Podcasts about hr saas

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Best podcasts about hr saas

Latest podcast episodes about hr saas

Down Round
Rippling vs Deel

Down Round

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2025 31:33


HR SaaS is probably the least sexy topic in the world, but fortunately two of the bigger players have made it interesting through bizarre corporate warfare. Rippling has launched a lawsuit against competitor Deel alleging that they placed a spy deep within. The saga contains a honey-pot Slack channel, a mole in the top ranks, and trying to flush a phone down a toilet. It’s good stuff folks. We get into it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Funky Marketing: Bold Strategies for B2B Growth and Revenue
Competitive Analysis in Action: Using Similarweb to Outpace Your Rivals - Nemanja Zivkovic

Funky Marketing: Bold Strategies for B2B Growth and Revenue

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 25, 2024 64:22


Welcome to another episode of the Funky Marketing Podcast! Today, we're diving deep into competitive analysis using SimilarWeb to uncover insights about HR SaaS companies like BambooHR, HiBob, and Personio. You can do it on your own while watching how I do it. Just use this link https://similarweb.partnerlinks.io/funkymarketingpod. Whether you're a marketer, a strategist, or just curious about SaaS growth strategies, this episode is packed with actionable tips. Let's get into it! In this episode, Funky Marketing takes you behind the scenes of competitive analysis for HR SaaS companies, leveraging the power of SimilarWeb. We analyze key players in the HR tech space, including BambooHR, HiBob, and Personio, to explore their positioning, messaging, and marketing strategies. You'll learn how to identify market leaders, uncover gaps, and create demand in competitive industries. This episode is not just about data—it's about using insights to make smarter decisions for your business. Whether you're new to competitive analysis or an experienced marketer, there's something here for everyone. Key Points: Introduction to Competitive Analysis: - Why competitive analysis matters. - Questions to ask before starting. - Overview of tools like SimilarWeb. Analyzing BambooHR, HiBob, and Personio: - Positioning and messaging differences. - Marketing channel breakdown (organic search, paid search, social media). - Traffic and engagement metrics. Insights from the Analysis" - How BambooHR dominates with organic traffic. - HiBob's focus on analytics and modern HR solutions. - Personio's geographic strategy and display advertising efforts. Actionable Takeaways: - Finding market gaps and creating a niche. - Leveraging tools like SimilarWeb for strategic insights. - Building trust with marquee customers to establish credibility. Final Thoughts: - The importance of data-driven decisions. - Planning for success in 2025. Important Links: Connect with Nemanja: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zivkovicnemanja/ Subscribe to the FUNKY MARKETING podcast on any podcast platform and drop a question here in the comments.

Rising Giants
Rising Giants N.135 - Ye Myat Min, Co-Founder, Better HR & Peek Money

Rising Giants

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2024 59:33


Today on Rising Giants, we have Ye Myat Min, aka Jeff, he is a serial founder, having run four startups: Nexlabs, Better HR, Bluejay Finance and Peek Money. Jeff enjoys taking unconventional routes. A self-taught coder at the age of 12, he dropped out of university and started his first business at 21. He scaled Better HR to be a market leader in HR SaaS in Southeast Asia. His latest venture, Peek Money, is an AI-powered personal finance platform to help you track, manage and grow your net worth. Peek Money: https://peek.money Better HR: https://betterhr.io Follow RG on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: @risinggiantsfm Catch our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠full videos on YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: @risinggiantsfm All RG links: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/risinggiantsfm

Category Visionaries
Albert Owusu-Asare, CEO & Co-Founder of Kadana: $7 Million Raised to Build the Future of Global Payroll Infrastructure

Category Visionaries

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 6, 2024 22:05


Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — the show that explores GTM stories from tech's most innovative B2B founders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Albert Owusu-Asare, CEO & Co-Founder at Cadana, a global payroll infrastructure platform that has raised $7 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Global Talent Marketplaces: Cadana focuses on empowering talent marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr, HR SaaS companies, and platforms looking to add global payroll capabilities. This strategic targeting aims to address diverse needs in the global payroll landscape. Buy vs. Build Dilemma: Albert shared insights on how Cadana addresses the buy vs. build dilemma, pitching the platform as a way for companies to go to market quickly and learn before investing in building their own solutions. Founding Story: The idea for Cadana originated from Albert's experience at Goldman Sachs and his role as a CTO at a billion-dollar company, where he faced challenges with global payroll management. Risk Management: Albert discussed his approach to risk-taking, emphasizing minimizing regret as a framework for making bold career moves, including leaving stable positions to pursue entrepreneurial ventures. Early Product Pivot: Cadana initially launched as an earned wage access product. The team used feedback from early users to pivot and develop their current global payroll solution. Market Potential: Albert views Cadana's market not just as existing payroll solutions but as a foundational infrastructure with the potential to unlock new opportunities for global payroll, similar to how Stripe transformed payments.   //   Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe.  www.GlobalTalent.co    

The People Factor
#65 Jens Bender | Founder & MD at WorkTech Advisory, Co-Founder PeoplePath, Initiator @ HR Angel Club

The People Factor

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 10, 2024 31:02


Experienced entrepreneur with a successful track-record in building global businesses in the HR SaaS industry. Skilled in business strategy, digitization, start-ups, marketing, and market entry. Business professional with a consulting background and Master's Degree in business administration, marketing and operations from WHU and HEC Montreal.Shownotes00:00 - Intro, M&A Deal Review11:53 - Valuations & markets23:16 - Start-up Investments28:21 - 29:25 - 2024 Outlook & Personio IPO?LinksJens Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jens-bender/Thomas Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-kohler-pplwise/Thomas e-mail: thomas@pplwise.compplwise: https://pplwise.com/

The @MarketingMax Show
#10 - Ask Max - Marketing B2B SaaS, Fractional CMOs, Marketing Women's Jewelry To Men & More...

The @MarketingMax Show

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 16, 2024 19:26


Max's first try at an "Ask Max" episode! Answering questions that were asked after his first event in NYC on Feb 29, 2024... Max shares his marketing strategy & playbook to grow a HR SaaS, his takes on hiring a Fractional CMO, how to market women's jewelry to men, and more! If you would like to submit a question for a future episode or just share feedback on this episode, DM him here or drop him an email at max@marketingmax.io Enjoy the episode! **Please consider following this podcast & sharing this episode if you got even 1 penny of value from it Say hi to ⁠@MarketingMax⁠ You can sign up for Max's newsletter ⁠here⁠

Talent Empowerment
The Role of KPIs in HR | Andrew Swiler, CEO of Lanteria

Talent Empowerment

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 4, 2024 38:54


Andrew Swiler, CEO of Lanteria, shares his entrepreneurial journey and experience in acquiring software companies. He discusses the challenges and opportunities of remote work, the importance of hiring dedicated and committed individuals, and the need for HR to evolve into a strategic role. Andrew also highlights the potential of HR software in improving employee retention and engagement.This podcast is powered by LeggUP, the ultimate accelerated leadership development platform with retention insurance. Click here to learn more: https://www.leggup.com/ Subscribe to the Talent Empowerment Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@TomFinnovation

How2Exit: Mergers and Acquisitions of Small to Middle Market Businesses
E166: CEO Andrew Swiler Shares His Experience Acquiring and Turning Around Lanteria

How2Exit: Mergers and Acquisitions of Small to Middle Market Businesses

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2023 45:58


"This episode was brought to you by Reconciled.com. Helping M&A Entrepreneurs just like you with Bookkeeping, CFO & Controller Services, Outsourced Enterprise Accounting and Tax Services. Reconciled.com"Watch it on Youtube: https://youtu.be/mqUo2JryOY4About The Guest(s): Andrew Swiler is the CEO of Lanteria, a company that provides HR management software built on the Microsoft ecosystem. He has a background in private equity and entrepreneurship and has a passion for turning around stagnant businesses.Summary: Andrew Swiler, CEO of Lanteria, shares his journey of acquiring and turning around the HR management software company. He discusses the challenges of managing a remote team and navigating the acquisition process in the midst of a war. Andrew also highlights the importance of employee engagement surveys and one-on-one meetings in managing a remote workforce.Key Takeaways: Andrew acquired Lanteria, an HR management software company, and is focused on turning it around and growing the business.He faced challenges managing a remote team, especially during the war in Ukraine, where the company's owners were based.Employee engagement surveys and one-on-one meetings are crucial for managing a remote workforce and building trust.Andrew plans to raise more capital to fuel the growth of Lanteria and potentially acquire other HR SaaS companies.He believes that humans will continue to be the most important part of every business, even with the rise of AI.--------------------------------------------------Contact Andrew onLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/swiler/Website: http://lanteria.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/swilera--------------------------------------------------How2Exit Joins IT ExchangeNet's Channel Partner Network!-Why IT ExchangeNet?Since 1998, IT ExchangeNet has created $5 billion in value by selling more than 225 IT businesses in 20 countries. IT ExchangeNet works exclusively with IT-enabled businesses generating between $5M and $30M who are ready to be sold, and M&A decision-makers who are ready to buy. For over 25 years IT ExchangeNet has developed industry knowledge that helps them determine whether a seller is a good fit for their buyers before making a match."Out of all of the brokers I've met, this team has the most experience and I believe the best ability to get IT service businesses sold at the best price" - Ron SkeltonThe IT ExchangeNet M&A Marketplace we partnered with has a proprietary database of 50,000+ global buyers seeking IT Services firms, MSPs, MSSPs, Software-as-a-Service platforms, and channel partners in the Microsoft, Oracle, ServiceNow, and Salesforce space.If you are interested in learning more about the process and current market valuations, complete the contact form and we'll respond within one business day. Everything is kept confidential.Are you interested in what your business may be worth? Unlock the value of your IT Services firm, visit https://www.itexchangenet.com/marketplace-how2exit and complete the contact form.Our partnership with IT ExchangeNet focuses on deals above $5M in value. If you are looking to buy or sell a tech business below the $5M mark, we recommend Flippa.--------------------------------------------------

The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life
HR Tech Exec Invested $200k into his own HR SaaS, Raising $200k on $3m Valuation Now

The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 26, 2023 16:38


Ex Corporate HR Exec builds nest egg to launch HR tech SaaS in 2019. Today he's doing just $10k in MRR but says pipeline is biggest it's ever been. Can he use that data to close his $200k seed round next week?

The Future Of Teamwork
Futuristic Thinking: An Opportunity for Teams to Shift & Thrive with Andrew Freedman

The Future Of Teamwork

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 29, 2023 45:51


Andrew Freedman stops by The Future of Teamwork to chat with host and HUDDL3 CEO Dane Groeneveld about practical wisdom and research-backed frameworks for driving performance culture, adapting to hybrid work, and harnessing technology to enhance team dynamics. Andrew is a managing partner at SHIFT, and author of the book "Thrive," a resource for creating more efficient, empathetic teams. During their conversation the two touch on several issues affecting the workplace today, including selecting from the wealth of HR SaaS platforms available, culture as a differentiator in the modern workplace, and the indications and implications of burnout on your employee base.Find Andrew Freedman:https://www.linkedin.com/in/afreedmanthrive/https://www.shiftthework.com/Key Takeaways[00:11 - 02:31] Andrew Freedman, author and managing partner at SHIFT[02:31 - 03:35] Bouncing out of bed and dialing back the energy, excitement to help[03:35 - 04:37] Decompression time in transit and at home, rebooting[05:06 - 07:08] Thrive, a result of transformative work and impact on teams[07:06 - 09:03] Frameworks and practical wisdom (backed by research) for living, performing, and growing[09:04 - 09:43] Refreshing team best practices[09:40 - 11:32] Different realities in the wake of Covid, accommodating different methods of communication for different neurotypes[11:34 - 13:39] Hybrid work and defining success for a connected culture[13:39 - 14:53] 2023 State of Workforce Burnout and organizational issue that correlates with hybrid work[14:54 - 16:37] Intentionality and asking whether or not the culture is worth it[16:38 - 18:42] Six measures for driving performance culture, reinforcing behavior and skills development[18:43 - 21:57] Skills development's context in high-performing team cultures[21:58 - 23:59] Many people think of skills and knowledge in a static way, and thinking about adaptability[24:07 - 25:41] Tools that can fragment efficient workflows, navigating options for HR SaaS and CRM[25:42 - 28:14] Harnessing technology so that the best tool is the member of the team utilizing it[28:15 - 30:05] The dark side of AI, protecting trade secrets, and culture as the one irreplaceable element of your business[29:53 - 31:40] Culture is the differentiator, $1.3 trillion in investments, and hasty implementation strategies[31:42 - 34:19] The pandemic as an accelerator of asynchronous communication and innovation (Latch as a use case)[34:20 - 37:21] Indicators of burnout, the cost and strain on employees[37:26 - 39:06] Data to substantiate the benefits of psychologically safe human experiences at work, understanding what not to tolerate any more[39:06 - 41:37] A natural attrition of leaders stuck in the past, and the coming shifts in culture thanks to technology[41:41 - 44:35] Skills development, "futuristic thinking," embracing disruptive thinking and empathy in assuming positive intent[44:37 - 45:45] Connect with Andrew

Business Creators Radio Show With Adam Hommey
HR Tech Pioneer and Investment Visionary, With Andrew Swiler

Business Creators Radio Show With Adam Hommey

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 22, 2023 56:46


Andrew Swiler works at the intersection of entrepreneurship and investing…starting, acquiring, and investing in HR tech companies around the world. With 12 years' experience starting and acquiring software companies, Andrew has built up a portfolio of small HR SaaS companies. Tune in to hear Andrew's answers to questions such as: How were you able to […] The post HR Tech Pioneer and Investment Visionary, With Andrew Swiler first appeared on Business Creators Radio Show with Adam Hommey.

The People Factor
#23 - Jens Bender | Founder & Managing Director | WorkTech Advisory

The People Factor

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2023 40:59


Experienced entrepreneur with a successful track-record in building global businesses in the HR SaaS industry. Skilled in business strategy, digitization, start-ups, marketing, and market entry. Business professional with a consulting background and Master's Degree in business administration, marketing and operations from WHU and HEC Montreal.Shownotes00:00 - Intro08:20 - Alumni software, Leading us player13:35 - Retention engine16:35 - Organisational transformation, Private equity27:35 - Work-tech, HR-tech33:35 - Angel network37:20 - RecommendationsLinksJens Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jens-bender/Thomas Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-kohler-pplwise/Thomas e-mail: thomas@pplwise.compplwise: https://pplwise.com/

Lessons I Learned in Law
Xavier Langlois on being a ‘jack of all trades' and harnessing your transferrable skills

Lessons I Learned in Law

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 8, 2023 33:27 Transcription Available


In this episode of Lessons I Learned in Law, Scott Brown speaks to Xavier Langlois, Chief Legal and Impact Officer at Beamery. Beamery is a HR SaaS tech company that provides a Talent Lifecycle Management platform which allows enterprises to create talent centric, human centric experiences for all talentXavier, or X, trained at Field Fisher and since 2013 has worked in-house for tech firms and in venture capital. Xavier has held numerous senior roles across various industries, including legal tech, private equity and tech more broadly. He has led numerous funding rounds, M&A, and advises management/founders on a wide range of legal and business issues and company strategy and growth.  X shares the three lessons he has learned in law including:·      There's no one way to have a legal career. X reveals how his secondments into industry firms opened his eyes to the possibilities of an in-house career; something that he wasn't aware of when entering into the legal profession. ·      When you come to work, bring your whole self to work. Be unapologetically you! ·      Don't just be the lawyer. Get into a position where you fully understand how the business works and how you can help with strategy and growth. Nurture internal and external relationships and apply your unique perspective to help teams across the business, regardless of what they might be working on. Bring solutions, not problems. X talks about his experiences of sharing his whole self with his colleagues, specifically his sexuality as a gay man. Whilst he says he doesn't like the term ‘coming out', he instead tried normalise his experiences through honesty with his team. He also reflects on lockdown and how that often created deeper more meaningful conversations and relationships with colleagues, despite being remote. Presented by Scott Brown of Heriot Brown Legal Recruitment. Follow Heriot Brown:Twitter | LinkedIn |  Facebook | InstagramThis episode of Lessons I Learned in Law is brought to you by Beamery.Beamery is an AI-powered talent platform, designed to hire candidates faster, develop the skills of your workforce, and increase employee retention.Find out more at Beamery.com

HRchat Podcast
Feeling Appreciated with Francois Fortier, Applauz

HRchat Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2023 29:40


The guest today is Francois Fortier, Founder and CEO of Applauz, a multi-award-winning HR SaaS platform based in Quebec, Canada.Francois has 15+ years of entrepreneurial experience and prior to starting Applauz, Francois was Founder and CEO of The KLF Group, a company specializing in building and scaling companies in the Reward and Recognition space.As CEO of Applauz, he is responsible for overseeing all facets of the business and is committed to providing effective and affordable solutions that help leaders better engage with their employees. Since 2019, Applauz has been on a mission to help companies make their work environment a happier place, by building people-first cultures where managers learn to better motivate and inspire their teams, and where employees feel appreciated and recognized.Questions for Francois include:Why should leaders care about building an authentic culture of appreciation?How must leadership be involved in the development of a culture of appreciation?How can HR leaders overcome obstacles to growing appreciation at work?Why is software only part of the answer? What are the other components?What does a culture of appreciation mean to you and how does that show up in the ethos of Applauz?How can listeners connect with you and learn more about Applauz?We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.   

B2B SaaS Podcast
How we got high-ticket beta customers for our HR SaaS platform

B2B SaaS Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2023 21:50 Transcription Available


Richard Lear, CEO of ApolloFactor talks about how they got high-ticket (1000s of employees) beta customers. We also talk about how the talent management platform stops employees from churning out & how he intends to grow the company going forward.How ApolloFactor helps companies detect employee satisfaction using AI & stops them from leavingHow they got the first 3 beta customersHow they built a pipeline for 20 more beta customersHow they are working with consulting partners as part of their GTM strategyHow they demonstrate ROI for their platformTeam, external funding & future vision

Adapter's Advantage: Breakthrough Moments that Lead to Success
Advancing Technology Transformation | Marilyn Pearson Hendricks

Adapter's Advantage: Breakthrough Moments that Lead to Success

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2023 35:33


Marilyn Pearson Hendricks, MBA is the co-founder & managing partner of WorkTech Advisory, a global consultancy specializing in the Human Resources and Work Tech sector. The firm helps SaaS companies unlock the full market potential of the investment they have made in their technology Marilyn has over 20 years of senior leadership, strategy, sales, marketing, alliances, and subject matter expert experience. She has dedicated her career to advancing the technology, processes, and mindset that support innovative people management used by organizations across the globe. Marilyn began her career as an HR practitioner, where she focused on digital transformation, change management, and business process redesign She now helps clients achieve their revenue and growth goals, specializing in strategic repositioning, pivots, opening new revenue streams, geographic expansion, and full-stack go-to market. Her experience spans numerous HR SaaS providers including Cornerstone OnDemand, Peoplefluent/Vector VMS/Affirmity (now LTG portfolio), Lawson Software (acquired by Infor) along with global HR strategic leadership consultancy PDI Ninth House (acquired by Korn Ferry) and SAP SuccessFactors implementation firm 3D Results (acquired by Rizing).    Show Notes https://www.linkedin.com/in/marilynpearsonhendricks/ https://www.worktechadvisory.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/worktech-advisory/

Screaming in the Cloud
Computing on the Edge with Macrometa's Chetan Venkatesh

Screaming in the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2022 40:29


About ChetanChetan Venkatesh is a technology startup veteran focused on distributed data, edge computing, and software products for enterprises and developers. He has 20 years of experience in building primary data storage, databases, and data replication products. Chetan holds a dozen patents in the area of distributed computing and data storage.Chetan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Macrometa – a Global Data Network featuring a Global Data Mesh, Edge Compute, and In-Region Data Protection. Macrometa helps enterprise developers build real-time apps and APIs in minutes – not months.Links Referenced: Macrometa: https://www.macrometa.com Macrometa Developer Week: https://www.macrometa.com/developer-week TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Forget everything you know about SSH and try Tailscale. Imagine if you didn't need to manage PKI or rotate SSH keys every time someone leaves. That'd be pretty sweet, wouldn't it? With Tailscale SSH, you can do exactly that. Tailscale gives each server and user device a node key to connect to its VPN, and it uses the same node key to authorize and authenticate SSH.Basically you're SSHing the same way you manage access to your app. What's the benefit here? Built in key rotation permissions is code connectivity between any two devices, reduce latency and there's a lot more, but there's a time limit here. You can also ask users to reauthenticate for that extra bit of security. Sounds expensive?Nope, I wish it were. tail scales. Completely free for personal use on up to 20 devices. To learn more, visit snark.cloud/tailscale. Again, that's snark.cloud/tailscaleCorey: Managing shards. Maintenance windows. Overprovisioning. ElastiCache bills. I know, I know. It's a spooky season and you're already shaking. It's time for caching to be simpler. Momento Serverless Cache lets you forget the backend to focus on good code and great user experiences. With true autoscaling and a pay-per-use pricing model, it makes caching easy. No matter your cloud provider, get going for free at gomomento.co/screaming That's GO M-O-M-E-N-T-O dot co slash screamingCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today, this promoted guest episode is brought to us basically so I can ask a question that has been eating at me for a little while. That question is, what is the edge? Because I have a lot of cynical sarcastic answers to it, but that doesn't really help understanding. My guest today is Chetan Venkatesh, CEO and co-founder at Macrometa. Chetan, thank you for joining me.Chetan: It's my pleasure, Corey. You're one of my heroes. I think I've told you this before, so I am absolutely delighted to be here.Corey: Well, thank you. We all need people to sit on the curb and clap as we go by and feel like giant frauds in the process. So let's start with the easy question that sets up the rest of it. Namely, what is Macrometa, and what puts you in a position to be able to speak at all, let alone authoritatively, on what the edge might be?Chetan: I'll answer the second part of your question first, which is, you know, what gives me the authority to even talk about this? Well, for one, I've been trying to solve the same problem for 20 years now, which is build distributed systems that work really fast and can answer questions about data in milliseconds. And my journey's sort of been like the spiral staircase journey, you know, I keep going around in circles, but the view just keeps getting better every time I do one of these things. So I'm on my fourth startup doing distributed data infrastructure, and this time really focused on trying to provide a platform that's the antithesis of the cloud. It's kind of like taking the cloud and flipping it on its head because instead of having a single region application where all your stuff runs in one place, on us-west-1 or us-east-1, what if your apps could run everywhere, like, they could run in hundreds and hundreds of cities around the world, much closer to where your users and devices and most importantly, where interesting things in the real world are happening?And so we started Macrometa about five years back to build a new kind of distributed cloud—let's call the edge—that kind of looks like a CDN, a Content Delivery Network, but really brings very sophisticated platform-level primitives for developers to build applications in a distributed way around primitives for compute, primitives for data, but also some very interesting things that you just can't do in the cloud anymore. So that's Macrometa. And we're doing something with edge computing, which is a big buzzword these days, but I'm sure you'll ask me about that.Corey: It seems to be. Generally speaking, when I look around and companies are talking about edge, it feels almost like it is a redefining of what they already do to use a term that is currently trending and deep in the hype world.Chetan: Yeah. You know, I think humans just being biologically social beings just tend to be herd-like, and so when we see a new trend, we like to slap it on everything we have. We did that 15 years back with cloud, if you remember, you know? Everybody was very busy trying to stick the cloud label on everything that was on-prem. Edge is sort of having that edge-washing moment right now.But I define edge very specifically is very different from the cloud. You know, where the cloud is defined by centralization, i.e., you've got a giant hyperscale data center somewhere far, far away, where typically electricity, real estate, and those things are reasonably cheap, i.e., not in urban centers, where those things tend to be expensive.You know, you have platforms where you run things at scale, it's sort of a your mess for less business in the cloud and somebody else manages that for you. The edge is actually defined by location. And there are three types of edges. The first edge is the CDN edge, which is historically where we've been trying to make things faster with the internet and make the internet scale. So Akamai came about, about 20 years back and created this thing called the CDN that allowed the web to scale. And that was the first killer app for edge, actually. So that's the first location that defines the edge where a lot of the peering happens between different network providers and the on-ramp around the cloud happens.The second edge is the telecom edge. That's actually right next to you in terms of, you know, the logical network topology because every time you do something on your computer, it goes through that telecom layer. And now we have the ability to actually run web services, applications, data, directly from that telecom layer.And then the third edge is—sort of, people have been familiar with this for 30 years. The third edge is your device, just your mobile phone. It's your internet gateway and, you know, things that you carry around in your pocket or sit on your desk, where you have some compute power, but it's very restricted and it only deals with things that are interesting or important to you as a person, not in a broad range. So those are sort of the three things. And it's not the cloud. And these three things are now becoming important as a place for you to build and run enterprise apps.Corey: Something that I think is often overlooked here—and this is sort of a natural consequence of the cloud's own success and the joy that we live in a system that we do where companies are required to always grow and expand and find new markets—historically, for example, when I went to AWS re:Invent, which is a cloud service carnival in the desert that no one in the right mind should ever want to attend but somehow we keep doing, it used to be that, oh, these announcements are generally all aligned with people like me, where I have specific problems and they look a lot like what they're talking about on stage. And now they're talking about things that, from that perspective, seem like Looney Tunes. Like, I'm trying to build Twitter for Pets or something close to it, and I don't understand why there's so much talk about things like industrial IoT and, “Machine learning,” quote-unquote, and other things that just do not seem to align with. I'm trying to build a web service, like it says on the name of a company; what gives?And part of that, I think, is that it's difficult to remember, for most of us—especially me—that what they're coming out with is not your shopping list. Every service is for someone, not every service is for everyone, so figuring out what it is that they're talking about and what those workloads look like, is something that I think is getting lost in translation. And in our defense—collective defense—Amazon is not the best at telling stories to realize that, oh, this is not me they're talking to; I'm going to opt out of this particular thing. You figure it out by getting it wrong first. Does that align with how you see the market going?Chetan: I think so. You know, I think of Amazon Web Services, or even Google, or Azure as sort of Costco and, you know, Sam's Wholesale Club or whatever, right? They cater to a very broad audience and they sell a lot of stuff in bulk and cheap. And you know, so it's sort of a lowest common denominator type of a model. And so emerging applications, and especially emerging needs that enterprises have, don't necessarily get solved in the cloud. You've got to go and build up yourself on sort of the crude primitives that they provide.So okay, go use your bare basic EC2, your S3, and build your own edgy, or whatever, you know, cutting edge thing you want to build over there. And if enough people are doing it, I'm sure Amazon and Google start to pay interest and you know, develop something that makes it easier. So you know, I agree with you, they're not the best at this sort of a thing. The edge is phenomenon also that's orthogonally, and diametrically opposite to the architecture of the cloud and the economics of the cloud.And we do centralization in the cloud in a big way. Everything is in one place; we make giant piles of data in one database or data warehouse slice and dice it, and almost all our computer science is great at doing things in a centralized way. But when you take data and chop it into 50 copies and keep it in 50 different places on Earth, and you have this thing called the internet or the wide area network in the middle, trying to keep all those copies in sync is a nightmare. So you start to deal with some very basic computer science problems like distributed state and how do you build applications that have a consistent view of that distributed state? So you know, there have been attempts to solve these problems for 15, 18 years, but none of those attempts have really cracked the intersection of three things: a way for programmers to do this in a way that doesn't blow their heads with complexity, a way to do this cheaply and effectively enough where you can build real-world applications that serve billions of users concurrently at a cost point that actually is economical and make sense, and third, a way to do this with adequate levels of performance where you don't die waiting for the spinning wheel on your screen to go away.So these are the three problems with edge. And as I said, you know, me and my team, we've been focused on this for a very long while. And me and my co-founder have come from this world and we created a platform very uniquely designed to solve these three problems, the problems of complexity for programmers to build in a distributed environment like this where data sits in hundreds of places around the world and you need a consistent view of that data, being able to operate and modify and replicate that data with consistency guarantees, and then a third one, being able to do that, at high levels of performance, which translates to what we call ultra-low latency, which is human perception. The threshold of human perception, visually, is about 70 milliseconds. Our finest athletes, the best Esports players are about 70 to 80 milliseconds in their twitch, in their ability to twitch when something happens on the screen. The average human is about 100 to 110 milliseconds.So in a second, we can maybe do seven things at rapid rates. You know, that's how fast our brain can process it. Anything that falls below 100 milliseconds—especially if it falls into 50 to 70 milliseconds—appears instantaneous to the human mind and we experience it as magic. And so where edge computing and where my platform comes in is that it literally puts data and applications within 50 milliseconds of 90% of humans and devices on Earth and allows now a whole new set of applications where latency and location and the ability to control those things with really fine-grained capability matters. And we can talk a little more about what those apps are in a bit.Corey: And I think that's probably an interesting place to dive into at the moment because whenever we talk about the idea of new ways of building things that are aimed at decentralization, first, people at this point automatically have a bit of an aversion to, “Wait, are you talking about some of the Web3 nonsense?” It's one of those look around the poker table and see if you can spot the sucker, and if you can't, it's you. Because there are interesting aspects to that entire market, let's be clear, but it also seems to be occluded by so much of the grift and nonsense and spam and the rest that, again, sort of characterize the early internet as well. The idea though, of decentralizing out of the cloud is deeply compelling just to anyone who's really ever had to deal with the egress charges, or even the data transfer charges inside of one of the cloud providers. The counterpoint is it feels that historically, you either get to pay the tax and go all-in on a cloud provider and get all the higher-level niceties, or otherwise, you wind up deciding you're going to have to more or less go back to physical data centers, give or take, and other than the very baseline primitives that you get to work with of VMs and block storage and maybe a load balancer, you're building it all yourself from scratch. It seems like you're positioning this as setting up for a third option. I'd be very interested to hear it.Chetan: Yeah. And a quick comment on decentralization: good; not so sure about the Web3 pieces around it. We tend to talk about computer science and not the ideology of distributing data. There are political reasons, there are ideological reasons around data and sovereignty and individual human rights, and things like that. There are people far smarter than me who should explain that.I fall personally into the Nicholas Weaver school of skepticism about Web3 and blockchain and those types of things. And for readers who are not familiar with Nicholas Weaver, please go online. He teaches at UC Berkeley is just one of the finest minds of our time. And I think he's broken down some very good reasons why we should be skeptical about, sort of, Web3 and, you know, things like that. Anyway, that's a digression.Coming back to what we're talking about, yes, it is a new paradigm, but that's the challenge, which is I don't want to introduce a new paradigm. I want to provide a continuum. So what we've built is a platform that looks and feels very much like Lambdas, and a poly-model database. I hate the word multi. It's a pretty dumb word, so I've started to substitute ‘multi' with ‘poly' everywhere, wherever I can find it.So it's not multi-cloud; it's poly-cloud. And it's not multi-model; it's poly-model. Because what we want is a world where developers have the ability to use the best paradigm for solving problems. And it turns out when we build applications that deal with data, data doesn't just come in one form, it comes in many different forms, it's polymorphic, and so you need a data platform, that's also, you know, polyglot and poly-model to be able to handle that. So that's one part of the problem, which is, you know, we're trying to provide a platform that provides continuity by looking like a key-value store like Redis. It looks like a document database—Corey: Or the best database in the world Route 53 TXT records. But please, keep going.Chetan: Well, we've got that too, so [laugh] you know? And then we've got a streaming graph engine built into it that kind of looks and behaves like a graph database, like Neo4j, for example. And, you know, it's got columnar capabilities as well. So it's sort of a really interesting data platform that is not open-source; it's proprietary because it's designed to solve these problems of being able to distribute data, put it in hundreds of locations, keep it all in sync, but it looks like a conventional NoSQL database. And it speaks PostgreSQL, so if you know PostgreSQL, you can program it, you know, pretty easily.What it's also doing is taking away the responsibility for engineers and developers to understand how to deal with very arcane problems like conflict resolution in data. I made a change in Mumbai; you made a change in Tokyo; who wins? Our systems in the cloud—you know, DynamoDB, and things like that—they have very crude answers for this something called last writer wins. We've done a lot of work to build a protocol that brings you ACID-like consistency in these types of problems and makes it easy to reason with state change when you've got an application that's potentially running in 100 locations and each of those places is modifying the same record, for example.And then the second part of it is it's a converged platform. So it doesn't just provide data; it provides a compute layer that's deeply integrated directly with the data layer itself. So think of it as Lambdas running, like, stored procedures inside the database. That's really what it is. We've built a very, very specialized compute engine that exposes containers in functions as stored procedures directly on the database.And so they run inside the context of the database and so you can build apps in Python, Go, your favorite language; it compiles down into a [unintelligible 00:15:02] kernel that actually runs inside the database among all these different polyglot interfaces that we have. And the third thing that we do is we provide an ability for you to have very fine-grained control on your data. Because today, data's become a political tool; it's become something that nation-states care a lot about.Corey: Oh, do they ever.Chetan: Exactly. And [unintelligible 00:15:24] regulated. So here's the problem. You're an enterprise architect and your application is going to be consumed in 15 countries, there are 13 different frameworks to deal with. What do you do? Well, you spin up 13 different versions, one for each country, and you know, build 13 different teams, and have 13 zero-day attacks and all that kind of craziness, right?Well, data protection is actually one of the most important parts of the edge because, with something like Macrometa, you can build an app once, and we'll provide all the necessary localization for any region processing, data protection with things like tokenization of data so you can exfiltrate data securely without violating potentially PII sensitive data exfiltration laws within countries, things like that, i.e. It's solving some really hard problems by providing an opinionated platform that does these three things. And I'll summarize it as thus, Corey, we can kind of dig into each piece. Our platform is called the Global Data Network. It's not a global database; it's a global data network. It looks like a frickin database, but it's actually a global network available in 175 cities around the world.Corey: The challenge, of course, is where does the data actually live at rest, and—this is why people care about—well, they're two reasons people care about that; one is the data residency locality stuff, which has always, honestly for me, felt a little bit like a bit of a cloud provider shakedown. Yeah, build a data center here or you don't get any of the business of anything that falls under our regulation. The other is, what is the egress cost of that look like? Because yeah, I can build a whole multicenter data store on top of AWS, for example, but minimum, we're talking two cents, a gigabyte of transfer, even with inside of a region in some cases, and many times that externally.Chetan: Yeah, that's the real shakedown: the egress costs [laugh] more than the other example that you talked about over there. But it's a reality of how cloud pricing works and things like that. What we have built is a network that is completely independent of the cloud providers. We're built on top of five different service providers. Some of them are cloud providers, some of them are telecom providers, some of them are CDNs.And so we're building our global data network on top of routes and capacity provided by transfer providers who have different economics than the cloud providers do. So our cost for egress falls somewhere between two and five cents, for example, depending on which edge locations, which countries, and things that you're going to use over there. We've got a pretty generous egress fee where, you know, for certain thresholds, there's no egress charge at all, but over certain thresholds, we start to charge between two to five cents. But even if you were to take it at the higher end of that spectrum, five cents per gigabyte for transfer, the amount of value our platform brings in architecture and reduction in complexity and the ability to build apps that are frankly, mind-boggling—one of my customers is a SaaS company in marketing that uses us to inject offers while people are on their website, you know, browsing. Literally, you hit their website, you do a few things, and then boom, there's a customized offer for them.In banking that's used, for example, you know, you're making your minimum payments on your credit card, but you have a good payment history and you've got a decent credit score, well, let's give you an offer to give you a short-term loan, for example. So those types of new applications, you know, are really at this intersection where you need low latency, you need in-region processing, and you also need to comply with data regulation. So when you building a high-value revenue-generating app like that egress cost, even at five cents, right, tends to be very, very cheap, and the smallest part of you know, the complexity of building them.Corey: One of the things that I think we see a lot of is that the tone of this industry is set by the big players, and they have done a reasonable job, by and large, of making anything that isn't running in their blessed environments, let me be direct, sound kind of shitty, where it's like, “Oh, do you want to be smart and run things in AWS?”—or GCP? Or Azure, I guess—“Or do you want to be foolish and try and build it yourself out of popsicle sticks and twine?” And, yeah, on some level, if I'm trying to treat everything like it's AWS and run a crappy analog version of DynamoDB, for example, I'm not going to have a great experience, but if I also start from a perspective of not using things that are higher up the stack offerings, that experience starts to look a lot more reasonable as we start expanding out. But it still does present to a lot of us as well, we're just going to run things in VM somewhere and treat them just like we did back in 2005. What's changed in that perspective?Chetan: Yeah, you know, I can't talk for others but for us, we provide a high-level Platform-as-a-Service, and that platform, the global data network, has three pieces to it. First piece is—and none of this will translate into anything that AWS or GCP has because this is the edge, Corey, is completely different, right? So the global data network that we have is composed of three technology components. The first one is something that we call the global data mesh. And this is Pub/Sub and event processing on steroids. We have the ability to connect data sources across all kinds of boundaries; you've got some data in Germany and you've got some data in New York. How do you put these things together and get them streaming so that you can start to do interesting things with correlating this data, for example?And you might have to get across not just physical boundaries, like, they're sitting in different systems in different data centers; they might be logical boundaries, like, hey, I need to collaborate with data from my supply chain partner and we need to be able to do something that's dynamic in real-time, you know, to solve a business problem. So the global data mesh is a way to very quickly connect data wherever it might be in legacy systems, in flat files, in streaming databases, in data warehouses, what have you—you know, we have 500-plus types of connectors—but most importantly, it's not just getting the data streaming, it's then turning it into an API and making that data fungible. Because the minute you put an API on it and it's become fungible now that data is actually got a lot of value. And so the data mesh is a way to very quickly connect things up and put an API on it. And that API can now be consumed by front-ends, it can be consumed by other microservices, things like that.Which brings me to the second piece, which is edge compute. So we've built a compute runtime that is Docker compatible, so it runs containers, it's also Lambda compatible, so it runs functions. Let me rephrase that; it's not Lambda-compatible, it's Lambda-like. So no, you can't take your Lambda and dump it on us and it won't just work. You have to do some things to make it work on us.Corey: But so many of those things are so deeply integrated to the ecosystem that they're operating within, and—Chetan: Yeah.Corey: That, on the one hand, is presented by cloud providers as, “Oh, yes. This shows how wonderful these things are.” In practice, talk to customers. “Yeah, we're using it as spackle between the different cloud services that don't talk to one another despite being made by the same company.”Chetan: [laugh] right.Corey: It's fun.Chetan: Yeah. So the second edge compute piece, which allows you now to build microservices that are stateful, i.e., they have data that they interact with locally, and schedule them along with the data on our network of 175 regions around the world. So you can build distributed applications now.Now, your microservice back-end for your banking application or for your HR SaaS application or e-commerce application is not running in us-east-1 and Virginia; it's running literally in 15, 18, 25 cities where your end-users are, potentially. And to take an industrial IoT case, for example, you might be ingesting data from the electricity grid in 15, 18 different cities around the world; you can do all of that locally now. So that's what the edge functions does, it flips the cloud model around because instead of sending data to where the compute is in the cloud, you're actually bringing compute to where the data is originating, or the data is being consumed, such as through a mobile app. So that's the second piece.And the third piece is global data protection, which is hey, now I've got a distributed infrastructure; how do I comply with all the different privacy and regulatory frameworks that are out there? How do I keep data secure in each region? How do I potentially share data between regions in such a way that, you know, I don't break the model of compliance globally and create a billion-dollar headache for my CIO and CEO and CFO, you know? So that's the third piece of capabilities that this provides.All of this is presented as a set of serverless APIs. So you simply plug these APIs into your existing applications. Some of your applications work great in the cloud. Maybe there are just parts of that app that should be on our edge. And that's usually where most customers start; they take a single web service or two that's not doing so great in the cloud because it's too far away; it has data sensitivity, location sensitivity, time sensitivity, and so they use us as a way to just deal with that on the edge.And there are other applications where it's completely what I call edge native, i.e., no dependancy on the cloud comes and runs completely distributed across our network and consumes primarily the edges infrastructure, and just maybe send some data back on the cloud for long-term storage or long-term analytics.Corey: And ingest does remain free. The long-term analytics, of course, means that once that data is there, good luck convincing a customer to move it because that gets really expensive.Chetan: Exactly, exactly. It's a speciation—as I like to say—of the cloud, into a fast tier where interactions happen, i.e., the edge. So systems of record are still in the cloud; we still have our transactional systems over there, our databases, data warehouses.And those are great for historical types of data, as you just mentioned, but for things that are operational in nature, that are interactive in nature, where you really need to deal with them because they're time-sensitive, they're depleting value in seconds or milliseconds, they're location sensitive, there's a lot of noise in the data and you need to get to just those bits of data that actually matter, throw the rest away, for example—which is what you do with a lot of telemetry in cybersecurity, for example, right—those are all the things that require a new kind of a platform, not a system of record, a system of interaction, and that's what the global data network is, the GDN. And these three primitives, the data mesh, Edge compute, and data protection, are the way that our APIs are shaped to help our enterprise customers solve these problems. So put it another way, imagine ten years from now what DynamoDB and global tables with a really fast Lambda and Kinesis with actually Event Processing built directly into Kinesis might be like. That's Macrometa today, available in 175 cities.Corey: This episode is brought to us in part by our friends at Datadog. Datadog is a SaaS monitoring and security platform that enables full-stack observability for modern infrastructure and applications at every scale. Datadog enables teams to see everything: dashboarding, alerting, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, UX monitoring, security monitoring, dog logos, and log management, in one tightly integrated platform. With 600-plus out-of-the-box integrations with technologies including all major cloud providers, databases, and web servers, Datadog allows you to aggregate all your data into one platform for seamless correlation, allowing teams to troubleshoot and collaborate together in one place, preventing downtime and enhancing performance and reliability. Get started with a free 14-day trial by visiting datadoghq.com/screaminginthecloud, and get a free t-shirt after installing the agent.Corey: I think it's also worth pointing out that it's easy for me to fall into a trap that I wonder if some of our listeners do as well, which is, I live in, basically, downtown San Francisco. I have gigabit internet connectivity here, to the point where when it goes out, it is suspicious and more a little bit frightening because my ISP—Sonic.net—is amazing and deserves every bit of praise that you never hear any ISP ever get. But when I travel, it's a very different experience. When I go to oh, I don't know, the conference center at re:Invent last year and find that the internet is patchy at best, or downtown San Francisco on Verizon today, I discover that the internet is almost non-existent, and suddenly applications that I had grown accustomed to just working suddenly didn't.And there's a lot more people who live far away from these data center regions and tier one backbones directly to same than don't. So I think that there's a lot of mistaken ideas around exactly what the lower bandwidth experience of the internet is today. And that is something that feels inadvertently classist if that make sense. Are these geographically bigoted?Chetan: Yeah. No, I think those two points are very well articulated. I wish I could articulate it that well. But yes, if you can afford 5G, some of those things get better. But again, 5G is not everywhere yet. It will be, but 5G can in many ways democratize at least one part of it, which is provide an overlap network at the edge, where if you left home and you switched networks, on to a wireless, you can still get the same quality of service that you used to getting from Sonic, for example. So I think it can solve some of those things in the future. But the second part of it—what did you call it? What bigoted?Corey: Geographically bigoted. And again, that's maybe a bit of a strong term, but it's easy to forget that you can't get around the speed of light. I would say that the most poignant example of that I had was when I was—in the before times—giving a keynote in Australia. So ah, I know what I'll do, I'll spin up an EC2 instance for development purposes—because that's how I do my development—in Australia. And then I would just pay my provider for cellular access for my iPad and that was great.And I found the internet was slow as molasses for everything I did. Like, how do people even live here? Well, turns out that my provider would backhaul traffic to the United States. So to log into my session, I would wind up having to connect with a local provider, backhaul to the US, then connect back out from there to Australia across the entire Pacific Ocean, talk to the server, get the response, would follow that return path. It's yeah, turns out that doing laps around the world is not the most efficient way of transferring any data whatsoever, let alone in sizable amounts.Chetan: And that's why we decided to call our platform the global data network, Corey. In fact, it's really built inside of sort of a very simple reason is that we have our own network underneath all of this and we stop this whole ping-pong effect of data going around and help create deterministic guarantees around latency, around location, around performance. We're trying to democratize latency and these types of problems in a way that programmers shouldn't have to worry about all this stuff. You write your code, you push publish, it runs on a network, and it all gets there with a guarantee that 95% of all your requests will happen within 50 milliseconds round-trip time, from any device, you know, in these population centers around the world.So yeah, it's a big deal. It's sort of one of our je ne sais quoi pieces in our mission and charter, which is to just democratize latency and access, and sort of get away from this geographical nonsense of, you know, how networks work and it will dynamically switch topology and just make everything slow, you know, very non-deterministic way.Corey: One last topic that I want to ask you about—because I near certain given your position, you will have an opinion on this—what's your take on, I guess, the carbon footprint of clouds these days? Because a lot of people been talking about it; there has been a lot of noise made about, justifiably so. I'm curious to get your take.Chetan: Yeah, you know, it feels like we're in the '30s and the '40s of the carbon movement when it comes to clouds today, right? Maybe there's some early awareness of the problem, but you know, frankly, there's very little we can do than just sort of put a wet finger in the air, compute some carbon offset and plant some trees. I think these are good building blocks; they're not necessarily the best ways to solve this problem, ultimately. But one of the things I care deeply about and you know, my company cares a lot about is helping make developers more aware off what kind of carbon footprint their code tangibly has on the environment. And so we've started two things inside the company. We've started a foundation that we call the Carbon Conscious Computing Consortium—the four C's. We're going to announce that publicly next year, we're going to invite folks to come and join us and be a part of it.The second thing that we're doing is we're building a completely open-source, carbon-conscious computing platform that is built on real data that we're collecting about, to start with, how Macrometa's platform emits carbon in response to different types of things you build on it. So for example, you wrote a query that hits our database and queries, you know, I don't know, 20 billion objects inside of our database. It'll tell you exactly how many micrograms or how many milligrams of carbon—it's an estimate; not exactly. I got to learn to throttle myself down. It's an estimate, you know, you can't really measure these things exactly because the cost of carbon is different in different places, you know, there are different technologies, et cetera.Gives you a good decent estimate, something that reliably tells you, “Hey, you know that query that you have over there, that piece of SQL? That's probably going to do this much of micrograms of carbon at this scale.” You know, if this query was called a million times every hour, this is how much it costs. A million times a day, this is how much it costs and things like that. But the most important thing that I feel passionate about is that when we give developers visibility, they do good things.I mean, when we give them good debugging tools, the code gets better, the code gets faster, the code gets more efficient. And Corey, you're in the business of helping people save money, when we give them good visibility into how much their code costs to run, they make the code more efficient. So we're doing the same thing with carbon, we know there's a cost to run your code, whether it's a function, a container, a query, what have you, every operation has a carbon cost. And we're on a mission to measure that and provide accurate tooling directly in our platform so that along with your debug lines, right, where you've got all these print statements that are spitting up stuff about what's happening there, we can also print out, you know, what did it cost in carbon.And you can set budgets. You can basically say, “Hey, I want my application to consume this much of carbon.” And down the road, we'll have AI and ML models that will help us optimize your code to be able to fit within those carbon budgets. For example. I'm not a big fan of planting—you know, I love planting trees, but don't get me wrong, we live in California and those trees get burned down.And I was reading this heartbreaking story about how we returned back into the atmosphere a giant amount of carbon because the forest reserve that had been planted, you know, that was capturing carbon, you know, essentially got burned down in a forest fire. So, you know, we're trying to just basically say, let's try and reduce the amount of carbon, you know, that we can potentially create by having better tooling.Corey: That would be amazing, and I think it also requires something that I guess acts almost as an exchange where there's a centralized voice that can make sure that, well, one, the provider is being honest, and two, being able to ensure you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison and not just discounting a whole lot of negative externalities. Because, yes, we're talking about carbon released into the environment. Okay, great. What about water effects from what's happening with your data centers are located? That can have significant climate impact as well. It's about trying to avoid the picking and choosing. It's hard, hard problem, but I'm unconvinced that there's anything more critical in the entire ecosystem right now to worry about.Chetan: So as a startup, we care very deeply about starting with the carbon part. And I agree, Corey, it's a multi-dimensional problem; there's lots of tentacles. The hydrocarbon industry goes very deeply into all parts of our lives. I'm a startup, what do I know? I can't solve all of those things, but I wanted to start with the philosophy that if we provide developers with the right tooling, they'll have the right incentives then to write better code. And as we open-source more of what we learn and, you know, our tooling, others will do the same. And I think in ten years, we might have better answers. But someone's got to start somewhere, and this is where we'd like to start.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking as much time as you have for going through what you're up to and how you view the world. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Chetan: Yes, so two things on that front. Go to www.macrometa.com—M-A-C-R-O-M-E-T-A dot com—and that's our website. And you can come and experience the full power of the platform. We've got a playground where you can come, open an account and build anything you want for free, and you can try and learn. You just can't run it in production because we've got a giant network, as I said, of 175 cities around the world. But there are tiers available for you to purchase and build and run apps. Like I think about 80 different customers, some of the biggest ones in the world, some of the biggest telecom customers, retail, E-Tail customers, [unintelligible 00:34:28] tiny startups are building some interesting things on.And the second thing I want to talk about is November 7th through 11th of 2022, just a couple of weeks—or maybe by the time this recording comes out, a week from now—is developer week at Macrometa. And we're going to be announcing some really interesting new capabilities, some new features like real-time complex event processing with low, ultra-low latency, data connectors, a search feature that allows you to build search directly on top of your applications without needing to spin up a giant Elastic Cloud Search cluster, or providing search locally and regionally so that, you know, you can have search running in 25 cities that are instant to search rather than sending all your search requests back in one location. There's all kinds of very cool things happening over there.And we're also announcing a partnership with the original, the OG of the edge, one of the largest, most impressive, interesting CDN players that has become a partner for us as well. And then we're also announcing some very interesting experimental work where you as a developer can build apps directly on the 5G telecom cloud as well. And then you'll hear from some interesting companies that are building apps that are edge-native, that are impossible to build in the cloud because they take advantage of these three things that we talked about: geography, latency, and data protection in some very, very powerful ways. So you'll hear actual customer case studies from real customers in the flesh, not anonymous BS, no marchitecture. It's a week-long of technical talk by developers, for developers. And so, you know, come and join the fun and let's learn all about the edge together, and let's go build something together that's impossible to do today.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:36:06]. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Chetan: My pleasure, Corey. Like I said, you're one of my heroes. I've always loved your work. The Snark-as-a-Service is a trillion-dollar market cap company. If you're ever interested in taking that public, I know some investors that I'd happily put you in touch with. But—Corey: Sadly, so many of those investors lack senses of humor.Chetan: [laugh]. That is true. That is true [laugh].Corey: [laugh]. [sigh].Chetan: Well, thank you. Thanks again for having me.Corey: Thank you. Chetan Venkatesh, CEO and co-founder at Macrometa. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry and insulting comment about why we should build everything on the cloud provider that you work for and then the attempt to challenge Chetan for the title of Edgelord.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Disruptive CEO Nation
Episode 162: Gillian O'Brien

Disruptive CEO Nation

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 14, 2022 21:15


Show Notes Disruptive CEO Nation Podcast with Allison K. Summers Episode 162 Gillian O'Brien Gillian O'Brien, Founder in Residence, Pilot, California, USA - Why companies can benefit from a Founder in Residence and why being loud about failure can lift up the startup community.  At 27, Gillian has had more adventure in her career than others do in a lifetime.  Pilot serves over 1,000 customers who are founders and business leaders with their accounting, finance and accounting needs. Having a Founder in Residence helps deliver insight, empathy, and meaningful ideation for their customer base. Pilot has a staff of 400 people strong and is valued at over a billion dollars. In our conversation, Gillian O”Brien explains: Her experiences at Y Combinator and why founders need a community of supporters. Her first startup Cherry, an HR Saas business, and her willingness to be public and 'loud' about lessons learned in failure as she had to shut down the company at the beginning of the pandemic. Understanding resources needed by founders and helping them with investor conversations. Be sure to check out Gillian's listed below.  Enjoy the show! Connect with Gillian LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillian-obrien/   Connect with Allison: Website: allisonksummers.com  #tech #SAAS # business #designthinking #AI #creativesociety #teambuilding #CEO #startup #startupstory #founder #futureofwork  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crypto Hipster Podcast
Are We Misunderstanding Blockchain's Potential or Headed for Crypto Winter 2.0? with David Long, CVVC

Crypto Hipster Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2022 28:02


David Long is a Swedish American citizen with in depth tech and asset management experience. Prior to joining CV VC, he served as Managing Partner & Investment Manager at an ESG Asset Management Firm and served as an Advisor to multiple tech companies. He currently still serves on the Board of Directors at LaunchSource, an HR SaaS platform headquartered in Boston. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/crypto-hipster-podcast/support

The Coral Capital Podcast
#04: Japanese Unicorn SmartHR's Path To $1B ARR

The Coral Capital Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 13, 2022 32:30


Welcome to another episode of The Coral Capital Podcast, a show about startups, technology, and venture capital with a focus on Japan and Asia broadly. In this episode, we chat with Takafumi Kurahashi, COO at SmartHR. SmartHR is the leading HR SaaS company in Japan. In 2021 they closed a JPY 15.6 billion (~$142.5 million) Series D, most of which was committed from global investors including Light Street Capital, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Whale Rock, and other global institutional investors. The round valued the company at JPY 170 billion (~$1.6 billion). In this episode we discuss: What it was like to join small Japanese startup 5 years ago and scale at T2D3 speed What foreign investors don't realize about the Japanese startup ecosystem The culture and management styles that got them here Why $1B ARR is on the horizon If you enjoy this episode, please make sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts. Disclaimer: The content of this podcast is not intended as an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any financial instrument. The views and opinions expressed are provided for general information purposes only.

Code Story
Notifications North Star - Eric Koslow, Lattice

Code Story

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2022 12:24


Notification North Star, sponsored by Courier!Guest: Eric Koslow is the Co-founder of Lattice, the people success platform. Prior to Lattice, he spent time engineering at TeeSpring, and now he is building a new venture called VStream.Questions:What impact does user communication have in the HR SaaS space?What infrastructure issues arose that caused you to look for a notification infrastructure vendor at Lattice?Tell me about your new venture Vstream, and how important will your communication strategy be?Have you experienced particular preferences from your user base, as far as how and when they are notified?How does Courier fit into your overall messaging strategy?Linkshttps://lattice.com/https://www.courier.com/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Irish Tech News Podcast
Are We Misunderstanding Blockchain's Potential or Headed for Crypto Winter 2.0? with David Long, CVVC

The Irish Tech News Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2022 28:40


David Long is a Swedish American citizen with in depth tech and asset management experience. Prior to joining CV VC, he served as Managing Partner & Investment Manager at an ESG Asset Management Firm and served as an Advisor to multiple tech companies. He currently still serves on the Board of Directors at LaunchSource, an HR SaaS platform headquartered in Boston. Jamil Hasan is a crypto and blockchain focused podcast host at the Irish Tech News and spearheads our weekend content “The Crypto Corner” where he interviews founders, entrepreneurs and global thought leaders. Prior to his endeavors into the crypto-verse in July 2017, Jamil built an impressive career as a data, operations, financial, technology and business analyst and manager in Corporate America, including twelve years at American International Group and its related companies. Since entering the crypto universe, Jamil has been an advisor, entrepreneur, investor and author. His books “Blockchain Ethics: A Bridge to Abundance” (2018) and “Re-Generation X” (2020) not only discuss the benefits of blockchain technology, but also capture Jamil's experience on how he has transitioned from being a loyal yet downsized former corporate employee to a self sovereign individual. With over one hundred podcasts under his belt since he joined our team in February 2021, and with four years of experience both managing his own crypto portfolio and providing crypto guidance and counsel to select clients, Jamil continues to seek opportunities to help others navigate this still nascent industry. Jamil's primary focus outside of podcast hosting is helping former corporate employees gain the necessary skills and vision to build their own crypto portfolios and create wealth for the long-term.

Brave Dynamics: Authentic Leadership Reflections
Hayley Bakker: Diversity & Inclusion, Building Self Awareness & South Africa Roots

Brave Dynamics: Authentic Leadership Reflections

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 28, 2022 44:24


Hayley Bakker is a Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Diversely, an HR SaaS platform that helps businesses attract more diverse applicants and remove bias from their hiring with smart (AI driven) tools, diversity analytics and bite-size unconscious bias training. Prior to that she founded Colibri Growth, a Tech Offshoring company that helps tech startups in Singapore to set up and manage their tech teams and development in Vietnam. Hayley's passion and drive for diversity in the workplace was sparked from her experience working in traditionally male dominated industries (M&A, banking and tech). She led non-profit Girls in Tech's Singapore chapter for a number of years and recently helped to set up the Vietnam chapter - both working to empower, engage and educate women (with an interest) in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Hayley graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Industrial Engineering and a Masters of Science in Financial Engineering and Management and is Certified in Agile Scrum, Human-Centered Design and Lean Six Sigma. Show notes at: https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/hayley-bakker You can find the community discussion for this episode at: https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/hayley-bakker

The Talent Revolution
How Simple HR Data Analysis Saved Over $200K

The Talent Revolution

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2022 39:42


Tom's Notes:The SaaS market in Human Resources is getting more crowded all the time—but just a few years ago, it wasn't unusual for Glenn Donaldson to meet with prospects who had never even heard of software as a service. At that time, Glenn and intelliHR founder Rob Bromage saw a distinct gap in the market. Hardly anyone was leveraging all of their valuable HR data to add value and make their organizations better.Their philosophy? The best software doesn't simply collect data; it uses that data to proactively identify critical insights.Gathering data helps, but even the best data is useless if you aren't sure how to use it. Using data well means going a step beyond collecting and collating data. If you go no further than speeding up the collection process, or replicating lines on a spreadsheet because you're used to seeing them, you're missing out in a big way. One of the core benefits we see in HR SaaS is communal learning. The more data we have, the more SaaS products can improve to help other organizations identify and solve similar challenges. More and more businesses are changing the structure of HR to include recruitment marketing and talent acquisition teams, but smaller teams don't always have the resources for that much specialization. HR is still often treated as an administrative branch of an organization, but that's starting to change. More and more, HR teams help drive business decisions rather than simply implement them.Previous episodes:Episode 18 - How to Create Content That Recruits For YouEpisode 17 - How the Right Assessments Can Help You Win The War For TalentEpisode 16 - The Case For Talent Acquisition as a Core Strategy

A Better HR Business
SPECIAL: Episode 142 - My 5-Minute Marketing Review For HR Tech Companies

A Better HR Business

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2022 12:01


Ever stopped to think about what a sales lead does before they hop onto a sales call with a member of your team to learn more about your HR Tech product? Today I'm sharing the simple 5-minute marketing review process that I follow before talking with someone from an HR SaaS company. I suspect there are some definite overlaps between my process and what a sales lead does before speaking with you. Reference from the show: HR Marketing Services. To see the list of topics as well as all the details of my other guests, check out the show notes here: www.GetMoreHRClients.com/Podcast WANT MORE CLIENTS? Want more clients for your business? Check out: www.GetMoreHRClients.com/Services.  

Startup Insider
Lohnabrechnungs-Startup Payfit sammelt 254 Mio. Euro ein (HR • SaaS • Employer Branding • Personalmanagement)

Startup Insider

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2022 27:12


In der Mittagsfolge begrüßen wir heute Istvan Laszloffy, Country Manager Germany bei PayFit. Wir sprechen über die frische Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 254 Millionen Euro in das von Firmin Zocchetto, Ghislain de Fontenay und Florian Fournier in Paris gegründete Unternehmen. Schnell, intuitiv und automatisiert unterstützt PayFit mittlerweile Arbeitgebern in vier Ländern bei einer einfachen und unabhängigen Lösung für Personalmanagement und erledigt die Lohnabrechnung komplett automatisiert. Das französische Startup hilft vor allem kleineren Unternehmen ohne große HR-Abteilungen dabei, alle Personaldaten an einem Ort zu verwalten und so die Lohnabrechnung automatisiert und digital zu erledigen. Das Büro in Berlin besteht seit 2018 und hat sich in der Zwischenzeit mit mehr als 70 Mitarbeitenden als zweitgrößter PayFit Standort entwickelt. Mit der neuen Series-E-Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 254 Millionen Euro von General Atlantic und bestehenden Investoren Eurazeo, Bpifrance und Accel Venture, will PayFit die bestehenden Standorte - Frankreich, Deutschland, Großbritannien und Spanien - weiter ausbauen und europaweit 400 neue Mitarbeitende einstellen. Auch das Deutschland-Team von PayFit soll auf über 120 Mitarbeitende erweitert werden. One more thing wird präsentiert von Sastrify – Die smarte Lösung für das Management eurer Software-Verträge. Erhaltet jetzt eine kostenlose Analyse eurer SaaS Tools und alle weiteren Informationen unter https://www.sastrify.com/insider

RecruitingDaily Podcast with William Tincup
meQuilibrium - New Data On The Threats To Employee Wellbeing With Jan Bruce & Brad Smith

RecruitingDaily Podcast with William Tincup

Play Episode Play 56 sec Highlight Listen Later Jan 18, 2022 29:53 Transcription Available


On today's episode of the RecruitingDaily Podcast, William Tincup speaks with guests Jan Bruce and Brad Smith of meQuilibrium about employee wellbeing.Jan and Brad are in the virtual studio today to discuss data focused around current threats to employee wellbeing.  They are observing an upward trend over the past 18 or 19 months in stress, burnout, and work life imbalance due to the pandemic.All of these things certainly have a cumulative effect on employee wellbeing.meQuilibrium is an HR SaaS digital platform, built to help employers and workforces deal with the challenges of work and life. These challenges can include stress, burnout and mental health as well as purpose and personal wellbeing. People access the program through a personalized app that acts like a personalized coach for each individual.Our employee wellbeing experts discuss:We discuss their tools to help predict or identify levels of burnout across an entire organization.How the cycle begins with stress, moves to burnout and ends with employees leaving.Perceived support is shown to have a powerful, protective impact on wellbeing.Tune in for the conversation.What's next for many of us is changing. Your company's ability to hire great talent is as important as ever – so you'll be ready for whatever's ahead. Whether you need to scale your team quickly or improve your hiring process, Greenhouse gives you the right technology, know-how and support to take on what's next.

The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life
HR SaaS Hits $500k ARR Helping Teams Give Rewards to Employees

The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2021 17:29


Cloud-based employee recognition platform

UBC News World
Try This HR SaaS AI Chatbot For Employee Feedback With Improved Technologies

UBC News World

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 16, 2021 2:00


Employee feedback software updates its solution to help more local businesses have an intuitive and emotionally intelligent employee feedback system. Now, managers have unique and actionable insights into their teams. Learn more at https://www.weeve.ai/post/the-new-world-of-remote-work (https://www.weeve.ai/post/the-new-world-of-remote-work)

Humans of Martech
37: Shannon McCluskey: Searching for remote martech pros

Humans of Martech

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 8, 2021 40:13


Shannon McCluskey is an analytical marketing leader at the top of her game counting 10+ years of martech experience with amazing SaaS companies.She works out of Vancouver but is originally from Ottawa, she's got a Bcom from the UofO and a masters in digital technology from university of Waterloo.She got her early start in marketing and UX at Fluidware, an Ottawa based startup with the same founders that are now behind Fellow.appFluidware was later acquired by SurveyMonkey where Shannon went on to spend almost 3 years in marketing ops where she worked with some of the top Marketo experts in the world.She went on to run the remote Ops team at an HR SaaS called Visier for almost 4 years.Shannon is currently Marketing Ops Manager at Clio - a distributed cloud-based legal tech company and she's building an awesome team with interesting open roles right now.She's certified by Marketo, Salesforce and Demandbase. She's spoken at top marketing conferences like the martech conference in San Jose.Shannon-- thanks for taking the time to chat with us today!- Your journey from Ottawa startup to Survey Monkey > Visier and now Clio - What's Clio and what does your team do, how do you market to lawyers - How a remote company of 600 people is run, how your MOPs team is run - What advice do you have for aspiring MOPs professionals? How do you know this path is right for you?- Are you getting lots of applications, what are your thoughts on the supply and demand of martech talen right now?- Describe the current role / pitch the opportunity on your team- Give us an example a project someone on your team would own, like a campaign a nurture, a data hygiene program or a compliance program - In the posting, the JT is specialist, but looking at the exp and the skills required, you're considering both early marketers willing to learn at the same time as a more seasoned IC with MKTO + SFDC experience. How do you balance that, how do you pick?- The stack you're building with- You lead a team, you're a frequent speaker and a constant learner, you also have a busy personal life, you're a mom working from home, how do you balance everything you have going on in your life to stay happy. --Shannon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonmccluskeyThe Marketing Operations Specialist posting: https://boards.greenhouse.io/goclio/jobs/3142437 All job openings on Clio: https://boards.greenhouse.io/goclio ✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw

Better Done Than Perfect
Building HR Software with Jonny Burch

Better Done Than Perfect

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2021 42:02


How do we design products to help users feel like they are making progress? In this episode, we speak with Jonny Burch, co-founder and CEO of Progression. We discuss several challenges they face while operating in the HR space — from selling their software to aligning vocabulary with customers.Visit our website for the detailed episode recap with key learnings.Show notesProgression — Jonny's career growth productProgression.fyi — the original free resourceDeliveroo — a popular UK-based delivery company, similar to Uber EatsDovetail — a tool for capturing product insightsFigma — web-based design tool, a community of design advocatesGainsight — customer success and product experience softwareSegment — a popular customer data platform (CDP)Mixpanel — a tool for event-based analyticsChargebee — a subscription billing & revops platformChartMogul — a tool for revenue analyticsSmartlook — a tool for user behavior tracking, similar to FullStoryFollow Jonny on TwitterFollow Progression on TwitterEmail jonny@progressionapp.com and mention UIBREAKFAST to claim your product discountThanks for listening! If you found the episode useful, please spread the word about the show on Twitter mentioning @userlist, or leave us a review on iTunes.SponsorThis show is brought to you by Userlist — the best tool for sending onboarding emails and segmenting your SaaS users. To follow the best practices, download our free printable email planning worksheets at userlist.com/worksheets.

We Don't Know Yet
Artificial Intelligence with Prem Kumar

We Don't Know Yet

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 3, 2021 49:37


Prem Kumar is the CEO of Humanly, a hiring platform that screens and schedules job candidates at scale, reducing time to hire and providing the best possible candidate experience for all applicants. Before Humanly, he spent 10 years in product at Microsoft, and 2 years at HR SaaS startup TINYpulse as Director of Product. This episode revolves around the Humanly.io platform, but we dive into the role artificial intelligence will play in our lives moving forward, unconscious bias within the hiring process, curiosity, self-discipline, and using writing as a self-education tool.

HRchat Podcast
#236: The Evolution of HR Technology w/ Phil Wainewright, Diginomica

HRchat Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2020 18:00


In this HRchat interview, Phil Wainewright shares what he's seen change in the HR SaaS space and talks about the massive shifts caused by adapting to today's new normal. Phil is a recognized authority on cloud computing as a writer, analyst, consultant and speaker since 1998, when he launched his first online venture to chronicle the early years of the SaaS industry. In 2013 he co-founded the tech media website diginomica to cover the evolution of business applications in the digital era and how they are changing the enterprise. His research and writing focuses on advances in digital teamwork, people management and business innovation.This podcast episode is supported by the Academy to Innovate HR: HR Analytics and Digital HR Certifications for corporate HR professionals. Learn more about the self-paced online training courses, taught by the world's leading experts.We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared in this episode are entirely independent of our show sponsors. There is no relationship between the guest and companies advertising within the podcasts published by The HR Gazette or our partners.

Restarting America
Growing a Venture Backed Startup during a Pandemic: Humanly's COO Andrew Gardner

Restarting America

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 13, 2020 31:31


In this episode of Restarting America, Josh Gibbs from 97 Switch interviews Andrew Gardner, COO of Humanly.io. Throughout the interview, they discuss the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on business and society. Gardner shares how the current pandemic has affected his company and how he is adapting to new circumstances. Andrew Gardner is the COO of Humanly.io Humanly is a hiring platform that screens and schedules job candidates at scale, reducing time to hire and providing the best possible candidate experience for all applicants. He has 10 years sales and management experience with early stage tech startups. Previously, Andrew worked with HR SaaS startup TINYpulse as global account executive, working with SMB - Fortune 500 companies.

Growth Everywhere Daily Business Lessons
How Zenefits is Focusing on Processes AND People for Long-Term Growth with CMO Kevin Marasco | Ep. #373

Growth Everywhere Daily Business Lessons

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 27, 2020 19:14


Most legacy HR software is complicated, costly, takes forever to get up and running, and worst of all seems to neglect one of its primary concerns – people. Zenefits changes this by bringing everything HR into one radically simple app, including the human element. Today we chat with Kevin Marasco, CMO at Zenefits about its unusual growth story, while also digging into his accidental journey into marketing as well as his favorite hobby – ultra-marathons! Kevin starts out by telling us how he switched from engineering to marketing and software development as a student, thereafter stumbling into what became a 15 year-plus path through multiple exits with different high growth SaaS companies. From there, we get into the tumultuous and controversial story of Zenefits, touching on its pivot from an online insurance broker to HR SaaS platform and Kevin’s take on its 2016 scandal. Kevin takes us on a deep dive next into what exactly Zenefits does as an HR platform built for people, weighing in on its quick onboarding process and services in the fields of compensation, performance, and wellbeing. After hearing about pricing models, growth metrics, and an updated strategy for increasing organic reach at Zenefits, we dig into Kevin’s passion for ultra-marathons. He talks about why he started them, how they have helped in a charitable as well as a personal sense, and how he honed his skill for them in no time using a continuous improvement formula! Be sure to tune in!   TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:41] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Leveling Up Podcast! [01:25] Kevin’s accidental road into marketing and experience in the high growth SaaS sphere. [04:47] Being a part of Zenefits’ journey from online insurance broker to SaaS platform.  [06:44] Leading with freemium versus pureplay SaaS and a key Zenefits differentiator: quick onboarding. [07:22] Zenefits’ features; displacing legacy HR platforms by being built for people, not processes. [09:36] The pricing structures at Zenefits from eight to 21 dollars per employee. [09:50] Differences between mediatized portrayals and actual perceptions of Zenefits’ scandal.  [12:06] Metrics for growth, retention, customers, and Zenefits’ payroll solution adoption rates. [13:12] Moving to a more widespread and organic growth model and the benefits of this. [14:09] What ultra-marathons are, why Kevin does them, his mindset, and training process. [17:04] Why Kevin’s favorite business tool is Gong and how it improves marketing messaging.  [17:36] Turning adversity into advantage and Kevin’s favorite book on this topic. [18:37] The best way for people to learn more about Zenefits and find Kevin online.   Resources From The Interview:   Kevin Marasco on LinkedIn Zenefits HireVue Growth Everywhere with Mark Newman U2 Drake on Instagram Metallica HubSpot Workday Oracle SAP TechCrunch David O. Sacks on LinkedIn Gong Ryan Holiday Growth Everywhere with Ryan Holiday Must read book: The Obstacle is the Way    Leave Some Feedback:   What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review here Subscribe to Leveling Up on iTunes Get the non-iTunes RSS Feed   Connect with Eric Siu:    Growth Everywhere Single Grain Eric Siu on Twitter  

The Sales Hacker Podcast
101. Ownership Is Dead w/ Luigi Mallardo

The Sales Hacker Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 17, 2020 47:38


This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Luigi Mallardo, Chief Revenue Officer at Woffu. Luigi is a long-time CRO and sales leader in the European community, and he's also the chairman of the Barcelona Revenue Collective. Woffu is an HR SaaS platform for time optimization in companies between 100 and 2,000 employees. Let's hear from Luigi about the subscription economy and the subscription business model!

The Sales Hacker Podcast
101. Ownership Is Dead w/ Luigi Mallardo

The Sales Hacker Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 17, 2020 47:38 Transcription Available


This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Luigi Mallardo, Chief Revenue Officer at Woffu. Luigi is a long-time CRO and sales leader in the European community, and he’s also the chairman of the Barcelona Revenue Collective. Woffu is an HR SaaS platform for time optimization in companies between 100 and 2,000 employees. Let’s hear from Luigi about the subscription economy and the subscription business model!

Evolving for the Next Billion by GGV Capital
Orion Zhao of Moka on Being a Sea Turtle Entrepreneur and SaaS in China

Evolving for the Next Billion by GGV Capital

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2019 33:28


This is a cross-over episode between 996 and Founder RealTalk, which is a biweekly podcast hosted by GGV managing partner Glenn Solomon.  Glenn and Zara interview Orion Zhao (赵欧伦), the co-founder and CEO of Moka, a fast-growing HR SaaS startup in China. Moka helps companies increase the efficiency of their hiring process by providing a CRM software solution. It currently has hundreds of customers in China, including the likes of Xiaomi, Sougou, Burger King, and Levi's. Moka has completed its Series A+ fundraising round and is a GGV portfolio company.   Orion is originally from China and graduated from Berkeley in 2013. He then spent close to two years working as a software engineer at Turo before returning to China in 2015 to start Moka with his co-founder Li Guoxing who is also a Chinese overseas returnee from Stanford.  Orion discussed the challenges he faced as a “sea turtle” (海归) entrepreneur, why his experience joining a business fraternity at Berkeley came in handy in China, how he manages employees who are older than him, and the status quo of China's SaaS market. 

Evolving for the Next Billion by GGV Capital
Orion Zhao of Moka on Being a Sea Turtle Entrepreneur and SaaS in China

Evolving for the Next Billion by GGV Capital

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2019 33:28


This is a cross-over episode between 996 and Founder RealTalk, which is a biweekly podcast hosted by GGV managing partner Glenn Solomon.  Glenn and Zara interview Orion Zhao (赵欧伦), the co-founder and CEO of Moka, a fast-growing HR SaaS startup in China. Moka helps companies increase the efficiency of their hiring process by providing a CRM software solution. It currently has hundreds of customers in China, including the likes of Xiaomi, Sougou, Burger King, and Levi's. Moka has completed its Series A+ fundraising round and is a GGV portfolio company.   Orion is originally from China and graduated from Berkeley in 2013. He then spent close to two years working as a software engineer at Turo before returning to China in 2015 to start Moka with his co-founder Li Guoxing who is also a Chinese overseas returnee from Stanford.  Orion discussed the challenges he faced as a “sea turtle” (海归) entrepreneur, why his experience joining a business fraternity at Berkeley came in handy in China, how he manages employees who are older than him, and the status quo of China’s SaaS market. 

Strong Suit Podcast
Strong Suit 255: Don't Bother Hiring Until You Fix Your Lousy Employee Experience

Strong Suit Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 30, 2018 24:01


Autumn Manning is co-founder and CEO of YouEarnedIt, a leading HR SaaS company that improves bottom-line performance metrics by enhancing the employee experience. Based in Austin, she has a compelling vision: to improve the lives of employees everywhere, one company at a time. Autumn's been featured in The New York Times and HuffPost, Inc., Business Insider, and Entrepreneur. Under her leadership, YouEarnedIt created the world's most robust employee experience platform and was named to Entrepreneur Magazine's list of Best Company Cultures in 2017. In this 20-minute conversation, Autumn shares what she's learned about employee experience and how to get yours right.  

The SaaS Revolution Show
The importance of hiring and culture, with Ben Gateley COO of CharlieHR

The SaaS Revolution Show

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 3, 2016 26:30


Ben Gateley is the Co-Founder and COO of the exciting HR SaaS startup CharlieHR. Ben joins Alex Theuma on this episode of The SaaS Revolution show to provide insights into the startup story of CharlieHR and the importance of hiring and culture on a startups success or failure.

Tanner's Influence Podcast
Cydni Tetro and Sara Jones, Women Tech Council

Tanner's Influence Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2016 42:41


In this Influence Podcast interview, we know you will sense the extraordinary determination and talent of Cydni Tetro and Sara Jones, two successful entrepreneurs who, in their “spare time” co-founded the Women Tech Council nine years ago, a scrappy not-for-profit that now has more than 10,000 members! With a degree in computer science and an MBA, both from BYU, Cydni is a successful technologist and marketing guru who has built a career with some of the world’s largest brands like Disney, Microsoft, Marvel, Star Wars, Facebook, MLB, MLS, Warner Brothers, Dreamworks, Target, Walmart, and Toys R Us. She is the founder and CEO of 3DplusMe, a 3D printing software platform, that was recently acquired by WhiteClouds and is an Operating Partner at Mercato Partners, a leading growth equity firm. Recognized as a respected patent attorney and shareholder at Workman Nydegger for almost ten years, Sara went on to become the Vice President of Strategic Development at Patent Law Works, before becoming the CEO of ApplicantPro, an HR SaaS company providing recruiting tools to over 3,000 clients, where she led the company to profitability and a high valuation. Sara graduated cum laude from Brigham Young University law school and holds a B.S. in chemical engineering, with honors, from the University of Utah. Cydni Tetro and Sara Jones have already had a long-lasting influence on so many women (and men) in our growing ecosystem. Perhaps more than anything else, they continue to show others how to have fun while doing hard things that make a big difference.

SaaS Insider
020: Interview with Dale Clareburt from Weirdly

SaaS Insider

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2016 39:25


Dale Clareburt from Weirdly, an HR SaaS company, is interviewed by Shira Abel. Dale is the Co-Founder and CEO of Weirdly Ltd. Weirdly (https://weirdlyhub.com/) is a SaaS platform that helps businesses put organisational and team culture fit at the beginning of the recruitment process. They believe that recruitment should be fun, engaging and useful and so they've created a product that delivers just that. Its clients range from SMEs to Enterprise across NZ and globally. Shira Abel is the CEO and founder of Hunter & Bard (http://www.hunterandbard.com), a marketing and branding agency that works with fast growing SaaS companies.

DriveThruHR - HR Conversations
Lunch with Valerie Warnock and DriveThruHR

DriveThruHR - HR Conversations

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 9, 2011 31:00


Co-Hosts, Bryan Wempen @bryanwempen and William Tincup @williamtincup will be talking about real Human Resources (organic HR) with HR practitioners' every single day. Give us a call with your thoughts at (347) 996-5600. The window opens at 12 Noon at "DTHR". Weigh in with your thoughts, we care a whole lot so tweet, call or message us with your comments at #dthr or directly to @drivethruHR

Strategic Advisor Board
Episode 403 "Successful Minds": Deal Making in SaaS Technology

Strategic Advisor Board

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 1, 1970 37:26


In this episode. Patricia Baronowski-Schneider is joined by Kevin Petersen, Founder and CEO of Growth Stack Inc., a leading provider of software and services to a select group of public and private sector markets.They acquire, manage and build industry-specific software businesses which provide specialized, mission-critical software solutions that address the particular needs of our customers. Their businesses continuously develop innovative solutions that enable their customers to achieve their objectives. Kevin shares with us his thoughts on his upcoming projects on supply chain tech, security tech, property tech, and HR Saas.Tune in to learn more!For more go to: www.strategicadvisorboard.comConnect:Strategic Advisor Board: www.linkedin.com/company/strategic-advisor-boardPatricia Baronowski-Schneider: www.linkedin.com/in/patriciabaronowskiwww.pristineadvisers.comKevin PetersenLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kevinpetersen1Twitter:  twitter.com/growthstackincFacebook: www.facebook.com/GrowthStackInc