already in the cloud? He said what? And he said, are you in the cloud? I said, Well, what is the cloud? He said, Well, every PhD, every scientist, when you start your PhD, you know, you have you go you go and read the latest papers in Science and in Nature and you see how somebody starts at Point A, makes a hypothesis about point B and then take the straight line from A to B, and then you say, OK, I'm going to do the same thing and you start at Point A, the known. You shoot for the unknown and you start going and suddenly you hit a roadblock. And then you hit another one and another one. At a certain point, you'd really lose direction, which he called the cloud. You're in the cloud. And then if you have enough perseverance and luck, you find a point C which is not exactly where you thought you're going to end. You go there with, you know, your last energy. And if you're lucky enough, then you publish another paper about how you started at point A, went to point C and connected between the two dots with a straight line. And then you have another generation of PhDs that are asking themselves, Well, why am I the only one that's struggling? And that lesson about how to be in the cloud, how to deal with uncertainty, to deal with failure and still move on. That is probably more important in the training that I got to become an entrepreneur and CEO of a company than any specific scientific knowledge.Harry Glorikian: Ok. Yeah, no, I mean, trial and error, dusting yourself off, getting up and moving forward is, you know, my wife calls me crazy when I keep doing it, but I think you have to be a little on the edge to constantly keep repeating and being willing to fail and then stand up and then move on. Maybe it's a, I think I was reading a paper recently that said forgetting quickly is evolutionary, you know, a positive trait so that you forget what happened, that wasn't good and you keep moving forward. So. But let's talk about your company, MeMed, like you started that in, I believe, it was 2009. And what was your founding vision? I mean, if you can talk about what you and your co-founder did when you came up with this idea, I think you were both studying at the Technion at the time?Eran Eden: Yeah, so so he was studying at the Technion, M.D., Ph.D. I was studying at the Weizmann Institute and Data Science and Biology. And frankly, I would love to tell you a story about a vision, but it started with a game. I don't think we had the presumptions to have really something that would grow to what MeMed actually became today. It was playing. We both have had different reasons first of all for doing this. I can say that from my my end, it was probably a pretty big gap between the places, the caliber of where we were able to publish high impact journals. And when I was looking at myself in the mirror and I was asking myself, Is this actually going to have an impact on real patients? I couldn't really see the connection. There's another reason why I decided to found MeMed or co-found MeMed. That's probably off topic for today. We can take this on a beer some time when we meet face to face. But so it's first of all, it didn't start with a vision. It started with a scratch wanting to apply a some of the know how that we had had in converting between molecular immunology and data science, and to try to solve big, ugly problems that don't have a good solution in 21st century medicine and trying to find something pragmatic now rather than having it a eureka moment. You know, some pioneers describe a eureka moment where suddenly you have the best and coolest idea in vision. For us, it was darkness for almost a year rather than the eureka moment. It is was more like an evolutionary process. Trial and error. We tried a bunch of solutions to problems that didn't really exist until eventually we came up with what we want to work with, but again was no, no eureka, and the way that it actually started was again, Kfir was coming from from med school talking about this problem of of AMR, antimicrobial resistance and the problem of distinguishing between bacterial infections and given our different backgrounds, we said that's interesting. How can we apply immunology and then science to try to solve that, and then at that point, we formulated what was to become MeMed's vision. And MeMed is based on a very simple premise, a very simple idea. Our immune systems have evolved to tell us what's going on our bodies and all we do at MeMed is we listen to the immune response with biochemical sensors and machine learning and what have you. And we use that to translate or decode the immune system into insights that can potentially transform the way that we manage patients with acute infections and inflammatory disorders. The first problem we went after, because that's a very lofty goal, was potentially the most prevalent clinical indication on the face of this planet. A child with sniffles. Our elderly patients that coughs. Come to the doc, they have a fever. As a parent, you're many times hysterical, you're asking yourself, is it a bacterial infection or bowel infection. If it's a bacterium, antibiotics. It's a viral infection, chicken soup. And we said, Well, what if we can harness the immune system? What if we could measure or listen to the immune system in real time and use that to try to aid clinicians to tackle this seemingly simple problem? So the vision was listening to the immune response. In the first embodiment of the first problem we went after is this huge intractable problem, B versus V versus. Bacterial versus viral infection. To treat or not to treat.Harry Glorikian: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny, you say simple, and I've worked in this area for a long time and now not simple, not simple, but I've been watching dozens of companies over time try and tackle this problem, and everybody always comes at it and says, Yep, we should be able to do it. And I'm like, OK, that's a big hill, you know, to go and try and die on so. But you got FDA approval for your device in the U.S., and I want to talk about that later. But it did take 13 years. Like to, you know which parts of the process turned out to be harder or slower than you thought it would be?Eran Eden: Before I answer that, I just want a minor correction. I didn't say it's simple. I said it's a seemingly simple problem. In reality, it's an extremely difficult problem to go after. I think some of the most the biggest challenges that we have can be phrased in a very simple manner. But as you alluded to, yeah, it's an intractable problem. Bacterial and viral infections are often clinically indistinguishable. And it took us over a decade to take this from my idea on a napkin and grandmother's kitchen. That's where we found with no garage, it was Grandmother's Kitchen to what is considered a landmark FDA clearance that I think many folks did not believe we're going to be able to get this because it required so many innovations, not only on the technological side, but also on the regulatory side. And when you ask why only a decade? I think it's, we're very lucky that it took us only a decade and it sounds there, let's not call them challenge. Let's call it problems. Challenges is something I always envy the people that have challenges. We have problems with immune, and we work every day to solve those problems, right? So. So there's many problems or hurdles you have to go through. So there's first of all, you have to overcome some pretty big research issues, where do you find these hypothetical molecules of the immune response that go after bacteria and viruses. So research, then you learn the hard way.Eran Eden: The research is very different from development, and development is very different than product, and product is very, very, very different than manufacturing, and manufacturing is very different than regular regulation, and regulation is very different than reimbursement in marketing, which is a very different than commercial, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not good, it's not enough to excel in one thing. You have to really reinvent the wheel on several things, and as a company and as a team, reinvent yourself, and that's probably one of the biggest challenge, probably your biggest impediment to progress is yourself and your team because you might be an excellent data scientist, but you have to talk with the clinician. You might be an excellent clinician, but you have to talk the language of the molecular immunology. You might be very versed in all these three, but it's still not product and it's still not the graphical user interface. And how is that connected to manufacturing and really creating a culture or a team that can combine these seemingly very diverse elements within a small company. That is a very, very daunting and big task, and again, we frankly failed on multiple avenues there. We had to go back, we were in the cloud and we had to reinvent point C again and again and again. So, you know, we were in a very far position that we are today that we thought we were going to be at this stage.Harry Glorikian: So I'm going to ask at some point, you know, after this whole interview is I'm going to encourage you to write the next IVD book because everything you said is absolutely the way that I've seen it over time is, you know, having to bring all these pieces together is not trivial in our world. But let's step back here for a second for everybody that's listening, right? Talk a little bit about basic immune system biology and the, you know, technology behind your diagnostic system. So if someone presents with an inflammatory response, why is it so hard for doctors to destroying distinguish between the bacterial and viral infection?Eran Eden: Because bacterial and viral infections are clinically indistinguishable and you don't have to be an M.D. to to understand this. Intuitively, we know our kids so well. But still, you know, when they have a fever or runny nose, you know, we know that it's 80 percent, 85 percent a viral infection. But what if? What if there's a lingering bacterial infection? And it just it turns out that because of the clinical manifestation is very similar. It's really hard to figure it out. Not only children, also adults with suspected LRTI or a fever without sores, and even when we apply modern, I would say diagnostics, there's still a big gap that remains. So for example, when as a scientific community or a clinical community, when we approach this problem, we have tools at our disposal. A rapid strep test. A rapid influenza tests. Multiplex PCR. In today's world, I think everybody, even my grandmother is talking to me about the difference between rapid antigen tests suddenly becomes a really interesting topic over, you know, weekend dinners, culture. So there's technologies out there. And going back to your question, why is it still, why is there still a gap? And we've identified several things. The first one is probably the most trouble is time to results. Many of the clinical encounters, you want to have the solution here and now where whereas that technology that we have often provide solutions in hours and even days, and that's not always good.Eran Eden: That's one hurdle. Not the biggest one. The second one is that many times the infection site is inaccessible. Take, for example, otitis media, an ear infection or sinusitis or bronchitis or pneumonia. It's really hard to reach the infection side and therefore identify the pathogen. It's one in four patients in the most prevalent disease on Earth. That's really hard. Third, even if you use the best, most broad technology diagnostics to try to identify the bug, say a multiplex PCR. In more than 50 percent, five, zero percent of the cases, you're not be able to put your hands on any microorganism, but you still, as a clinician, have to make a decision. And lastly, there's the issue of colonization. So even if you're lucky, the infection that is readily accessible and you do get some sort of a virus, for example, that you detect, say, for example, an influenza or or let's take a rhinovirus, the rhinovirus is very prevalent in children. That's a problem. It's very prevalent in children. Even if you take seemingly healthy children in a very high percentage of those children, they're going to have a rhinovirus. So mere detection does not apply causality. All this complexity is sunk into this few minutes that the clinician basically needs to make a decision, and it's a really hard dilemma because it's hard to know to distinguish between the two and the ramifications could be quite significant.Harry Glorikian: So I know the answer to the question, but I'm going to ask it so you can explain it is: So who cares? I mean, I know that it's ineffective to treat a viral infection with antibiotics and that only you know, that only work against a bacteria, but you know. We've been doing a trial and error, so what's the downside of doing that?Eran Eden: So it's actually a pretty deep, it's a very deep question because there are several layers. You're right, this sometimes people actually say there's several layers to answering because the first one is, well, if you treat erroneously, with antibiotics, antibiotics, because of this uncertainty, there's a lot of antibiotics overuse that one of the consequences of this it drives anti microbial resistance, which basically means that the drugs don't work anymore. And if we continue on that path, we will potentially lose modern medicine because if you lose the potency of antibiotics, you cannot treat infants when they have an infection. Or an oncology patient that would succumb to a parasitic infection, or even yet have your wisdom tooth pulled out, because antibiotics won't be effective. And there's several quite influential studies that came out in the last few years. The last one actually in The Lancet came out two weeks ago portraying a world without antibiotics, which is, you know, we're seeing right now the consequences of COVID SARS-CoV2. Some might argue it's not a smaller problem. So that's and it has both clinical and health economic consequences. According to Jim O'Neill, over $100 billion by 2050 in lost GDP.Eran Eden: And. And it's a big number, right? It's a really, really big number. And maybe, maybe it's overly inflated and maybe it's conservative, but it's a big problem. The issue is that nobody cares. Sometimes the individual doesn't care because the doctor, right now, when he has a patient in front of him, he doesn't think about the masses. He thinks about the patient. So you might ask, well, what the doctor care. Why does the patient care? And it turns out that there is an angle on the personal level as well, not only the societal level. If you give erroneous antibiotics, you can drive anaphylactic responses. You can drive allergies, which have a toll. But then there's another element that people are less aware of. In addition to overuse, there's also simultaneously underuse. One in five patients that have a bacterial infection are not receiving antibiotics in time. There's much less publication on that. But it is a reality. And that also has consequences, including prolonged disease, duration and sometimes even morbidity and mortality. So it's a really delicate equation, right? You don't treat. And you don't want to get ... some countries overtreat, some undertreat. And again, at the end of the day, the day to day, it does have ramifications both from the patient and on the doctor.Harry Glorikian: You know, if we could accurately treat people right, I think there would be a whole host of issues that could get solved and a whole host of issues that wouldn't emerge because of overtreatment or treating the wrong people that you know, we could spend hours over a beer discussing the microbiome and allergies and all sorts of other consequences of doing this. [musical interlude]Harry Glorikian: Let's pause the conversation for a minute to talk about one small but important thing you can do, to help keep the podcast going. And that's leave a rating and a review for the show on Apple Podcasts.All you have to do is open the Apple Podcasts app on your smartphone, search for The Harry Glorikian Show, and scroll down to the Ratings & Reviews section. Tap the stars to rate the show, and then tap the link that says Write a Review to leave your comments. It'll only take a minute, but you'll be doing a lot to help other listeners discover the show.And one more thing. If you like the interviews we do here on the show I know you'll like my new book, The Future You: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help You Get Healthier, Stress Less, and Live Longer.It's a friendly and accessible tour of all the ways today's information technologies are helping us diagnose diseases faster, treat them more precisely, and create personalized diet and exercise programs to prevent them in the first place.The book is now available in print and ebook formats. Just go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and search for The Future You by Harry Glorikian.And now, back to the show.[musical interlude]Harry Glorikian: So your system, which is, I love, is a basic blood test, right? So the MeMed BV looks at three immune system proteins in the blood: TRAIL, IP 10 and CRP. So how are these proteins related to infection and how can measuring their levels tell you about the nature of the infection?Eran Eden: Ok, so. Each one of those proteins that you just mentioned plays a critical role in the immune response to different invaders, bacteria and viruses. What's special about this particular trio, is that they work really well as a team. Maybe if you take a step backward to identify them, we had to run for about four years what is arguably the largest prospective proteomic study ever to be conducted of the human response to acute infections. And start with a host of multiple tens of thousand proteins bioinfomatically and then down-select this eventually to three. And these three, while none of them is perfect in itself, they cover one another's blind spots. So let's go one level deeper. When we went on this, one of the things where we were surprised to find out that is a clinical community, we've been obsessed with the bacterial side of the equation. Every biomarker that you have in 21st century medicine, 20th and 21st century medicine, has been mostly predominantly upregulated in bacterial infection. Procalcitonin: bacterial infections, CRP: bacterial infections, white blood count: bacterial infections, absolute neutrophil count, which we use as part of routine day to day care: bacterial infections. What about the viral side of the equation? We couldn't find one that was used or cleared by FDA as part of 21st century medicine. The last. The reason the FDA cleared us, we actually just cleared the first viral protein ever to be cleared by FDA. And so we went on this fishing expedition and four years into the process, again, this was 2009-2013. We identified this trio. TRAIL Is a protein that shoots up in your bloodstream when you have a viral infection, whether it's a common influenza A, influenza B, parainfluenza or corona, and it has this very unique property that it goes down when you have a bacterial infection, why nobody really understands the reason. But it really creates a very dramatic full change because of this up and down type of a response. And the story there, there's a lot of interesting stories around TRAIL, but one of the ways mechanisms by which it does that it causes the cells that are infected by viruses to commit apoptosis. Cells suicide. And by that, protect the brethren cells. So that's one of the mechanisms that the body is using.Eran Eden: The second one is called IP 10, which is an interferon. This protein basically shoots up in your bloodstream if you have a general infection, and more so if you have a viral infection. It recently got a lot of headlines in the context of SARS-CoV-2 and hyperactivity of the immune response. It's also associated with lung injury, but a really interesting biomarker that plays a critical role there in clearance of infections. The third one is called C-reactive protein, that's been around for about 40 years. Goes up in bacterial. And the nice thing about them? They work as a team. So as I said, they're not perfect. So take, for example, CRP. It's reasonably OK after 48 hours. But because it takes it to about 48 hours to reach maximum level, but in the early phases, you have a blind spot. Whereas TRAIL, at time of symptom onset, it's already differentiated, so they cover one another. By the way, we didn't identify this. The computer identified that. This is a lot of insights that we had in hindsight when we were looking.Harry Glorikian: Yeah, that was going to be my next question, which is. You know, the the heart of the show is always like, you know, artificial intelligence and its whole basket of tools and biology. So how does machine learning come into this process? Is there some corpus of training data that shows that certain levels of these three proteins correlate? Or can you tell us, you know, how you developed that part of the system?Eran Eden: Absolutely. And I think again, I was teaching a machine learning at the Weizmann Institute over a decade ago before it was a sexy topic. You know, people are using the term machine learning and data science so often so frequent. I think what's important to say is that machine learning is part of the component technology, but there's hardcore immunology and molecular biology. So it's not just one technology that we're, you know, it's a it's a very high entry barrier because of that and adds to the complexity. So that's one thing, just to put machine learning in context. Where machine learning plays an important role here is two places: in the development and in the final product. In the development, there's a process of how do you find the optimal team of biomarkers that would give you the the best performance? And over there, there's a lot of activities around using publicly available data sets and and proprietary data sets and data analysis and statistical analysis and feature selection and find the right models, et cetera, et cetera, coming up with what is the right model. Some of these are more conventional tests. Some of these are more cutting edge tests in the final product. It basically uses what's called a supervised learning approach, which basically means the following. Imagine every problem in here, I'm going to be a little bit technical here. Imagine you have, let's say one feature. Say a viral biomarker. TRAIL. High levels, viruses, low levels, bacteria. You find some sort of cutoff that separates between the two. It was the most informative biomarker that we found.Eran Eden: Is it good? It's reasonably good, but there's no perfect biomarkers out there. We don't have them, nor do we believe they exist. Nor do we believe in unicorns, even though my daughter is trying to continually persuade me that there is one. Then you add another biomarker to that. Imagine that you have right now a two dimensional grid. And now suddenly, every patient is met this two dimensional coordinates and you have a cloud of bacterial and the cloud of viruses. And you find a line that separates the two. And then a third dimension and a fourth and so forth and so on. And eventually, the problem becomes how can I find this type of plane or hyper surface that separates between the cloud of bacteria and the cloud of viruses? This is the essence of the machine learning and the way you go about this. You train give it a lot of patients, a lot of data, and then you train the system. And the more data you have, the smarter it becomes. The same principle applies for doing diagnostics in oncology, span detection, computer vision and what have you. It's the same underlying, often similar underlying principles to try to solve many of these problems. So hopefully I was able to to simplify and somewhat exaggerate how this is actually working and where the AI plays here.Harry Glorikian: So what's that accuracy rate of the diagnosis from your system? And is there are certain things, let's say it's good at in certain things, it's maybe not so good at?Harry Glorikian: Yeah, absolutely. So so if you look at the overarching population, if you look at our pivotal FDA study, the AUC, the area under the operating curve, the entire population was 0.9 to 0.97 across different cohorts, which is considered very high. So that's the short answer. The more we see deeper level, it's there's obviously nuances across different populations. One of the things you have to show is what happens in children versus adults. Upper respiratory tract infections, lower respiratory tract infections, et cetera, et cetera. So we've shown a relatively consistent and robust response. That's how the system was developed. But there are, for example, certain viruses that we know that we perform less accurate. For example, adenoviruses. Adenoviruses are notoriously hard to to treat well. By the way, they're one of the most prevalent, for example, viruses in children, why? Because the immune response looks like a bacterial infection. For many, many reasons. So white blood count is going to be elevated. Procalcitonin is going to be elevated, CRP is going to be elevated and we're often going to overtreat with antibiotics. So if you look at our performance in that particular sub-cohort, our performance drops somewhat from, you know, a 0.90-something to maybe 0.89, but that's actually one of the viruses that we see the most added value because compared to standard of care, it's many times close to flipping a coin.Eran Eden: So even though our performance is eroded in this particular virus. The standard of care in this particular situation is particularly challenged, and it's almost 0.5, 06. so that's one example. There's multiple examples. We can study the immune response to pathogens again for almost a decade now. This is just one interesting anecdote. And I think just connecting this to the who cares question that you had. So here's an interesting case that we had a few weeks ago. A child, young, three years old, coming to a major medical center, not really sure if it's a bacterial or viral. Ran a PCR, came positive for adenoviruses and it looked a little bit bacterial. But yeah, OK. Adenovirus explains everything. Released home. Got a 99 score. 99 probability of bacterial infection. So they start to do additional follow up and then it eventually turned out to be a bacterial axis in the spinal cord of that particular child. It had to be mechanically removed. This is a very dramatic case. This is one of those potentially underused cases that could be very dramatic. This is very rare. It doesn't happen often. But again, it's hard. It's really, really tricky to distinguish between infections and we added this right now, this is how everything maps together to the adenoviruses and and to why we think this could be helpful.Harry Glorikian: So, you know, like I said earlier in the show, you know, you got FDA approval and granted 510K clearance back in September, which congratulations, that's a huge step. But you know, for everybody listening, what Gates does, does that open for you. What's the pathway to getting the device out into the market?Eran Eden: So as you said, first of all, you have to get the clearance, which I think took us almost five years working with FDA. FDA, by the way, we've worked with them extremely collaboratively and they've been instrumental in helping us form and shape, what's the methodology to actually prove something. We didn't talk about this? But how do you prove that absence or presence of bacterial viral infection in the absence of a true gold standard? So let's put that thing aside. We were able to work with FDA and come up with a methodology to do that. So now, what is required to take it to the next step? There's several things. The first one you need, and we didn't talk about this, you need a way to measure those biomarkers. You need a platform. Right, one of the challenges that we had is that in the early days, none of the big strategic players, the Roches, the Abbotts, the DiaSorins of the world were willing to bet on this because the risk were so high, as you alluded to in the beginning, the graveyard. And nobody got FDA clearance, so they basically they wouldn't. They were not willing to bet on us today. Some of them become partners and we're working with them. So it's, you know, there's been great development. But at that time, it was really hard. The platform is also challenged because some of the proteins are picograms, some are nanogram and some are micro per mil, which poses again the challenge from a technological perspective. Again, not going too much into the technology side, but we've been able to come up with a technology or a platform that can actually measure multiple proteins across almost a six to nine order of magnitude range. And so you have to have a platform and can do that in about 15 minutes right now, serum working in whole blood.Eran Eden: The second thing you need, you need obviously manufacturing capability, which is again, a different story, you have to manufacture the cartridge. The third thing you need is building the clinical evidence beyond, I mean, FDA's great, but you have to create what's called a clinical utility, real world evidence, what have you, working with peers. Work with partners or with clinicians working the societies. Publishing. Building a commercial team which we're right now established commercial team in the U.S. So there's multiple things. And probably last but not least, this is too big of a challenge to go at it by yourself. You need to have partners. Whether it's governments, the U.S. Department of Defense, the European Commission have funded this heavily and have been amazing partners, whether it's strategic partners, you can take it by yourself versus vs not one market. It's markets. You have patients in the wards and the EDs and the urgent care physicians' offices, retail clinics. No single player has enough of a presence in one platform that covers it all. So again, we've announced about a year ago, you know, the first partnership with DiasSorin, which has today almost a thousand installed installed across Europe and the US in these large automated immunoassay machines. And that's covering certain parts of the market that are overlapping or, sorry, that are complementary where we're going at. So that's a little bit of what needs to be done. But again, it's changing the boundaries of what what we've been doing so far, and that's always a it's always a challenge, but also an opportunity.Harry Glorikian: So you guys raised I believe it was $93 million, if I remember the number correctly, in new funding, which sort of really adds to the firepower of being able to take that next step, but. You know, can you can you envision a future where we get a solid diagnosis and an appropriate treatment plan, you know, quickly while you're in the doctor's office?Eran Eden: Oh, yeah.Harry Glorikian: That was the shortest answer you've given yet.Eran Eden: I think you can be much more radical. I think there's several things that are happening. There's two major discontinuities. There's a technological discontinuity. There's a regulatory discontinuity. And I'll actually add another one, which is there's a psychological discontinuity. The technology that we can do today that we have today, the tip of our fingers can do can provide so much valuable information that can help make better decisions. The regulatory framework has changed because of COVID, it's basically shattered a lot of things. And from a psychological perspective, I think there's a push to polarization, right? Both decentralization and centralization at the same time. And so I definitely see that happening. I think we can take this several step further. How can we take it from physician's office, also retail clinics and even further? And that will take time, obviously, because we're dealing here with some pretty, pretty deep questions. But I think the world across multiple fields and this is not different than anything else. I think it's definitely going in that direction.Harry Glorikian: Yeah, no, I mean, I was going to, you know, looking at what you've created and, you know, obviously first getting everybody on board, but then seeing how it can be deployed at a CVS or something like that, it could drum, you know, you could have a dramatic impact on how we manage patients. The whole antibiotic dynamic and maybe even relieving stress on the system so that, you know, it doesn't get overwhelmed by what your system may be able to sort of help get to a much faster, much more accurate answer too.Eran Eden: I wanted to say relieving stress from stressed mothers and fathers. But yeah, I agree with you also, relief. And by the way, as you start going from more centralized to decentralized, there's obviously additional workflow challenges. How do you make this simpler? There's regulatory bars that you have to meet. How do you go from a mod complex to a clear waived test that can actually go to those directions so that there's we still have we have work, there's work, work to be done. But I think we've been able to potentially break a glass ceiling in terms of getting the clearance. And now I think with that, there's going to be additional innovation that will come in both by us and others who are entering the space.Harry Glorikian: So. Just slightly moving to one side is like, how has MeMed responded to say, COVID-19? I think you guys have developed a test that runs on your platform and predicts how severe the infection will be. How does that test work? Did your previous work, you know, and also did your previous work like on the platform prep you for this virus? Just curious how it works and how you got there?Eran Eden: Absolutely so. So it always starts with the clinical question. I mean, many of us are technophiles, but at the end of the day it's about solving a real problem. And the problem here is the following. You have see SARS-CoV-2 positive patient presenting to the ED. And one of the questions that we have in mind is whether that patient is going to deteriorate or not. Do we escalate treatment or not? And it's a real question, right? And the more you know, the more stress the system is feeling because, you know, because of the the peak of a pandemic, the more important that is. So we said, Well, how can we harness the technology? Is the framework that we created host response in general, right? The biomarkers we've developed, the platform that we have, the Biobank and what have you. And so and how can we take a process that maybe took 10 years and now collapsed into something maybe that's 10 months? How do you get a 10 X? And and first of all, with amazing partners around the globe, you start running huge clinical studies to basically collect patient samples. We also use again information from the public domains, our own repositories, our own previous data because from many perspectives. Sars-cov-2 is very interesting, but guess what? Similar to SARS and to other types of severe viruses, there's differences, but also commonalities.Eran Eden: So we use a lot of the bioinformatics, the previous data samples. Current data samples. The know how and the platform that's readily available right now. They can measure basically anything to collapse this and develop. This is probably just got clearance in Europe that basically allows to take a snapshot, the main response again in real time. Give you a risk stratification regarding the probability of a patient to experience severe outcome defined as ICU level of care and mortality within two weeks. Again, it's only clear right now in Europe, not cleared in the U.S. and we view this also as a stepping stone going beyond just COVID severity to a general severity signature. So what you do, both B versus V and severity, what if you could do it in the same cartridge or what have you? So I think what's what's really interesting, we build here this core technology. We went after one big problem, B versus V, but now that you have that, you're like a child in a candy store. There's many more things that you can do. And rather than taking you a decade, you can start to collapsing things because there's a lot of there's a lot of. Resources that you can now leverage or platform that you can leverage, so that's a story around MeMed and COVID severity.Harry Glorikian: Yeah, platforms are wonderful in that way, right, that I like a platform more than I like, like a, you know, sharpshooter bullet, from an investment perspective. Thinking about it that way. But so. You recently got COVID. We were supposed to talk like over a week ago, and I, you know, we had to postpone it. Did you use the test on yourself? I mean, if you did, like did it work the way you thought it was going to?Eran Eden: Yeah, so so yeah, I got my I got it from my daughter. We went on a trip and five out of five family members got infected. So yes, it was at least from our small experiment. It was very infectious. We got the Omicron. Actually we didn't have symptoms, apart from the fact that I think it just jacked up the energy level of my kids. So before we talk about running around the house and thank God, you know, my wife didn't didn't kill any one of them. So there's no casualties from this, from this infection. So because we didn't have symptoms, we didn't go to the ED. It was not relevant. You have to have SARS-CoV-2 symptoms. So in that case, no, no, no need. I mean, we were pretty much hunky dory. But what I can tell you is that on the B versus V. Again, it's potentially bacterial and viral infections are potentially the most prevalent indication in children. And my children, those little incubators of bacteria and viruses, are no exception. So I had a chance to use the technology on my kids many, many times, including last time was about a month and a half ago, and my eldest daughter, who is four, before going to a business trip. And my wife is asking, is it a bacterial infection? I said, I don't know. She spits on me. The shoemaker is going barefoot. So we ran it. It was a viral infection. No antibiotics. Went back to school. So and I got a lot of brownie points with my wife and my mother in law, which is obviously always very, very strategic.Harry Glorikian: That's that's a good one. That's always helpful. Exactly.Eran Eden: So we're actually using this quite often in our families as well. And it's very very gratifying.Harry Glorikian: Interesting. Excellent. So now you guys are, you know, I believe you have an office in Haifa, which I remember as being beautiful and hilly and wonderful food, and then you have Boston. You know. What are the strengths of being in these two locations. What happens in Boston that can't happen in Haifa and vice versa?Eran Eden: Well, again, we're going after a global problem and you have to have a global team to have a global perspective. Whatever you have in San Francisco today, you have tomorrow in Shanghai and the day after that in Tel Aviv. So you have to look at this from a global perspective, number one. Number two, since the US is the primary market, as I said, we have to build a very significant presence in the U.S.. Why specifically Boston? Very talented pool of, a pool of talent that's very wide in the domain. There's a big overlap in terms of hours between Boston and Tel Aviv, so you can grow one unified team. And that's basically, that's where we're basically building our U.S. headquarter. And the team is quite complementary. Again, we've we've recruited by now roughly 25 to 30 folks, folks with a very strong background, both IBD, Troy Battelle, formerly Thermo Fisher, who's buying commercial for microbiology in the Americas. Fred, who is running Corp Dev, from bioMérieux. Again, another large multinational, Jim Kathrein was former head of sales for BioFire. Again, not sure if your audience is familiar with but and so forth and so on.Eran Eden: And Will Harris was running our marketing global marketing, is ex-Amazon and then before that, 15 years in IBD. So it's really bring here a blend of, we call this affectionately an anti disciplinary team. We don't care about disciplines, we care about solving big, ugly problems. So you have to bring the IBD experts with the clinicians, with the folks and the big data science side or in the molecular immunology and the manufacturing. And nobody knows, single location has all the know how, no single location has the recipe because frankly, we're doing here something new. There is no real tech like this. And so bringing those this pool of talent, I think has really helped us, propels us moving forward. And it is the bridge to be able to to launch in the U.S., a U.S. very focused, commercially marketing product where a lot of the I would say more of the molecular immunology data science team is more in Israel. I'm simplifying and exaggerating. That's some of the team.Harry Glorikian: So the last funding round, was that the argument to the investors, like we need to hire these types of people to help blow this out? What was what was the rationale for that last round?Eran Eden: So, so basically three things. Number one, commercialization. U.S. Europe, Israel. That's our initial focus and then the rest of the world. Second is product pipeline, so we talked about bacterial versus viral infection and a bit about COVID severity. But what would you do if you had a blank canvas and these platforms to go after the new response to measure the immune response? What additional big problems would you go after? So it turns out that there's some pretty interesting stuff in. We're working on additional activities. So that's the second thing product pipeline. And the third thing is a scaling manufacturing. So as I think people have a new appreciation for manufacturing and supply chain during COVID times, it's a really big topic and critical for success. So this these are the three major elements that we raise the funds for.Harry Glorikian: No sounds I've I've been I've seen this rodeo a few times, so yes, I understand completely. So, well, you know, especially because I come from the diagnostic world and I can't wish you enough success because we need more products like this out on the market to help us manage patients and help give physicians better information so that they can make better decisions, right? More informed decisions than just, you know, looking at a patient and trying to figure out what's going on. So I wish you incredible success and I'm, you know, great. Great to have you on the show.Eran Eden: Thank you so much for for the kind invitation. Enjoyed our discussion.Harry Glorikian: Thanks.Harry Glorikian: That's it for this week's episode. You can find a full transcript of this episode as well as the full archive of episodes of The Harry Glorikian Show and MoneyBall Medicine at our website. Just go to glorikian.com and click on the tab Podcasts.I'd like to thank our listeners for boosting The Harry Glorikian Show into the top three percent of global podcasts.If you want to be sure to get every new episode of the show automatically, be sure to open Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player and hit follow or subscribe. Don't forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And we always love to hear from listeners on Twitter, where you can find me at hglorikian.Thanks for listening, stay healthy, and be sure to tune in two weeks from now for our next interview.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jackie Miller, Program Director of the Corporate Innovation Fellowship at On Deck. She's also a former corporate innovator at Chobani and Chanel. Jackie and I talk about the ups and downs of corporate innovation and the benefits that a community of peers can bring to helping both startups and corporates navigate today's fast-paced world of change. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast, to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Jackie Miller, Program Director of the Corporate Innovation Fellowship at On DeckBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Jackie Miller. She is the Program Director of Corporate Innovation Fellowship at On Deck. Which is an accelerator for startups and careers. Welcome to the show, Jackie.Jackie Miller: Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show to talk about this amazing On Deck Program focused on Corporate Innovation. You've got some heavy chops in corporate innovation yourself. I know a lot of our audience is familiar with the startup scene and what's going on in corporate innovation.And they may have even heard about On Deck. Because I know over the last year on-deck has been putting on a variety of different accelerator types of programs. And now this move into corporate innovation. Maybe start off with telling us a little about what is On Deck? Jackie Miller: Yeah, absolutely. I was really excited to discover it existed. To your point, like working in the corporate innovation space, you're always a few steps away or immersed in like the startup ecosystem and world.But I think that what On Deck is doing is something really unique and special. On Deck was founded by Erik Torenberg. He was early, employee number one at Product Hunt. And later founded Village Global VC firm. So, really immersed in this space. And started On Deck or the vision for On Deck as a series of live dinners for founders, founders in between, people, ambitious people, thinking about their next move. And started with some like in-person IRL dinners that quickly kind of grew outside of San Francisco. And clearly was filling a need. Then in the pandemic, really accelerated this community to become a virtual global one. Right? The idea that there was such demand for this leveling up. Finding your next thing. And connecting with the right people, and ideas. So that really created the On Deck momentum that has brought us to today.It started with founders. A community for founders. And then quickly grew from there. So, we raised our Series A about a year ago, and now we have a startup accelerator. Yes. Which we announced recently. But we see ourselves as, like you said, as a career accelerator. So, there are programs for Chiefs of Staff, Product Managers, Designers, Marketers, Business Development, and now Corporate Innovation. Sort of designed to help people, whether you're starting a company or joining a company or kind of growing an existing company. How do you level up? How do you connect with your peers? And how do you find the safe space for digging into some of those ideas? And this is exactly the kind of thing I think, as you and your listeners probably know, could add a ton of value to corporate innovators.Brian Ardinger: I've followed On Deck from the beginning. Has a lot of different overlap with some of the audience as far as things that we talk about as trends. Whether it's no code or podcasts, or angel investing. And all these types of multitalented types of people that have this intersection of building things.And so, when you came to me and said, hey, we've got this corporate innovation fellowship spinning up, what do you think of it? I'm super excited to be part of it. And why is there a need for a corporate innovation fellowship versus anything else that's out there? Jackie Miller: You know, as you mentioned, I spent some time doing this at Chanel, spent the last few years in this space. And will probably be a surprise to no one that innovation in a corporate context can be really challenging. Right? The idea that every time I talk to people in this space. Both my colleagues at the time and my peers at other orgs. You quickly kind of realized that what people were looking for was moral support. Like this is almost envisioned as a support group, right? Like-minded builders who are navigating the same internal politics. Sometimes it's such a relief to hear. I was talking to someone the other day who described it as like, I feel like a unicorn in a forest. Find the other unicorns. Where they live and what they're doing. It's a really comforting and motivating, energizing feeling. And, you know, you mentioned following obviously the startup space. There sometimes it feels like we're drowning in startups, right? There's so many out there, but finding really good, vetted enterprise ready startups and having mutually beneficial outcomes with them is really hard too. As we all know, there's a big cultural difference there. So, there's a need for a better interface between corporates and startups.We know both sides want to work together. But more often than not, it's hard to integrate those two worlds. Which usually comes down to the very, not so sexy part of innovation. Which is really like internal processes, infrastructure, and governance. I've always found that it comes down to this and none of us are reinventing the wheel with how you strategize and plan around that. But it's really hard to know what works and where the roadblocks are. And to your, you know, No Code mention on some of the other trends, I think all of this is intersecting around emerging tech. And like trends that are impacting brands. And, and why they even have to think about innovation. So, all of this to say, like there's a lot going on here. We're all facing the same challenges. Wanted to take down the innovation theater and buzzwords. And create a space for real talk about what's going on. Brian Ardinger: I think the other trend that this is really hitting on is this whole move to education. You know, this changing trend of education. And like you said, career paths. You know, we talk a lot about this slash career or this portfolio career that people are having to embrace because change is happening so fast. And you used to be able to get a degree and continue your career for 20 years. And that'd be good. But nowadays, everything's changing so fast. You need to have outlets to learn new skills and things along those lines. So that's another thing I really liked about what On Deck's doing is again, it's not focused on one particular thing. Even though you do get the depth, but you'll also have the opportunity to see what else is out there and strengthen your skills in different ways. Let's dive into a little bit about what this particular program is all about. Who's it for? What's entailed. Things like that. Jackie Miller: In terms of who's part of this community and who we're seeking to be part of the community, we're casting a pretty wide net with innovation, right? We're looking at people who are a little bit further along in their career. This is probably Director Level and above. People who have eight years, maybe more, of experience. They've been at this for a while. And the title or duties could include everything from Innovation to Growth Strategy or Corporate Development. Labs, Venture, Transformation, the kind of Future of. You know, I joke that there's so many new titles in this space. My title at Chanel was Head Innovation Catalyst. It's a lot of innovation within innovation. So, we're casting a pretty wide net. But the personas essentially are anyone who is an active practitioner in innovation. Which I think is an important distinction. There's a lot of service providers and other folks that are part of the ecosystem, who are great, and we want to work with, but for starters, we want to focus on those innovators who are actively in these roles at large companies or organizations. And the three personas that we think they fall into are the culture and capabilities, which is that internal building, internal focused approach. And building and incubating new ideas, businesses, and ventures. And then lastly that investing in and acquiring more of your Corp Dev venture kind of side of things.So, it's a pretty big umbrella. Sometimes as you probably know and have seen like one person is all three of those things, depending on like the structure of any given innovation practice. So, we recognize that it's broad. And there's a lot of variety there. We want to have lots of opportunities to bring those people together. But also segment and do some really curated sessions and content for different ones.But I think beyond just those types of folks in those types of roles. What's important to us is, you know, I mentioned that innovation theater and avoiding the innovation theater trap, is people who really have a mandate to build and scale their innovation projects. Especially with startups. And I think that's part of the value of the On Deck community.People who are really tasked with that. They have the budget. And the time and the mandate to do that. That's where we think we can have the most impact. And, you know, Spirit of Service is one of our core values. It's yes. It's about learning, achieving your goals, and growing and making progress, in your own career, but that's only possible in a community like this when you can support. There's a lot of peer-to-peer support, learning, exchange. So that kind of Spirit of Service and bringing things to the community, will be a key filter too. Brian Ardinger: That's pretty exciting, because again, I've looked around and I haven't seen a lot of frameworks out there that really do approach and have that Inside Outside approach. I've seen a lot of people focused on internal innovation. And how do you do design thinking inside of a company, things like that. I've seen that these corporate venture sides where you're talking about investing in startups. But very few really understand that the value of having that cross-politization between the ties and the t-shirts or the tucked and the untucked. How I like to call them. Folks that I think you learn quite a bit by seeing that exploration side of starting something brand new and building it. And then on the reverse side, you know, startups get a lot from understanding what it takes to scale. And exploit and execute on something that they built. So, I'm excited about seeing that overlap. With this, how much do you see the programming being around specifically working with startups versus internal building? Or talk a little bit about the program itself.Jackie Miller: The programming itself is designed around these formats, right? It's very community driven learning. But it's about both group sessions and curated connection. So, we do a lot of facilitating that in the format of deep dives, panels. Something I'm really excited about that. I like to call a template potluck. Where we all ask our fellows to bring to the table, a pitch deck, a project strategy, a budget, even of things that have worked. For you, scrubbed of sensitive details. And a way to kind of just share and see what others are working on. Lots of like social opportunities to connect and access to our platforms. Right? So Slack and the Directory, which is almost like our own internal LinkedIn. As well as access to the sessions for all of our programs. Right? So, if our Chief of Staff program is doing a deep dive on Web Three. That's something we can tap into the expert network of On Deck to take part in. So, there's going to be a lot of different formats. In terms of the topics themselves into your question of, you know, how we take the broad topics and the specific ones. I think that certainly we'll do deep dives on things around like Open Innovation, Internal Culture, and Building. And the kind of specific challenges of Venture Building and certainly Building Corporate Venture Practices. But there will be some broader topics that I think are, they're the things that light up when I have conversations with different folks, at least. Like one of these is that when we touched on of like internal processes and structure of an innovation team. You know, how do you interact with the business units? How do you create good communication between all your stakeholders and get buy-in on what is often a huge challenge in this space? Or even the small bets, right. Brian Ardinger: Like measuring if you're on the right track in the first place. That's a big one. Understanding the metrics around it. Jackie Miller: Figuring out you're solving the right problem. Right. So I think those are things that are going to apply across the board. I think there's things like leadership, talent development, hiring, and when that should look like for the future of an innovation practice. That I think will apply across the board. And there's the founder mindset. I really believe that corporate innovators are at their core, they're founders, right. They're just not pitching to venture capitalists. They're navigating a much more constrained universe of what success looks like. But there's a lot of the same skillset mindset that a founder needs. And one other topic, I think that has been interesting to see across the board is sustainability, diversity, and inclusion are some of these big drivers of innovation right now. These are some of the core pain points or challenges that businesses have to solve. So, there's this intersection with innovation, that's exciting to me that I've heard from different founding fellows from Starbucks and Nike, JP Morgan, Walmart, who have all raised similar challenges. Brian Ardinger: And that's the other interesting part about it is because it's kind of industry agnostic. Like I think a lot of us can learn from what's happening in another industry and apply that to our own industry and vice versa. And so, I think that's a big strength to this type of program that you're pulling together as well.Jackie Miller: I think that's huge. I mean, I really think that in innovation, we already get stuck in a bubble sometimes. In your own echo chamber of the buzzwords. But then we do that in our industries too. When I was at Chanel, I can't tell you how refreshing and inspirational it might be to have a conversation with Pepsi, for example, right. This idea that it doesn't always have to be your exact peer to get really interesting new ideas and new insights. Brian Ardinger: When can people apply? When does it start? Some details around that. Jackie Miller: We just announced this in January. So still excited to see those applications roll in. The program actually kicks off in mid-March. So, applications are open. The deadline to apply is February 27th. You'll be tagged as an Inside Outside applicant, so that we can fast track your application. Once people apply, some will be invited to interview. And then they'll receive an offer to join us when the program kicks off in mid-March. Brian Ardinger: And you and I were talking earlier that you created a special URL for IO listeners. If they go to go.odci.io/podcast, they can apply via this link and get fast-tracked. You've been in corporate innovation. And you were with Chobani, and I think you launched a successful accelerator for early-stage food and tech companies there. And most recently, like you said, you were at Chanel. What's some of the biggest mistakes or biggest learnings, maybe that you've learned by being in corporate innovation. Where have you stubbed your toe and where do you think you can help others not. Jackie Miller: It's a great question. I think that my experience on the spectrum of, you know, different approaches to corporate innovation is one that I come back to time and again, right. This idea that innovators, people in corporate innovation should almost be in the position of making their roles obsolete.Right. Like putting themselves out of a job, in a way. Which is maybe a little provocative. But what I mean by that is, you know, it shouldn't be siloed. And you can see very clearly, early on whether or not a program is going to be a program or a practice or a department. It's going to be successful, if it feels siloed and stuck on to the side, rather than truly a top-down initiative. And then there's top-down buy it. And it doesn't mean, not to get into like the details of the corporate governance or anything than that. It's mostly about like the right stakeholders and the right communication line with the stakeholders, right. This idea that you need to be in between the business units on the ground and the leadership at the kind of strategy and priority and decision-making. And really navigate between those spaces. And it's easier to do that when you have that top down buy in. My experience at Chobani. Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder and CEO of Chobani, really prioritized the incubator program. It was important to him. It was extremely founder friendly. We didn't take equity. It was just something that was part of his personal values and mission. And that, you know, shows in how he got hundreds of employees, internally, to be involved and engaged and really scale up that program.That kind of top-down buy-in makes a huge difference. And yeah, you need that combination of top down and grassroots impact, right? So, I think that not every corporate innovator has an influence over that kind of strategy and structure of that team. But those communication lines with leadership, are just as important as the structure itself.Brian Ardinger: The fact that the practice of spinning up something brand new, or working with a startup, for example, that doesn't have it all figured out. It doesn't have the business model all ready to scale, is significantly different than what most people are typically working in, in an existing business. Where they know the business model. They know what they're supposed to be doing. Their job is to scale and execute and make that better. Fundamentally, there's a lot of knows. Versus the world of startups, the world of innovation, where fundamentally it's all unknown at the start. And so how do you manage those expectations on both sides. Expectations from the people who are building that. Whether it's a startup itself or the internal team that's building up something from scratch. And then communicating that to the upper management, like timelines may be different. The measurements may be different. What you're looking for may be different. It's all very important because they are fundamentally different worlds to some extent. Jackie Miller: I think that's right. When you're pitching something new, it's sort of like, I think that empathy is at the root of all like change. And innovation at its core is about change. You know, it's about problem solving and introducing new kind of ways of doing things. Put yourself in the shoes of that person hearing that pitch. Right. And this idea that, of course there's a preconceived set of KPIs. And how we measure our projects and our initiatives. Really setting the stage and then making the case for exactly what you're saying of, okay. We're entering the unknown here. And introducing upfront the, these are going to be different metrics for success. And really defining. That really primes people to be more receptive to change. It can be a hard thing for them to process Brian Ardinger: So, what do you see are the biggest opportunities for corporates who can do innovation well? Why should they be doubling down on this?Jackie Miller: There's a lot of opportunities here. Right? And like a few things come to mind. Corporate innovation more often than not can be found in a cost center, right. This idea that, you know, how close are you to the business impact. To revenue. To building something new. I think that every corporate innovation team or program should have an eye towards that possibility.I think there are certain things that absolutely should be separate and are about experimentation and are about learning. It's something important for any department within a company thinking about what's the long-term sustainability and scalability of what we're building here. That should be part of the discussion part of the conversation.Another piece is interacting with emerging technology trends and startups. It's very easy for corporates to feel like it's a foreign language or that world is so far away. And I don't know what I could possibly do or how I could add value to that conversation or that exchange. I think corporate innovators really kind of understanding the value they bring to those exchanges. And how meaningful those exchanges with a startup or a founder can be even if we're talking about really big cultural differences. If you really go in knowing, and sometimes the things you wouldn't expect are the things that are super valuable. I can't tell you how many times what a startup really needed from me as a representative of the big company was like an org chart Sherpa, right. Someone would tell me, how are things organized? Who does this? Who owns that? And like, yes, ultimately that may be just who do I sell my thing to, but more often than not, it's about learning. What are the priorities? How are things organized? How are things structured and how do things get done? That is hugely valuable to a startup. And I think we oftentimes undersell the kind of knowledge and insight and support we can bring to startups. That goes beyond just the petting zoo. But is actually like here's some actionable information to help them achieve their goals. Brian Ardinger: What are some of the trends and opportunities that you're seeing out there in the marketplace? Whether it's technology trends or things that people should be paying attention to in this space.Jackie Miller: Part of the reason I was so excited to join the On Deck team, and you mentioned it upfront, about the work we were doing in no code. The fact that we are a fully remote company. Future of work is obviously a big topic when you look at like innovation culture and capabilities. And I think things like No Code, the idea that, and this is very challenging for large enterprises, where there are a lot of IT, data, infrastructure limit to what kind of tools you can use. But there is something fundamentally innovative about cultivating the skillset and the knowledge to use tools like No Code tools. And we're talking about like an Air Table or a Notion, or some of these. And while yes, there are enterprise platform challenges. I really think that the trend here is it's also that like talent wants to learn how to put on their resume and talk about how they were able to build things.They may not be coders. But they were able to build things themselves. Like that's what talent is looking for. That is what truly innovative projects come from, that kind of mindset and that kind of talent. Trying to find ways to create spaces. You can do this with Microsoft. Like when I was at Chanel, we use Microsoft and there are all kinds of interesting analytics and automation tools that you can experiment with. You don't have to be expert level. But I think there's something there. And future of remote working, right. Every corporate is navigating hybrid or remote, and what that looks like. These are new demands in the idea of innovative talent and the war for innovative talent. So, I think there's sort of a must have in terms of exploration, that are not necessarily suited immediately to the corporate environment. But I think it's something that corporate should definitely be thinking about. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Yeah. We've talked about that quite a bit. And how, if nothing else just being exposed to some of these tools gives you a different appreciation for the speed at which disruptors could come on board. Or other ways that you could change the dynamic within your company or outside. Thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your experiences and that. If people want to find out more about you or the On Deck Program, what's the best way to do that?Jackie Miller: The best way is to visit us at https://www.beondeck.com/corporate-innovationBrian Ardinger: Well Jackie, thanks again for coming on. I'm excited to be a part of the Fellowship. I encourage people who are listening to check it out. Looking forward to having further conversations. Jackie Miller: Thanks so much Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

Charles Breed, VP Corporate Development at Corel Corporation (NASDAQ: CREL)  142. Hiring The Head Of Corp Dev That Fits Your M&A Strategy In this episode of the M&A Science Podcast, Charles Breed, VP of Corporate Development at Corel Corporation, talks about how to hire a corporate development team that fits into your M&A strategy. When you're building a corporate development function, the first thing you need to do is hire a head of corporate development, but hiring is not as simple as it sounds. The head of corporate development needs to fit into the overall strategy. Things you will learn in this episode: -What to look for in when hiring a head of corporate development -The role of the head of corporate development -Skills required for a corporate development leader To join our network of M&A practitioners and sign up for our newsletter go to mascience.com.

Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures, and formerly head of Corp Dev at Twitter, SuccessFactors, McAfee and Akamai, discusses exit strategy from the buy-side perspective at length.

We talk to some really dope superstars in the games industry to discuss this issue: - Gigi Levy-Weiss, Partner NFX - Brian Peganoff, former Corp Dev at Glu, VP at Deutsche Bank - Kristian Segerstrale, CEO Super Evil Megacorp Content Overview: 0:00 Intro 2:26 Role & Time of the CEO 14:31 Product Oriented CEOs 19:22 Examples of Great CEOs 26:52 Required Qualities 32:36 Three Views of the CEO 38:24 CEO by Company Stage 44:57 Finding Weak Points 49:22 Society + CEO Role Read about it in the GameMakers newsletter: https://gamemakers.substack.com/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/gamemakers/message

Over this season, apart from our portfolio founders, we've been able to talk to a couple of interesting venture capitalists from different parts of the world like Brazil and Canada and hear their thoughts about Southeast Asia. In this episode, we're back with another venture capitalist, and now doing this in conjunction with Insignia Ventures Academy, Asia's first experiential VC accelerator. You can expect to have more episodes with mentors and alumni from the 12 week-program as well. One of them is Mark Sng, Vice President of Gentree Fund, the venture capital fund of the Sy family office, the family behind one of the largest conglomerates in the Philippines. He talks about his career going from private equity to corporate development to venture capitalist as well as the evolution of the Philippines' startup ecosystem and what's exciting in the market these days. Transcript Timestamps 00:46 Paulo introduces Mark Sng, VP of Investments at Gentree; 01:44 Philippines' Startup Ecosystem Rising; 02:57 Mark's Career Part 1: TAEL Partners (PE Fund); 04:58 Mark's Career Part 2: Gojek Corporate Development; 06:34 Mark's Career Part 3: Go-Ventures; 08:24 Mark's Career Part 4: Gentree Fund; 11:20 Impact of more family offices and corporates setting up funds in Southeast Asia; 14:30 Comparing PE, Corp Dev, and VC from skill sets POV; 17:04 Value of regulatory clarity in attracting investors; 19:45 Thinking beyond the Philippines for market; 20:47 Rise of elephants and unicorns in the Philippines; 22:41 Rapid Fire Round; About our guest Mark Sng is the Vice President of Gentree Fund, the venture capital fund of the Sy family office, the family behind one of the largest conglomerates in the Philippines. Mark previously spearheaded the Singapore office launch for Go-Ventures and supported the ventures team as Head of Singapore and Vietnam Coverage. Before Go-Ventures, he was with Gojek's Corporate Development Team, where he was part of the team that led the acquisition of Coins.ph in the Philippines. He also supported growth equity transactions into family-run businesses at TAEL Partners: a SEA growth equity fund with a focus on the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia markets. Music: Cool Upbeat Background Music For Videos by MorningLightMusic Tags: startup, Southeast Asia, founder, entrepreneurship, business, technology The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.

"Crypto" is a term that has recently re-shaped the way the world thinks about money. For Emilie Choi, President and COO at Coinbase, it has been at the forefront of her work and mind for quite some time. Emilie is a true workplace warrior and that is reflected in her leadership at Coinbase as she has cultivated an ethos that endears her entire organization and those she works alongside.In this episode, Emilie doesn't pull the punches as she divulges her own strengths and weaknesses and how she strives to make them both equal assets. She also expounds on fostering connections in the workplace, her mission-oriented mindset, and how it is a mindset she likes to see in entrepreneurs. Emilie also offers essential insight into the current shape of cryptocurrency and the exciting direction that it is headed.      In this episode, we cover: Emilie's competitive advantage and how she transformed her weakness into an asset. (3:35) Sensitivity in the workplace: Emilie opens up about a time when she showed her vulnerability in her “top of mind” email to the organization and how that cultivated a connection across the teams. (7:34) Building out LinkedIn's Corp Dev team in its early stages and how entrepreneurs successfully ran LinkedIn's three business lines. (9:21) Missionary vs mercenary: Emilie shares why it's refreshing to work with crypto entrepreneurs who are mission-oriented - and Joubin taps into his recent experience with hiring a candidate. (13:00) Why Emilie admires Amazon's core business strategy - and her opinion on companies she would hypothetically buy. (17:36) How Emilie's desire to continue learning led her to make a lateral move from LinkedIn to Coinbase - and how she navigated the recruitment process of her team. (22:10) An overview of Coinbase: assets, revenue, long-term trajectory, and their three main focuses - and Emilie breaks down Coinbase's innovation by comparing it to the evolution of mobile phones. (31:10) ‘Volatility is a feature, not a bug': What volatility means for Coinbase - and why Amazon and Adobe serve as an influence for Coinbase as they invest in their future acts. (38:38) Weathering the crypto winter: How Emilie frames investing in crypto to potential buyers - and how she integrates grit and resilience into her role and across the organization. (43:47) Emilie shares her thoughts on Coinbase's %5 employee departure after their pledge to be apolitical - and what she admires about the Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong. (49:09) Emilie reflects on what she has learned as she grew into COO and President - and how Coinbase grew to be the number one regulated crypto custodian in the world. (56:22) Links: Connect with Emilie LinkedIn Coinbase Connect with Joubin Twitter LinkedIn Email: gtmg@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

Andrew Gazdecki is the Founder of Microacquire, an online startup acquisition marketplace. Andrew is also the former CEO & Founder of Bizness Apps and Altcoin (both acquired). On this episode, Chris and Andrew discuss the early days of founding Bizness Apps and Altcoin before his jump into Microacquire. They break down the process of how Microacquire works, what types of companies are on the platform, how they engage with potential buyers and advice for founders to be successful in selling their businesses. Finally, Andrew discusses why VC isn't right for everyone, his Bootstrappers platform and much more. Enjoy! Follow Chris on Twitter: www.Twitter.com/FortWorthChris Learn more about Chris Powers and Fort Capital: www.FortCapitalLP.com Follow Chris on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/chrispowersjr/ (02:43) - Andrew's Career Background Leading into Microacquire (15:31) - Why Andrew Regrets Starting an Ethereum Transaction Company (18:43) - What is MicroAcquire and what are you trying to achieve? (21:05) - How do you make money? (24:03) - What is the range of sellers you're seeing on the platform? (26:48) - Does the seller have to put the price they want on the platform? (29:08) - What's the vetting process for sellers to get on? (30:47) - What's the range of buyers you see on the platform? (32:28) - What do you mean by Corp Dev licenses? (33:24) - Have you had any first-time buyers who just looking to get into entrepreneurship? (35:03) - What would a $10,000 per year revenue business vs. an $8mm company look like on Microacquire? (38:43) - Are you providing resources for new buyers or how do they learn how to acquire businesses? (42:00) - What are the things sellers need to check off the list in order to sell quickly online? (44:49) - Is something like the founder wanting to exit immediately listed on Microacquire or does that only come up in conversations with buyers? (46:56) - Does Microacquire cut out intermediaries like investment bankers? (49:36) - How does the buyer and seller communicate with each other? Do they need to use platform-approved legal templates? (56:15) - How are the smaller buyers financing deals? (59:44) - How are you going to crack the code to get $100+ MM companies onto the platform and do you plan to bring non-traditional companies on to sell? (1:03:44) - Dealing with Team Members Either Knowing or Not Knowing the Business They Work For Is Up For Sale When It's Listed on Microacquire (1:06:29) - Launching Bootstrappers.com & Beefing with Tech Crunch (1:12:15) - How does a company know if they should go raise from a VC or not? (1:16:57) - The #1 Reason For Start Up Success TED Talk: The Single Biggest Reason why Start Ups succeed (1:18:12) - Why did you choose to build in public and what have been some positives/negatives of the experience? (1:20:01) - How do you build a ‘fun' company? (1:23:46) - Is it harder to build a fun company when you're fully remote? (1:26:11) - Is a hotdog a sandwich? (1:26:49) - What's the best advice you've ever been given? (1:28:44) - How can people find you or Microacquire Website: www.microacquire.com  Email: Andrew@microacquire.com Twitter: www.Twitter.com/agazdecki The FORT is produced by Johnny Peterson & Straight Up Podcasts

Hiring a bank to facilitate a divestiture is an option, not a necessity. Kison Patel interviewed Russ Hartz, VP Corp Dev at Ansys, to talk about his vast experience of successfully executing divestitures without a bank. Here's what you'll learn:   - The importance of constant business evaluation - How to create a competitive buyers' pool - How to know which buyer is right for the company   To join our network of M&A practitioners and sign up for our newsletter go to mascience.com.

Emilie Choi is the President and Chief Operating Officer @ Coinbase, the easiest place to buy and sell cryptocurrency. Prior to their IPO earlier this year, Coinbase raised funding from some of the best in the business including USV, a16z, Initialized and Ribbit to name a few. As for Emilie, before Coinbase she was Head of Corporate Development for @ LinkedIn and before Linkedin served in various positions at Warner Bros., including as Manager of Corporate Business Development and Strategy. If that was not enough, Emilie currently serves on the board of Naspers and ZipRecruiter. In Today's Episode with Emilie Choi You Will Learn: 1.) How Emilie made her way into the world of startups, came to lead Corp Dev @ Linkedin and how that led to her joining forces with Brian @ Coinbase as COO & President? What lessons did Emilie learn from Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner that she has taken with her to Coinbase? 2.) Corp-Dev Guide: Why are so many startups trying to hire Head of Corp Devs today? What are the signals that suggest now is the right time? How would Emilie structure the process of hiring a Head of Corp Dev? What questions should be asked? How can you test their skills? What mistakes do CEOs often make when hiring Head of Corp Devs? 3.) COO Guide: What does the role of COO really mean to Emilie? How does Emilie advise founders on whether they do actually need a COO? How would Emilie structure the process of hiring a COO? What are some common red flags that concern Emilie when hiring COO's? What is the right relationship between CEO and COO? 4.) Resource Allocation: How does Coinbase think about internal resource allocation between core product and their venture products? What was the thinking behind Coinbase Ventures? Why do they have no full-time staff? What is the core objective of the fund? Why does Emilie think it will be one of the best performing funds in venture? Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode with Emilie Choi Emilie's Favourite Book: The Secret History

Andy Steuer has 20 years of VP and C-level experience leading business development and product innovation in both a startup environment and at Fortune 500 companies. He's been on the Executive Leadership Team at 8 fast-growing companies - 3 of which became Top 10 Internet companies (CNET/CBS, Infoseek/Disney, Xoom/NBC), one went through a successful IPO (Xoom.com), and 7 were acquired. In all, these companies generated over $6B in enterprise value while he worked there. Andy is a technical product development leader, and deal-focused strategic thinker with expertise in corporate strategy, business development, team building, managing $100m+ P&L, and Corp Dev financial forecasting.   Find out more about Andy and his team – https://writeforme.io/   Reach out to Andy – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andysteuer

In this episode, @monkeydomination015 shares with us his path coming from a non-target university in the south. We learn how he was able to stack internships during his time at university to land himself at Fortress in the real estate arm right out of school. Learn why he decided to go into investment banking at a boutique shop and how he was able to leverage that role to land in corporate development at a large healthcare company.

Hello! Welcome to DealLab, a Corporate Development and M&A podcast where we examine the methods, theories, and stories behind the deal. In this podcast, we speak with practitioners, dealmakers, and industry experts — from strategy to execution, anything and everything Corp Dev and M&A. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode!

This week, Victor and I spoke with Dan Teran about building and operating a tech enabled services business in the office management space. Dan is the founder of Managed by Q which was sold to WeWork. He was also the former head of Corporate Development and Venture M&A at WeWork. In our conversation, we covered the following topics: - Why happy employees help create happy customers - The opportunity in tech enabled services - His role in M&A at WeWork - His thoughts on the office and big cities post-pandemic --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-circle-of-competence/support

In this episode, we learn about Calvin's path from investment banking at Perella Weinberg Partners (PWP) to corporate development at some of the top technology firms in the world including DropBox and Twitter. Listen to hear how he broke into investment banking out of Berkeley, the big risk he took going into his senior year and what it's really like working on the inside of one of these tech darlings. We talk about pay, lifestyle and some great advice for those of you looking to follow in his footsteps.

EP259- Listener Questions News Amazon is building Micro Fulfillment Centers to deliver fast-moving grocery & convenience SKUs in under 45mins. Locations include Seattle, DC, Baltimore, Dallas, Nashville, Detroit, Chicago, San Diego, Phoenix launching this year. Listener Questions Ted: will headless commerce take off in 2021? why/why not? RetailRazor: Amazon has been getting hit w/an endless series of media articles about their private label development at the expense of other merchants on the platform. But #retailers have been doing this since, well, forever. Ex. – Dept Stores private label apparel. Why is Amazon different? Wanda Cadigan: We’re seeing a big increase in visual media use cases for e-com. It’s the new digital proxy for in-store experience. Curious on your thoughts around shoppable video trends and adoption esp. in Americas. Darin Archer: When will we have a major paradigm shift from the online store? Category pages and PDP’s seem dated in the era of TikTok. Instagram shopping and all those other things are like pop-up shops. When will retailers make a big step change in the experience? Brendan Witcher: When will the Jason And Scot Show T-shirts finally be made available and can I have mine signed before you send it? You guys rock! Thanks for helping to keep balance in the (retail) Force. Kevin Cronin: Thoughts on e-com conversion tracking and how it has +/- impacted companies/industry. BinhWinn: What do you think is keeping Amazon from entering the promising African market? Kelly Goetsch:  Looking forward to the episode! I’m seeing all the CX-related vendors (Salesforce, SAP, Bloomreach, Acquia, etc) building or buying CDPs in the past ~12 months. I get the value of CDPs but why were all of these acquisitions done so rapidly? Is this related to 3rd party cookies? tec_wiz: We have seen a significant “stimi” bounce on Amazon, do both of you feel the reopening exuberance will keep the sales acceleration going and if so for how long? Interested to see if you two are in the Jamie Dimon camp? Trevor Sumner: There will be a multi-billion media shift to in-store.  Who controls the brand spend?  Will it be media folks?  Will shopper marketing and trade dollars increase?  How will brand orgs need to transform to take advantage of the digitized store? Scott Silverman: What do you think will be the most surprising post-pandemic consumer behaviors that e-commerce retailers should prepare for? Episode 259 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Thursday April 8, 2021. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 259 being recorded on Thursday April 8 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners Jason how’s your spring going up there and sunny Chicago. Jason: [0:47] It is going well but you you’ve already thrown me for a loop I don’t deal with change and you took the year out of our intro thing so I total I’m totally messed up now. Scot: [1:01] It’s 20 21 so you’re back. Jason: [1:04] Thanks thanks I appreciate you appreciate you saving me ya know spring is going good we had two lovely days of like, like High 70 low 80 degree weather here and I got super excited and then as is often going to happen in Chicago it was all a mirage because today it’s like 16 raining. Scot: [1:24] Want want want sorry to hear that here in North Carolina it’s funny because we’ve had, Bob’s Ilion New people move to our state some of them from the Midwest a lot from California New York and when they move here we’re always like hey in February, used to be get ready for pollen season it’s going to be like unlike anything you’ve ever seen in their lap and like we have pain and San Francisco are you crazy and then are real pollen season hits which were in the thick of right now and they lose their minds because you literally get a you know coating on your car where your car is essentially just looks like it’s been painted yellow so we are in heavy heavy pollen season right now, I have seasonal allergies so I am you know pretty pretty loosey-goosey right now I think I’ve had like 16 Benadryl ‘s and 5’s vertex of so if I’m a little spacey it’s due to that. Jason: [2:14] I love that yeah I was going to ask if you like develop a stronger immunity system because that would that would wreak havoc on me although it has to be good for the car wash industry. Scot: [2:27] It is so that’s the computer that’s the Silver Lining so yes we we are very very busy right now so it’s good a good thing. Jason: [2:35] Yeah where I grew up in Southern California we had a very similar issue the saltwater from the beach would make all the cars filthy. Scot: [2:45] Good we will have to look at San Diego as a possible location. Jason: [2:49] Yeah the beachfront homes in San Diego. Scot: [2:53] So tonight we have a lot of good listener questions but before we get to that it wouldn’t be a Jason Scott show if we didn’t talk about a little breaking Amazon news. Jason: [3:11] News your margin is their opportunity. Scot: [3:20] Jason I was excited as our resident grocery Guru in the chief digital grocery retail. Grocery grocery store officer I wanted to get your expert opinion I saw this on Twitter I guess there’s a magazine called hungry and it’s missing a bunch of vowels H NG Ry, hindery and they had a scoop so they have confirmed that Amazon is building 11. A hundred and forty thousand square foot micro fulfillment centers. It’s kind of funny to talk about a hundred forty thousand square feet and taught micro but I guess you know when the alternative is a million it is small, and they are designed to move a hundred thousand fast-moving Grocery and convenience cues in less than 45 minutes, and the initial set of cities are Seattle Washington D.C Baltimore Dallas Nashville Detroit Chicago San Diego Phoenix and going to be launching them this year. This is super interesting to me because we had we’ve had several amazonians on the show past amazonians, and Amazon does these pretty big Cycles on an annual basis where they’re going to make big Investments and to me this was a really big signal that they’ve decided that this is an important category. So I tweeted about this and then I had several. [4:39] What I would call Amazon insiders not bullies but people that are maybe in orbit away from Amazon and know what’s kind of going on and the thing that surprised me is that there, they were saying that go puff we’ve talked a little bit about on the show but I want to use this entree into that to get your thoughts on that too. They are growing at a tremendous Pace I’ve heard several people say they have over a billion dollars in sales they are a retailer so it’s not a gmv Marketplace kind of thing so GM ve is real Revenue. And then they didn’t acquisition of an alcohol company that was also about a billion dollars so now they’ve got kind of a two billion dollar company they’re going after some categories and areas Amazon is very keen to get to so the grocery and alcohol, I looked him up in some of the databases that go plows raised over two billion dollars you know squarely in the, if passed the Unicorn status which is over a billion dollar valuation I think they’re into the DECA unicorn kind of status so really interesting moves here you’re kind of I guess a battle between these two folks breaking out into the open what do you think about all that. Jason: [5:49] Yeah yeah there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on there the maybe I’ll start with BevMo and work backwards to Amazon Amazon or go puff and work backwards to Amazon. The you know we talk a lot about covid accelerating trends that already existed this whole notion of. Delivering alcoholic beverages was already really starting to pick up some steam we’ve had drizzly on the show before which was one is one of the dominant players in in alcohol delivery and most of them are via these. These are complicated Marketplace models because you have to do the delivery from someone that has a liquor license. [6:30] And so then the pandemic vastly accelerated liquor delivery because under normal circumstances the vast majority of alcohol is consumed. What the industry calls on premises which means at a bar and so because you know Bars were closed or constrained so much, we certainly were consuming way more alcohol at home which means we had to buy it or get it delivered, we got a bunch of meals delivered from restaurants that weren’t allowed to bundle alcohol with them in many cases so all of these Trends made it really accelerated the alcohol delivery industry and. I don’t you know we don’t there’s not great numbers but my sense is that no one benefited more than go puff and partly because they, are closer to a first-party model so they did by a very significant alcohol chain on the west coast BevMo. Um so they own a bunch of their own liquor licenses they own a lot of product that they deliver to people, and they actually started out not delivering the liquor but delivering the snacks so go puff started out do everything you know Munchies presumably to people that were high. [7:47] Um hence the go puff delivering snacks on college campuses and so. Part of their model is they actually inventory their own snacks they have these micro fulfillment centers and so buying BevMo give them a bunch of liquor licenses and it also gave them a bunch of locations that they could stage. [8:09] There there fast-moving food alcohol items and go puff is always focused on cold so they’re one of the best. Nationwide cold chain one hour delivery services so if you need to store something cold and then deliver it. They’re one of the few options out there so for all those reasons. Go puff is booming then you know we throw in the trend we’ve talked about a lot on this show the retail media networks and all these sellers you know monetizing their business by selling ads, so you know go puff has been able to successfully get a nice chunk of AD revenue from that, and I have to believe Amazon sees that and says hey we need you know they obviously have a lot of their own plans and capabilities around to our delivery of those kind of items, and I’ll bet you go puff is sort of accelerating Amazon’s aspirations. Scot: [9:06] Another another Insider told me that go puff has an ad Network that’s kind of getting a fair amount of traction and that’s another thing that Amazon’s attention you know we’ve talked about on the show that they’re their ad Network. It’s getting a lot of steam it’s kind of getting to be almost the scale of AWS and contributing quite a bit of profit it’s in the kind of pesky other category so it has some other things mixed in there but from what we can tell it’s pretty pretty large and growing making Amazon the third largest ad Network behind Google and Facebook. What do you think about does that make sense to you or you familiar with this go puff ad Network. Jason: [9:46] Yeah a little bit It’s Tricky I do think they’re generating some significant Revenue. The the wrinkle is. Advertising for alcohol is dicey so you know so I think what go puff is generating the most is is right these ad revenue from the these like cpg snacks and things like that that are getting delivered, with the alcohol like the you know the bummer is the alcohol people spend so much money on pram and with that clothes they would have shifted a bunch of money into these other channels but it’s. It’s risky to do and and you know most of the big players aren’t willing to take those. Those sort of risks with with the various compliance and to do so. So that’s a little complicated and then I you know I would say they’re probably generating a bunch of Revenue but it’s not a very mature platform with a lot of tools yet and so I haven’t seen any. Any sizing on it. Scot: [10:46] So that is the news and now let’s go into. Jason: [11:01] This question question question question question. Scot: [11:08] All right our first listener question comes from Ted and he says and I’m going to shoot this one over to you Jason well headless Commerce take off in 2021 why or why not. Jason: [11:23] Yeah, talked about a lot we’ve covered it few times on this show just for people that may not be familiar it’s a it’s a method of. Implementing an e-commerce site so instead of a piece of software that’s kind of a monolithic software that has all the check out functions and product catalog functions and all those sorts of things with the user interface. Um it’s a it’s a system where, where the software company provides a bunch of apis and you kind of build your own e-commerce experience leveraging those apis and it generally you build your own user interface so hence it’s headless, um and it’s the definitely the most trendy architecture right now it’s talked about the most. [12:16] The and it kind of is catching on but the reality is we’re just not really going to know because one of the problems with headless Comet or it’s a benefit of headless Commerce but it’s a problem when you’re tracking it is. You can do it very piecemeal right so you could you could have mostly monolithic software and you could say oh you know what, my checkout isn’t very good and I can’t take all the the alternative payment methods I’d like so I’m just gonna, improve my checkout flow and so you could add a couple headless apis just for the checkout flow and it could be. Four percent of your total e-commerce site but now you’re partly headless so you know so I would say. [13:02] Most people that build something new are going to adopt a technology like that but it often is very incremental versus a big bang where you kind of rip out everything you had and put something else in so it’s it’s a little bit like the. The so slowly increasing water temperature in the Frog like we’re all getting boiled by headless Commerce but like I don’t know when you’ll officially declare it like taking off versus not taking off. Scot: [13:29] Yeah and so some of the big players so there’s Commerce tool or tools and then, Faisal has a company called Fabric and we had some confusion over multiple Fabrics but he is one of the fabrics and then anyone else there’s because I’ve seen I’ve seen some of the Shopify folks and sidebar it seems like they’ve hired everyone I know in e-commerce at Shopify those guys are hiring it’s like some kind of an incredible clip right now. I see them all talking about how they effectively, are at least framing Shopify as being a headless player which doesn’t make sense to me bless there’s like some study Pi is enough moveth so who are the players and is Shopify a player. Jason: [14:10] Yeah so there’s kind of a couple categories of platforms that that offer headless Commerce and it’s such a buzzword I like a lot of other things I would argue people that like. Are are not very truly headless Commerce. Have an offering they would call head owes Commerce but so there’s a bunch of traditional platforms that were monoliths that saw this trend coming and kind of pivoted right so, to me that would be someone like an Alaska path, that that kind of had a turnkey platform and they really like focused on the Headless version of that platform and today I think. [14:45] Any new customer is probably mostly headless the all of the the brand new platforms tend to be headless so certainly fabric. Um There there’s a bunch of small players it’s pretty fragmented industry you mentioned Commerce tools which to my knowledge was really the first platform out there that was headed west so there now they’ve been I want to say they’ve been doing headrests for like 10 years they were originally a spin-off of hybris before sap bottom. And so those guys have been doing ahead of us for a long time and. Traction but then there’s the the traditional SAS players and the two biggest examples would be Salesforce Commerce Cloud which formerly was demandware and Shopify in both of those are. Monolith software that’s offered via SAS but both companies have recognized the Headless Trend and have launched. Separate products which are an API SAS model so you can rent. Salesforce Commerce apis and build your own head with solution that leverages the Salesforce infrastructure and similarly you can. Via Shopify plus you can rent apis from Shopify and build a headless solution and Shopify plus so they they both are very legitimate. [16:11] Head West Solutions but I would say you know as a percentage of their total user base it’s a small minority of their user base that have that headless configuration. And then in the case of Salesforce one other note I would make is, one of the problems with headless is okay so now you don’t have a user experience or a GUI and you have to build that yourself and there’s cost associated with that and you may or may not be good at that you may not follow all the, the industry convention so there’s pros and cons to not getting a, a store in a box and particularly as we talked about on this show a lot mobile is so complicated and evolving so fast that there was a company out there called MOBA 5 that had built a really good. Mobile user interface that could leverage all of these these Head West Commerce tax and they were acquired last year by Salesforce because that’s. There’s so much energy there so now somewhat ironically, you can buy MOBA fi user interface and Salesforce Commerce cloud apis and put them together and I you know you’re technically headless on the one hand but on the other hand you got a complete TurnKey solution from Salesforce. Scot: [17:30] Yeah it’s like when you were a kid remember those things that had like three little sections and you can change the purple head the body and the feet so sounds like that’s kind of where we’re going to. Jason: [17:39] Yeah I mean that the simple metaphor for these platforms are like Legos right so you know you get a kid a little Legos and you can you can snap them together like the picture on the outside of the box or you can you know snap them together in an entirely different way if you. [17:57] Um so let’s go to the next question also from Twitter this is from retail razor and the question is Amazon has been getting hit with an endless series of media articles about the private label development at the expense of other merchants on the platform, but retailers have been doing this since well forever example department stores private label apparel why is Amazon different. Scot: [18:25] Yeah and this is a while I’m an Amazon Guru I’m not a huge on politics but but this is a political kind of thing that’s going on here so you know you’ve got so you got Jeff Bezos world’s richest man I think at this point yeah I think Elon is kind of catching up to him at some point I think they crossed for a little bit one what does. Jason: [18:50] They did but it shouldn’t even count because you know Jeff Bezos has like ex-wife that also has 40 billion dollars. Scot: [18:57] True yeah but she’s not giving it away as quickly as you can so she may actually. Jason: [19:02] She’s much more admirable than him that’s true. Scot: [19:05] She may be the millionaire poor house and then, you know another thing is he bought the Washington Post which is you know also seems to have caused a lot more political kind of Venom to come his way. And you know Amazon itself is a big company and you know there’s they’re just easy to shoot at and so you’re hearing a lot of talk antitrust talk a lot of folks want to break them up, the two most vocal that I see are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren yeah they very much want to break those guys up Bernie Sanders is always talking about how they pay more and you know. If you look at the disparity between what Jeff Bezos makes and the $15 an hour employee that’s a big number. [20:01] Let’s Elizabeth warrant then there’s Amazon doesn’t pay taxes because they take every penny they make in plow it back into growing and hiring more people and and buying where houses and building, we just talked about they’re going to build you know what it was at Eleven Hundred and forty thousand square feet facility centers that’s not cheap I don’t know. Each of those maybe 50 million bucks so that’s 6 billion dollars right there, you know so so they don’t they take every penny of profit and they just see such a big opportunity they keep plowing it in and therefore they don’t make profit and you get taxed on profit so they don’t really pay taxes and then of course everything he does a lot of you know. Corporate all legal but corporate setups so that they can avoid taxes like. They’ll have their European group and some kind of a tax-free area and you know they will set up the structure of the companies to minimize taxes globally and then also the United States. [21:02] So I think that’s why they’re under a Target and then you know there’s it’s also really easy to find third-party sellers that are brands that have sold on there and a private label came out of their stuff and it’s, it’s kind of catnip for reporters to find a, it’s very easy to find people that are very upset about Amazon I see it on Twitter all the time yeah there’s third-party sellers that are very unhappy about the way they’re treated and creates a lot of possible content. So that’s that’s my take I think it is. If this ever got into a court and you were looking at the facts I think retail razors right that there’s nothing new going on here and it’s kind of silly to argue this, it’s even silly the argue the antitrust argument because you know I think it’s pretty fair to Define Amazon in the same context as Walmart right and. [21:57] Walmart is as big or bigger so it’s not like Amazon is got some. Position compared to like a Walmart targets really big there are other very big large retailers and there’s it’s also hard to point to note the consumer being harmed. Poor consumers they’re getting cheaper stuff faster its there’s not a lot of, it’s not like a monopoly where your price gouging or there’s no choice anything Amazon’s Lord prices and increased choice. Now that being said if you look at Europe Dave kind of defined monopolies differently in there it doesn’t have to be a consumer damage so there’s a lot of talk about that kind of coming, and then the Biden Administration hired someone that has that similar kind of a take on on antitrust that it’s really. The size and not the the consumer. [22:50] So those are my loose reading of some of the political winds you know what. My take is companies move a thousand times faster than governments and they’ll be able to, navigate whatever the government throws out them succeed if we all remember well you and I remember the Microsoft all the who are around antitrust, Microsoft’s doing okay after that they’re they did find they had to just kind of do some, little things around their browser they spend a bunch of money around it but at the end of the day it was effectively a slap on the wrist of anything so so I don’t think it’s just a lot of noise and I don’t really foresee there being anything that slows down Amazon from this. How about you Jason. Jason: [23:31] Yeah I mean there’s a lot there I won’t rehash it all but. [23:39] I think you’re right like I think the biggest companies in capitalist economies are always, targets for a lot of concern and they’re generally there are always some valid concerns and there’s always a lot of. Scrutiny that isn’t necessarily valid right and certainly you know Walmart’s head is fair its fair share and before that Sears did and, before that Montgomery Ward’s and Woolworths and A&P like you can go back as far as you want, these big huge retailers like there have always been concerns about their size. The bottom line is the you know us antitrust laws are not super strong and the way they’re in written and enforced today. I just don’t think. Amazon has very much risk so per your point they’re probably way more exposed in Europe where there’s a much broader perspective on, but the the thing that a lot of these lawmakers are going after is just, right / retail razors Point like is it kind of a misunderstanding like there’s this thing oh my gosh Amazon’s using. [24:49] Sales data from their third-party sellers to design their first party products and when you say it like that it doesn’t sound very fair, but the point is retailers have been doing that for the entire history of retail I mean you know Sears had a lot of Their Own Private Label products in the Sears catalog you know listeners may be familiar with Brands like Kenmore and crap. [25:12] Craftsman and you know all these these various brands that Sears built right you know doing these exact same thing so, that’s not new they’re some antitrust people would say oh but you know what’s different about Amazon is there also a platform in an ad Network and they get extra data from that, that a traditional retailer wouldn’t get so they would say I don’t object to Amazon using the retail data to make their own products but I object to them using their, their platform data and their their the ad spend data that they’re getting, but even that to me is a thin argument because every other retailer have advertising programs and co-op programs and slotting fees and things like that so I just. Um I think there’s some legitimate things to look at all these companies about but I think that particular one is a hard argument and and again the US antitrust laws are pretty heavily in Amazon’s favor so I think we’re always going to hear about this stuff but I don’t think. Amazon’s fundamentally different than than previous private-label efforts the one thing that is better about Amazon you know and therefore you know potentially more concerning is. Amazon. [26:32] Collects a lot more data about how you shop and what you don’t buy right so a traditional retailer doesn’t know very well. What other products you considered on the way to buying the brand that you bought but Amazon you know because by virtue of them being online, they collect much more data about your browsing behavior before you buy and so that’s not saying it’s it’s an antitrust violation to use that data but that is a new data set that you know Sears and Walmart, didn’t necessarily have it at their disposal so yeah I think we’ll keep hearing about it the, you kind of alluded to it but one funny thing that happened this week our Prime not funny dramas on, the rumor is that Jeff was upset that Amazon Executives weren’t defending Amazon aggressively enough for all of this this noise, and so it appears that a bunch of Amazon execs totally stepped up their social presence and started arguing. [27:30] Up to and including arguing with like sitting Congress people on Twitter, um a congressperson you know is complaining about labor standards in Amazon and made reference to Amazon employees having a pee and Bottles because they can’t take a break, and a senior vice president Amazon like chimed in like that’s absurd I can’t believe you believe those rumors, if that was really true do you think people would really want to work for us. Um and then a week later Amazon had to print a retraction and say like it turns out a bunch of our employees do have to be in bottles. [28:03] But so do UPS’s so that probably like when you have to issue that press release that’s not a good look. Scot: [28:10] Yeah that’s a tough one and it is confusing because there’s the DSP program aren’t really Amazon employees but they’re just that I guess during a branded truck they get that kind of assumed. Jason: [28:22] Yeah so again. Scot: [28:23] This one is this next one is for you Jason and it comes from listener Wanda cadogan. [28:47] Wanda hope you enjoyed that we know that’s your favorite song now to your question we are seeing a big increase in visual media use cases for e-commerce it’s the new digital proxy for in-store experience I’m curious about your thoughts around Shopville video Trends in adoption especially in the Americas. There’s a there was another question that will kind of group together here in this one came from Darren Archer when will we have a major paradigm shift from the online store category pages and pdp’s seem dated in the era of tick tock Instagram shopping and all these other things that are like pop-up shops when will retailers big change step change in the experience. Jason: [29:27] Yeah both good questions and I do I do agree they’re bundled and side note I think I’m assuming daren’t an Archer is a former Adobe Alaska path and now at the Gap so so he, has definitely been around a lot of the issues that were we’re talking about today. So so yeah the. Video Commerce and is often called live-streaming Commerce although a ton of it is not live streaming is huge right now it’s it’s even Huger in China where by some estimates, eleven or twelve percent of all e-commerce is live streaming, um more more consumers start their shopping trip on Ali Baba’s a live streaming site than they do on Team all right now, so so this live streaming Commerce has totally exploded in China and there. Appears to be appetite for it in the US as well and so you’re definitely seeing. The platforms that that can support it so most notably Instagram and Tik Tok. Um are we leaning heavily into it and we’ve seen Walmart due to two pilots where they had Commerce events on Tik-Tok now, and. [30:54] The jury’s out on like social commerce in the in the west is way smaller than it is in China so it may be 12 percent of e-commerce and in China and it’s like 4% of e-commerce here so, so it has a ways to go in the jury is out on whether Chinese consumers are different than Western consumers and it’s never going to catch on or whether they’re just ahead of Western consumers and they kind of WEP frog. Um so we’ll have to see but I can tell you a ton of retailers and brands are super interested right now and the part of the reason is implied in Wanda’s question. Um a sort of Inconvenient Truth about all of this e-commerce that we’ve invented is. We’ve made it very easy to find products that you know you want and buy them and we’ve taken all the friction out of the buying process and so you know there’s a saying. E-commerce solved buying but broke shopping, right so you know it’s super easy to buy stuff you can go on Amazon there’s 800 million products you type it in the search engine a product pops up you click one button and it shows up two hours later you’re good. Um weather is not is. [32:09] Discovering products you never knew you wanted right like there’s never like creating demand for products a lot of the things that traditionally stores were good at and a lot of you know Discovery experiences that happen in stores. E-commerce isn’t particularly good at and so the hypothesis is that this social commerce. Has the potential to replace all those Discovery experiences and the way I think of it as kind of decoupling Commerce like the buying and browsing used to both happen in a store and that was kind of the monolithic solution. [32:46] The digital disruption of Commerce means. Buying and browsing now can be decoupled and browsing can happen in all these micro moments on Tick-Tock and Pinterest and and taobao, and the buying can happen in another moment on Amazon or Walmart or or wherever else so, I definitely think there, it is we’re going to see it can continue to increase I don’t know whether we’ll catch up to China in the near future or not but they’re you know appears to be a lot of Headroom and therefore sure is a lot of interest. Of in retailers and brands that want to experiment in the space and platforms that want to you know capitalize on those experiments so I have major, social commerce initiatives with almost every client right now that are kind of you know mostly in the test and learn mode. Scot: [33:43] Um couple things you didn’t mention Amazon’s poke around here they have Amazon live which is this video program that’s kind of running and it’s pretty terrible right now but you know I’ve seen some stuff start to get some traction there. They have a couple of influencers that that hop on there and don’t forget that Amazon owns twitch so there’s, there’s Twitches really started with video game streaming and there’s there’s a lot more that platform is widening there’s some interesting things we’ve had some Congress people get on there we’ve had, um [34:18] There’s a lot of interesting music content and then there’s a lot of innovative new social media companies like Clubhouse and some point maybe they’ll be some selling that happens to some of those channels. The other one is I highly recommend everyone make sure you listen to our deep dive episode recently. We talked about all the changing privacy rules I think that’s going to be another Catalyst for this because Facebook is in this kind of squeeze between Apple and Google in a way. Facebook doesn’t have a platform like they do so, Facebook could lose some ad revenue and they’re doing a lot to replace that through a variety of different experiments and I think we’ll see a Facebook doing a lot more in this this area, and they on Instagrams and Instagram alive is getting a lot of Engagement as well so, a lot of interesting platforms were this kind of live streaming and more social commerce could come from. Jason: [35:16] Yeah hundred percent Amazon’s done a ton of experiments and and twitch is a very powerful platform so like I certainly. I think Amazon is you know at the front of this trend along with several other Front Runners. Scot: [35:32] This one this one this next question is it’s a it’s a tough one so I’m going to throw it at you here comes from Brendan Witcher and I can’t hear his name without hearing the toss a coin to hear what your song and anyway mr. whicher says when will the Jason and Scot show t-shirts finally be made available in can I have mine signed before you send it you guys rock thanks for helping to keep balance in the, parentheses retail Force thanks Brendon Jason any your our chief swag officer Chief swag digital retail grocery officer what what’s the take. Jason: [36:08] Yeah great question Brandon appreciate it. So we do have some swag and I’m sure I’m going to regret saying this but if you ping me on Twitter I will be happy to send any listeners some Jason and Scott. Riri a pliable stickers for your laptops and and the your bedroom windows and all that good stuff. We have not offered t-shirts I’m open to it I have to be honest got and you weigh in on this as well. Rrr logo Works reasonably as podcast cover art, but it’s kind of intricate for a t-shirt I just I’m not sure what looks cool like I feel like we need a more elegant logo. For a T-shirt and then side note I would also point out like you and I have both lost some significant weight since the characters were done so I like part of me before we invested in a lot of apparel I’d want like skinny or characters. Scot: [37:12] Yeah yeah we’ll have to maybe we’ll have a con reader contest readers can submit their their artwork let’s see you again from and then most of. Jason: [37:22] Yeah and side note when he says bring balance to the force I assume we all knew that you’re the dark side of that. Scot: [37:29] Okay ouch I’ll point out that your son is clearly on the dark side. Jason: [37:36] Well but my son also likes you more than me so that’s further proof. Scot: [37:40] I can’t no accounting for Taste okay back to real questions so this one is from Kevin Cronin what are your thoughts on e-commerce conversion tracking and how it has positively and negatively impacted companies in the industry. Jason: [37:59] Wow so I don’t know what your angle for asking this question is but it’s a great question in my mind I am anti e-commerce conversion so it’s a. [38:10] Super important and useful metric but for my entire career I’ve been walking into situations where people were using it as a kpi and for me it’s an incredibly stupid kpi because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients a Json I want to hire you to improve my conversion, and my answer is always the same that’s awesome I accept because, I’m gonna do a white make your eCommerce site password only so that only good customers that I know have buying intent are going to come in and your conversion rates going to go through the roof, you’re your revenue and traffic will go way down right because conversion is related to all these other things, um and while it’s possible to do multi-session conversion the overwhelming majority of people when they talk about e-commerce conversion are talking about single session conversion, and very often it’s not profitable the cell one thing one time. And so again so for all of those reasons I think you need better kpis like for sure conversion is a metric that that should be included in your. Your overall ecosystem but that’s not the thing that should be steering your business and and I don’t know if this is, what you were implying in your question Kevin but like there’s a shockingly high amount of e-commerce operators that that give too much Credence to conversion. Scot: [39:37] Interesting or you guys give products away if you really want to increase conversion. Jason: [39:42] Yeah yeah I can sell dollar bills for for 98 cents and have a very high conversion rate I would throw. I had something else I was going to add to the conversion conversation but I’ve totally lost my train of thought so I should have come to rehearsal. Scot: [40:00] Are so all the tracking changes aren’t going to really change conversion while still no when people are on our side. Jason: [40:09] On site conversion again if you’re doing more nuanced multi-touch attribution type conversions there some of the depreciation of the third party cookies and the in the mobile tracking is. Going to make that more difficult so we’ll see how that that all. Toys out oh I do remember my other point on conversion a fun fact about conversion average conversion rates on e-commerce sites today, are almost identical to what they were in 2000 like the its chin mobile has changed a lot but. [40:46] The the overall desktop conversion rate hasn’t changed very much like a cross, there’s huge deviation but across a ton of sites it’s about 2% of Visitors by something as we’ve already talked about. Stupid metric and a lot of those people didn’t come to the side to buy something maybe they wanted to check your store hours or your your your store address or all sorts of other things, but what I always chuckle about that is there’s this whole industry of conversion rate optimization companies and what they do is they come in with this one tactic which is multivariate testing, and they say like we’re going to improve your user experience and dramatically improve your conversion rate and there’s a bunch of companies that have been doing that for 20 years, and yet the conversion rate in our experiences today is exactly the same as it was 20 years ago and so like we like to joke that like all conversion optimization regresses to the mean. How’s that for a math joke. Scot: [41:45] It is good if conversion isn’t a good kpi then what are Jason recommended gibbous. Jason: [41:53] Yeah so go listen to. Our customer lifetime value show with Dan McCarthy and and to me metrics around LTV or seal the are much more valuable, then then just conversion rate even if you’re going to adopt a conversion rate I like to do some some more. More derived conversion rates that I sometimes call the real conversion rate where I infer your mission from some of your on-site behavior and I only look at the conversion rate of people that actually had some buying intent right so, so in that example you would, you would take all the people that used your store locator or you know left on the rating and review page or something else or the warranty page you wouldn’t count all of them in your conversion rate because they probably had some mission that they accomplished on your website that was other than buying something but for sure. Having a multi-touch attribution system and ultimately getting to a COV or LTV as the way to go as far as I’m concerned. So let’s move on to the next question bin win what do you guys think is keeping Amazon from entering the promising African Market. Scot: [43:20] Yeah Amazon’s Geographic expansion has definitely slowed if you look at kind of the last markets they’ve opened up, think they’re opening a Poland right now, India has been a big one and they’ve just really that one seems to I’ll use this analogy of kind of the snake eating the pig right so so India seems they went storming in there and it seems to have been a handful for them they really haven’t done a huge meaningful expansion since India my recollection I don’t think Poland would count as huge, then there’s Brazil and Australia are kind of in that category of most recently geographies they’ve opened and I think what’s going on there is. You know they have to evaluate every opportunity just like any other company even though they’re huge they have not endless resources so they’re always having to figure out where to apply them. And you know I could say the same thing for South America South America. Commerce is really complicated because you’ve got a big cluster of countries you’ve got different languages currencies shipping things, now mercadolibre in South America has gone in there and figured all that out Africa is you take, you take South America and I think Africa is like four times the complexity there inside of Africa you’ve got on the order of 50 countries. [44:45] Lots of complexity and you know if your Amazon do you. Go after that or can you go get that in 10 years let it mature and worry more about go puff taking you know a big grocery category United States, so I think that’s really what it is it’s a prioritization exercise and for whatever reason Africa just has made it to that priority I guess you could say they’ve also expanded the Middle East through that acquisition they did, of a big Marketplace there yeah haven’t really heard much about that I haven’t heard them adding 1 p 2 that or anything or I only think they rebranded I think they wanted it as almost like Zappos as its own kind of little Standalone thing sounds kind of weird because in the past when they would go into a new geography by acquisition they would Rebrand it too Amazon Japan it was on China this raw Acquisitions to my knowledge they haven’t rebranded suit could all and kind of the brand their Stokes I think that’s what is required is a sure thing Jason Do you have a. Jason: [45:51] Yeah well I’m not sure if you’re aware of this but strategy is actually one of the words in my title. [45:58] And it’s a little known fact but in order to get a strategy certificate you have to have a great affinity for a 2 by 2 Matrix, and I don’t know if you remember who did this I feel bad that I don’t but I used to attend the channel advisor conferences and they would always do this great. Session on the latest trends and opportunities in global expansion and they always started with this 2 by 2 Matrix and, one axis is complexity and the other axis is opportunity right and so you think complexity how hard is it to go into that, Channel what you know what’s the regulatory environment what’s the currency environment what’s the language environment and Africa is actually High complexity because, there really is no African continent from a Commerce standpoint, there’s a bunch of countries there’s like 50 for different countries mostly with unique languages and unique regulations and unique currencies so the complexity is very high, and the opportunity at the moment is pretty low penetration of e-commerce in Africa on a per capita basis is much lower in the spend is much lower than a lot of these more established market so I, I’m sure there’s a long-term aspiration for Amazon to dominate the whole planet before they get to Mars but, in the short run I just feel like that Africa hasn’t done as well on that on that two by two Matrix that I got from Channel advisor. Scot: [47:26] Yeah and I’ve actually talked to a fair number of South Africans and they order a lot from Amazon and Amazon has some kind of a global cross-border trade thing where you can actually shop from Amazon and get it shipped to you in South African and not crazy amount of time so there is an interesting not native Amazon shopping going on in certain areas of Africa that I’ve heard about. Jason: [47:52] Yeah for sure and not saying there’s not an opportunity now I’m just saying if you’re if you have limited treasure that it may not you know you may get more value out of your India investment then you are Africa and the short run. Scot: [48:04] Yeah and if you’re already like covering half of the opportunity through this cross-border trade solution than that even is better. All right here’s one for you Jason this comes from Kelly gauche I think is how you’re going to feel so looking forward to that pisode I’m seeing all the CX related vendors Salesforce sap Bloom reach, acquia Etc building or buying cdp’s in the past 12 months I get the value of cdp’s but why we’re all of these Acquisitions done so rapidly is this related to the third-party cookie changes coming. Jason: [48:42] Good question so sidenote Kelly is the chief technology officer at Commerce tools who were talking about earlier and he’s also the author of. I think at least two books that are published by Riley on headless Commerce so we probably should have forwarded the Headless Commerce question to Kelly. With regards to his CDP question for listeners that may not be familiar CDP stands for customer data platform. Um and so this is a tool that was primarily developed for advertising although it’s now used for some other things. Where you build a database of unique customer IDs and what you know about those customers and you use it for marketing purposes and mostly for targeting ads win to win to show what adds to what customers. Um and they are super trendy right now the. [49:38] Has the acquisition spree been been accelerated by the Privacy changes that we talked about a couple weeks ago. My short answer is probably but it’s interesting because those privacy changes both help and hurt cdp’s, they make that first party data in a CDP more valuable, um but they actually make it harder to collect that data and they make it harder to activate that data on not first-party data and so I in the aggregate. I’m not sure. [50:14] I sort of doubt that all these Acquisitions are because the cdp’s very clearly go up in value as a result of these privacy changes in some ways. [50:26] More customers opting out and more attention to privacy means that cdp’s get smaller, um and the the alternative versions of these things that don’t have uniquely identifiable data for an individual customer which are often called dmps. Maybe get bigger so that’s my long answer to say I don’t think it’s purely related to the, changes in privacy what I think is related to is, the the whole category in notion of personalization is super hyped and popular right now we actually did a deep dive on personalization a year ago that frankly I still think stands up pretty well, and in it I kind of highlight that at the moment a lot of this personalization is probably overhyped. [51:17] You know in the last year there was a lot of investment dollars that were you know looking harder for a home, you know there’s a lot of Buzz and hype around personalization and a lot of confusion about privacy and so I suspect that all of those factors. Um contributed to the the shopping spree and cdp’s but in the long run and because of the privacy issues I think the way this all plays out is. Um instead of it being super valuable for everyone to have a CDP that there’s going to be a small handful of cdp’s that are you know operated by people that have a ton of first-party data that are going to be most valuable. Scot: [51:57] Yeah I’ll just throw in there as a guy that watches kind of the SAS space and startups you have this kind of interesting musical chairs / Supply Domino thing that goes on, so you know one of the the big cloud players and I think the bigger ones would be like Salesforce sap Adobe then obviously. You know you have a little bit IBM they’re not really as aggressive especially on the e-commerce side now maybe Oracle but even they been quiet so those are the three really right now but you know what let’s say for some reason Salesforce buy something then the Corp Dev groups of other guys are out there looking and saying hmm. If there’s 10 of these then then you don’t have to do anything but if there’s one more than your Adobe or sap you have to be kind of quick because. These Cloud companies are really in an arms race against each other and. They never want to have one of them with some advantage over the others so it’s such a big space the multiples that those companies enjoy are so big, there’s a lot of Risk by not not having something so that could be one of the reasons you saw this kind of fast uptake by something was really more of, competitive concerns and keeping up with the Joneses and then a lack of Supply I don’t are there tons of CDP companies or are they kind of rare. Jason: [53:23] Um There there’s a ton of CDP companies that it’s a long tale type thing where only only you know there’s a finite supply of ones that have significant customers in them so that you that me teacher you think so I’m going to call that the domino theory of acquisition. The ones that first first acquisition Domino Falls at triggers a bunch of other Acquisitions is nobody wants to be the loser in the musical chairs right. Scot: [53:49] Yeah. Jason: [53:51] So let’s move on to the next question this is from Tech whiz we’ve seen a significant stimuli bounce on Amazon do both of you feel the reopening exuberance will keep the sales acceleration going and if so for how long interested to see if you two are in the Jamie dimon camp. Scot: [54:13] Yeah and I love these economics questions because I always beat you on these Jason so, so it’s gonna be interesting so if you kind of so you got two things going on here number one in our world your of your comps are very important right so same-store sales and comps and stuff, and that’s going to get it super easy right now because this March is obviously way better than last March and April it’s going to be way better for a lot of people. From a store perspective but then on the e-commerce side it’s going to be inverted so e-commerce is going to face really tough comps retail is going to look really good and then just so that’s going to be one aspect. And then we talked last week about that channel advisor blog and a couple other folks that were talking about this kind of. Material bump in sales from the stimulus checks kind of going out and you know so the. [55:17] I think what’s going to happen is there tide is going to rise so. Hard from the money being pumped into the system by not only stimulus checks but just. You know we just had another two trillion dollars go out there’s talk of a four trillion dollar infrastructure, some people are saying that should be five or six trillion we’ve never had so much money pumped into the system, so I kind of in my mind the metaphor there is the tide is going to rise very quickly and e-commerce will benefit from that so if we had just the year-over-year affect Commerce would look like flat to down I think. But because the tides going to be rising I think we’re going to have a really nice continued growth in e-commerce. [56:04] I also when you one of my favorite. But I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk and people eyes asking me on how how are you able to do these things that you do he always goes to core principles and His World core principles are physics you know Rocket Fuel Burns of this right in that custody. In our world the core principles are consumer behaviors and I’m I’m convinced that. You know go puff and instant card and all these things that that people have sampled through the pain Dynamic their addictive and I use that phrase zero friction addiction. The pretty sticky because once you have that really super low friction great experience it amplifies the friction of the the higher friction experience. So I think those things are going to stick it kind of a rate of 80% way more secure than a lot of people I think. [56:57] I don’t know if that puts me the Jamie I’m in Camp but I. I think those are the things so a negative is summarized a negative vizier of your comps are going to be hard on Commerce a positive is the. Not only the stimulus checks but the macro stimulus going on and then the third one is, I do think the zero friction addiction is going to also surprise people so I think that Nets out that we’re going to be surprised that we see the sales acceleration keep going and. You know the thing that can this is probably a topic for another time but then the thing that concerns me is we’ve never put this much money out there we’ve never printed so much money and at some point inflation is going to be a problem and we’re starting to see it in certain parts of the economy and food cost and Home Building things are getting pretty hot already so that could be the thing that slows it down I think that’ll probably be a early next year problem that will have to worry about what do you think Jason. Jason: [58:01] Yeah it is I mean in general I think in aggregate if you look at all of these favorable and unfavorable Trends it’s, the favorable are going to outweigh it so I think like industry averages for both retail and e-commerce will continue to go up. But the real story is going to be the winners and losers right so there there are definitely categories of consumer spending, that are likely to go backwards a little bit you know next year right like there’s huge pent-up demand for travel, and so some of those dollars that people have been you know investing in their home this year, are not going to get reinvested in their home next year they’re going to get invest in a new trip or more time in the bars and more restaurant food instead of grocery food, so I do think. There are going to be some people that are going to struggle to comp because they they were disproportionate beneficiaries this year and, and there’s going to be a counter Trend next year. [59:05] I also do think there is a little bit of a bifurcation there’s big chunks of the economy that are booming and you don’t have all this extra cash pouring in and the savings rate is going up and, all of these good things, , there’s a huge chunk of the economy that were low-wage workers many of which worked in the restaurant industry and half the restaurants aren’t going to reopen and it’s going to take five years for those jobs to come back. And there’s going to be no more economic stimulus for the rest of this year next year because once the health problem goes away, there’s going to be no appetite for passing it and so those people are going to have a really hard time in the industries that are, tied to those people are going to be challenging so I think we’re going to see a both ways but on the aggregate there’s going to be more good economic news than not, and I’m calling it right now you’re going to see it check me in a year I wish I could go back to the prediction show the new catchphrase is yacht yeah which is year over two years ago and and I’m predicting that when you do the word cloud of all the things CEOs say in their in their shareholder meetings for the next year that yeah is going to show up a little bit. Scot: [1:00:15] Yeah okay that’s weird prediction but if you say so so we are we have two questions left and we’re up against time so we’re going the lightning round Jason lightning round for you this comes from Trevor Sumner there will be a multibillion-dollar media shift to in-store who controls the brand spin. Will be media folks will Shopper marketing and trade dollars increase how will brand organizations need to transform to take advantage of the digitized store. That’s an easy one to answer and Twitter a tweet length. Jason: [1:00:50] Yeah it actually is easy to answer and lightning around like that whole industry in the siloed budgets get disrupted in the long run and I don’t know how many years it’s going to take all those budgets get Consolidated in the silos breakdown right so there there’s going to be a marketing person a CMO that that owns all of that spend and there’s not going to be a separate trade budget and all these separate retail budgets and they’re going to you know consider the next best dollar for you know Super Bowl ads against ads on the Shelf at Walmart. Scot: [1:01:24] I don’t have an opinion on that so we’ll go on to the next question and it comes from this was from Facebook Scott Silverman what do you think will be the most surprising post pandemic consumer behaviors that e-commerce retailers should prepare for. Jason: [1:01:41] Scot you want to go first Scot to Scott. Scot: [1:01:45] Um sure I yeah I you know I think the things that we’ve already tried are sticky. I’ll be controversial there’s a lot of Buzz that people are all going to work from home I think that’s over balloon I think, 90% plus the folks will go back to an office they’ll get pulled in they think they’re going to work remote and then you know what’ll happen is another domino effect so sales teams are not efficient working from home so you’ll have a sales floor and then those folks would be like well why isn’t the marketing team here supporting yes and in the marketing team will kind of come in and then they’ll be like well why aren’t the accounting folks here you know we have all these questions and now I have to hop on a zoom decimal question and they’ll be like well let’s bring the engineering team in and suddenly the whole company will be back in an office so I think that’s one that’s not going to that’s a lot of people are assuming it’s going to change that’s not it doesn’t really impact e-commerce per se but that’s one that I’ll be slightly controversial, how about you Jason. Jason: [1:02:49] Goodwin I’m so we don’t have time to get into it I don’t totally agree with you on that one so that’ll be fun will visit it again later I totally get where you’re coming from though, the the short-term one that everyone talks about that I’m many on is peacocking right like that that you know we’ve all been wearing sweats sweatpants and, and sitting in our homes for a year and so there’s going to be this counter-reaction where everyone’s going to want to wear you know you know stand out and go be very. Um gregarious and outgoing like that’s kind of what happened in the Roaring 20s after the Spanish Flu in 1918. Um so so there is some of that. Um that we might see in the short term to me the big the big thing that’s happened that people aren’t talking about enough is consolidation right that the, the pandemic dramatically and disproportionately benefited big chains over small Independence in every category but especially in retailgeek. Um and so I’ll Paris publish a new version but. Almost every public company that has reported their e-commerce growth Drew dramatically more than the industry average. [1:04:00] And the reason that’s possible is because a ton of Mom and Pops shrunk and I think there’s all kinds of implications for that but you know, Walmart Albertsons and Kroger were 40 percent of of a cpgs business before the pandemic and now they’re going to be 60% and that that’s going to be a, shift in the balance of power and a shifting leverage and and they’re all these other implications around. This enormous consolidation the chain restaurants are doing fine but all the independent restaurants are gone bars everything. I think there’s all kinds of implications from that that we’re just starting to think about are you in on that one’s got. Scot: [1:04:42] I disagree on some of that stuff but yeah well we’ll have to this is a good topic will have to revisit. Jason: [1:04:49] Yeah I like it it’s a great question Scott always appreciate your participation and that is going to be a good place to leave it because we have used up our allotted time plus gods for bonus minutes, so as always if we if you disagree with our answer or didn’t get to our reading get your question feel free to hit us up on Facebook or Twitter, um and you know as always if you enjoyed the show please give us that five star review on iTunes. Scot: [1:05:19] Thanks everyone and. Jason: [1:05:20] Until next time happy commercing!

On #SFLive we are joined by Trevor Woolfe, VP Corp Dev and Honza Catchpole, VP Exploration of GR Silver Mining Ltd (TSX.v: GRSL) for a #BREAKINGNEWS Special #SILVER MAKE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL & HIT THE ALERT BUTTON Also, follow us on www.twitter.com/soarfinancial - make sure to follow us & click on the bell icon! Please find more information at https://www.grsilvermining.com ►► Follow Us! ◄◄ Twitter: http://twitter.com/soarfinancial Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soarfinancial/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soarfinanctial/ Website: http://www.soarfinancial.com SF Live is a new format by Soar Financial Partners. The goal is to give short company updates and more importantly get investors engaged directly with the companies. Intro Music: "Summer" by Bensound.com Disclaimer: GR Silver Mining Ltd. is a client of Soar Financial Partners. We own shares and options in the company. Unless specifically disclosed, all information available on Soar Financial and its affiliates or partners should be considered as non-commercial in nature. None of the content produced by Soar Financial should be considered an endorsement, offer or recommendation to buy or sell securities. Soar Financial is not registered with any financial or securities regulatory authority in Canada, the US, Europe, or the UK, and does not provide, nor claim to provide, investment advice or recommendations to any consumer of the content that Soar Financial produces and publicizes. Always do your own due diligence and/or consult a qualified legal, tax, or investment professional if personal advice is deemed necessary. Soar Financial and its related companies (including its directors, employees, and representatives) or a connected person may hold equity positions in securities detailed in communications. When this occurs a disclosure will be made. Disclosures on social media will be made using the hashtag #coi (short for conflict of interest). Soar Financial, its affiliates, and their respective directors, officers, employees, or agents expressly disclaim any liability for losses or damages, whether direct, indirect, special, or consequential, or other consequences, howsoever caused, arising out of any use or reproduction of this site or any decision made or action taken in reliance upon the produced content of Soar Financial, whether authorized or not. By accessing Soar Financial's content, each consumer of Soar Financials content releases Soar Financial, its affiliates, and their respective officers, directors, agents, and employees from all claims and proceedings for such losses, damages, or consequences. Soar Financial may provide content on third-party sites and we disclaim any responsibility for the content of any information posted on such other websites. #mining #exploration #debt #financing #investing #investment #stocks #goldprice #inflation #wealth #FED #moneyprinting #silver #gold #wallstreetbets #silversqueeze #wsb #hold

In this episode, Matt shares his impressive path from UPENN as a biology major to equity research at Morgan Stanley. Learn how he managed to make an internal lateral move in Morgan Stanley's tech IB team, how that opened up the opportunity at Khosla in venture capital and how he approached starting his own business. Finally, learn why Matt ended up back in the corporate world as the HEad of Corp Dev at ServiceNow and why he recently pivoted to the Head of Strategic Finance.

On this episode of M&A Science, we're featuring a session from our December 2020 holiday summit. In this session, Carlos Cesta, Vice President of Corp Dev at Presidio discussed the best practices to capture value from initial deal prospecting to integration. You will learn: - How to price a deal with integration in mind - How to test your synergies during diligence - Why involving the deal sponsor is crucial This podcast is brought to you by DealRoom, an M&A lifecycle management software. Go to DealRoom.net to learn more. To join our network of M&A practitioners, sign up for our newsletter at mascience.com. Perfect your M&A practice using Agile. Go to agilema.com to learn how you can close deals faster.

During this episode of Money Tales, we speak with Rowland Savage who is an entrepreneur, Corporate Development professional and now a published author. Rowland shares stories of growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland during the times of “The Troubles” and how his background and upbringing have influenced his life up to this point.Rowland has focused on the startup arena on “both sides of the fence.” He has taken two startups from concept through to paid deployment, has held roles in Venture Capital and most recently, focused on Corporate Development. As a leader in the Corp Dev team at Atlassian, Rowland successfully executed six deals and was part of the team that acquired Trello. Seeing both sides of the fence has inspired Rowland to publish his first book on the topic of Corporate Development titled, “How to Stick the Landing, the M&A Handbook for Startups.”Rowland is a software guy, who has had the good fortune to work on projects on four different continents. Hailing from Belfast, Northern Ireland originally, he now calls the Bay Area home, along with his wife and two children. Rowland came to the US via the Chicago Booth MBA program, which he has found a useful compliment to his undergraduate degree in Computer Science.At the end of this Money Tales podcast we provide a quick personal financial insight on taxation, the good, the bad, the ugly of how taxes come into play when you are selling a home.Learn more about Money Tale$ > Subscribe to the podcast Recent episodes See all episodes > Form CRS Form ADV Terms of Use Privacy Rights and Responsibilities

During this episode of Money Tales, we speak with Rowland Savage who is an entrepreneur, Corporate Development professional and now a published author. Rowland shares stories of growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland during the times of “The Troubles” and how his background and upbringing have influenced his life up to this point. Rowland has focused on the startup arena on “both sides of the fence.” He has taken two startups from concept through to paid deployment, has held roles in Venture Capital and most recently, focused on Corporate Development. As a leader in the Corp Dev team at Atlassian, Rowland successfully executed six deals and was part of the team that acquired Trello. Seeing both sides of the fence has inspired Rowland to publish his first book on the topic of Corporate Development titled, “How to Stick the Landing, the M&A Handbook for Startups.” Rowland is a software guy, who has had the good fortune to work on projects on four different continents. Hailing from Belfast, Northern Ireland originally, he now calls the Bay Area home, along with his wife and two children. Rowland came to the US via the Chicago Booth MBA program, which he has found a useful compliment to his undergraduate degree in Computer Science. At the end of this Money Tales podcast we provide a quick personal financial insight on taxation, the good, the bad, the ugly of how taxes come into play when you are selling a home. See all episodes >

In this episode we cover the full spectrum of an amazing startup story: Patrick's original idea, recruiting a team, landing his first customers, getting into an accelerator (Techstars), raising a $1.2 million seed round, and being acquired by ServiceNow. Overall, the purpose of this show (Ventures) is to educate and inspire a new generation of venture builders and investors. In this episode, we dive deep into a variety of strategies and tactics that are important for founders to consider. My guests today are Patrick Lowndes (https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricklowndes/) and Brian Geihsler (https://www.linkedin.com/in/briangeihsler/), co-founders of VendorHawk (acquired by ServiceNow in 2018)Visit https://satchel.works/@wclittle/ventures-episode-12 for full notes and links to resources mentioned. You can watch this episode via video here. In this episode we cover the following (this is an abbreviated list): 3:55 - The origin story of VendorHawk8:22 - Work with the early Prota Ventures crew and support for Patrick to focus on selling the idea to potential customers with wireframes/mockups. 10:25 - Intentionality on writing down and testing hypotheses with wireframes/mockups, and eventually quick MVP demos of the business concept.12:06 - How exactly did Patrick successfully sell contracts with wireframes? What strategies/tactics did he use? 16:04 - Key hypothesis: is this enough of a pain point that customers would pay money for it?16:26 - What was the problem that Patrick/Brian were solving? What was the value proposition that the first handful of customers were sold on?18:25 - How did Patrick navigate his way into an organization in order to meet a decision-maker?20:21 - What was Brian thinking about during the time when Patrick was landing the initial customers? 26:50 - Importance of worldview and value alignment, especially amongst co-founders, and why investors should look for it in early stage companies. 28:44 - The story of scaling the company even more, getting into Techstars, and raising seed money. 30:30 - Help from the Seattle community, mentors, and other founders. Closing their seed round 70 days after demo day.32:00 - The story of hiring software engineers, an early sales team, and scaling a business while navigating family life as founders, having a new baby, etc… 33:12 - At what point did Patrick quit his day job? 34:37 - At what point did Brian quit his day job? 35:12 - What aspects of an accelerator - and Techstars in particular - make it most helpful for founders? 36:40 - What did Patrick/Brian and their team do after being seed funded? How did they scale? How did they architect their product roadmap and company operations? 41:40 - How did they build a B2B software sales team? 50:32 - What was Brian learning during the scaling process? How did he think about building the best possible engineering team and operations processes? 52:14 - How to successfully sell customers when you can't build all the features they need right away? 54:47 - Where did those conversations with Corp Dev end up? What is the story behind selling VendorHawk to ServiceNow?  1:00:06 - How did Brian/Patrick navigate telling their team about the company sale? How did they set expectations with their acquirer about what the team merging in would look like?1:03:06 - What did things look like after the acquisition? What did the team do? How did it go?

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Four Winds Interactive is one of the largest and most well-known pure play digital signage companies in the industry. But the Denver-based company went a little quiet about 18 months ago, when a venture capital company based in Austin, Texas took on a majority stake. That perceived quiet spell changed recently when word circulated that Four Winds had itself completed an acquisition - a UK company focused on workplace communications and operations. News of that deal presented a good reason to get back together on a podcast with David Levin, who started the company and has long been its CEO. We chatted about several things, including where the company is at, how fully half of its business is now with screens that are employee-facing, and why he and his clients call the work visual communications. We also get into how the company is weathering the pandemic, with maybe 15% of staff going into the company's two Denver offices, while the rest work from home. Levin goes in, by the way. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT So David, good to catch up. It's been a long time since we've seen each other.  David Levin: Thanks, Dave. It's been way too long.  It's been my impression and you can correct me, that about a year and a half ago, you weren't acquired, but you got a major investment from a private equity firm. And, since then, you’ve been kind of quiet. I don't see Four Winds Interactive around as much as I used to, but tell me I'm wrong and that you guys are noisy as hell and I'm just missing it. David Levin: We might've been quiet, from a press standpoint, but we've been very busy. We did do a majority investment from Vista Equity Partners about 18 months ago. And we've been hard at work. I think when we talked maybe three years ago, we were at the early part of our FWI Cloud Initiative, that we are now into end to end on cloud and have had, I don't know how many releases, but a lot. We're extraordinarily proud of where that's turned out and with Vista, we've made a lot of changes operationally that are great. We've changed a lot of things in our go-to-market operation. And, building the foundation for the company for the next phase.  Now, what drove those changes? Was it because the PE guys or VC guys said you need to make these changes or the cash infusion and support enabled you to make changes that you already had in the works or wanted to do? David Levin: So one of the things we liked about Vista and the reason we partnered with them is that they invest exclusively in software companies and they are known for studying best practices and figuring out what works best. And that's an evolving process because, as companies try new things that go back into the best practice creation, companies evolve together, but you get the benefit of being able to be a member company of 60 plus software companies and figure out what works best. And for the 14 years prior to that, we had essentially figured everything out on our own. And, I was excited to have those resources available to us.  So, long story short, we jumped full-on and implemented a lot of the best practices. What does it mean culturally? As you said, you had 14 years of, pretty much bootstrapping with some angel level private investors, building the company up to where it was at, to then go to having majority owners outside of the company. And now, you're still in charge, but you have masters. David Levin: Yeah, well, it doesn't feel like that. You know, they are a majority owner, but we still retained a significant stake and we have a meaningful ownership piece in this business. I started and have been the CEO since the start, it will always feel like our organization, regardless of the equity structure and they're very collaborative. So it has felt like a partnership.  Yeah. One of the things when the announcement happened that you guys had done this deal, I looked at the company and I looked at the portfolio of companies that Vista already had under its wings and thought, this is interesting. There's a whole bunch of companies in there who I could see doing integrations with and getting you into lines of business or opening doors that would be very hard to otherwise open it. Has that played out or was I just imagining things?  David Levin: The investment thesis wasn't about integration with other portfolio companies. We are what's considered a platform investment for them, which is, they're picking leaders in software industries to go win a category. And the platform investment is the first company investment in a space. And then, in almost all of their investments, there add on acquisitions to that platform company to help when the market broadens the offering to customers, and the Spark Space acquisition was our first acquisition. That's part of that. So no, it was a platform investment versus something related to integration with the portfolio.  But when you have kind of sister companies, so to speak, who are doing work, let's say, in the restaurant or hospitality industry, and they have a platform that does whatever it does, it struck me as so many technologies are starting to blend and blur together that there were complimentary technology opportunities here that you could add capabilities to another platform and vice versa and enable integrations.  David Levin: It's super helpful from an integration standpoint. So where customers want to, in a simple case, pull data from a US system and that system is part of the Vista portfolio, then it's obviously easy to make a call and get the product teams working together, but that wasn't core to the investment strategy. That's just a helpful benefit.  Right, and what has it meant for the company in terms of how you operate? You said you made a lot of structural changes and things like that. How has that played out? David Levin: Yeah, so we've changed our sales territories. We have increased investments, and in marketing, I think, we had launched just prior to the investment, but we've made a significant investment in our customer success organization and our support for customers overall and their renewals and their growth and countless others, but those are the first ones that come to mind.  One thing that always struck me about Four Winds was that you had a lot of people and you opened a hell of a lot of new accounts, very strong in terms of email marketing and customer acquisition. But then, what comes with opening a lot of accounts is you've got to manage all of those people, and manage all of those accounts, and very small accounts can be needier than whale accounts. Has that changed or have you streamlined and focused more on corporate and enterprise?  David Levin: Yeah, enterprise across multiple use cases, but definitely enterprise, after adding to the software platform for 14 years and having the luxury of being able to work on some of the more advanced use cases out there, the product was positioned for enterprise and as a larger organization, you need big customers generally to keep growing. So yeah, that's where we're focused.  So if you have a small account, let's say a, a tribal casino in Missouri that needs 10 screens, would you push them off to a reseller or would you say it's not really what we do anymore?  David Levin: So, the interesting thing in the casino market is that even smaller casinos are great digital signage customers because they've got far more than 10 screens. We do have some phenomenal partners, ConnectedSign is one of those and we'll work with partners to make sure that they're taken care of. The most important thing is that they're on our platform. so generally, yes.  Historically you've put a lot of emphasis on vertical markets, and from my perspective at least, you’ve been very smart in terms of not putting all of your eggs in the generalized “trade show” basket, by going to vertical market-specific trade shows that nobody else, who you would consider a competitor was at, like Airport trade shows and Hotel trade shows, and the Hospital trade shows, and so on.  Have you thinned out the number of verticals that you're after? Cause it seemed to me, when I was looking last week on your website, it seemed to be about corporate and guest experience. David Levin: We've definitely put more focus there, with an overriding theme of enterprise visual communications. Some of our larger customers are retailers and have customer-facing applications. probably go to market perspective, yes, with the caveat that if you've got a lot of screens, you need enterprise-grade visual communication software, where you've got more advanced use cases, we target those. You said visual communication software. Is digital signage, the term you even use with your customers, are they asking for digital signage or are they asking for visual communications or something else?  David Levin: They ask for both. I think cust customers that have been working with us for a long time,tend to use visual communications. And I think the industry is still digital signage and both are great.  Don't really care, just by, please! (Laughter)  David Levin: Yeah.  I'm curious about workplace and enterprise-level workplace, and what's now happening and what's going to happen longed term with, big damn offices that maybe won't be as big as they used to, or at least not as heavily populated as they used to. Is that for some of your clients, as well as yourself to rethink and pivot around the new way that workplaces are gonna operate? David Levin: Yeah. I think all organizations are going through this question of “what does life looked like post-COVID in the workplace?” It has fundamentally changed and customers are at different levels of bringing people back to work. And, technology is a key part of enabling that and I think there's just this fundamental shift where most organizations have proven you can be very effective at home, so then what's the role of the office? And how many people are coming into the office on any given day, what's a safe number of people to come into the office while we're still in COVID and then how do you use technology to manage that?  Does it matter to the typical client whether there are 500 people in the office now, or trimmed down to 200 because you still have 200 people who you need to communicate with? David Levin: Yeah, I think it makes a difference because you've got to communicate, across multiple platforms. So first of all, in workplaces, generally breaking down into three categories, employee communications, which we talk about a lot in the industry, digital workplace, which tends to be more meeting or a management desk management, visitor management, interactive directories, wayfinding, emergency messaging, and then, performance-related, you know KPI boards, manufacturing floors, call centers, Salesforce, etc.  So in the employee communications realm, you've gotta be multichannel. So for people that aren't in the office, obviously digital signs are very important, but if you're at home, you've got to get communication with people on their personal device. So we've got viewer channels that enable people to do that and other tools to make sure that the communication objectives are met.  So the viewer channels are effectively desktop screensaver kinds of things, and alerts that'll pop on a screen? David Levin: Yeah, digital signage content that you can view on your personal device primarily using the browser.  Now, how do you get workers to use that? Because I'm thinking if I worked at a company, and maybe I'm just a cranky old guy, but I don't think I would want that if I could avoid it. I don't know that I would use it if there was a way not to use it.  David Levin: It's funny. A lot of us, when we were working at home, had digital signs running in the background, but you don't have to have a dedicated device for that. So for example, if you've got your laptop connected to multiple screens, then you can take one screen and make that your sign, or resize a window in the corner. And it's a way to get content throughout the day. And some of our customers who are using the product for sales KPIs, they're used to looking at those boards when they're on the office floor. You know, you want to be able to see how you're performing throughout the day, meet with your peers, and you're just running it in a different format.  One of the things I've talked a lot about is the whole idea of KPIs on manufacturing floors and elsewhere. And I've wondered how many end-user companies are actually using it yet, and while I've seen no end of chatter about workplace comms and showing KPIs for showing Salesforce, opportunity pipeline, reports, and everything on a screen. They make sense in a white-collar environment, but are you seeing many companies adopting KPI dashboards for production blue-collar areas? David Levin: We are at the evolution of visual management as part of lean manufacturing and the more screens people end up getting in a venue, then this question of “okay, how do you control the devices and Is there a better way to present the information?” The number of screens that are out there in manufacturing floors on rolling carts may be running an app, a dashboard that wasn't designed to be a digital sign, it's intended for desktop use, but you're running it on a public screen, and you're trying to view it from a long way away. that still exists quite a bit out there.  So as customers evolve their needs, they find themselves looking for digital signage or edge of visual communications products and have really good visual applications and good device management and everything else that comes along with the solution. So tell me about the Smart Space acquisition. Was that an acquisition led by Four Winds or by Vista and it's a paper announcement that this was an acquisition by Four Winds? Or is you guys?  David Levin: No, it was led by Four Winds, but it's a close partnership. We work with the Vista team on the business. So when we started 18 months ago, we mapped out the market, you know, things like where are our largest segments, where the biggest population of our customer base, what are our natural product extensions, where can we bring the most value back to customers and, what does the universe look like? And that helped create our Corp Dev strategy. And with Smart Space, we were talking to them for a while and I really wanted our first acquisition to be able to bring something more back to our base. Now our base really breaks down pretty evenly between 50% of our customers are using the product for customer-facing applications, and 50% of our customers are using the product for internal and employee communication You know, it's hard to do one acquisition to cover everybody from the start, so we're looking across the board. You know, workplace is important to us, and then in the workplace, again, those three kinds of segments between employee comms, performance management, and digital workplace. And then in the digital workplace, If you find yourself with a meeting room signage product, which we have, and customers have been adopting, you're really quickly into meeting room management and desk management. And if you're in meeting room management and desk management, then you really need analysts about the usage of those spaces, you need sensory integration, you need a mobile app for the employee experience, and so that’s why we just felt like it was a good product extension to buy.  So it was one of those cases of, “Our customers looking for this, we know that we're going to have it. We can either build it or the faster track is to buy it and get a pretty significant number of customers with it?” David Levin: Yeah, exactly. And you know, if you're involved in real estate or digital workplace for a large enterprise, then usually you're involved with both digital signage and desk and reading room management. So it's a great fit.  And with the Smart Space deal, will they be rebranded as Four Winds or will it continue to be its own entity?  David Levin: So Smart Space is becoming part of Four Winds. We're still figuring out the naming of the product. We really like what they've done with the product, but right now, Smart Space is an FWI company and will become part of our overall platform.  You had European people before, EMEA people before, but this gives you an office, right? David Levin: It gives us an office and 40 great people, most of who are based in the UK and a really nice center for our operation in Europe.  Does it play out the way I've heard from other companies in terms of you start with very simple applications with a corporate enterprise, like a meeting room sign and it just cascades out from there because if they're happy that the client asks for more capability, directories analytics, KPI dashboards, and so on? David Levin: For sure. In general, the more applications a customer can run on a single platform, the better. And that's where a lot of our growth has come from over the years, as a customer will start in an area that is the most important need at that particular time and then they'll expand and expansion is pretty easy because it's an endpoint on the platform and it's an application that's built on the platform and content that gets managed by the platform and feeds that application, so it's pretty easy to expand and we love the fact that there's so much you can do on the product. We’d love all these different use cases to get rolled out. And even at a workplace customer, it's interesting, even in a workplace customer, there are these different parts of a workplace which ends up being customers facing, like your lobby experience, your executive briefing centers, your trade show. So, it even finds its way over there, even if it started internally.  I know this answer, but I'm curious anyway, you've gone into a few verticals as a company and kind of backed off of them because it was just too hard. Is part of the drive around just being corporate and guest experience by and large a way of kind of simplifying things and realizing, “Hey, verticals like retail are really difficult and verticals like hotels”, what you were doing on your own to some degree, let's say five, six, seven years ago. There's a whole bunch of companies who now say, we do hotels and we're after that market.  David Levin: Yeah. we haven't limited to workplace and guest experience, and again, some of our larger customers are customer-facing applications in retail environments, and they're extraordinarily successful. I think where you get into nuances is if you're going to sub-sectors of retail, let's say like a QSR, if you consider that retail and then you're looking at again, the solution overall, and then you're adding self-service kiosks and other parts of the application. If the customer wants all of that and you don't have that, or don't have the experience on that, then you're not going to be as competitive there. And so, it just depends on how much of the solution is more pure visual communications or digital signage in retail, and how much is broadening into other areas of retail, and I think sub-sectors of retail, QSR, grocery, or specialty retail, sometimes it broadens a bit. Right. You're having real-world experience, well like everybody, with the pandemic in terms of having a pretty significant office. I think the last time I got a count, you guys were up around 350 people, and most of those going into an office in Denver, where are you at now in terms of the number of people coming into the office? David Levin: Yeah. We've got about 350 people in Denver. There are about 20 people in the office. Well, we have two offices in Denver, so maybe 40 people on any given day in the office and it's purely voluntary. We've got plenty of space, so people that are coming in are well socially distant. And, we were shut down completely for several months and you know, your work from home experience differs based on what you have going on at home. And so we wanted for people that wanted to get out of the house for whatever reason, to have the ability to come back to the office in a safe way, so we opened it up, but it's a small percentage. I think we all have about 3000 square feet year at the office.  And coming out of this, do you anticipate that, based on the experience of so many people doing their work from home, when you have the opportunity with your lease, that you'll trim back and this homework will be permanent for some of your staff? David Levin: I don't know if we'll trim back, but I don't see us acquiring a lot more space because we're going to implement our own desk and room booking system and make everything bookable across the office, so people will use the office, as they need, for activity-based working. They'll book what they need when they need it, and I think there'll be this hybrid model of people working from home and working from the office. And, we'll enable that through the software, and put more investment in collaboration.  We're seeing our customers do this too. They're just putting more into teams’ rooms and Zoom’s rooms, so when part of your team's in the office and part of the teams out of the office, it's still really easy to get the resources you need to have effective collaboration.  Are you challenged at all by the Zoom(s) of the world and the big consulting companies like Deloitte(s) and Accenture(s) and ones like that who seem to be getting into this space?  You have Zoom that has a very elemental digital signage system, but you know, so much of what's being done these days is done over Zoom, that they could start to offer the capabilities that you guys are presenting.  David Levin: Yeah, so Zoom is very simple, and as you described, it's good and bad. And, to me, the good part about it is that if people start digital signage and do visual communications and they put screens out, and even if they start on zoom, at least they're getting screens out and chances are the more screens that are out the more their sophistication evolves for applications and management, etc. and they will come back to the market most likely and look for an enterprise provider. The bad is, of course, it is free and they get a little bit of the market, but, I think there's probably more good than bad. And with the large consulting companies, I think they're more partners than competitors and we've done some really great projects with most of them. And it's generally part of a big digital transformation scope. And there are some digital signage applications that are part of that scope, and then they're often using a product like ours to execute on that part of the scope.  Okay. So, they're happy to sell you guys into it as long as they're getting their consulting hours out of it?  David Levin: Definitely. Nobody wants to build all these applications from scratch, you want to use a platform.  Oh, I don't know about that. (Laughter) I get those phone calls and emails almost daily from people saying, “Hey, I'm doing a digital signage startup. Can we get on the phone and talk?” And I'll get on the phone with them and they’ll talk with me, “You would be software platform #487, doing what you just described to me. Please stop now.” It makes them sad, but too bad, I’m saving them a lot of money in the long run.  You are more a technical CEO than a number of CEOs who I speak with, who come more on the sales side or marketing side, where do you see things going in terms of the way all of this stuff is done?  We've had some shifts through the years. There's a hell of a lot more adaptation of systems on chip displays, then maybe, some early observers sought there might be, are we getting to a point where devices are nothing more than little edge devices and visual communications, as you call it, is very much a software-driven initiative, and we don't get fixated on the hardware?  David Levin: Yeah, I think so. From a software perspective, Cloud and IoT have been huge. If you look at a lot of what went into our R&D investment in the last four or five years, it was transforming our own software platforms to take advantage of native clouds and all the technologies around IoT that enable you to manage these remote devices. That just didn't exist when we started 15 years ago and it probably didn't exist five or seven years ago, but we get to take advantage of what the big cloud providers offer and how remote devices are managed in general, for consumers and businesses. Related to edge devices, it's getting a heck of a lot better. To be able to use edge devices effectively and still have pretty sophisticated applications that run on those, when we went live with cloud, we supported BrightSign, Samsung, and LG, we support those three in addition to our Windows platform. And it's a matter of picking the right device or the right use case.  Are enterprise customers, the IT teams, less antsy than they used to be about cloud and unfamiliar devices that aren't HP boxes or Dell boxes that they buy by the hundreds or thousands? David Levin: Yeah, they're embracing with really high-security standards. That was another big part of the investment because it's hard to sell cloud if the security is not there and end-user customers have a really sophisticated way to assess security. So yes, cloud with the security and as far as devices go, there is a movement, of course, to move away from Windows devices and the management that comes along with Windows devices but it also depends on the organization overall. There are some people where they are still heavy Window shops and it's easier for them. And then, there are a lot where if it's more of a, if there's less going on at the endpoint device, it's easier for them to manage overall.  Do you get a sense from end-users, when they're canvassing the potential vendors/service providers who can help them with their visual communications, that most of the people they have coming in really have their act together in terms of security, or is it a breath of fresh air for guys like you to come in and have sales engineers who can talk about serious security? David Levin: Yeah, it's a breath of fresh air, but also for us, we got the security department now, led by Maurice, he’s our Chief Security Officer. So the sales team often at a certain part of the sales cycle, or if customers are upgrading their security standards, which happens quite often, then we'll bring in the team members from our security group and they'll take over from there, cause it really is a specialized discipline. How long have you had that role in place?  David Levin: Gosh, I think I want to say Maurice joined us four years ago to head up the org, and now there are probably five people in the org, and they work closely with our cloud operations and our legal and compliance team and sales engineering. And, it's been a big part of maturing the organization. Yeah, I would imagine that there are end-user customers who are somewhat comforted by the fact that you have full-time people just in that case and not saying, “Oh yeah, we pay attention to security.”  David Levin: Well, they have made it a requirement. When you see some of the security addendums that are attached to contracts, if you don't have a team handling those, there’s just basically no way to comply.  So, looking ahead, I know this is a weird year. and it's hard to forecast anything, but work goes on, so what will we see out of Four Winds in the next 6 to 12 months?  David Levin: Yeah. I think in general, what I'm most excited about is that this world is getting more digital and I think, COVID is pushing that even faster because everybody has had to rethink everything they do.  If it's customer-facing, what's the new customer engagement model? In venues, how do we interact with customers in these venues in a safe way? And how does technology enable that? And digital signage fits in. And if you're in the workplace, it's the same thing related to that to return to work.  I think that's good for our industry overall. I think we play a key role in that. And, for us, we've got a great roadmap where we've got a couple of big releases coming out before the end of the year on Cloud, we’re excited about the integration with Smart Space. Look for more integrations with that on our platform and also us to take key elements of that, like their mobile and wayfinding and some of the other sensory integration, some of the other attributes, and do other use cases for key markets and, just keep, building the company. We're still got a lot of energy.  That's good. All right, David. Great to catch up with you.  David Levin: Thanks, Dave. Appreciate you having me on. Thanks for all you're doing.  

In this episode of Brex in the Black Michael Tannenbaum and Arthur Levy give us their thoughts on how to approach acquihires. Why companies do Acquihires and how to know if yours should Proactive vs. Passive Build pipeline around key properties Building your buckets with your Product team Build brand within the community How to structure your Corp Dev team to “know” what to look for How to objection handle How to speak to VC’s and let them know what to look for You can sign up for Brex by visiting: brex.com

Garrett Smallwood (CEO of Wag!) joins NFX partner James Currier to share his thoughts on profitable and efficient management of companies, thoughtfully operating before and after COVID-19, and shifting your mental models to adapt to your current situation. Garrett has earned all the badges — having sold his company to Wag!, operating as VP of Product, Partnerships, and Corp Dev, before building the roadmap to CEO. Garrett's current roadmap at Wag! is centered around operational excellence, strategic advantages through services and density, how to navigate through uncertainties, and the importance of thinking deeply about the way you build your company.

Kison sits down with Sachin Kumar, Senior Director - M&A and Regional Lead for HR North America at Conduent, to discuss the topic of the not so famous process of Rebadging. Together they break down the process step by step and explain the use case. Some tips: Don’t forget to get the HR team involved quickly.  Without having an HR plan, focused job descriptions, and performance standards, rebadging can quickly turn into a big headache. Also, problems arise if Corp Dev was not informed because the business team doesn’t know how to manage an asset deal. So try your best to keep Corp Dev in the loop especially when the deal is scaling. 

On today’s Tank Talk! We welcome our guest Villi Iltchev, Partner @ Two Sigma Ventures.On today's Talk, we ask Villi about his journey into technology investing after starting his career at HP on the corporate development side and then moving over to Salesforce during the last crisis. We ask Villis' about his time as Vice President of Corp Dev at Salesforce Ventures and about some of the amazing startups he invested in like BOX, Hubspot, Zapier and countless others.We dig into Villi’s experience moving from corporate venture into traditional venture roles as a Partner at August Capital where he made his investment into unicorn startup Gitlab as the Series B lead and his reasons behind that investment even after 100 Venture firms already passed on them. Next, we ask Villi to explain why Two Sigma Ventures was the best fit for him for his next journey in venture and how their quantitative approach to investing on the public side has shaped their investment strategy on the venture side. Finally, we ask Villi what he looks for when investing in emerging areas and how he manages timing risk and avoids being too early into an emerging market. This tank talk really helps you think about the ways in which venture investors are forced to think outside the box and into the future sometimes decades ahead in order to place bets on startups at the early stage today and how founders should approach these kinds of investors.Now please welcome today's guest to the Tank, Villi Iltchev.Books Mentioned In The Show:-The Brothers Karamazov- The Death of Ivan IlychVilli’s words of inspiration - “Have a truthful life, do things that are meaningful and do things that matter.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tanktalks.substack.com

On today’s Tank Talk! We welcome our guest Villi Iltchev, Partner @ Two Sigma Ventures.On today's Talk, we ask Villi about his journey into technology investing after starting his career at HP on the corporate development side and then moving over to Salesforce during the last crisis. We ask Villis' about his time as Vice President of Corp Dev at Salesforce Ventures and about some of the amazing startups he invested in like BOX, Hubspot, Zapier and countless others.We dig into Villi’s experience moving from corporate venture into traditional venture roles as a Partner at August Capital where he made his investment into unicorn startup Gitlab as the Series B lead and his reasons behind that investment even after 100 Venture firms already passed on them. Next, we ask Villi to explain why Two Sigma Ventures was the best fit for him for his next journey in venture and how their quantitative approach to investing on the public side has shaped their investment strategy on the venture side. Finally, we ask Villi what he looks for when investing in emerging areas and how he manages timing risk and avoids being too early into an emerging market. This tank talk really helps you think about the ways in which venture investors are forced to think outside the box and into the future sometimes decades ahead in order to place bets on startups at the early stage today and how founders should approach these kinds of investors.Now please welcome today's guest to the Tank, Villi Iltchev.Books Mentioned In The Show:- The Brothers Karamazov- The Death of Ivan IlychVilli’s words of inspiration - “Have a truthful life, do things that are meaningful and do things that matter.”

Unless you NEED to sell your business RIGHT NOW, don't talk to corporate development from a big fancy company.

An interview with Roy Stein, Founder of BabelBark. About Roy Stein: Roy is a serial entrepreneur and former executive in companies ranging in size from public corporations with thousands of employees to idea & seed stage startups, with a proven track record in building businesses and turning a problem or company around. His strong skills as a communicator and team builder have enabled him to successfully lead both mature corporations and new ventures in operations, business operations, corporate development, and revenue generation. With over 20 years’ experience leading, building, and operating business units and companies across different countries and spanning continents, he understands the nuances of global and local markets, product development, technology integration, partnership eco-systems and generating widespread adoption in the marketplace – while building multi-cultural / multi location teams. Roy currently serves as the CEO of BabelBark, a company he co-founded in 2015 with his long-time business partner Bill Rebozo, a successful highly unique software platform for the companion animal space. Prior to founding BabelBark, Roy held executive leadership roles and led business units in EnergyPoints (Co-Founder and COO, was acquired in 2014 by Lux Research), GridPoint Inc. (SVP Operations, acquired by TFC Utilities), Comverse Technologies Inc. (public company, VP Corp Dev) and Comverse Billing Systems Ltd (VP Operations, acquired by Amdocs) Connect with Roy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roy-stein-576abb/ Amazon links to the gear we use to podcast: Zoom H6 Handy Recorder: https://amzn.to/2Jp14uA Audio-Technica AT2020 Cardioid Condenser Microphone: https://amzn.to/2UqvDq1 Adjustable Mic stands: https://amzn.to/2wNODFI Simple Pop filters: https://amzn.to/3arhONJ XLR Cables: https://amzn.to/2UpMVDs SD Card: https://amzn.to/2UFCzhQ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

CVC 7 Forces Model for Innovation" as part of a series on Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) discussing a model of how innovation, information or specific cases can be shared among these business units: CVC, Corp Dev, HR, R&D, IT, Strategy and even the Board of Directors.

In this episode, member @jKim219 shares his story graduating during the financial crisis in 2008. Hear about what is was like to work at a prop trading shop that requires you to put up your own money, what he did when he burned out and quit and finally how he turned it all around.

Neal Hansch (@nhansch) and Liz Keen (@Liz_Keen) of Silicon Foundry join Erik on this episode. They Discuss:- How Silicon Foundry is building bridges between communities- How corporations have interfaced with Silicon Valley over time- The purpose and rise of Corporate Venture Capital- How have accelerators evolved and what opportunities have they created for corporations- The role venture studios play in corporate innovation- When should startup founders start talking to Corp Dev teams- What are the most common mistakes of corporations dealing with startups and vice versa- What does great corporate innovation look like from an organizational perspective- The role of Economic Development Corporations- Corporate VCs betting against their core businessThanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg.

Neal Hansch (@nhansch) and Liz Keen (@Liz_Keen) of Silicon Foundry join Erik on this episode. They Discuss:- How Silicon Foundry is building bridges between communities- How corporations have interfaced with Silicon Valley over time- The purpose and rise of Corporate Venture Capital- How have accelerators evolved and what opportunities have they created for corporations- The role venture studios play in corporate innovation- When should startup founders start talking to Corp Dev teams- What are the most common mistakes of corporations dealing with startups and vice versa- What does great corporate innovation look like from an organizational perspective- The role of Economic Development Corporations- Corporate VCs betting against their core businessThanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg.

Do you want to be an ally but don't know where or how to start? Diversity and inclusion in technology workplaces is not a women’s issue, or an issue relevant only to other underrepresented groups. Diversity and inclusion are business issues, and they are human issues. We know that businesses profit from the many benefits that diverse perspectives bring to innovation and company competitiveness. In this panel discussion, we aim to facilitate a conversation to better understand the barriers to advocacy, to promote best-practices for effective advocacy, and to enable sharing of first-hand experiences of successful advocacy. Speaker(s) Ammar Maraqa, SVP Strategy and Corp Dev, Splunk Asmita Puri, Sr. Software Engineer, Splunk Marvin Green, Principal Product Manager, Mobile, Splunk Josh Klahr, VP of Product Management, Splunk Robin Barre, Senior Director of Engineering, Splunk Katrina Reid, VP Technical Program Management, Splunk Slides PDF link - https://conf.splunk.com/files/2019/slides/FND1829.pdf?podcast=1577146225 Product: Splunk Developer Cloud Track: Foundations/Platform Level: Good for all skill levels

Do you want to be an ally but don't know where or how to start? Diversity and inclusion in technology workplaces is not a women’s issue, or an issue relevant only to other underrepresented groups. Diversity and inclusion are business issues, and they are human issues. We know that businesses profit from the many benefits that diverse perspectives bring to innovation and company competitiveness. In this panel discussion, we aim to facilitate a conversation to better understand the barriers to advocacy, to promote best-practices for effective advocacy, and to enable sharing of first-hand experiences of successful advocacy. Speaker(s) Ammar Maraqa, SVP Strategy and Corp Dev, Splunk Asmita Puri, Sr. Software Engineer, Splunk Marvin Green, Principal Product Manager, Mobile, Splunk Josh Klahr, VP of Product Management, Splunk Robin Barre, Senior Director of Engineering, Splunk Katrina Reid, VP Technical Program Management, Splunk Slides PDF link - https://conf.splunk.com/files/2019/slides/FND1829.pdf?podcast=1577146202 Product: Splunk Developer Cloud Track: Foundations/Platform Level: Good for all skill levels

Do you want to be an ally but don't know where or how to start? Diversity and inclusion in technology workplaces is not a women’s issue, or an issue relevant only to other underrepresented groups. Diversity and inclusion are business issues, and they are human issues. We know that businesses profit from the many benefits that diverse perspectives bring to innovation and company competitiveness. In this panel discussion, we aim to facilitate a conversation to better understand the barriers to advocacy, to promote best-practices for effective advocacy, and to enable sharing of first-hand experiences of successful advocacy. Speaker(s) Ammar Maraqa, SVP Strategy and Corp Dev, Splunk Asmita Puri, Sr. Software Engineer, Splunk Marvin Green, Principal Product Manager, Mobile, Splunk Josh Klahr, VP of Product Management, Splunk Robin Barre, Senior Director of Engineering, Splunk Katrina Reid, VP Technical Program Management, Splunk Slides PDF link - https://conf.splunk.com/files/2019/slides/FND1829.pdf?podcast=1577146253 Product: Splunk Developer Cloud Track: Foundations/Platform Level: Good for all skill levels

During the Association for Corporate Growth's Strategic Acquirer Summit, Middle Market Growth sat down with two corporate development leads to talk about their roles and how they approach M&A. The first interview explores corporate development in the tech space and features Kate Anissimov, who recently joined Google, having previously worked in corporate development and strategy at Twitter. Anissimov described how she identifies and evaluates technology businesses, and what unique challenges are associated with tech M&A. The second half of the podcast features Peter Troup, vice president of corporate development at Veritiv, a publicly traded B2B distributor of packaging, paper and janitorial and sanitation products, based in Atlanta. Troup described what Veritiv's M&A activity looks like, how the company's deal team is structured, and what competition and disruption look like in its space. Anissimov and Troup both spoke about how they measure success in their deals. To read more about trends in the middle market, visit our website, middlemarketgrowth.org.

RECAST Any part of this episode: https://recast.simplecast.com/7eb82844-74aa-4e1e-9c1b-e7a6653da300Part 1 of 2 - Nick Jeswald has been an external and internal recruiter in security. He shares with us what he looks for in a candidate, common mistakes made by candidates, and the nuances of hackers he's learned over the years.BIO:I've been in infosec for 8 years, and in various IT roles since 1996. Developer -> Sales Engineer -> BD Specialist -> Security BD -> Security Recruiting -> Dir. Corp Dev. However, whatever role I've had, I've also been one of the top recruiters for each company I worked at.Show Notes:Internal recruiters != external recruitersBackgrounds are differentExternal recruiters come from varied backgrounds, virtually zero from infosecMuch like BD peopleInternal recruiters are more likely to have a greater understanding of infosec or at least ITA recruiter that doesn't understand security is more likely to make bad placements with higher turnoverMotivations are far differentI want to choose people to spend a career withThey want to make a commission and meet SLAsAttention to detail is very differentA tiny detail that could betray a hidden skill set or flaw would likely be overlooked by a 3rd partyI have an interest in understating the person, not just the resumeWhat is their desired career/life trajectory?How will our company enrich/hinder that life?You are in competition with an army of low-skilled counterfeitsYou need to be able to demonstrate raw skills, not just list your certsHave a body of work available for review on GitHub, your own site, etc.Internships are a nice touch, but they cut both waysYou interned with unnamed-big-4-biz-consulting firm? Don't drag that culture in here. I fear for what you learned.Can't talk about where you interned because it was a non-DOD three letter agency? Communicate that point to me in your way. If that is the truth, I'll trace you back and verify.Always be client facingI have seen many recruits passed over for poor hygiene, arrogant treatment of interviewers, disclosure of illegal activity, and just generally obnoxious behaviorYou couldn't act like this on a client site and not get sent home; don't do it on the interviewYes, you are talented...there's always someone cooler than youInterview your interviewersYou should have a standing list of questions for interviewersWhy do you stay with them?What is the intended growth path? Organic? IPO? Channel?Is there any merger/acquisition activity going on? Planned? Intended impact?Is there any rebranding activity going on? Planned? Intended impact?What conditions are driving this open role? Turnover? Internal restructuring? Organizational growth?Will I be supported in my security research? How?Does your company have a defined mentoring path? Why not?How does the company support continuing infosec education?Meet your teamWatch the team interaction closelyCan you see cohesion? Are they supportive or adversarial? Are they authentically happy with their jobs?Understand the org chart you are stepping intoTo whom does security answer? CXX? IT Director? General Counsel?Understanding this will help mitigate surprises laterUnderstand the company cultureBig corp? Big corp problems.Boutique? Founder problems.Is there a "tree house" mentality among the senior employees?Never forget who you areI know you want a job, but don't take a job that is sure to kill you slowly from the insideLike doing offensive security? Don't start in the SOC.Did you walk away from the interview(s) thinking that this company understands the care & feeding of hackers?If you can already see the point at which you will outgrow the company, is it the right place to start?Maybe! If you have a goal of entrepreneurship, or of working for a specific team, this first step just needs to support that eventual goal. This may be detected by an astute interviewer, though.Resume tipsOne page.My dad started at the bottom, and worked up to EVP of a Fortune 50 corp. One page.Focus on your relevant work experiences and extracurricular infosec workI'd rather read about 0days and CVEs than certsI want to know about your community involvement2600, local DCs, TOOOL, OWASP, etc.Presentations at cons matter to me, especially if I can watch you deliver information to an audienceLike a free audition, and believe me I watch every one people link in resumesI don't care about your GPA, fraternity/sorority, who we know in common, what sports you enjoy, or what you look like. At all.Seriously, don't add a photo.General tipsCode. Know it. In several languages.Despite semantic differences, you should have a pretty good working knowledge of the most widespread VMs, coding languages, and compilersWeb apps are your paycheckKnowing the OWASP Top 10 is like knowing your middle name...not impressive in and of itself, but if you don't know them, there's something wrong.Many composite "red team" projects will involve some Web app hacking, and even the most specialized consultancies will agree to a Web app assessment for an established clientThink holistically, and make yourself more valuableIf you can't write a report, of what value are your assessment activities?Seem to always have interpersonal conflict? Time to read up on Empathy and EQ. Be the go-to on your squad.Get comfortable with an audience. Toastmasters is there for you.Learn the value of "the Halloween Mask" as Henry Rollins called itSure, you're a young security professional. We all expect eccentricity from you. We're all also trying to make money and be taken seriouslyDon't forget: in boardrooms of white haired old men across the nation, we're still the same guys who lost them millions of dollars on ERPs and useless Y2K preparationsI'm not kidding about this.Don't wield your difference like a blunt object. A little bit goes a long way when you're also scaring the hell out of everyone with pen test reports.My life is far more complex and wacky than my coworkers know, and I talk a lot. I just know how much to let through the mask.Getting Into Infosec:Follow Me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/coffeewithaymanSubscribe To YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg6gV_gdfc188HZdN8LUx4ACheckout My Book: https://amzn.to/2HP2i25Sign up for updates and commentary: https://mailchi.mp/467573a314e5/gettingintoinfosecWebsite: https://gettingintoinfosec.com

Guest: Oliver Jay - Head of Global Sales & Partnerships @Asana (Board Director @Grab; Formerly @Dropbox, @NEA, @HBS) Guest Background: Oliver Jay is the Head of Global Sales & Partnerships at Asana. Prior to Asana, he scaled the Dropbox sales team from 20 to 100 people across multiple geographies. Previously, Oliver worked at Morgan Stanley and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) where he invested and worked alongside entrepreneurs in consumer internet, cleantech and enterprise SaaS companies. Oliver earned his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Harvard Business School.  Guest Links: Website | LinkedIn | Twitter Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - Top Talent: 4 Hiring Criteria & Step x Step Recruiting Process - The International Expansion Playbook - Upstream: Product-Market Fit to Freemium to Enterprise - Building Sales Engines - Self Serve, Online Sales, Enterprise, Partnerships & Channel - 3 Criteria for Picking Horses (the Right Hypergrowth Companies) - The Role of Unit Economics for Sales & Marketing Leaders Full Interview Transcript: Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy! Naber:  Hey everybody. Today we have Oliver Jay on the show. OJ is they call him. OJ is the Head of Global Sales at Asana, a $1.5 billion valuation company, a Unicorn with $213 million capital raised. Prior to joining Asana, he scaled the Dropbox Sales team from 20 to 100 people across multiple geographies. Dropbox IPO in 2018 $9.6 billion valuation. Previously Oliver worked at Morgan Stanley and New Enterprise Associates, NEA. We invested and worked alongside entrepreneurs in consumer internet, clean tech and enterprise SaaS companies. OJ is also on the Board of Directors for Grab, who has a $14 billion valuation and $9.1 billion capital raised. OJ earned his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Harvard Business School. Here we go. Naber:  Oliver Jay, awesome to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Oliver Jay (OJ):  I'm so glad to be here, Brandon. Naber:  Excellent. Thank you. It's July 4th. I'm sure you don't have anything better to do, so I'm really glad that you're spending it with me this morning. and I really appreciate your time. So we've got a lot to talk about. We're lucky enough to know each other personally and professionally, so I get to talk about some of my favorite things and hear about your story personally, and we'll hop into professional as well, hop through some of your career journey and ultimately, spend the bulk of our time in your professional journey, talking about a lot of the strengths, experiences, and ultimately superpowers that you've built up over time, that you've been able to study about, but also execute on that at several different, really, really high growth businesses. So let's start with on the personal side, little bit about you growing up, a little bit about what you were like as a kid. I mean, Hong Kong, Concord, New Hampshire, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Sydney, San Francisco 2.0, been all over the planet. And I'd love to walk through you as a kiddo and talk about some of your interests, some of the things you're interested in, and then your journey through school. And then we can get into some professional stuff. Maybe in five to seven minutes, et's talk through what was OJ as a kid? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Awesome. Yeah. Well, so I grew up in Hong Kong. My parents are still there. And, I think even as a child I was always, I was the Lego kid, I was the builder. I was a total nerd throughout. And I excelled in math and science. Not a surprise. And it got to a point where my parents were , okay, math is only going to get you so much here. So they then sent me to boarding school in New Hampshire. Naber:  And that was St Paul's? Oliver Jay (OJ):  And that would be St Paul's. So I went there. That was my entry to the US was a ninth grade. Naber:  Nice. Excellent. So, what were some of the interests you had or the hobbies you had when you were a kid? Oliver Jay (OJ):  My main thing was tennis. Tennis was my major hobby growing up. And I think a lot of who I am came from just that sport, because that sport, just like any sport, requires you to be excellent. You just have to be, continue to grind away. A lot of, how I think actually came from that sport and competing, learning how to lose graciously, learning how to stay calm when there's, when it's things are looking rough. When you're down a set, what do you do? I'm thinking about how do you change your tactics in real time? That all comes from tennis. Naber:  Absolutely. Especially in an individual sport. We have to be so iterative. Where you do things a thousand times in practice, and it just becomes a transaction when you're in the actual match. That makes a lot of sense. So when you moved to St Paul's, and you were in Concord, New Hampshire, out of your comfort zone, tell us about that transition. And then let's talk about some of the things that you were interested in when you were in New Hampshire and high school. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Boy, so the interesting thing was Saint Paul's is one of the top high schools in the US, and that's pretty much all my parents knew. And my parents said, you're very strong in math and science, but your English sucks, and it's just really bad. And they're like, you need to supercharge that. And so they looked at the list, I think it was a US News and World Report list. And they had a couple rankings and some names that people have heard of, Exeter, St Paul's, whatever. And then so I applied and got in. And I mean St Paul's is a real school, in that it's academics is intense. And it's in the middle of nowhere. I mean, you're literally in the woods. I grew up in Hong Kong, I grew up in the heart of the jungle, a concrete jungle, and then I'm literally moved into a jungle. The school had, I think 200 acres. And I mean, it was nuts. But I learned to adapt. I learned about the American way. Yeah, it was tough, but it was certainly, also the best four years of my academic career. Naber:  Nice. Very cool. And did you play tennis when you were there? Or what were some of the activities that you were doing? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah, yeah. I was on the tennis team, I was captain of the tennis team there. We were decent, we were decent. I did that, and then I was just lots of part of lots of clubs. But honestly, high school was tough for me. I didn't have that much spare time. Obviously, it should be clear, I have tiger parents, right? Obvious. So I did play a violin as well, but I was terrible at it. But I did the orchestra thing, but I was, I was so bad, so bad. But I survived, and I was okay. But I mean, I just, I worked so hard because my English level was far, far, far, behind my peers at school. Naber:  That must have been so challenging. Learning all that curriculum at such a high level, while you're learning how to master the English language yourself. That is immensely complex. Oliver Jay (OJ):  It was crazy. It was crazy. But, it changed my life. Because when I went to college, I studied philosophy, politics and economics. I went to Penn, right? So I didn't go to Wharton and just do a bunch of math and talking about strategy. I mean it's funny, I'm in business now. It's so easy compared to a career, or studying old philosophy texts, and debating, and writing papers or why you disagree with Socrates. I mean that's...But if I didn't go to St Paul's, and then of gotten out of my comfort zone, I wouldn't have done that. Naber:  That's cool. That's actually a really good way of looking at it. The most challenging class I think I've ever had in Uni was my logic class, my philosophy class - deductive reasoning, and logic, and going through all those different frameworks, and squaring everyone from old philosophers, and folks that...it's just almost, it feels it's impossible with their life experiences to contend and debate with. But that's, that's really interesting. You moved to U Penn. Why did you decide to choose U Penn? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Actually it was specifically because I really liked this program. So PPE, philosophy, politics and economics, is the most popular major in Oxford, in the UK. And Penn was one of two schools that adopted this program. It sounds fancy. Sometimes when I tell people that, it sounds I tri-majored. It's not true. It's more than one, but, it's this integrated curriculum of three disciplines that I think are really, really tied together. So that's why I went to Penn, for that program specifically. Naber:  Got It. So I won't tell anyone you didn't tri-major, but it sounds really, really stimulating. So you were at U Penn, What were some of the things you're interested in at U Penn? Before we get into your first job. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Like I said, Saint Paul's really opened my eyes to the world of humanities, and that's why I really loved that. But my interest had always been in business. You grow up in Hong Kong, you're going to be in business or you're a doctor, right? Or maybe a lawyer. It's just what you do, and it's in my blood. And so even when I was in high school, I was reading Peter Lynch books on how to invest. And so I've always been interested in business, but I took a couple of business classes and I was like, especially the management ones, and I was like, this is ridiculous. I'm not gonna pay this tuition to learn how to work as a team. Not to dismiss it, but I'm like, I don't think I'm going to have a chance again to, to read about Immanuel Kant, and how he thinks about the world. So in college, what I did was I spent most of my time academically on humanities, and then extracurricular was where I got scratch my itch on business. And my biggest thing there is I started the Wharton China Business Society. And back then, it was 2000. China had just gotten into the World Trade Organization, this was before China is the China we know it as today. But you knew it was going to be big. And it's cool, that society is still running now. I'm still getting their emails. Well they keep asking me to for donations. Naber:  That's how you know you made it. All right, cool. So you're you go through UPenn, you tri-major, obviously we talked about that. And you're interested also in studying business. I know you've always been interested in studying companies. I don't know if that's at the cost of studying people, but I know you've always been interested in studying companies. Is that when that started? Or did you get more practical with investing at Morgan Stanley, at NEA, at Harvard, before you started studying companies a lot? Oliver Jay (OJ):  I think the turning point was Morgan Stanley. I mean it was probably that summer internship. I just find it really fascinating. So when I got to Morgan Stanley, and I picked Morgan Stanley because I always liked tech as well. So I've always been a geeky, nerdy guy. And so at Morgan Stanley, I joined the tech team. And I ended up joining team that covered hardware. So companies Cisco, Juniper, and all the companies that died, Nokia, Motorola, they don't exist anymore, Nortel. But I just found it so fascinating to think about how a lot of these companies basically sell commodity hardware. A Cisco router is not that much better than Juniper router, or vice versa back then, at that point. Naber:  That's like a nightmare for software, I mean you're selling on features and pricing. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Exactly, exactly. And, but you were able to see very, very different trajectories. A lot of these companies no longer exist. A lot of them are still strong today. And that's just because of a different strategy that companies took. And I had the opportunity to go really deep. So that's why I joined equity research as opposed to a lot of my colleagues that joined investment banking to work on IPO's and deals. Because, it's probably my humanities background in education that I had led me to want to dig in deep, as opposed to more of a transactional finance job. And that's why I ended up in equity research. And through that experience I've really got to learn how to dig into companies. Naber:  Yeah. Very cool. That's a great transition. So while you're at Morgan Stanley...What's the top thing you learned from Morgan Stanley? The top learning you had, before you moved into NEA. And then we'll hop into NEA after that. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Ooh, top thing from Morgan Stanley. I actually, I have two things in my mind. So can I give you two? Naber:  Give me 10 if you want to, I've got time. Naber:  Yeah. Yeah. So the first, is I think of all places, I was extremely fortunate. And I had two great Managers at Morgan Stanley. They were my first bosses. And they say your first Manager really impacts you and your career, more than any other, right? I was just so fortunate because normally you don't get that on Wall Street. Naber:  Yeah. Statistics aren't on your side. Oliver Jay (OJ):  And I got placed with Scott Coleman and John Marchetti, and they were up and comers. And they rose through the ranks, and so they know what it took to move up. And they just had a very empowering mentality from the beginning. So they just pushed me, and I always asked for more. But every time, they just really gave me great feedback, pushed me, I learned so much. And they empowered me so much that by the second year I was they put me on stage at the Morgan Stanley tech conference, interviewing tech CEOs. And I was like 2 years out of school. And I think that was a very formative experience because I got to benefit from that, and I know what that did for me, and my career, and my confidence. And we'll talk more later about building teams and managing teams, but I've taken a lot of that philosophy from them. I was so lucky. I mean, that would be the number one thing. I will give you that, that was my number one thing I got from Morgan Stanley. Naber:  Nice. That's great. I mean, you're going to talk us through NEA. I mean you've worked for incredible companies, and you're on team building. Let's talk about that. Hiring great teams. One of the things that I know is your superpower from hearing from other people, from talking to you personally, talking to you professionally. But the result speak for themselves. You've hired incredible individuals that I know, because I used to work with them, or I know people that used to work with them, are just the best at what they do. And you consistently do it time, over time, over time. What's I'd love to hear is one, what's that hiring philosophy that you took away from those guys, as well as any additional things you've applied today? And then we can talk a little bit about your actual process. Because clearly there's something you're doing in execution that is better than most, if not better than almost all. So what is your philosophy around hiring that you took away from those guys as well as how you think about it? And then we'll talk through the process like, candidate profiling strategy, how do you attract and recruit, how do you close? So we'll talk about those things as well. So, what's on your mind? Naber:  I love building teams. I mean, it starts there...let me start with why I care about it. And I think for me, that's literally why I think...That's where I find meaning in my life. Bringing in high potential talent and seeing it grow, and creating opportunities. And I've always thought of myself, on my deathbed if I'm seen as the Y-Combinator of talent, I'll be really, really happy. And so because of that, I think that it impacts what I look for, because I really look for people who I believe we can go on a journey together, and they can learn from me and I can learn from them, and we're going to achieve great things together. That's the high level mentality that I have. I really don't look at...no matter how senior or whether someone's a fresh-out-of-school graduate. I think I can learn something. If I can't learn something from you, then I don't think you're a good fit. But that's how I see it. And so it's interesting, at Asana, we recently distilled down what are our Sales attributes, the hiring profile, not profile, but what are the attributes or values, depending on how you define it, that we look for. And I was very, very involved you can imagine, because in many ways I think I codified the things that I really value. So there are four pieces that I really care about in every single person that I hired. No matter, again, fresh out of school or you're going to run EMEA. The first is someone who really "pursues excellence". What I mean by that is, I want to see evidence that someone knows what excellence means. Because in high growth companies, you're growing 100%, 200% early on, 300% in the super early days. Every knows...information is everywhere now. So you can imagine you've got great competition. And so, you gotta go for people who really, really...Well, if you're not excellent, you don't even have a chance. You don't even have a chance to survive. And so, if you're fresh out of school, and I'm digging into your profile, and I don't see one thing...And I don't care, it could be a violin. If you've gotten really good at violin, I'm like, oh yeah. And this is sometimes why I think some of my best hires have been teachers. Because, gosh, if you can teach, especially if people from Teach for America, if you can teach math to inner city kids who have no interest in math, okay, you've pursued excellence here. And I think in this world, you either get it or you don't. You've either seen excellence, and you know what that means, and what it takes to be great, or you just don't. And it's very binary, and you can tell very quickly. So someone who does that is something I value a lot. The second piece is, we're calling it, you "lead with empathy". And in Sales, of course, if you don't have empathy, you're not going to understand your customer's needs, and you're not going to relate to them. You're not going to build a good relationship with them. But I think a lot of this is also empathy just in terms of how you work together, right? Like in Sales...you never win because of Sales. This is a huge thing, where a lot of times I've talked to other founders and they're like, oh, okay, it's time to monetize, but I need to hire some Salespeople. Those Sales people are gonna fail, right? Because Sales is just a part of a bigger engine, because you've got to work together. And working together is fricking hard. It's really hard. So if you don't lead with empathy, you're not going to know how to work together cross-functionally. In Sales, what do Sales people say all the time, every single Sales person, every single Sales leader, I need more leads. Marketing's not developing more leads for me. I'm like, okay, great. Tell me more. How could they be developing more leads for you? And why? Most people can't answer that. If you can't answer that, just like with a customer, you're not going to be able to partner with Marketing to generate the leads that you actually want, right? It's not transactional. So anyways, so leading with empathy I think is something really important. And really behind that, what I'm looking for is self awareness, right? In a fast growing company, you don't have the time to coach every single person. You really don't. I've got some Managers right now who are managing 14 people because we're just growing that fast. And I couldn't hire Managers fast enough. That means that of the 14 people, honestly, they're not each individually getting the top quality mentorship that, say, I got from two guys at Morgan Stanley. But, if I hire people who are self-aware, they're going to teach themselves. They're going to look for ways to learn. And that combined with pursuing excellence, you're going to get good people. The third piece is what I call, someone on our team defined it as, "do the hard". And this is simple, this is like, you've got to grind. I mean, no one has achieved excellence without grinding away. And Sales is really tough. I mean, literally it is the definition of a grinder job. But also, do you take shortcuts? Sometimes the hard way now is actually the easy way long term. And that's what I look for. Are you willing to do, the hard work today so they easier for you later. And the last thing we call it "ascending together", which is your ability to work as on a team. It's like, thinking like an owner, right? That's something LinkedIn, I think it was one of Jeff's big things. It's one of my big things too. I remember when I was Morgan Stanley, that's what John Mack said when he was running the company. Now this is a big bank, Morgan Stanley. When he first said that, I was like, yeah, how am I going to change the trajectory of Morgan Stanley as a first year analyst. But, I did think that way, I really did, and I love that. So, those are some of the high level qualities that I look for in anybody. Naber:  Nice. That's awesome. One follow up on that, that was really well articulated, thanks. And the one follow-up on that...Do you have a particular process you go through? Let's talk about hiring directly on your team, your team, your directs. Do you have a particular process you go through around candidate profiling, attracting that candidate, and you reaching out to them either personally, or the message that you craft? Going through the recruitment, and interviewing process, and then closing. Do you have any tactics that you think completely set you apart from, maybe what other people do, just based on the results that you've gotten? You know that they work. Oliver Jay (OJ):  I don't know if it's differentiated, but I'll tell you how I approach it. I think the first step is you really have to understand the nuances of the role that you're trying to hire for. This is a mistake I see a lot in companies. Especially early stage companies, at some point they have like 10 Salespeople, they're hitting quota, kind of. And then the Board's like, you need a VP of Sales. And then they go and the hire some kind of recruiting firm, and they load them up with VP Sales candidates, and they just hire someone to do VP Sales. And that happens every day. And, I think there's so many nuances to the rule. What kind of Sales? How do you want to build it? And, what types of talent would you want this person to bring in? And, so I am a big believer that you don't know how to hire for that role unless you've done that job yourself, for at least a quarter or two. I think as you get better, you use pattern matching and shortcut. But in the beginning, you have to do it yourself...in the Sales world, so you know what type of companies are you really, really going after and such. And so that's my first step. Because even though I'm desperate for bandwidth, and I would just love to hire someone right now to just take the job, if I don't dig in myself, I don't think I'll hire her right, the best person for that job. So that's first, and I think that helps a lot downstream, and I'll come back to it. Second is, I leveraged my network. So I leverage my network, and I go talk to people. You and I have talked. I'm like, hey, I'm looking for this person. And now I know what I'm looking for, right? Who's the best two people you know? And I don't need to recruit them, but I want to talk to them. Naber:  You do this a lot. You do this a lot. To the point where sometimes I know you're in the market for someone because either I'm close with someone that might be one of the best in the market, and I'm hearing that you had a conversation because he or she and I will talk, and hear that, OJ had a conversation. You do this, it is perpetual, it is in your nature, perpetually to do this all the time. Oliver Jay (OJ):  And I think part of it is, I find it interesting, right? It's like, you get to learn. It's free education, why not? And so I constantly do that, that's true. And then I get referrals. I remember when I moved out to Australia to run, to start Dropbox APAC, and back then LinkedIn when you were there, LinkedIn was one of the top SaaS organization. Smaller than Salesforce, but the talent was super high quality, right? I canvas the top three layers. I talked to every single person across Sales, Marketing, Talent Solutions, everybody...and that's how I met great people Gareth. So, that's step two. Step three is then obviously building that list and talking to people. And I think this is one where, I don't know if it's different, but I do it myself. I do it myself. I reach out. I mean, I'm looking for a Head of BD right now. I'm the one who's InMail'ing people. I don't outsource it to a recruiter. And I think that makes a big difference. Because if you're a top talent, you want to hear from...you want your best shot at this person, right? So I do it myself. And when I get in touch with these people, and I think this is where having done the job yourself for at least a quarter to really, really make a difference, because then now you can talk about the role in a much more sophisticated way. You're not like, I'm just hiring someone to run east coast...Someone is interested it when you're able to map the distinct qualities needed for someone to be successful in a certain role, and why that candidate is a perfect fit. Naber:  There's something ultra sexy about that. There's something ultra sexy about that from a candidate perspective. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Because the candidate, people have choices. There's so many great companies out there. And what candidates want to know, ultimately no matter where and who, is that they're going to be set up for success. And so I think that comes across when you actually know what you're looking for, and then you can talk about why that person...Hey Brandon, I'm talking about you, and you specifically, because of XYZ, and that XYZ is exactly what I'm looking for. And that makes it a lot better. And then I also think a lot, again, you gotta develop that relationship, especially if you're hiring General Managers...If you treat it as just a process, that's where I've seen these things fail. I mean, I've seen bad hiring practices, even at Dropbox where I was, where you meet a lot of hiring mistakes. It was when you make these critical roles that you just rush through a process. I'm gonna go find an executive recruiter from, they're gonna bring me 20, and then I'm going to whittle it down to three, bring people back onsite, pick one. Those almost never work out because you don't have that trust developed, or you can't close. Because that trust has not been built up throughout the process. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Those are great. Those are great. All right. I feel people are going to be furiously writing down notes in audience, much slower than you can talk about this stuff. All right, let's move into NEA...So you're at Morgan Stanley, you make the jump to NEA. Why do you make that jump? What are you doing there? And then I've got a couple of questions for you. Naber:  Cool. NEA was the world's largest venture capital fund. And back then they were, they had never hired pre MBA analysts before, so I was a guinea pig of the first class. Essentially all of these partners just wanted people to do their work for them. And fast forward, now NEA I think has 20 analysts because it's like, wow, that's great to get people to do great work, do all that work for them. NEA - why did I join NEA? Well, first why did I join venture, go into venture capital. And when I was in equity research, I got into the business of studying companies, and giving buy, sell, neutral ratings on every stock, right? You go to CNBC, and there's someone talking about their stock, that was me. Well, that wasn't me, I didn't go on TV, but that's the work I did. Behind that analyst on TV, there's some baby, junior OJ who is crunching numbers. What I realized about my job that I liked was actually understanding the company, the strategy of companies, and the technology of companies. Back then, that was right when iPhone came out. And I made a bad call, by the way. I was like, Blackberry, RIM, remember Research in Motion? Blackberry is for consumers. Remember this company called Palm - PalmPilot remember? Palm is for prosumers. When the iPhone came out, I was like, this is for consumers. Don't worry. Buy more Blackberry. Buy, buy, buy. Obviously I was wrong. But anyways, I love that analyses. What I did not care about was the actual finance. I can do the job, but whether Cisco is going to trade to 35 or 33, I just didn't care. It was almost too easy. It was like, okay, I can look at a stock chart, after a month be like, okay, it's going to pop back up. Naber:  Humanities OJ comes out again. Oliver Jay (OJ):  I think so. It's just not for me. It wasn't fulfilling. if I made a really great call, and I helped a client make a ton of money, I just didn't find that rewarding. So, venture sounded interesting because it sounded it was like, okay, I'm still leveraging some of my analytical background, but I can dig deep into strategy and technology. So that's why I learned to venture. And there was a really a crazy adventure where I got to work with a great farm. Also, so fortunate work with some such great Managers, who empowered me and challenged me. And that's when I got closer to entrepreneurs, and founders. And my job there was due diligence for deals that came in. NEA got great deal flow because it was one of the best firms. So the pressure was more on diligence, and then working with companies, which is great. And then as I worked more with companies, and if we fast forward, that's why I ended up working as, becoming an operator. I was like, wow, that seems fun. It was funny because it gave me that kind of exposure. Naber:  Nice. I read a quote that you had mentioned, in a couple places, that you saw the fun the operators were having, and you wanted to hop on that side of the coin. And I think it's well said. So when you were there at NEA, I've got two particular things that over your career, you've been good at...But since we're on NEA, and you've had a ton of exposure to a lot of different types of companies and deals, it could have been one of the places where the seeds were planted for these two things. The first one is around picking horses, picking the right companies that are going to take off, and understanding the process you need to go through in your mind for one, picking that business, and two, evaluating as to whether or not you would want to hop on board. You've done an amazing job with evaluating them for the companies that you've joined, Dropbox and Asana as an operator, as well as a bunch of businesses you've helped, either been a Board Observer, or you've been a Board Director on a bunch of different types of companies. So when you're thinking about picking horses, what is the criteria you think about for joining a company? And like you said, people have options that are the best...that it being worthy of one, you looking at it, and two, you hopping on board? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah, it's I absolutely learned that from venture. And as a result of that, I look at everything from a investor lens now. When it comes to picking horses, I think...two of the most legendary investors in the valley, Dick Kramlich was a founder of NEA, and Forest Baskett who is still a GP there and just incredibly smart. Basically, when Tableau was founded, he worked with the early founders in the NEA offices to start Tableau. And I asked them, hey, what's what's the secret? Because there are some venture investors that are just clearly better than others. What's the secret? Naber:  Yeah, top quartile year over year. Oliver Jay (OJ):  What's the secret? I mean, when I asked them, I was amazed...Dick was like, find companies that are going after really large markets. And you're like, okay, duh. Naber:  Let me just write that down. Oliver Jay (OJ):  But as I've matured, and I've looked into different companies, and how markets have matured, I can't tell you how many times I've told people on my teams who want to go to some company gave them some VP Sales job, and it sounds great, but the category is just not that big. And I think that's number one, you have to pick a company that has an exploding market, and most importantly is timing. Is the market about to explode now. Let's take a couple of examples. Let's look at Zoom and Slack, two examples recently. Zoom was one of the best IPO's of all time. I mean incredible IPO. Messaging, I mean, I remember the days in 95 when we were using ICQ. I don't know if you ever used ICQ. I still remember my ICQ number, right? We were messaging. Slack versus ICQ, or later MS Messenger, is honestly not that different. And then there was Skype in the middle. So, why is this so different? Do I really believe that the UI is so amazing that that's the reason. Like, okay, maybe, but I don't know if that's a $20 billion difference. It's just that somewhere, in the B2B world around 2014, the market tipped. There was a need in the market for more dynamic communications because the pain of email was just too high, for that use case. And CIO's started believing in it. And that's when it tipped. And that market, the enterprise messaging market, basically tipped in 2014 to 2016, I would say. In those two years the winner, it's a winner take all market...There's good research that shows that when a category tips, you get a flood of competitors, and then within two years, 18 to 24 months, the leader ends up taking I think 78%, something that, call it 80% market share of the market. But if the market is huge, you can go into a big market and you'll still be okay, right? Remember there's a company called Jive, right? And remember Yammer? Remember there was a Chatter? All the still did okay, but if you want the get the $20 billion market cap that Slack got, you have to be the winner during that window when the market is ready to tip. And I would say the same thing about video conferencing. Zoom...this is nothing new. I mean, that's how my wife and I developed a relationship, right, over video conferencing, over Instand Messenger - AOL, by the way, another messaging tool. And look, somewhere between 2015 to 2017, maybe even later, was when the need really, really tiped, and now you see Zoom taking off. And you and I now, we're doing this podcast via Zoom, and we use it all the time. Same thing with file storage. Dropbox, is generating $1.4 billion in recurring revenue for file sharing. Naber:  Fastest company to $1 billion for a SaaS business ever? Is that right?...ARR. Oliver Jay (OJ):  That's right. That's right. And they didn't invent file storage. I remember when I first used Yahoo in 1995, I got to upload a file into Yahoo, and then download it when I was in the library. It was life changing. Yeah, it was amazing. So it's not new. Cloud storage wasn't new. It's just that the market tipped at that point where people were starting to move away from servers. And in 2013 to 2014 was when mobile adoption in the enterprise had hit a certain rate, and that's when you needed cloud storage. Because on mobile, you can't access files anyway. So number one, you've got to pick a huge market, and most importantly, you've got to join that market right before the market tips. And so you have to make a call. I joined Asana when people were like, what is this project management thing? I don't know what it is. Forrester and Gartner haven't written reports on it yet. But I asked the most progressive CIOs, what's next? They're like, well, I just put in Slack, and now all my work is fragmented even in more places than before. I need something to pull it back together. So I'm going to look into this project management, work management space. And I'm like, oh, interesting. So I developed this hypothesis that the capstone of the new modern collaboration stack is going to be something like Asana that pulls things back together, at least for the things that I really did matter to that company. And I'm seeing that market...we are in the heart of the race right now, that 18 to 24 month window. So that's number one. Number two is obviously what people generally look for which is technology, right? If this market is going to tip, does this company have the right technology to win? And this is very much a venture thing, where you need to some make some calls on the architecture, how they built it. What are customers saying about the product, right? That's when you get some feedback. So the second thing is, does this company have the right product to win the market. Because I do think, especially in the B2B now, SaaS more and more, is dictated by the end user and what they use. So you gotta make sure you're the one that people are gonna pick. And then the last part is, do you have the right team? Does this company have the right team that you're going to back? And that's probably the number one thing, besides the size of market, that venture capitalists bet on, is the people. Because early stage you don't really have much of a business yet. Or even a product. And I think in terms of picking companies to join, same thing, right? Let's say you join a Series C company, what is the management team? What are the dynamics? When things go south, which always happens, how does that management team work together to solve them? Or is there finger pointing? 90% of the time it's fingerpointing. 90% of the time Sales says Marketing didn't generate enough leads. Well, no, let me start...Customer Success and Support says Sales as closing crappy deals. Sales says well, what do you expect? Marketing is driving these bad leaves? Marketing goes, well, what do you expect our Product is missing all this stuff. Product goes well, that's because design is a bottleneck, and it's not shipping. We're not shipping fast enough because design is not ready. Design is like, well, you know what, it's not my fault. I can't hire enough designers, it's recruiting, right? Recruiting..it just goes on. And when I say 9 our of 10, I think that it's 9.8 out of 10. And I made this mistake myself. Before Dropbox, I joined a company that I probably shouldn't have. So a lot of people look at the company profile, and the executives, and where they came from. Oh, this person was at Google for 20 years. Well, you know what, so have like 10,000 other people. And you've seen this at LinkedIn, not everyone's a star at LinkedIn buddy. A lot of stars. But, quite a few duds too. Naber:  Totally. I mean, nature of large numbers like that, for every one of those businesses. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Totally. Totally. Or they haven't seen the right stage that's relevant for your company. So, finding the right team that you think you can bank on just to get through the hard times is really, really important. Don't just look at the profile. Naber:  Nice. Awesome. Great answer. Okay. So, we've gotten through NEA right now. At this point, I believe you jump into Harvard, correct? HBS. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah. Naber:  Cool. So take us through the reason you decided to go get your MBA. Why Harvard, which may be self-explanatory. And then take us all the way up through your decision to join Dropbox. So through that period, Scientific Conservation, Harvard, etc, up through the point where you're joining Dropbox. And then we'll talk about what you were responsible for there. And I've got some, a couple of questions for that. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah, sure. So I decided when I was at NEA that I wanted to be on the operating side. So I was like, they have all the fun. I didn't understand how much pain they had either, honestly, but I was like, it sure seems fun. And, the short answer of why I decided to get my MBA...I was like, okay, well if I got into a great school, I might as well take a break because I'm going to make this career switch anyways. So I'll just do it. And that's literally the logic. And this was mainly...I remember one of my mentors at NEA, John S., who's a fantastic guy, fantastic...Remember remember there was this company called The Ladders? Naber:  Yeah, of course. Yeah. The $100K+ jobs is their thing, right? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened with them? Naber:  They died. I have no idea. It was almost overnight. Because I remember, I mean, I did a lot of research on ladders for at some point in my career. Anyways, I don't know, they just died at some point. Oliver Jay (OJ):  So we we're going to meet with The Ladders in New York. I remember this clearly. This was right around the recession starting, and John's just like, you need to apply to business school. And this was October, and the deadline was coming up in December. So I was like, all right. He convinced me that would be good. I mean, I might as well, I'm going to try it. John's like, you're probably not going to get in, and that's cool, but why not try? Because getting into business school, certainly getting into HBS, is a total crapshoot. It's a total lottery. Yeah. I got some friends who were way more qualified than I am and didn't get in. And I now know it's for sure a crap shoot. So anyways, I applied. And I only had time to apply to one school, and that was not the plan, but I just didn't have time because I had to take the GMAT, write the essays, get the recommendation, all that. I only applied to Harvard assuming that I didn't get in. And then I got in. Naber:  Stop it. Hold on. This is unbelievable. Hold on, hold on. So you only applied to Harvard and you got end up... Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah, it wasn't because I had so much confidence or that it was the only school that I would go to. I was gonna apply to like five. But dang it, man, these essays, they take like...I haven't written these essays in a long time, and they go back to humanities OJ. It took forever. I just didn't have time. I think the the application was due January 1st or something, and I remember over Christmas I was writing these essays and I was just like, I don't have time for this. And I just applied one. I really didn't think I was going to go to business school, and then I got it in. And I'm like, oh, okay. I guess I'm going. Naber:  No one can see me losing a right now. Laughing silently while I'm listening to this, and not believing it. This is a great story about getting into Harvard Business School. Such a good story. All right, so you're at Harvard, what's the biggest thing you learned there? And then take us through up to you joining Dropbox. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Ah, man. Yeah. So Harvard was great. Naber:  You must have met some really cool, interesting people. Oliver Jay (OJ):  I met some amazing people. And people that I considered to be my best friends today. That's where I met the co-founders of Grab, I'm on their board now. I met a lot of great professors.Look, I think the thing about business school...A lot of people poo poo on business school. They're like, it's expensive, you don't learn anything, it's just networking. I mean, I call bullshit on that. Because I'm a nerd, I to learn. And so I studied. I'm like, wow, this is interesting. And I'll tell you at that point I was going through this big clean tech phase in my life. I was really interested in clean tech. I was doing clean tech investments at NEA. I was part of the environment group at HBS. I was super active. I thought I was going to build a career in clean tech. And now that I'm selling productivity software for the past seven years, it's given me a different kind of perspective looking back. But I was so into clean tech. And I met some great people through that, through other who have similar interests. But I'll tell you, so my first job was Scientific Conversation - they basically sell building automation software to help optimize the equipment in commercial buildings to optimize their energy spend. Think of it as HVAC optimization software. I would not have been able...and I took a Sales role coming out of school, which is interesting because very few people go to HBS to come out to be a Sales guy. It's pretty rare. And I sold to real estate developers. And if I did not take a real estate class at HBS, I wouldn't know how to speak that lingo. Cap rates, and TNI, and whatever. I mean it's just, there's different things. I learned that from school. And then what was really interesting was then Scientific Conversation went through a big period of restructuring. And I had to be a big part of that. I took this class called turn arounds, because it's a new topic, when you learn about - how to turn around companies? How do you learn about bankruptcy law? You learn about how to negotiate with your creditors so you can live to die another day, so to speak. And then I used those skills. I literally looked up my notes on bankruptcy. Because I would call our creditors, and it'd be like, hey man, we're about to go under here. I'm going to give you, I know I owe you $2 million, I'm gonna give you $2,000, or you can have a shot at bankruptcy court. Anyways, long story short, business school was awesome. I met great people, and I learned a ton, got great exposure, and I actually implement the things that I learned. Naber:  Wow. That's great. Great Story. Okay. So Boston, Beantown, you leave. Scientific Conversationis next, you join in a Sales and Partnerships capacity. Every Harvard Business Schoolers dream, joining Sales right after that. Oliver Jay (OJ):  That's why you go to HBS. Naber:  That's right. #HBS. So what is the biggest thing that you learn at that business, and why did you join Dropbox? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Well, a lot of my lessons learned around the people, in part, was what I learned at Scientific Conservation. It had on paper, all the things that most people look for, right? I said, oh, pre rocket ship, hot industry, a team that looked really, really strong on paper. That's what I went for. You know, hypergrowth. I remember Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Accel. Everybody was like, this is the next one, this is the next OPOWER. This is the commercial version of OPOWER. I thought it was the best thing. But you know what, just didn't have the right team to execute going through the tough times. and that's what I learned. That's honestly the biggest lesson I learned. I met a lot of great people. But that's where I really realized, wow, so much of execution is the people, and the chemistry of those people. And that's what I learned there. So why did I Dropbox? Honestly, I mean...we had to do a big turn around in Scientific Conservation. Within a year we went from 30 people, to 180 people, and then I had to play a big part in restructuring down back to 90 people, and then down to 50 people. I mean it was a year that felt 10 years. So Dropbox, I showed up, people on scooters, drinking from coconuts...you've been to the office. It was just a different world. I'm over here trying to make payroll, literally. There was a payroll period where I... Naber:  And letting people go daily. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Ugh, brutal. People always ask, what's the biggest done, whatever. I'll say the biggest deal I've done was in...I broke my lease, the Scientific Conservation lease with a real estate developer...Because we had signed this Embarcadero Bay Bridge View Office for a seven year lease, even though the company was making zero in revenue, so that tells you something. But thankfully, the one thing that went in our favor was the rental rates have actually gone up in SF. Far, far greater than our committed rate of increase in her seven year lease. So they way I made payroll was, I went to the developer and I said, I will break the lease if you give me x amount of money. Well, they didn't know it was how we were going to make payroll. It was hilarious. And then negotiation, at the end the thing that clinched the deal was office furniture. I was like, I'll throw in the office furniture. Naber:  Stop it. I always find it mind blowing when in residential, someone rents someplace for like, a few grand more a month just because the furniture's included. And that was your deal with the developer. That guy has done tons of deals, tons of deals, and this guy closes over the furniture. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Honestly, I probably would have gotten it done anyways. I was actually in my head thinking, I don't want to pay to get rid of the furniture. That was what was going to be my head. Naber:  Oh, that's a good win-win. All right, so you join Dropbox. There's coconuts, there's cupcakes, there's all of it. So walk us through in one or two minutes, what you were responsible for and the jumps that you made at Dropbox. And then I've got a few questions around some of your super powers, okay? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah. So Dropbox I went in as one of the first business generalists. There wasn't a role, it really just do everything. So, looking to our payments gateway infrastructure, looked into capital financing for our data center to help raise capital. I looked into real estate because they're like, oh, now you're a real estate pro from my background. So I had to try to figure out finding office space. Andthis was all in the first three months. We were moving so fast. And and then there was this business called Dropbox for Teams that was starting to grow really, really quickly. And the Head of Business, our COO was like, can you just take a look at that. Basically, do the Sales Ops work to see what's going on. And that's how I got into it. And then one thing led to another. So took that role on, started adding some visibility into the business. And then moved into actually managing part of it. And ended up running a lot of it, growing the North America Online and Inside Sales teams to 70 or so people. And then got the opportunity to co lead our APEC expansion efforts. Naber:  With Tony, is that right? Oliver Jay (OJ):  With Tony, that's right. And they're like, all right, figure it out. I mean, that was it. Figure out APAC, period. So then we did that, that led to both of us moving out to APAC for a year and a half. Started the Australia office, Japan office, I was gonna think about Singapore, but didn't end up doing Singapore. Also looked at Latin America, when the new CEO joined. He's like, well, there's another continent. Someone's going to look at it. And they just put it on our plate. And then did that for a while. And then when I came back to the US, transitioned into the Corp Dev team, so think about M&A at Dropbox. And then through that experience I realized I really missed building teams. Which is why I went back to the Sales world at Asana. Naber:  Nice. After hearing your story, and I saw a lot of firsthand when I was working with teams at Dropbox and I'm working with teams at Asana, now I get that, why you made that jump. Or at least why that was the right time in your life, and in missing teams to want to make that jump. Wow. That's really interesting. Okay. So a couple things about Dropbox. There is a theme, and you've done this really interestingly coming at it from, let's call it the Sales Ops angle first, and then jumping into manage these teams. Which some of the best operators I know from a Sales and Marketing perspective, have come from the Ops side. I look at them as the Ying to my Yang. They speak a beautiful language and I want to hear all of it. So as you're doing that, you're building things from scratch. And you are building at one phase at Dropbox, and you go through a lot of different phases of growth in your international expansion playbook. You're also going through phases you've been in before at Asana, and planning for phases that are things you've seen before, and things you know a lot about. So let's talk about your international expansion playbook. As you're going through phase by phase, and one, making the decision as to whether or not you should do it in the first place - Expanding outside of, let's call it the US for now, into other markets? And then two, once you decide yes through that evaluation process, you want to go about doing it. What's your step by step process you're going through in order to expand internationally? You can use the Dropbox example or the Asana example, or both, If you just want to say, hey, this is what we did then and this is what we did then. But either way, what's your phase by phase and step by step approach as you're executing on this expansion playbook. Oliver Jay (OJ):  So I think the first is understanding that international operations is not...Adding international operations is, honestly from management overhead perspective, it's the minute you go international, for every new region and office you add is equivalent of adding two, and the next one you add is like adding three. There's a complexity, the overhead is so much more, and sophistication is so much greater. And that's not to say it's not worth it, right? Obviously I do it, but it's something that I think you need to be really, really honest with yourself, with your teams on whether or when are you ready for that? Because honestly, one of the things that I think about is, most companies go international too late, right? I think Slack is a good example. Slack to me, and I have a lot of good friends at Slack, so maybe you have to delete this. But, international is only 30% of their revenue, or 35% of their revenue at this scale. And I think Microsoft got a jump on them internationally. Well Microsoft has a jump on everybody, but especially internationally. And so, you want to go fast, but you got to make sure you commit. So step one, before you commit 100%, what you can do is just play the digital game. Localize your product, localize your ads, localize your website. And I would say probably even in that order. Again, it depends on what product you have, right? But if you have a user facing product...and in Enterprise it starts with the product. In many countries you may have one or two people who aren't very comfortable with English, but the rest of the team may not be. And you're not going to get good adoption that way. So I think that's important, localize your product, as long as you feel you have enough confidence that it's worth the engineering investment. Because it's a big investment. There's a certain threshold where you're going to start seeing...Whether it's tickets that come in asking for your language, or your community, you'll get that ask. Yeah, I mean, maybe French and Spanish, the website, that's as an obvious one. But what's interesting is you can some good lift from just localizing the ads, in Dutch or Japanese, and it points to an English website. You're still going to get some incremental dollars there. So play the digital game. And then at some point, and you have to come up with a framework, and it's different company to company, and you don't have to be that Scientific. But at what point do you feel you're ready to go open an additional office? And almost always, you'll see English speaking markets adopt first - UK, Australia, are the next two, and Canada. Large markets that, for many reasons, and we're not gonna have enough time talking about them, but they usually are the next to adopt technologies. And so your next move almost guaranteed is going to be somewhere in Europe, right? And you pick between Dublin, Amsterdam or London and we can talk about which one, why, but it's going to be one of those three almost guaranteed, right? So setup your Europe hub. And then depending on the type of company, you can think about growing from there. So then the most obvious, next markets would be France and Germany in Europe. And so then you got to make that decision on whether you want to service those markets in whichever hub you've picked, or you go even more local. And I think that depends on the type of company that you have. We talked about Australia, that makes a ton of sense already. The minute you're looking into the UK, if you have the bandwidth, you should look in Australia as well. I would think that the market demand would be equivalent in terms of the time. And then Japan. Japan, people forget, is the second largest IT market in the world. And they're early in their cloud adoption. But for SaaS companies, it's really starting to take off. And so Japan is a market where investing in early can pay off dividends three, four years down the road. Japan is Slack's number two market. It's Salesforce's number two market. But it takes years to build up that market. And so you can start thinking about that. So the order of sequencing, I guess I'm not even...I guess I've done it enough now to just know the sequence instead. I mean the first time I did this at Dropbox it was like, okay, how many users do we need to see before we go green light here? How much revenue? How many businesses? How many domains we want to see? And, I've traveled so much in the last couple of years. This is the order that I would go in, Naber:  Good one. Awesome. You know what's really interesting about that, is you mentioned you've looked at the data, and from the data side it says to do this, this, and this. What you're saying is don't necessarily do the work that everyone else has has done. This is an all likelihood, the chronology of the markets that you will go into next. And that's really interesting. Don't redo all the work. Do not reinvent the wheel. I have two follow-up questions to that. One is how do you know whether to hire local, even more local, versus doing it from a regional hub? How do I know whether or not I should sell from Dublin or London or Amsterdam into France, Germany, Spain, Italy, some of the Nordic countries, etc? Or hire local in that particular market? And by that I mean, when do I do it? And I'll ask the other question after that. Oliver Jay (OJ):  Yeah. To me it all depends on your target audience. Who are you trying to go after and how? So if you're going after SMBs, this is primarily going to be Inside Sales function. You're not showing up. It's not a relationship sale. Then there is so much value in centralizing to the last minute that you can because you're still trying to figure it out. So Asana is small deals, we start with small teams and then we expand them. And, we essentially have a big machine in Dublin. Why? Because the French rep who has learned some new insight selling to Mid-market & SMB companies in France can share with the Nordic Rep, and those best practices when you're early in a region, you got to learn quickly, and you're gonna to learn from the field. And that information transfer is so valuable. And then eventually you go the other way. You launch a new product, you've got to enable the team. There's a lot of operational overhead to enabling lots of people in the field, versus you just fly into in one office, and you basically enable a team all at once. So huge, huge advantage to centralizing. However, if your Sales cycle and process relies a lot on relationship building, whether it's for bigger deals, whether it's a complex deal that relies on partners, then you need to go in the field. And that's where showing up makes a ton of sense. And what changes is the unit economics of that office, where if you open an office in Paris, now showing up at a mid-market opportunity of a 10K Pounds deal, normally is not going to justify a flight in, hotels, make it work. But now it's just, down the street. I mean not down the street, but now you can justify making that visit, and absolutely everything that increases the conversion rate. So there is benefit there too. But balancing operational overhead, learning earlier, I am a big believer that you should hold off as long as you can. Because once you're decentralized, there's no way you can centralize again. Or you can, but it's very painful. You gotta shut down offices, and it's really painful. So you want to wait as long as possible. Naber:  Nice. Great answer. Thank you. And then, second question is...So you're going through this process of massive expansion, within Dropbox and Asana, and you're going through different stages of growth. One of the things that you need to constantly think about...which I don't necessarily believe that a large number of Heads of Sales and Heads of Marketing are very good at this. One of the things you need to constantly be aware of...and coming from VC, you've got interesting perspective on this, and not all the people who have gone from VC to operator and done it with the amount of, not only success, but the amount of speed that you've done it...So a Head of Sales and Marketing needs have the right mindset, with planning and execution, with unit economics in mind. So how do you make sure that you have the right mindset? What is your mindset when you're thinking about balancing, things LTV to CAC ratios, versus booking in revenue growth rate expectations, versus the growing pains of teams and the engagement of those teams. How do you think about incorporating unit economics into your approach? And how do you think about that as a Head of Sales and Marketing? Oliver Jay (OJ):  Okay. So I would say there's a couple of things. First in terms of mindset, if you're leading Sales and Marketing, let's say your company is growing at 100%, right? My mindset, and I tell this to all my Managers, is that my job is to plan and execute as if we were 12 months from now. My Manager's job is to execute and plan as if we were six months from now. Your IC's are the ones who were executing to quarter to quarter. And I think that's something that I always drill into my team, and my Manager because most people manage to the quarter. And by the time you manage to a quarter, you've already forgotten about the next one, and you're basically accumulating debt. And I think part of what's challenging and exciting about managing in high growth, is you've got to balance executing and the job at hand, but at the same time develop the vision of where you need to get to - So if you're a line Manager six months from now - and you've got to do both at the same time. So as my leads, they got the quarterly number, that's great. I just assume they're going to hit it. I mean just tell me if you're not going to hit it, but I'm assuming you're going to hit it. What are the programmatic things you're building in right now as if you're six months from now? Because that is going to take time to build it. And then once you build it, boom, now you're ready. My job is 12 months. So right now, I'm thinking about what my team needs to be doing this time next year. Because, well, my team is getting pretty big now. It's hard to steer a big ship. And so if I'm optimizing for something for the end of the year, not to say that's I don't do that, I do that. But I also push myself to think longer because for me, and from my angle, what's going to happen in the second half of this year has already been shipped. Our performance, our unit economics, our, whatever programmatic infrastructure we build is going to be, it's already too late to change that. So I'm thinking ahead. I think that's important because, you mentioned about unit economics, your unit economics need to change over time. And so you got to work with your management team, your finance team, to understand what unit economics you need to have this time next year. So that you can slowly migrate there. Otherwise you're just hiring heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, and eventually you're like, oh, one day you wake up and finance is like, okay, you're going to get three heads next year, but you have the grow revenue revenue by 50%. So that's the high level mindset that I think is really important, to understand end state first, and work with finance to understand what that looks like. And so I know next year what my unit economics need to be. Now, I can start back filling. And then this is what I do to backfill. So what I do is, I ask my teams to now start thinking about, not unit economics first though, strategy. First strategy, then tactics, then numbers. So for example, my team in Europe. Right now, it's July, and it's the end of our quarter this month. The leads are going to come over to the US and present their strategy for next year, so basically the next 18 month strategy. What do I mean by strategy? Who's our primary customer? Who are we trying to win over and outserve everybody else. Why? And where are we going to focus? Because you can't go after everything. And when I think about Europe as an example, a microcosm of the world, the UK is very different than Germany, which is very different than Spain, and very different than the Nordics. So, if someone calls me and tells me this is my EMEA blanket strategy, I'm like, that's not a strategy. I want you to define what winning looks in the Nordics, and define what winning looks in Spain. Portugal, not as important to me, lump it into that region. Iberia, right? Or something. But, I think it's important that to have a view where you define success. Okay, this is what I'm trying to accomplish in Germany. Align on that first. That's a strategy. Then the tactics. How are we going to do that? Okay. in Germany we're going to go after this segment

Sajith Pai is a Director at Blume Ventures, one of India's leading early-stage venture firms with $150M under management. After a two-decade long stint in Media & Entertainment, much of it in The Times of India Group, across Strategy & Corp Dev roles, Sajith moved to Blume Ventures in 2018. At Blume, Sajith focuses on supporting their investments in the Media, EdTech, Commerce space, in addition to helping build up the Research function. On this episode you'll learn: What does the total funding funnel look like for Indian startups? What are the differences between India1, India2, and India3 and why has almost all VC gone into India1 focused startups? How has the Indian ecosystem evolved over the past 5 years?

Dave Sobota is the Vice President of Corporate Development @ Instacart, the company that delivers your groceries in as little as 1 hour. To date the company has raised over $1.9Bn in funding from some of the very best investors and operators including Mike Moritz @ Sequoia, Jeff Jordan @ a16z, Aaron Levie @ Box, Sam Altman, Garry Tan and more incredible names. As for Dave, prior to Instacart, he was Director of Corporate Development @ Google for over 10 years and before that was with leading law firm, Wilson Sonsini. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Dave made his way from the world of law to Director of Corporate Development at Google to his position at Instacart today? 2.) In 2016, we had 513 BC backed exits, 499 were M&A, so how does Dave assess the M&A landscape today? Why id Dave bullish on the future M&A environment, at least for the next 12 months? Where are his concerns around M&A clustering? How does Dave view the entrance of large scale PE into the tech M&A arena? 3.) From leading Google's M&A practice, what have been Dave's core learnings on whether an entrepreneur should sell their company or remain independent? Paul Graham once said, "startups only talk to corp dev when they are doing really well or really badly". Does Dave agree? What are the reasons a startup would not speak to corp dev? What is the right way for them to communicate this while leaving the door open for future conversations? 4.) How does Dave operationalise the tracking of the startup market and determine what startups he wants to meet? How does Dave like to and think about working with the VC community here? What does that relationship building process look like? In those early meetings, what are the core questions that founders must ask? How much of a role does price play for Dave when considering an acquisition? 5.) How can founders ensure when they sell their company, that it will be properly integrated? What answers from the acquirer suggest it will or will not be? From countless M&A processes, what do the best integrations look like post-acquisition? Where are mistakes often made? Does Dave agree with Paul Graham in stating it is a "gruelling" process? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Dave’s Fave Book: Lonesome Dove Dave’s Most Recent Acquisition: Tenor As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

I had a privilege of sitting down and interview Eli Calderón Morin, A Y-Combinator Hackathon winner, Founder & CEO of All_ebt. Eli has been at the forefront of mobile disruption as an advisor and team member to some of the fastest growing and groundbreaking mobile startups on the planet: AdMob/ acq Google, SnapTell/ acq Amazon, Alohar / acq AutoNavi/ Alibaba, Mojiva, InMobi, OpenX, Lipa Learning, Appfuel, and Adtile. Over the last decade, Eli has gained expertise in the areas of Startup Growth, Operations, Developer Evangelism, Market Expansion, Corp Dev, M&A, Strategic Partnerships, Sales Engineering, BizDev, SaaS, and Product Management. All_ebt is a smart wallet for Food Stamps. Over 54 million Americans receive SNAP (food stamp) benefits each year. They have tremendous purchasing power in aggregate, yet remain under-served by consumer technology.Serving underbanked and low-income communities and acting as a consumer on-ramp for mass crypto adoption and financial services. I met Eli at EOS Global Hackathon Finale in Cape Town, South Africa. We discussed his previous startups, how he is redefining food stamps and he gave advise on startups.

On this episode of Shunya One, we're rebroadcasting an episode from the archives, where hosts Shiladitya and Amit are joined by Miten Sampat, who leads Corporate Development for Times Internet Ltd. The show brings you a conversation covering corporate development investing, the scale of data security in the country, and technology operations in India versus Silicon Valley. Tweet to Miten @miten, Shiladitya @shiladitya and Amit @doshiamit for your questions or reactions to this episode! To join the Shunya One slack channel, request for an invite here: http://ivmpodcasts.com/shunyaone Listen to this show and other awesome shows on the IVM Podcast App on Android: https://goo.gl/tGYdU1 or iOS: https://goo.gl/sZSTU5

In episode 21 of Venture Confidential, Lan Xuezhao, Founding Partner at Basis Set Ventures, describes how she went from a career in Corp Dev at Dropbox to later founding a venture firm that invests in companies that improve people's work efficiency. The post Ep. #21, Feat. Lan Xuezhao of Basis Set Ventures appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 21 of Venture Confidential, Lan Xuezhao, Founding Partner at Basis Set Ventures, describes how she went from a career in Corp Dev at Dropbox to later founding a venture firm that invests in companies that improve people's work efficiency.

Dan Scheinman is one of the West Coast's leading angel investors with a portfolio including the likes of Zoom.us, Tango.me, TomFoolery (acquired by Yahoo) and Arista Networks, where he also sits on the board. Prior to angel investing, Dan spent 18 years at Cisco in numerous roles including Senior Vice President of Corporate Development where he rebuilt corp dev as a growth enabler for Cisco. Dan was also the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG), an internal startup which successfully developed and marketed a hosted software. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Dan made his way into the world of angel investing following leading the M&A and Corp Dev teams at Cisco? 2.) Why does Dan believe that the days of spray and pray angel investing at seed are over? What does the re-entrance of large funds like Sequoia back into seed investing mean for angels and early-stage VCs? How must the early stage alter their approach with the re-entering of these giants? 3.) Why does Dan believe that the No 1 destroyer of value in a VC portfolio is founder drama? How does this lead his thinking when assessing opportunities? How can this be mitigated? Why does Dan believe it is much harder for people over 35 to raise VC funding? 4.) Why does Dan believe that in the best deals price does not matter? What opportunities has Dan passed on a deal due to price, what have been his subsequent learnings? How does Dan approach the aspect of reserve allocation? What is the decision-making process around reserves? What are the reasons he would not take his pro-rata? How does he communicate this to founding teams? 5.) Why are incumbents no longer so willing to acquire for technology and talent? What problems do these early-stage acquisitions cause for their internal dynamics and culture? When done, why are these early-stage acquisitions less and less friendly for the early investors of the company being acquired? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Dan's Fave Book: Moneyball Dan’s Most Recent Investment: Cycognito As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dan on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. We also speak about Movidiam – as brands turn to smarter ways of creating video and digital content, the Movidiam platform offers faster turnarounds whilst maintaining or improving quality. They’re already working with some of the biggest, most innovative companies to help compare teams and freelancers across the global curated network of creative talent. Producers and marketers looking for the best creatives can get a shortlist from Movidiam’s account managers in hours – tailored to their project’s needs. Submit a brief or check out the platform at Movidiam.com.    

Emilie Choi is Head of Corporate Development @ Linkedin where she has led 40+ acquisitions, acquihires or investments. In terms of acquisitions, Emilie led the acquisitions of Lynda, Bizo, Newsle, Bright, Pulse, SlideShare, and Rapportive just to name a few. On the strategic investment side, she led Linkedin's investment in Cornerstone On Demand and G2 Crowd. Before Linkedin, Emilie enjoyed roles such as Director of Digital Business Strategy and Operations at Warner Bros, International Strategy and Ops @ MySpace and Corp Dev and Strategy @ Yahoo. Emilie has also sat on the Naspers board for the last 10 years. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Emilie made her way into the world of M&A and came to lead over 40+ game-changing acquisitions for Linkedin? 2.) In 2016, M&A made up 95% of startup exits, how does Emilie evaluate the current state of exit environments? What 2 reasons have caused the drop in startup M&A? How does Emilie view the rise of PE and strategic investors to the acquisition markets? 3.) Paul Graham said ‘startups should only talk to corp dev when they are doing really well or really badly’. What are Emilie's thoughts on when is the right time for startups to have conversations with Corp Dev teams? When does Emilie you most like to begin the relationship? How does Emilie like to work with VCs in this relationship building? 4.) Paul Graham also described the structure of M&A as "grueling". Does Emilie agree with this? How does Emilie map out the structure of a typical M&A deal, from start to finish? How much of a role does price play in her evaluation of a deal? How does Emilie measure the success of an acquisition? 5.) Matt Switzer @ Hootsuite stated the biggest M&A risk to be integration. What does smooth integrations look like for both consumer vs enterprise? Why do they differ? How can this integration work be de-risked and front loaded? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Emilie’s Fave Book: The Bonfire of the Vanities  Emilie’s Most Recent Investment: Heighten As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. NatureBox Unlimited snack plans offer all you can eat snacks for one fixed price per employee. Naturebox use simple ingredients you can trust to create bold flavors you can’t find anywhere else. All NatureBox snacks are free from artificial junk and variety is endless with options from sweet or savory to vegan or gluten-free. Simply choose the plan that fits your team’s unique snacking habits and select any of NatureBox’s time-saving add-on’s. And beyond Unlimited snacks, you’ll receive perks such as free kitchen setup, no contracts, a dedicated account manager and more. Simply click here to and use the offer code VC20 to get 20% of your first Naturebox month. Leesa is the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Leesa have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is ordered completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10-inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com to start the New Year with better nights sleep!

In this episode of Shunya One, hosts Shiladitya and Amit are joined by Miten Sampat, who leads Corporate Development for Times Internet Ltd. The show brings to you a conversation covering corporate development investing, the scale of data security in the country, and technology operations in India versus Silicon Valley. You can listen to this show and other awesome shows on the IVM Podcast App on Android: https://goo.gl/tGYdU1 or iOS: https://goo.gl/sZSTU5 You can check out our website at http://www.ivmpodcasts.com/

Join the Acquired Limited Partner program! https://kimberlite.fm/acquired/ (works best on mobile)   Ben & David are joined by special guest Taylor Barada, VP and Head of Corporate Development & Strategic Partnerships at Adobe, to discuss how large tech acquirers approach buying companies. This episode is full of great insights for startups & entrepreneurs who might find themselves navigating the M&A process, as well as anyone curious about the craft of dealmaking and the strategic approach of large acquirers.    Topics covered include: How conversations begin between startups and acquirers The importance of building a relationship with acquirers over time and "investing in lines, not dots” (just like raising VC) The often under-appreciated role of culture fit between acquirers and acquisition targets  How entrepreneurs should evaluate acquirers throughout the M&A process  Two examples of successful acquisitions Taylor completed at Yahoo in Citizen Sports and IntoNow The M&A process at large technology acquirers, from initial conversations to LOI, due diligence and the definitive merger agreement  The relative roles of Corp Dev, business/product owners and executive sponsors in the M&A process Common mistakes startups (and VC’s) often make in the M&A process Different “categories” of M&A that acquirers think about, and the relative risks & opportunities of “core" acquisitions vs transformative new businesses  What percentage of deals Adobe looks at actually happen, and the importance of being willing to say no M&A as a tool for strategy, and the different M&A cultures & approaches at different companies  Tech themes Taylor and Adobe think about as part of their M&A strategy Evaluating the longterm success of deals and the importance of the M&A integration function    Followups: Ben & David’s quick take on Instagram Stories!    The Carve Out Ben: Why the Concorde failed by Vox David: Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast of all time Taylor: Mindset by Carol Dweck, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

Every meeting a busy founder takes is time away from building the company. So it's understandable why engaging corporate development groups is believed to be a waste of time, unless you're selling your company. But... there ARE good reasons to engage corporate development. You just have to know when, and how. And what to avoid! On this episode of the a16z Podcast, operating partner Jamie McGurk, and Tyson Clark and James Loftus (veterans of corporate development from companies like Google, Oracle, and Yahoo) share advice for founders talking to corporate development.

Entrepreneurs are perpetually interested in M&A and Venture Capital topics, but often have little direct experience themselves. The math behind this is pretty obvious: if an entrepreneur starts 3 or 4 startups in his career, there are only so many opportunities that an entrepreneur gets to learn about these kinds of deals. On the other hand, the people who work inside of Corporate Development (those who do M&A deals as their job) and Venture Capital see hundreds of opportunities a year. To an entrepreneur, it is a big deal. On the other side of the table, it is just another day on the job.  This week on the podcast we talk to Tim Porter (@tmporter), managing partner at Madrona Venture Group and former investor in my startup, AppFog. Before that, he worked at Microsoft doing M&A and Corp Dev which gives him a lot of perspective that many entrepreneurs don't have. We pick his brain and try to learn as much as possible this week.