Podcasts about emea

Gideon Kedem, Head of Valen Semiconductor's Automotive Business unit, discusses innovation's deep roots in our DNA and the need for effective management to ensure its impact.  He also shares his view on the different types of innovation beyond technology. Finally, Gideon offers his thoughts on technology's direction and emphasizes the importance of taking risks and managing the process. More about our guest:Gideon Kedem has led Valen Semiconductor's Automotive Business unit since 2020. He brings more than 30 years of experience in the semiconductor and EDA industries, with various roles at leading companies like Cadence, Intel, and Xilinx. Prior to joining Valens in 2020, Gideon managed sales and business development at Xilinx activities across EMEA, Israel and India, with revenue responsibilities exceeding $200M. He holds a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA, both from Tel Aviv University.Know more about her and her company here:Gideon Kedem------------------------------------------------------------Episode Guide:1:16 - What is Innovation?6:19 - Innovation perspectives7:28 - Innovation in Valens company11:53 - What isn't Innovation?15:08 - Intersection of innovation, technology, and art: MoMA17:46 - Advice to innovators--------------------------OUTLAST Consulting offers professional development and strategic advisory services in the areas of innovation and diversity management.

Joe Mazzola, Managing Director – Trading Education at Charles Schwab, joins to discuss investing strategies and gives his market outlook. Jackie Bowie, Managing Partner and Head of EMEA at Chatham Financial, joins to discuss the outlook for recession in Europe and other parts of the globe and resiliency in the US. Callie Cox, US investment analyst with eToro, joins to talk about markets and investing strategies. Odeta Kushi, Deputy Chief Economist at First American, joins to discuss the housing market and outlook for rates and the economy. Everett Millman, Chief Markets Analyst at Gainsville Coins, joins to discuss commodities, metals, and crypto. Eileen Mullaney, workforce transformation lead at Vialto Partner's discussing the company's latest findings on labor and work-from-office trends. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The CPG Guys are joined by Neel Arora, Global Head of eCommerce at Nestlé, the world's largest food & beverage consumer goods manufacturer.Follow Neel on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neel-arora-60912130/Follow Nestlé on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nestle-s-a-/Follow Nestlé online at: https://www.nestle.com/Listen to Neel's colleague Veeral Shah on the CPG Guys at: http://cpgguys.com/veeralshahNeel answers the following questions:How are you thinking about the evolution of retail and the role eCommerce plays? What do you see as the key differences in eCommerce in the 3 major regions: North America, EMEA and APAC ?How should you think about resources and setting yourself up to win? What is the role of data and insights in building brands and creating winning consumer propositions?How do you see online search changing as generative AI is integrated into the tools we use? Will shoppers continue to use retailers or will personal virtual assistants begin to rise in importance? What do brands need to focus on to win in the next gen of search?At last count, there exist over 600 retail media platforms in North America alone. How can CPG brands realistically build a meaningful RM strategy that can be executed at scale? What market conditions (products, outcomes, etc.) need to change to make this objective more achievable?At many FMCG companies, eCommerce operates as a center of excellence. What do you think are the KPIs that should matter to the organization around eCommerce and at what point does the CoE need to absorb back into the business units?The IAB recently produced a Retail Media Buyers Guide to help bring structure to industry offerings and measurement approaches. A good first step, leaves much to be desired or something else?Looking out to the next 5 years, what transformational capabilities, technologies, etc. excite you most about the eCommerce space in fast moving consumer goods?CPG Guys Website: http://CPGguys.comFMCG Guys Website: http://FMCGguys.comCPG Scoop Website: http://CPGscoop.comNextUp Website: http://NextUpisnow.org/cpgguysRetailWit Website: http://retailwit.comRhea Raj Website: http://rhearaj.comVote for Lara Raj in Dream Academy at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=E1LSX8plfy9J82cP&v=_lKKx3O30oI&feature=youtu.beDISCLAIMER: The content in this podcast episode is provided for general informational purposes only. By listening to our episode, you understand that no information contained in this episode should be construed as advice from CPGGUYS, LLC or the individual author, hosts, or guests, nor is it intended to be a substitute for research on any subject matter. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by CPGGUYS, LLC. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. CPGGUYS LLC expressly disclaims any and all liability or responsibility for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential or other damages arising out of any individual's use of, reference to, or inability to use this podcast or the information we presented in this podcast.

The “Gunkie Jar” is a Powerful Measurement of Effectiveness.I had my very first hydrafacial and at the end I was asked, “Want to SEE the results?” While my skin felt great afterwards, the memory that's seared in my mind is seeing the results of the dead skin, dirt, and gunk.Get inspired by President and Chief Executive Officer of BeautyHealth, Andrew Stanleick, who is leading the beauty industry to be more vulnerable, transparent, and real.He leads a category creating company at the intersection of beauty, aesthetics, wellness and health that is transforming the professional beauty and skincare experience.From a small fishing village in Devon, England, he has led some of the biggest and fastest rising beauty and fashion brands, working in 9 countries over his 25+ year career. He led L'Oréal's expansion in EMEA, Coach's growth in Southeast Asia, and the turnaround of Coty Americas, especially the relaunch of Covergirl and as CEO of the Kylie Jenner beauty business.Now as CEO of The Beauty Health Company (NASDAQ: SKIN), Andrew is building a multi brand, tech-driven beauty platform, with rocket-ship brand Hydrafacial as its hero– which is present in 90 countries, delivers 3 million treatments a year, and behind BeautyHealth's 41% revenue growth in 2022.LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewstanleick/Company Link: https://www.beautyhealth.com/What You'll Discover in this Episode:What happened during my first hydrafacial.The big change that's happening in the beauty industry.Why more men are getting into the beauty treatments.How hybrid working is driving the skin care industry.His workout regime. Why he left the “Big Beauty” and transitioned to leading a smaller organization.What it's like working with Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian.How he gets feedback from the frontlines.Their positive LinkedIn strategy.The quote he uses to motivate his team.-----Connect with the Host, #1 bestselling author Ben FanningSpeaking and Training inquiresSubscribe to my Youtube channelLinkedInInstagramTwitter

Our expert hosts, David Brear and Ross Gallagher, are joined by some great guests to talk about the most notable fintech, financial services and banking news from the past week. This episode is a live recording from our After Dark event. If you want to join us for a future recording, you can find out more here (https://info.11fs.com/underground). This week's guests include: Veronica Glab, Head of Engagement at Innovate Finance Sara Castelhano, Co-Head of Payments and Commerce Solutions for EMEA at JP Morgan We cover the following stories from the fintech and financial services space: Monzo are set to launch a new £1 investment service to its customers India have hit their financial inclusion targets 41 years ahead of target Cash payments are up in the UK for the first time in a decade Is the Metaverse dead? Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a bi-weekly podcast dedicated to all things finance, banking, technology, and financial services. Our expert hosts, with real industry experience, are joined by the biggest decision-makers, VCs, and reporters from across financial services including guests from Visa, Nubank, M-Pesa, Techcrunch, Starling, and JP Morgan Chase to discuss the latest news, developments, and trends within the industry. Our weekly news show drops every Monday and tackles the biggest news stories, from acquisitions and launches, to regulatory changes and innovation. Then, every Friday our Insights show dives deeper into the hottest topics shaping the industry like web3 and BNPL. Whether you're already immersed in the world of financial services, or just keen to learn more, this is the #1 podcast for you. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: @fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, or email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Sara Castelhano and Veronica Glab.

As Sales Engineers, our job is complex, but it's very hard to do if we don't stay on top of our learning. Therefore a great skill that we need to develop is continuous learning. Or even more importantly the skill to set time aside to do continuous learning or to learn on the fly!    Today's podcast is an interview with Max Van Burke, Director of pre-sales at Pluralsight for EMEA. EMEA stands for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. We will cover the topic of continuous learning, how Max tackles it, and what he expects his team to do as well.   And If you're not familiar with Pluralsight, it is a learning website that owns Cloud Guru that I've been using on my AWS journey! show notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show284

After the US Department of Justice (DOJ) updated its guidelines for compliance in 2020 to include the use of data analytics, many companies have been contemplating how to integrate analytics into their compliance and audit programs. While Asian regulators are currently less stringent in their guidance, it is highly likely that others will follow suit, and companies both inside and outside Asia need to be prepared. In this episode, Angela Mancini, Partner talks to Allanna Rigby, Partner and regional head for Control Risks' data analytics in EMEA and Asia Pacific on how compliance officers, audit teams, and risk teams can embrace the use of data and analytics to adhere to regulations, even when they think that that have “bad data”. Interested in our analysis? Visit Our Thinking to learn more. For more insights across the Asia-Pacific region, please subscribe to our Asia In Focus podcast.

As shareholder activism gains momentum worldwide, this podcast sheds light on key trends covering universal proxy rules, the capital allocation debate, M&A activity and the overall global outlook. Learn how boards and management can prepare for activism efforts and navigate the evolving business environment.   J.P. Morgan experts lead this discussion, including David Freedman, Global Head of Shareholder Engagement and M&A Capital Markets, Alfredo Porretti, Head of Shareholder Engagement and M&A Capital Markets for North America and Darren Novak, Head of Shareholder Engagement and M&A Capital Markets for EMEA.   This episode was recorded on September 15, 2023. This material was prepared by certain personnel of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates and subsidiaries worldwide and not the firm's research department. It is for informational purposes only, is not intended as an offer or solicitation for the purchase, sale or tender of any financial instrument and does not constitute a commitment, undertaking, offer or solicitation by any JPMorgan Chase entity to extend or arrange credit or to provide any other products or services to any person or entity. © 2023 JPMorgan Chase & Company. All rights reserved.

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Jim Berkman, Fractional CMO at GROW Powered/ New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.   Jim is a seasoned marketing and growth leader with several decades of experience in the B2B start-up technology space. He has helped dozens of companies cross the chasm, scale, and achieve market leadership with successful exits. As a fractional CMO and board advisor, he has leveraged his expertise in strategy, product marketing, digital marketing, and competitive differentiation to help B2B start-ups grow and innovate. Passionate about empowering start-ups to thrive in competitive and emerging markets, Jim has hands-on global experience in the LATAM, EMEA, APJ, and ANZ regions.   Jim holds an MBA from Pepperdine Graziadio Business School.   On the couch in this weeks' episode, Brandi and Jim will tackle Channeling Success: Navigating the Creation of a Powerful Reseller Channel.   Links: Get in touch with Jim Berkman on: LinkedIn  Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live

In this week's Scale Your Sales podcast episode, my guest is John Ashton, the Vice President of the EMEA Sales team for Braze. Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers meaningful and relevant interactions between customers and brands. Prior to Braze, he was an Infantry Officer in the British Army and served on operations around the world. Outside of work he is an adventure enthusiast and is currently preparing to row across the Atlantic this December of 2023. In this episode, John talks about the shift in focus from pre-2022 business strategies centered on personalized and optimized cross-channel messaging to the current importance of streamlining tech infrastructure in enterprise organizations. He discussed the need for users to quickly onboard and upskill in this reduced tech environment, highlighting the significance of human resource optimization. He shares their focus on product expertise, effective utilization of technology, and the vital role they play in customer retention and growth. Additionally, we learn how Braze differentiates itself in the competitive market through customer advocacy and a positive post-signing experience. Welcome to Scale Your Sales Podcasts, John Ashton.   Timestamps:   03:56 – In today's competitive market, high-frequency data analysis, personalized engagement, and flawless execution define Braze. 08:28 – Success lies in quantifying and reducing wasted resources. 12:54 – Talent is key, and so are intellectual curiosity and effective communication. 16:55 – Feudal exercises with vague briefs foster curiosity. 23:49 – His role in in account management, prioritizing advocacy and clear communication 26:34 – Interdepartmental synergy fuels sales success, anchoring in value-driven projects. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jecashton/   Janice B Gordon is the award-winning Customer Growth Expert and Scale Your Sales Framework founder. She is by LinkedIn Sales 15 Innovating Sales Influencers to Follow 2021, the Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on Customer Experience Nov 2020 and 150 Women B2B Thought Leaders You Should Follow in 2021. Janice helps companies worldwide to reimagine revenue growth through customer experience and sales.   Book Janice to speak virtually at your next event https://janicebgordon.com    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janice-b-gordon/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/JaniceBGordon    Scale Your Sales Podcast: https://scaleyoursales.co.uk/podcast   More on the blog https://scaleyoursales.co.uk/blog Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janicebgordon   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScaleYourSal...

In this week's episode of "The Conference Room," we welcome LogRhythm's VP EMEA, Kev Eley, an industry veteran with nearly thirty years of experience in growing technology businesses across EMEA. Join us as we dive into a conversation about the challenges and intricacies of launching and growing technology businesses in Europe, including the impact of Brexit and the importance of understanding regional differences. KEY TAKEWAYS FROM THIS WEEK'S EPISODE 00:10:38: Kev emphasizes the constant innovation in the tech industry and the unique position cybersecurity professionals hold as the "good guys" in the battle against cyber threats. 00:11:20: He draws an analogy between the cybersecurity community and superheroes, highlighting the inspiring aspect of working to protect organizations and society from cyber threats. 00:12:17: Kev delves into the evolving landscape of cybersecurity, describing it as an ongoing arms race driven by political motivations, financial incentives for cybercriminals, and increasing digital reliance. 00:14:23: The conversation shifts to Kev's experience at TrapX and the challenges he faced while growing a non-European business in Europe. He explores the regional disparities and cultural differences within Europe that organizations must navigate. 00:15:40: Kev discusses the common approach of American organizations launching in Europe, often starting with the UK as a beachhead and expanding to other European regions. He acknowledges the complexity of managing regional disparities. 00:22:46: The impact of Brexit on businesses entering Europe is discussed. Kev highlights the advantages of the UK as a launchpad due to its language, cultural affinity, and mature market for cybersecurity. 00:29:15: Kev emphasizes the importance of hiring local talent when expanding into European regions. Understanding regional differences and the need for a global-fit product are critical for success. 00:34:00: The complexity of managing teams across different European countries is explored. While coaching principles remain consistent, understanding regional nuances in business conduct is essential. 00:38:03: Kev and Simon stress the importance of appreciating the subtleties and regional differences when launching a business in Europe. Hiring the right talent and understanding cultural nuances are keys to success. THIS WEEK'S GUEST - KEV ELEY Kev Eley is a seasoned industry professional with nearly three decades of experience in driving the growth of technology businesses across EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). His impressive career includes notable positions at industry giants such as IBM and Microsoft, where he honed his expertise. Kev has also made significant contributions during his tenure at innovative cybersecurity companies like TrapX and Egress Software. Currently, he holds the prestigious role of Vice President for EMEA at LogRhythm, a global cybersecurity powerhouse. YOUR HOST - SIMON LADER Simon Lader is the host of The Conference Room, Co-Founder of global executive search firm Salisi Human Capital, and lead generation consultancy Flow and Scale. Since 1997, Simon has helped cybersecurity vendors to build highly effective teams, and since 2022 he has helped people create consistent revenue through consistent lead generation. Get to know more about Simon at: Website: https://simonlader.com/ Salisi: www.salisi.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/simonlader LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/headhuntersimonlader The Conference Room is available on Spotify Apple Podcasts Amazon Music iHeartRadio And everywhere else you listen to podcasts!

The Africa Risk-Reward Index – produced jointly by Control Risks and Oxford Economics Africa – is an authoritative guide for policy makers, business leaders and investors that illustrates the evolution of the investment landscape in major African markets and provides a grounded, longer-term outlook of key trends shaping investment in these economies. Although a polarised world poses serious risks for Africa, the continent has proved resilient time and time again, presenting significant opportunities. For African countries and investors, the time is now.    Join  Patricia Rodrigues, Associate Director Africa, for a discussion about the Index with Tristan Gueret, Senior Analyst; Rose Mumanya, Analyst; and Jacques Nel, Head: Africa Macro,  at Oxford Economics Africa.  

Lee Hardman, Senior Currency Analyst, and Andrea Hayward, Vice President of the Japanese Client Sales Group for EMEA in London, discuss what has been behind a volatile week for the USD. They also discuss how the latest central bank updates from the BoE, BoJ and Fed in the week ahead are likely to impact the FX market.  

Rory is joined by Milka Privodanova, VP Head of EMEA of Pinterest to talk about the online platform which they describe as 'personal media' rather than social.Milka outlines how the user experience of Pinterest is a positive and natural environment for advertisers and how almost everything you see on Pinterest is available to buy. Food, beauty, fashion and home décor are all hugely popular but the company is also experiencing success in the areas of travel, financial services and entertainment.In the Top Two Challenges, Milka shares what she believes is the biggest challenge for Pinterest and also the most pressing issue for the online media sector as a whole.If you want to do business with the UK's leading brands, request an ALF Insight demo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the midst of our escalating waste crisis and the global call for sustainable solutions, chemical recycling for plastics has emerged as both a potential solution and a subject of spirited debate. The concept of transforming post-use plastic into usable resources equivalent to virgin materials through chemical processes holds significant promise. However, several pitfalls and question marks have been raised around how sustainable the process and its outcomes truly are. In this instalment of our debate series, our panel of experts have come together to dissect the feasibility, benefits, and challenges of integrating chemical recycling into our journey towards a sustainable future. They discussed: The methodologies behind chemical recycling. Can the process be sustainable, and how? The opportunities and positive impacts of chemical recycling, and the potential trade-offs and pitfalls. How brands are approaching chemical recycling in their plastic-reduction strategies. The future of this approach. Is there a sustainable way forward with it, and how can we get there? Our expert panel: Chris Dixon, ocean campaign lead, Environmental Investigation Agency Nick Cliffe, deputy challenge director, UKRI Charles Van Reij, global lead packaging, paper and print, Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute Inari Seppa, director, circular advocacy, EMEA, Eastman This webinar was moderated by Ian Welsh, publishing director at Innovation Forum.

Kimberley Cole speaks with Jennifer Geary, a 25-year veteran of the Risk industry, about her handbook for the modern Chief Risk Officer - practical advice, and skills you can bring into your own role as a CRO. Jennifer Geary has over 25 years of experience in finance, technology, risk and legal, across diverse industries from financial services to not-for-profit. She has been Managing Director, EMEA for a software company, and COO and CRO for a number of fintechs. She has also worked in major banks such as Santander and Barclays, and was also COO for Save the Children UK. She is author of a range of business books. Her first book was "How to be a Chief Operating Officer” and she followed up last autumn with "How to be a Chief Risk Officer", and has just launched “How to be a Chief People Officer”, a collaboration with a HR professional. SHOW NOTES 02:03 Career Journey 05:00 Doing Good for Social Good 10:00 Jennifer's 3 Books: How to be a COO, CRO, CPO 13:20 3 Pillars: Culture, Strategy & Execution. 6 Risks: Strategic, People, Tech, Financial, Operational & Sustainability 22:57 How to Keep Yourself Ahead of the Game   Transcripts and membership info: https://www.riskywomen.org/2023/09/podcast-s6e7-how-to-be-a-cro-jennifer-geary/

This week Jenn is joined by Aine Lyons, fellow CLOC board member, and Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at VMware to chat about the CLOC 2023 EMEA Summit, September 18 and 19 at the Royal Lancaster in London.You will love this jam-packed conversation between Aine and Jenn, as they discuss the launch of the CLOC European Advisory Committee, the themes of this year's summit, and luxury pajama shopping in NYC.Tickets are still available.See you there!!

In this episode, Pim chats with Harriet MacEacharn from Darktrace about a groundbreaking deal that highlights the significance of multi-threading. Taking about 18 months from beginning to end, with 4 million TCV, it was one of the biggest deals in EMEA at the time.As is the true sign of an elite dealer, when Harriet looks back at this deal, despite her not using MEDDPICC at the time, she recognizes its pivotal elements as driving forces behind the deal's success. Talk about a killer framework!Throughout the episode, Harriet shouts out different members of her team who engaged with various stakeholders. Their hard work provided invaluable insights that shaped the deal's trajectory. Tune in to uncover the true power of an amazing and reliable team.ABOUT HARRIET:Harriet has been in sales for 8 years, becoming a key part of Darktrace's successful growth story when she joined the company five years ago. Regularly in the top 5 UK performers throughout her tenure, Harriet has continued to improve and develop and as of 2023 now holds the title of Worldwide Sales Rep of the Year, beating over 600 of her colleagues in sales to the title, with total new business bookings for FY22/23 over $12,000,000.   As a Senior Account Director in the Enterprise Team, Harriet heads up a team of high performers and is responsible for their upskilling and development whilst also retaining her own targets.ABOUT ELITE DEALERS:Elite Dealers is a MEDDICC MEDIA production brought to you by our very own CRO, Pim Roelofsen, where he talks with leading sales professionals across the industry where they share their best deals and what made their deals so special.

Mark Davis, Analyst at Keypoint Intelligence, sits down with Canon Europe's Pierre Meurice and Ryan Stewart to investigate the important topic of how buyer personas can influence purchasing patterns. Their discussion spans the fast-moving borderless world of B2C and B2B across social media, adjusting for cultural differences in the expansive EMEA geographic region, and how to engage with customers on their unique journey.

Over the years recruitment has changed and hiring is now seen by some as a science. One person who considers hiring as a science is Colm O'Cuinneain the General Manager of EMEA for Greenhouse Software and he sat down for a chat with Ronan. Colm talks about his background, what Greenhouse Software does, AI and more. More about Colm: His passion is building high growth businesses and leading teams to great results by always doing the right thing by our customers and our teams. His team's create close partnership with customer's, looking to understand their challenges and investigate how our solutions can best solve them. His main purpose is to make a positive contribution to the transformation and career development of the individuals I work with. This is his true north as a leader.

Today, I will take you into the often-overlooked corridors of finance within the digital marketing realm. My guest, Chris Pearce, serves as the International Finance Direct for EMEA and APAC at Marigold, a name that commands respect in the digital marketing arena.  In the episode, Chris walks us through Marigold's transformative journey as they made the shift from manual to automated accounts receivable using Quadient AR by YayPay. Chris delves into the before and after, revealing a landscape fraught with challenges, including inconsistent system reports and missed follow-ups that were a part of their pre-automation days.  With automation, the game has entirely changed for Marigold, with remarkable improvements like securing on-time payments, enhancing customer experiences, and slashing overdue customer payments by an impressive 40%. We then discuss the K-Piver-Cordion system, a leap forward in the company's automated accounts receivable efforts. This has significantly optimized communication with customers, streamlined payment processes, and bolstered cash flows. The conversation turns richly informative as Chris elaborates on the challenges Marigold had to navigate during this transition. He emphasizes the meticulous data organization and communication strategies that were pivotal to their success. We also explore the exciting horizons that automation and artificial intelligence could offer Marigold in the near future. Not just confined to accounts receivable, but the potential for sweeping transformations across various operational facets of the company. Tune in for a deep-dive into the transformative role of finance in digital marketing, as Chris Pearce offers an unprecedented look at the operations behind one of the industry's leading names. Whether you're a digital marketer, a finance professional, or someone intrigued by the blend of the two, this episode promises invaluable insights.

After recent high inflation has been controlled, Karen Ward, chief market strategist for EMEA at JPMorgan Asset Management and adviser to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, has questioned the Bank of England's 2% inflation target. Despite the UK government's willingness to change the bank's mandate, BOE officials fear it will damage the bank's credibility. ✅ Get prepared with 4Patriots!!! Don't wait until SHTF. Make sure you have food, power & medical supplies. First-time buyers can save 10% at 4Patriots.com with code RTD. https://www.4patriots.com/rtd ✅ Take a deeper dive into some thought provoking analysis and research. Uncover insights, prepare, and thrive!

Following today's employment report from the US, Derek Halpenny, Head of Research for Global Markets EMEA & International Securities talks to Matthieu Gloux, Head of Global Client Sales for EMEA, about the implications for the dollar and whether the data changes the outlook for Fed policy. Derek also highlights the changes to MUFG's US dollar forecasts following the release today of the monthly Foreign Exchange Outlook publication and updates listeners on the MUFG Research trade ideas.

Sean O'Connor is the Director of Engineering at Datadog. Datadog is the essential monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Sean discusses his transition from an individual contributor to management and shares why he chose Datadog, emphasizing the appeal of high-scale problems and the real business nature of the company. They delve into the importance of performance management and observability and cover the cultural and technical challenges Sean faces in managing a diverse, geographically spread team, and discuss the transition at Datadog from a decentralized model to more centralized platforms, the corresponding changes in both technical strategies and people management, and what excites him about Datadog's future, including the integration of security offerings into developers' daily experiences, and the evolution of Kubernetes and internal build and release tooling. __ Datadog (https://www.datadoghq.com/) Follow Datadog on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/datadog/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/datadoghq/), Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/user/DatadogHQ), or Twitter (https://twitter.com/datadoghq). Follow Sean O'Connor on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanoc/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/theSeanOC). Visit his website at seanoc.com (https://seanoc.com/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is Sean O'Connor. He is the Director of Engineering at Datadog. Datadog is the essential monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Sean, thank you for joining us. SEAN: Hi, thanks for having me on. VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm super excited to get to talking with you about everything cloud, and DevOps, and engineering. But why don't we first start with just a conversation about what's going on in your life? Is there any exciting personal moment coming up for you soon? SEAN: Yeah, my wife and I are expecting our first kiddo in the next few weeks, so getting us prepared for that as we can and trying to get as much sleep as we can. [laughs] WILL: Get as much sleep as you can now, so...[laughs] I have a question around that. When you first found out that you're going to be a dad, what was your feeling? Because I remember the feeling that I had; it was a mixed reaction of just everything. So, I just wanted to see what was your reaction whenever you found out that you're going to be a dad for the first time. SEAN: Yeah, I was pretty excited. My wife and I had been kind of trying for this for a little while. We're both kind of at the older end for new parents in our late 30s. So, yeah, excited but definitely, I don't know, maybe a certain amount of, I don't know about fear but, you know, maybe just concerned with change and how different life will be, but mostly excitement and happiness. [laughs] WILL: Yeah, I remember the excitement and happiness. But I also remember, like, wait, I don't know exactly what to do in this situation. And what about the situations that I have no idea about and things like that? So, I will tell you, kids are resilient. You're going to do great as a dad. [laughter] SEAN: Yep. Yeah, definitely; I think I feel much more comfortable about the idea of being a parent now than I may have been in my 20s. But yeah, definitely, the idea of being responsible for and raising a whole other human is intimidating. [laughs] VICTORIA: I think the fact that you're worried about it is a good sign [laughs], right? SEAN: I hope so. [laughs] VICTORIA: Like, you understand that it's difficult. You're going to be a great parent just by the fact that you understand it's difficult and there's a lot of work ahead. So, I think I'm really excited for you. And I'm glad we get to talk to you at this point because probably when the episode comes out, you'll be able to listen to it with your new baby in hand. So... WILL: Good. Excited for it. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, love that. Well, great. Well, why don't you tell me a little bit more about your other background, your professional background? What brought you to the role you're into today? SEAN: Yeah. Well, like we mentioned in the beginning; currently, I'm a Director of Engineering at Datadog. I run our computing cloud team. It's responsible for all of our Kubernetes infrastructure, as well as kind of all the tooling for dealing with the cloud providers that we run on and as well as kind of [inaudible 02:54] crypto infrastructure. Within Datadog, I've always been in management roles though I've kind of bounced around. I've been here for about five and a half years. So, before this, I was running a data store infrastructure team. Before that, when I first came in, I was running the APM product team, kind of bounced around between product and infra. And that's kind of, I guess, been a lot of the story of much of my career is wearing lots of different hats and kind of bouncing around between kind of infrastructure-focused roles and product-focused roles. So, before this, I was running the back-end engineering and DevOps teams at Bitly. So, I was there for about five and a half years, started there originally as a software engineer. And before that, a lot of early-stage startups and consulting doing whatever needed doing, and getting to learn about lots of different kind of industries and domains, which is always fun. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's great. So, you had that broad range of experience coming from all different areas of operations in my mind, which is, like, security and infrastructure, and now working your way into a management position. What was the challenge for you in making that switch from being such a strong individual contributor into an effective manager? SEAN: Sure. You know, I think certainly there is a lot of kind of the classic challenges of learning to let go but still staying involved, right? You know, as a manager, if you're working on critical path tasks hands-on yourself, that's probably not a good sign. [laughs] On the other hand, if you come, like, completely divorced from what your team is doing, especially as, like, a team lead level kind of manager, you know, that's not great either. So, figuring that balancing act definitely was a bit tricky for me. Similarly, I think time management and learning to accept that, especially as you get into, like, further steps along in your career that, like, you know, it's not even a question of keeping all the balls in the air, but more figuring out, like, what balls are made out of rubber and which ones are made out of glass, and maybe keeping those ones in the air. [laughs] So, just a lot of those kind of, like, you know, prioritization and figuring out, like, what the right level of involvement and context is, is definitely the eternal learning, I think, for me. [laughs] WILL: I remember whenever I was looking to change jobs, kind of my mindset was I wanted to work at thoughtbot more because of the values. And I wanted to learn and challenge myself and things like that. And it was so much more, but those were some of the main items that I wanted to experience in my next job. So, when you changed, and you went from Bitly to Datadog, what was that thing that made you say, I want to join Datadog? SEAN: Yeah, that was definitely an interesting job search and transition. So, at that point in time, I was living in New York. I was looking to stay in New York. So, I was kind of talking to a bunch of different companies. Both from personal experience and from talking to some friends, I wasn't super interested in looking at, like, working at mostly, like, the super big, you know, Google, Amazon, Meta type of companies. But also, having done, like, super early stage, you know, like, seed, series A type of companies, having played that game, I wasn't in a place in my life to do that either. [laughs] So, I was looking kind of in between that space. So, this would have been in 2018. So, I was talking to a lot of, like, series A and series B-type companies. And most of them were, like, real businesses. [laughs] Like, they may not be profitable yet, but, like, they had a very clear idea of how they would get there and, like, what that would look like. And so, that was pleasant compared to some past points in my career. But a lot of them, you know, I was effectively doing, like, automation of human processes, which is important. It has value. But it means that, like, realistically, this company will never have more than 50 servers. And when I worked at Bitly, I did have a taste for kind of working in those high-scale, high-availability type environments. So, Datadog initially was appealing because it kind of checked all those boxes of, you know, very high-scale problems, high availability needs, a very real business. [laughs] This is before Datadog had gone public. And then, as I started to talk to them and got to know them, I also really liked a lot of kind of the culture and all the people I interacted with. So, it became a very clear choice very quickly as that process moved along. VICTORIA: Yeah, a very real business. Datadog is one of the Gartner's Magic leaders for APM and observability in the industry. And I understand you're also one of the larger SaaS solutions running Kubernetes, right? SEAN: Yep. Yeah, at this point. Five years ago, that story was maybe a little bit different. [laughs] But yeah, no, no, we definitely have a pretty substantial Kubernetes suite that we run everything on top of. And we get the blessings and curses of we get some really cool problems to work on, but there's also a lot of problems that we come across that when we talk to kind of peers in the industry about kind of how they're trying to solve them, they don't have answers yet either. [laughs] So, we get to kind of figure out a lot of that kind of early discovery games. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah. I like how exciting and growing this industry is around kind of your compute and monitoring the performance of your applications. I wonder if you could kind of speak to our audience a little bit, who may not have a big technical background, about just why it's important to think about performance management and observability early on in your application. SEAN: There can be a few pieces there. One of the bigger ones, I think, is thinking about that kind of early and getting used to working with that kind of tooling early in a project or a product. I think it has an analogous effect to, like, thinking about, like, compounding interest in, like, a savings account or investing or something like that. In that, by having those tools available early on and having that visibility available early on, you can really both initially get a lot of value and just kind of understanding kind of what's happening with your system and very quickly troubleshoot problems and make sure things are running efficiently. But then that can help get to a place where you get to that, like, flywheel effect as you're kind of building your product of, as you're able to solve things quickly, that means you have more time to invest in other parts of the product, and so on and so forth. So, yeah, it's one of those things where kind of the earlier you can get started on that, the more that benefit gets amplified over time. And thankfully, with Datadog and other offerings like that now, you can get started with that relatively quickly, right? You're not having to necessarily make the choice of, like, oh, can I justify spending a week, a month, whatever, setting up all my own infrastructure for this, as opposed to, you know, plugging in a credit card and getting going right away? And not necessarily starting with everything from day zero but getting started with something and then being able to build on that definitely can be a worthwhile trade-off. [laughs] VICTORIA: That makes sense. And I'm curious your perspective, Will, as a developer on our Lift Off team, which is really about the services around that time when you want to start taking it really seriously. Like, you've built an app [laughs]. You know it's a viable product, and there's a market for it. And just, like, how you think about observability when you're doing your app building. WILL: The approach I really take is, like, what is the end goal? I'm currently on a project right now that we came in later than normal. We're trying to work through that. SEAN: I haven't come from, you know, that kind of consulting and professional services and support kind of place. I'm curious about, like, what, if any, differences or experiences do you have, like, in that context of, like, how do you use your observability tools or, like, what value they have as opposed to maybe more, like, straight product development? VICTORIA: Right. So, we recently partnered with, you know, our platform engineering team worked with the Lift Off team to create a product from scratch. And we built in observability tools with Prometheus, and Grafana, and Sentry so that the developers could instrument their app and build metrics around the performance in the way they expected the application to work so that when it goes live and meets real users, they're confident their users are able to actually use the app with a general acceptable level of latency and other things that are really key to the functionality of the app. And so, I think that the interesting part was, with the founders who don't have a background in IT operations or application monitoring and performance, it sort of makes sense. But it's still maybe a stretch to really see the full value of that, especially when you're just trying to get the app out the door. SEAN: Nice. VICTORIA: [chuckles] That's my answer. What kind of challenges do you have in your role managing this large team in a very competitive company, running a ton of Kubernetes clusters? [laughs] What's your challenges in your director of engineering role there? SEAN: You know, it's definitely a mix of kind of, like, technical or strategic challenges there, as well as people challenges. On the technical and strategic side, the interesting thing for our team right now is we're in the middle of a very interesting transition. Still, today, the teams at Datadog work in very much a 'You build it, you run it' kind of model, right? So, teams working on user-facing features in addition to, like, you know, designing those features and writing the code for that, they're responsible for deploying that code, offering the services that code runs within, being on call for that, so on and so forth. And until relatively recently, that ownership was very intense to the point where some teams maybe even had their own build and release processes. They were running their own data stores. And, like, that was very valuable for much of our history because that let those teams to be very agile and not have to worry about, like, convincing the entire company to change if they needed to make some kind of change. But as we've grown and as, you know, we've kind of taken on a lot more complexity in our environment from, you know, running across more providers, running across more regions, taking on more of regulatory concerns, to kind of the viability of running everything entirely [inaudible 12:13] for those product teams, it has become much harder. [laughs] You start to see a transition where previously the infrastructure teams were much more acting as subject matter experts and consultants to, now, we're increasingly offering more centralized platforms and offerings that can offload a lot of that kind of complexity and the stuff that isn't the core of what the other product-focused teams are trying to do. And so, as we go through that change, it means internally, a lot of our teams, and how we think about our roles, and how we go about doing our work, changes from, like, a very, you know, traditional reliability type one on one consultation and advising type role to effectively internal product development and internal platform development. So, that's a pretty big both mindset and practice shift. [laughs] So, that's one that we're kind of evolving our way through. And, of course, as what happens to kind of things, like, you still have to do all the old stuff while you're doing the new thing. [laughs] You don't get to just stop and just do the new thing. So, that's been an interesting kind of journey and one that we're always kind of figuring out as we go. That is a lot of kind of what I focus on. You know, people wise, you know, we have an interesting aim of...There's about 40 people in my org. They are spread across EMEA and North America with kind of, let's say, hubs in New York and Paris. So, with that, you know, you have a pretty significant time zone difference and some non-trivial cultural differences. [laughs] And so, you know, making sure that everybody is still able to kind of work efficiently, and communicate effectively, and collaborate effectively, while still working within all those constraints is always an ongoing challenge. [laughs] WILL: Yeah, you mentioned the different cultures, the different types of employees you have, and everyone is not the same. And there's so many cultures, so many...whatever people are going through, you as a leader, how do you navigate through that? Like, how do you constantly challenge yourself to be a better leader, knowing that not everyone can be managed the same way, that there's just so much diversity, probably even in your company among your employees? SEAN: I think a lot of it starts from a place of listening and paying attention to kind of just see where people are happy, where they feel like they have unmet needs. As an example, I moved from that last kind of data store-focused team to this computing cloud team last November. And so, as part of that move, probably for the first two or three months that I was in the role, I wasn't particularly driving much in the way of changes or setting much of a vision beyond what the team already had, just because as the new person coming in, it's usually kind of hard to have a lot of credibility and/or even just have the idea of, like, you know, like you're saying, like, what different people are looking for, or what they need, how they will respond best. I just spend a lot of time just talking to people, getting to know the team, building those relationships, getting to know those people, getting to know those groups. And then, from there, figuring out, you know, both where the kind of the high priority areas where change or investment is needed. But then also figuring out, yeah, kind of based on all that, what's the right way to go about that with the different groups? Because yeah, it's definitely isn't a one size fits all solution. But for me, it's always kind of starting from a place of listening and understanding and using that to develop, I guess, empathy for the people involved and understanding their perspectives and then figuring it out from there. I imagine–I don't know, but I imagine thoughtbot's a pretty distributed company. How do you all kind of think about some of those challenges of just navigating people coming from very different contexts? WILL: Yeah, I was going to ask Victoria that because Victoria is one of the leaders of our team here at thoughtbot. So, Victoria, what are your thoughts on it? VICTORIA: I have also one of the most distributed teams at thoughtbot because we do offer 24/7 support to some clients. And we cover time zones from the Pacific through West Africa. So, we just try to create a lot of opportunities for people to engage, whether it's remotely, especially offering a lot of virtual engagement and social engagement remotely. But then also, offering some in-person, whether it's a company in-person event, or encouraging people to engage with their local community and trying to find conferences, meetups, events that are relevant to us as a business, and a great opportunity for them to go and get some in-person interaction. So, I think then encouraging them to bring those ideas back. And, of course, thoughtbot is known for having just incredible remote async communication happening all the time. It's actually almost a little oppressive to keep up with, to be honest, [laughs] but I love it. There's just a lot of...there's GitHub issues. There's Slack communications. There's, like, open messages. And people are really encouraged to contribute to the conversation and bring up any idea and any problem they're having, and actively add to and modify our company policies and procedures so that we can do the best work with each other and know how to work with each other, and to put out the best products. I think that's key to having that conversation, especially for a company that's as big as Datadog and has so many clients, and has become such a leader in this metrics area. Being able to listen within your company and to your clients is probably going to set you up for success for any, like, tech leadership role [laughs]. I'm curious, what are you most excited about now that you've been in the role for a little while? You've heard from a lot of people within the company. Can you share anything in your direction in the next six months or a year that you're super excited about? SEAN: So, there's usually kind of probably two sides to that question of kind of, like, from a product and business standpoint and from an internal infrastructure standpoint, given that's where my day-to-day focus is. You know, on the product side, one thing that's been definitely interesting to watch in my time at Datadog is we really made the transition from kind of, like, a point solution type product to much more of a platform. For context, when I joined Datadog, I think logs had just gone GA, and APM was in beta, I think. So, we were just starting to figure out, like, how we expand beyond the initial infrastructure metrics product. And, obviously, at this point, now we have a whole, you know, suite of offerings. And so, kind of the opportunities that come with that, as far as both different spaces that we can jump into, and kind of the value that we can provide by having all those different capabilities play together really nicely, is exciting and is cool. Like, you know, one of the things that definitely lit an interesting light bulb for me was talking to some of the folks working on our newer security offerings and them talking about how, obviously, you want to meet, you know, your normal requirements in that space, so being able to provide the visibility that, you know, security teams are looking for there. But also, figuring out how we integrate that information into your developers' everyday experience so that they can have more ownership over that aspect of the systems that they're building and make everybody's job easier and more efficient, right? Instead of having, you know, the nightmare spreadsheet whenever a CVE comes out and having some poor TPM chase half the company to get their libraries updated, you know, being able to make that visible in the product where people are doing their work every day, you know, things like that are always kind of exciting opportunities. On the internal side, we're starting to think about, like, what the next major evolution of our kind of Kubernetes and kind of internal build and release tooling looks like. Today, a lot of kind of how teams interact with our Kubernetes infrastructure is still pretty raw. Like, they're working directly with specific Kubernetes clusters, and they are exposed to all the individual Kubernetes primitives, which is very powerful, but it's also a pretty steep learning curve. [laughs] And for a lot of teams, it ends up meaning that there's lots of, you know, knobs that they have to know what they do. But at the end of the day, like, they're not getting a lot of benefit from that, right? There's more just opportunity for them to accidentally put themselves in a bad place. So, we're starting to figure out, like, higher level abstractions and offerings to simplify how all that for teams look like. So, we're still a bit early days in working through that, but it's exciting to figure out, like, how we can still give teams kind of the flexibility and the power that they need but make those experiences much easier and not have to have them become Kubernetes experts just to deploy a simple process. And, yes, so there's some lots of fun challenges in there. [laughs] Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don't have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot's Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. WILL: I have a question around your experience. So, you've been a developer around 20 years. What has been your experience over that 20 years or about of the growth in this market? Because I can only imagine what the market was, you know, in the early 2000s versus right now because I still remember...I still have nightmares of dial-up, dial tone tu-tu-tu. No one could call you, stuff like that. So, what has been your experience, just seeing the market grow from where you started? SEAN: Sure, yeah. I think probably a lot of the biggest pieces of it are just seeing the extent to which...I want to say it was Cory Doctorow, but I'm not sure who actually originally coined the idea, but the idea that, you know, software is eating the world, right? Like, eventually, to some degree, every company becomes a software company because software ends up becoming involved in pretty much everything that we as a society do. So, definitely seeing the progression of that, I think, over that time period has been striking, you know, especially when I was working in more consulting contexts and working more in companies and industries where like, you know, the tech isn't really the focus but just how much that, you know, from an engineering standpoint, relatively basic software can fundamentally transform those businesses and those industries has definitely been striking. And then, you know, I think from a more individual perspective, seeing as, you know, our tools become more sophisticated and easier to access, just seeing how much of a mixed bag that has become [laughs]. And just kind of the flavor of, like, you know, as more people have more powerful tools, that can be very enabling and gives voice to many people. But it also means that the ability of an individual or a small group to abuse those tools in ways that we're maybe not fully ready to deal with as a society has been interesting to see how that's played out. VICTORIA: Yeah. I think you bring up some really great points there. And it reminds me of one of my favorite quotes is that, like, the future is here—it's just not evenly distributed. [laughs] And so, in some communities that I go to, everyone knows what Kubernetes is; everyone knows what DevOps is. It's kind of, like, old news. [laughs] And then, some people are still just like, "What?" [laughs]. It's interesting to think about that and think about the implications on your last point about just how dangerous the supply chain is in building software and how some of these abstractions and some of these things that just make it so easy to build applications can also introduce a good amount of risk into your product and into your business, right? So, I wonder if you can tell me a little bit more about your perspective on security and DevSecOps and what founders might be thinking about to protect their IP and their client's data in their product. SEAN: That one is interesting and tricky in that, like, we're in a little bit of, like, things are better and worse than they ever have been before [laughs], right? Like, there is a certain level of, I think, baseline knowledge and competency that I think company leaders really just have to have now, part of, like, kind of table stakes, which can definitely be challenging, and that, like, that probably was much less, if even the case, you know, 10-20 years ago in a lot of businesses. As an example, right? Like, obviously, like if it's a tech-focused company, like, that can be a thing. But, like, if you're running a plumbing business with a dozen trucks, let's say, like, 20 years ago, you probably didn't have to think that much about data privacy and data security. But, like, now you're almost certainly using some kind of electronic system to kind of manage all your customer records, and your job scheduling, and all that kind of stuff. So, like, now, that is something that's a primary concern for your business. On the flip side of that, I think there is much better resources, and tools, and practices available out there. I forget the name of the tool now. But I remember recently, I was working with a company on the ISO long string of numbers certifications that you tend to want to do when you're handling certain types of data. There was a tool they were able to work with that basically made it super easy for them to, like, gather all the evidence for that and whatnot, in a way where, like, you know, in the past, you probably just had to hire a compliance person to know what you had to do and how to present that. But now, you could just sign up for a SaaS product. And, like, obviously, it can't just do it for you. Like, it's about making your policies. But it still gave you enough support where if you're, like, bootstrapping a company, like, yeah, you probably don't need to hire a specialist to [inaudible 25:08], which is a huge deal. You know, similarly, a lot of things come much safer by default. When you think about, like, the security on something like an iPhone, or an iPad, or an Android device, like, just out of the box, that's light-years ahead of whatever Windows PC you were going to buy ten years ago. [laughs] And so, that kind of gives you a much better starting place. But some interesting challenges that come with that, right? And that we do now, literally, every person on the planet is walking around with microphones and cameras and all kinds of sensors on them. It's an interesting balance, I think. Similarly, I'm curious how you all think about kind of talking with your clients and your customers about this because I'm sure you all have a non-trivial amount of education to do there. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, definitely. And I think a lot of it comes in when we have clients who are very early founders, and they don't have a CTO or a technical side of their business, and advising them on exactly what you laid out. Like, here's the baseline. Like, here's where you want to start from. We generally use the CIS controls, this internet for internet security. It puts out a really great tool set, too, for some things you were mentioning earlier. Let's figure out how to report and how to identify all of the things that we're supposed to be doing. It could be overwhelming. It's a lot. Like, in my past role as VP of Operations at Pluribus Digital, I was responsible for helping our team continue to meet our...we had three different ISO long number certifications [laughs]. We did a CMMI as well, which has come up a few times in my career. And they give you about a couple of hundreds of controls that you're supposed to meet. It's in very kind of, like, legalese that you have to understand. And that's a pretty big gap to solve for someone who doesn't have the technical experience to start. Like, what you were saying, too, that it's more dangerous and more safer than it has been before. So, if we make choices for those types of clients in very safe, trusted platforms, then they're going to be set up for success and not have to worry about those details as much. And we kind of go forward with confidence that if they are going to have to come up against compliance requirements or local state regulations, which are also...there's more of those every day, and a lot of liability you can face as a founder, especially if you're dealing with, like, health or financial data, in the state of California, for example. [laughs] It puts you at a really big amount of liability that I don't think we've really seen the impact of how bad it can be and will be coming out in the next couple of years now that that law has passed. But that's kind of the approach that we like to think. It's like, you know, there's a minimum we can do that will mitigate a lot of this risk [laughs], so let's do that. Let's do the basics and start off on the right foot here. SEAN: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah, it's definitely something I've come to appreciate, especially doing work in regulated spaces is, when you do reach the point where you do need to have some kind of subject matter expert involved, whether it's somebody in-house or a consultant or an advisor, I've definitely learned that usually, like, the better ones are going to talk to you in terms of, like, what are the risk trade-offs you're making here? And what are the principles that all these detailed controls or guidelines are looking to get at? As opposed to just, like, walking you through the box-checking exercise. In my experience, a really good lawyer or somebody who will talk to you about risk versus just saying whether or not you can do something. [laughs] It has a very similar feeling in my experience. VICTORIA: Yeah, it's a lot about risk. And someone's got to be able to make those trade-off decisions, and it can be really tough, but it's doable. And I think it shouldn't scare people away. And there's lots of people, lots of ways to do it also, which is exciting. So, I think it's a good space to be in and to see it growing and pay attention to. [laughs] It's fun for me to be in a different place where we're given the opportunity to kind of educate or bring people along in a security journey versus having it be a top-down executive-level decision that we need to meet this particular security standard, and that's the way it's going to be. [laughs] Yeah, so that I appreciate. Is there anything that really surprised you in your conversations with Datadog or with other companies around these types of services for, like, platform engineering and observability? Is there anything that surprised you in the discovery process with potential clients for your products? SEAN: I think one of the biggest surprises, or maybe not a surprise but an interesting thing is, to what extent, you know, for us, I don't know if this is still the case, but I think in many places, like, we're probably more often competing against nothing than a competing product. And by that, I mean, especially as you look at some of our more sophisticated products like APM, or profiling, it's not so much that somebody has an existing tool that we're looking to replace; it's much more than this is just not a thing they do today. [laughs] And so, that leads to a very interestingly different conversation that I think, you know, relates to some of what we were saying with security where, you know, I think a non-trivial part of what our sales and technical enablement folks do is effectively education for our customers and potential customers of why they might want to use tools like this, and what kind of value they could get from them. The other one that's been interesting is to see how different customers' attitudes around tools like this have evolved as they've gone through their own migration to the cloud journeys, right? We definitely have a lot of customers that, I think, you know, 5, 10 years ago, when they were running entirely on-prem, using a SaaS product would have been a complete non-starter. But as they move into the cloud, both as they kind of generally get more comfortable with the idea of delegating some of these responsibilities, as well as they start to understand kind of, like, the complexity of the tooling required as their environment gets more complex, the value of a dedicated product like something like Datadog as opposed to, you know, what you kind of get out of the box with the cloud providers or what you might kind of build on your own has definitely been interesting. [laughs] VICTORIA: Is there a common point that you find companies get to where they're like, all right, now, I really need something? Can you say a little bit more about, like, what might be going on in the organization at that time? SEAN: You know, I think there could be a few different paths that companies take to it. Some of it, I think, can come from a place of...I think, especially for kind of larger enterprise customers making a transition like that, they tend to be taking a more holistic look at kind of their distinct practices and seeing what they want to change as they move into the cloud. And often, kind of finding an observability vendor is just kind of, like, part of the checklist there. [laughs] Not to dismiss it, but just, like, that seems to be certainly one path into it. I think for smaller customers, or maybe customers that are more, say, cloud-native, I think it can generally be a mix of either hitting a point where they're kind of done with the overhead of trying to maintain their own infrastructure of, like, trying to run their own ELK stack and, like, build all the tooling on top of that, and keeping that up and running, and the costs associated with that. Or, it's potentially seeing the sophistication of tooling that, like, a dedicated provider can afford to invest that realistically, you're never going to invest in on your own, right? Like, stuff like live profiling is deeply non-trivial to implement. [laughs] I think especially once people get some experience with a product like Datadog, they start thinking about, like, okay, how much value are we actually getting out of doing this on our own versus using a more off-the-shelf product? I don't know if we've been doing it post-COVID. But I remember pre-COVID...so Datadog has a huge presence at re:Invent and the other similar major cloud provider things. And I remember for a few years at re:Invent, you know, we obviously had, like, the giant 60x60 booth in the main expo floor, where we were giving demos and whatnot. But they also would have...AWS would do this, like, I think they call it the interactive hall where companies could have, like, more hands-on booths, and you had, like, a whole spectrum of stuff. And there were, like, some companies just had, like, random, like, RC car setups or Lego tables, just stuff like that. But we actually did a setup where there was a booth of, I think, like, six stations. People would step up, and they would race each other to solve a kind of faux incident using Datadog. The person who would solve it first would win a switch. I think we gave away a huge number of switches as part of that, which at first I was like, wow, that seems expensive. [laughs] But then later, you know, I was mostly working the main booth at that re:Invent. So by the, like, Wednesday and Thursday of re:Invent, I'd have people walking up to the main booth being like, "Hey, so I did the thing over at the Aria. And now I installed Datadog in prod last night, and I have questions." I was like, oh, okay. [laughs] So, I think just, like, the power of, like, getting that hands-on time, and using some of the tools, and understanding the difference there is what kind of gets a lot of people to kind of change their mind there. [laughs] VICTORIA: You'd get me with a switch right now. I kind of want one, but I don't want to buy one. SEAN: [laughs] WILL: Same. [laughs] VICTORIA: Because I know it'll take up all my time. SEAN: Uh-huh. That's fair. [laughs] VICTORIA: But I will try to win one at a conference for sure. I think that's true. And it makes sense that because your product is often going with clients that don't have these practices yet, that as soon as you give them exposure to it, you see what you can do with it, that becomes a very powerful selling tool. Like, this is the value of the product, right? [laughs] SEAN: Yeah, there is also something we see, and I think most of our kind of peers in the industry see is, very often, people come in initially looking for and using a single product, like, you know, infrastructure, metrics, or logs. And then, as they see that and see where that touches other parts of the product, their usage kind of grows and expands over time. I would obviously defer to our earnings calls for exact numbers. But generally speaking, more or less kind of half of our new business is usually expanded usage from existing customers as opposed to new customers coming in. So, I think there's also a lot of just kind of organic discovery and building of trust over time that happens there, which is interesting. VICTORIA: One of my favorite points to make, which is that SRE sounds very technical and, like, this really extreme thing. But to make it sound a little more easier, is that it is how you validate that the user experience is what you expect it to be. [laughs] I wonder if you have any other thoughts you want to add to that, just about, like, SRE and user experience and how that all connects for real business value. SEAN: I think a lot of places where, you know, we've both seen internally ourselves and with customers is, you know; obviously, different companies operate in different models and whatnot. Where people have seen success is where, you know, people with formal SRE titles or team names can kind of be coming in as just kind of another perspective on the various kind of things that teams are trying to drive towards. The places reliability is successfully integrated is when they can kind of make that connection that you were talking about. It's, like, obviously, everybody should go take their vitamins, but, like, what actual value is coming from this, right? Nobody wants to have outages, but, like, to do the work to invest in reliability, often, like, it can be hard to say, like, okay, what's the actual difference between before and after? Having people who can help draw those connections and help weigh those trade-offs, I think, can definitely be super helpful. But it is generally much more effective, I think, in my experience, when it does come from that perspective of, like, what value are we providing? What are we trading off as part of this? As opposed to just, well, you should do this because it's the right thing to do, kind of a moralistic perspective. [laughs] But, I don't know, how do you all kind of end up having that conversation with your customers and clients? VICTORIA: That's exactly it. That's the same. It's starting that conversation about, like, well, what happens when this experience fails, which designers don't necessarily think about? What's, like, the most important paths that you want a user to take through your application that we want to make sure works? And when you tie it all back there, I think then when the developers are understanding how to create those metrics and how to understand user behavior, that's when it becomes really powerful so that they're getting the feedback they need to do the right code, and to make the right changes. Versus just going purely on interviews [laughs] and not necessarily, like, understanding behavior within the app. I think that starts to make it clear. SEAN: Part of that, I think that's been an interesting experience for us is also just some of the conversation there around, like, almost the flip side of, when are you investing potentially too much in that, right? Because, like, especially after a certain point, the cost of additional gains grows exponentially, right? Each one of those nines gets more and more expensive. [laughs] And so, having the conversation of, like, do you actually need that level of reliability, or, like, is that...just like what you're saying. Like, you know, kind of giving some of that context and that pressure of, like, yeah, we can do that, but, like, this is what it's going to cost. Is that what you want to be spending your money on? Kind of things can also be an interesting part of that conversation. VICTORIA: That's a really good point that, you know, you can set goals that are too high [laughs] and not necessary. So, it does take a lot of just understanding about your data and your users to know what are acceptable levels of error. I think the other thing that you can think about, too, like, what could happen, and we've seen it happen with some startups, is that, like, something within the app is deeply broken, but you don't know. And you just think that you're not having user engagement, or that users are signing off, or, like, you know, not opening the app after the first day. So, if you don't have any way to really actively monitor it and you're not spending money on an active development team, you can have some method to just be confident that the app is working and to make your life less miserable [laughs] when you have a smaller team supporting, especially if you're trying to really minimize your overhead for running an application. SEAN: Yep. It's surprisingly hard to know when things are broken sometimes. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yes, and then extremely painful when you find out later [laughs] because that's when it's become a real problem, yeah. I wonder, are there any other questions you have for me or for Will? SEAN: How big of an organization is thoughtbot at this time? VICTORIA: Close to 75 people? We're, yeah, between the Americas and the [inaudible 38:31] region. So, that's where we're at right now, yeah. SEAN: Nice. At that size, like, and I guess it sounds like you're pretty heavily distributed, so maybe some of this doesn't happen as much, but, like, one of the things I definitely remember...so, when I joined Datadog, it was probably about 500 people. And I think we're just under 5,000 now. There are definitely some points where there were surprisingly, like, physical aspects to where it became a problem of just, like, where certain teams didn't fit into a room anymore. [laughs] Like, I had surprise in the changes in that, like, dynamic. I'm curious if you've all kind of run into any kind of, I don't know, similar interesting thresholds or changes as you've kind of grown and evolved. WILL: I will say this, we're about 100, I think, Victoria. VICTORIA: Oh, okay, we're 100 people. I think, you know, I've only been at thoughtbot for just over a year now. And my understanding of the history is that when we were growing before COVID, there's always been a very intentionality about growth. And there was never a goal to get to a huge size or to really grow beyond just, like, a steady, profitable growth. [laughs] So, when we were growing in person, there were new offices being stood up. So, we, you know, maybe started out of New York and Boston and grew to London. And then, there was Texas, and I think a few other ones that started. Then with COVID, the decision was made to go fully remote, and I think that's opened up a lot of opportunities for us. And from my understanding in the previous and the past, is that there's a big shift to be fully remote. It's been challenging, where I think a lot of people miss some of the in-person days, and I'm sure it's definitely lonely working remote all day by yourself. So, you have to really proactively find opportunities to see other people and to engage remotely. But I think also, we hire people from so many different places and so much different talent, and then, also, you know, better informs our products and creates a different, you know, energy within the company that I think is really fun and really exciting for us now. WILL: Yeah, I would agree with that because I think the team that I'm on has about 26 people on the Lift Off team. And we're constantly thinking of new ways to get everyone involved. But as a developer, me myself being remote, I love talking to people. So, I try to be proactive and, like, connect with the people I'm working with and say, "Hey, how can I help you with this?" Let's jump in this room and just work together, chat together, and stuff like that, so... And it has opened the door because the current project that I'm on, I would never have had an opportunity to be on. I think it's based in Utah, and I'm in South Florida. So, there's just no way if we weren't remote that I'd been a part of it. So... SEAN: Nice. And I can definitely appreciate that. I remember when we first started COVID lockdown; I think, at that point, Datadog was probably about...Datadog engineering was probably about 30% remote, so certainly a significant remote contingent but mixed. But my teams were pretty remote-heavy. So, in some ways, not a lot changed, right? Like, I think more people on my team were, like, who are all these other people in my house now instead of [laughs], I mean, just transition from being in an office to working from home. But I do remember maybe, like, about six months in, starting to feel, yeah, some of the loneliness and the separation of just, like, not being able to do, like, quarterly team meetups or stuff like that. So, it's definitely been an interesting transition. For context, at this point, we kind of have a hybrid setup. So, we still have a significant kind of full-time remote contingent, and then four people who are in office locations, people joining for about three days a week in office. So, it's definitely an interesting transition and an interesting new world. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah. And I'm curious how you find the tech scene in Denver versus New York or if you're engaging in the community in the same way since you moved. SEAN: There definitely is some weirdness since COVID started [laughs] broadly [inaudible 42:21]. So, I moved here in 2020. But I'd been coming out here a lot before that. I helped to build an office here with Bitly. So, I was probably coming out once a quarter for a bunch of years. So, one parallel that is finally similar is, like, in both places, it is a small world. It doesn't take that long for you to be in that community, in either of those communities and start running into the same people in different places. So, that's always been [inaudible 42:42] and especially in New York. New York is a city of what? 8, 9 million people? But once you're working in New York tech for a few years and you go into some meetups, you start running into the same people, and you have one or two degrees [inaudible 42:52] to a lot of people, surprisingly quickly. [laughs] So, that's similar. But Denver probably is interesting in that it's definitely transplant-heavy. I think Denver tends to check the box for, like, it was part of why Bitly opened an office here and, to a degree, Datadog as well. I think of like, you know, if you're trying to recruit people and you previously were mostly recruiting in, like, New York or Silicon Valley; if you're based in New York, and you're trying to recruit somebody from Silicon Valley, and part of why they're looking for a new gig is they're burned out on Silicon Valley, asking them to move to New York probably isn't all that attractive. [laughs] But Denver is different enough in that in terms of kind of being a smaller city, easier access to nature, a bunch of that kind of stuff, that a lot of times we were able to attract talent that was a much more appealing prospect. [laughs] You'll see an interesting mix of industries here. One of the bigger things here is there's a very large government and DOD presence here. I remember I went to DevOps Days Rockies, I think, a few years ago. There was a Birds of a Feather session on trying to apply DevOps principles in air-gapped networks. That was a very interesting conversation. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's interesting. I would not have thought Colorado would be a big hub for federal technology. But there you go, it's everywhere. WILL: Yeah. SEAN: Denver metro, I think, is actually the largest presence of federal offices outside of the D.C. metro. VICTORIA: That's interesting. Yeah, I'm used to trying to recruit people into D.C., and so, it's definitely not the good weather, [laughs], not a good argument in my favor. So, I just wanted to give you a final chance. Anything else you'd like to promote, Sean? SEAN: Generally, not super active on social things these days, but you can find whatever I have done at seanoc.com, S-E–A-N-O-C.com for the spelling. And otherwise, if you're interested in some engineering content and hearing about some of those kind of bleeding edge challenges that I was mentioning before, I would definitely check out the Datadog engineering blog. There's lots of kind of really interesting content there on both, you know, things we've learned from incidents and interesting projects that we're working on. There's all kinds of fun stuff there. VICTORIA: That makes me think I should have asked you more questions, Sean. [laughs] No, I think it was great. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'll definitely check all that stuff out. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Sean O'Connor.

Karen Ward, EMEA chief market strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management and a key adviser to Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, joins hosts Francine Lacqua and David Merritt to unpack key points by central bankers who attended the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, and what it all means for the BOE and the UK. For the latter, the answer is recession.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Trintech, a global provider of cloud-based financial close solutions for CFOs and their teams, announced the acquisition of Fiserv's reconciliation businesses in North America and EMEA. The deal comes at a time of relatively low M&A activity in the broader software vertical and, of course, sustained high interest rates. That said, it's also happening within a segment that has an estimated value of over $20b. Join Tearsheet's editor and chief, Zack Miller, and Trintech CFO, Omar Chocuair, as they discuss why his team chose to make this acquisition now. We also chat about the opportunities and challenges of M&A in the SaaS and financial tech spaces, and the market outlook he has for the remainder of this year into 2024.

Twitter - https://twitter.com/PlatChatPodcast 0:00 - Intro 2:17 - SKIN REVIEW! RISE OF THE DRAGON KINGS 7:35 - Evil Geniuses WIN Champions 2023 27:39 - Paper Rex's story ends in 2nd place 47:22 - Fnatic have their WORST placement all year 1:02:54 - Was LOUD's performance enough to keep aspas? 1:08:33 - s0m and FNS moved to NRG's bench… ardiis back to EMEA!? 1:20:03 - TIER LIST: Champs 2023 Expectations vs Reality 1:37:29 - Riot Games DELETE The Guard from VCT 2:29:34 - Former XSET roster suing over unpaid skin revenue 2:37:31 - Evil Geniuses Champions Merch is AWFUL 2:47:19 - Patch 7.04: Jett nerfed into the ground 3:07:42 - NEW MAP “SUNSET” - WE LOVE LA!! 3:14:04 - Breeze is back! …and it's worse? 3:27:35 - Wyatt's Weekly Award

Disney+ Has Hits Its Target Of 50 EMEA Originals A Year Early https://whatsondisneyplus.com/disney-has-hits-its-target-of-50-emea-originals-a-year-early/   #DisneyPlus 

Disney+ Has Hits Its Target Of 50 EMEA Originals A Year Early https://whatsondisneyplus.com/disney-has-hits-its-target-of-50-emea-originals-a-year-early/   #DisneyPlus 

Disney+ Has Hits Its Target Of 50 EMEA Originals A Year Early https://whatsondisneyplus.com/disney-has-hits-its-target-of-50-emea-originals-a-year-early/   #DisneyPlus 

Today's companies think about going global from the start and in fintech, that means thinking about payments and money movement across borders. Partnerships can play a strategic and tactical role in going international. Join me Tearsheet's editor and Airwallex's Ravi Adusumilli, SVP of Partnerships for a LinkedIn Live session. As General Manager, Americas, Ravi oversees the company's strategy and operations in the region, identifying opportunities to drive the company's rapid regional growth. As SVP of Partnerships, Ravi oversees an international team across the US, APAC and EMEA, managing Airwallex's extensive global network of strategic and financial partnerships. Prior to Airwallex, Ravi was Head of Global Partnerships at Pinterest, and also held a number of executive leadership roles across several fast-growth startups and tech businesses including with Tile, Netflix, Hitachi and Hewlett Packard.

In this bonus podcast episode, we talk to a gaming advertising expert: Meta's Tim Lion. For his Shiny New Object, Tim tells us why marketers have been overlooking a huge opportunity when it comes to gaming, especially the mobile audience. Find out why gamers are an ideal target market thanks to their diversity and addressability, and hear top tips for marketers looking to advance their career, on the latest podcast out now.

Attention to detail is needed when dealing with the Economic Buyer. You don't want to under-qualify them, but over-qualifying them can do equal damage! In this episode, the Med Men take a close look at what people typically get wrong with the Economic Buyer.Andy and Pim talk about the need to accept change - that as circumstances and deals change, so will the Economic Buyer. But, if you keep your wits about you, you can still find success with the Economic Buyer. If you have any questions about identifying or engaging with the Economic Buyer, or any suggestions of what you'd like to see the Med Men cover next, make sure to comment below!Until next time - cheers! Med Men is a MEDDICC MEDIA production, where CEO Andy Whyte and CRO Pim Roelofsen dive into aspects of the MEDDIC framework, and look good doing it. *Who are Pim Roelofsen and Andy Whyte?**Pim Roelofsen* Born and raised in the Netherlands, Pim lived in the Dutch Caribbean and London, before making the move back home. Having been involved in tech sales for 10 years, Pim is passionate about MEDDICC and is a big believer that more organizations should adopt the qualification framework for sales and beyond. Pim empowers sales organizations across the globe to implement the tried and tested framework as MEDDICC CRO. *Andy Whyte* The founder of MEDDICC™ and the author of the five-star rated “MEDDICC' book, it's no surprise that Andy has an impressive sales career spanning over 18 years. Andy first started out as a door-to-door, double-glazing salesman where he quickly built up an appetite for sales, hungry for more, he started his B2B career as an SDR, progressing through the ranks to eventually lead the EMEA at Branch before moving on to set up MEDDICC™. Andy used MEDDIC in multiple companies as an individual contributor and sales leader and even implemented MEDDPICC into two SaaS organizations. Known for his mantra “Nobody ever regrets qualifying out” and his passion for the science and art of sales. Away from the day-to-day, Andy practices many skills as a chef, sports coach, taxi, and cleaner in his most important role to date - DAD.

Online payment is one of the latest activities to be transformed by smartphone technology, as more and more consumers opt for the convenience of their mobile device to complete transactions. According to a Statista survey from December 2021, 33 percent of respondents said they purchased via the mobile channel every day or week. Donal McGuinnes CEO Prommt believes that smartphone technology still has a greater role to play in business transactions, particularly where risky over-the-phone solutions are being employed.  Ronan talks to Donal about Revolut, how smartphones have changed the way we think about payment, payments over the phone, open banking and more. More about Donal McGuiness: Serial entrepreneur Donal McGuinness is CEO of Prommt. He studied Computer Science at DCU and Telecommunications Engineering at DIT and spent the early years of his career in the telecommunications industry. His experience in mobile payments dates to 1999 when he founded his first mobile payments company, ItsMobile. Donal was also a Non-Executive Director of the Irish Internet Association from 2009 to 2011 and a movie distribution business from 2002 to 2020. In 2016 Donal joined a silicon valley startup in the identity verification space called Danal inc, where he set up and grew the global business outside of the USA as General Manager of EMEA until 2019 when the business was acquired by Boku Inc for $112 million USD. Donal joined Prommt as CEO in 2019. He is an innovator and is passionate about payment innovation.

In this episode of "Blood, Sweat & Balance Sheets," host FloQast Co-founder and CEO Mike Whitmire chats with FloQast's first business development representative and current Managing Director, EMEA, Adam Zoucha, Managing Director about his incredible journey from audit at Deloitte to becoming a successful account executive, sales manager, and now, a key figure in FloQast's European expansion.Listen in as Mike and Adam reminisce about FloQast's early days, operating out of the cramped FloQast House in Valley Village, learning how to sell accounting software, trying (and failing) to double as an accountant at FloQast, and ultimately, launching FloQast's office in London, and what that process was like. In three years as General Manager and VP of FloQast, EMEA, Adam has helped scale FloQast's presence in the region while growing the team to over 40 employees in the process.Join Mike and Adam as they discuss the "roll up your sleeves" mindset that has been crucial in shaping FloQast's success, and how Adam's understanding of the market, empathy for colleagues, and dedication to mentorship have all contributed to making FloQast the company it is today. This candid conversation offers valuable insights into leadership, growth, and the journey of a finance company making its mark in the world. If you're curious about the inner workings of a dynamic leader and the growth of a prominent finance company, this episode is a must-listen.Blood, Sweat & Balance Sheets is available on all major podcast platforms. Subscribe now to gain valuable insights from finance industry leaders.

The 14th edition of the Global Wealth Report, the first launched jointly by UBS and Credit Suisse, reveals valuable insights about the state of the global economy and society, as well as the shifting meaning and potential of prosperity. Discussing the findings are Paul Donovan, chief economist in UBS Global Wealth Management; Nannette Hechler-Fayd'herbe, chief investment officer for the EMEA region and global head of economics and research at Credit Suisse; and economist, wealth researcher and report co-author Anthony Shorrocks.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Guest interviewed in this episode include:   Jay Chaudhry https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaychaudhry/ Seasoned and successful entrepreneur and CEO. Looking for ambitious, driven professionals to join the Zscaler family.   Jay Chaudhry is an accomplished entrepreneur, having founded a series of successful companies, including AirDefense, CipherTrust, CoreHarbor, Secure IT and Zscaler. Chaudhry has a history of introducing visionary innovations that address the demand for securely enabling emerging technologies, such as the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange for distributed and highly mobile enterprises. His work in the IT security sector has made him a trusted advisor for many enter   Ashley Tarver Data & AI Cloud EvangelistData & AI Cloud Evangelist Microsoft   https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-bigdata/   Responsible for driving better insights from data, cloud, machine learning and AI. I am the strategic advisor to business, community and government leaders in all areas involving joint solution vision, strategy and success metrics of their data. I provide guidance to corporate and regional leaders involving product development, sales revenue targets, pipeline growth, and market share capture. I evangelize joint value propositions and solutions through an ecosystem interlock with partner executives, regional partners, marketing, field sales and customers.     Philippe Bousissou PH.D https://www.linkedin.com/in/phbouissou/ TEDx speaker, best-selling book author, growth expert, entrepreneur, CEO, venture capitalist, board member. Three decades in Silicon Valley growing and running businesses. Managing Partner at Blue Dots Partners LLC, a management consulting firm focused on top-line revenue acceleration for companies or business units with at least $10 million in sales.     Guy Kawasaki https://www.linkedin.com/in/guykawasaki/   Guy is on a mission to make people remarkable. He is the host of the Remarkable People podcast featuring people such as Jane Goodall, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Marc Benioff, Angela Duckworth, Bob Cialdini, Arianna Huffington, and Kristi Yamaguchi. He possesses extensive knowledge of innovation, entrepreneurship, social media, podcasting, and marketing. Plus, he is a mediocre surfer.   Chris Gentle https://www.linkedin.com/in/cgentle/ I help boards and senior executives generate enhanced top-line growth so as to help map the path to a successful future for their organisation. By defining and identifying the most important insights, I work with decision makers to put this into practice. I also help organisations build the reputation and influence required to ensure they achieve their strategic goal.  My contributions can be captured under three headings: Board Level Professional: I have international experience in 25 countries working with the leaders at the very highest levels including Big Four executive leadership at Deloitte and KPMG, businesses across EMEA region and in government with the UK Prime Minister and President of EU to fashion strategies which engage stakeholders and drive lasting change….   Velchamy Sankarlingam https://www.linkedin.com/in/velchamy/ Experienced in hardware, software and service industries on engineering and management areas. Advanced degrees in Engineering and Management. Excellent track record on delivering products. Specialties: Strong technical and management skills.   and more

In this Masters of MEDDIC episode, MEDDICC CEO Andy Whyte sat down with David Weiss to uncover how MEDDPICC utterly transformed the way he sells and why he teaches it to as many people as possible (including people knocking on his door to sell pest control services!).David Weiss has 20 years of experience as a sales leader, and is currently CRO at Sales Collective, a company dedicated to sales transformation. There, he pursues his passion for finding challenges people face and working with them to solve it. Andy Whyte The founder of MEDDICC™ and the author of the five-star rated “MEDDICC' book, it's no surprise that Andy has an impressive sales career spanning over 18 years. Andy first started out as a door-to-door, double-glazing salesman where he quickly built up an appetite for sales, hungry for more, he started his B2B career as an SDR, progressing through the ranks to eventually lead the EMEA at Branch before moving on to set up MEDDICC™.  Andy used MEDDIC in multiple companies as an individual contributor and sales leader and even implemented MEDDPICC into two SaaS organizations. Known for his mantra “Nobody ever regrets qualifying out” and his passion for the science and art of sales. Away from the day-to-day, Andy practices many skills as a chef, sports coach, taxi, and cleaner in his most important role to date - DAD.

Guest: Rich Davis, Head of Security & Networking Solutions, EMEA at Netskope [@Netskope]On LinkedIn | https://uk.linkedin.com/in/richarddavis1Host: Chloé MessdaghiOn ITSPmagazine  

Over the past 25+ years Nick has worked in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. As a seasoned entrepreneur he has founded and sold multiple multi-million dollar agencies and advised countless others, including Fortune 500 companies, non-profit organizations, small businesses, entrepreneurs, political parties and members of royalty. Nick wrote the best selling book, 'Exactly Where You Want to Be - a business owners guide to passion, profit and happiness'. He owns and operates a coaching and peer-advisory agency, an international marketing agency, and a project management company. Fun fact - Nick met his wife eighteen years ago at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. Outside of work, Nick is studying to be a Sommelier and loves international travel. Find Nick Online: https://www.exactlywhereyouwanttobe.com/ http://www.nettresultsllc.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickleighton/ If you're enjoying Entrepreneur's Enigma, please give us a review on the podcast directory of your choice. We're on all of them and these reviews really help others find the show. GoodPods: https://gmwd.us/goodpods iTunes: https://gmwd.us/itunes Podchaser: https://gmwd.us/podchaser Also, if you're getting value from the show and want to buy me a coffee, go to the show notes to get the link to get me a coffee to keep me awake, while I work on bringing you more great episodes to your ears. →  https://gmwd.us/buy-me-a-coffee Follow Seth Online: Seth | Digital Marketer (@s3th.me) • Instagram: Instagram.com/s3th.me Seth Goldstein | LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/sethmgoldstein Seth on Mastodon: https://s3th.me/@seth MarketingJunto.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of our APAC Masterclass, Amber Chen - SVP Strategic Partnerships & Global Account Development, China, at Flywheel Digital walks us through three of the 6 key marketplaces fueling digital commerce in China - Alibaba, Tmall, and Taobao. From retail elements such as consumer behavior & expectations, business models, and ways of working on-site to media elements through Alimama, you'll leave this episode with a deeper understanding of how these marketplaces compare and contrast to those such as Amazon in North America & EMEA. Be sure to listen to part two for three more key Chinese marketplaces!

TITLE: From Romania to Spain With Green Building Expert Patricia Abrudan    Patricia Abrudan is an architect certified as a Sustainability Consultant with post graduate training in Project Management and Facility Management and her work has mainly been oriented towards sustainable development projects. She has been focused on green building, life cycle assessment and sustainability consulting and certifications and is currently leading the ESG and Decarbonization Consulting team at JG Ingenieros in Barcelona, while continuing my work as a LEED Project Manager for several projects in the EMEA region.   Additional Work and Education: - Sustainability and Energy Efficiency Consulting - Carbon Footprint consulting for real estate assets - Life Cycle Assessment and Costing - LEED ZERO and Net Zero Carbon Services - Circular design development - Space planning and workplace consulting - Architecture planning, measurements and compliance   Show Highlights   Reimagining “matchbox” neighborhoods to make a difference in urbanism projects. Improve the deliverability sustainable projects in our cities to make better spaces by embracing the various challenges from public vs private enterprise. Transform projects into reality and impact people's lives with so little.  Work with different types of clients to achieve their goals and make the environment better, with contradictory objectives. Walk the path of sustainability and embed sustainability in your business model, construction projects and real estate.   Patricia shares a unique opportunity to use our engineering infrastructure.  Expertise in engineering to assist clients in implementing global strategies into practice from the building level, portfolio level and wellness level..  Fascinating college classes and questions for the industry to consider and be an eco-engineer.  Switch the paradigm from a linear economy to a circular economy in order to achieve decarbonization.  “The first requirement for you to start a green building career is to believe in the movement. And not to just sign up because it's fashionable. Investigate a little bit what's behind this movement, and if you actually are in sync. And then, try to formalize your learning/education path, because it helps you discover where you can contribute.” -Patricia Abrudan   Show Resource and Information Linkedin   Connect with Charlie Cichetti and GBES   GBES is excited our membership community is growing. Consider joining our membership community as members are given access to some of the guests on the podcasts that you can ask project questions. If you are preparing for an exam, there will be more assurance that you will pass your next exam, you will be given cliff notes if you are a member, and so much more. Go to to learn more about the 4 different levels of access to this one-of-a-kind career-advancing green building community!   If you truly enjoyed the show, don't forget to leave a positive rating and review on .  We have prepared more episodes for the upcoming weeks, so come by again next week! Thank you for tuning in to the !   Copyright © 2023 GBES

Innovation and technology have led to an explosion of new payments networks and infrastructure. Listen to use cases and considerations for using Real-Time Payments (RTP) and how it can be a strategic differentiator for companies across the globe.   Host Oliver Northern, International Payments, Product Manager, Bank of America   Co-hosts Miyoshi Lee, Head of U.S. Real-Time Payments, Bank of America David Koo, Global Platform Lead, Bank of America Matt Cornwall, Head of Treasury Operations in EMEA, Chubb   MAP 5858644 / 8-4-24

Hello and welcome to  Anxiety at Work.  We hope the time you spend with us will help remove the stigma of anxiety and mental health in the workplace and your personal life.What you will learnListen intently. Hearing employees builds trust, lowers anxiety.Accept different work styles. Don't force one mold. Value unique strengths.Have monthly "aspirational conversations" on career goals. Prevents turnover.With us is our dear friend Mark Servodidio is an advisor to public and private CEOs, CHROs and leadership teams on Talent Teamwork and Strategy.  Prior to Co-Founding Prossimo Global Partners, Mark was President of International for Avis Budget Group for the EMEA, Asia and Pacific regions with $3B+ in revenue, over 10,000 employees in 21 corporate countries. Over his career, he has worked with PepsiCo, Kraft Nabisco, as well as Avis Budget.Support the showUntil next week, we hope you find peace & calm in a world that often is a sea of anxiety.If you love this podcast, please share it and leave a 5-star rating! If you feel inspired, we invite you to come on over to The Culture Works where we share resources and tools for you to build a high-performing culture where you work.Your hosts, Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton have spent over two decades helping clients around the world engage their employees on strategy, vision and values. They provide real solutions for leaders looking to manage change, drive innovation and build high performance cultures and teams. They are authors of award-winning Wall Street Journal & New York Times bestsellers All In, The Carrot Principle, Leading with Gratitude, & Anxiety at Work. Their books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold more than 1.5 million copies. Visit The Culture Works for a free Chapter 1 download of Anxiety at Work.Learn more about their Executive Coaching at The Culture Works. christy@thecultureworks.com to book Adrian and/or Chester to keynote

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I'm Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m excited to have Bana Kawar from AWS join us. Bana, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Bana Kawar: Thank you very much, Shawnna. Hello, everyone who’s listening to this podcast, and a shout out to all enablement professionals all over the world. My name is Bana, and oftentimes people think of a banana without an A to remember my name here in the UK. I look after the UK public sector enablement here at Amazon Web Services. I have been with the company for seven and a half years now in different functions and different countries. I currently spearhead the enablement function here in the public sector and help the organization grow to what it is today and reach our organizational outcomes. Apart from work, I have a huge passion for ID&E. I try to call it IDEA where possible, where A stands for action. It’s inclusion, diversity, equity, and action. I’ve co-founded the EMEA chapter, along with two other Amazonians to reach where we are today. I love to mentor and empower different leaders on different topics. I’m a career coach as well. That’s a bit about me, Shawnna. I look forward to our discussion today. SS: Absolutely. Likewise. I look forward to digging into that with you as well. Now to get started, for our audience and sales enablement, which I’m sure they can all relate to, you are extremely passionate about driving excellence in sales performance. I’d love to start there. From your perspective, how does enablement strategically influence sales performance? BK: A lot of organizations, including ours, are focused on growth. I truly believe as an enablement function, we have key responsibility, and also a pleasure to be part of that journey as well. If I look at my current role for the UK, we’re trying to hit 1 billion business this year, and enablement is helping to drive insights that would help sellers in different orgs and different roles from ISRs, account managers, business developers, partner teams, etc, to drive those valuable conversations with their customers and help them on their key missions. I really think when enablement is aligned to the business and also aligned to revenue ops or business ops, depending on how organizations define it, you can influence strategically as well. The last piece that comes to mind is how enablement can play a role in reducing time to market. When you’re enabling teams to be more adaptive versus reactive, you are already helping in reducing that time to launch and ramp up faster. Finally, the downstream impact of this is having more time and more focused resources to drive high-velocity decisions and build better products from there. In a nutshell, that’s three different ways, how I see enablement playing a role in the business strategy. SS: I couldn’t agree more. One of your areas of expertise is really around building everboarding programs that continue to align with those organizational goals. I’d love to hear more about your everboarding programs. What are some of your best practices for building everboarding programs that drive sales performance? In other words, what does good everboarding look like? BK: I really believe in the power of everboarding because it also shows that you’re a learn it all organization versus a know it all organization. I truly believe in any function, learning does not stop when you hit that 90-day mark that oftentimes is the industry standard for onboarding. That continuous learning journey is ongoing in so many different ways and functions. To build a good everboarding program I think you could look at it and dissect it into different ways. The first one is the discovery piece. Truly understanding what are some of the problem statements that you’re solving for. In today’s world, we have a tsunami of information, and people are overwhelmed with how much they should get up to speed on. An everboarding program should sometimes also be a refresher. We have recharge programs here and I really think some of those key skills that a lot of people learn in their early selling journey are needed very much in everboarding programs. Examples that come to mind include prospecting, objection handling, mission understanding, and negotiation skills. Those are key to any seller in any role, and sometimes those refreshers can be absolutely valuable to drive those customer conversations and reduce time to ramp. The second piece that comes to mind is making sure you’re always up to date with what’s happening in the market. That brings me to the second point product knowledge and market understanding. A lot of SaaS companies have so many solutions and products that they’re trying to bring to market and one way to really do that is certifying reps and making sure that they’re actually going through the knowledge check and getting certified on a specific use case. I’m a firm believer in having certifications on any new product releases and also on new market trend understanding because that also shows your customer that you are meeting them where they need you to be as well. Last but not least, an everboarding program, or as a matter of fact, any enablement program, should align with business objectives. That includes successful OKRs to measure their success and iterate from there. If I zoom out, those are the three key things I would look at from an everboarding perspective and build from there. SS: Yeah, absolutely. Bana, what would you say the importance is of having everboarding programs rather than just onboarding programs? BK: One of the things that are important in any organization is staying agile and moving to a learning journey continuously. As I mentioned before, the learn it versus know it all, because of the pace and the agility that the market is moving towards. I think having everboarding programs is not nice to have, it is an absolute must-have, in my humble opinion, to be successful and have your position in the market lead and truly help to solve one customer problem at a time. A beautiful way to do that is to help grow the business and grow your own knowledge as well, whether you’re a seller, a partner, or even someone in enablement because I believe that you should enable the enablement org as well. You do that through creating everboarding programs to maintain that high performance, and retention, and also hit your OKRs at the end of the day. SS: Absolutely. Everboarding is increasingly important, especially as you try to make sure that you’re maximizing the productivity of your in-sync sales team. Now your everboarding programs have reached upwards of 400 employees globally. What tips do you have maybe for our audience who are also trying to create enablement programs on a global scale? BK: I really believe that scale happens a bit easier than what we expect when we’re solving the right problem. What I’ve noticed at Amazon, as an example, is that the problem statement is often shared across different functions and across different geographies versus only the actual customers that you’re looking after. That brings me to the first part of problem-solving, which is ensuring that the discovery phase is done really well. What I mean by that is what problem to solve first, and from there, you move into the solution. Enablement could and should, in my opinion, spend a bit of time on the discovery phase understanding first, is that problem statement shared across? Is that a global or regional problem only? You do that by asking the same set of questions as an example across the board to understand who’s the customer at this point. What are some of the key missions that they’re solving for? Who are the customer profiles that they look at at the moment? What is their impact on the industry? What vertical do they sit in? What are some of the KPIs that they’re assessed against? More often than not, sellers have similar metrics, but different numbers that they need to hit. That’s one way how to approach it when you’re trying to scale as well before you move into build mode. The second part that brings me to the ID&E is any perspective because I’m a huge believer in getting different perspectives and getting content reviews and content even being created by different people across the company and having that cross-functional and cross-pollination happening to build the best products you have so they get that impact that they need. The third piece, if I’m thinking of the power of scaling, is what happens afterward. How do you make sure that you tie in your input with your output through what we call a mechanism? That’s when you build through iterations and have a phased approach and a very clear feedback process built in and weaved done and you hold yourself and your stakeholders accountable to make sure that whatever you’re building is insisting on the highest standards and also really impacting the end customer and helping them move faster towards their mission. If you put those 3 things together, that’s when a beautiful Venn diagram is shaped and you see the impact of what we think of as the power of scaling. SS: I think that is amazing. You have done a phenomenal job building these programs at scale. Now, as you mentioned in your introduction, you are also a co-founder of the EMEA inclusion, diversity, and equity chapter. I think you also had action at the end of that at AWS. How do you incorporate ID&E best practices into your enablement programs, and what would you say is the impact of doing so? BK: I love that question, Shawnna. Thank you for addressing it, especially in today’s world where ID&E is really helping a lot of customers understand what is important and how to create that diverse product line, and best programs, and build better. To achieve this, in my opinion, the first thing you could also look at is how you could address some of the biases we all have. Everyone has biases, including myself, and those are just the mental shortcuts you have in your programs and the content you produce. The first thing that I try to address when I have a new program is to build an advisory board and have different people with different experiences and backgrounds to help build this up. You can cover it from different angles. If we focus on and double click on the enablement programs, you could also have people from different functions that you look after, like sales ops or biz ops, who should be part of that. The other pieces, having different and equal representation from your customers, for example, different geographies that you cover, different countries, different verticals, different personas, et cetera, bring that experience that you actually need to build that best product. If anyone wants a practitioner tip, one of the things that really helped me uncover some of those biases and understand them better is the Harvard Project Implicit Test to uncover some of those biases and address them. The second piece you could do is also have diverse speakers when you build those programs. Building the content and having the content reviews and the advisory board is one thing and then you move into the build phase. That’s where diverse speakers can help refine their program, and bring that message to different folks. That can already embed representation within having different levels of seniority and creating opportunities for underrepresented groups throughout the process versus just calling it global and having speakers from one country, as an example. The last topic, which is a dear topic to my heart and something that I’m trying now to learn more about is neurodivergence. A lot of products that we create sometimes have technical jargon and not the simplest visual aids that people should understand. We can take a step back and think from different perspectives and throughout that advisory board that you build, you can understand the different needs. For example, how do you build for people with visual impairment? How do you build for people with dyslexia? Understanding your neurodivergent customers in different sectors can be overwhelming at the beginning, but it is an absolute must to have that inclusive and best product. Those are the three key ingredients that come into play for enablement. The key ingredient from all of that is woven in through communication. When you have communication flowing, bottom-up, top-down, and sideways, you make sure that you’re also using that inclusive language and embodying inclusion throughout to make adjustments where you need and stay humble. As I mentioned at the beginning, the A part comes into play. It’s not enough to say we care about ID&E, but not embed ID&E throughout the content and the programs that we build. Every seller deserves an equal chance to have the best impact they could have on their customer, and it starts with the enablement team to do that. That’s my two cents on ID&E and enablement, Shawnna. SS: I love that. The last question for you, recently I saw a post from you on LinkedIn about how generative AI is really transforming businesses, including some of the ways that it influences the ID&E space. How do you think I will influence how you create and deliver enablement programs in the next year and maybe even beyond? BK: I really believe that in today’s world, we have far more accessibility on the topic of AI than ever before, thanks to generative AI. AI has been around for a while now, and whether we thought about it or not, it has shaped how we learn in different ways. Whether we think of it in person-wise self-learning and customized versions of learning, into chatbots, which is quite prominent in today’s world, having virtual assistance, simulated learning has been around for quite some time in today’s world. What I believe is important is how we’re using it and the ethical framework around it because it’s here to stay. I really think those tools can help us if used right, and if it’s a stress test and the accuracy is measured that it can help us be more productive. It also can help us reduce our time to impact our time to market. When we have that embedded in our processes, for example in our text summarizing that we could leverage, for example, generative AI for it can already have an impact on our sellers, and that will have the dominant effect on the end customer that we are already helping them on their mission. I do believe that AI and generative AI can absolutely personalize learning experiences and provide real-time performance insights, let alone automate content delivery. I really think it’s important to develop those mechanisms and I would also stress the ethical framework around it to build for impact and build for performance. I’d like to tie that with what I mentioned in one of my answers earlier today about having a more agile and adaptive selling team. You do that when you use the resources that are available to you to help your learners grow in their own journey and remain obsessed with the right technology at the right time and the right way. SS: I think that is phenomenal. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your insight. BK: Thank you for having me, really enjoyed listening and having that discussion with you, Shawnna. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there's something you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Today we're speaking with Seema Tilak, an IP lawyer, and founder at Create LLP and Bianca Ker the Managing Director of EMEA at Tagger Media In this event, they discuss the increasing integration of AI in influencer marketing. They explore the potential benefits and drawbacks of using AI for content creation, highlighting the importance of authenticity and the unique storytelling abilities of humans. They also touch upon the legal implications of AI, such as personal rights issues. They conclude by expressing their excitement for the future of AI in influencer marketing while acknowledging the potential challenges that may arise. Tune in to gain valuable insights into the evolving landscape of influencer marketing and the role of AI. TIMESTAMPS [00:28] Authenticity and AI. [04:15] Behind the scenes of influencer marketing. [10:06] Who to f***, marry, kill - Instagram, Youtube or Tiktok [12:28] Online interactions and social media. [17:09] Next generation of women in the industry. [20:10] Aging out of influencer marketing. [24:02] Putting performance clauses in agreements. [27:22] The affiliate model. [32:10] Dodgers' successful decision during Pride Month. [36:59] Industry changes in recent months. [39:00] Investing in mid-nano creators. [42:19] Fans investing in creators. [49:18] Authenticity in influencer marketing. [52:32] AI in influencer marketing. [55:45] Virality clause in contracts. [01:00:38] Smart decisions about influencer marketing. [01:05:10] SAG AFTRA contracts and influencers. Check out Create, LLP Check out Tagger Media Connect with Bianca Instagram LinkedIn Connect with Seema: Twitter LinkedIn Check out Oversubscribe Chicago Meet Up More Events Want to join WIIM's Membership? Check out our website Don't forget to follow us on Instagram --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wiim/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wiim/support