Podcasts about ipoed

In this episode we're taking you on a journey to some of the most remote corners of West Africa, where energy access is scarce, and innovation is changing lives. Our guest is Nicole Poindexter, the founder and CEO of Energicity, a company that's bringing clean, reliable solar power to off-grid communities in countries like Sierra Leone, Benin, and Liberia. Nicole and her team are doing something extraordinary: building solar mini-grids that provide electricity to tens of thousands of people who otherwise rely on polluting and expensive energy sources—or have no power at all. And, impressively, Energicity is doing all of this while making a profit, already being an EBITDA-positive company.  In our conversation, Nicole shares how she transitioned from a background in finance—after an Ivy League education—to founding Energicity in 2015, driven by her vision to end energy poverty. We dive into how solar mini-grids are more than just a source of light—they're catalysts for economic growth, education, and health improvements in communities that have often been ignored. Nicole also talks candidly about the challenges of working in rural Africa, from financing to infrastructure to cultural dynamics, and how she tackles these head-on. One part of this conversation that resonated with me and I think will with a lot of founders is when Nicole says she takes to heart the saying: “Those who know how work for those who know why.” So many people see a problem, and because they don't know how to solve it, they don't act. Nicole makes it clear that if you surround yourself with smart people of whom you can ask many questions, combining those who know how with those who know why can really lead to transformational results. So, if you're ready to get inspired by a trailblazer who's proving that business can indeed be a force for good, stay tuned for this enlightening conversation with Nicole Poindexter. Discussed in this episode Nicole was employed at Opower when it IPOed. TechCrunch on Energicity's work. Energicity has raised $10 million so far, and is seeking to raise another $30 million. Nicole recommends reading Atomic Habits and Dare to Lead. She also recommends checking out Entrepreneurs for Impact. Our past episode with African clean energy startup I-G3N. More about Nicole Poindexter From starting her career as investment banker, Nicole Poindexter has had a variety of leadership roles in finance, government, and business. Prior to her founding Energicity Corp, she was an early employee at OPower prior to its successful IPO and subsequent sale to Oracle, founding and growing the business development team. In that role, she brought together the skills of an operator and software product development with sensitivity to energy customer needs delivering USD 10's of millions in revenue for the company. She was inspired to start Energicity Corp both due to her deep seated commitment to developing renewable sources of energy and also her passionate desire to create economic opportunity for some of the world's poorest people through energy access.

I sat down with Jonathan Doerr, the Co-founding Partner at Antler MENAP to learn about his experience in building, scaling and exciting companies. Jonathan brings a ton of learning from his time with Rocket Internet, where he was the Co-founder and Managing Director at Jumia Nigeria, Africa's leading e-commerce site which IPOed on the NYSE in 2019 and the Co-CEO at Daraz, the South Asian e-commerce player which was acquired by Alibaba in 2018. We discuss challenges of building e-commerce companies in emerging markets and the differences between an IPO and an acquisition. Today, Jonathan is leveraging his experience to enable the next generation of founders via Antler where he plays matchmaker and investor to 100s of founders that join Antler's programs in Dubai, Riyadh and more to come.Support for the show comes from Capital.com, a global investment platform. If you are enjoying this episode, make sure you hit the 'subscribe' button wherever you are listening to this episode and give us a rating and a review!

I sat down with Jonathan Doerr, the Co-founding Partner at Antler MENAP to learn about his experience in building, scaling and exciting companies. Jonathan brings a ton of learning from his time with Rocket Internet, where he was the Co-founder and Managing Director at Jumia Nigeria, Africa's leading e-commerce site which IPOed on the NYSE in 2019 and the Co-CEO at Daraz, the South Asian e-commerce player which was acquired by Alibaba in 2018. We discuss challenges of building e-commerce companies in emerging markets and the differences between an IPO and an acquisition. Today, Jonathan is leveraging his experience to enable the next generation of founders via Antler where he plays matchmaker and investor to 100s of founders that join Antler's programs in Dubai, Riyadh and more to come. Support for the show comes from Capital.com, a global investment platform. If you are enjoying this episode, make sure you hit the 'subscribe' button wherever you are listening to this episode and give us a rating and a review! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week's episode, I had the pleasure to interview Lomit Patel. Lomit is the Vice President of Growth at IMVU. Prior to IMVU, Lomit managed growth at several startups including Roku ( a digital media player manufacturer that IPOed ), TrustedID (acquired by Equifax), Texture (acquired. by Apple) and EarthLink. Lomit is a public speaker, author, advisor, and was recognized as a Mobile Hero by Liftoff. Lomit's new bestselling book Lean AI, is part of Eric Ries' “The Lean Startup” series.

In today's show, I'm receiving Marie Ekeland, the founder of 2050, a French Climate Tech fund. She's a superstar investor in the French Venture ecosystem. She was a Partner at Elaia Partners where she invested early on in Criteo (which IPOed at the Nasdaq and remains one of the biggest success stories of the FrenchTech). Then she founded Daphni, a Generalist VC fund.In 2012 she co-founded France Digitale, bringing together French VCs & entrepreneurs to make the French digital ecosystem thriveShe's been BUSY and loves to take on new challenges.This time it's Climate Tech! She launched 2050, with profound innovations at the Fund construction level to TRULY solve the systemic crisis that we're facing.We cover a lot, and it gets technical, but there's a LOT to learn from someone as inspiring as Marie:-ALIGNMENT, what that means as a Fund Manager, why it's not easy during bearish cycles when fundraising is made extra hard-the future of the Venture Capital industry to REALLY solve this Crisis - it's not only technological but also Juridic and structural-why they created a Chief Knowledge Officer and an open source Climate Tech course with the University of Paris Dauphine to spread knowledge and leverage the commons.--------------ABOUT CLIMATE INSIDERS:Learn all the insights from the top Climate Tech Founders and Investors. Listen to the stories behind the startup successes, understand the drivers of investment decisions, and become a true Climate Insider.Check us out at: https://www.climateinsiders.co--------------ABOUT THE GUEST:Marie Ekeland is co-founder of Daphni, a venture capital firm that invests in European tech startups and is supported by an online platform and an international community of experts. She began her career in 1997 at J.P. Morgan in New York as a computer scientist. Since 2000, Marie has been acting as a VC, first at CPR Private Equity, then, from 2005 to 2014 at Elaia Partners, leading investments in Criteo, Edoki Academy, Pandacraft, Teads, Wyplay, and Ykone. In 2012 she co-founded France Digitale, bringing together French VCs & entrepreneurs to make the French digital ecosystem thrive. She serves as a board member for Parrot, Showroomprive. Marie holds an engineering degree in mathematics and computer science from Paris Dauphine University as well as a master's degree in Economics from the Paris School of Economics.--------------SHOW NOTES:00:00 – Intro00:05 – Who is Marie?00:35 – Why 2050?02:22 – Are we going to hit rock bottom?03:19 – The transition from generalist VC world to climate04:58 – The new fund model and the specificities of 205008:47 - The Challenge of Proposing New Ideas in Challenging Times09:41 – Is it better to focus on one problem rather than a wide range of problems?13:22 - The Debunking of Incremental Mindset and the Core Dilemma of Venture Capital15:42 - The ultimate goal of changing decision-making models and the role of visionaries in driving new industries21:33 - How to maintain fundraising when faced with potential compromises that may disrupt internal alignment?25:22 - The Impact of Market Cycles on Decision-Making; How to Remain Strong?31:45 - Insights into fund construction dynamics35:56 - Innovations in Fund Structure and the Role of Chief Knowledge Officer 39:59 – Is Creative Commons open source for everyone?40:05: How are Hybrid and Esoteric Roles funded?41:04 – How are the findings of Creative Commons published?42:03 – Outro --------------ABOUT THE HOST: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yberno/ Yoann Berno is committed to the democratization of climate tech investing, to contribute significantly to the fight against global warming. Passionate about empowering...

Like what you hear? You can tip us here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Startuprad.io Welcome to our October 2023 wrap-up with vital news from the startup scenes in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in 30 minutes or less

This is a repost from a few years back and it's definitely one of my favorite episodes of all time. Kristian Segerstrale is the CEO Super Evil Megacorp, a games company based out of San Francisco. Kristian is a legend in gaming. He started his first games company Macrospace twenty years ago, which IPOed as Glu Mobile a few year later. Later he sold his second company Playfish to EA in 2009. We talk about being an entrepreneur in gaming, and how Kristian's beliefs have evolved over the years, in what it takes to succeed in gaming.

There's a much broader wave of digital transformation happening in fundamental industries that make up about 40% of the world's GDP, and are the infrastructure of the planet, Samsara CEO and co-founder Sanjit Biswas explains to Bloomberg Intelligence. In this Tech Disruptors podcast episode, Biswas sits down with BI engineering software analyst Eileen Segall to discuss how Samsara — which IPOed in December 2021 — through its Internet of Things devices and cloud-based software is helping to increase the safety, efficiency and sustainability of industries with substantial physical operations like transportation, retail, construction and utilities.

Aarish Shah is the Founder of EmergeOne and Projected.ai and host of Off Balance and Nothing Ventured Podcast. Will talks to Aarish about having the venture capitalist money idea and having that "aha!" moment that it could work, what drives him and having a purpose of helping others, and using his podcast to teach lessons that he's learned along the way. EmergeOne (http://emergeone.co.uk/) Projected.ai (https://projected.ai/) Off Balance and Nothing Ventured Podcast (https://nothingventured.tech/off-balance) Follow EmergeOne on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/emergeone/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/EmergeOneUK/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfrtssmo3LELM6QDFOkU1Ug/featured), or Twitter (https://twitter.com/emergeone_uk). Follow Aarish Shah on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adsinuk/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/adsinuk). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. And with me today is Aarish Shah, Founder of EmergeOne and Projected.ai and host of Off Balance and Nothing Ventured Podcast. Aarish, thank you for joining me. AARISH: It's great to be here, Will. Really happy to be talking to you today. WILL: Yeah, I'm excited. I can't wait to dive in and learn more about you. Tell me about your journey, how it all started. AARISH: Wow, it's a bit of a long run. I'll try and condense it. But I am 44 years old at the moment. About 20 years ago, I came out of uni with a degree in languages which I found was sort of useful but not essential. So I ended up for a few years doing kind of the normal corporate thing. I worked with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Nortel Networks, and then Deutsche Bank. And I qualified as an accountant along the way, so I'm effectively what you guys would consider a CPA over in the U.S. I then kind of up sticks, and I spent the next ten years of my life running a group of manufacturing and trading businesses alongside a property portfolio out in Papua New Guinea, which is a very, very interesting place to be, definitely one of the hardest environments to be building and running businesses for many reasons. I've had everything from people coming into one of my offices with guns. I had one of my factories burned to the ground and everything in between. So really, really great learning experience and certainly amazing to learn about physical products, you know, the manufacturing and distribution and sales and so on of actual physical products. And then, in 2015, I came back to the UK. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And so I had a bunch of coffees with people and ended up as founding CFO in an EdTech venture, which was a joint venture between Eton College, which is one of the premier schools here in the UK where famously all of our Prime Ministers seem to come from, and Founders Factory which is an accelerator that was founded by Brent Hoberman of lastminute.com fame. So that was really exciting. I was straight off the boat from Papua New Guinea, sitting 10 feet away from Brent Hoberman, learning everything that there was to learn about the tech sector here in the UK and beyond. And had a really great couple of years working in that business and learning really everything there was to know about the VCA ecosystem, the early stage ecosystem, how to build products, how to finance them, how to sell into new territories (We were operating in China at the time.) and all sorts of other things. And then, in 2017, I decided it was time to move on. And I became what you guys would probably call a fractional CFO. So I worked across C through Series C businesses, everything from EdTech to FinTech, D2C, B2B marketplaces, beauty tech, you name it, kind of been there, seen it, and done it. And in 2019 and 2020, started getting approached by FDs and CFOs that wanted to work with me. And I really doubled down at that stage and decided to build EmergeOne into what it is today, which is a consultancy providing CFO services to venture-backed tech startups and scaleups. So we work with a huge bunch of businesses here in the UK that are backed by VCs, some of the big names here like Hoxton Ventures, Stride, Octopus, Outlier, Founders Factory, and others. And I'm really, really passionate about helping founders build their businesses in a scalable and sensible way, I guess, especially in the current environment. And so we're really lucky that we're trusted by these VCs and the founders that we work with to deliver really great services to them. And then, a couple of years ago, because I've been working kind of in the tech sector for so long, I started noodling around with a couple of ideas of projects that I wanted to move forward with. I raised a really small kind of pre-seed back in 2021 and started building a product, which is today Projected.ai, which we have just launched. We're in the process of launching at the moment. And what that is is effectively an email newsletter, if you can believe it, providing internal and external data to our client businesses. So effectively, it's like a flash report of your financials alongside some really sort of personalized news about what's going on in your industry, alongside some other sort of bits and bobs that we're currently building in. On top of that, a couple of years ago, again, I realized that I had a really good network of people that I had relationships with, and I decided to launch the Nothing Ventured Podcast to start speaking with people that operated in the VC ecosystem here in the UK and beyond. So I've been really fortunate to have guests like Hussein Kanji from Hoxton Ventures, Mac Conwell from RareBreed ventures in the U.S., and various others. And I really got to talk to them about why they got into venture, what they see is happening in the market, what are they excited about. And all those sorts of things. Because, to be honest, I'm really passionate about learning and understanding about where people are coming from, why they do what they do, what drives them, what they're passionate about, but equally, the sort of challenges they've also faced. And that's been going now for 60-odd episodes. We're launching Season 4 shortly. And I'm really lucky and fortunate to have been able to do that. And then finally, at the back end of 2022, so in December, actually, just as I was jumping on a plane, I sort of released something on LinkedIn, which was like 100 lessons that I've learned as a CEO and CFO over the last 20 years of operating. And unexpectedly, the thing went viral. I've had close to a million views on it, thousands of likes, hundreds of comments, and reshares. And I decided to turn what was effectively just a list into a short-form podcast, which has turned into Off Balance. So we're releasing that daily and kind of expanding on each and every one of those topics that I went through in that list. So, yeah, look, I mean, I'm someone with a finger in a lot of pies. I'm a massive generalist, so I love getting involved in different projects at different times. But I'm really fortunate to be able to do what I love doing. It's just been a wild journey for the last seven years, certainly, but the whole 20 years of my life. WILL: I love it. I love it. I love every idea that you had weaves into that venture capitalist money idea. So let's start at EmergeOne. When did you have that aha moment that this could work? AARISH: So I work a lot in strategy, so there are two forms of strategies, emergent and there's defined. So most people know about a strategy that is written down; it's a playbook. They go out, and they pursue it. For me, it was really emergent. Firstly, I realized that there were not that many great CFOs operating in tech, certainly here in the UK, because it's, to an extent, a nascent industry. And whilst there are great accountants, and there are great finance leaders in larger businesses, actually doing that in a startup or a scaleup is very, very different. Now, don't get me wrong, there are some great CFOs out there. It's just that I think there are far fewer than many people [laughs] assume there to be. So that was kind of the first thing that twigged with me. And I was seeing a lot of businesses picking up people and calling them a CFO when I knew for a fact there was no way that they really had the experience to be able to call themselves a CFO or to operate as one. So I guess that was the first aha moment. And the second aha moment was as I started talking to more and more VCs via the podcast, and just generally because I was out in the ecosystem talking to them, I realized that actually, the work that I was doing was not being driven necessarily by the client companies but actually by the VCs themselves because they wanted to make sure that having invested 1,2,5, 10 million pounds or dollars that those companies were in good hands and safe hands and that capital was being managed effectively and efficiently. And obviously, we're sitting in January of 2023 now. Never has that been more appropriate. More and more businesses are struggling. They're struggling to raise. They're having to extend their runways and figure out how to manage their cash in a much, much more significant way than maybe they had to two or three years ago. And so, for us, that's like a massively important thing. And having a great CFO in your business is going to help you do that. And therefore, we are getting approached more and more both by VCs as well as by companies that are just on the lookout for someone to help them. It was sort of a series of aha moments. But as I said earlier, it was an emergent strategy. It was something that kind of developed over time. But also, I'm someone that learned quite early on in my life to back myself. I think I took the punt on building this agency, if you like because it felt right. And it felt like something that I would enjoy doing, and it felt like something that I could actually make a difference in. And I think all of those things kind of culminated in really making EmergeOne what it is today, and I'm really proud of what we've been able to achieve. WILL: Yeah, I love that idea because I feel like, especially in startups, like you said, that excellent CFO is really hard to find. It's really hard to find. But if you don't have the numbers, you don't have a business. Let's be honest, the numbers you just don't have it. AARISH: Yeah, it's crazy to me that over the last decade or so, we've had, obviously, this period of super cheap money, super cheap capital. People have been raising at very inflated valuations. But we're seeing all of that come home to roost. We're seeing that in the public markets. A lot of these companies that IPOed over the last several years, obviously, have had their valuations drop significantly, you know, companies like Peloton, I guess, and others. People are starting to realize that actually cash is king. They need to understand how the cash is flowing through their business and to know that they need to have an intimate knowledge of their numbers. And, in fact, a lot of our role as a CFO in a business is to kind of coach the founder to make sure that they do understand those numbers and how they need to present them to internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, whether that's your board, whether that's investors, or whether that's your employees to make sure that people have a good idea of not only how they're tracking but where they're heading and where the end goal is. And I think it's massively important. I've always been a massive advocate for people getting to grips with their numbers, even if you're not a numbers person. Because especially if you're a founder or you're the leader in the business, the CEO, ultimately, the buck stops with you. You've got to know those numbers. It's not good enough to say, "Well, my CFO, my accountant has a handle on them." Like, if you're sitting in an investor meeting trying to pitch them to raise 5 to 10 million bucks, you're going to need to know those numbers inside out. And it's astonishing how many people actually ignore those. And what I would say is, you know, ignore them at your peril. WILL: Yeah, that just blows my mind because if I put myself in an investor seat if I'm giving you money, I want the head person, the CEO, to know exactly how to handle that money. So yeah, I love that idea, and I love what you're doing. Let's go on Projected.ai. And if I understand this correctly, this is more of a kind of [inaudible 10:51] the words. AARISH: So it's like a newsletter on steroids. WILL: Yeah, but it's to be honest about your numbers to board members and investors, correct? AARISH: Yeah. So Projected.ai was born out of this understanding that I guess I have, which is that CFOs and finance professionals working in startups and scaleups and SMEs they have dashboard fatigue. We interviewed CFOs, and they're operating off like 20 different dashboards, each of them giving them different numbers, each of them telling them something different. And they don't even have time to look at those dashboards, let alone make decisions based on the numbers that are coming out of them. So what we wanted to do with Projected was provide a touch point for that CFO where they could check in with their numbers in a really easy way on a consistent, regular basis. When I thought about this really clearly, I don't live in dashboards; where I live is in the tools I communicate in, so that's my emails, that may be my Slack channel, that may be WhatsApp or iMessage, or whatever it is that you use. But certainly, for business, it's going to be email and Slack for the most part. So I thought, what is the easiest way to communicate with someone in their business? It is via one of those channels. And what are the things that they want to know? Well, they want to know what's happening in their business, what's changed in their numbers over the last week, or two weeks, or month, but also what's happening outside their business. Because often, in startups, we get so kind of tunnel-visioned into what's happening inside the business. We don't take the time to look outside and figure out what others are doing or what may be happening in the macro environment that may have an impact on our business. And an obvious case of that at the moment is interest rates having moved up quite significantly over the last several months and still going to, as well as sort of inflation numbers also on their way up, and central banks everywhere trying to rein those in. All of that is going to have an impact on your business, especially if you're a consumer business, for example. And if you don't factor in all of those things or if you don't look at all of the things that could impact your business, you're going to make decisions with imperfect information, and, therefore, you'll make imperfect decisions. Now, you're never going to have perfect information. But the more information, the more pertinent information you have, the more transparent you can be, exactly as you said, to your board, to your shareholders. Tell them exactly what's happening, and get their advice to help you through those rough patches. Ultimately, we've got some tricks up our sleeves in terms of what we're going to be doing with those numbers, and how we're going to be presenting them, and how we're going to be manipulating them when we do show them to our users. But I kind of felt like we've moved past that time where CFOs were only about the numbers looking backwards. A really great CFO today is all about communication, information. It's about turning data into information, turning numbers into a narrative. Yeah, that's what we wanted to build, a tool that could support them and help them really be the best CFO they can be. WILL: Yeah, that's amazing. Transparency is the word I was looking for. So you nailed it, yeah. So I love that idea, the transparency of the numbers of the business just using AI. So that's amazing. It makes it a lot easier to send it out and to make it happen. So I love that idea. AARISH: Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing is; obviously, we've all been hearing a lot about generative AI and large language models at the moment. And we've definitely got plans to incorporate that into what we're doing. But the other side of that is you got to be really, really careful, obviously, because, as we all know, there are biases that can creep into any of those sort of AI-driven models. But equally, there are inaccuracies. And, in fact, a lot of those models tend to be great with words, not great with numbers. So one has to be really, really careful about bringing those tools into play. And because we know what we're doing, we can assess for that and make sure that the information that we're putting out there is the right sort of information, but actually, what we can do in terms of modeling our cash flows and revenue and effectively forecasting out a business. Because bearing in mind a lot of startups, most startups, most scaleups, most SMEs don't have the balance sheet. They don't have the money to go out there and build an AI tool themselves. They just simply don't. And they may not have the wherewithal in-house, but they almost certainly don't have the cash. So what we're doing is hopefully providing a bridge for them to get better information in terms of what's happening today but also maybe an inkling of what might happen tomorrow, which helps them, again, to plan better. And, again, it comes back to this whole thing around decision making, transparency, and making sure that they're able to look at their numbers with confidence and communicate those to others with confidence, and really understand what's driving those numbers as they keep building their businesses. But everything we do at Projected, everything I do definitely as a founder and as someone that operates in this ecosystem, is all driven by how do we make the ecosystem better? How do we help founders? How do we help their companies? How do we make sure we can drive that number down from 90% of startups failing within the first three or five years? How do we turn that number into 70%, 60%, or less? So that's all about information. It's all about giving those hard-won lessons, hard-learned lessons back to founders and guiding them, I guess, in the best way we can. WILL: Yeah, I love that. I love that. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. WILL: Let's transition to talking a little bit about you. I love to just ask questions to the founders because, honestly, what founders go through just amazes me that you continue to go. You wake up, and you do it over and over again. So it's amazing, so kudos to you. So let's talk about that; why? Why do you wake up every morning and do EmergeOne, do Projected.ai, do the podcasts? What's your why? AARISH: I'm in therapy trying to figure that answer out myself. WILL: [laughs] AARISH: No, look, I mean, I think what drives me, again, it's that sense of purpose of helping others. It's also scratching the itch. I think a lot of founders, it's about scratching that itch. There is something that you can see that is wrong in the universe, and you want to fix it. And if I think about those various sorts of businesses or podcasts, each of them attracts me in different ways. So EmergeOne, we get to help lots of businesses, providing them really, really significant support. And we're working with great VCs, with great clients, great startups, and scaleups. At Projected, we get to expand that range because you're no longer reliant on one person providing a CFO service or a bench of 20 people or whatever. We can now do that across hundreds, thousands of startups if need be. With the podcasts, it's a combination of learning and hopefully also providing some learning to others, helping them understand a bit more. So the Off Balance podcast these are like two-minute short episodes, which go into the detail of those 100 lessons that I've learned. And some of them are very, very personal to me, but they're probably applicable across most businesses. And all I'm doing is exploring those in a bit more detail and hopefully passing that on so that some other founder somewhere doesn't have to go through the same pain of learning that lesson. They can look out for the signals and figure out how to deal with it in advance. And Nothing Ventured scratches my itch to learn more about the VC ecosystem. If you imagine I'd spent ten years out in New Guinea, I had no idea what venture capital was out there. I really didn't understand what the tech ecosystem was. When I arrived there, we were still on dial-up. There were no mobile telephones. It wasn't until 2008, 2009, that mobile telephony really kind of picked up over there. So when I came back to the UK, I was just surrounded by all of this stuff which I was massively curious about. And so everything I've done since then is about scratching that curiosity and learning. And I think that that drives pretty much everything that I do in life in general, which is this huge passion to learn and understand the world a bit better and to hopefully pass on whatever I can to others because I think life's too short to hold it all for yourself. The more you can give, the better the world is. WILL: Yeah, definitely, definitely. Let's give a sneak peek into Off Balance. You said that you use that to teach lessons that you've learned along the way. What have been some of the big obstacles that you've come across? AARISH: Oh wow. I mean, there are 100 lessons in there, [laughs] so I'm going to have to pick a couple of my favorites. Okay, so one which actually I posted about today on LinkedIn it was like the episode we dropped today, which is "Hire Slow, Fire Fast." And I got a lot of flak about this actually talking about it on LinkedIn when I first posted it. And the reason I think that I got a lot of flak was all people read were those four words: hire slow, fire fast. And they just assumed what I was saying was you should fire in the vein of a lot of the larger tech businesses over the last couple of years where maybe they've sent a mass text message or email and just sacked a bunch of people. And that's absolutely not what I'm advocating for. I think you should always be human when you are dealing with people all the time. But the things that I've really learned is if you don't have a process to hire people well, you end up hiring the wrong people. And you end up hiring people that either don't have a fit in the business or are just not the right people in terms of their ability to do what you need them to do. And we're all probably aware of this fact by now, but it bears repeating, right? All of us when we are talking to other people, we look for reflections of ourselves. So when we are hiring people, we look for people that emulate how we see ourselves, whether that's in the way they talk, in the way they dress, whether they look like us, or whether they come from a similar background. And I think those are all obviously negative biases that we all need to remove. And the way you can remove those is in a couple of ways, so, one, use data wherever possible and use data points. Secondly, have a process that makes sure that you have a really strong top-of-the-funnel, bringing in candidates from across all sectors, all experiences. I make sure that there are several people involved in that process so that you're all giving your feedback on an individual so that you can make sure that, actually, I thought this person was going to be great in this role, but maybe my CTO thinks they're not; they're going to be mediocre. We can have that conversation and understand where those challenges have come up, and hopefully get to a place where we either decide actually, yeah, you know what? We shouldn't hire this person. Or, actually, yeah, you know what? I think you're right. I'm convinced that this is the right person. We should go for them. But I think the point is companies can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring the wrong person, that's in recruitment fees, in training fees, and lost time, et cetera, et cetera. So it makes sense to do it right, right from the beginning. And the flip side of that is if you have hired someone and they turn out to be a toxic person or not fit for purpose in terms of the role that they're doing; the point is not to then just send them an SMS and say, you know, "You're fired." The point is, you know, Donald Trump style, no. WILL: [laughs] AARISH: The point is actually to take the decision really quickly. So if you realize that that person is not working out, then make the decision and execute on that decision as quickly as possible because I've seen it too often and have done it myself to the business' detriment. I've seen too often people sitting on a decision to move someone on. And that's ended up leading to problems in the business because other employees, other members of the team will recognize that toxicity or that person isn't pulling their weight, or they aren't able to do the job even. And that will just lead to negative impact on the rest of the business as well. So that's definitely one I would always come back to is, like, hire slow, fire fast. I think I'm happy to take more flak on it because I strongly believe it is something that more founders and more businesses should take heed of. And the other one, I think it was number one on my list for a reason, and that's cash trumps everything and today, even more so than anything else. I think businesses over the last, certainly in the venture ecosystem, over the last sort of five years, growth at all costs has been the mantra, and that's throwing dollars at marketing and just building new customers, or buying new customers, I should say, to supercharge growth when actually that isn't sustainable. And it doesn't necessarily lead to good outcomes in the future. My preference is twofold, one, spend as much time and money as you can in cultivating your existing customers, make sure you're really giving them delight in whatever product or service you're providing them because that means that they're going to stay with you longer. They're going to pay themselves back in terms of how much it costs to acquire, and hopefully, they're going to be advocates for your business. And all of that basically leads to a better cash bottom line. And today, always, but today over and above any other period, I think over the last 5, 10 years cash trumps everything because you are only as good as your runway. And when you run out of money in this market, it is very hard to go out and try and raise additional capital, and raising capital at the sort of valuations that people have also been used to over the last several years is getting harder and harder, if not impossible. So those are probably the two that I would always come back to; it's the hire slow, fire fast, cash trumps everything. And it's better to spend money retaining and loving your customers than trying to constantly acquire new ones. WILL: Yeah, I love that. I love that. Let's flip it to the other side, what have been some of your biggest wins in life? AARISH: I mean, I'm going to say the obvious one. My biggest wins are my family, you know, my wife, my kids. I've got two beautiful daughters, one's 21, one's 15. I hope we've raised them to be well-adjusted children. We've given them, I think, the ability to go out and do what they want in life. And that's really important to me. My wife, her, and I have been together for 20 years. We've had our ups and downs, but today I think we make an amazing team. And I'm really fortunate to have her in my life. If I think about wins and success in business, it's really hard for me and, again, because I think success is a state of mind. It's not something that you can chase. And I think too many people get caught up in this sort of idea of I'll be successful when. And what I mean is I'll be successful when I've raised that big series A, or I'll be successful when I've exited my business, or I'll be successful when I've made that huge sale, or when I've hired that rockstar employee or made it to founder, or whatever it is. If you approach success with the attitude of you are already a success, whatever you're doing, you are alive today, living in one of the most exciting times on the planet. You are a successful human being; whatever anyone else says, that's a major win in itself. And understanding that state of mind that you have to be in is something that it takes a really long time to understand and really internalize. And I think the way that I've managed to get to that place is I've realized that in the past, either I was chasing success or I was waiting for someone else to tell me that I've been successful. When in reality, if I judge success based on my own benchmarks, then it's impossible for me to look at what I've done and say I haven't been successful. I've got two businesses, two podcasts. Who knows? One of those businesses may fall over, one of those podcasts may not get a single listener or whatever. But the mere fact that I've shown up and broken ground on all of that stuff for me is, I think, an indication of success. It's something I'm really proud of. And as I move forward in life, I'm always going to try to do better. But I already know that whatever successes or failures I may have in the future, I've already been successful. And I think that's the thing that all of us should hold on to in life. WILL: Yeah, I totally agree with that, and I really, really like that. So I'm going to close it out with this: what advice would you go back and give yourself when you first started at the very beginning knowing what you know now? AARISH: I would say from the age of like 15 to the age of getting on 37, 38, I was a product of what other people wanted, what I did at school, what I studied...well, what I studied at university was what I wanted to do, but it was almost in retaliation for what others wanted me to do. Where I worked, the sort of path that I trode was very much based on culturally, familiarly what was expected of me kind of growing up in a very middle-class and privileged background. It wasn't until I came back to the UK from Papua New Guinea, where I basically came back with nothing to my name and no idea what I was going to do, and I started doing things that I wanted to do and started backing myself in spite of what other people were saying. So even when I left that first job working at the EdTech business, one of my cousins turned around and said, "Why are you leaving that job? It is paying you a really good salary. Like, why would you leave that to do this thing?" And I had someone else, an angel investor who's one of my closest friends; she turned around and said, "Well, if one of my portfolio companies came and said, oh, they're looking to bring in a CFO, I'd tell them they're stupid and spend their money elsewhere." And I was like, "No, I can see that there is something to be done in this space. I'm going to go and do it." And, lo and behold, again, it's paid off. And so I think the one piece of advice I would have given to myself, and I would give to everyone, is back yourself early on. You may not have the experience to do everything. You may not have the network. You may not have the cash. You may not have the friends and family that can invest in you or whatever it might be. But take that first step, back yourself because ultimately, if you can't back yourself, no one else is going to. WILL: Wow, that's really good, really good. Wow, I really like that. Yeah. Yeah, I really liked that because it's kind of the initial stage of that self-care, especially as a founder. Like, if you don't believe in yourself, how can you even ask someone else for it? Because they can see, like, well, is this a good investment? Are you going to see it through, or are you going to quit? AARISH: Yeah, and in fact, I'd add to that one of the other things I've said is, but I came to this late in life, is if my mind and my body aren't healthy, then my business can't be either. I realized quite late in life, as I say, probably mid-30s, again, that I'd probably done more damage to my body than I needed to through my diet, through whatever proclivities I may have had. The most amazing I've ever felt is today, where I'm exercising daily, where I'm taking care of myself mentally, taking the time to think about what is important to me, and to show gratitude for a lot of stuff as well. And exactly as you say, if you're not looking after yourself, it's really, really hard to look after a business, to look after team members. And certainly, when other people are looking at you, they're going to kind of sit there and say, "Well, how safe is my money in this guy's hands? Or do I think that this person is going to be able to see it through?" So 100% the two things are back yourself and look after yourself. I think those are two really important things. WILL: All right, to close out the podcast, is there anything that you would like to share with the audience? AARISH: I mean, I think it's been awesome speaking to you. I would love for everyone to come and check out Nothing Ventured and the Off Balance Podcast. And please connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me, follow me on Twitter. My handle is @adsinuk, so that's @A-D-S-I-N-U-K, both on LinkedIn and on Twitter. You can find me at Aarish Shah on LinkedIn, obviously, as well. I'm always keen to hear from people, learn from people, talk to them. All I would ask is be gentle with each other. Come find me. Come have a chat. And, yeah, it's been awesome speaking to you today. WILL: Yeah, it's been great talking to you too. And I'm going to lead by leadership. And I'm going to look you up on LinkedIn, Twitter; check out the podcast. I'm excited about that. So I'm looking forward to it. AARISH: Amazing. Thanks, man. WILL: Yeah, thank you. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have any questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Aarish Shah.

Welcome to Season 2, episode 3 of Backstage Pass, the podcast by Front Row Ventures taking you behind the scenes into Canada's tech ecosystem and its success stories. Today, we're happy to have Chris Arsenault as our guest. Chris is the co-founder, President & CEO of Inovia Capital, one of Canada's largest Venture Capital firms with now over $2.2 billion dollars under management. Chris currently serves as a director on the boards of AppDirect, Groupe Dynamite, Poka, Snapcommerce, LifeHouse; and, until recently, Lightspeed (which IPOed in 2020), and Luxury Retreats (acquired by Airbnb in 2017) Prior to Inovia, Chris co-founded and launched a number of Software, Mobile and Consumer Internet technology start-up companies, including two spin-offs of telecom giants Microcell and Teleglobe. His work in the mid-90's as co-founder and CEO of SIT provided him with the opportunity to play an important part in the initial growth of the Internet. As one of Netscape's first external partners and integrators, SIT was sold to Ubizen of Belgium in 1999 for €42 million. In this episode, we'll cover all of that and more - We deep dive into Chris' entrepreneurial journey before he became an investor. And how a guy born on the northeastern tip of Quebec, almost 10 hours from Montreal, went on to build one of Canada's largest VC firms. Without further a due, here's, Chris Arsenault.

Our guest in this episode is Carlos Diaz, founder and CEO of Uncut.fm. Carlos is a repeat entrepreneur. He created his first startup, Emakina, at the age of 23, and it IPOed in 2006. He founded blueKiwi, the first SaaS in France, moved the company to Silicon Valley in 2010 and sold it two years later. He ran a startup accelerator program for four years and continues to invest through his rolling fund Diaspora Ventures.He is also host of the independent podcast, Silicon Carne, which has become one of the most listened tech podcasts in France, with more than 10,000 downloads per episode.Carlos is one of the first content creators to launch an NFT project specifically for his podcast, and then to build a platform, Uncut.fm, for other creators to do the same with ease.In our conversation Carlos talked to me aboutThe Creator Economy where creators build community and add unique value to that community;How podcasters can engage their community of listeners as shareholders;Why intention is the “new attention”.Listen to the podcast to find out moreSeth Silvers, in episode 537 introduced us to Carlos.

S2E1 – The Retail Avengers vs The Metaverse!Welcome back to The Retail Razor Show – It's Season 2, Episode 1!Back for season two of the show, we saved a BIG topic to open up with – The Metaverse!Yes, our Retail Avengers team has been jumping out of their seats to bring you this discussion, recently held in our Clubhouse room, to answer the biggest, burning questions retailers and brands have about the Metaverse. What exactly IS the Metaverse? What is it not? Why should you be interested and what can you do with the metaverse? How can you use the Metaverse? Is it about building brand loyalty? Commerce? And what about NFTs and web3? All of the above? The Retail Avengers team digs into these questions, and more, to cut through the clutter!Hosts, Ricardo and Casey then come back to recap the discussion and talk about a few key examples of brands that seem to know what they're doing in the Metaverse right now. Plus, they'll bring you an easy 5-step roadmap to getting started in the Metaverse. All that in the season 2 opener!Have you heard the news? We're up to #20 on the Feedspot Top 60 Retail podcasts list, so please keep those 5-star reviews in Apple Podcasts coming! With your loyal help, we'll move our way up the Top 20 in no time! Leave us a review and we'll mention you in a future episode! https://blog.feedspot.com/retail_podcasts/Meet your hosts, helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:I'm Ricardo Belmar, a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer for 2022 & 2021, RIS News Top Movers and Shakers in Retail for 2021, a Top 12 ecommerce influencer, advisory council member at George Mason University's Center for Retail Transformation, and director partner marketing advisor for retail & consumer goods at Microsoft. And I'm Casey Golden, CEO of Luxlock. Obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer. I've spent my career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business. Now I slay franken-stacks!Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, including E-Motive, and Overclocked, from the album Beat Hype, written by Hestron Mimms, published by Imuno.The Retail Razor ShowFollow us on Twitter: https://bit.ly/TwRRazorConnect with us on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/LI-RRazorSubscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/RRShowYouTubeSubscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/RetailRazorShowRetail Razor Show Episode Page: https://bit.ly/RRShowPodHost → Ricardo Belmar,Follow on Twitter - https://bit.ly/twRBelmarConnect on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/LIRBelmarRead my comments on RetailWire - https://bit.ly/RWRBelmarCo-host → Casey Golden,Follow on Twitter - https://bit.ly/twCaseyConnect on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/LICaseyRead my comments on RetailWire - https://bit.ly/RWCaseyTRANSCRIPTS2E1 The Retail Avengers vs The Metaverse[00:00:00] Pre-Intro[00:00:00] Ricardo Belmar: Hey, Casey, it's season two. Now maybe we should do something different for the show intro.[00:00:04] Casey Golden: Yeah, I've seen some podcasts play different clips from the main interview in the beginning of the show, kind of like a preview.[00:00:11] Ricardo Belmar: I don't know. That kind of seems like it's been done to death doesn't it? [00:00:14] Casey Golden: True. We can always just pick up. In the middle of a conversation and give the audience some FOMO. They wouldn't know whether or not they've missed something or arrived right on time.[00:00:23] Ricardo Belmar: Hmm, not a bad idea though. I don't know. I wonder if we might get some bad reviews for trying to trick our listeners that way. What if we just added some cool sound effects?[00:00:31] Casey Golden: That would be too simple. What would happen afterwards?[00:00:34] Ricardo Belmar: Okay. I guess you got me there. All right. All right. So, we could just start talking about our main topic and give listeners a preview that way of what's to come without really giving away our speaker.[00:00:44] Casey Golden: Sounds like plan. I think that's what we should do, but how much time do we have to do that? A minute. 30 seconds, two minutes, 15.[00:00:54] Ricardo Belmar: well, uh, let's see, how long have we already been talking about it? I don't know. We might not have much time to talk about the m... [00:01:00] Show Intro[00:01:00][00:01:20] Introduction[00:01:20] Ricardo Belmar: Hello, and welcome to the first episode of season two of the retail razor show. I'm your host Ricardo Belmar.[00:01:26] Casey Golden: And I'm your cohost Casey Golden. Welcome retail razor show listeners to our unapologetically authentic retail podcast for product junkies, commerce technologists, and everybody else in retail and retail tech alike.[00:01:40] Ricardo Belmar: It's great to be back in front of the camera and on the mic.[00:01:43] Casey Golden: Yeah. And for those of you watching us on YouTube, how about that? , you're actually watching us on YouTube now, not just listening. This is a big step for us this season. And personally for me, I'm blow drying my hair again![00:01:58] Ricardo Belmar: totally, totally. And, for listeners or, or maybe I should say viewers, can expect to see us on video pretty much every episode now, apart from when we're bringing you our clubhouse sessions, because you know, obviously those are audio only.[00:02:11] Casey Golden: Well, Ricardo, this is our first season of the new season. So of course, we've got an amazing topic this week. One that have been asked about and asked for many times,[00:02:24] Ricardo Belmar: And one that our Retail Avengers crew had really been dying to cover for months and months.[00:02:30] Casey Golden: That's right. So with all of this anticipation, I am so bummed that I missed the clubhouse session.[00:02:37] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Especially since the topic is, wait for it, retail and the metaverse. I mean, this one was just about tailor made for you, Casey.[00:02:44] Casey Golden: Yeah. So I know I'll save my commentary for our recap discussion after the clubhouse session.[00:02:51] Ricardo Belmar: It'll be worth the wait. So with that lead in, since this is a topic that doesn't really need an introduction, let's just dive right in and listen, sorry, youTube viewers, view , well I guess still listen because it's clubhouse, to the Retail Avengers versus the Metaverse. [00:03:11] Clubhouse Session[00:03:11] Ricardo Belmar: All right. Welcome everyone to the retail razor room. We have a really amazing topic for discussion today. I know the entire group here has been just itching to, come back and talk about the metaverse. And so we've got five folks up here on stage. I am sure there'll be some folks from the audience that are gonna join us later.[00:03:30] And I know we have one more of our retail Avengers team. It's gonna join us a little bit later in the hour. So without further ado, we'll do some introductions. Jeff, why don't you go first? [00:03:39] Jeff Roster: Hi, Jeff Roster former Gartner retail analyst now cohost of This Week In Innovation podcast.[00:03:44] Ricardo Belmar: Thanks Jeff, Shish. [00:03:46] Shish Shridhar: Good afternoon. I'm Shish. I'm the global lead for retail with Microsoft for Startups. I've been in retail for over 20 years primarily focused on AI for retail and solutions around it. And currently just building out a portfolio of innovative startups. Thank you. [00:04:02] Ricardo Belmar: Thank you. Brandon [00:04:03] Brandon Rael: Brandon Rael, I've also been in and around the retail consumer industries over 20 years. And since our last discussion, I've joined Capgemini Invent team, they focus on innovation transformations and all the digital stuff we love to talk about here. So looking forward to this great conversation about the metaverse and all the potential.[00:04:19] Ricardo Belmar: And Trevor, [00:04:20] Trevor Sumner: Hey everybody. I'm Trevor Sumner. I'm the CEO at of perch. We do interactive digital displays at retail that use computer vision to detect which products you touch. So. We're basically instrumenting the clicks at retail, opening up new intelligence, data streams, and really cool shopping experiences for customers like Johnson and Johnson, joe Malone, Purina, Unilever, many others. [00:04:44] Ricardo Belmar: All right. Great. And I'm Ricardo Belmar. I started the retail razor club room here in, in clubhouse last year. Also running the retail razor show podcast with my co-host Casey golden. So everybody in the audience who hasn't subscribed yet, do yourself a favor, hit your podcast player and hit the subscribe button there.[00:05:01] You'll find some of our past clubhouse sessions showing up in each new episode of the podcast. I'm currently the lead partner marketing advisor at Microsoft for retail and consumer goods. And we are just gonna jump right into the metaverse here. So probably makes sense to start with a few good definitions.[00:05:18] I think everybody has a definition that it's kinda like that joke about economist s where if you ask 50 different people, what the metaverse is, you get 60 different answers, something like that. But I'll throw this one out, I think this is a Wikipedia definition that defines metaverse as a collective virtual shared space created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality and the internet. And it's also defined as a network of 3d virtual worlds focused on social connection.[00:05:51] So just to kick things off, what does everyone think of that rather complex definition.[00:05:56] Brandon Rael: It's a bit overwhelming. Isn't it? , [00:05:58] Ricardo Belmar: it's a mouthful for sure.[00:05:59] Shish Shridhar: it is! [00:06:03] Jeff Roster: I'm gonna have to go back to my Catholic school days and and diagram that sentence. Cause I think that's about run on over, run on, over run on, but I, I mean, it's, it's, it's fine. I mean, we're gonna have about a hundred different definitions before this thing really gets up and running. I think though, intuitively we kind of understand what it is.[00:06:19] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, I think that's, that's a, a fair, fair statement. I mean, there's gonna be lots of definitions. I think some of the keywords, maybe I pick out from that, whether it was implied or not, is this notion of seamlessly moving between virtual and physical worlds.[00:06:32] There's the notion of leveraging augmented reality and virtual reality. That's certainly part of it and how you actually go about interacting with that space. There was that last part of the sentence. I, I like where it just throws in' and the internet' into that, because we didn't wanna leave that out.[00:06:48] but you know, you could view the internet as sort of a, a connecting glue perhaps of the, the metaverse. But I think one question I see gets asked by a lot of people at least one of the early questions is, well, are we talking about a single virtual reality world? Are we talking about multiple virtual reality worlds or is it the combination of all of them?[00:07:06] And just this idea that I can do things in this virtual digital space that has an impact in the physical world. [00:07:12] Trevor Sumner: Well, to me, there is not a, the metaverse, there is many metaverses and many different environments, and I'm watching people, contort themselves to define what this thing is.[00:07:26] And I think one of the, the greatest contortions was this notion that we're already in the metaverse right, that, you know 10 years ago we spent an hour on our phones and now we spend six hours on our phones. And we interact, if you look at kind of what our digital consumption, looking at TV and looking at other kind of digital formats that, that has gone up and that we are actually already kind of working in these metaverses now I don't know that that's helpful.[00:07:54] So the question is like, what is the definition that makes it helpful? [00:07:58] Brandon Rael: And I think to Trevor's point it's ever evolving, it's ever pivoting. We can't just say that's a single metaverse, it's multiple metaverse with different customer types and different generations. So it's hard to nail down what, you know, what exactly it is.[00:08:12] And I think what companies like Facebook or meta are doing, or like establishing a metaverse, but there's ones that already exist already that are they're in flight, you know? So it's, it's a very complex undertaken to single it to one, one single metaverse. [00:08:24] Trevor Sumner: Yeah. And, and I don't know that Microsoft is doing one metaverse either, right.[00:08:27] It could be blizzard is one metaverse that they're investing in as, as an environment. And then, another game world has another. And you know, HoloLens potentially, is a whole nother thing. [00:08:40] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. I think you could say that you can divide this into different areas, right?[00:08:43] There might be a, a metaverse for a work environment that you encounter there's might be a metaverse for gaming. There might be a metaverse that you go to for shopping. There might be a metaverse. You go to for fitness exercises, right? [00:08:58] Shish Shridhar: Yep. And, and I kind of think [00:09:00] I I've been playing around with a few of these environments, including Microsoft's acquisition from 2018 prior to blizzard something called Altspace VR.[00:09:09] So Altspace VR is an environment where you can set up virtual meetings. You can have a mall in there. You can have shopping experiences, all of those. And I've also played around with decentraland where, companies like Coors and Miller Coors and, and others have been creating environments.[00:09:26] And then there is still other ones, the popular ones being sandbox and, and a few others where some of them mimic the real world, because there's that spatial element to the metaphors where you can buy digital, digital, you can buy land and build your malls and build your spaces. And all of those things pretty much like buying domain names in the internet.[00:09:47] And I think because there's so many of these environments, I think a point will come where you can kind of port between one and the other. I kind of believe there probably will never be a, sort of a, a single place. There will be competing environments always, but I think the tipping point will be where you can create an avatar of yourself and objects that you could kind of port from one environment to the other, make it available in multiple environments as well as in the physical world through AR. And I think that would be the, the convergence that, that we are all looking for, where you don't have to completely rebuild everything in, in all these different environments and brands that are today.[00:10:29] I think fairly confused about which one should be, be on, should we go to the sandbox. It should we go to, to decentral land or, or one or the other platforms. [00:10:40] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, I think that is maybe the tricky part in these early days of almost competing metaverses . Or competing metaverse worlds maybe is a better way to further refine that statement.[00:10:52] And how do you decide which one to go to? I, one of the things I've noticed that I've kind of scratched from my head at a little bit is when we see some brands deciding that their, their first experiment here in the metaverse is gonna be to just replicate exactly what they have in physical space and assume that that's gonna cause people to just flock to their location.[00:11:09] Shish Shridhar: Yeah. I strongly feel about that. [00:11:11] Sorry, go ahead. [00:11:13] Authenticity, Storytelling, Experiential[00:11:13] Brandon Rael: Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry. Shish, I, I think it's, it's all about authenticity and storytelling and, and that's what we're looking for with the emergence of TikTok and Instagram, and you expect something magical and experiential and not, not replicating your day to day life and not replicating a storefront or a grocery store.[00:11:29] We look for something different, unique and authentic, and that's what we're hoping for in terms of inspirational content, out of the metaverse. [00:11:35] Shish Shridhar: Yeah, I kind of think it is, you know, it's an opportunity for brands and retailers really to rethink because in the past, in the 3d environments, you know, retailers have tried to recreate stores in 3d.[00:11:47] So you could go and do the normal shopping that you do in the physical world. You could do it in the 3d world. And that has never really worked. I think it's an opportunity to, to reinvent and to really say, how can we create experiential shopping? How do we make shopable experiences in the metaverse where we create an experience, which enables us to shop for the things that we want to in that experience, rather than recreating an actual store with shelves and exactly the way it looks like in, in the real world.[00:12:20] That is certainly one of the aspects for combining the real world and the digital world. But I think in addition, the opportunity really lies in, in creating that experience because this is all about experiential shopping and going beyond the webpage and, and making it more real. [00:12:37] Trevor Sumner: Yeah. I, I find that I find this conversation so interesting cuz it just it's so parallels the conversations we had 10, 12 years ago with regards to social media, like which sites do you pick and oh, you just can't put your same website on Facebook.[00:12:51] You've gotta do something different and what you do on Twitter or Snapchat or, or TikTok. Right. And additionally, you do need to be thoughtful about what you pick, especially in the early days, because one of the interesting economics here is that the early adopters tend to get the spoils.[00:13:08] Right? So you look at like Ashton Kucher right. He was an early adopter of Twitter. He took on CNN on a race to a million followers. And, those early adopters, get the, get the spoils. And so, you have to lean in and say, what am I doing here that's differentiated, that's actually valuable? Where's the cool factor that people wanna talk about. Cuz otherwise I think most people do like, oh, I'll just port my website. [00:13:37] Ricardo Belmar: And there's also I think an element of how do you retain attention? Right? So it's one thing to say, oh, I'm gonna jump into the metaverse I'm gonna create my virtual storefront.[00:13:45] And you'll probably get a lot of people that will come to see it just for the sheer novelty that first time. But you really need to be thinking about, what's gonna get people to come back the second time and the third and the fourth and the fifth. Another kind of extension to this point that you just brought up.[00:14:00] The early days of social media, I'm gonna go even further back to the early days of eCommerce and who remembers when there were discussions of people saying, you know, someone should build a virtual mall on the internet and get all the retailers to come and build their eCommerce sites in that virtual mall.[00:14:15] And we know how that story went. how that played out. [00:14:17] Trevor Sumner: Yeah. [00:14:17] And, I think I, yeah, I still see the echos of that in VR shopping. Which is analogous to this VR side of the house. And so I think the questions like who's actually doing interesting things versus doing analogous things.[00:14:31] it's interesting Chris Dixon , talks about this as kind of like business skew morphism, it's just like X for Y , and you're just trying to recreate the, the same thing in the new environment, but the really interesting businesses that have exponential growth create something completely new.[00:14:48] Trillion dollar opportunity[00:14:48] Ricardo Belmar: yeah. That that's true. That's true. And I'm, I'm, I'll throw out another interesting data point I saw. So JP Morgan claims that there's a trillion dollar market opportunity in the metaverse and I'm curious what everyone thinks of that data point. I'm sure Jeff has. [00:15:03] Jeff Roster: I'll go last. Yeah. [00:15:05] Brandon Rael: Hear that sign. [00:15:06] Ricardo Belmar: Our analyst has to have an opinion on that.[00:15:09] Jeff Roster: I'll [00:15:09] go last. [00:15:10] Brandon Rael: That's a very bold stand. I don't know what they're substantiating that on, but it it's a bold one and let's see what, what emerges, I mean, First, you have to actually capture the attention, capture the imagination, inspire generations with all this amazing content and, and find a way to retain them.[00:15:26] Like you mentioned to even make this a commercialized opportunity for retailers and brands to want actually spend money and spend time and engage and build communities. So it potentially could be at that level, but it's certainly gonna take a lot of effort, content creation and imagination [00:15:45] Shish Shridhar: I agree with what Brandon's saying and I think potentially yes, but I think there's a lot of things that need to happen before that. And you know, my experiments with the metaverse the, the graphics right now is a little clunky and performance is a little sluggish.[00:15:59] So from a technology perspective, I think we are not fully there. And then the other aspect of it, I think we are still waiting in a way for AR and AR glasses to be ubiquitous cheap enough and performant enough to be used where I think that will be another tipping point we are waiting for.[00:16:17] So there are certain things that need to happen before we go, headlong into, the metaverse. But I think there is a lot of opportunity in creating those digital experiences and marrying it with the physical world where in the physical world you could experience when you're shopping digital media, digital experiences through AR that was created in the metaverse.[00:16:41] So you could experience either in the virtual world or the physical world through AR. Then there's so many other experiences like clothing, trying on clothing and, and that next evolution of, of streaming commerce in a way where today the streaming commerce is I would say the beginning, but in the metaverse, it kind of goes into a completely new level where you're experiencing things you're trying on things, and you are engaging with store associates in the metaverse. I've been working with companies that are also experimenting with AI assistance companies like Soul Machines and Deep Brain that are creating these avatars, which are deep fakes of people, but powered by AI engines that are very personal and relevant.[00:17:26] So when you engage with someone, it could be a real human you're engaging with, or an AI assistant that you're engaging with that is been trained with your data and is becoming very personal as a result. And so those are the kind of experiences I think are gonna evolve . And also, the evolution of streaming commerce is gonna be the other aspect of it. And the ability to actually create all the digital objects like furniture and all those things. Being able to create a digital twin of your home in the metaverse, furnish that home with digital goods that you buy, and then recreate that in the real world through commerce engines.[00:18:04] And I think the headless commerce engines will play a big part in, in the metaverse where you can buy things, things that you see. So it not necessarily in a store environment, but really making that experience shoppable through, through the commerce engines. [00:18:20] Trevor Sumner: So I'm gonna go and say yes to trillion dollars just, you know, without any qualifications, although obviously it depends on how you define this phase.[00:18:29] Jeff Roster: Well, neither did the writer of the article, so no one needs qualifications, apparently. [00:18:33] Trevor Sumner: Totally. And, and, and, oh, actually that's a little bit of my point, which, which is where I'm going with this, which is, you know, look, you, you could back into it and say, the real estate market for the metaverse is at 500 million and supposed to double this year.[00:18:46] So just the real estate market of the metaverse is a billion dollar market. And that's core metaverse, that's not like messing around and, deciding to like, I'm not picking on Shish here, but like social shopping. I, I don't count that as metaverse, but when it gets to that next stage, as Shish was talking about of being in the metaverse and, and going to the next level, it is, but without playing lines, like they're billion dollar markets and it's so early with like, who's been in decentral land?[00:19:11] Who's been in the sandbox, very few of us, right? Now at the same time. The question is, if you look at usage, it's younger people it's gen Z and like specifically, like take a look at the data in South Korea, it's astounding, they're spending more money on virtual goods for their avatars than actual physical apparel for themselves.[00:19:30] That is crazy. Right. I think, yeah. If, if you look at that trillion dollars? Sure. Trillion dollars I'm in, [00:19:38] Brandon Rael: I think to that point, the, the luxury sector we're seeing all these major companies are now investing in the metaverse space. They're betting big on it. So Gucci and other major global corporations are an investment in space because it, their brand has such value in it.[00:19:52] And they're exclusively extends to the metaverse. So if you can capture that audience and capture that imagination to, to where we had the right clothing to have the right accessories for your avatar, then it could be a, a winning proposition. I mean, it could be limitless, to be honest. [00:20:05] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. I mean, if you just look at virtual goods and games, I think that's a hundred billion dollar market right there.[00:20:11] So if we're gonna include that then to Trevor's point, you can make this work, right. You can add your way up to a trillion dollars if you keep including these different things. And if you roll in you know, brand to your point with luxury brands, any NFTs that they're starting to release, and I'm, I'm jumping again a little bit to, to that part of the discussion, but you know, you roll that component into your, into the math here.[00:20:30] You can see yourself getting to a trillion dollars. If you just keep adding more and more components to it. [00:20:34] Trevor Sumner: And then the last, last point I wanted to make that that, that we hit to at earlier is I also don't believe anything that these guys say, right? Like it's JP Morgan chase. He like he's writing.[00:20:43] Jeff Roster: There you go. [00:20:44] Ricardo Belmar: I think you just told Jeff's comment. [00:20:46] Jeff Roster: Yeah. Thank you. You just stepped on my line [00:20:48] Trevor Sumner: as analysts you wanna predict things just so that you get clicks. I remember in 2001,[00:20:53] Jeff Roster: no, you don't. Analysts analysts want to make intelligent points. Hack writers wanna do that. So real analysts don't wanna do that.[00:21:02] Trevor Sumner: I like, I, I don't know. I think analysts wanna get attention too, cuz they wanna sell the research. I remember in 2001 Forrester predict, well, they're not, especially when you predicted out six to 10 years and there's no consequence, right? In 2001, I was at a wireless center company and Forrester was predicting mobile internet traffic would outpace, internet traffic in five years.[00:21:24] It took,[00:21:24] Ricardo Belmar: I remember that [00:21:25] Trevor Sumner: 15 and it's just like, it just wasn't even in five years it was nothing. It was less, it was less than 5%. [00:21:31] Brandon Rael: Well, they had the form factor, the iPhone wasn't invented in time for that [00:21:35] Trevor Sumner: well, the analyst should have known that. So my, my point is JP Morgan chase missed the boat on cryptocurrency. So they wanna throw out a big number and they did. [00:21:43] Ricardo Belmar: Yep. Jeff, you wanna add anything to that? [00:21:45] Jeff Roster: Yeah, I mean, just, I just hate these articles because one I think Trevor's really a hundred percent correct. It's it's just, you're throwing out to put out a, interesting number it's click bait to a certain degree.[00:21:55] I'd have to look at the methodology. Are we talking about IT spend to build the metaverse? Are we talking about revenue moving through the metaverse? Just, I, I don't see them. I don't see these articles being helpful as somebody that tries to understand how to forecast things. It just. It's silly.[00:22:07] I think it's a big number. I haven't actually put the numbers together. I, I don't see a reason to do that, but it they're big and they're huge and they're gonna grow. Yeah. And that's that that's all I need to do is, is somebody that comments on the space, but is it 1,000,000,000,002, Ricardo, what was the largest number we saw?[00:22:22] Cause we were kibitzing about that a while ago. I [00:22:24] mean, it was, I don't know how many was there? [00:22:26] Ricardo Belmar: Was there someone else that said it was more than a trillion? I, I can't remember now. [00:22:29] Jeff Roster: Oh yeah. [00:22:29] Ricardo Belmar: This is the one that stood out to me most recently. [00:22:31] Jeff Roster: Cause there's, there's an art and science to the game of forecasting.[00:22:34] There should be a methodology you should be publishing that you should be talking about what you're talking about. You should talk about definitions and none of that work has really been done that I've seen evidence by the, the conversation we had to start with, you know, sort, sort of wrestling around with what a definition is.[00:22:48] Ricardo Belmar: Right. [00:22:48] Jeff Roster: So to, you know, do these clickbait articles just it's just frustrating. [00:22:52] Brandon Rael: It's a coupling with the per Jeff's point. If you're adding in live events and advertising and keep expanding a definition of, of metaverse, it could be 800 billion to a trillion, but it's just a loose definition of it. You know, I understand gaming Roblox, et cetera.[00:23:06] And those, those , newer, authentic spaces that we're talking about. But if you're adding all those availments in there, it will get expanded.[00:23:12] Ricardo Belmar: Yep. That's a fair point. I see we've got some raised hands and Ananda, I just invited you up onto the stage. If you have a comment or a question for us.[00:23:20] No, Really, What IS the Metaverse?[00:23:20] Ananda Chakravarty: How's it going? [00:23:21] Ricardo Belmar: Hey, Ananda, how are you? [00:23:22] Ananda Chakravarty: I'm thanks for inviting me, Ricardo. I do have a couple of questions. I honestly, I'm, I'm kind of new at this whole metaverse concept. I'm you know, you guys have given me some explanations, but I think your first comment when you brought in that very ambiguous definition of metaverse really still gave me a lot of pause as to what we're really counting when we're talking about all these dollars, trillions of dollars that are potentially coming in from many different sources into a either a channel, a, a throughway, whatever you wanna call it.[00:23:52] Aren't these just dollars that are going into variations of the internet, or maybe even variations of social commerce. I'm just wondering what really defines the metaverse right now. And what, what is the real, I guess conceptually, what is it supposed to really be? Is it like that second life?[00:24:09] The only places I've seen the metaverse in real you know, from a realistic point of view has been in the gaming universe. You go to a Minecraft Mojang location. You can find tons of people playing, engaging, and effectively having their avatars in the universe. Right. But I've not seen that from a retail perspective.[00:24:26] I've not seen that from almost any other kind of context. Maybe Shish you have some, you had some thoughts of some examples that you shared, but I'd like to get a better definition of what it really means to be a metaverse and what that is from an overall perspective. [00:24:40] Ricardo Belmar: Well, I'll jump in on, on a couple thoughts there and then maybe Shish, I think you might have some things to add. I mean, for me, there has to be an element of this, you know, virtual world that is representing something in the digital space that you're interacting with. So whether we call that, a virtual world, you access through VR glasses or something like that, it, I think is sort of a secondary point.[00:25:00] I think you're right, that in the gaming space is probably where it's leading in this area. If my kids are an indication, then things like Roblox, is sort of an early version of, of what can happen in the metaverse. Although I'll, as a side note, make a point that I just read an article today about how Roblox, since they IPOed, I think their about their stock has dropped about 50%. So I don't know if that's sending a message or not, but I think gaming is definitely an area that maybe leads the way here.[00:25:23] I have seen some good examples of what I alluded to early on in the session about the metaverse at work, where companies would use a virtual space, for example, to facilitate onboarding new employees. So in a remote work era when you don't necessarily bring all of your new hires into a common physical location, you could bring them into that virtual space and have them interact with other employees and go through training exercises and such there.[00:25:48] I think there's definitely a use case there. And then I've seen in the manufacturing side and, and production environments. If you're building a product and you need to either do maintenance on something, or you're trying to figure out how things are connected in a assembly line. You know, there there's some value in using an augmented reality experience there, which I would, again, still label as part of a metaverse that allows you to virtually manipulate some of the physical items that you're working with in a way that might help you understand how you need to manipulate them in the physical space.[00:26:19] So it's the idea that Shish mentioned earlier about digital twins. I think that's an early use case that makes a lot of sense for metaverse applications. I think what we're all kind of getting to, and I'm curious, everybody else here will think about this comment, that when we start looking at the commerce application of it, which is really what, what retailers care about, what consumers might care about, where are those use cases coming from? And I'm gonna let everybody comment, but I think the next thing we should probably get to, because I think it's related, you know, we often hear the term metaverse not too many sentences removed from terms like web 3.0 and NFTs. And I think there's a reason for that association when it comes to evaluating the commerce implications, but I'm gonna leave that comment there for us to come back to and see what everybody else here has to has to say in response to Ananda's comment.[00:27:06] Jeff Roster: Well, so I love that. And you can tell Ananda was a analyst. Cause if you draw the circle big enough, you mean you could, you could drag everything into it. But I think what I would say is in that's just now, since I've spent so long talking to some of the folks that are building these pieces of metaverses. There's technology that that's at play right now.[00:27:23] If you look at some of the interviews I did Obsess is doing 3d objects and that will clearly be a key capability in a metaverse world. And that's available on websites today. AR I think, you know, certainly not here, but far more interesting to me than, than VR is because I can, you know, being a pilot I'm used to having a lot of data feeds come in and I want to be able to walk through a store and look for nutritional information the way I do when I'm flying. So there's big chunks that were in the very, very early stages of a buildout, which is why I hate those articles that say it's a two or 3 trillion or $1 trillion market, because we're the early stages of this build out.[00:27:56] I think Roblox is, is their market cap is phenomenal and that's a component of it. So there's, there's pieces that are there and there's, speculation and everyone wants to get their, you know, get their clicks in. But there's a lot of real true value that I'm seeing already in pieces.[00:28:11] Trevor Sumner: So can we shift the conversation about who's doing really cool stuff in, in the metaverse and like start defining the problem space less by abstract lines that and define a little bit more about like real world stuff that people can do in the metaverse things that are interesting or even successful at this point.[00:28:28] Ananda Chakravarty: Would love to hear that Trevor. I mean, just, you know, when I think of metaverse, I'm thinking second life I'm thinking we had islands and all sorts of cool, neat stuff there with big huge I guess advertising, if you will a huge banner for IBM in, in a, you know, a corner of this quote world.[00:28:45] But what did it really translate into in terms of dollars in terms of value in terms of productivity for the, the world? I mean, that's the question at the end of the day. [00:28:54] Where physical and virtual converge[00:28:54] Shish Shridhar: And I kind of think the, the second world and the virtual worlds that's been done in the past is sort of just leading up to where we are now, the metaverse, which is the convergence of physical worlds and virtual worlds and, and really having a multidimensional interface to, to that environment. So people can join into a metaverse right from the physical world, could be shopping in an area or in a physical space and become and interact with people in the virtual space and the other way around. And I think that convergence of real world and virtual world is one of the, I would say the bigger differentiators in addition to you also mentioned, you know, the ability to, to monetize engagements, to be able to create things in the metaverse and experience those things by those things in the physical world, as well as the, the virtual world.[00:29:44] And I think that's the other aspect, which second life didn't really have. It didn't really have that convergence of real world and, and physical world and the, the ability to experience it, you know, no matter what, where you are. And I think that's really the, one of the differentiators anyway. [00:30:00] Trevor Sumner: Yeah, I, I would agree with that.[00:30:01] And so let's talk about what, what some of that looks like. Right? So stock X, for example launch an NFT where you'd get a, a physical product as well as your virtual product. And so, you'd get your Nike air Jordan's and you get a virtual version as well. Now, that's kind of a cool way to think about, collectibles, the challenge came several weeks later when Nike sued them and said, whoa, you're violating our trademarks by selling a virtual Nike item. And right, so like this, some stuff that needs to be worked out there are other people who are treating this physical purchase as also this digital representation patron, you could buy a bottle patron, they get like a special, you know, commemorative patron, icebox, I think they called it. And you get also a physical bottle that's, a limited addition, et cetera. [00:30:47] So I, I think of it almost as like a lot of this as a membership club and NFTs as like a deed to something. And in this case, like either a loyalty club or a membership club that gives you access to the physical world.[00:30:58] I think when you, you start, if you think about loyalty as like points, if, if the points in your metaverse as a game. Start giving you access to the real world. If your interaction in the metaverse with Chanel gets you to the new Chanel fashion show or the, the new, line that comes out and you get to, to go to the store or some V I P this starts becoming really, really compelling.[00:31:24] And it's a way for brands to create engagement with their brands across all different properties and convert to real world commerce and, and virtual commerce too. And, and I think that's exciting. [00:31:35] Brandon Rael: Yeah. And, and add to all that we talked about luxury being the, the ultimate sandbox for, for the metaverse it's, it's already happening.[00:31:42] Gucci's has sold a digital the honest purse, but thousands more than it's worth in real life. So versus a physical product. Dulce Gabbana, sold a a 5.7 million nine piece NFT collection. Saying that their gems can't be found in real life, on earth and in the digital world, metaverse, world's more, more exclusive and more prestigious.[00:32:01] And then Nike lands on the Roblox platform. And they also acquired the virtual sneaker and collectables company or a star company called RT FK T studios. So Nike has been one of the leaders and luxury space has been on fire. [00:32:13] Trevor Sumner: Let let's talk about Nike land for a second.[00:32:15] I think that's a great example. Right? So how are retailers using it? So Nike land, you can buy shoes that don't exist in the real world. Well, okay. Who cares? Well, they can look at the popularity and say, oh, people really like this shoe. We're gonna use it as kind of data demand data to determine which products that they are going to create.[00:32:37] So they may launch a hundred virtual shoes. Just take their top 10% performers and actually create real versions of those shoes. If you think about that as part of your marketing funnel, as your brand engagement funnel that's pretty exciting. And then you can start thinking about, well, if you bought that shoe and we end up making it, you get 20% off or you get it engraved or you get, the special version of it with, you know, who knows, you know, like, [00:33:03] Ricardo Belmar: yeah, there there's like a loyalty implication that goes along with that, right.[00:33:06] Loyalty, a hundred that makes it much more appealing in, in both spaces, right? Digital [00:33:11] Trevor Sumner: Totally. And if, because of all of these benefits, you spend time in Nike land and you spend hours and hours interacting with Nikes, Nikes, Nikes, Nikes, Nikes. What are you gonna do in the real world?[00:33:22] Ricardo Belmar: You need buy more Nike. [00:33:23] Trevor Sumner: Right. You're gonna buy more. Nike, you're gonna talk about Nike. You're gonna wear more Nike. You're gonna talk about how the Nikes you're wearing matches your avatar in Fortnite and allows you to jump 20% higher. [00:33:35] Ricardo Belmar: You're gonna post pictures on Instagram. [00:33:36] Ananda Chakravarty: Trevor, have a strange feeling.[00:33:38] You actually own a pair of Nikes, just a guess [00:33:42] Brandon Rael: strong feel. [00:33:42] Trevor Sumner: Okay. All right. So just virtual ones, one, I, I do own Nikes. I'm sure. Somewhere in my collection, but they're, they're, they're not my basketball show choice. And I'm not actually all that loyal to Nike as a brand. It turns out, but I think what they're doing here is really.[00:33:56] Ananda Chakravarty: Yeah, I kind of like that example, but because that's the closest I've gotten from what I've seen out there and Jeff kind of hit on the, a couple of points on this as well, by the way. And that is when we start thinking about these different pieces that are, that are coming together, are they really big enough to be mainstream, right?[00:34:13] I mean, that's what metaverse, and this whole thing that meta itself and Facebook is trying to push is that this is really a mainstream function. That's, that's gonna be, you know kind of a, a, a combination of what's gonna happen in movies, like ready player one and and The other one, right?[00:34:28] I mean, that's, what's eventually going to be the world, as we know it, if you will, the physical and the blurring of, of this digital avatar state, I just don't know how much reality there is to that. If these are very, you know, focused on these very specialized cases, it has to be something that is really very popular before it becomes anything close to mainstream.[00:34:48] And I don't think we're close to that at this time. [00:34:50] Ricardo Belmar: it's definitely early. [00:34:51] Trevor Sumner: So the, yes, but you know, you're talking about concerts in the metaverse being attended by tens of millions of people. Like that's pretty size. I mean, like, I don't know what you talk about scale, but like that's, that's the biggest concert in the world.[00:35:05] Ricardo Belmar: It depends on the category. Right. And you know, we started out this, with the Nike example, talking about an apparel example, and, I could argue, for example, apparel overall, I think is actually in some ways could be defined as a shrinking market, right? Because what the same amount of money that used to take for you to buy apparel 20 years ago, you can buy a lot more now, putting the side, whether it's a luxury brand or an off price brand, you can get more for your money in apparel, which means that individual apparel brands, they've gotta find other ways to diversify a bit and find new sources to get revenue from what potentially is a shrinking share. So one area where they can do that of course, is in this metaverse digital space. You know, another example of thrown an addition to Nike, Ralph Lauren, right? Ralph Lauren created a space in Roblox and they've, they're selling digital Ralph Lauren collection to Roblox gamers.[00:35:51] So is, is that a significant revenue source for them? I'm not sure that it is now, but I think, from an experimenting point of view, it's a great idea to try it. I think that's where we'll see lots of interest from retailers is just trying different things. This is one of those areas where there's gonna have to be a lot of experimentation now, long term, is that a significant amount of revenue?[00:36:11] And I think it could be cuz Trevor to your point, if millions of people start getting interested, that's a potentially, much larger audience than you get from a physical space. [00:36:20] Trevor Sumner: Right. And, and also, do we measure this as marketing dollars? Right. Right. I got 10 million people to look at this thing.[00:36:27] Like they didn't buy the thing, but did that translate to some [00:36:30] Ricardo Belmar: yeah. What did it do to our brand awareness [00:36:32] Trevor Sumner: brand awareness and eventual sales, right, [00:36:34] Ricardo Belmar: exactly. Yes. It's one more touch point to track in that customer journey. [00:36:38] Trevor Sumner: Right. And, and so, there's a company called pretty little things that created a digital only model that they're now using in their advertising, right? Like what if we start thinking about, the ability to leverage metaverse in all other types of digital content channels and then to the point of, Hey, let's not do the analogous thing. Like, oh, I wonder what a werewolf would look like in Gucci.[00:37:01] Like how do you start doing stuff that's more creative and interesting and, and goes across all of that. And what's the value of that from a marketing return on investment. [00:37:09] Shish Shridhar: I think the, idea that Trevor kind of pointed out about new idea validation is a very powerful one for brands. So really testing out the digital products, the popularity of the digital products before going into production in the real world, and this could apply to apparel shoes, it could apply to furniture, furnishing the digital twin of your home with, with furniture and then getting, a sense of, is this a good design enough before actually going into the real world and potentially maybe car designs, all of those kind of things.[00:37:38] I think it's got a huge potential. [00:37:40] Ananda Chakravarty: I know Michael. Hasn't had a chance to talk, but he's on the stage. So maybe [00:37:43] Ricardo Belmar: welcome, michael . [00:37:45] Michael Zakkour: Hey guys, [00:37:46] Brandon Rael: rockstar. Michael, [00:37:47] Ricardo Belmar: how are you? [00:37:48] Michael Zakkour: So many loved and familiar faces. [00:37:51] The foundation is only a beginning for retail[00:37:51] Michael Zakkour: Okay. Just a couple things I think that need to be cleared up. There's a lot of confusion, nevermind with the average person and consumer within our industry, whether it's retail technology, development, whatever between the metaverse, web three, NFT, and blockchain.[00:38:08] And we've been talking clearly about the metaverse, but there's some underlying foundational with web three NFT, blockchain, and how it relates to retail. The first thing I wanna say is they're not the same thing. The thing that we see most often, or I see most often out in the marketplace is people confusing web three and metaverse meaning sort of the same thing.[00:38:32] They're not. The second thing I'd wanna say is there is no metaverse yet. It doesn't exist. Okay. And if you run into a company Zuckerberg who tells you they're building the metaverse runaway quickly, if you run into anybody who has a complete answer that says, I know what the metaverse is and will be run away.[00:38:57] right. It's just not possible at this point. We are with metaverse web three NFT and blockchain integration, basically where internet technologies and eCommerce were in 1997. Right. We're at the very, very early stages of it. What I can tell you is you do need to think about where the metaverse web three NFT and blockchain exist as separate entities and how they integrate to eventually come to occlusion on something that is something we can call a metaverse or a multiple of a metaverse.[00:39:35] Okay. As it relates to retail one of the most surprising and, and happiest things I've seen is that, you know, six years ago, I was still arguing with all of my luxury clients about whether they should even recognize that something called the internet exists. And a lot of these luxury companies have gone all in and are the leading edge on developing metaverse based web three NFT, blockchain offering. So interesting there.[00:40:05] And so this is really guys on the retail front. I can't emphasize this enough. Retail is the leading edge of what will become the metaverse. I can't define for you what it is right now, but we are building it. So I think, I don't know if it was Ananda,[00:40:22] it might have been Ananda who asked, are there some real life examples of where this is going? We can look at the Gucci platform. We can look at what LVMH is doing with digital avatars, but all of this is it's something beyond an add-on to the internet. As we know it, it's a complete redefinition of how we experience, right.[00:40:44] And you guys have heard me talk about ecosystems and the new retail model being the complete integration of online, offline technology, supply chain, entertainment, and media. This is the next step above it. How do you bring that to life in 3d? Whether it's use of devices or not. It doesn't matter, guys. We don't know what the metaverse is yet.[00:41:08] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. That's an interesting point. Certainly in the early phases of any new technological area, right though, that early phase, there's the novelty of it being new. That gets attention.[00:41:17] You can spend through any number of, of marketing outlets to drive traffic the first time. The real question is how do you keep them coming back. And I think there's a, a component there, you know, we've only touched or I realize we're coming up on the hour, so I'm gonna bring us to a closing point here.[00:41:31] With one last comment I'll throw out and you guys did a good job bringing this up and differentiating between web three NFTs and, and the metaverse. But it's the combination of these things, right? It's the combination of how brands are going to drive the usage of these elements to make that experience worth repeating and worth experiencing over and over and over again for those consumers.[00:41:52] And I think that's, what's going to be the, the key experiment area. We see happening at least over the next year. And in these, I'm gonna keep calling it the early phases. It may be here, but I think Michael, the way you put it was very nice that, you know, whatever it is, it's not well defined yet. And that's probably why we all struggled at the beginning of this hour to come up with a good definition that wasn't as clunky as the one that I read off from Wikipedia.[00:42:16] And that's because it really is still something that has to be figured out by everyone who's going to not just dip their toes in, but dive in and build something.[00:42:25] Especially when you have, what I would describe as the convergence of a number of different technologies that are making this possible at the same time that I guess opens the door for a lot of less interesting ,let's say, solutions and capabilities, but, we're essentially bringing together, I'm just gonna list out all the things that we've mentioned, there's blockchain, low code, VR, AR of course the internet, which was just thrown in, I love how that was thrown in that Wikipedia definition at the very end of the run on sentence.[00:42:50] And that's just to start right. There are a number of other technical capabilities and technologies, and all of these had to converge to get us to the point where we can start to build this out. So I think it's exciting to see where it's gonna go. It's exciting to see what retailers and brands are going to come up with.[00:43:03] And that's why we like to keep this discussion forum going. Cuz it gives us a way to, to speak to different things with our collection of speakers, everybody's got a different viewpoint, a different focus area that they've read about and we've all consumed different types of content and different pieces of articles and such.[00:43:20] So when we all get together and cover one topic, we can all bring a different angle to it. [00:43:24] And I think with that note, we're gonna wrap things up in the room today. The the fact is , this topic is so rich and so involved that we, we could have had just a short bullet point list of 10 other things to talk about and probably fill another 10 hours of this.[00:43:38] So I'm sure we will be scheduling more metaverse discussions in the future . And with that, I'm gonna thank everyone for joining us in the audience and thank our folks who came up here for some questions and all the other speakers, and we will close out the room from there. Thanks everybody. [00:43:54] Metaverse Recap[00:43:54] Ricardo Belmar: Welcome back retail, razor show listeners and viewers. We hope you enjoyed that Retail Avenger's clubhouse session on the metaverse.[00:44:07] Casey Golden: It was a great session. I love the focus on what the metaverse is and what it's not. And honestly, you guys just killed me with the debate on this trillion dollar opportunity. This is gonna, you know, grab your popcorn. Like this is gonna be fun.[00:44:21] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, that really got everybody jumping on that one. A good, good discussion on a few retail examples too, like Nike for one, I mean, what, what do you think about what Nike's doing, Casey?[00:44:30] Casey Golden: It was really smart for them to just acquire artifact. really early. And throw legal to round up and protect their brand. They're filing new trademarks and sending out cease and desist to companies trying to make money off their swoosh. And I think that this is something that a lot of brands are doing right now is getting ready, getting prepared and protecting their brand.[00:44:53] And they're gonna have to do that. Nike land, their Roblox micro metaverse has already attracted like over 7 million people in 224 countries. Like this is not a bad start. This, this space has such low expectations on the design side.[00:45:12] just play[00:45:13] Ricardo Belmar: Right. Yeah.[00:45:14] Casey Golden: it. Doesn't have to be perfect.[00:45:17] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, I have to agree. Have to agree with that one that that's so true and, and pretty impressive, that they've got so many people attracted to it at these early stages. So, one of the topics I do think we covered a bit, but honestly we could do another entire show on it. Is this idea of digital twins.[00:45:33] Shish brought it up first. I think we touched on it with Nike specifically, and then Trevor highlighted it a bit more for me, the idea of brands using these digital twins to test new products, see what's popular, then use that knowledge and insight and to decide what products and features they wanna drive to scale maybe for a big product launch.[00:45:53] And I think that's a massive use case. It certainly shortens the time to market. In that whole process. So I, I have to believe we're gonna see more and more of that. And I suppose it's kind of right up your alley. Isn't it. Casey.[00:46:03] Casey Golden: Yes, but I mean, the conversations I'm having is, defining a digital twin it's it's, it's turning into an omnichannel debate of like, what is a digital twin? And I've seen brands using digital twining as an opportunity to pre-sell the physical item include an avatar wearable file. So that they are digital twin to their avatar providing a gift with purchase for like a flex on the item, by sharing that an NFT with an, an artistic version or a very photo realistic version of the item kind of with that proof of purchase and authenticity.[00:46:45] And then just to test a new product into the crypto community, right. This web three and crypto community is a different consumer group. They may have had this consumer group already serviced in their stores or online, but they didn't know that trait necessarily. They didn't know that the, that consumer is also part of a different community, then what they might be familiar with or the way that they would've seen their communities in general.[00:47:13] So there's a lot of different digital twins that are out in the market. And I think we really need to understand what is a use case for these digital twins and what do they do because it's consumer facing. And so just like omnichannel, this is gonna get very confusing.[00:47:31] If we can't decide what a digital twin is, and maybe there's a wearable twin or a meta twin, or I don't know, we need to start coming together and using words that mean something[00:47:45] Ricardo Belmar: Be before we have another Omni channel.[00:47:47] Casey Golden: before we have another Omni channel[00:47:51] Ricardo Belmar: You have to agree with that. And you bring up a, a good point too there about the, community building aspect of all of this, especially when you start to tie in web three and NFTs and in the metaverse, which admittedly, we, we didn't have a lot of time to get into that in the clubhouse session. I'm sure there'll be some future sessions for that kind of discussion.[00:48:10] But I, with, with all these kinds of examples, would you say apparel and luxury brands are kind of taking over the early metaverse right now? Are they really the early adopters? I mean, who would you say is missing out right now? That should be jumping in.[00:48:22] Casey Golden: Luxury is leading technology. Like I just said that luxury is leading [00:48:27] Ricardo Belmar: out there now. [00:48:28] Casey Golden: Is out there and I am so, like, I just got goosebumps. Like I am so proud of the luxury industry adopting tech. And being on board this innovation train, it makes so much sense for the luxury space because the crypto and web three, the crypto space is literally the NFT space was built off of rarity, exclusivity, and these are all the values that are shared, you know, VIP's, this is something that luxury space can really get behind because they have the same core values, unlike a self serve model or a Facebook advertising model. It's very hard for them to get on board because the core values at the end of the day are so separate.[00:49:12] So that's why I believe there is a future over here. Luxury's going to figure it out. I don't know what that means at gap, but, Balenciaga is doing a really great job. Gucci's killing it and they're building it into their business. And I think that it's wonderful. They are early adopters. And at the end of the day, we're in the business of selling products, selling physical products.[00:49:37] I haven't spoken to a single brand that has been excited about selling a digital good. they're like, so if I make this 3d asset or this digital good, or this NFT, like how much product can I move?[00:49:50] Ricardo Belmar: Right. Yeah. How does that help me sell the physical products I'm sell.[00:49:55] Casey Golden: They want to sell physical goods. Even though like, it could be a lot cheaper to sell digital goods. We are going to be figuring out what these digital twins are and how they're going to facilitate these real life purchases. And that's essentially how it's going to be defined, but the brands see I'm finding, they just wanna sell more product.[00:50:15] Ricardo Belmar: right. [00:50:15] I mean, at the end of the day, the digital goods they might sell, it's like in the, all the video game, virtual worlds where you see all of these digital assets sold, it's, it's real money. It's, meaningful money, but compared to what these luxury brands are selling and, and generating in sales, in physical goods, it's an incremental revenue at most. It's not gonna replace the physical goods revenue, but it helps motivate more physical sales.[00:50:40] Casey Golden: oh my goodness. I just have to share this there is narrative out here right now. That that there are companies that are creating digital clothing saying that this is the most sustainable way to shop, and this is how we're going to save the world. I'm like, I'm sorry, but what are we wearing me buying a digital t-shirt.[00:51:02] How is that[00:51:03] Ricardo Belmar: help you in the real[00:51:04] Casey Golden: shopping? [00:51:07] Ricardo Belmar: How are you, how are you, wearing that digital t-shirt Casey[00:51:10] Casey Golden: Right. Like, I'm sorry, but that's not going to work. I still need to go buy physical clothes, but just the narrative twist on this, that this is the most sustainable way to shop, and [00:51:20] Ricardo Belmar: That's one way to look at[00:51:21] Casey Golden: these resources.[00:51:22] Ricardo Belmar: That's one way to look at it.[00:51:24] Casey Golden: I just couldn't, I just couldn't.[00:51:26] I had to, just leave for a moment and I'm like, yeah, I don't even know how to have a conversation with this person right now, because , they do not believe that anybody should be physically manufacturing clothes. I'm like, this is kinda impossible here.[00:51:41] Ricardo Belmar: That's gonna go far in the, in the industry for sure.[00:51:43] Casey Golden: Yeah. I just like, okay, I'm confused, but okay. Continue.[00:51:49] So one thing that, that came up in the clubhouse discussion that is worth more attention is this idea of multiple metaverses. What'd you get, let's just keep confusing the consumer, but you have some thoughts on this and I'd love

In 2010, over a sushi dinner with a friend, Jason sparked an interest in what would become his next entrepreneurial adventure: transforming modern card issuing. With a deep intellectual curiosity for how credit cards work, Jason built Marqeta to bring game-changing card products into the world. Marqeta now works with customers in 39 countries, has a team of nearly 900 employees, and IPOed in 2021. Jason shares how he almost moved to Australia to start a Jamba Juice-style chain before Marqeta, how he persevered after nearly running out of money in 2015, and why he's fueled by the challenge of people not believing in him.

In episode 10 of the podcast (@AugmentedPod (https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod)), the topic is “A Brief History of Manufacturing Software.” Our guest is Rick Bullotta, Partner, TwinThread, and co-founder, ThingWorx. In this conversation, we talk about how Rick has shaped manufacturing software history and the lessons learned from being an early employee of Wonderware, the famous precursor to manufacturing automation, back in 1993, a company first sold to British engineering giant Siebe in 1998, which merged with BTR to form Invensys, which, in turn, merged with French multinational Schneider Electric, and later the CTO. Rick Bullotta was also the co-founder of Lighthammer Software which was later acquired by SAP, then in 2009 founding ThingWorx, the first complete, end-to-end technology platform designed for the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) which was acquired by PTC in 2003. We also touch on his current advice to founders in the industrial space, his board role at Tulip, and what he sees lie ahead for the industry. After listening to this episode, check out Thingworx as well as Rick Bullotta's social profile. * Thingworx (https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/iiot/product-brief/thingworx-platform) * Rick Bullotta (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickbullotta/) Trond's takeaway: Wonderware, Lighthammer, and ThingWorx are prominent parts of manufacturing software history, and there's a chance that the 4th company he now is involved with, Tulip, also will be. I do things with things is Rick Bullotta's motto. The things he does, he does them well, and it is an internet of things, more than anything else. I, for one, am eagerly listening to what he predicts will happen next. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like episode 4: A Renaissance of Manufacturing or episode 5: Plug-and-Play Industrial Tech. Augmented--the industry 4.0 podcast. Transcript: Augmented reveals the stories behind a new era of industrial operations where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In Episode 10 of the podcast, the topic is a Brief History of Manufacturing Software. Our guest is Rick Bullotta, Partner at TwinThread and Co-Founder of ThingWorx. In this conversation, we talk about how Rick has shaped manufacturing software history and the lessons learned from being an early employee with Wonderware, the famous precursor to manufacturing automation, back in 1993, a company first sold to British engineering giant Siebe in 1998, which then merged with BTR to form Invensys, which in turn merged with French and multinational Schneider Electric and later the CTO. Rick Bullotta was also the Co-Founder of Lighthammer Software which was later acquired by SAP. Then in 2009, founding ThingWorx, the first complete end-to-end technology platform designed for the industrial internet of things, which was acquired by PTC in 2003. We also touch on his current advice to founders in the industrial space, his board role at Tulip, and what he sees lie ahead for the industry. Augmented is a podcast for leaders hosted by futurist, Trond Arne Undheim, presented by Tulip.co, the manufacturing app platform, and associated with MFG Works, the manufacturing upskilling community launched at the World Economic Forum. Each episode dives deep into a contemporary topic of concern across the industry and airs at 9:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time every Wednesday. Augmented - the industry 4.0 podcast. TROND: Rick, how are you today? RICK: Good morning. TROND: Well, it's a nice morning. I wanted to talk to you about some history. RICK: Sure. TROND: Well, you are a bit of a legend in this field, Rick. You've been basically part of almost every development in this field for several years. I wanted us to spend a little time today, not just going into your history of background as the founder of several startups that have had very significant impact on the industry but also just bring people in a little bit to the environment and how it has changed, and how based on your perspective, you see it evolving. You had a degree from Cornell, and then you went on to fund several companies. Can you bring us back to those days when you were studying industrial engineering at Cornell? What was the environment then for manufacturing? And what was it that brought you into the thought that you would start engaging sort of entrepreneurial software development in manufacturing of all fields? RICK: Just to be clear, I barely graduated. [laughter] So I had a fantastic time in college. But that was when I think we thought of engineers as mechanical engineers, or chemical engineers, the physical aspects of making things, building things, vending product as opposed to...I think software and technology was kind of a nascent concept there, at least certainly in manufacturing. But I actually switched degrees from mechanical engineering to operations research mid-stride there, realizing that looking at pieces of broken metal under a microscope wasn't for me. So I graduated. My degree was in operations research, and actually, my first position was at a very progressive steel company called Lukens Steel, doing essentially industrial engineering work. However, this was what? 1985, dawn of the PC, dawn of a new gen of computing. And some opportunities opened up there to kind of take on some additional responsibilities that involved applying computing to simulations and optimization models, all the stuff that I studied but never thought I'd actually practice. So I'd spend a lot of time in the local library checking out software, take the disc home, teach myself to code. An opportunity then opened up to go into steel plant operation. So I used to run a heat-treating process. And that's one thing that a university degree won't prepare you for, having 15 steelworkers working for you. That's where you get a real education. You also quickly realize that the exception is the rule on the manufacturing floor. And we'll talk later about how it gave me a great appreciation of the importance of the role of people in this whole process and not just technology. But yeah, I spent a few years in that role and then moved back over to an industrial computing group. And we were applying at the time very advanced technology, mini computers, very innovative user interfaces, high levels of automation to some of these processes back at the very site that I worked. And the very operations that I worked at was one of the first places for that. So that's kind of where I got into the technology side of things. But I like to say I was blessed and lucky, right? This crusty, old steel company happened to be very, very committed to investing in technology. And it was a learning opportunity for me. And then, across the years, I moved into systems integration. I did some stuff in discrete manufacturing. I had the opportunity; again, luck sometimes happens here, to work for arguably the first well-known company in the industrial software space company called Wonderware, first IPO in the space. And I joined very early, which is kind of cool. TROND: The Wonderware story is somewhat famous for people inside of manufacturing, but just in case, there are some listeners here who don't really appreciate how early Wonderware was. What was the situation when you created your first product? And why, in your account, has it become so emblematic of that early-early era? And what year are we talking about exactly when that entered the stage with Wonderware? RICK: So late '80s, early '90s Wonderware came on the scene. I joined in; I believe it was '93. And my role there was actually in sales. So you'll find that a lot of my life experiences are all the elements that help build a successful business: sales, marketing, technology. So the founding team there...and there'll be a circle of life moment here in a little bit when we talk about how ThingWorx came to be. The two key co-founders there, Dennis Morin and Phil Huber, recognized the value. And they harnessed the PC revolution and Microsoft Windows. So we're talking Wayback Machine when Windows looked like the Mac user interface. There wasn't a lot of PC application on the plant floor. There were some very interesting companies that I had worked with, competitors to Wonderware but a bit earlier companies like [inaudible 7:28] But we were just kind of at that inflection point where people were comfortable with the role of the personal computer as this kind of human interface to all the automation systems that we had. What Dennis and Phil did was really twofold. And this, I think, ties into a lot of the innovation we're seeing today is they democratized the ability to build applications. They made it easy and fun. So the whole experience wasn't coding; it was very visual. It leveraged kind of a drag and drop experience. You didn't need to understand software to apply it. You could build these incredible applications literally in minutes or hours, connect them to the physical world. I don't know if you've ever seen some of the classic applications they've built. But they're those process mimics, very dynamic graphics that represent the physical world. And I learned a lot during that period about the importance of two things: one is ease of use and empowering others to build applications, particularly in the manufacturer domain. Second was, ironically, the importance of marketing. If there's one thing, that company did extraordinarily well in addition to having a great product was getting the message out there, maintaining a larger-than-life image. And the company grew rapidly to 5 million, 10 million, 15, 20, and on and on, and then IPOed. But there wasn't anybody in history that didn't know the name. Go to a trade show...this is a company that kind of put some perspective. I think the first year I was there; we did about 20 million in revenues. We spent about a million-five on a party. That's kind of the priorities were well balanced there. But what an extraordinary group of people to learn from; I developed lifelong mentors and friends at that company that fast forward to my last company, some of those same people came and joined my team. So it was a complete honor to work with them again, so yeah. TROND: So back in those days, what was it that Wonderware apart from the marketing side, and like you said, the menus and things...first of all, who was the target audience at this point? Was this still process engineers that were doing this, or was it still the IT department managing? RICK: Typically process engineers, and that was the democratization, taking it out of that...let's go back to my time in the steel industry. We were writing Fortran code, PL/M code. We were writing code. We were creating database schema, all the kinds of classic development processes. And it was part of a corporate IT function. Now, this shifted to empowering two main groups, process engineers inside these manufacturing companies and, secondly, a new breed of systems integrators that were very, very focused on this automation domain. So historically, they may have done the physical automation, the PLCs, the actuators, sensing distributed control systems. Now they were able to take on this role. Two other things happened. Just prior to the advent of things like [inaudible 10:42] and Wonderware, that user experience was physical gauges, and push buttons, and things like that, and sliders. Now, it became digital. In a way, this was almost like magic at the time. It's virtual reality. It's like a lot of people the first time...I'll never forget my mother the first time she played solitaire on a PC and that virtual card dragging. It was just utter magic. Well, similar experience here, right? People were able to reproduce these and rapidly reconfigure. But to your point, I would say, yeah, it was those in-house process engineers and the systems integrators that helped implement these systems. TROND: Were you all aware of how innovative you were? I mean, clearly, the marketing department thought you were something special. But did you realize at the time how timeless and etched into manufacturing history Wonderware would become later? Were you aware of how far ahead this was? Or were the customers telling you that clearly? RICK: That's a great question. I think it was a combination of both. We had an almost cult-like customer following that was pretty unique, and it created a lot of energy. They knew we were doing something interesting. But we had very legitimate competitors who were also doing super cool stuff. I think another life lesson here was a lot of companies create great products. To bring great products to market at scale is a whole nother task. It's a whole nother challenge. And I think what we had going for us was an absolutely extraordinary distribution channel, global distribution channels, and very energetic, bright people, independent businesses that could sell, support, implement this technology. That allowed us to achieve scale pretty quickly. But the customers were the primary feedback loop. We won all kinds of awards from the trade rags, all that kind of stuff. I definitely think it was the kinds of applications that the customers were building. That always gives you energy when you see that. TROND: Rick, give me another sense of as we're sort of moving to your next company, just bring us back to that time with the early years of Wonderware. What were some of the things that were challenging to you on the application side then that today we would laugh off and it would just be like a line item? What were some of the things that were really complicated that you were so proud of having accomplished? RICK: Well, let's just take the obvious, which is sort of the inverse of Moore's law. If we turn the clock back that many years, we have half as much compute power every year. And to have a very graphical dynamic user experience, it had to be reliable. I would not underestimate the incredible work that that development team did to take not only a new product in what we built with InTouch, which was the product at the time but also Windows itself. It wasn't evolved. It wasn't mature. It certainly wasn't targeted at these kinds of mission-critical applications. So those were the kinds of things you had to work with. You had to make it robust, reliable, and take advantage of very, very limited compute and visualization capability at the time. It changed the modalities by way...people typically, you know, we were all used to keyboards at the time. Now it's touch; it's a mouse. It's a different means of interaction. And then how do you bring that? Some interesting challenges. Like, I'm a task worker down on the floor in protective equipment and gloves, and how do I interact with that? So all kinds of creative stuff to try and bring a whole new modality of human interaction to a pretty demanding segment. TROND: So what then happened to you? What happened around you leaving Wonderware and moving on to the next challenges? Because you've also had a foray in larger companies, but then you immediately went back to the startup world. Give me a sense of what was your thinking then? RICK: Sure. So there was a little detour as there are often in our careers. [laughs] I left and experimented. I actually came back to Wonderware a second time prior to my first startup in a product management role. I got to see M&A. So we got involved in a couple of key acquisitions that I was intimately involved in. So that was another learning experience for me. Then I saw this opportunity at a level above the Wonderwares of the world, of the OSIsofts of the world, of all these kinds of operational systems that we had. They were islands. No one had that holistic view, a supervisor, an operator. No one was sharing information. And so the light bulb went off. This is actually about when the web technologies were starting to get a little traction, the browser, the Netscape effect, ubiquitous TCP/IP connectivity, Ethernet, and the plants. So that's when the light bulb went off. Let's see if we could do something not dissimilar from the way a Wonderware product will connect all your centers and controllers. Why not provide a unified way to see all the systems that you have? So basically, that's what became Lighthammer, and that was in 1998, we started that company. But the intent was, again, to provide that unified view of first...it was called the Plant Information Portal. That was another cool word at the time, right? Portals. And so that was the objective, it's kind of unified visibility. I started the company with some colleagues that I knew from Wonderware. And we built, I think, something pretty groundbreaking there. TROND: And the situation then was there was this need for almost like an information service to kind of...it was almost like an early portal for the industry in a sense. RICK: I think what we found...the unique thing about the industrial space I like to say that everything's a legacy the moment it gets put in. Everything has proprietary APIs, interfaces, and protocols. My approach has always been solve hard problems because you're going to have fewer competitors, and the value is there. So we tried to solve a pretty hard problem, all these like debubblizing all these different crazy systems that were scattered around. Yeah, so that's really what the objective was initially, unified visibility. But then we realized if people can see that information, why can't other systems? So it rapidly progressed from just being empowering people with information to empowering other lines of business systems. So your supply chain systems, warehouse systems, ERP systems can now be informed with real information in a timely manner. And that was what got us on SAP's radar. TROND: Well, because the point was there that you started discovering the importance of standards. And there were standards at that time, but they were very basic web standards. And you started realizing that even in the side of the industrial field, you had to start depending on that. Is that also what got you involved in the intersection of interoperability and also open sourcing certain types of software? RICK: Yeah. In fact, we were actively involved in a lot of open-source projects. I think that was also early in the open-source world. So if something was broken, no one was going to fix it for you; you fix it, right? TROND: [chuckles] RICK: So yeah, if you want to leverage and get value out of open source, you better be prepared to give back. So as a company, we definitely gave back to a lot of interesting projects that became part of the Lighthammer stack. The other thing that I think is important to understand is, and this pattern repeats itself in my career, is building tools, not applications. My goal was always to empower people to build interesting stuff. They've got the ideas. They've got the innovations living inside them. But if it's hard, if there's friction at every point in the process, cost, time, whatever, they're not going to undertake it, so whether it was Wonderware stuff we were implementing, Lighthammer, ThingWorx. And nowadays, with solutions like Tulip, it really was all about that takedown friction, empower non-technical people to be innovators and do it fast. TROND: So, Rick, then you got on SAP's radar. Tell me a little bit about not necessarily your experience there per se but just the difference for you in having straddled a startup that gets on the radar of a large company, and now you're working in a large company. What's the situation there? What is their understanding of the shop floor, and how does that all work? Because it gets more complicated when you're that kind of a software environment. RICK: Well, I think SAP was a very good place to be for a number of reasons. SAP was dominant in the manufacturing vertical in terms of cost manufacturing. Customers, the vast majority of them ran SAP for their back-office systems. SAP had kind of light solutions for the manufacturing domain but a desire to go deeper. Secondly, they were launching a partner ecosystem at the time. We wanted to prove that, in fact, partners are an integral part to their offerings. So we were able to kind of get that visibility, but also, we started stealing some revenue. So when you start taking customer spend instead of upgrading that module in my ERP system, I'm going to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on my plant floor. That gets you on the radar too. Interesting sidenote, so after SAP, the salespeople told us something fascinating. If you think about in a typical manufacturing company, there's arguably four to seven times more blue-collar...I hate the term blue-collar, task worker, you know, frontline workers, so to speak. But that's got a new meaning nowadays as opposed to back office. Secondly, we had something that not only had a user license for each manufacturing worker but also manufacturing site costs. So think about comparing selling something to the CFO's office that will run in a data center. The scale and size of the deals were pretty substantial, and there was real value being created. So I think in the first year, our sales grew like 800%, 900% from a pretty good base, having that ready base of manufacturing customers to sell into a global company with global sales and support presence. It's pretty easy to get traction there. TROND: But then you had a stint back at Wonderware before you went on to found a new company. What was that like? So you came back and now kind of almost running the show at Wonderware for a little bit. RICK: No, not really because I think the company...this was an interesting dynamic. The company had grown substantially by that point, so from 60 people in my first experience to probably 800 at that point. I was a remote CTO. This was long before remote work was a thing. It was extremely challenging. And I just think those dynamics kind of made it probably not as effective as I could be. That said, some work that I had done in SAP research is what kind of led to the ideas behind ThingWorx. And I actually think, to be blunt, I think Wonderware at the time could have realized those pretty well. Collectively, we could have brought that product to market probably faster of what became ThingWorx. But it just for a variety of reasons, it wasn't the right time, fit, location, all those kinds of things. So dove back into it again, got the band back together, so to speak. TROND: How did that happen? Because at this point, you're not new to startups, and you have had a taste of the corporate world, in fact, in two leading positions, I guess. What is it that then motivates you to go back into that grind, and then you found a groundbreaking company? [laughs] RICK: Part of it is you feel like you cheated on the test. You've got the scars. You've had the lessons learned. I think we had a pretty well-rounded idea on what the new product was going to be, how we were going to take it to market. So I think we actually went in with a pretty solid plan rather than just A; we're going to do some R&D. Secondly, my business partners at Lighthammer were my business partners at ThingWorx, common investors. And some new folks that I worked with at Wonderware joined the team. It was sort of...I'm not going to say we couldn't fail. There were a lot of things we could have done wrong. But we had an incredible team of people with a lot of experience building companies like this, selling software like this. I had a pretty good feeling that we were on the right track there. TROND: And what exactly was ThingWorx in the early days? Because you read things like machine to machine, and those are terms that only much later...today we call internet of things. But you guys were very, very early, honestly, in that domain to produce products in that space when most people were just starting. Machine to machine didn't mean anything to people back then. RICK: And I think where we did well was going a little bit beyond that. And you'll see, once again, it's a pattern that repeats itself, the importance of people, the machines, and the other systems and processes that people have in their companies. Synthesizing all those together is actually where the value nexus is just massive. Any one of those taken in isolation or the connections between them, yeah, there's value to be done. But so we went in kind of with a broad...rather than just machine to machine. And there were some companies doing cool stuff just for getting updates down to an MRI machine or whatever. But we tried to go beyond that. We also realized early on the classic issue; it's good to know what you don't know. And remote access over unreliable links and all that stuff was something...My team had primarily lived in what we would jokingly call the internets of things. Everything's on the local network. You have different considerations. So we acquired a company, a super team, a small company that had a lot of expertise in the kind of internet of things and that remote connectivity, remote management, and that was this the second wave of rocket fuel to get things going. TROND: That's interesting you say that because I think that temptation for many would be you're so far ahead, and you start building things, and you're building things in the future. But I mean, surely, the reality is the shop floor and other things, and you're dealing with poor internet connections. Forget skills. I mean, you're actually dealing with a network that doesn't scale to your idea. RICK: Exactly right. And it was a very interesting balance between...I oversimplify kind of that industrial IoT is smart, connected operations and things like that, so factories, power plants, and then connected fleets of stuff, trucks, MRI machines, light towers, and cities, radically different requirements. One's 98% on-prem, one's 99.9% cloud, one's intermittent, unreliable, expensive connectivity, one's reliable, isolated. So we built a platform to serve both of those tests. In retrospect, we probably made compromises along the way to accommodate that. But still, today, I think PTC's revenue with ThingWorx is fairly well split between those two domains. But that was an interesting challenge on its own because the requirements were dramatically different. TROND: But again, you got acquired. So is this a pattern in your companies? Or is it more a pattern in the field that, at a certain point...because, I mean, I'm making this up here. But is there something about the industry itself that lends itself very easily to just in order to get that scale, you have to be acquired, and it's very desirable? Or is it more a choice that you each time made to say we've built it to a certain scale? RICK: I think in our segment, there are the rare few that an IPO track makes sense, and it's achievable. I think, for the most part, companies in our domain are...they're talking acquisitions to technology companies, cloud companies, enterprise app companies, industrial automation companies. So they have the luxury of we can be the innovation engine. It doesn't have to come off... If you think about a BigCo that wants to build something organically, every dollar they submit...first of all, they're typically 10 to 20 times, and it's just reality, less efficient in developing software for a variety of reasons. And that money comes off the bottom line. So it's actually an interesting dynamic that it's almost more attractive for them as well. But the ThingWorx story is super interesting in the sense that I told someone the other day...so Jim Heppelmann super visionary right there. He had this concept of the digital twin and IoT connected with products way back. And he actually took some of his best and brightest people, his CTO, a number of other people, moved them out of their office, put them in the Cambridge Innovation Center, and said, "Go create something." Well, along the way, we got introduced to that team. And they came to the conclusion that, hey, it's going to be faster, cheaper. We can get to market capture mindshare quicker through acquisition. And if you think about it, that's a very...immature is not the right word. I don't even know what the word I'm looking for here, but it's you've just been given an opportunity to intrapreneur. You've got a clean sheet of paper, all the fun stuff after grinding out your day job for years. And you make that decision to well; we're not going to do that. We're going to go buy a company. I have huge respect for that. And it turned out to be a very good decision for everyone involved. So that's actually how that happened. We were an intrapreneurial effort at a relatively large company, decided to go and become acquisitive instead. And that's worked out quite well. TROND: So we haven't talked so much about the surrounding companies throughout these years. But were there other companies doing innovative things? I'm not so familiar with the history of all of the kind of less successful or less visible manufacturing IT companies throughout the early '90s. What was wrong with some of those, and why don't we talk about them? I mean, are they also still part of the picture? Were there smaller acquisitions that go into this history? RICK: Yeah, there's actually a lot that we were doing right. It was a big enough pie that the gorilla, you know, in the segment might only have a 20-something percent market share. So it was still fairly fragmented. It's partially because of geography, partially because of different segments, and partially just because it was such a big opportunity. The companion market to a lot of what I was doing, for example, at Wonderware and Lighthammer, was the data side of it. So that's the historian companies. Greatest example of that recently is the acquisition of OSIsoft by AVEVA for $5 billion, biggest little company you never heard of. I mean, just a fantastic success story. They stuck to what they did very well and built essentially a dominant market position. They had competitors with good products as well. But I think they're one of those success stories in that space that's only visible to most people now. We had competitors in almost every company I've ever worked at that had great solutions. But this is, again, where I think the X factor stuff comes into play. Your go-to-market machine, the passion that your team and people have that's contagious. If people really believe and they interact with customers and partners, it's just magic. The second thing was, again, where you're really doing useful stuff for customers. Some companies were software companies. Some companies were really just integration companies masquerading as software companies. But, Trond, you know this. There's no shortage of bright people on this planet, and it's -- TROND: Well, sure, there's no shortage of bright people. But I guess this is the third segment that I wanted us to get into. You kind of have a third career now, which is this portfolio life, I guess. [laughs] You can characterize it yourself, but I don't know how to explain it otherwise where you're seeing, first of all, a number of companies and the maturity, I guess, in the space, that's a little different. But you are in a different stage in your career. And I want to eventually get to Tulip and discuss why you got involved with that. But first, maybe you can address some of these portfolio things that you're doing right now. RICK: Sure. TROND: Obviously, mentoring a lot more and getting involved on the board side. How do you see even just the last five years? What's happening right now? Where are we right now with manufacturing software? RICK: So generically, I would say I'm doing manufacturing and adjacent stuff, kind of IoT industrial. I am so excited that it's cool again, right? Because it was for two decades. It was like -- TROND: Well, you were never concerned about that, surely. [laughs] RICK: But, you know, what's the old...in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So if you were cool within your segment, you didn't have to be that great. And you could have done underselling what we achieved at the different companies. But I think it really has visibility now. There's investment money flowing into it. I think the increasing importance of...we kind of hit that little productivity inflection point where it started to flatten out. People are investing in technology. The challenges around people there's just not a lot of know-how, or there's much less know-how about everything from manufacturing operations to the different tasks that get performed to the technologies. So, how do we offset that? So technology is starting to fill an increasingly important role of focused VCs, and focused investors, and focused incubators around this kind of stuff. I think that's probably the biggest change. And then, like any technology segment, the building blocks, the Lego blocks that we build from, just get better and better and better. Someone that wants to add AI capabilities to their solution today, it's never been easier. I want to add Vision. Now, what you do with it can be very differentiating. But my point is that the building blocks we have today are just better than ever. I think the challenge...what's changed maybe in a negative, I think the way you get to customers, get to market has changed and become more challenging. An example, if you think about a venture-funded or otherwise funded startup, turn the clock back 10 or 15 years. We primarily sold perpetual licenses plus maintenance. So you get a big chunk of revenue upfront. Today in the SaaS and subscription world, in essence, we're all in the financing business. We're financing our cost of sales, our R&D., So the capital requirements for companies in our segment are bigger than they ever have been. And we see that with some of the raises, but that's just a reality. That dynamic perhaps even gets ignored sometimes, but it is a big change. Yeah, and then, you know, just to -- TROND: And what got you to Tulip? RICK: So I think it was actually indirectly through Wonderware, if I recall. So Natan and team and Rony and team were looking around at comparables. What are some companies that have been successful growing a business in this space? And he kind of had the hit list of Wonderware folks that he wanted to talk to. And somewhere, somehow, I don't recall the exact moment, but we connected up, and I got it. When he explained what they were doing. The light bulb went off, and I said, "I'd love to be part of this." So I'm both an investor and advisor in the company. And also, I love smart people, like innovative people. TROND: [laughs] RICK: And there's no shortage of those in Natan's team. So first visit there, seeing what they were doing, meeting the team, it was like, all right, there's something going on here. TROND: So tell me what it is that you saw because I was also...I was at MIT at the time when Natan created the company. And I remember vividly going into the lab or whatever you want to describe his early workspace. Because that's what it was, right? It felt like a lab. RICK: Sure. TROND: But the stuff that was coming out was incredible. What do you think? Was it the product vision, or was it just a capability of the people that you saw early on? And now that you're looking at Tulip and its environment, what is being accomplished right now, would you say with this new app reality? RICK: I think it was the aggregate of all the above. Because great example, if you recall the first demo scenario with the mixed reality projecting instructions onto the work –- TROND: That was crazy. That demo was for me, the demo of all demos in the -- [laughs] RICK: Absolutely. TROND: It was crazy. RICK: And I said, wow, you're taking a very fresh look at a problem here. And obviously, with their collective backgrounds, really interesting mix of skill sets, they're going to do cool stuff. And I think Natan and team would be the first to admit they were coming in with not a lot of domain knowledge. They had been involved in companies that made stuff, but there was a learning curve for sure. And that's what a lot of...not just myself, but they had a lot of advisors, customer feedback, brought in some folks into the team, and then just learned on the job training, engaging with customers, engaging in pilots. So I think it took a year or two to kind of get grounded in what are some of the realities of the shop floor, not that they didn't have a good idea. But once that kind of confluence of smart people, customers starting to do cool stuff with it, and the end the product itself evolving, then that's kind of when the rocket took off. TROND: Well, this is interesting what you're saying here because as I'm interviewing a lot of people who have innovated in this space, time and again, what comes back is this is not just your average software innovation garage. A lab is not a garage. Literally, you can be as smart as you are. You can have a big team of smart people. But unless you get coupled up with that manufacturing shop floor experience, you don't stand a chance, or you just can't build. You can't get past the demo. Tell me more about that one because you have had it ingrained. We talked about this a few minutes ago. You started out that way. But there are so many more innovators these days that they can't; well, maybe they can start out, but they haven't started out on the shop floor, so many of them. RICK: I wish they would...everybody who wants to get in this space needs to do...the equivalent of in law enforcement would be a ride-along. You go and spend a couple of nights working the streets. You realize how things really work. It's not like TV. It's not like you read in your textbooks. So there's no substitute for it, even if it's like super-concentrated real-world experience actually going out and spending some time with customers, real-world experience. But I also think it's the third leg of the stool, which is important. It's the technology expertise and creating products. It's manufacturing domain knowledge and then figuring out how to get it in front of customers and sell it. We can never underestimate the importance of that. So that's another thing that I think Tulip took a lot of very iterative and A/B style testing approaches to go-to-market models and continue to innovate and experiment. It's a challenging space to do low-touch, but they've found a niche with that, particularly as a means to plant seeds of customers that can take a first taste of the technology like, wow, that's pretty awesome. The holy grail, I think, for a lot of companies in our space to try to figure out how to do that. No one's really completely cracked the code yet. So it's a kind of combination model. But the domain expertise, a couple of key hires, for example, a great example is the hires they made in the pharmaceutical industry. So life sciences now has become a really, really powerful vertical for Tulip as a result of bringing in civilian expertise plus the evolution of the product from a platform and tooling and some hardware to application, so the app marketplace that they launched. Now when I'm a buyer, you can approach not only that developer buyer, that integrator buyer, but now you can approach a business buyer and say, "I've got all these apps you can assemble together or just use as is." That was also a maturity thing. So it took the domain knowledge, interaction with customers, and then you can progressively build more into the software itself and less that the customer has to configure. That maturation has been pretty exciting to see. TROND: Rick, we've been through a history here that's very, very exciting to me and, I think to listeners. What's next for the digital factory, for the manufacturing, execution systems, all these acronyms? I tried to shy away from them a little bit because we had so many, many other interesting things to talk about today. But if you're looking to the next decade, the holy grail you mentioned, or this final integration project that would marry software, hardware, shop floor, and considering all the challenges that just the past year has brought us, and let's not even bring into it all of the other challenges of this decade and of this century, if you're going to go into the big words. Where are we headed? RICK: I'll maybe focus on where I hope we head, which looks perhaps a little bit different. I started the discussion with one of the things that I learned in my first job working in the plant flow is the importance of people, the knowledge that they have, the experience that they have. People in a lot of our processes are still the sensor, the algorithm, and the actuator. Like it or not, we haven't yet reproduced the human hand. We haven't yet reproduced the human brain. There are some really unique things about humans. And in that context, I hope that the next decade or so is about collaborative technology and how we use robotics, and AI, and information, and mixed reality to help people be better at what they do. And there's always a risk of dehumanization in something like that where people become interchangeable and they don their Iron Man assembly suit. But I'll maybe take a more optimistic view that it's really...we're going to continue to increase productivity output. But there are so many roles like that that could benefit from the synthesis of all these cool technologies that we have. I maintain that there's no such thing as an AI market. There's no such thing as an IoT market; that they're all just building blocks, right? It's what we assemble to solve some actual problem that is interesting. I'm hoping, and I'm confident, that the bar to implement these things becomes increasingly lower. AR is a great example today. It's hard. Building content is time-consuming and difficult. So maybe that's the next one that needs to bring the content creation to mixed reality, next-gen robotics, codebots, and some really interesting stuff happening there. The democratization of machine vision, and audio, and meta sensing that's happening. TROND: But it's interesting you're saying they're still our building blocks, and they're still our collaboration challenges. And maybe those collaboration challenges are going to have to last longer than a decade, and maybe we need more building blocks. But what comes after that once a critical mass of building blocks get assembled? And you have watched this decade by decade that there's a certain coalescence of building blocks, and then a new platform is formed. But still, in this industry, as you have said, so far, most of the time, these new platforms merge into the more traditional platform players, or they merge into more established. Is that a pattern that you see also in this decade? Or will we see the first mega conglomerates come out of completely new manufacturing combination platforms that are integrating all of these technologies and doing something truly new and can sustain their own new creation, whatever iteration of the manufacturing industry that would become? RICK: And I don't know if it's going to be necessarily the suppliers that become the mega innovators. What may well happen is that the manufacturers themselves start to become because the tools have become so powerful that they become the mega. If you actually take a deep dive into a lot of really innovative manufacturing companies, it's the machines that they built to make the product. It's the processes they use to make the product. That's where some of the real breakthroughs happen. That doesn't come from outside. Now, sometimes suppliers can provide some of that equipment. So maybe this is just an amplifier for that. And the second thing is I know is coming is this massive disintermediation of manufacturing. So we already have companies where the brand owner contracts the design of the product. It contracts people to make the products. It contracts people to service the product and sell the product. So they're literally just the brand name on top of it. Now you matrix that, right? Where you have companies with very, very flexible manufacturing capacity that's additive or traditional. Who knows, right? But I think a manufacturing supply chain 10-20 years from now is going to look radically different. Fewer companies will be making stuff on their own. But the companies that are making stuff will be really applying some innovative technology to be flexible, versatile. That's never going to happen for grunt commodity stuff where the cost to produce matter; you do purpose-built. But increasingly, look at the proliferation rate on new product introductions and electronic products and so many different things in our lives, clothing, right? There are so many things that we could innovate faster if the manufacturing systems themselves could adapt faster. Maybe that's an outcome. TROND: Well, I mean, whichever of these scenarios pan out, it seems to me that at least segments of this industry, if it remains, you know if you can talk about it as one industry anymore, is going to be super exciting. So that brings me, I guess, to just my closing question. If you were to advise a young person today who is maybe thinking about college, or they're thinking about should I follow my passion, which happens to be actually going and making and building things? Or should I get a theoretical education, or is that a false choice? Where should they go today? There's this dichotomy between getting a four-year education versus just going and getting some skills like we have been talking about, so you have some inkling of where you actually need to be to understand in order to produce the innovations. RICK: I think all the above, and let me elaborate on that a little bit. When I was in university, I created my own co-ops in the summer. So I worked...I sought them out. My son's at Drexel University now, and a co-op program is an integral part of his education there. For a lot of folks, getting kids particularly exposed to co-ops and those kinds of internships give you two things. It might tell you what you don't want to do just as much as you want to do, which is I think a lot of people in their career would wish they knew that earlier. It helps you get that real-world experience and just interacting with people. So I think that aspect of in your university education doing a diverse and interesting set of co-ops would be very valuable. Having a liberal arts aspect to any technical education or focus skills education is still valid. You have to know how to read, write, speak, those kinds of things. Design is ever increasingly important. The polymath is going to be a great skill to have. Secondly, learning has never been easier. You've got so many online resources as well. If you need a technical skill, I mean, I could probably learn neurosurgery on YouTube if I really needed to if there was no other option, you know, 60% chance that patient would live. TROND: [laughs] RICK: But we have so many different resources. I'm a believer in lifelong learning. So it's not a static thing. Certainly, a highly specialized skill if you're going to be geneticists doing CRISPR whatever, you need to spend 8-10 years of true rigorous study to master a lot of that kind of stuff. Maybe not; maybe that's even getting easier. TROND: Ricky, you just brought me back to eighth grade and my one-week internship at the National Geological Lab, where I was sorting through minerals. And it's incredible how one week is etched into my mind. I don't think about it every time, and I haven't thought about it for years. But while you were just describing with seeking out these internships, you brought it all back to me. And I can almost remember how the Monday was different from the Tuesday rotation when I went through that institute. There is just no comparison to that kind of real-life experience. RICK: And the other advice that I give any person is versatile set of skills. Do a sales role sometime in your life. You might hate it, you might despise it, but you're going to learn what the salespeople in your company go through. You might love it, and it becomes a career. Communications, what your marketing folks have. Having a diverse set of skills and getting exposure...maybe it happened accidentally for me. Those were the opportunities that presented themselves, but I think having that diverse skill set and toolbox is extremely valuable, particularly if you want to start a company. TROND: Rick, I thank you so much. We have gone way over what I had promised and even my promise to our listeners to be very succinct. But this has been, for me, at least a fascinating roller coaster through your career and throughout manufacturing, both history and future. I thank you very, very much. RICK: My pleasure. TROND: You have just listened to Episode 10 of The Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. And the topic was A Brief History of Manufacturing Software. Our guest was Rick Bullotta, Partner at TwinThread and Co-Founder of ThingWorx. In this conversation, we talk about how Rick has shaped manufacturing software history and the lessons learned from being an early employee at Wonderware, the famous precursor to manufacturing automation, back in 1993, a company first sold to British engineering giant Siebe in 1998, which merged with BTR to form Invensys, which in turn merged with French multinational Schneider Electric and later the CTO. Rick Bullotta was also the Co-Founder of Lighthammer Software, which was later acquired by SAP. Then in 2009, founding ThingWorx, the first complete end-to-end technology platform designed for the industrial internet of things, which was acquired by PTC in 2003. We also touch on his current advice to founders in the industrial space, his board role at Tulip, and what he sees lie ahead for the industry. My take is that Wonderware, Lighthammer, and ThingWorx are prominent parts of manufacturing software history, and there's a chance that the 4th company he now is involved with, Tulip, also will be. I do things with things is Rick Bullotta's motto. The things he does, he does them well, and it is an internet of things, more than anything else. I, for one, am eagerly listening to what he predicts will happen next. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 4: A Renaissance of Manufacturing or Episode 5: Plug-and-Play Industrial Tech. Augmented- the industry 4.0 podcast. Special Guest: Rick Bullota.

There were loads of easy ways to make money during the dotcom bubble in the 90's.Folks were buying up domains with common words, slapping together a few pages on a deck about how they're going to take ‘x' industry and move it to the internet, and venture capitalists were screaming, “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!”Financial magazines and newspapers at the time were absolutely effusive about the potential, further inflating already incredible valuations. I can tell you from experience, nothing turns a venture capitalist from a skeptic into an expert like reading one Wall Street Journal article about it.And what happened? Starting in 1999, many of these companies starting missing their growth projections, some that IPOed had their stock prices plummet, founders with poor business acumen were revealed, and the glory days of ‘free money' started coming to an end.But what came out of that boom? Those with strong businesses were able to weather the storm. Amazon went from book seller to juggernaut in the ecommerce business. As did eBay. And Shutterfly. And Priceline. So many names we still rely on today.And how did this happen?Simply: they were built to be sustainable businesses.There are a lot of similarities to web3. Now that we're seeing our first post-Crypto Winter NFT apocalypse, many projects have had to re-think their roadmap. Money isn't as free anymore. And speculators are feeling less spendy.The term ‘rug pull', meaning an NFT project abandoning their roadmap after their mint, is now being attributed to plenty of projects that likely launched with good intentions.So how do you as a collector, company, or creator do your best not to fall apart when the crypto market tanks?MetaAngels NFT has done just that. I got a chance to chat with Alexandra Cavoulacos, CEO and co-founder of MetaAngels. Now this isn't the kind of project you're seeing all over the press, but they've melded the model of an incubator and a web3 community, backed by business professionals with a background running successful businesses. And Alex had incredible advice to share on how projects that are looking beyond the ‘cash grab' can approach the market.As always, this is not financial advice, buy any NFT at your own peril, and don't gamble with money you aren't ready to set on fire. Even if it's digital money.So let's go to web3 business school with Alex.FOR MORE INFO:Phil Ranta's Twitter: https://twitter.com/philrantaPodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/NFTStoriesPodYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwuexPh0bx-6jXQMRv3iq1gCopyright 2022 - We Are Verified, LLC

Hey, Performance Marketers! I have a treat for you today. It's something you asked me to do. Actually, a few weeks back, I posted something about Groupon and their push marketing. I also said that I'd be glad to dive into the company if you wanted me to go further into the details. You said yes, and here I am! Today, we're going to look at the Groupon company. In addition to its revenues and marketing strategy, I'm going to give you a high-level view of its journey from 2001 (when it went public and IPOed for a big number - $12.7 billion!). As always, the best part (and the greatest value) of my presentation is the fact that if you understand this, you can put together a strategy for any business. Once you crack the code and figure out the numbers I'm explaining, you'll be able to hack any company (private or public) you like.And you don't have to be a genius for this. You'll be able to literally model what you know works!So, let's dive in and see what works for Groupon!  Key Takeaways:Intro (00:00)Public vs. private company (02:17)What does Groupon do? (03:16)Who does Groupon target? (07:16) Who does this work well for on the merchant side? (11:26)Let's talk about Groupon's numbers (15:49)What numbers really matter? (24:41)Modeling similar business - the value of the company (29:45)Additional Resources:- Eric Beer's One Affiliate Offer Challenge- Sign up for the SurveyDetective VIP Waitlist (Coming Soon)---Connect with Eric!- Join Eric's Text Community: 917-636-1998- Eric's website: https://ericbeer.com- Follow Eric on Instagram.- Subscribe to Eric's YouTube Channel.---Follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, or anywhere else you listen to your podcasts.If you haven't already, please rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts!

Growing from a startup to an IPOed and then an acquired company meant that Slack's sales org was scaling rapidly. Apun Hiran, Slack's Director of Software Engineering explains how the data stack and architecture evolved to support this growth with more reliable and timely metrics. Speaker: Apun Hiran, Director of Software Engineering (Data), SlackHosts: Eldad and Boaz Farkash, CEO and CPO, Firebolt

Growing from a startup to an IPOed and then an acquired company meant that Slack's sales org was scaling rapidly. Apun Hiran, Slack's Director of Software Engineering explains how the data stack and architecture evolved to support this growth with more reliable and timely metrics. Speaker: Apun Hiran, Director of Software Engineering (Data), Slack Hosts: Eldad and Boaz Farkash, CEO and CPO, Firebolt

The first time I heard about Dutch Auctions was in 2004 when Google became a public stock (IPOed). I thought it was the most amazing this ever and assumed NFT Dutch auctions were the same…but they are NOT! Today we are going to discuss dutch auctions in and outside of the NFT space. Dutch Auction v1 Example: 5 items 10 buyers Max Bids = 1 at $10, 1 at $7, 3 at $5, 5 at $1 All five items will sell at $5 Newsletter + Free NFTs: https://niftybusinessweek.com/ (https://NiftyBusinessweek.com/) Twitter @TropicVibes: https://twitter.com/TropicVibes (https://twitter.com/TropicVibes) Email: mail[at]niftybusiness.co NFT 101 Episodes: https://niftybusiness.co/episode/web-3-0-explain-so-simple-even-congress-should-understand (#36 - Web 3.0 Explained) https://niftybusiness.co/episode/10-reason-to-buy-nfts-besides-making-money (#30 - 10 Reasons to Buy NFTs) https://niftybusiness.co/episode/nifty-words-nft-verbiage (#7 - NFT Words & Verbiage) https://niftybusiness.co/episode/nifty-words-nft-verbiage-part-ii (#47 - NFT Words & Verbiage Part II) https://niftybusiness.co/episode/nifty-words-nft-verbiage-part-iii (#97 - NFT Words & Verbiage Part III) *Recommended Reading: The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques: https://amzn.to/3vTgVud (https://amzn.to/3vTgVud) The Bitcoin Standard: https://amzn.to/3KS52ZR (https://amzn.to/3KS52ZR) *Amazon affiliate links

"Just like you use your dollars with an online payment service, you can still be defrauded USDC. It wasn't the dollars that defrauded you. It was the other side of it." Jeremy Allaire"I actually believe the web of value exchange. Whatever you want to call it, the internet of value is going to be extraordinarily more valuable and extraordinarily more impactful than the web of information." Jeremy AllaireEpisode Summary:In this episode of The Raz Report, Jason Raznick speaks with Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle.Hosts:Jason RaznickTwitter: https://twitter.com/jasonraznickSign Up to Benzinga Pro today to receive most exclusive interviews, news and stock picks fast!https://pro.benzinga.com/Click here for more episodes of The RazReport.Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.Transcript:BZ: We're very excited to have on this edition of the RazReport, Jeremy Allaire founder and CEO of CircleYou're going to hear about building companies, building enterprises and Circle USDC, which is taking the world by storm in a good way. Jeremy, welcome to the show.J: Thank you, Jason. Psyched to be here.BZ: Circle your latest company, I think you've raised over 700 million over $700 million for it. Is that correct?J: that's exactly right.BZ:When you founded this company in 2013 is it where you thought it would be?J: when we founded the company back in 2013, there were a whole set of ideas that we had about digital currency.We were very excited about this idea that you could build what we like to think of back then as an HTTP of money, meaning like a protocol for money on the internet. And by money we meant traditional money.The liabilities of a central bank, what we think of as everyday money. But convey onto that money, the power of cryptocurrency.So Bitcoin obviously itself brought into the world, this idea of a protocol that could work on a decentralized infrastructure to enable people to directly exchange value in digital cash like way.We wanted to build on that same fundamental technology foundation, but enable people to exchange, stable value assets, like dollars or Euros. And we believe that a kind of protocol layer for money would eventually become possible on top of these blockchain infrastructures. And that was a core mission and goal from the outset.We experimented with realizing that idea through building on a lot of, kind of digital currency banking infrastructure, we built a consumer facing application that kind of brought that to life. We actually built it on top of Bitcoin, which was the first-generation blockchain that was available back in 2013 and 2014 and 2015. And in during that time period, and then eventually in 2016, when ethereum, which is the second generation blockchain technology really emerged, it introduced more of the building blocks that we had been looking for back in 2013, when we founded the company.ETH allowed us in 2017 to begin work on and then also release what's now known as USDC, which is in fact the protocol for dollars on the internet and eventually other Fiat currencies too. But founding vision was there, the path to it obviously takes many, shifts.The metaphor I like to use is you can see the mountaintop. You can literally, standing far back, you can see that mountain top and how beautiful that looks, but you actually don't know how you're going to get to the top of the mountain. And you may actually go up one path and realize, oh, I'm staring over a cliff. I need to go back down and go up another.BZ: Ethereum is what allowed you to go create USDC?J: So back in 2012 and 2013 there, there were a lot of technologists or not a lot, actually back then, there was a lot now, but there were technologists getting involved in this space. And a lot of us got really excited about ideas issuing other assets on top of the blockchain or smart contracts and programmable money and what it would mean if you could have if you could say issue a dollar token and have a smart contract that could enable the programmability of that was like a mind-blowing concept.Early in my career, I worked on programming languages, app development, infrastructure, developer platforms, content infrastructure, lots of things like that. And so had a background in thinking about, developer platforms and the idea of a developer, an open infrastructure that was like a developer platform for money on the internet was super exciting. And so there were a lot of ideas on how to do it in 2013. It just technically wasn't possible.The history of Ethereum is really relevant here because Vitalik, who also was really excited about a lot of these ideas of how you can extend this kind of blockchain infrastructure to do other things. A lot of people thought that might happen that Bitcoin itself as an open source project would evolve to do those things. But there was an ideological battle between those in the core development community who really wanted to keep Bitcoin simple and focused on being a kind of digital gold store of value.Then there's a whole other group of technologists that wanted to advance this into being something that's more like an operating system that you could build a lot of things on top of including things like protocols for stable coins,DEFI, NFTs, DAOs all these things that have emerged. So it was really that kind of forking off and development of a new infrastructure layer that then made it possible to pursue and execute something like USDC.BZ: Jeremy, where did you grow up?J:I grew up in a small town in Southeastern Minnesota, a town called Wynnona Minnesota. I went to college in the St. Paul McAllister college and studied political science philosophy and a concentration in economics.I got introduced to the internet in my dorm room, literally in, in 1990 had a high-speed internet connection, which in 1990, there was not a lot you could do on the internet, but I was down the rabbit hole became completely obsessed, made all of my educational work about it and started using it in my studies around what was happening in the former Soviet Union and what was happening in the sort of changing revolutions around the world and got me excited about the idea of an open network, open permissionless networks, decentralization, disintermediation, a lot of these themes that still show up today in the internet space got me into it. And then graduated college there and started working on my first company.BZ: Did you ever go to Mall of America when you were growing up?J:So mall of America merged when I was a little bit older, I think when I was in college.BZ: But as a kid, did you have side hustles where you like selling the newspaper? Like Mark Cuban was doing the garbage bags? Were you doing that?J: I was a paper boy, that was my first job if you want to call it. But I actually had, I got really lucky in a sense when I was a teenager. I convinced my parents to take, like some, a small amount of money. I had been passed down to me from my grandparents and was in like mutual funds, which was a big deal in the eighties. You had mutual funds. I convinced them to let me invest it into baseball cards.So in the kind of mid to late eighties, I ran Southern Cordillera sports cards. So I ran a trading operation and I would deal and I would go and basically do baseball cards. So that was my side hustle that helped me pay for my spending money in college.BZ:Did you have tables ? So you'd buy cards, flip them and did you make some decent money doing it?J:Absolutely. Yeah, so I took long positions. Okay. On on term sort of players. Mark McGuire, Jose Conseco, that's just some of the big onesBZ:What was one of your best trades?J: Brett saberHagan was, 19, he had just an incredible record and I like accumulated a huge bunch of those. And then that was a short-term trade. I keep thinking in a bunch and then flip them at a huge increase in value as everyone wanted the Brett Saberhagen for a piece that I think that was one of the best one of the best trades I did.I would do arbitrage.That's where I go to these shows. find someone who really, wanted X and I would just run around and find it, buy it for Y and then turn it around. So there's that. And then, I had I still have a fairly sizable collection.BZ: How did you get involved in internet in college?J: I had a T1 which was basically like a hard wire, it was effectively ethernet, but hardwired into a campus that were, and, campuses where some of the only places that had access to the internet for research purposes. And a T1 was, even now was whatever, I, that was back then 1.5 megabits per second, which was really good.BZ: You're in college and you're exploring this whole open network of sorts were your parents supportive of that?J: No, not at all. They were like, I don't know what this is. I don't understand this.I graduated college in 1993 the tail end of the first Gulf war recession.. I studied, what I would thought would be interesting to help understand the world and whatnot. And so I was like temping and but, and, on the side I was just going deeper and deeper into the internet space.And and I remember coming home, I quit my temp job and said, fuck this, I'm going to be an internet consultant. I called myself, which was basically like helping educate people about how businesses, how to use the internet and actually, working on the very, very first websites, this was before, even like Mosaic was out, was hacking around.Basically how helping organizations figure out how to build stuff from the web. And I went home and my father was just so distraught and just so afraid that, he didn't understand any of it. And he was like, this isn't a job, so concerned. I was following my bliss and it was good timing in 1993 to be really going down that rabbit hole and learning all the technology and figuring out what it was to. Build stuff back then. That led to the Genesis of some of the first products that I helped build and create.BZ: You called yourself an internet consultant?J: So there all these people learning HTML, and then in 1995, more people.I really wanted to be able to do interactive apps where you could connect a database, you could have interactivity. And my idea was that anyone should be able to build a global online service because back then, like the idea of an online service was you had to have AOL, or you have to have, CompuServe or whatnot.But I was convinced that an open network that anyone could publish to or any device could connect to, it would be a lot better. And so working with my brother, who's a much more of a computer scientist than I am, became the product manager designer for cold fusion and hidden the kind of chief architect. And we ended up working through a lot of ideas and building essentially the first easy to use web programming language and what is now known as an app server, an application server, one of the very first commercial app server, which basically was a piece of software you can put on a machine connected database, do transactions, dynamically generate webpages. And, that paradigm now, is everything from SAS and content management and everything else on, on the internet. So built that and, got super passionate about enabling developers to dream what they wanted to build on the internet, everything from content to community, to e-commerce, to all kinds of things and built, developer platform business.I find it, you can find it out there.There's still millions of sites with that are still run by that it's now owned by Adobe. That product line is owned by Adobe, which bought Macromedia, which is I merged my first company or we merged layer into Macromedia as public company.BZ: And when you started Cold Fusion, you and your brother, what'd you call the coming like the layer corporation?J:.We had a whole family of products. We had the most popular HTML web development tool in the world Homesite.Literally millions of developers use Homesite. So most websites in the 1990s were built using that. And it was one of the reasons why Macromedia wanted to acquire us because they had Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver was really popular with professional designers.But like the average Joe or Jane would get Homesite it was free. And it was like super powerful HTML editor. And so we had millions of people using that.So no, like no one used front page, because it was so awful because it forced you into like these templates you couldn't get control. So Homesite was like gave you access to the HTML and made it really easy to edit the HTML. And we gave it away for free. It was like a feed, it was a freemium product. We wanted to get it out there. And then we got other people into our more advanced products.BZ: So you were doing freemium before, that was even a word. Okay. Did you raise money for Cold Fusion?J:I think it was three rounds of venture capital and then like a mezzanine financing. And then we IPOed in January of 1999.We were a public company on NASDAQ for 2 years. And in January of 2001, we merged with Macromedia, which was about three times larger than us. And merged the two public companies. And I became the chief technology officer of Macromedia.BZ: IPO process versus the M&A process? Which did you like better?J:I like building. And operating. I I like that a lot. it's interesting, there are times and places where M&A makes sense both as a buyer and as a seller, obviously the vast majority of outcomes and business are some form of merger transaction typically or in bankruptcy. So the number of companies that remain independent is smaller.But I think both had a lot of advantages back at that period of time merging at the time was a really good thing for our company and actually gave us a much stronger platform that was, as you recall, when 9/11 happened and the entirety of the certainty of the market, and really the demand for internet software and stuff collapsed alongside the collapse of the.com.BZ: So Brightcove, how did you get to start that?J: So in 2002, when I was chief technology officer Macromedia, we put the ability to render video and PR and have video as like a programmable object in something called flash player and flash player at the time was the most ubiquitous piece of software in the history of the internet.98% of computers in the world had it. We could actually upgrade the internet to a completely new virtual machine that essentially like a new client in like less than 12 months. So we put video in and it was right before broadband came out and like for consumers.And it was really clear to me looking at broadband wifi devices that can be connected to those.And then having a ubiquitous playback mechanism for video. I got really excited, started incubating ideas inside of Macromedia for basically self publishing, self video publishing type of applications actually built something internally that the company did not want to bring to market. I was really frustrated.My vision was video's going to become as ubiquitous as text on the web. Everyone's going to become a video publisher. Every business is going to be able to distribute television quality video to devices everywhere. And so this was in like 2002, 2003. And so I got frustrated and left, went to a VC as a technologist and resident general catalyst and incubated brightCove.And then founded it in 2004, really with this idea that again, video was going to become as ubiquitous as texts on the web and that you needed a new generation of publishing platforms for it. That could integrate everything that was needed for either a brand like a corporation. Or an organization or a media company itself to basically do direct distribution of television instead of relying on cable and satellite and all the old ways and transform other media companies who work in television and video into being into television and video. So it was a video platform company, a SAS company, as we now call these and founded it in 2004.it had a really nice growth run. And I took it public in early 2012. And then stepped into a chairman role after about a year. Cause I had gone down the crypto rabbit hole in 2013 just became obsessed with.What was going on in crypto and made a decision to basically, start Circle.BZ: Mark Cuban emailed me a question, Mark Cuban's known you from his tech days. His question is "what did you learn from your layer or your database days that you are applying today?"J: it's actually really relevant. As I talk about the inspiration for circle and what, I've been inspired by, , in this space. in, in many ways, right?What got me super excited about the internet in the first place was this kind of obsession with the idea of the internet itself, being an open network that was permissionless that anyone could bring a computer to and connect, and that anyone who did that could take open protocols like the SMTP protocol or the HTTP protocol or the VOIP protocol, or these sort of protocols, which are really just public IP, intellectual property, that's open source it's in the public domain.People can write software to it and that you could connect anyone anywhere through these protocols and do really amazing things in terms of information, exchange, knowledge, exchange communications so powerful. That's what drew me into the internet in the first place and kind of an obsession with open networks, decentralized and distributed model.What that could unleash and really a belief that architecture could maximize access and could maximize the ability for people to to reach the most people in the world and entrepreneurship and ideas. So that's what kind of, that was what informed. The work around cold fusion back then. And so if I fast forward to crypto, that was fundamentally the insight for me in 2012 and early 2013 was this is just like a replay.This is just another open protocol on the public permissionless internet that solved a set of problems that hadn't been solved before, which was a way to ensure that data could not be counterfeited. And that transactions could happen in with certainty in an irreversible way without requiring centralization. And these are big ideas and it was like a fundamental new infrastructure layer. The internet was being born. And so when I looked at it and said, okay, This is going to do for the exchange of value. And I don't just mean moving value from point a to point b, I'm talking about the richness of what we do in exchanging value.As people, as entities, as corporations it's going to do for the exchange of value, what the web and those earlier protocols did for information and communications.And to me in 2013, like that was so profound because I actually believe the web of value exchange.If you want to, whatever you want to call it, the internet of value is going to be extraordinarily more valuable and extraordinarily more impactful than the web of information. And so it very much informed how I think about this and the work that we're doing here.BZ: When you started Circle, did you start with anyone else?J: I co-founded, the company was Sean Neville. Sean is absolutely brilliant. He he co-led the company with me almost like co-CEOs for a long time. And then several years ago, he just stepped into a director role. He's on the board of directors and he runs a crypto incubator, a crypto kind of studio incubator.But he and I had worked together back Allaire, my first company we worked together a bunch at Macromedia. We worked together and bright Cove. He's just one of the most brilliant minds technological minds, strategic minds, creative minds.BZ: Was Circle easier to raise money for than your previous ventures because of your huge track record of success?J: When we started the company, I went to people who invested with me and who had made money with me in the past and said, this is what I'm working on. And they're like, Bitcoin I don't get this. You're crazy. This seems crazy. But. We believe in you, so go for it. I mean that kinda kind of thing. So it definitely helped.2013 and then 2014, 2015, during that time, there were not a lot of quote unquote adults in the room, in the space. If people think it's a wild west, now it was an extraordinary wild west back then. And we had, seasoned entrepreneurs, technologists.We had a really strong proactive approach with regulators with kind of major fiduciaries and really worked really hard to try and build something that was compliant and that, differentiated us as well and allowed us to raise quite a bit of capital. I think, a couple hundred million dollars within our first few years of getting started.BZ: And were you personally buying Bitcoin back in those early days?J: Yeah, absolutely. And buying ethereum and when it was less than a dollar. Like Solana and it was less than a dollar.BZ: Do you still own some of that?J: I am a owner of crypto assets. I don't talk about my particular trading and liquidity strategies, I'm quite structurally long on crypto.BZ: How would you define a stable coin to a fifth grader ?J: On the internet today, I can download a piece of software like WhatsApp or or log into a service like Gmail. We're open up Google Chrome, and I can connect to anyone else. Directly, I can have a direct communication with them. It doesn't cost me anything. It doesn't matter where they are in the world.As long as they have a smartphone, they can get that piece of software. We can do that. Or if there's someone who has an idea and wants to connect their computer, the internet and put some content on it, as long as I have a web browser, I can connect to that. And that's generally the case other than, some authoritarian regimes that have great firewalls.But even there, like it's generally the case, you can connect to anyone. I can freely communicate with anyone in China right now. And that model is so straightforward. It's the air we breathe. We don't even think about it. the fact that this kind of open connect and open permissionless, global decentralized network of communications and information exists. So why can't we do that with money?Why can't we have a way. Someone can just download a piece of software from an app store. And and then someone else could download a different piece of software made by a different creator or a different piece of hardware, or log into a service and exchange value with each other instantly globally frictionlessly at no cost. it's really that simple is how do we make it possible for storing, moving dollars or digital dollars to work in exactly the same way we have with information and data. And that's what we set out to solve is that problem and doing it on the DNA of the internet, doing it around this idea of an open protocol that anyone could connect to. So that's really the fundamentals of what USDC allows for. And, but I think. Yeah the idea goes far broader because you now have essentially an open API for dollars on the internet and it's programmable dollars on the internet. And so you can do a lot with that. And the use cases are really exploding,BZ:How big is USDC these days?J:So USDC has grown really fast at the start of the pandemic, there were about 400 million USDC in circulation that was just like, let's call it six months. Or, there's a year after or so after we had launched.Then it grew to 4 billion in circulation by the start of 2021. And it grew from 4 billion to 42 billion in circulation. At the end of 2021 and it's already grown to to over 52 billion in circulation, just in the past couple months here.And so USDC is about that big and I supported, trillions of dollars of transactions. Just on the public internet using blockchains. And it's still early days. It's super early days. Our view is that eventually there could be more than a trillion USDC in circulation and could be used for every imaginable use case for money and use cases that we haven't even thought of because programmable money is not existed until now.BZ: How can USDC offer such nice interest rates when banks are giving 0.5%?J: Look so if you think about. And you have a kind of base layer, which is the sort of digital cash equivalent of USDC. And it's a regulated, digital cash instrument that exists. And it's very easy to exchange, right? With point to point as your friends or others, that you've talked to really straightforward to send it, receive it, use it.And it's become very popular as a digital currency to use in trading, investing, international payments, other things. And so as its utility has grown and as more and more people and firms want to use. +As a form of working capital as a new kind of electronic stored value working capital mechanism, there's higher and higher demand for people who want to borrow it. And so one of the really powerful things about blockchains is not only do they allow these fast transactions to happen, but you can actually build essentially, borrowing and lending models on top of it.And so there's grown over the past in particular, the past several years, the last two to three years, large, both centralized, what are often called CEFI lending markets and what are called DEFI lending markets, where the market of borrowers and lenders is convened by a piece of software on the internet. So you're not dealing with a company you're just dealing with a protocol, but nonetheless you have essentially interest rate markets of borrowers and lenders.The demand to borrow USDC is high. And the interest rate that borrowers are willing to pay is high. And that is the source of those yields. Basically you have borrowers and to put it fairly simply the other side of that borrowing and I'll use circle yield as an example, because it's the one I understand probably the most you lend us USDC and we lend it wholesale to institutional borrowers. So these are in fact, hedge funds, family offices, systemic trading firms, electronic markets, firms, or other major firms in the ecosystem that want to operate using USDC. And these are firms that are borrowing at a high interest rate, but who are generating returns in north of that.An 8% interest rate to borrow at an 8% interest rate or borrowed 10% interest rate. That's not unheard of in a lot of things. Our credit cards are 20% interest rates or 17% interest rates. venture debt, which is what startups borrow typically have interest rates of, 10, 12, 13, 14% on them. interest rates in securities lending markets, which is the interest rates that say an institutional fund would pay to borrow against their stock can be fairly high now, corporate debt that's underwritten where a corporation's borrowing against their balance sheet and their P&L and it's underwritten by an investment bank and has a coupon and rating. So that tends to be a lower interest rate debt product.But generally when you look at interest rates that people borrow, right? They vary from, most single digits to high double digits or higher. And so what you have in USDC is you have a borrowing lending markets that exist at the retail and institutional level, and those are floating right now. So in DEFI right now, you can borrow you can borrow you USDC I think for 3%. the interest rate markets adapt to kind of market conditions and demand.BZ: How secure is my money in USDC ?J:The thing to remember is USDC itself is is regulated examine it's the USDC itself is A full reserve dollar digital currency.Now, if you're lending your USDC to someone else you're determining what is the credit risk that I'm taking with, who I'm lending to. It has nothing to do with USDC. It has to do with what are they doing with it? So there are some major differences, right? Are you a secured creditor or are you an unsecured creditor? is this unsecured credit that's then being used to do highly speculative trading or is, this secured credit with known institutional counterparties? So you're dealing with a huge variance.I like to use the example of a bank, right? If you walk into a branch of Chase and you say here's $10,000, you're depositing, and you're not depositing $10,000, you're lending chase $10,000.And you have a balance that says $10,000. But actually what you have is you have a claim against their loan book. They're taking that $10,000 and they're lending it out eight times over. And you're basically saying, Hey, I think that they're going to be good for that, that the small business loans, the credit card loans, the home mortgages, the corporate debt, all the stuff that they're doing to take my money and lend it out on a fractional reserve basis eight times. But fundamentally, you've got an IOU and now, you might look at a dollar that you've deposited and chase really different than s let's say you went to a bank in Zimbabwe and they said, you can deposit your dollars. And you say I don't know, what are you going to do with my dollars? And so it all comes down to, w what in fact are you w what, in fact are you seeing on the other side of that?So we've tried to design something with circle yield, which is very institutionally friendly. It's regulated, it's supervised it's over collateralized and it only, faces the best quality institutional wholesale borrowers on the other side. And so we've just tried to build some. I think the kinds of features that make it attractive, it doesn't produce the highest yields. It doesn't produce the same yields you might see through some of these retail platforms, but there's a reason for that.BZ: Is there a chance of defaulting?J: this has become a major issue from an investor protection regime, right? So very clearly, like I think the SEC, his view is that these are lending products. They're not banks. And in fact, for the average person they're basically making an investment and a lot of these are offered as an, they're unregistered investment contracts in a sense. What is an S1? And that's one is a public disclosure document that a retail investor can read and understand. And you can decide, you can read through the S one and say what are the risks? What is this? What am I actually getting into here? And so that's fair disclosure. So that's people and, the review of a major regulator the SEC.And so that's one, one standard to look at, there are others that, don't have any of that. And so you don't actually know what the underlying risk is other than the reps that are made through marketing, or maybe some high level stuff. And so I think you have to, you have to look at this through, through that lens. now DEFI is a different story. if you get USDC. DEFI protocols have some advantages to them. But they also have a whole lot of risks to them as well.There've been DEFI protocols that were hacked. And this is like software and all of a sudden the money is managed by software and the software gets hacked and they, that's gone, but you have some, defined protocols that are more pressure tested. There's probably going to be more and more disclosure audit type requirements on defy protocols over time, as well as the market participants want to have better hygiene around them. I think, buyer beware on all this stuff.BZ: USDC has a brand. So do you talk to these exchanges to make sure that they're trying to make sure that borrowers are good ?J: Because USDC is a free floating digital currency it can be utilized in so many different applications in so many different businesses and so on. And you've got, electronic markets firms that might be.Doing a trade with someone with USDC for $300 million in one transaction, you've got other, NFT markets that are utilizing USDC for payments on pieces of digital content and the, and those are, multiple layers removed. it is important though, that we need to always ensure that people understand USDC as a dollar digital currency itself is safe, stable, transparent regulated, compliant, all these things.Just like you use your dollars with an online payment service, you can still be defrauded. It wasn't the dollars that defrauded you. It was the other side of it.BZ: Do you have a minute to talk CND ?J:We initially negotiated a merger with Concord acquisition and business combination agreement in July of last year.And getting through the SEC qualifications taken a bit longer than we had expected. We had thought it would be, consistent with other spots4-5 months it's just taken longer and which is fine, and we're getting through it. We're making progress through every round of comments. But as we walked into the new year the business outlook has changed pretty significantly. The company grew USDC really rapidly. We're in a rising interest rate environment.Our transaction and treasury services businesses are taking hold nicely. And so we looked at the actual deal was set to expire in April. And so we we re-negotiated the deal.We extended the timeline so that it had enough time to get through the dispatch and the, in the sec process.We also eliminated the pipe from the first year. we also issued revised financial outlook for 2022 and 2023, which are considerably stronger from from a both a top line and a bottom line perspective from where we were, nine months earlier or whatever that exact timeline is.And so the increase in the value of the company is really reflective of the tremendous position that we've put ourselves in with the business and obviously the new outlook.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-raz-report/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This interview features Brendan Gahan, Partner and Chief Social Officer at Mekanism. We discuss working with OG YouTubers like Smosh back in 2005, founding Epic Signal and selling it to his former employer, hanging out in El Salvador's Bitcoin Beach, why it takes him 100 drafts to publish content, the future of the creator economy, and learning how to enjoy what you create.Subscribe to our newsletter. We explore the intersection of media, technology, and commerce: sign-up linkLearn more about our market research and executive advisory: RockWater websiteFollow The Come Up on Twitter: @TCUpodEmail us: tcupod@wearerockwater.com---EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Chris Erwin:Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up. A podcast that interviews entrepreneurs and leaders. Brendan Gahan:I felt like my strengths could be better utilized going off on my own. It was really as simple as, well, I want to do this work the way that I know how to do it and the way I want to do it. And if that takes me going off on my own, then that's what I'm going to do. So I did. In hindsight, it sounds much smarter than it was. It was not smart from like an on paper standpoint, but I just felt like it was the right thing for me to do because I've been doing it longer than most people, I have relationships, I have a sense of what strategically works. I want to do it the way that I want to do it. Chris Erwin:This week's episode features Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at Mekanism. So Brendan was born in Ventura, California, and grew up surfing many local breaks. But although his parents were educators, he entered college without a career focus. But just a few weeks away from graduation, a last minute call from his uncle sparked his entry to media and advertising, and he never looked back. His career started at a creative agency working on some of the first YouTube campaigns with hit creators like Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox's Smosh. With a growing reputation as a social and digital expert, Brendan eventually started his own agency, Epic Signal, which he ended up selling to Mekanism. Chris Erwin:Today, Brendan is their chief social officer. On the side he also publishes a wide array of content, making it one of the industry's most well regarded thought leaders. Some highlights of our chat include what it was like to sell his company to his former employer, why he's hanging out in El Salvador's Bitcoin Beach, how it took him 100 videos to post his first TikTok, the future of the creator economy, and learning how to enjoy what you create. All right, let's get to it. Chris Erwin:Brendan, thanks for being on The Come Up Podcast. Brendan Gahan:Thanks for having me, pumped to be here. Chris Erwin:We were just having a little chat about, you got a surf in this morning, if that's right. Brendan Gahan:I did. I'm working in El Salvador this week in a little town called Zonte, people may have heard of it referred to as Bitcoin Beach. And there's a nice little right hand point here, so made sure to get out there. Chris Erwin:Are you regular foot or goofy foot? Brendan Gahan:I'm regular, yeah. Chris Erwin:Okay, so you like the right-handers. I'm goofy, I like to go left. Brendan Gahan:Yeah, right hand point in particular, it's like my favorite kind of wave. I grew up in Ventura. So grew up surfing C Street, at the point in Ventura. And then every once in a while I would make the trek up to Rincon and stuff. Chris Erwin:I'm curious, where exactly did you grow up? Were you in the LA County or were you up north? Brendan Gahan:No, I was in Ventura. So there's Ventura County, which encompasses quite a bit of Southern California, but I grew up in the city of Ventura, maybe three quarters of a mile away from the beach, it's like a 15-minute walk or so, and yeah, it was great. Chris Erwin:Great. And do you still have family that's in Ventura? Brendan Gahan:Parents are still there. I've got some aunts, uncles, cousins in the area. And then my younger sister lives, she's still in Ventura County, but about 30 minutes away from where we grew up. Chris Erwin:I often talk about Southern California real estate. And you look at one of the few pockets in SoCal that's near the beach that has been underdeveloped is definitely Ventura. I think that's true for the last 30 years. I think that's finally starting to change, particularly during COVID and remote work. Have you seen that there? Brendan Gahan:Oh my gosh, it's crazy. I was just there this past weekend. And there's all these developments going up, like apartment complexes and condos, and yeah, it's sort of interesting. When you look at Ventura on a map, there's sort of like this no man's land between LA and Santa Barbara. And for years, Ventura was just sort of like overlooked. It was like people would pass through Ventura to go to either Santa Barbara or LA, but then more and more Ojai started to become a place, and Ventura has become a bit of a destination and there's now some startups out there. Before the biggest company there was Patagonia. Ventura, growing up was sort of like this blue collar cowboy meets surfer vibe for the most part. And yeah, that's definitely evolving. Chris Erwin:I think cowboy meets surfer vibe sounds about as good as it can get, you know? Brendan Gahan:Yeah, yeah. Chris Erwin:I forget who, but when I was at Big Frame almost 10 years ago now, I remember there were some industry friends that had set up shop in Ventura and were commuting to LA, and it was only about like an hour, hour and 15 away, not that crazy if you timed it right. So curious, looking at you being at the nexus of digital media and advertising and all the things, were there any media influences when you were there, when you were younger? Did that come from your parents or anything like that? Or was your upbringing focused on completely different things? Brendan Gahan:Yeah, definitely not. LA seemed like the furthest thing in the world to me growing up. And it seemed like a city, it may as well have been New York in my mind. Even though it was only like an hour and a half, we would go to LA on a field trip every couple years, or maybe my parents would take us there and we'd visit a museum or something like that. But it was not like a destination that was really on my radar. And from a professional standpoint where my head was at, I sort of had the cliche jobs in mind, it was like, oh, okay, maybe I'll be a teacher or a lawyer. A lot of people I knew growing up, and a number of relatives were like firemen, so my mind was sort of gravitating towards, I thought I'd either be a doctor, a lawyer or a psychologist. So I didn't have much of like a media or a tech influence until later. Chris Erwin:What did your parents do? Brendan Gahan:They were both in education. So my mom was a teacher's assistant in resource classes. And then my dad initially was like a teacher and then became a principal at a number of the special education schools in Ventura County. And then when he retired, he was the director of special education in Ventura. So education ran deep in the family, I guess. Chris Erwin:Yes. No, clearly understood. But I think you mentioned that you had an uncle that was in the media space, right? Brendan Gahan:That's right. Yeah, yeah. So I had an uncle who worked in advertising and he was at Wieden+Kennedy like in the heyday when it was like Bonos, Air Jordan, all that, when it was as big as it could get, and they lived a ways away. But whenever I saw him, I would just like pepper him with a million questions because to me, somebody working in advertising, in particular on like Nike and in that era, it wasn't just ads. It was like shifting culture, like Spike Lee and all that stuff. So I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. And I'd always ask him a million questions about it. But in my mind I never thought that I would end up working in that space. It seemed like this extra terrestrial sort of thing. Brendan Gahan:But he was always really cool. And he was like a creative director doing a lot of the Air Jordan spots and that sort of thing. So he always had funny stories he would share. And I just thought it was the coolest thing. I remember being in like elementary school, he'd visit or we'd go visit him, and I'd just pepper him with questions. So it was always sort of like seated in the back of my mind, but at the same time it felt unattainable, but I was really fortunate. Brendan Gahan:I don't know if we want to skip ahead too much, but basically he ended up offering me my first internship, totally came out of the blue. I got a phone call one day, I was like two days away from graduating from college. And I was about to go home for summer and work, and yeah, just out of the blue, he's like, "Hey, I got this guy on my team," he had started his own agency at this point, he's like, "And we need some young kid who understands digital," because this is 2005. And so I came up there and I interviewed with this guy he wanted me to intern for- Chris Erwin:But you did not go to college for this, if I understand correctly, you went to, is it UC Santa Cruz and you were psychology and history? Brendan Gahan:Yep. Yep. Chris Erwin:And again, you thought with that you were going to follow in your parents' footsteps, become an educator, or become a lawyer. Brendan Gahan:Something like that, yeah, I thought I was zeroing in on like teacher, lawyer or psychologist. I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. And psychology I always thought was fascinating. So I studied that, and then I realized two, three years in, I was like, oh, I've taken a ton of history courses and if I just take a few more, I can get a double major in apparently history, because of all the writing and stuff if I remember correctly, it was like not a bad thing to have if you were looking to get into law school. So it just kind of like was a circuitous path to get where I ended up. Chris Erwin:It didn't feel like you were overly passionate about anything at that point. I think you were open minded and you had some, call it nuclear, familial inspirations or influences. But when you got this call from your uncle, you're like, hey, this has been the cool uncle that was part of these massive sociocultural movements, Michael Jordan and Nike, I totally hear you. So when you got that call, were you really pumped up or was it, oh no, this sounds like something interesting and there's some direction and let's just go see what happens. Brendan Gahan:I was really pumped. I was also really torn because I was going to go home and work as a teacher's assistant for the summer and do summer school, which I know my parents were sort of excited about on so many different levels, because I'd be home. They would see me. They loved the idea of me getting into education, at least I'm pretty sure that's what they were excited about. And so I was like very torn, but also super excited. Brendan Gahan:And I went out and drove up to San Francisco for the interview. And I still remember walking into the ad agency office for the first time just being like, holy shit, this is so fucking cool. This is an office, people work out of here. It was like this creative space. And I remember thinking, especially as a college kid, wow, there's like a beer fridge and your pool table, and all these things. And obviously I knew work was happening, but it seemed like a great environment to get work done. I don't think I ever overdid it on any of the fun things, but it was like this relief to sort of have that there, and it felt really exciting to me. Chris Erwin:So then you get the job and you move up north. Brendan Gahan:Yep. Chris Erwin:What were you focused on in the beginning there? And then, I think from our notes that you did some early work with Smosh, is that right? Brendan Gahan:Yeah, exactly. So I did an internship and then I eventually got hired, and I was technically like a junior account executive. This was 2005, 2006, 2007, I think, and it was in the early, early days of social media and I was the youngest guy in the office. So people would ask me random questions, like, "What's the deal with MySpace, what happens on that?" Or, like Facebook, nobody else could get on Facebook because you still had to have your college email address. So I sort of found myself being this resource, and at the same time me being flabbergasted by the way advertising was being done. Brendan Gahan:I remember the first time I found out how much a billboard cost, and looking at that and being like, this is almost more than, I mean, I can't remember the number right now, but I remember thinking, this is about as much I make in a full year with my salary and being like, I don't think anyone does anything because of the billboard, or certainly not like a normal billboard ad, and seeing this huge disconnect between what drove people to do things and what people were genuinely excited about and where dollars were being allocated. Brendan Gahan:So I think I slowly started just embracing that and being like, to me, it was common sense to a certain extent, like, look, I can go on YouTube and I can see how many people watch this video. Why aren't we doing this? This shows millions of people. Once again, like walking down the street, I don't know of anybody who does anything because of a billboard. And so that sort of evolved, and I started just pitching ideas proactively. And I remember I even tried to pitch clients and stuff, and stuff I in hindsight probably didn't have- Chris Erwin:Existing clients of the agency, or were you doing some new business development? Brendan Gahan:All of the above. I remember reading about it in the ad trades, like, oh, so and so company fired their agency and I'd be like, well, why don't they work with us? And literally come up with ideas and mail them things, and like try and get a response. And I don't know, just like this sort of, we're a creative industry, let's be really creative. Chris Erwin:Was that the expectation from your role or was that you just having some gumption of being a self-starter? Brendan Gahan:Not to pat myself on the back, but I think it was definitely me sort of having a little bit of gumption. I think I also just didn't know. It was a relatively small loose agency. And so I thought, well, it wasn't like this is exactly how you're supposed to do this job, and this, this and this, I think creativity was really encouraged and so long as work was getting done, anything I wanted to do sort of beyond that was like, all right, yeah, sure, that sounds cool. Chris Erwin:So did that spirit, is that what drove you... Did you work directly with Smosh? What is that story there? Brendan Gahan:Yeah. So late 2006, this client the agency had had before I was even there, they came to the agency and they were like, "Hey, we want to do an ad campaign. We don't have a big budget." And it was a portable MP3 player. And the partners at the agency were talking about it right behind me. And they were about to turn it down. And it was one of those situations where in hindsight, yes, it was not much money, and they should have turned it down by all means. But I just butted in. I was like, "Hey, what if we pitched them this idea of getting these kids on YouTube to promote it. And we just rather than try and squeeze like a campaign into this budget, let's just do one video." Brendan Gahan:And so they were like, "Oh, that sounds kind of cool. Yeah, let's pitch it to the company, to the brand." And they bought it. I think I literally turned around after the partners said it was okay to pitch it to the client and I emailed Ian and Anthony, found their email on MySpace and they emailed me back that afternoon. And I think the next week they came by the office because they were just up in Sacramento area, so it wasn't too far. Chris Erwin:They were one of the biggest YouTube channels at the time, right? Just for context, this is 2005, 2006. Facebook had just started in '04. YouTube had just started in '04. Google bought them I think a couple years later. So Ian and Anthony were probably one of the biggest personalities on the platform at that time. Brendan Gahan:Yeah. I think they might have been number two. I know they eventually were number one for a couple of years, but I don't think they were quite number one yet. It was sort of like early days and there was a lot of jostling for position and stuff. Chris Erwin:So you got their emails from their MySpace page, you hit them up. That definitely wouldn't happen today, not as easy to go direct to the top creators. And then they came by your office, what happened? Brendan Gahan:Yeah, they came by, by that point we had gotten the thumbs up from the client to like, "Oh yeah, sure, we're down, if you can make it work." They came by the office, we literally got in a room and it was sort of funny. I remember nobody knew what you would charge for something like this, you know? So we were literally just kicking around like, what would you want to charge for this? I don't know, how much do you want to pay for this? Just going back and forth. And then finally, one of the partners was like, "Well, I don't know, would you guys do it for like 15 grand or something?" And they were like, "Probably, why don't we go back to..." I think Anthony's dad was an accountant or something like that. Brendan Gahan:And they were going to run it by him. I might have those details wrong, but they were like, it was basically like a, pretty sure that'll work. Let's go talk to our parents. And then they came back and they were like, sure, and so we did it, they made this video called Feet for Hands. I remember when it went live it crashed the client's website, which I thought was so fucking cool. I felt so validated. And then, yeah, it got like millions of views. And I just wanted to do that again and again, and again. And I saw what Mekanism was doing and my first boss at that agency, he'd left for Mekanism, Jason Harris, the president and CEO of Mekanism now. He joined Mekanism, became a partner. And we had a great working relationship. Brendan Gahan:I interned for him and stuff. And I showed in that video, I was like, look, look, look at this thing. It's got three million views. I know I can help you guys. I was so envious of the work they were doing. They were doing like early viral video stuff. And this is like 2006, 2007, when a lot of this stuff, people weren't paying attention at all. And so I was just so envious of the projects they were working on. And they brought me in for a few interviews and I literally met the whole agency, which at the time was pretty small, I think like twice. And then they hired me. Chris Erwin:Was this East Coast based? Brendan Gahan:This is all West Coast. They were in San Francisco, just a few blocks away from the office I was at, at the time, and then got hired, it was like Mekanism was doing a ton of branded content, viral video stuff but oftentimes without any paid media. The platforms, most of them didn't even have paid media as an option. I think at the time you could buy a YouTube homepage banner and that was it. Facebook didn't have it. There was no sort of formal way of promoting that stuff for the most part. So we sort of, myself and a couple other guys, younger guys, we built out a team over time that was the social media team. And we were just constantly coming up with different ways to promote content, doing everything from Reddit seeding to tons and tons of work with creators. We worked with all the big creators in those early days, which was great, because it was a small community. We got to make a lot of deeper relationships at the time. Chris Erwin:Yeah. And you were probably working with a lot of those creators direct versus now there's tons of representatives, managers and agencies, and sometimes you never even talk to the end talent, but back then probably different. Brendan Gahan:Oh, 100%, yeah. We would get pretty elaborate sometimes with these campaigns, we would do like in person summits and kickoffs. We worked with 20th Century Fox on some campaigns, and we would fly like 50 influencers in and a bunch obviously would be in LA, but host these elaborate dinners and events, and sometimes it'd be two, three days long where they're meeting with the execs, meeting with actors, kind of getting a download of the campaign, what the expectations were for them. Then we'd take them out, go partying. So it was cool. Got to spend a lot of face time with people and it was a really fascinating time. Chris Erwin:You were there for about five to six years at Mekanism, right? Brendan Gahan:Yeah. Chris Erwin:And then I think you transitioned to full screen after that for a brief stint, but then you started your own agency, Epic Signal. So what was the catalyst for you to leave this kind of the broader corporate support and other people that were helping elevate your career to say, I want to do something differently, I'm going to do it by myself. Brendan Gahan:I felt like full screen was exploding at the time. You know this, all the MCNs were blowing up, but I felt like there was a lot of distraction and stuff. And the thing that I was really passionate about at its core was the strategy in collaborating with both brands and creators to create something awesome. And I felt like full screen, it was like they were trying to grow this MCN, this network and make a scalable business. So it was a little bit different from what I was really passionate about. And so I left, I thought I was just going to take my time sort of consulting. But I mean, this was like when influencer marketing was reaching this new fevered pitch because... We talked about it yesterday. Sometime around there, Maker was acquired, all these clients that I'd worked with and people at different agencies that I'd worked with over the years came out of the woodwork and were like, we have to have an influencer strategy. Brendan Gahan:We have to have a YouTube strategy. And I'd been the, air quotes, like YouTube guy and influencer guy since 2006. So I was one of a handful of people who had sort of like this deep bench and experience in this niche. So all my old clients started hitting me up. All of a sudden I had more work than I could personally do. And slowly started hiring people just out of necessity, because I didn't want to say no to these awesome opportunities. I was like, oh crap. I get to work with Mountain Dew, hell yeah, let's do it. Chris Erwin:I do want to clarify, but when you went off on your own, I mean I'm sure look, as the industry is growing, Google original channels program happened in 2011, 2012, hundreds of millions of dollars of funding into digitally native production companies to fuel the overall video ecosystem to help you to recruit more advertisers. And so when you decided to go off on your own to start Epic Signal, why was that? Had you always wanted to be an entrepreneur? Did you think like, hey, I want to be an owner and I'm early in a very nascent industry and so this is scary, but I'm going to get an early foothold and see what happens. Brendan Gahan:It honestly wasn't as strategic as that, it was more like, I felt like my strengths could be better utilized going off on my own. And I like being really hands on and strategic. It was really as simple as, well, I want do this work the way that I know how to do it and the way I want to do it. And if that takes me going off on my own, then that's what I'm going to do. So I did. And in hindsight, it sounds much smarter than it was, it was not smart from like an on paper standpoint. I left full screen. I left my equity on the tape because I left just shy of a year, but I just felt like it was the right thing for me to do, because I knew, I'd seen this space grow so fast and I was like, I've been doing it longer than most people. I have relationships, I have a sense of what strategically works. I want to do it the way that I want to do it. And that just made me feel good, and so that's what I did. Chris Erwin:Now did you launch Epic Signal in LA or did you move to New York? Brendan Gahan:So I was in LA, but very quickly was splitting my time up between LA and New York. I was going back and forth. I'd spend two weeks in LA, two weeks in New York, back, forth, back forth constantly, and then was about to move to New York officially, I ended up having more clients there than anywhere else, more brands I was working with there than anywhere else. And then as I was sort of putting the plan together to do that, I ended up selling it. And then I had to move to New York, so it moved things along. Chris Erwin:That happened pretty quickly, right? Because I think you had Epic Signal for, was it a couple years before you sold it to Mekanism? Brendan Gahan:Yeah, I think it was just shy of two years. It was almost two full years, yeah. Chris Erwin:Okay. And when you decided to sell, how big was your team at that point? Brendan Gahan:It wasn't big. It was like a half dozen people. Chris Erwin:Okay. Why did you decide to sell? Brendan Gahan:I found myself in a situation where I was doing so much back office stuff. It was like the very thing that I left to go do was, I wanted to focus on the strategy and deal with that, do the actual work. And then what I found was, when you are an entrepreneur, it's very easy to get sucked into dealing with lawyers and accounts, and payroll, and all this stuff that is not fun, all that back office stuff. Chris Erwin:I'm feeling you right now on that. That's where I feel like I'm at with RockWater. Brendan Gahan:You try and delegate it, but it's like all these things get this overflow back to you. And so I was back in this situation where I was doing the work that wasn't making me happy. And at the same time, I sort of felt like I have this window of opportunity where it's like, this is a really small team, we're lean and mean. We've got great profit margins. We've also got dope clients. We were working with like ABI. We worked on Bud Light campaigns, Corona. We did work with several PepsiCo brands, a handful of others. So we had a dope roster of clients that we were working with, a handful of whom were on retainer. And I was like, we have this niche where we're focusing on helping brands with YouTube strategy and YouTube creators. And oftentimes, especially the bigger brands, like a Pepsi, Mountain Dew, they had multiple agencies and they would have like a social AOR even. Brendan Gahan:And they did have a social AOR, but I was like, it's only going to be a matter of time before I get squeezed out and they start offering this services that I'm sort of in this interesting niche I can offer at this time that they don't have. And so I felt like the cache of the brands that I had, the team in place, people would find it desirable because of the relationships and already booked revenue, and great team. And so I thought I'll try and capitalize on my time and see if I can make a deal happen. Brendan Gahan:And then I had a letter of intent on the table and I would call my old boss at Mekanism for advice. "Hey, I'm negotiating with these guys, and this is a deal on the table. Does this make sense? What should I push back on?" So he was aware that things were moving along. And basically I was in New York, I had signed a letter of intent, things were sort of going through due diligence and all that. And he was like, "Let's grab drinks." So I met up with him for a drink. He's like, "Just come back." I was like, "All right, well, I got a deal in hand if you can beat it, I'm down. Like let's do it." I loved working with him. Chris Erwin:Hey listeners, this is Chris Erwin. Your host of The Come Up. I have a quick ask for you. If you dig what we're putting down, if you like the show, if you like our guests, it would really mean a lot if you can give us a rating wherever you listen to our show. It helps other people discover our work. And it also really supports what we do here. All right, that's it everybody, let's get back to the interview. Chris Erwin:I have to ask, did you run a formal sales process where you decided to sell and then you're like, all right, here's the 20 best fit buyers that are out there and I'm going to go call them or I'm going to hire someone to dial for dollars on the company's behalf. And/or were you also just getting unsolicited in bounds that you were like, oh, hey, this is interesting. Maybe with the market timing, things that you were sharing, where there was a lot of brands had big agencies of record, you felt that you were going to get squeezed out. So now is the time to sell, what was that looking like? Brendan Gahan:Exactly that, but sort of like the inverse. Initially, I sort of had a hunch and so I sort of informally had some conversations and dinners with people where like, I didn't come right out and say, "Hey, I want to sell," I didn't want to come across as desperate. Because I mean, and I wasn't, I wasn't desperate, but I wanted to sell. But I would sort of just seed the idea, like, "Hey, I'm kicking around the idea of selling, I'd love to do X, Y, and Z. And like' Chris Erwin:Just like dating, the classic courting phase, you're just doing the dance. Brendan Gahan:Exactly. And then once people started expressing interests, I was like, okay, I'm definitely onto something. This is something I'm way out of my depth on. So I asked around and some buddies recommended some lawyers and I hired them and signed a deal with them. And I was like, all right, let's make this happen. And that was the best decision I could have made. They earned every dime I paid them and then some, because beyond just the relief of handing it over, they definitely got me more money and I didn't ever have to be the bad guy throughout the process, which I'm very bad at saying no to people in negotiations and stuff like that. They were just like, every step of the way they were like, "No, just pass it over to us. We'll take care of it." And then they would hit me up and they're like, "Here's what's on the table, here's what we advise. What do you want to do?" And the process was stressful enough as it is, but having them sort of take the reins just alleviated so much stress. Chris Erwin:Selling your company is a very unique work stream that requires a very unique set of skills to execute well. And it can be very emotional for a founder, operator and CEO. This is your baby. You could transform your life through a big liquidity event, but it's also going to impact, you might be selling to another company and working for someone else. So having a partner there to guide you along the way is really important. I mean, I saw this a lot because I was a banker on Wall Street back in the day and sold a variety of different companies and helped shepherd the sale with Big Frame to Awesomeness TV. I just talked about that in the last podcast with Sarah Penna, one of the co-founders of Big Frame, and it's a really big decision. Chris Erwin:So I totally get it. I'm curious, who were the buyers that you were talking to? Was it different brand agencies? Was it different brands that wanted to actually just bring you on in house? Was it some of the emerging YouTube MCNs that wanted to build out their influencer sales arm? What was that group looking like? Brendan Gahan:I think it was two MCNs and this holding company, I won't name names and stuff, but it was a fascinating process. And to your point about seeing it and it being stressful and all this stuff, if you think about it, it's like, it's an experience that, as an owner or an entrepreneur you're out of your depth, it's a very unique thing that happens. It doesn't happen that often. And so bringing in professionals is so helpful because they actually do these deals. I'm doing totally different types of deals. I have no experience selling an organization. Chris Erwin:Yeah. You need to create a very compelling story and also urgency, get people excited and the feeling that they're going to miss out. So if you kind of go after the process willy nilly, you can set up a really bad result for your company. And also for your counterparties that are saying, "Hey, we're interested here. We've been in talks for a while. Why is this dragging along? Who else are you talking to?" Chris Erwin:So you can really damage, not only all the value that you've created for your business, but it can impact your team, it can impact the ability of you to continue working in the industry thereafter. So got to do it right. But so many say, I was just talking to a banker about this yesterday. Oftentimes, transactions result from long standing relationships and trust that have been built. So the end buyer for Epic Signal was your past boss at Mekanism, that became your eventual home. So after you joined forces with them, was the mandate, "Hey Brendan, come back on board. You're now part of the senior leadership team. The market opportunity is even bigger. Let's go after it with you and your whole team in a bigger way." Brendan Gahan:Pretty much, yeah. It was a bit of a plug and play option, they had... Obviously there was a social team when I left, the feeling was like there wasn't... A number of people had left by the time I came back, so I was able to bring my team in, merge it with the existing team. And we started expanding the offerings again. When I was running Epic Signal, I deliberately tried to keep it very narrow in niche, because I couldn't compete with a big social agency, it just wouldn't happen. Brendan Gahan:But by having two very key offerings, it streamlined so much of the processes and it gave me a clear point of differentiation. And when I joined back up with Mekanism, it was like full service, social, we're doing everything, community management in the lightweight, social content creation, analytics, reporting, influencer marketing, all this stuff. And so had to scale up the team and integrate with the larger organization as a whole. And it was fun. I think I'm sort of like this entrepreneur at heart or intrapreneur, and I like the process of sort of building and evolving and exploring new opportunities. So it was a really good fit, is a good fit. Chris Erwin:Thinking back on all of the brand and influencer campaigns that you've done, there's got to be one or two that stand out in terms of just something crazy went down. I think back to at Big Frame, working with some talent, doing a six figure brand deal, talent deciding literally two hours before something's supposed to go live that they're not going to post it or having a meltdown on the floor of VidCon and sobbing and crying because they're having a personal breakdown, because look, that life is tough and burnout is real in the influencer space. I remember a bunch of stories when we were launching different content verticals and flying in different 40 creators into like a creator house. This is like back in 2013, before there was like the modern creator houses of today. So any stories from the trenches that you remember from your early days? Brendan Gahan:Oh my God. Yeah, it's like, working with creators I think is one of those things, when you're in it, you're almost like, I'm never going to do this again. Then afterwards you're like, oh, that wasn't so bad. That was really fun. I think probably one that took the cake as far as stress goes, was we were working with Brisk Iced Tea, which is a PepsiCo brand. And we're about to host a summit because Brisk was relaunching, they had Eminem in the super bowl spot, and they were reviving the Claymation look. They did one with Ozzy Osborne, they did one with Danny Trejo, and we were actually having Danny Trejo fly out to New York, and he was going to meet with all these creators and stuff. And this was during the winter before super bowl. So I don't know if it was like December or January, or maybe early February, but there was a massive snowstorm. Brendan Gahan:Flights kept getting canceled and delayed. And I remember being glued to my phone, refreshing constantly, looking at, I think there were a handful of flights that were going to make it out of LA to New York before things were going to get canceled. And I remember, we signed up all these creators, Danny Trejo was going to show and he was going to be the cool, shiny object, and his flight to New York. I remember it kept getting delayed, delayed, delayed, it got canceled. We got him on another flight, delayed, delayed, delayed. And I was just like refreshing my phone and being like, this whole thing is going to fucking fall apart if that flight doesn't take off. It sounds like not that big a deal right now but I remember it was just one of those moments where I was just like, the whole thing was going to fall apart. The world was on my shoulders and I was just freaking out. But I've had a million situations like that, I remember- Chris Erwin:Did that work out? Did he get on the flight and did the campaign come together? Brendan Gahan:Oh yeah, he ended up [crosstalk 00:34:02]. Chris Erwin:He's like, I can't leave the audience hanging. Brendan Gahan:Yeah. He made it and it was freaking amazing. We thought we had him for like an hour, he was going to do a little talk, kind of talk about... His story's amazing first off. And then his spot with Brisk was super cool. And we thought people were going to get a kick out of that. I think we had like 45 minutes for him booked. He was going to come out and hang out and talk with the creators. I think it was like 20 or so creators. And we thought that was going to be this awesome experience for everyone before we sort of called it a day and then went out. And he was so cool. He came out, told this story, which is insane. And then he was like, "All right, what are we doing next, guys?" And he hung out... We had all these YouTubers there. Brendan Gahan:We had like Nice Peter and Mike Diva, and Tim DeLaGhetto, all those guys. And he made himself available to do cameos and their vlogs or any content they were making. Chris Erwin:Wow. Brendan Gahan:People would be like, "Hey, can you pretend to choke me out and beat me up for my video?" And he'd be like, "Oh sure." He just was there hanging out all day. And then we were going to take all the creators out to a dinner, take them to [inaudible 00:35:10] or one of those, where drinking and bowling and stuff. And he's like, "Oh, could I come along?" He doesn't drink. So he didn't drink. But he was hanging with the whole crew, all of us until, I don't know, like one in the morning or something. He was the nicest guy, and so it was this amazing sort of transition from like the day before, one of the most stressful experiences of my life. I don't think I slept that night to everything went off better than I could have possibly hoped for. Chris Erwin:I just want to call that out. I think that's one of the beautiful things about working with digitally native creators and being in the advertising business, is meeting all these incredible personalities. So I think Danny Trejo, tell me if I'm wrong, but I think he's LA born, Latin, very tatted up, I think had a pretty rough upbringing, but made his way into American movies and TV series. And he often plays like the bad guy or the thug and maybe those roles have been evolving, but what you see on screen- Brendan Gahan:It's pretty spot on. Chris Erwin:Yeah, what you see on screen is clearly very different than who his actual personality is, and were it not for what you're doing, Brendan, you would never have gotten to meet him, and you probably have hundreds of stories like that, that's a pretty beautiful thing. Brendan Gahan:We did one campaign with Virgin Mobile, they were sponsoring Lady Gaga's tour at the time, we got to go hang out with Lady Gaga after one of her shows like, it was wild. I bring up celebrities, but I think honestly hanging out with the creators was my favorite thing, because especially back then, there was a lot of uncertainty in terms of like, how am I going to turn this into a job? Or this is my job, but I'm just kind of scraping by. And it was an interesting mix of sort of a lot of belief in what they were doing, which I found super admirable, and I was almost envious of the fact that they took that leap as well as this sort of insecurity and doubt that they had. Brendan Gahan:There's so much pressure to keep making content and to power through, but at the same time, not knowing exactly where it was headed. You think back then, like the daily vloggers, that was a big thing in that era, those guys, we would spend all day with them doing stuff for the brand. And then when other people would go have dinner and drinks late into the night, they would have to go edit and they'd be editing until like three in the morning, running on [crosstalk 00:37:21] of sleep. Yeah. Chris Erwin:You ask what kids want to be nowadays, they want to be a creator, but whether it's a daily vlogger, or you're creating content, you're managing a fandom that is always on, and that's a lot to take on and that's why there's burnout. And I hear you, some of those early creators, they were probably just racing because they're like, hey, I have put all my resources into this, all my focus. Maybe this goes away in a couple years because the fans' interests and the passions are going to change or the algorithms are going to change and maybe this is not going to be here. So it was like a money land grab. Chris Erwin:But Brendan, when you say that you would look at creators and say, oh, I was jealous how they took the leap, maybe I want to take the leap as well. You took that leap during COVID and you started really building out your own personal audience and thought leadership. And that speaks to that you like to do things on the side. I think you have a strong entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial spirit as you described. And I don't think it just started over the past couple years. I think when we were talking in advance of this interview, you were investing back in the day as well. And I think that you were an early investor in Big Frame, is that right? Brendan Gahan:So I did invest in Big Frame, but via Mekanism because I knew Sarah from back in the day when she was working for Phil DeFranco. And so when she was starting it, I was like, oh my gosh, can we get in? So yeah, we made this small investment and I just sort of wanted to be a part of all that. I definitely had like a serious case of FOMO. Chris Erwin:Yeah. I think that was really cool. I think Sarah and Steve, we actually had a bunch of different creators and I think peer business partners in our cap table, a way of giving them ownership as a thank you, helping us build this together. And so when we sold, all those creators that were in our cap table got some money. Was it life changing money? No, but it was something. And I think they really represented a pretty special ethos from the top. Brendan Gahan:That's awesome. That's so cool. Chris Erwin:But yeah, and you are also early on and I think you still are, you're an advisor to the VidCon board, is that right? Brendan Gahan:Yeah. So I sit on the advisory board for the industry track specifically. So I mean, I've been to all the US VidCons, a bunch of the international ones. So I was always deep in that space. And I've known Jim since the Revision3 days, he was, Jim Louderback the CEO was the CEO of Revision3, which was one of the big early MCNs. And I'm not sure exactly to be honest how that came about other than... But I think what prompted it was as part of the acquisition of Viacom for VidCon, Jim came on board and I think it was a way to make sure that, I think he put together a few advisory boards to make sure that he was getting a lot of input from multiple points, because for so long the community was relatively insular, and its expanded so much so quickly. Chris Erwin:I first met you, I think via an introduction from Chas, Chas Lacaillade who I think was an early interview on this podcast. You guys overlapped at full screen back in 2013 and then have both built your own businesses after that, pretty funny track. And first met you in New York. And I remember a conversation a year and a half ago or a couple years ago, I was asking, what are you focused on? What are you doing? You're a dabbler in so many things, you're at Mekanism, but I'm seeing that you're doing all this incredible thought leadership on LinkedIn, all these incredible posts and you're really consistent about it. Chris Erwin:They were really high quality. And you said, "Hey Chris, I'm really focused on building an audience. And I think audience in the modern creator economy is one of the most valuable currencies that you can have." And you weren't completely clear what you wanted to do with that audience, but you're like, I'm going to build and now's a great time to do it. So I am curious to hear that story of how that came to be and what you're working on today. Brendan Gahan:You probably said that so much more articulate than I did. I'm going to have to remember that, but yeah. That was definitely the insight. I think the way it came about was sort of like, I was legitimately beating myself up over the fact that I had probably hundreds of pages of writing and thoughts in Google Drive that I'd never published as a blog post. And I would just like constantly beat myself up over this. I'd have what I thought was a great idea. I'd work on a blog post and then it would just sort of get longer and longer and longer and longer. And then eventually it became this daunting task to like push it out, because I had a blog for a while and I would sort of fall into this pattern and then not publish for like a long, long time. Brendan Gahan:And the thing I sort of found was the hardest part was to press publish really. And so I was like, okay, well what's the easiest way I can get myself to kind of overcome that, because I did want an audience. I felt like I had thoughts that I wanted to get out of my own head. And so basically I was like, all right, what is sort of the easiest way to do this and inoculate myself to this idea that this fear of pressing publish. And so I started small and basically I was like, all right, well, I'm going to start posting one thing a day on LinkedIn. It doesn't matter if it's simply sharing an article, just writing cool or writing a whole blog post if I feel like it. And that made it very approachable. Brendan Gahan:In the early days, I would literally just sit there and press a timer, 20 minutes and write. When it was done, I'd give it a once over and then press publish. And that really helped me sort of start to overcome this fear, and did that for all of, what was that 2020 I believe. And then at some point towards the end of 2020, I was like... We'd already done multiple TikTok campaigns and I'd seen the power of TikTok, and like early days, you can still get in there and you can have an impact. Brendan Gahan:It's a softer landing than it will be later. So after seeing all the successful campaigns, I was encouraging my fiance to get on there and do it. And then every time she would post something, it would blow up. Because she had a decent sized YouTube channel and Instagram but it wasn't massive. And I was like, just get on TikTok, trust me. So I found myself sort of giving this advice to everyone, but not taking it myself. And I was like, all right, I should just... These opportunities they only come by every few years if you're lucky, and I was like, I need to just take my own advice. And so in the same way I had to get over writing and sharing my thoughts, I had to get over that with TikTok. Chris Erwin:Yeah, putting yourself on video, that's a big difference than writing and text base expression on LinkedIn. Brendan Gahan:It was so hard. It was so hard. She used to laugh at me because I would put the camera on me and then I would just try and say something, and I would be like, "Fuck, fuck," and then try and say a word and I'd stutter. And I would sit there for like 20 minutes trying to spit out two sentences. Chris Erwin:Brendan, I got to say, I feel you on that because Kevin Gould at Kombo Ventures, he would do these job rec videos on LinkedIn where he'd just be like, call it one or two minutes. "Hey, we're Kombo Ventures, I'm Kevin, we're looking to hire someone, this is what we're doing. And here's who we're looking for." I record these and this is like an inner tip on me. I'll record that like 15 times, it's a one minute video, but I'll say no, I skipped up, I said something I didn't want to say. I don't like how I look. I don't like the lighting, and people think like, oh yeah, you just put it up and that'll be like my one thing I need to get done in the morning, and it'll take me 15 tries to do it. Then you just go to think about, okay, if you're a professional creator doing that for a living, I really feel it then, it's a pretty good glimpse into it. Brendan Gahan:100%. And I think one thing I saw Roberto Blake, maybe, I think I saw a video or saw him tweet, you've got to make 100 bad videos to get to your first good one, or maybe it was Mr. Beast. And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's very true. And that sort of made me embrace the fact that the first ones are going to be awful, and I tried to not focus on like each one, but more building the habit because that would, I don't know how else to say it, but sort of inoculate yourself to that feeling of just sheer fear and anxiety of getting in front of the camera. Chris Erwin:On the outside looking in, I look at, we're a big content marketing machine at RockWater to drive awareness and legitimacy for the services that we do as the self-described McKinsey of the creator economy, right? Market research, strategy advisory, capital raising, and all of that. We look at what you're doing, Brendan, from your LinkedIn posts to your blog, to now almost I think over 100,000 followers on TikTok. It's very, very impressive. A lot of people in the industry say the same thing, right? Like, oh, do you see Brendan's path and what he's posting? It's incredible. I look at the TikTok videos. They're very well edited. Are you doing that yourself? Do you have a team helping you? Brendan Gahan:I'm not editing them myself anymore. I was up until late last year. So I hired an editor out of the Philippines actually who works full time on my TikTok. Then he does design for my blog posts and a bunch of different things basically, he helps me out with a bunch of stuff and that's been a huge relief because now I feel like I'm trying to transition to... There's almost sort of like, as a creator and this is something I observe, but I'm having trouble implementing it, sort of like people find you because of your topic is interesting or maybe you've got a helpful bit of information, but then they stick around and embrace you because of kind of the personality piece. Brendan Gahan:And I'm really trying to sort of evolve it into creating something that provides more insight into me at the same time. And hopefully people feel like there's a connection to me rather than like, "Hey, here are just some interesting stats or an interesting strategy." So that's sort of like where my head is at in terms of where I want to take it. I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to do that. But I think similar to just the same way I got started before, I'm just trying to throw things out there and see what sticks. Chris Erwin:Loudly from the RockWater team, keep doing what you're doing. We love it. Brendan Gahan:Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. Chris Erwin:Yeah. A closing theme before we get into some rapid fire questions and close out the interview. What's next for Brendan and Mekanism? And maybe that's a theme of talking about, what do you think is most exciting in the creator economy and how do you want to support it? You've been writing about Web 3 and X to earn models. Is that something that you're thinking a lot about lately? Brendan Gahan:In terms of Mekanism, I really enjoy that. And so long as I get to work with great brands and great people and do great work I'm content. In terms of the creator economy and stuff, I love everything that's happening there. And I do a little bit of investing and advising, and I love nothing more than sort of brainstorming with people who are building, it's so exciting. And I think the aspect of the creator economy that I'm really fascinated by is sort of... Rather than, most of the VCs coming in are like, oh, we're going to build this scalable product for creators. And that's interesting, but I think the thing that's more interesting is sort of the creators building their own brands, and I think right now production and productization, that's sort of the commodity piece. The development of a brand and cultivation of an audience is becoming the differentiator and the most valuable asset. Brendan Gahan:We were talking about that at the beginning, an audience is leverage. And so as we see sort of this transition from like Web 2 to Web 3, where everybody sort of breaks it down, Web 1 was read, Web 2 is read, write, Web 3 is read, write, own. If the creators of platforms and communities within Web 3 are the users and owners, it makes sense that they would be less likely to embrace traditional methods of advertising. There are some stats out there, like 96% of people hate ads. Yeah, nobody likes most advertising. There are great ads, but by and large people don't want advertising. So those who are sort of able to understand how to embrace communities and build communities, they're going to have a leg up as we sort of transition to Web 3. And we're already seeing the ripple effects of this. Brendan Gahan:I mean like iOS 14 impacted the ability to advertise, do targeted advertising. Creators are launching big brands now faster than ever, partnering with creators is the easiest way to have an impact because they've maintained that direct line of communication to their audience. And so I think creators building and owning brands is really exciting. And also, people are like, oh, like creators think it's in this nascent state. And yes, in the grand scheme of things, it is. But there are already multi billion dollar creator brands. It's so funny, I mean, you probably know him, but Richard Ryan, he was a YouTuber back in the day. I used to do a ton of work with him. He and this other YouTuber, Matt Best, they partnered with some other guys a few years back. They were the guys that launched Black Rifle Coffee, which I didn't realize how big that brand was until they IPOed, and like- Chris Erwin:Yeah, they just went public, right? Brendan Gahan:They went public. I actually was in Austin two weeks ago, I hung out with Richard. It was so wild. It's like, that was built, the platform for that initially was YouTubers. So it's really fascinating. And we're seeing all these other great brands, Logan Paul and KSI, their Gatorade competitor, et cetera. I think that aspect of the business, it just shows how powerful these creators are, which I think is really, really exciting. Chris Erwin:The Black Rifle Coffee, we were doing some research into that company a year ago to understand how some of these creator led brands and particularly CPG brands are incubated and looking at their story, and look, I don't want to undersell what they have done, but I think the quality of their coffee is good, but that's not their specialty. It's that they have these personalities behind it. And this ethos founded by former members of the military, pride in country. And they've built an incredible business doing that. And they've gotten a lot of other ambassadors that have helped them build their business along the way. And I think, yeah, it was funny, Chas was telling me about this. I guess you guys maybe hung out with Richard together. I would love to interview Richard on the podcast. So if he's listening, I'm going to be reaching out soon. Brendan Gahan:Richard's a really, really good dude. Chris Erwin:All right. So Brendan, we're going to enter the last segment of this interview. We're going to do a rapid fire, six questions, and the rules are as follows. With these questions, looking for short answers. So one sentence, or maybe even just one to two words, do you understand the rules? Brendan Gahan:Yes. Chris Erwin:Let's get into it. Proudest life moment? Brendan Gahan:Still ahead of me. Chris Erwin:What do you want to do less of in 2022? Brendan Gahan:Emails and late night work sessions. Chris Erwin:What do you want to do more of? Brendan Gahan:IRL time with friends and family. Chris Erwin:Okay. Maybe more time in Bitcoin Beach, down in El Salvador. Brendan Gahan:Yeah. Serious. Chris Erwin:What one to two things drive your success? Brendan Gahan:I'll keep this one short, crippling insecurity. Chris Erwin:Okay. I dig it. Advice for media execs going into 2022? Brendan Gahan:Get your hands dirty. Chris Erwin:Any future startup ambitions? Brendan Gahan:TBD. Chris Erwin:To elaborate on that, that could be some intrapreneurship at Mekanism or other things you're doing on the sides. I think my prediction is, this audience that you're building particularly on TikTok, I think something's going to come out of that in a pretty unique way. Brendan Gahan:So long as I can think and strategize, I'm very content. Chris Erwin:Here's the last one, Brendan, pretty easy. How can people get in contact with you? Brendan Gahan:Just Google my name, Brendan, B-R-E-N-D-A-N, Gahan, G-A-H-A-N. I'm on all the socials. So whatever your platform of choice is, you'll be able to find me. Chris Erwin:Yeah. And his website is great, lots of content there. Brendangahan.com. All right, cool. Brendan, thanks for being on the show. This was a delight. Brendan Gahan:Thank you. This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate you having me on and I love all the content you guys put out, so I'm really stoked to have made the cut and be on this. Chris Erwin:Very welcome, an easy decision. Chris Erwin:Wow. That was a super fun interview. And I really learned a lot. I think that Brendan and I are kindred spirits in a couple ways. One, our mutual love for surfing in Southern California, and two, just the vulnerabilities of putting yourself out there as a content creator. So that was really fun. Quick note, we just hosted our first executive event of 2022 just this past Thursday in LA. We did a media and commerce executive dinner at Chilena. It was awesome. We had an incredible array of guests. I think over 50 people came out and I also hosted a panel about the future of livestream commerce. So we had the head of operations of Popshop Live there, and the founder and CEO of both Verb, which is the parent company of Market.live and also StageTEN, just an awesome chat. It was a lot of fun, really great energy, and we're pumped to do more. Chris Erwin:So I think we're planning a dinner for investors in media and commerce coming up in the fall in New York City. And then also, we want to put another one together for sports media. So if you'd like to get involved as a sponsor, as a guest, or you want to be on a panel that I will moderate, reach out, you can hit us up at hello@wearerockwater.com. And then as always for all you listeners out there of our podcasts, we love to hear from you. If you have any ideas for guests or any feedback on the show, just shoot us a note, TCUpod@wearerockwater.com. All right, that's it everybody. Thanks for listening. Chris Erwin:The Come Up is written and hosted by me, Chris Erwin, and is a production of RockWater Industries. Please rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts and remember to subscribe wherever you listen to our show. And if you really dig us, feel free to forward The Come Up to a friend. You can sign up for our company newsletter at wearerockwater.com/newsletter, and you could follow us on Twitter @TCUpod. The Come Up is engineered by Daniel Tureck, music is by Devon Bryant, logo and branding is by Kevin Zazzali, and special thanks to Alex Zirin and Eric Kenigsberg from the RockWater team. 

In today's episode, Anirudh Singh sits down with Christina Melas-Kyriazi, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. Previously, Christina served as Head of Product for Consumer Foundations at Affirm and Senior Product Manager at GoFundMe. They discuss being at Affirm as the company IPOed, launching her whirlwind career at Bain Capital Ventures, and helping founders go from 0 to 1. Christina Melas-Kyriazi: Christina joined Bain Capital Ventures in 2021, where she focuses on early-stage investments in fintech and commerce. Christina was previously Head of Product for Consumer Foundations at Affirm, where she led a team of product managers to enable a delightful, frictionless customer experience from account creation to loan servicing. Before Affirm, Christina was a Senior Product Manager at GoFundMe, where she worked on growth and new product areas. Earlier in her career, Christina also spent time in business operations at LinkedIn and as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Christina is an active angel investor and an advisor to early-stage companies. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics from Stanford University. Christina grew up in Los Angeles, CA and now lives in San Francisco with her husband John and son Theo. She loves running in the Presidio and skiing. For more FinTech insights, follow us below: Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/wharton-fintech-club/ WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech Anirudh's Twitter: twitter.com/avsingh_24

Intro.(1:40) - Start of interview.(2:34) - Dan's "origin story". He grew up in southern California, did his undergrad at Stanford where he studied international relations. This prompted his quest to do something "cross-border." He did an exchange program in his junior year to Santiago, Chile, where he met his now wife and that planted a seed to do something related to Latin America. After law school he went to London where he practiced with Allen & Overy for 4.5 years. In 2004 he came back to Silicon Valley to practice as a corporate associate at WSGR, where he spent 6 years. At that time, there was not much cross-border work with Latin America, although there were partners focused on China, Israel and India, so the international blueprint was there to start building bridges between Silicon Valley and Latin America. Since then, he has developed his practice (passing through Goodwin Procter and Greenberg Traurig) and now at Gunderson Dettmer where about 80% of his practice is focused on Latin America.(5:53) - Dan's description of Gunderson's Latin America practice: "Fundamentally, we're transactional lawyers that do international cross-border work." Their focus is on venture-backed technology-driven, high growth companies.(10:21) - Why he advises his clients to incorporate in the Cayman Islands. "When we advise clients on a choice of a holding company, it comes down to a mix of investor preferences, tax considerations and administrative aspects." For Latin American companies, there are now three preferred choices: Delaware C-corp, a Cayman Islands company or a UK company. Kaszek Ventures was an early advocate for using a Cayman holding company. "I think we're going to see those 3 structures prevail in the market." Three prominent examples with Cayman holding structures: Nubank (the Brazilian neobank that recently IPOed in the US), Cornershop (a Chilean grocery delivery company that was acquired by Uber) and Kavak (a Mexican used-car online marketplace).(17:26) - On the geopolitical tensions between the US and China, and its implications for the startup ecosystem in Latin America. On the rising investments from China in Latin America and the increasing role and scope of the Committee of Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) impacting transactions in the US.(20:39) - On the increasing antitrust pressure from local regulators in Latin America. The example of Cornershop in Mexico and Chile.(23:19) - Dan's overview of entrepreneurship in Latin America. "Brazil is by far the most important market, followed by quite a distant second place from Mexico. Those two markets by themselves dominate the region in terms of capital deployed, number of deals, exits activity, etc." 2021 was a record year for venture activity in the region [$15bn in venture investments]. What's driving this growth? A combination of factors, per Dan: "The pandemic accelerated many changes, all of it boosted by widespread broadband adoption, digitally native people, younger generations, generational shifts in family businesses with decision-makers in their 40s or 30s and a vast under-banked and under-served population." There is also a virtuous cycle with big investors such as Softbank investing in the region ($8bn in two funds focused in Latin America) and other late-stage investors that have increased the cadence and velocity of investments such as Tiger Global. On the corporate governance implications of these investments.(30:22) - On the changing landscape of venture funding  in Latin America: "There is a much richer ecosystem of investors in Latin America, with stronger local investors." The rounds are getting bigger and investments are done at a faster pace. "But the markets will always be cyclical." His take on dual-class shares and other governance structures. "There will be down-rounds or re-caps if we go on down cycles, and these questions may play out in the next decade. We are still in an incipient stage of corporate governance in the region."(39:13) - On SPACs, and how they can impact exit strategies for Latin American companies. "I'm somewhat cautionary and skeptical of this structure, generally." "It doesn't really save that much time, nor much cost." [See Prof. Klausner's latest research on SPACs.](44:20) - On the role of directors, and diversity on boards. What's the status in Latin America? "It's slowly percolating down in Latin America." "Some of the investors are pushing some ESG standards in their investments, but not so much on gender diversity."(48:28) - On the positive impact in the increase of equity compensation and stock options in Latin American startups ("from top to bottom"). This is a sort of "democracy within the cap table." This is a trend that is starting to become more prevalent in the region.(52:15) - Dan favorite books:Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell (2008)Historical novels and intrigue, such as Red Notice by Bill Browder (2015)(53:27) - Who were your mentors, and what did you learn from them?Steve Bochner (WSGR)(54:36) - Quotes that he thinks of often, or lives his life by:"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose." Dr. Seuss.(55:41) - An unusual habit that he loves: He likes to collect scorecards from golf courses, he's been doing it since childhood.(57:56) - The living person he most admires: Barack Obama.Dan Green is a Partner and Co-Chair of the Latin America Practice for Gunderson Dettmer, a prominent international law firm headquartered in Silicon Valley. If you like this show, please consider subscribing, leaving a review or sharing this podcast on social media. __ You can follow Evan on social media at:Twitter @evanepsteinLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack https://evanepstein.substack.com/Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License 

“To accelerate our growth, we need to buy companies”Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia Tune in to our Internet Radio Station here: www.startup.radio  Subscribe Here Find all options to subscribe to our newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel or listen to our internet radio station here: Link https://linktr.ee/startupradio Our Sponsor Invest-in-Hessen This show was made possible by Hessen Trade and Invest with their brand Invest-in-Hessen. You can learn more about them here (https://www.invest-in-hessen.com/). We also run a dedicated sub-podcast with all interviews and news in cooperation with them. Find it all here: https://anchor.fm/techstartupsgermany “My goal is 10 mn Euros revenue. To reach this we need to keep buying [companies]”Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia The Founder Pascal Lauria (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascallauria/) has a very diverse background, raised in the Rhine-Main-Area his studies took him to Canada. He later worked in Taiwan, Silicon Alley (New York's startup hub) and in Silicon Valley. He took his experience to go back to Frankfurt and set up Cogia there (https://www.cogia.de/?locale=en_us). “Acquisitions are not always successful. We are very aware of that. We are working on it. For example in our last acquisitions we did not lose even one employee.”Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia The Startup Cogia Intelligence (https://www.cogia.de/?locale=en_us) is a big data, ai startup. It provides in its current setup innovative products and solutions in the areas of web and social media monitoring, market research and open source intelligence. The company Cogia GmbH is the startup, the company Cogia AG is the listed entity. Pascal started Cogia in 2010 but listed Cogia AG only in 2021 in Düsseldorf. Then the two entities merged and so Cogia GmbH got listed. You can learn more about the listed entity here: https://cogia.ag/de/investor-relations/ “With the access to capital markets I want to do one to two acquisitions per year.”Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia The Video Interview is set to go live on Tuesday, December 14th, 2021 at 16.00 CET https://youtu.be/GIlccHp_DgY  The Audio Interview Podcast You can subscribe to our podcasts here. Other Interviews with Pascal You can find the interviews with Coin Analyst here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/follow-up-with-the-bloomberg-of-crypto-coinanalyst/ Feedback Reach out to us, here is our audience survey, to give us feedback, suggest topics, interview partners or just to say “Hallo!” https://forms.gle/mLV6mVKwGwKuut8BA The Interviewer This interview was conducted by Jörn “Joe” Menninger, startup scout, founder, and host of Startuprad.io. Reach out to him:LinkedInTwitterEmail Keep Up to Date Here is our publication calendar: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=MDEyaTI3YWs1MjVxaTNzbWdqbDh2OXRiaW9AZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ Find all links and show notes here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/cogia-just-ipoed-and-wants-to-use-the-access-to-capital-to-drive-market-consolidation/

“To accelerate our growth, we need to buy companies” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia Our Sponsor Invest-in-Hessen This show was made possible by Hessen Trade and Invest with their brand Invest-in-Hessen. You can learn more about them here (https://www.invest-in-hessen.com/). We also run a dedicated sub-podcast with all interviews and news in cooperation with them. Find it all here: https://anchor.fm/techstartupsgermany “My goal is 10 mn Euros revenue. To reach this we need to keep buying [companies]” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia The Founder Pascal Lauria (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascallauria/) has a very diverse background, raised in the Rhine-Main-Area his studies took him to Canada. He later worked in Taiwan, Silicon Alley (New York's startup hub) and in Silicon Valley. He took his experience to go back to Frankfurt and set up Cogia there (https://www.cogia.de/?locale=en_us). “Acquisitions are not always successful. We are very aware of that. We are working on it. For example, in our last acquisitions, we did not lose even one employee.” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia The Startup Cogia Intelligence (https://www.cogia.de/?locale=en_us) is a big data, ai startup. It provides in its current setup innovative products and solutions in the areas of web and social media monitoring, market research, and open-source intelligence. The company Cogia GmbH is the startup, the company Cogia AG is the listed entity. Pascal started Cogia in 2010 but listed Cogia AG only in 2021 in Düsseldorf. Then the two entities merged and so Cogia GmbH got listed. You can learn more about the listed entity here: https://cogia.ag/de/investor-relations/ “With the access to capital markets I want to do one to two acquisitions per year.” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia Find all links and show notes here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/cogia-just-ipoed-and-wants-to-use-the-access-to-capital-to-drive-market-consolidation/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/deeptechgermany/message This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podder - https://www.podderapp.com/privacy-policy Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy Feedback We are always looking for ways to make the show better. Please take this opportunity and share your feedback with us! We would love to hear from YOU!!! https://forms.gle/mLV6mVKwGwKuut8BA

Pascal decided to list Cogia in Germany to use the access to capital markets to drive the consolidation across Europe

“To accelerate our growth, we need to buy companies” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia Our Sponsor Invest-in-Hessen This show was made possible by Hessen Trade and Invest with their brand Invest-in-Hessen. You can learn more about them here (https://www.invest-in-hessen.com/). We also run a dedicated sub-podcast with all interviews and news in cooperation with them. Find it all here: https://anchor.fm/techstartupsgermany “My goal is 10 mn Euros revenue. To reach this we need to keep buying [companies]” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia The Founder Pascal Lauria (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascallauria/) has a very diverse background, raised in the Rhine-Main-Area his studies took him to Canada. He later worked in Taiwan, Silicon Alley (New York's startup hub) and in Silicon Valley. He took his experience to go back to Frankfurt and set up Cogia there (https://www.cogia.de/?locale=en_us). “Acquisitions are not always successful. We are very aware of that. We are working on it. For example, in our last acquisitions, we did not lose even one employee.” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia The Startup Cogia Intelligence (https://www.cogia.de/?locale=en_us) is a big data, ai startup. It provides in its current setup innovative products and solutions in the areas of web and social media monitoring, market research, and open-source intelligence. The company Cogia GmbH is the startup, the company Cogia AG is the listed entity. Pascal started Cogia in 2010 but listed Cogia AG only in 2021 in Düsseldorf. Then the two entities merged and so Cogia GmbH got listed. You can learn more about the listed entity here: https://cogia.ag/de/investor-relations/ “With the access to capital markets I want to do one to two acquisitions per year.” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia Find all links and show notes here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/cogia-just-ipoed-and-wants-to-use-the-access-to-capital-to-drive-market-consolidation/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/deeptechgermany/message

“To accelerate our growth, we need to buy companies” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia Our Sponsor Invest-in-Hessen This show was made possible by Hessen Trade and Invest with their brand Invest-in-Hessen. You can learn more about them here (https://www.invest-in-hessen.com/). We also run a dedicated sub-podcast with all interviews and news in cooperation with them. Find it all here: https://anchor.fm/techstartupsgermany “My goal is 10 mn Euros revenue. To reach this we need to keep buying [companies]” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia The Founder Pascal Lauria (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascallauria/) has a very diverse background, raised in the Rhine-Main-Area his studies took him to Canada. He later worked in Taiwan, Silicon Alley (New York's startup hub) and in Silicon Valley. He took his experience to go back to Frankfurt and set up Cogia there (https://www.cogia.de/?locale=en_us). “Acquisitions are not always successful. We are very aware of that. We are working on it. For example, in our last acquisitions, we did not lose even one employee.” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia The Startup Cogia Intelligence (https://www.cogia.de/?locale=en_us) is a big data, ai startup. It provides in its current setup innovative products and solutions in the areas of web and social media monitoring, market research, and open-source intelligence. The company Cogia GmbH is the startup, the company Cogia AG is the listed entity. Pascal started Cogia in 2010 but listed Cogia AG only in 2021 in Düsseldorf. Then the two entities merged and so Cogia GmbH got listed. You can learn more about the listed entity here: https://cogia.ag/de/investor-relations/ “With the access to capital markets I want to do one to two acquisitions per year.” Pascal Lauria, founder and CEO Cogia Find all links and show notes here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/cogia-just-ipoed-and-wants-to-use-the-access-to-capital-to-drive-market-consolidation/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/techstartupsgermany/message

Björn Öste is the co-founder of Oatly, a Swedish food company that produces alternatives to dairy products from oats. He's also the founder of Good Idea Drinks.He started Oatly in 1994 along with his brother, Rickard Öste, a food scientist and the inventor of oat milk. In 2021, the company IPOed at a $10 billion valuation.SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER & STAY UPDATED > http://bit.ly/tfh-newsletterFOLLOW TFH ON INSTAGRAM > http://www.instagram.com/thefounderhourFOLLOW TFH ON TWITTER > http://www.twitter.com/thefounderhourINTERESTED IN BECOMING A SPONSOR? EMAIL US > partnerships@thefounderhour.com

2:58 - Rivian's IPO. Rivian, the electric adventure vehicle company, IPOed this week. The stock began trading at $106.75 a share, giving Rivian a market valuation of $91 billion.5:36 - Saudi Arabia gears up to host world's largest camel fest.   8:24 - Saudi Arabia's Red Sea International Festival. This is Saudi Arabia's first-ever film festival, and it will run from December 6-15 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The original date was in 2020. In total, the Red Sea Film Festival will feature 138 feature films and shorts from 67 countries in 34 languages, including 25 world premieres. Among this lineup are a slate of 27 new Saudi features from emerging local filmmakers.13:41 - 7 Years of King Salman. Saudi's worldwide celebrated the 7th anniversary of King Salman ascending to the throne as custodian of the two holy mosques. The second youngest of the Sudairy seven, King Salman is the 7th King of Saudi Arabia. The hosts discuss why he is the Reformer King.35:54 - Saudi Arabia at COP 26. OPEC+ countries, including Saudi Arabia, are defending a future role for fossil fuels at COP26."It is imperative that we recognise the diversity of climate solutions, and the importance of emissions ... without any bias towards or against any particular source of energy," Saudi Arabian Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al-Saud said in a speech to the conference.“We should use all [energy] resources as long as we congregate around mitigating.” 

My favorite shoe brand IPOed this week to much fanfare, and its success says a lot about the state of enabling technology platforms like Shopify, which Allbirds is built upon. We also breeze through a couple of other headlines about the new laser eyed major of NYC and Airbnb's blowout quarter. And, I couldn't help myself, so I had a couple more things to say about Meta. – PC Links: Eric Adams on Twitter Airbnb Announces Third Quarter 2021 Results Yahoo Finance: Allbirds surges 90% on IPO day

Joakim Achrén is a gaming entrepreneur, with fifteen years of experience from two venture-backed gaming startups, including Next Games, which IPOed in 2107. Joakim is now running Elite Game Developers, a company that helps entrepreneurs start their first game company. He's also an angel investor in Skunkworks Games, Lightheart Entertainment, Savage Game Studios, and more. Joakim recently took on the role of Venture Partner at Play Ventures and hosts his own podcast, Elite Game Developers Podcast. Join us in this fascinating discussion with topics like: - How Joakim caught “the bug” for helping other founders - What comes between the early validation phase and obtaining data from user behavior within a playable version of your game - The most common trap mobile developers fall into - The biggest takeaways you should be gaining from your metrics - The key to building mobile games that make players want to come back - The balance between “stealing like an artist” and innovating - What the gaming industry can learn from Pixar's creative process For more resources head to www.playmakerspodcast.com

“The lesson I've learned the hard way is that the only way you build a great business is by marrying a great product with a great distribution channel. That's essentially what we did at BladeLogic and that's what we're trying to do at MongoDB and when I look at all the great software companies, I can't think of one who doesn't have those two elements.”  - Dev Ittycheria Hunters and Unicorns shares the playbooks from leaders, founders, executives and investors from high growth technology companies. In this special edition series The 33 CXOs we investigate the greatest success story in the history of software sales. Discover how thirty-three sales execs from one organisation, BladeLogic, became CXOs in the world's 100 fastest growing technology companies. We uncover the stories and playbooks of the most prolific sales leaders in the industry. The final episode of this series features Dev Ittycheria, CEO Of MongoDB. Dev has over two decades of experience as an entrepreneur, investor, and leader, specialising in high-growth software companies. Dev joined MongoDB in 2014 and has led the company through some of its highest growth years. Before MongoDB, Dev founded and IPOed two companies—Breakaway Solutions, which went public in 1999 and was acquired by Verizon in 2001, and BladeLogic, which had one of the most successful IPOs of 2007 and was later acquired by BMC Software for $900 million. He has also invested in and served on the boards of many successful software companies including AppDynamics, Athenahealth, and Datadog. “I've seen many execs fail or stop scaling because they feel like they've mastered the system and all of a sudden, they hit a wall. The best people always have some degree of doubt and are constantly trying to understand and adapt to what's happening. You can't cut and paste from a past experience. Every company has its own unique issues and needs different things as it grows and as a leader, you need to be able to adapt.” Dev's philosophy is simple – always be a student of the game. In reference to his earlier career, Dev discusses experiencing imposter syndrome, feeling “caught in a trap of trying to portray that you're on top of everything” and his inspiring realisation that vulnerability can actually be strength, not a weakness. “You don't need to have the answers to everything, you just need to be able to ask good questions and surround yourself with good people.” Dev accredits his astounding success to having a learning mindset and to the incredible teams and mentors who have helped shape his management philosophy over the years, especially Steve Walski and John McMahon. He is a true believer in the importance of building trust across an organization and creating a strong culture of communication by providing a safe space for teams to discuss, experiment, and give candid feedback. As a leader, he understands that people mirror how he behaves and is therefore very intentional about the values he sets and creating a meritocratic environment in order to attract and retain great people. “I consider myself almost like the conductor of an orchestra. I don't really make the music, I don't even necessarily write the music, but I make sure that all the different people in the orchestra work well together and that together, we make beautiful music.” In this vodcast you will discover: Dev's reflection on the success and impact of BladeLogic How Dev manages the huge pressure and decision processes attached to the role of CEO How to recruit the right people and lead by influence, not fear Dev's operating rhythm – how he views his role and is able to focus on the right areas MongoDB's powerful position in the evolving digital world Dev Ittycheria is an inspiration for all concerned in today's transformational environment of business technology. As the visionary founder behind BladeLogic, he has immense pride for the achievements of his teams and mentors both past and present and continues to redefine great leadership at MongoDB by aiming to create a “company for the ages” by putting a foundation in place so that the company can continue to soar even in his absence. We discuss Dev's path into tech, leadership and investing, and gain a unique insight into the behind-the-scenes journey of a company from start-up to unicorn status. This one-off discussion has been a true honour for us and is essential listening for anyone with an interest in sales strategy, as well as a passion for the technology space.

This episode features Jim Albert, Chairman & Co-Founder, Neptune Flood Guest Bio This episode features Katelyn Johnson, Managing Director, AmFam Ventures Katelyn Johnson is a Managing Director at American Family Ventures, a leader in insurtech venture capital. Katelyn focuses on early stage B2B enterprise solutions in the New York, Boston, and Philadelphia markets. She is an active advocate in the entrepreneurial community, having served as a mentor at TechStars, Harvard Business School, MIT, and MassChallenge. Katelyn is currently serving as Executive Director of the Horn Program VC Council at the University of Delaware. An engineer by training, Katelyn earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delaware and started her career as a medical device engineer before attending Harvard Business School.  Highlights from the Show AmFam Ventures started in 2012/2013 as a more traditional CVC with a $50m, balance sheet-based fund, with one of their investments being Ring, who was a unicorn It has evolved since then with their second fund changing from being committed balance sheet funding to a committed pool of capital, with an investment being Bold Penguin, which AmFam recently acquired Now their third fund includes LPs beyond AmFam with $230m in total funding, which started in 2019 They had seen how they can help AmFam by bringing in new ideas and companies to work with, and benefited from AmFam's help on assessing and vetting potential investments, and saw value in expanding that to more carriers and lines of business through additional LPs in fund 3 AmFam made decisions early on to give the Ventures team freedom to do what it needs to do regardless of what AmFam itself would find relevant, for example not having to have a contract with part of AmFam to get an investment Embedded Insurance is a focus for the industry this year, an AFV is putting a lot of focus on Claims They invest in things that are both core and adjacent to insurance Core - brokers, distribution systems Adjacent - insurance can use, but it doesn't have to be only in insurance An adjacent example is Tire Agent, who sells tires online Tires are responsible for a meaningful percent of car accidents, so there's an insurance tie in her But there's also an opportunity to embed insurance into the sale process A focus right now is embedded insurance, which AFV was working on in 2015/2016, and what lead to the creation of Clearcover out of AFV As more InsurTech carriers IPOed, they're being valued on growth multiple, which is very atypical for insurance Now there's a focus on bottomline profitability, so if we can't control the loss ratio, how can we get leaner on the expense side? This episode is brought to you by Medallia (Medallia.com), and the book series, The Future of Insurance: From Disruption to Evolution, by Bryan Falchuk (future-of-insurance.com). Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com for more details and full show notes. Music courtesy of UPbeat Music, available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google Play. Just search for "UPbeat Music".

China Tech Investor is a weekly look at China’s tech companies through the lens of investment. Each week, hosts Elliott Zaagman and James Hull go through their watch list of publicly listed tech companies and also interview experts on issues affecting the macroeconomy and the stock prices of China’s tech companies.Make sure you don’t miss anything. Check out our lineup of China tech podcasts.In this episode, James and Elliott are joined by Protocol’s Zeyi Yang. Zeyi shares his thoughts on Zhihu, the popular Chinese information-sharing platform that recently IPOed in New York. The guys discuss the company’s strengths and weaknesses, and how investors view the company’s potential.Hosts may have interest in some of the stocks discussed. The discussion should not be construed as investment advice or a solicitation of services.Watchlist:TencentAlibabaBaiduBilibiliXiaomiJDPinduoduoMeituan-DianpingKuaishouHosts:Elliott Zaagman– @elliottzaagmanJames Hull– @jameshullxGuest:                   Zeyi Yang - @zeyiyangEditor:Peter IsachenkoPodcast information:iTunesSpotifyRSS FeedMusic: “Hey Ho” by Steve Jackson, Royalty Free Music

Nick joins Carolyn to discuss Gainsight's acquisition by Vista, growing up in Pittsburgh, the importance of community in the growth of the customer success field, how he runs a human-centric company, his passion for creating equal opportunities for all people, and his advice to other entrepreneurs. 1:12 Nick talks about growing up in Pittsburgh and being a Steelers fan 3:07 The importance of community in the growth of the customer success field 7:25 Nick discusses founding his first company, chipshot.com, while at Harvard, and how it almost IPOed 11:31 Why Nick is known as being a “fun CEO” and how he's motivated to create a human-centric company 18:50 How Gainsight handles tough situations 23:33 Nick's passion for creating equal opportunities for all people at Gainsight and in the customer success field 31:20 Gainsight's future and it's acquisition by Vista 36:50 Nick's advice to other entrepreneurs 

Dev Ittycheria is the President and CEO of MongoDB, the maker of the world’s most popular general purpose database. Built on open source, MongoDB has had an enviable run since its 2017 IPO. Dev joined MongoDB in 2014 and has steered the company through some of its highest-growth years. Before taking the helm of MongoDB, Dev founded and IPOed two companies—Breakaway Solutions, which went public in 1999 and was acquired by Verizon in 2001, and BladeLogic, which had one of the most successful IPOs of 2007 and was later acquired by BMC Software for $900 million. He has also invested in and served on the boards of many successful software companies including AppDynamics, Athenahealth, and Datadog. In this episode, Dev explains how he learned to be vulnerable as a CEO and galvanize the workforce to reset company goals and ultimately create the community-driven database that MongoDB is today.

Joshua Schachter, Investor, and Founder of Self Racing Cars joins Grayson Brulte on The Road To Autonomy Podcast to discuss what's next and the current state of investing in the private markets.The conversation begins with Joshua sharing his thoughts on new trends that he is starting to see emerge and his philosophy regarding investing. One of his key investment traits is the emotional deal in which he invests based on his gut and intuition.Out of the two-hundred plus companies [that I have invested in] this has probably happened 6,7,8 times, but 5 of those have IPOed. – Joshua SchachterInvesting in tech start-ups is based on patterns and that is what Joshua looks for when he is making an investment.By the time people have identified trends, it's a little lagging. – Joshua SchachterWhile fintech is hot now, it's an area that Joshua is currently not investing in, despite his experience on Wall Street. Joshua spent a decade on Wall Street working for Morgan Stanley.Before fintech became an identified trend, Joshua's long-standing relationship with Jack Dorsey led to an early investment in Square. This conversation evolves into a discussion about reputation and it's importance in investing.I will absolutely take it on the chin to make sure that a founder is not screwed over. – Joshua SchachterWith a great reputation, one can build life-long relationships. To learn a new industry, one must invest. This is one of the main reasons why Joshua created Self Racing Cars. He wanted to develop relationships in a sector where he did not have any connections.Joshua goes onto explain what Self Racing Cars is and how his love of racing inspired the event. Grayson asks Joshua about how he is planning to maintain the homebrew club feel of the event as it scales and becomes more popular.This conversation evolves into the current state of markets. With a red-hot IPO market and stocks of electric vehicle companies soaring, Grayson asks Joshua to share his thoughts on the current state of the private market.It's a much more slowly moving system. I think venture goes throw waves of contraction and relaxation. – Joshua SchachterAs a seed-stage investor, Joshua looks for companies that have a market value of $10 – $12 million. Investing at this stage is risky and takes years to realize returns.With the current global pandemic, Grayson asks Joshua what new opportunities might be bubbling up for investors in the private market. Additionally, why investors are following the herd mentality by investing large sums into loss-making electric vehicle startups.Expanding upon his thoughts, Joshua explains the difference between enabling and enabled companies. An electric vehicle start-up (excluding Tesla) is an enabled company as the companies depend on battery technology to create and deliver their product.There are still a lot of enabling technologies that have yet to be unlocked. In the future, new technologies will be invented which completely change the current state of the electric vehicle market.New technologies (such as autonomous vehicles) will become mainstream one day. But before they get there, there will be a massive round of consolidation in the industry. Grayson and Joshua have a lively discussion around investments in autonomous vehicle companies and the current state of the market.The shape of organizations will change as consolidation begins. Joshua explains the impact that this will have on the teams that are working on the technology. With Uber ATG being in the news (and eventually sold to Aurora), Grayson and Joshua discuss the program and why it was not in Uber's best interest to start the program.Looking at programs and acquisitions, Grayson shares his thoughts on Zoox and why Amazon made a brilliant purchase. With Amazon being the “Everything Store”, Grayson and Joshua discuss why the Amazon Prime Mobility tier might one day become a reality.Looking at the competitive advantages that certain companies have as they look to enter the autonomous vehicle sector, Grayson discusses why the Apple Store will be one of Apple's competitive advantages. Joshua goes onto explain Voyage‘s competitive advantage with master-planned communities. The master-planned community strategy was one of the main reasons why Joshua invested in Voyage.Closing out the conversation, Grayson and Joshua discuss the current state of the autonomous vehicle market and who will ultimately be the winners.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Airbnb, Doordash, and Asana have all IPOed. Is the PAK buying or waiting? Apple releases a brand new product. And one of the PAK throws a major pick six.

The story behind Slack—the communication platform used by millions around the globe—is almost a happy accident. Cal Henderson and his co-founders had been toiling away on a gaming startup, Glitch, when they realized the product of most value within their organization were the tools they'd hacked together to collaborate across locations. That collaboration tool spun off into Slack, which IPOed in 2019 and now has a market cap of over $16 billion. Slack has become more vital than ever in 2020, standing in as our "digital office." Cal shares how to scale an engineering organization, why the role of the office is forever changed, and how to master personal time management.

Welcome to another episode of the China Aerospace Weekly News Roundup! This week, we cover two interesting developments in EO and launch:1) A big week in EOIt was a big week in China’s EO and meteorology sector. First, China launched the Gaofen-13 EO satellite at just after midnight on Monday 12 October. It is the second Gaofen satellite bound for geostationary orbit, an interesting choice and a must-have for any sufficiently large EO constellation. Gaofen-13 is the latest in China’s Gaofen constellation, a primarily civil constellation of EO satellites of which there are currently ~20 satellites (depending on whether one defines the Jilin-Gaofen series, operated by Charming Globe, as part of the Gaofen series). The launch was the first in a couple of months for Xichang, with the launch center having undergone a series of upgrades to increase its annual launch capacity from around 17 to 30. Somewhat related to Gaofen, China’s Fengyun meteorological EO satellites celebrated their 50th anniversary this week. Chinese Premier (#2 most powerful politician) Li Keqiang wrote a statement on the importance of Fengyun, and Hu Chunhua (Vice Premier of CCP) attended an event for Fengyun. Premier Li’s statement was featured prominently on CASC’s homepage, and is seen as a high-level endorsement of the program more generally. 2) Developments on a deal between Guangzhou and the CASThe Municipal Government of the southern city of Guangzhou and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) had signed an agreement in 2019 to jointly build a 99-square-kilometer Nansha Science City in Nansha (a rural district of Guangzhou). Several space institutes & companies will open facilities there, including CAS Spaceflight Technology Center (research) and the Zhongke Aerospace Exploration company (commercial launch company). On September 29 2020, the Zhongke Aerospace conference was held there, officially kicking off the construction of the project.Zhongke Aerospace, aka CAS Space, is a CAS spin-off with main headquarters in Beijing. The company plans to develop solid & liquid rockets, aiming at 30 rockets per year by an undefined timeline. Liquid rockets seem reusable (see rocket family infographic on YT).The move is interesting because the space industry of Guangdong has historically punched below its weight. Guangdong is a province of 100M people, the GDP is roughly as big as Russia or South Korea, and it is home to many of the world’s biggest tech companies--Huawei, Tencent, ZTE, Ping’an, DJI BYD, etc. The economy of Guangdong has historically been more “commercial”/export oriented, however, which has contributed to relatively limited space activity. With a major initiative such as the Nansha Science City, we may see the Guangdong space sector start to accelerate its development. 3) And another recent IPO company share price continued to “rocket”Shaanxi Zhongtian, a CASC subsidiary that IPOed on 25 September, continues to go up the 10% daily limit every day, now (Monday 19 Oct) having reached 10 days in a row of +10%, i.e. 250%+ return since IPO (would be ~RMB 18.6 per share to RMB 48 per share). The company’s performance is an indication of probably three factors, namely: 1) lot of savings in China, 2) strong investor preference for state-owned companies that are seen as more stable, and 3) Few ways for average investors to invest into the space sector. The biggest winner here? Probably CASC, which has seen their stake in Zhongtian increase in value from ~RMB 1.5 billion to ~RMB 4 billion.---------------------------------------------Follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and on our official website: https://www.dongfanghour.com/

Thank you for bearing with me as I roll out podcasts. Some of you had trouble subscribing to get these podcasts in your regular player. You have a few options. The simplest way is to just add the RSS feed to your player (link). You can also find the podcast the way you find any podcast. Here is the link to the larger players: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. The “best” way to subscribe is a little more complicated. Click on the little grey link above (or here). It will give you a URL for a “private RSS feed”. If you ever subscribe to Marketing BS+ this will allow you to get the premium podcasts directly into your player (and all the non-premium ones in the meantime).Sorry for the confusion yesterday. I am figuring this stuff out as I go along. (Fun fact: The idea of public “beta” software originated with Netscape, October 13, 1994. It has been growing strong ever since.)Onto Part II. of my interview with Jason Goldlist, former head of marketing for WealthSimple. Yesterday's Part I covered Jason's career. This part of the interview dives into the (unusual) marketing channels and techniques Jason used to scale WealthSimple into the largest “roboadvisor” in Canada. I particularly like the billboard stunt. As always the entire transcript of the conversation is below, but I recommend listening through your podcast player.Transcript:Edward: This is part two of my interview with Jason Goldlist. Today, we're going to dive into his experience as Head of Marketing at Wealthsimple. First, Jason, can you describe what Wealthsimple is for those who do not understand?Jason: Wealthsimple is a leading financial technology player in Canada that helps make personal finance really simple and really powerful. It's a robo-adviser, so it helps automate investments. It's a savings platform, helps you save your cash for the future, it lets you buy and sell stocks, and even buy and sell cryptocurrency.Edward: Is it like a combination of Betterment with Robin Hood?Jason: And Coinbase.Edward: Got it, and is that a good description or is it something different? Again, if those three companies were to merge, that's Wealthsimple?Jason: Sure. Wealthsimple operates predominantly in Canada and the Canadian financial services market is totally different than in the US. What happens in Canada is you've got five big banks that completely control Canadians' finances. Wealthsimple is hoping to be that sixth alternative bank that's going to come in and shake up the entire industry. We think that there is a whole slew of financial products that consumers need, that they want, but they aren't getting from the big banks.Edward: Got it. I think that's super helpful and sets the groundwork. I want to dive into your biggest marketing channels, which I think are fairly unusual for a company of that size. Let's start with offline partnerships. What were you doing there?Jason: I was lucky enough to join Wealthsimple at a very early stage. I was the 10th employee of Wealthsimple, leading marketing, building that team essentially from scratch, and when I left Wealthsimple, it was several hundred employees managing billions of dollars with a really large, robust marketing, product, and brand team.The channels that we focused on changed throughout the evolution of Wealthsimple. You can imagine at the beginning when I joined, we had only raised, I think, less than $ 2 million Canadian. There wasn't a lot of money to go out and spend. We were really scrappy with each and every customer. At that time, adding 10 customers, adding 100 customers was a big win. Later to the end of my 10 years at Wealthsimple, of course, adding 10 or 100 customers happened in the blink of an eye. We were looking for new ways to grow customers by thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands at a time. What we looked at evolved over time, but we've always been looking at channels that aren't the easy ones. I've always had this feeling that if it was an easy channel, the return isn't going to be there. You've got to pioneer a channel in order for it to be really unique and interesting to your business. Because every business is a little bit different, I also think you want to create your own little bit different channel. Just because these big channels, whether it's traditional channels like television, Facebook, or Google work for other people, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for you. I think the process of thinking deeply about what it is that makes your business and your customers different and then going out and creating your own channel for it, can make a world of difference.Edward: When you say offline partnership, what does that mean?Jason: One of the channels that we cultivated was, as you mentioned, offline partnerships. What that means to us is how could we find other brands or other organizations that had large customer bases that wanted to share those customers with us. This would be not through a platform, not through a marketplace, but actually going directly to other brands, finding, and building relationships that were win-win and mutually beneficial. As an example, one of the earliest partnerships we did was with Airbnb. We looked at the landscape of brands and said the brand that we aspire to be and that our clients aspire to use would be a brand like Airbnb. I think I went on LinkedIn and I think I just typed in Airbnb and I use the geography filter for Canada. I was like, who is running Airbnb in Canada? We traded some emails and we sort of said we think there's this opportunity. Let me understand your goals better and maybe there's something that we can do with a campaign to actually go out and help you with your goals, and at the same time raise Wealthsimple's brand awareness with our target market and also acquire new customers.They said one thing that we're really trying to do is get people to use Airbnb for the first time. I think this was in 2015. They were still growing in new markets. We said, okay, cool. Do you have a financial incentive for new customers? They said, yeah. We pay $200 to acquire new customers so we can pay that out.So I said if we were to go out and spend some money on channels and incentivize people to try Airbnb, that would be helpful for you, right? They're like, yeah. And we were able to make this channel. We're able to leverage Airbnb's brand to go to market with an offer to attract people to use Wealthsimple and it became a new Wealthsimple client that got some of that and an Airbnb client. They got some of that Airbnb money deposited directly into their Wealthsimple account. That's an example of an offline partnership that worked really well for us and not only did it work in the direct channel and that there are lots of customers that responded to campaigns that we were able to attribute to that partnership, but also in the mind of the market. We were now hanging with the Airbnb brand and it set the idea that we were an innovative company, a young company, an emerging company that had the same brand DNA as Airbnb, and opened up the floodgates of being able to partner with lots of other organizations in Canada as well.Edward: Sounds to me that there are two parts to that. There was the halo effect or the fact that your brand is getting affiliated with Airbnb, and then there's Airbnb giving you the $200 or whatever you negotiated that you could go and drop into your customer's accounts. But you still need to have a marketing channel now to go and attract that customer. It just makes it easier to make that marketing channel work now, right? Now you have $200 additional monetization for any customer that you attract.Jason: That's right. Now we've got a great concept for a campaign and the question is, how do we want that campaign to live in the world? Most of my campaigns are going to be across multiple channels. There'll be different places that I'm going to share that with the market. The first place that I'm looking to, especially with a partnership like this, is to leverage Airbnb's channels. Now, here's an opportunity for them to also incentivize their followers. Maybe it's an email list of non-converters, maybe it's their social media to go and check out Wealthsimple for this benefit. At the same time, I can also go to the market and put some money behind it. Maybe we'll even co-market it together in the sense that maybe Airbnb will chip in some marketing dollars for me to go and put this on Facebook and retarget some visitors, or put it through a social channel like Twitter in order to get more people, or run an email campaign or something in order to get people to convert. Certainly, there's a bunch of different moving parts here. I love that you brought up that there's the halo effect and there's the direct effect. I think almost all of my campaigns fall into one or the other or a combination of both. Starting with what you think success is going to be on those different dimensions can really help you make sure that the campaign from end-to-end achieves the right objective.Edward: Let's talk a little bit about that. So you're Airbnb, Airbnb has a list now of users that have not converted. What's their incentive to target that list with a Wealthsimple offer versus just saying, hey list of people who haven't converted, we'll give you $200 that you can spend on Amazon. Why partner with you on that deal?Jason: There's a bunch of different ways that the value gets created. One of them is that there is a bit of a quid pro quo when you're negotiating a partnership like this. At the time, our Canada list was a lot bigger than their Canada list. For a brand like them who's trying to build a new market, we're excited to reach their list and they were excited to reach ours. So there is a bit of a trade that happens there and it's a win-win as long as the brands are aligned and customers aren't confused as to why it's happening. You need to create a great story, a little bit of a landing page collateral to make sure that the story's well-articulated. But there are other offline partnerships that were really successful where it's even plainer the benefit. I'll give you an example of a partnership that we did together with Zipcar, Ontario.Zipcar has members and they have a specific member benefits portal. They're always looking for interesting opportunities to put into their member benefits portal that's going to reward Zipcar members in Ontario. That was an easy one where they actually have planned activities to email their entire base about new offers in their members' benefits. They're just looking for the right members' benefits to be there. We were able to approach Zipcar and show them how our audiences would overlap, and we had a really interesting and compelling on-brand offer for them to share with their mailing lists.Edward: How many of these types of partnerships did you have? Between Airbnb and Zipcar, how many of them existed at that scale?Jason: Well, in the beginning, there was the first one. Of course, we found success with them. One of the reasons that we did find early success with them is, as we were growing, we were trying to convince larger brands to use us and to partner with us. We were able to reach wide audiences without typically a cost of acquisition. Now, the cost was the hustle, originality, creativity, and the relationship-building that it takes to make this, but there wasn't an incremental cost to it, which is why we liked it. What happened is as we got bigger, first we expanded the portfolio and then we actually contracted it. The reason that we contracted it is that as we grew bigger, it was no longer so helpful to get dozens of new clients from a channel.It was only really worth our time to get larger ones, so we had to create partnerships with larger organizations that had a broader reach. Now when I think about the partnership opportunities in the landscape for Wealthsimple today, they look a lot more like large telcos, other large financial institutions that maybe aren't related, other consumer retailers like a grocer, gas, or pharmacy that really reach millions and millions of Canadians. That would be an opportunity that would get me excited today, but it just started with members' benefits of Zipcar.Edward: That makes sense because I think initially, if it's quid pro quo, if you have no email list, you don't have anything to offer a really big partner. Then, as you get bigger through leveraging, it's almost a ladder up strategy of starting with smaller partners, use that to get to scale so you can trade for bigger partners.Jason: That's exactly the strategy. What's interesting about this is that there isn't a website that you can go and log into, then just put your credit card down and get these partnerships up and running. These are partnerships that require you to go and meet with real people, create something out of nothing, and you've got to demonstrate and establish trust. You've got to follow through for your partners. You've got to do awesome tracking for them. You've got to make them feel really special. I think to my point I made earlier, they're not easy because there isn't a directory of them to take off. But I think to the point of creating new channels, I think these are the kinds of channels that I love creating. Something that didn't exist before, something that's uniquely your brands and something that's really effective for both sides.Edward: Let's talk about public relations. That was another big channel for you.Jason: It sure was. One of the things that's interesting about public relations or I call it earned media, is that similar to these partnerships, you're not paying cost per acquisition for each customer. Of course, there's an investment that you make in time or if you hire an agency and you can tie it back, but ultimately if you do it well, you're able to get low cost, ongoing inbound traffic. I remember sitting around the table with the early team, and if we would just get a mention on the national news, in Canada, it's the CBC. The phone would start ringing. It was like magic and we didn't pay anything for it. A reporter got us, we reached out to a reporter, and then suddenly we got new clients. It was always exciting to see the traffic volume spike on the website when something as boring as an article in the local newspaper came out. But I think that showed us really early on the power of doing this well.Edward: How did you do it well? PR is one of them, obviously. You can optimize page search to death and there are agencies that can optimize television spend. How do you optimize PR? How do you know you're doing it well? Jason: First we didn't do it well. I think sometimes it takes not doing a channel well first to learn a little bit more about how to do it better. The first thing that we did is we hired a firm that specialized in financial services public relations, to help us with this. I think that playbook was irrelevant to us. We paid them a retainer every month, and every month they've got to get some relationships with the journalists and they go through all their client list. At the end of the day, that wasn't differentiated, it wasn't interesting, and it didn't get us the results that we needed, but we had that early taste even before I think we were working with an agency of what PR could do. So when we set out to do a real earned media campaign, we tried to think a little bit differently. We try to think about a couple of different ways to do it. For example, you can create data and then share that data back with publications. You can capitalize on emerging news trends and then use that to get into the news cycle. There's a whole bunch of different tactics and we would think of interesting and differentiated tactics to do it. I'll give you one of my favorite stories. One of my favorite stories of an earned media tactic that worked really well for us was in Canada, there was a large tech company that had IPOed called Shopify. We, of course, in the wealth management business, love when big tech companies IPO because that means a lot of wealth is typically created. We'd like them to park their wealth with us. During the IPO, it was really hard to cut through the clutter of that news cycle and get earned media for different tech companies' IPO. What we found was there was going to be a different date that was less celebrated and it typically is never celebrated in the media, but it could be, which is the expiry of the IPO lockup period. Not a super sexy date, but nine months after the IPO, that's when the insiders can actually sell. That's when the wealth is realized, not just created. What we did is we created a campaign around the expiry of the lockup period that would educate Shopify employees on how to get a diversified portfolio out of their holdings. We created a little ebook, we made a landing page on our website, and we actually took out a billboard across the street from Shopify so that you could see both the billboard and the Shopify building in the background. We hired a photographer to take the picture, and then we shopped and pitched that story to the media. We said, hey, are you covering the Shopify lock-up period? You should be thinking about what happened nine months ago. Now is the time all this money is liquid. Oh, by the way, here's a photo, a Wealthsimple guide that we've made to help Shopify employees manage their wealth.Can you believe it? Articles were written about the story, we did the journalists' work for them, our photo ran as the photo in the article, and there was a great mention about how companies like Wealthsimple were helping employees at Shopify manage their wealth.Edward: That's fantastic. I believe that there's something to this new way of marketing, which is this combination of PR and paid media. In that example, you use paid media to presumably acquire some Shopify customers but then accelerated with PR.Jason: And the loop doesn't even end there, Ed, because once that's done, you take that article that's being published by reputable news media, then you go and you put some dollars behind it on social media to amplify it even more. That, actually, I think goes beyond that. From there, we actually got some inbound traffic. I believe Toby, the founder and CEO of Shopify, messaged us and said, "Hey, great campaign." That opened the door for us to actually get into Shopify and start managing their employees' retirement plans, which was fantastic and it involved us bringing out our wealth advisors to help manage their employees. I believe for a long time, Shopify was the number one source of clients at Wealthsimple by employer by a large margin, even though they only employed several thousand people, our percentage of Shopify employees using Wealthsimple was astronomical.Edward: If we were to break that particular campaign down into (say) four parts, which was number one, was the billboard and the marketing to get Shopify customers to come on board. Number two is the PR push around that was targeted more broadly and far more than just Shopify customers. Number three was the paid acceleration of number two and then number four, was the enterprise sale effectively that you got to Shopify. Roughly, how much impact did those four things have? Was it 25, 25, 25, 25? What's your best estimate?Jason: I love that you say best estimate because some of those things we can directly track and of course many of those things we can't, but we know they're there. If I were to do my estimates, I actually think the last one, the halo effect we got inside of Shopify's hallways, of them talking about us, of them referring their friends, of them trying us, and then bringing and consulting their wealth with us over the years was so much bigger than the direct effects of (say) having the billboard in the first campaign. I think that the fourth one is only possible if you get number two. So, you need that multiplier. I think if you have that campaign without that endorsement or thought that earned media pick up, I think that would be a failure of the campaign. But once you've got number two that allows you to unlock number three and number four (if you can), it becomes even more successful than you imagined.Edward: If you hadn't got them all, like if you'd only gotten number one or only gotten number two, would it have been ROI positive or would have been negative, and you needed those three and four in order to get it over the top? Jason: They're not really expensive ideas and the truth is, we're talking about one that works for everyone that worked. Of course, there's a whole bunch that don't work and that we don't talk about as guerrilla campaigns or earned media opportunities that didn't work out. But if you look at the direct costs of doing that, we recycled some content. We wrote some original content. We're talking about hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars. We chased down that billboard. Hard work especially because we need it on short notice, but we got it. We're talking about single digits, thousands of dollars. We're talking about a campaign that was a few thousand dollars. At the time, if that hadn't worked out, we'd be totally fine. But I think there was an ROI on that that was well beyond the five digits or maybe even six digits on it, so the percentages return on that campaign like that were fantastic.Edward: What does growth hacking mean to you?Jason: I've never described myself as a growth hacker and I don't have a stock definition. But what it makes me feel is that how do we do alternative things to drive the adoption of the product. One of the things it does sort of bring up for me are the viral loops. How do we get the customers that we have today to maybe adopt another product, increase their usage of the product, or tell others themselves about the product, too?Edward: So when you talk about growth hacking at Wealthsimple, is Shopify an example of that or is there something different?Jason: Probably in the broadest sense, but I think in the more narrow sense of how do we have a virality coefficient that supports growth without (for example) creating new campaigns or without (for example) spending money on social channels. That is sort of what growth hacking would mean to me more so. I think we are really lucky at Wealthsimple in that for whatever reason, your wealth advisor and some other financial products do tend to be products that people talk about, and especially if you do them different or better, save people money, and make their life more effective and efficient, you share it with family and friends. For a long time at Wealthsimple and hopefully to this day still, that was the number one way that people found out about us, by referring Wealthsimple to their friends and family.Edward: That's great. Hey, thanks so much for coming on today, Jason. Before we go, tell me about your “quake book”.Jason: My quake book, of course. I'm always thinking about my quake book. What did I tell you my quake book was, Ed? Edward: Fooled by Randomness. Jason: Oh, yes. Are you a fan of Nassim? Edward: Nassim has blocked me on Twitter. Jason: There you go. Well, that's all you need to know. Hopefully, he hasn't blocked you from reading his books, though. What I love about Fooled By Randomness is that sometimes we see patterns where there aren't patterns. Certainly, as an analyst starting my career, all the time I think we talked about things that maybe weren't there, but we hoped were there. I think reading that book is one of the eye-opening opportunities, along with the rest of Nassim's writing, to help you really understand the way the world works and not the way that you hope the world works.Edward: Thank you for that, Jason, and really excited to have you on the show. Jason: Thanks, Ed. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

When Olivier and his co-founder launched Datadog in 2010, they didn't write a single line of code for the first six months—despite having backgrounds as engineers. Out of the gate, they have made it their mission to listen to customers and understand what problems they can solve for them. Fast-forward a decade: Datadog is the essential monitoring platform for cloud applications and a true DevOps pioneer. The company IPOed in 2019 and its market cap now exceeds $27B. Olivier shares why he thinks of companies as a set of systems, how to push forward even when VCs tell you no, and why he's still subscribed to all Datadog support emails.

Every Tuesday, I go into detail a question I frequently get asked. Should you use a local bank vs online bank for bay area home loans. While interest rates are always very important, there is one piece you need to be most aware of. Online banks have gained significant market share over the years claiming to be very customer centric and streamlining the process. They even advertise some of the lowest rates you will see! Check this latest ad out from Quicken Mortgage. They are offering loans for under 2% for a 15 year fixed rate! And they are not the only ones. They are clearly doing very well as their parent company, Rocket Mortgage just IPOed last week making Dan Gilbert the 28th richest person in the world. But, should you use them for your home loans here in the Bay Area? It depends. Let's talk about home purchases first. While these online banks are commonly used in a lot of markets across the country, they don't do many purchases here in the Bay Area for several reasons. Because of how fast properties move, the time it takes to close is very important. They don't have the same sense of urgency to be competitive with the banks that are local. Many banks even as busy as they are today can close as fast as 15-18 days. 2nd online banks don't have local contacts that you can chase! The benefit with working with someone local is that reputation matters a lot. It means a lot to me as a top Realtor for future transactions, but also for them to do a good job so that they can get future business with you.. They have much more on the line with their credibility than someone that doesn't have a focus of a particular area.. Last but not least, it is the ability to actually close the loan! When you are in contract, you would have 3% EMD or Earnest Money Down. This is your commitment amount that you need to fulfill the loan. No slight interest rate improvement is worth this risk! I've personally seen many of these loans claim that they have these amazing interest rates, only to fall out of contract weeks later jeopardizing the entire deal and the buyer's EMD altogether. Now where is it a good option? Refinances are a great solution because you don't have the time constraint and the monetary risk of breaking a contract. You are welcome to shop around and try to get those teaser rates. Worse comes to worse, the refinance doesn't go through so while you lose time and have a headache, at least you aren't losing tens of thousands of dollars. Just be wary of the fine print. A lot of banks can go very low if you pay points. Think of interest rates and your closing costs as a sliding scale. Anybody can go really low if they are willing to pay a higher closing cost for it. Let's look at that same teaser rate, while the rate is at under 2%, the closing costs are at close to 1 point which is a lot of money here in the Bay Area. -- Want to talk about your real estate goals? Find a time on my calendar! Looking for a real estate agent in your city? I have a network of top producing agents around the country. Email me and I can put you in contact with an agent in your area. Spencer@SpencerHsu.com

You may not know exactly what Soft-Tex is, but chances are you’ve seen or even own a Soft-Tex product. That’s because Soft-Tex is a B2B2C company that provides products to retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Bed Bath & Beyond, Macy’s, and many more. The company specializes in sleep products, like pillows, mattress toppers, mattresses, mattress pads, or anything else you might need in your bedroom to help you get a good night’s sleep. But Soft-Tex doesn’t only ship to their retail partners. In recent years the company has upped its Ecommerce and drop-shipping capabilities in an effort to get even more in the lives of consumers. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Taylor Jones, the Vice President of Marketing for Soft-Tex explains how the company is creating a collaborative partnership with retailers while also exploring and consulting in the world of Ecommerce. He explains the ways in which Soft-Tex goes about ensuring successful product launches — including the exact number of reviews he thinks is the sweet spot — why SEO and product-usage videos are the ultimate keys to success, and the need for an Amazon strategy and what that looks like.   3 Takeaways: There is a delicate balance you have to strike when working with retail partners and also selling products D2C. You have to work collaboratively and across multiple channels to ensure that you have the products selling where you want them and not competing against themselves  Amazon is a price-leader, and in order to get any market share, you need to have an Amazon strategy that allows you to live there, while also ensuring that other partners have exclusive access to other products Product reviews and product-usage videos are absolutely essential to achieving a high conversion rate. Generating about 15 reviews and placing a usage video front and center are two strategies to implement to help grow conversions For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Hey everyone. And welcome back to your number one show on all things eCommerce, I'm your host, Stephanie Postles. And today we have Taylor Jones on the show, the VP of marketing and eCommerce at Soft-Tex International. Taylor. Welcome. Taylor: Hey Stephanie, thanks so much for having me. Stephanie: I'm excited to have you here. I'm feeling a little bit sleepy now, thinking about all the nice products you guys have, that are centered around sleep. I'd love for you to dive a bit into what is Soft-Tex International and how did you come to the company? Taylor: We'd love to hook you up first off. Stephanie: Yes, please. Taylor: So at Soft-Tex, we're really serious about sleep and home comfort products. I think for a long time, the company has been a leader in memory foam and cooling technologies and just everything to help you get a better night's sleep and live a comfortable and better life. I came to the company about three years ago. I have deep digital experience, worked for a company called Red Ventures here in Charlotte. Maybe you've heard of them. Then for another company in the call center space, Arise Virtual Solutions, and from some mutual connections found this role at Soft-Tex and started, really owning the eCommerce business for them. And it's blossomed into a larger marketing role, including e-commerce still. Stephanie: That's great. So how do I think about Soft-Tex? Because maybe a normal consumer, maybe hasn't heard of them. So how do I think about, how big the company is, who their partners are, how you guys sell? Tell me a bit about that. Taylor: Soft-Tex is really a B2B, to C company, and Soft-Tex is the entity that would be known to our retail partners. So think about Macy's, Bed Bath & Beyond, J.C. Penney, Walmart, Amazon, the whole gamut of retail, we supply with bedding, pillows, toppers, mattresses, mattress pads, protection, anything that is in the bedroom that you'd sleep on, it would probably make it. Taylor: We have a direct to consumer presence that we work with, bedpillows.com. We also have a robust, drop ship capability. So it's not just, we sell in bulk to a retailer. We do that absolutely, but we do, as a core capability, have drop ship to over 50 partners. Stephanie: Wow. So it seems like there's an interesting mix where, you're trying to market for yourself, you're doing direct to consumer, you have your retail partners. How do you think about managing these relationships and also not cannibalizing yourself at the same time? Taylor: Right. So I would say, our partnership with bedpillows.com, is emerging. It's a delicate balance for folks in our position, because we supply, our retail partners, we absolutely don't want to compete with them. Ultimately those relationships are very important to us and we build custom products. It's a very collaborative process with our brick and mortar retail partners and the branding that that goes into all of our different channels. Soft-Tex we have about five or six national or licensed brands that we supply product under or, or we'll develop product under a private label, to mitigate some of the brand conflicts or sales channel conflicts that may arise with selling our products. Stephanie: Very cool. And are you helping your partners when it comes to digitally marketing, the mattresses, pillows, are you helping improve their eCommerce strategy? Because I could see you having a lot of insights into different brands and their strategies and what they're doing to maybe share that knowledge and help each other out. Taylor: Absolutely. So the role we play on with the eCommerce team is a consultative role in that aspect, in that, we're able to see over the wall, we supply our products to the 50 different partners that I mentioned. So we can see some really interesting things that, maybe somebody over here is doing, in merchandising, assortment, with features, attributes, something cool on the product description page. And we can make that suggestion to someone else who maybe has not done that yet. Stephanie: That's great. So what are some learnings or key things that you see happening on these eCommerce sites where your like, here's some good best practices that anyone could implement or I see this working really well right now, or maybe it wasn't working six months ago. What lessons are you seeing through all these brands that you work with? Taylor: I think the concept of reviews syndication and review seeding is very important. Obviously, authenticity is critical and you don't want to see fake reviews, but when you have a new product, accelerating the process through which consumers can experience the product and write a review and leave a review, such that it exists is social proof, for other customers who see that product, is so important to getting a product off on the good foot. We've seen, in the home comfort space, 10 to 15 reviews, seems to be a sweet spot for a new product introduction to really help accelerate its growth. Stephanie: Completely agree on there. How do you encourage reviews? Taylor: There are review seeding partners out there, those companies that you can do seeding programs with, Bazaarvoice is a big one in our space. They have a really interesting service where you can collect reviews if you have a direct to consumer presence and syndicate those reviews. And they also have a network of folks that exists to, you can nominate your products and folks order it to sample your product. And those reviews can get syndicated out to retailers that, on the flip side are members of the Bazaarvoice syndication network. So we've seen retailers who participate in that, really scale up quickly on our products. Stephanie: Very cool. So they're not really having to do as much of the heavy lifting because essentially a consumer would review a product and that review can be used multiple times. Is that how to think about it? Taylor: Through a seeded review, say we did 10 reviews, those same 10 reviews would appear on Macy's, on J.C. Penney, on Kohl's, all at the same time, versus, if someone visited Macy's and bought the product and reviewed it, obviously that review would be owned by Macy's, and it will show there. So, as much as we can do to help reviews go as many places as possible, that's been very helpful. Stephanie: That makes sense. So when it comes to, I'm thinking about mattresses and buying mattresses, for a while, everyone wanted to lay on them and sit on them and see how they feel. And now with the market evolving, especially with the pandemic and everyone being a little bit more comfortable with ordering online, what shifts have you seen? Do you see consumer expectations increasing, consumer demands increasing on the sellers? What are you seeing happening behind the scenes right now? Taylor: For our products, from basic bedding, so everything non-mattress and the mattress, it's been through the roof. I think, folks want a fresh and clean sleeping environment, especially cleanliness is top of mind. With COVID in fact, Soft-Tex, my company announced a deeper partnership with Thomson Research Associates. They make an anti-microbial technology called Ultra-Fresh, the market is hot right now for all bedding products. And I think, from the customer experience point that you're hitting at, do you need to touch and feel the product in order to feel confident in purchasing it? Certainly bedding is a very tactile and personal experience and the same pillow or mattress that's great for me may not, may not work for you. Right. Taylor: I think we've seen folks through warranties and trial periods that the industry has, particularly on the mattresses, pretty much a hundred nights sleep trial guarantee, in some form or the other is a standard now. But from a pillow or top or other product standpoint, maybe there's not that trial period, but being as descriptive as possible, the images, the copy, using enhanced content and the importance of video is so important. Batched attributes, iconography, to really recreate that story and experience, doing everything you can without the consumer touching the product, and that way, I joke with folks at my company that I have the hardest job, right. I have to convince people to buy something that's highly personal and tactile, that they have never touched prior to receiving it. Stephanie: That's pretty tough. What best practices have you seen around creating videos? Because that's something that a lot of companies are leaning into right now, but especially for, a mattress or something, what are you seeing work when it comes to videos for the products? Taylor: I think the concept of video can take a number of forms. YouTube is the second largest search engine. So, you can do a ton of explainer videos or keyword optimized videos, to try and drum up search traffic to your products. But you can also leverage video, in particular the 30-second to a minute product video, to help drive conversion. And I think, that's been a huge thing that we've seen. The addition of video to product pages has scaled our conversion rate by an incremental 10 or 20%. It's hard to fathom, because typically most retailers merchandise video is the last piece in an image carousel, right? People don't like to read, they want to be told, and be surprised and delighted. Taylor: And so, leveraging that video format in a short, condensing it to 30 seconds, has been really big for us. And I think, stylistically, it's very on brand for us, the videos that we've done. As I mentioned at the top of the podcast, Soft-Tex is a very innovative company with emphasizing technology, cooling, I mentioned antimicrobial. So our videos come off as very techie, with graphics, lower thirds that pop up. So I think, making sure your videos are on brand and authentic to your brand voice, clearly and concisely conveying the product value proposition. In our space, it's really, how are we different than everybody else selling a mattress or a pillow? There's thousands of options. Stephanie: Yep. Are you making the videos for your brand partners, or are they all are using the same one, or are you customizing them where you're like Bed Bath & Beyond, this video works better versus Macy's they have a different clientele and we're going to make a different video for them or are they making their own? Taylor: Absolutely great question, Stephanie. For private label products, or we have some national brands that we offer exclusively to certain retailers, obviously those are customized, and we work with retail partners like Bed Bath & Beyond, and Macy's, on art direction, model considerations, we work with them on developing a storyboard and get it approved by them before we film it. Stephanie: Got it. That makes sense. So the one thing I was thinking about when we were mentioning direct to consumer, how you guys were going about that route right now. I was thinking about a very large mattress brand who I think recently IPOed and a lot of people are talking about their negative unit costs. And I was wondering, how are you guys thinking about that with your direct to consumer strategy? Are you willing to have negative margins to add a new customer, or how do you think about the digital growth around them? Taylor: I think the way we've thought about it in a lot of ways, is in the concept of, getting reviews on Amazon is so critical to helping ramp up. If you're giving a discount or something, that you may be selling your product at a loss initially to help gain those reviews, gain some initial sales traction initially. I think it has to be for a finite period of time, right? That you turn the corner and have a clear path to profitability. You can't just do it indefinitely. Right. But I think that there are definitely values to doing it, in that, you get your brand out there, you get some exposure, user generated content is so powerful right now. I think if the world is telling us anything, the power of social media and viral media, the same can be true for user generated content and reviews. If you get a really good review or a really bad one, people can upload them, they're always going to be there. Right. It's so important. Stephanie: That makes sense. Is there any model that you developed around we're going to, we're okay with going in the negative for this amount of time with this campaign, or is there any models that you build to influences these decisions, around adding new customers? Taylor: In terms of the review thing, it's still an algorithm that we're working out, what's the right quantity of review that moves the needle towards a product being successful. That's mostly in our space, right? When you're syndicating in a retail environment, so products sold across many retailers, because really the review is a key way to optimize, each retailer has its own search engine, right? Now, if you're your own brand, right? Selling direct to the consumer. I think it's a different calculus, you have your own tolerance with whoever's providing your investment. Taylor: If you're going to go negative for a time. What is the strategy? How do you become cashflow positive? In the industry, a lot of these, just e-commerce mattress in a box guys, is really, they're marketing companies if you think about it. There's a lot of articles, a lot of them are made by the same folks in terms of manufacturers and who pours the foam, et cetera. So it's interesting. Stephanie: That's really interesting to think about. I think I have three different brands of mattresses in our house, but I'm pretty sure they're probably all the same or made from the same people. Taylor: Or from the same cloth. Stephanie: I think so. They all feel pretty similar. How do you think about returns, for something as large as a mattress or, I'm thinking about furniture companies and stuff, how have you seen some brands lower their return rates? What are some best practices around them? Taylor: I think for the industry, for the mattress in a box, we've seen return rates average out between 10 and 15%. I would include basically everything in that, including the comfort trials and everything. Right. So, when you're a direct to consumer mattress in a box guy, that has to be factored into your pricing. Some other things that we've seen creative ways to save the sale, a lot of, one of the big complaints with sleep products is, maybe the bed is too firm. Maybe you'd send a topper or something to make the mattress more plush, as a method to save recouping, returning the mattress. Because ultimately, right, wrong or indifferent, in the mattress industry once somebody slept on a bed, you can't resell it. It's just one of those things. People don't don't buy used mattress. Stephanie: Good. All the things I'd never really thought about. So you were just mentioning how... I'm glad that you have to deal with that and not me. So we were talking about how a lot of the brands that maybe we think are unique, maybe are utilizing the same types of underlying materials and things like that. So they're kind similar. I saw that you guys sell on Amazon. Are you ever worried that Amazon could just knock you off and just make a mattress that's so similar, that it's maybe not beneficial to be on there, or what's your reason for selling products on there? Taylor: Well, I think, so many things nowadays, if you're searching for a product, folks don't just begin on Google anymore. There's a large contingent of the population that are Prime subscribers and really begin the product search phase on Amazon. I think you pretty much have to be there to have the share of voice, whether you like it or not. I think, for us, Amazon's a growing partner. Certainly it's hard, we have a lot of rebates and allowances with them, from a margin standpoint and I'm sure you've heard this from many folks. It's hard to find products that, you can be profitable. But, I think brands have to make a decision to have an Amazon strategy. Taylor: It is delicate. Obviously, retailers are very sensitive to being comped on Amazon. So it's a very nuanced delicate road that we walk. We have an assortment that we have on Amazon, but we also offer exclusive products to other channels, that we don't offer to Amazon. Stephanie: Got it. Is there any other advice that you would give when it comes to selling on Amazon, but making sure that it's beneficial, like you said, one idea is keeping exclusive content to where not everything you offer is all on Amazon, but is there anything else that you all do, where you're like, this works well? Taylor: I think, really it's ensuring that you're being thoughtful about your assortment, if you're selling on multiple outlets. We've learned in our experience that Amazon is a price follower. Well, we're a first party vendor. Obviously many of your listeners, maybe third party sellers were there. They set the retail price, but as a first party vendor, we have a wholesale price that we give to Amazon and there are, like I mentioned, rebates and allowances. But ultimately, they then retail it to make a profit or not, in some cases. Taylor: They're pretty aggressive in price scraping and seeing what others are doing and commanding the market share to come to them, if they see a lower price out in the market, they will likely try and beat it. So I think, you just have to be prepared, before you open that flood gate, if that's your strategy, making sure that you're ready to enforce, map or, D inventory Amazon as needed. I think, certainly if you're a third party seller on Amazon, you're in much more control of your destiny in that respect, as you can, you set the retail yourself. Stephanie: That completely make sense. In terms of SEO, I'm thinking it's pretty tricky for you guys to, you want your brands to be seen as leaders, but then you also want yourself to be seen as leaders. What SEO tactics do you all use for yourself and your brands? Taylor: Great question. I totally think, in our space in particular, features and attributes are more important than the brand overall, in terms of the search volume. Obviously, if you build a brand, which obviously we all are in the business of doing, you can build search volume that way, but, most of our SEO strategy exists around, trying to optimize and rank for generic keywords, based on the features and benefits of each product. For us, the brand story and value proposition is more of a conversion factor rather than a volume driver, if you will. We as a company have invested more in building a robust e-commerce interface, to target that non-branded search term versus building, paying money for our brands to be the most searched today. Taylor: That's not to say that, our brands don't have an impressive story and value proposition, but I think, part of that comes into cost, right. A brand that spends a lot in marketing, a direct to consumer mattress that may retail for $1000, queen size, roughly, you have a very similar product that we offer under one of our brands, through Macy's or J.C. Penney, or Walmart, Amazon, that retails for 350 to $400. Is there much difference in the product? I would say they're very similar in terms of features and attributes, but it comes down to advertising and price point, right? Stephanie: So what have you seen works? How do you win? Taylor: I think, again, each retailer is its own search engine and each retailer's algorithm for the sort that they show, when somebody types in a pillow, I'm searching for memory foam pillows or pillows or mattresses, is a little different. They take into effect or into account different factors, all of them leverage the trailing sales history, review quality. So, is your product good? Four stars or better? Are you getting reviews recently? So review count and frequency and recency. And then how does it relate to the query that was searched? Taylor: So, for example, there's a lot of backend keywords that we look to put with our products and we've really gone through and looked to optimize those to make sure that we're calling out things like, if a product is antimicrobial, it is tagged appropriately, or if it's got some certifications or whatever it is, such that, when you're searching on a retailer, if you're typing in the keyword or leveraging a checkbox menu, faceted navigation, that we're optimized to show as much as we can. Stephanie: Got it. So how are you finding new brands who would be willing to work with you on selling your product? Are you marketing to them? Are you approaching them directly, cold email? How do you find new partners in your space? Taylor: It's a great question. A lot of our business is, if you put it into two buckets, hunting and farming, it is farming. You bring new ideas and new product and new concepts to the same folks you've been dealing with. But we absolutely have hunting strategies as well. Honestly, I think Soft-Tex has taken a position as an industry leader of research. We've undertaken bedding industry research initiative, both of bedding buyer trends. We work with, many, many retail partners, and especially during COVID times, we've been able to survey our partners on what they're seeing and aggregate the results and provide that as a free service, that I think has been really valuable to folks in the industry. And then also not just industry or retailer, B2C information, but what the consumer is looking for in bedding today. We've actually just completed a large scale research initiative for bedding consumer tastes and preferences in 2020. Stephanie: Very cool. And are you plugging in some of your products, because consumers are very interested in cleanliness going forward and what do you know? We have an antimicrobial, I'm saying that wrong, but you know what I mean, product? Taylor: It's absolutely the type of a feedback loop that fuels our product development cycle. So in our bedding buyer survey, we just got the results back on that. As you might imagine, anything with fresh and clean attributes has been on a positive sales trend and we've for a long time had anti-microbial infusions and treatments in our products, but obviously we're ramping that up now, given the favorable sales trend that it's seeing. We're looking forward to, seeing the full landscape of what consumers are shopping for, how they shop, as that's in constant flux, especially with COVID and beyond. I think, consumers are more comfortable shopping online, increasingly daily, more and more orders, for all of eCommerce, not just bedding are taking place digitally. Stephanie: Do you think this is a longer term trend? And if so, how have you guys shifted your strategy? What things are you planning on doing differently or changing going forward? Taylor: I think, like I mentioned, we've done a great job at Soft-Tex in optimizing our product pages and the end retailer optimization. We are making the investment now, in that top of funnel or off of retailers sites discoverability. So we want people to have our brands, enter the consideration phase earlier in the process versus, just see them on a retailer site and click on them. So we're definitely investing there, because we do see the shift towards e-commerce, increasingly as a longterm trend, just rough numbers that I had looked at before this podcast. When I started at Soft-Tex, e-commerce was, just under 10% of the total business. Stephanie: That's four years ago, right? Taylor: That was in 2017. And I think, ultimately even then we were under-indexed as a company. This year, I think, just given how the trends are going and how we're pacing, it's looking, 35 to 40%. And that's not to say that the brick and mortar piece or other channels of business have shrunk terribly either. It's just grown that much, just organically as well. Stephanie: The pie has increased. Taylor: Exactly. Stephanie: With that much growth, I'm thinking about your tech stack now. And I saw a quote on some article, where you said, our approach is working, and we believe that the tech stack we've built is well positioned for continued growth. So what does your tech stack look like? What are you guys investing in? What platform are you using? What does it look behind the scenes? Taylor: I think, product information management and taxonomy, and really taking control of your data as the expert of whatever product you make, is so critical. Before I started, all of our product data was in, 50 million Excel sheets, right. Now it's much more systematized. And also, not to mention, different retail partners require different fields and everybody's set up processes a little different, whereas, before that, was institutional knowledge and it lived with a person, now that lives with platform. So that's a huge process improvement that we've made. Taylor: Digital asset management is so critical, particularly from being able to rapidly get new images out to different syndication platforms, but also tests. We've done a lot in push the envelope on image standards. We talked about how we can play a consultative role with retail partners. We'd seen some really nice boosts when we added some batches to images, as trust symbols, like if something was featured on, Better Homes & Gardens, sticking that, in the bottom right hand corner. Sometimes that's been a little tough, because certainly main images get picked up in Google shopping and there's some rules against how much text can be in the image. Taylor: That worked well for a time, when we were able to get it approved. From a text tech standpoint, email marketing, that's super important, leveraging, and also of course social, being able to leverage all of our digital assets and brand voice and value, getting it out there consistently to the customer as well, has been really important. Stephanie: What metrics do you look at for success around, whether it's your B2B type of backend or your eCommerce platform, what metrics are you reviewing to see if things are going well? Taylor: An early indication, skew count. So how many skews do we have in our assortment and how many places are they set up? Obviously if we have a thousand skews, they should all be 50 places, ideally, right? For full skew syndication. Certainly not every retailer is going to take every skew that we have. A lot of retailers still have more of a curated assortment versus an endless aisle. Certainly I think, we see a value in an endless aisle, because of how we differentiate our products. Literally we try to create every product to be a little different, to have a little bit of unique feature and value proposition. So that concept that, there's something for everyone, right. Taylor: So skew count, a very important metric, ultimately total sales obviously, unit sales and how are retailers trending, particularly ramping up impression volume, how many people are getting to a product page and certainly for folks listening, they're probably like, well, how do you get that? Not every retailer provides that information. But you certainly can leverage tools out there, on Amazon, there's intelligence tools to look at, how many views your products are getting and other things of that nature. I think that, being able to just check that and see the demand for your product over time is very important. Taylor: Other metrics that we really look at, sale, when we give discounts, how things perform, because ultimately a lot of things come back to the law of supply and demand, right. We might have a price in our mind where we think something should be, but that's not the price that the consumer wants to pay for a product. Finding that right price that moves the volume, through discounts, just finding that equilibrium is interesting. And then obviously we talked about reviews a lot, review count and quality. The quality is a big feedback loop that we take very seriously, in terms of work with our quality assurance and customer service teams, to make sure that, we don't have an issue. And we're very proud, that our products have about a 4.7, 4.8 aggregate rating. Stephanie: That's great. Taylor: It's huge. I said at the top of the call, what works for one person doesn't for another. So you might think that a pillow, if left long enough to its own devices might net out around a three. So the fact that, we're at a 4.8 overall, is really encouraging. Stephanie: That's awesome. Do any of your partners right now, not having an eCommerce platform? I'm thinking there must be some people who don't, how do you work differently with them if they only have a retail location versus your eCommerce partners? Taylor: There are, sometimes e-commerce is challenging to jump into. It can seem daunting for folks that aren't doing it, because you're talking about things at the each level versus, big old fat POS, the way you retail used to run, right. You order a bunch to a warehouse and it gets distributed. There's a lot of implications to that, especially when you're talking about commitments for product, with e-commerce and drop ship the risk is inherently on the supplier or the vendor. There's no risk for the retailer, right. The retailers is like, Oh, sure, I'll put it up on my website, but you're inventorying it. Right. You're going to ship it for me, just when I sell it. Taylor: A lot of companies, that's their biggest objection, I think, is, without a hard commitment or a retailer to commit to bulk units upfront, if they don't have that, they won't offer it for e-commerce. They won't bring it in, because they don't have that driver to pull them into it. Because it's very easy, if a retailer's ordering 10,000 units of something, pepper and a few thousand more free commerce while we're at it. But if e-commerce is the first channel you're thinking about, it can be a riskier equation. Stephanie: Do you see that changing going forward? Do you see a lot of these brands thinking about now going online? Taylor: Yeah. I mean, even within Soft-Tex it's changing, right. We have now for, within the past couple of years, now digital first product, whereas, not saying that my e-commerce department was a recycling bin before, but pulling off of the success of things in brick and mortar initially, was really what drove eCommerce previously, which is not necessarily a bad strategy. But I think today, for innovation and new product, more and more stuff, if you're confident in it, you have to commit and leverage on e-commerce. Stephanie: I completely agree. So I saw you guys had some showrooms, I think, for your product. How are you all thinking about that? Taylor: We have permanent showrooms in New York and Las Vegas, and participate in market events where we host, the buyers from many different retail partners, so much of that. The importance of an in person event, has been blown up now through COVID. We went through a virtual market in March, which, obviously is hard to convey everything through a video, but, we had fun doing it and a lot of people really enjoyed it. That whole concept has been a challenge. Right? Being able to find that dedicated time to get in front of your customers and have them, if anything, particularly for stores, it's all about creating an experience to surprise and delight. Taylor: Those buyers really want to feel the product and experience it, to ensure that it's worth, that it will monetize that floor space, that it will take up. With the first touch point being a virtual video, that can be a challenge sometimes, but, we're adapting through virtual markets, mailing samples for, Zoom calls to review them. But it certainly has been different, it looks like, the Las Vegas market furniture show was pushed back.It's likely that, at least for us, it's virtual still, just given everything that's going on. And many of our customers are, you've seen probably the announcements, a lot of travel moratoriums. Some through the end of the year, they've already come out and said so. It's been interesting from that standpoint. I guess from that point- Stephanie: I can imagine. Taylor: I think home products, more folks will spend money, through e-commerce on home and other products, that they're not spending on travel. So, positives for us and for many others. Stephanie: That could be a good opportunity. I'm thinking of, these virtual events right now to sell to buyers. I think, I would just run and jump on the mattress and then just go to sleep and then people would just be interested to see if I'd wake up, that might pull people in. That's how I would sell it. Taylor: That's a very attention grabbing headline, for sure. Stephanie: It'd be like, is she asleep or is she dead, what happened or is she frozen? I don't know. Taylor: That's all right. Maybe we'll use that in our next market video. Stephanie: Great. I can be the star of it, I'm pretty good at sleeping and internet freezing, all of the above I'm good at. Are you thinking about incorporating these virtual strategies going forward? Is it something even when the pandemics over, that you're like, this is working well, we might try this out in the future and use it for, our initial targeting effort to then retarget them to an in person event afterwards. Or how are you thinking about that marketing strategy going forward? Taylor: I think it's something that, we're definitely going to do. It's something that we had been doing, I guess, even before. We would do video walk throughs of our showroom and our virtual experience with an industry publication called, Home Textiles Today. But for the most recent market, we produced the virtual market video ourselves. So, leveraging, either internal or partner capabilities, we still think it's very important to address that. There's always going to be people that can't come to an event, even forget COVID times. So it's always good to have that digital touch point to be able to send to them. And also, to your point, it absolutely can sit on our website and exist as a lead generation tool as well, for people to sign up, to see our latest innovation and then fill out a lead form and then go watch the video. Stephanie: There is definitely a lot of opportunity there, for content that is being created now that maybe wouldn't have been thought of before everything that was going on. Taylor: Right. It's a delicate situation, because a lot of what we produce for a trade show like that, and our competitors, is very future looking and conceptual. There is a level of security. Most of what we sell at a trade show is not yet fully commercialized. Sometimes it is, but in many cases it's like, this is new brand new technology and we're introducing it here. So, there's also a dimension of, yes, we want people to see it, but no, we don't want everyone to see it. Stephanie: That's got to be a little bit, get a little FOMO there and make it a secret. Taylor: That's right. Stephanie: So you have an interesting intersection between B2B and B2C. Is there anything that you wish existed right now in the eCommerce space or technology wise, or you're like, we're struggling with this right now, that you could see getting better in the future or that you hope to get better? Taylor: We have some partners now that help us provide really high quality CGI imagery. Obviously that's been around, but, making that process easier, it takes a lot of work to stage a live photo and video shoot, especially for our product class. That's something that we're looking to get better at, such that we can, as we commercialize new products, we don't have to have crazy processes to stage a photo and video shoot. Certainly there's value to that, and we will continue to use it. We have to use live folks for a lot of things, and models and videos, but for the static, just e-commerce imagery, getting those images up front can really increase our speed to market. Taylor: I would think the other thing, that perhaps we're missing today, is really seeing an aggregation of reviews across platforms. So obviously we see reviews that are syndicated. But we don't always see every review out there. So getting notified when there's a negative review in particular, such that we can see, is it just a one off? Somebody just didn't like it, or, is it the start of a trend of some sort. That happens very seldom with us fortunately, but it's always good to be on the forefront. Taylor: If you think about it, I'm sure we're not alone. A company like Kraft, they have millions of skews probably, having that feedback loop automated is so important. You can't have a person, tracking every review manually, right? So the more automation that's out there, the better. And we've done a really good job, I think, building out partners with the scraping capability to monitor our product pages and also, with advertising as well. Stephanie: Very cool. That's two very useful things. I'm sure a lot of people will be looking for, going forward as well. So we have a couple of minutes left and I do not want to let you get out of the lightning round. So let me know if you're ready and we can start that, Taylor. Taylor: Let's do it. Stephanie: All right. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It's where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready? Taylor: Yes. Stephanie: All right. First one. What's the next sleep product that you're excited about buying or what are you most excited about right now? Taylor: CBD pillows. Stephanie: Tell me more about that. Taylor: Our CBD, we're really proud of the chemistry. It's microencapsulated into the cover. So with body pressure and as you toss and turn, as you sleep, the capsules break open and release the CBD up through the fabric and it's absorbed in the CBD receptors in the skin. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. That sounds very interesting. I have to check that out. Taylor: Coming, next quarter. Stephanie: Cool. I'll be on the lookout for that. What's up next on your reading list or audible? Taylor: That's a really great question. I don't read as much as I should. Mostly, I'm reader of the news. I would love a good mystery. I don't read enough fiction, sometimes it's good for diversion, especially during COVID times, right? Stephanie: Yep. We'll have to find one for you then. I'll source one and let you know. Taylor: Yes, please. Stephanie: What's up next on your Netflix queue? Taylor: Ozark. We just started, it's been really intense. So my wife as a mental health counselor, and I have some stressful days at work, so we both agreed, it's pretty much a weekend thing, because it's so intense, we can't watch it. Stephanie: Yes. I agree. You got to balance that out, put on a Disney movie or something. Taylor: Exactly. Stephanie: And the last one, what one thing, will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year? Taylor: I am going to say, voice search, I think more and more people will leverage, Siri or Alexa or the Google voice piece, for searching on stuff. I think, particularly, so much of our population is aging. For whatever reason, when I see somebody have a question, I see them using the voice search the most, like my grandparents, that demographic. As it gets better, we'll see it used more and more. Stephanie: I completely agree [inaudible 00:57:15]. To take anymore, too much work. Taylor: I know. That's all right. Stephanie: I like that. Well, Taylor, it's been a blast having you on. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Soft-Tex International? Taylor: You can check us out on the web at, soft-tex.com. We're also on Facebook and Instagram. You can also check out any of our brands, like SensorPedic, SensorGel or BioPEDIC. For me personally, I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter, Taylor Jones. There's a lot of Taylor Jones's, but I'm out there. Stephanie: We'll link you up. We will find you, don't worry. All right. Thanks so much, Taylor. And we will talk to you soon. Taylor: Okay. Thanks so much, Stephanie. This is great.  

Kristian Segerstrale is the CEO Super Evil Megacorp, a games company based out of San Francisco. Kristian is a legend in gaming. He started his first games company Macrospace twenty years ago, which IPOed as Glu Mobile a few year later. Later he sold his second company Playfish to EA in 2009. We talk about being an entrepreneur in gaming, and how Kristian's beliefs have evolved over the years, in what it takes to succeed in gaming. Watch Kristian's talk from 2011 by going here https://elitegamedevelopers.com/egd-news-26/

In this episode of The Remote CEO Show, I had the pleasure to interview Lomit Patel. Lomit is the Vice President of Growth at IMVU. Prior to IMVU, Lomit managed growth at several startups including Roku ( a digital media player manufacturer that IPOed ), TrustedID (acquired by Equifax), Texture (acquired. by Apple) and EarthLink. Lomit is a public speaker, author, advisor, and was recognized as a Mobile Hero by Liftoff. Lomit’s new bestselling book Lean AI, is part of Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup” series.

We launch into why 100 Bn in value just evaporated from “Silicon Valley” and why that is a good thing for private companies and investors going forward. We discuss the rationality of public markets and go into the IPO landscape... B2B vs B2C, as well as hardware vs software. We analyse direct listings and why that may (or may not) matter. Finally, we discuss secret teams at Apple, the controversy around its Activation Lock and Amazon steadily making their role noticed in the Tablet market. Navigation: Silicon Valley bubble bursts? (02:18) Hardware IPOs continue to struggle, but public performance is not always bad (11:53) B2B vs. B2C IPOs (22:49) Direct listings (28:33) Apple’s (not so) secret satellite team (37:32) iFixit controversy (43:17) State of the Tablet market (47:20) Resources: WSJ, Silicon Valley adjusts to new reality as $100B evaporates - https://on.wsj.com/2TRGKYD Top Tier, B2B vs B2C IPOs - http://bit.ly/2INnoxz Tech Crunch, Hardware IPOs continue to struggle - https://tcrn.ch/2IQXZmJ CNBC, NYSE proposes allowing companies to raise fresh capital in direct listings - https://cnb.cx/39TjMWx Bloomberg, Apple Has Secret Team Working on Satellites to Beam Data to Devices - https://bloom.bg/39VjVsy Walt Mossberg, Apple has added the infamous "Activation Lock" to Macs, and it's going to cause tons of perfectly good laptops to go to waste -  http://bit.ly/2wYuGMe iFixit, Apple’s Activation Lock Will Make It Very Difficult to Refurbish Macs - http://bit.ly/33mrCWr Business Wire, Strategy Analytics: Prime Day and Alexa Catapult Amazon to #2 Tablet Spot Globally - https://bwnews.pr/38U1Nyb Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Tech Entrepreneur, co-founder and Chairman at App Annie, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, co-Founder and Managing Partner of Strive Capital, @ngpedro  Our show:   Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news. Subscribe To Our Podcast Full transcription: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors Nuno: Episode 7.  In this episode, we're gonna discuss news around IPOs, initial public offerings, or exits, as we like to call them. We will be talking about , the de-mystification of venture capital and startups. And finally, we'll end up with some gadget news. Bertrand: Excellent Nuno, thank you.  Let's start with IPOs and as you say, sometimes we talk about IPOs and we equate that with exit. I think that might be actually  dangerous to think too much as an exit, at least from an entrepreneur perspective. Yes, from a VC perspective, but from an entrepreneur perspective, it's often a stepping stone, to getting bigger and getting, maybe out of your teenage years, but definitely an exciting time when it happens. Nuno: Correct. And you get to ring bells and do all sorts of funny things that are interesting.  Silicon Valley bubble bursts? (02:18) That said, sometimes reality sets in, which brings us to the first article today, which is the article on Silicon Valley, adjusting to the new reality as a $ 100 Billion evaporates, the Wall Street journal article. This article goes into quite a lot of detail on the significant haircuts that have happened with companies that have IPOed in the last few years. So companies that have lost a lot of value from their initial public offering price,  and also companies that almost IPOed and manage not to IPO and had significant hair cuts in their private market caps, with the case of WeWork being obviously, probably the most discussed one. Bertrand: Exactly. I think today in this article, actually the most value lost has been by private companies moving from one private round to another private round instead of an IPO per se.

Welcome to Finance and Fury, The Say What Wednesday Edition Question from one of my friends – What is happening to oil prices? Is it a time to buy oil linked companies due to large losses? Over the past few days the price of oil has plummeted On Monday - the Brent has dropped as much as 31% to just $33 one of the most dramatic bouts of selling ever and is the biggest one-day drop in Brent on record Goldman's shocking price target cut, which now expected Brent dropping into the $20s What is going on - Oil pricing war between Russia and Saudi Arabia – See different headlines – Putin Launches "War On US Shale" After Dumping Mohammed bin Salman & Breaking Up OPEC+ Saudi Arabia Starts All-Out Oil War: MbS Destroys OPEC By Flooding Market, Slashing Oil Prices Truth is somewhere in the middle – OPEC and Russia oil price war – with the US industry as potential targets   Important first step when looking at oil price OPEC - The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries - intergovernmental organisation of 14 nations - headquartered since 1965 in Vienna, Austria - International cartel Mission of the organization is to "coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its member countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets, in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers, and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry." Cartel wording – to keep prices high enough to turn a profit for its members The current OPEC members are the following: Algeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo, Saudi Arabia (the de facto leader), the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela. Ecuador, Indonesia and Qatar are former members But two of the world largest producers – USA as number 1 and Russia as number 3 – Are not OPEC Members - Those members not officially in OPEC are members of OPEC+ - which is where the drama starts   It appears that OPEC+ is no more Last week OPEC+ was meeting in Vienna to discuss how much supply of oil should be allowed for the year To keep prices high – supply needs to be cut Heading into Friday's session, OPEC had been pushing for an additional 1.5 million barrels per day of cuts, reducing production by 3.6% of the world's total supply would have required Russia and other non-OPEC states (but mostly Russia) to contribute 500,000 bpd to the extra cut. Russia said that they were unwilling to cut oil production further - The Kremlin had decided that propping up prices as the coronavirus has impacts to reduce the global energy demand would be a gift to the U.S. shale industry.  Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said that "considering the decision taken today, from April 1 of this year onwards, neither we nor any OPEC or non-OPEC country is required to make (oil) output cuts." Over the past few years – US frackers had added millions of barrels of oil to the global market while Russian companies kept wells idle – and higher prices were helping USA more than Russians with lower production costs On the news - Oil prices fell more than 10% - wasn’t just the market that got a shock – a lot of the ministers were caught by surprise – like any treaty or agreement – when one party doesn’t agree – why should you do anything? So deal to cut supply fell apart   Saudi Arabia’s turn was next – Had to respond That is where the OPEC and Russia oil price war really kicked off over the weekend when Saudi Arabia aggressively cut the relative price at which it sells its crude – this was by the most in at least 20 years - in an effort to push as many barrels into the market as possible This was the first major decision since the Saudi state producer Aramco, which IPOed just before the price of oil started to drop in Jan Aramco widened the discount for its flagship Arab Light crude to refiners in north-west Europe by a hefty $8 a barrel, offering it at $10.25 a barrel under the Brent benchmark – so prices dropped In contrast, Urals, the Russian flagship crude blend, trades at a discount of about $2 a barrel under Brent – Saudis move is trying to reduce the ability of Russian companies to sell crude in Europe – which is their major market Cannibalistic competition – you take a loss short term to price out competitors then create a monopoly a flood of Saudi supply as demand is in freefall - could send oil into the $20s - what is the worst-case scenario for oil prices? Brent traded at an all-time low of $9.55 a barrel in December 1998 - also during one of the rare price wars that Saudi Arabia has launched over the last 40 years – similar to now In addition - a second announcement came right after - in addition to huge price cuts, Saudi Arabia was set to flood the market with a glut of oil to steal market share and capitalise on its just-announced massive price cuts as the kingdom plans to increase oil output next month told some market participants it could raise production much higher if needed - going well above 10 million barrels a day – up to 12 million barrels a day if needed Currently sitting at 9.7mb/d – then in April going to 10m b/d – then up to 12m if needed This is the oil markets equivalent of a declaration of war – a price war at least – but at least petrol should be cheaper   All of this means that the OPEC oil cartel is now effectively dead – at least for now - Why do this on the Saudi’s end? Could be an attempt to impose maximum pain in the quickest possible way to both Russia and other producers, most notably shale, in an effort to bring them back to the negotiating table, and then quickly reverse the production surge and start cutting output if a deal is achieved – form of heavy-handed negotiating tactic Estimates that Russian producers may lose $100m a day out of the lower prices But it has already been tried once - back in 2014/2015 - and the result was humiliation for Saudis as not only did US shale come out stronger, but Russia had no problems absorbing the lower prices. Most likely outcome is that Russia will be able to withstand a shock price far longer than Saudi Arabia, which has budgeted for a Brent price of $58/b for 2020 (which would lead to a 6.4% budget deficit) Could lead to social unrest and government turmoil in Saudi Arabia, and may explain why earlier today Saudi crown prince launched another crackdown on dozens of royals and army officers following the arrest of powerful princes, who may compete for the throne once the public mood in Saudi Arabia turns nasty in the coming weeks Russian Minister stated - "Of course, to upset Saudi Arabia could be a risky thing, but this is Russia’s strategy at the moment – flexible geometry of interests," Rather than flexible geometry – Russia is much more flexible in its budget at the moment - unlike the rest of OPEC+, Russia's budget is much better prepared for a lower oil price than it was six years ago So for now the Kremlin can now sit back and wait as one after another OPEC nation and their oil producers sink into the negative territory - and its production permanently taken offline amid social unrest, resulting in far lower long-term output – Look what happened to Venezuela last time oil went down – they nationalised oil under socialist policies and wasted the premier oil manufacturer in the world – but a lot of the other OPEC nations are not much better off – third world or developing nations that rely heavily on oil All of this has Shocked OPEC and the oil markets – But now Saudi which now faces social unrest with the price of oil far below Riyadh's budget, and - in a repeat of the Thanksgiving 2014 OPEC massacre - sending oil prices plunging by the most since the financial crisis.   The ultimate target is potentially the US shale – at least if the Russian translations can be trusted Russian state-run think tank Institute of World Economy and International Relations president Alexander Dynkin as saying, "The Kremlin has decided to sacrifice OPEC+ to stop U.S. shale producers and punish the U.S. for messing with Nord Stream 2." - Nord Stream 2is a new export gas pipeline running from Russia to Europe across the Baltic Sea Narva Bay - Just south of Finland and entering Germany in Greifswald US may look at enforcing sanctions on the completion of the pipeline So Russian initial Strategy – to not cut production and to look at boosting sales into Germany and rest of Europe – one pipeline is completed will be lower cost on exports That way Russian oil would be better than US oil for Europe – which is a big market Then Saudi strategy - drag the price of oil low enough for long enough – to make it not profitable US in the middle – A decade ago, the shale industry barely existed, and falling oil prices cushioned the blow to the U.S. economy by making energy cheaper. Today, an oil market bust could pretty quickly plunge Texas, North Dakota and Appalachia, among other places, into a recession. Estimates show that if crude drops further – 25% of shale industry producers in USA wouldn’t be producing profitably due to costs Russia may just succeed where Saudi Arabia failed in 2014, after shale - funded generously by junk bonds - not only survived the great oil price crash of 2014/2015, but has since reached record output But market isn’t the same at back then due to the fears of demand drop due to coronavirus Summary – This is nothing new – commodity world went through this in Nov 2014 with Saudi decision to (temporarily) break apart OPEC, and flood the market with oil in failed hopes of crushing US shale producers - who survived thanks to generous banks extending loan terms and even more generous buyers of junk bonds Nonetheless resulted in a painful manufacturing recession as the price of Brent cratered as low as the mid-$20's in late 2015/early 2016 And over the weekend – seems to be a repeat as Saudi Arabia launched its second scorched earth, or rather scorched oil campaign in 6 years   Effects on our market  ASX saw a massive drop on Monday 8% - Oil search down 35%, Santos down 27%, Worley down 20% - for a reason- profits due to lower demand and increased supply likely to be affected – If oil prices continue to drop – some of these companies will be put to the test - but long term – should come back up But when depends on Why I haven’t been a fan of long investment into resource companies that focus on one commodity – especially one that is controlled in the price and the supply by an international cartel We are a long way off from ‘green’ energy replacing oil – so if things bottom out – could be a good speculative buy – But Could the price drop even lower now than it did in 2014? Yes: back in 2014 there was no coronavirus panic having the potential to reduce global oil demand due to fear-mongering and Government responses But what happened to oil companies back in 2014? Compare prices to 2016 then recently before drop Worley went from $16 down to $3 – but back to $16 before their recent drop to $10 Oil Search went from $10 to $6, back to $8 but has dropped to $3.36 Santos – Went from $13 down to $2.84 – Went back to $8.50 before dropping to $4.92 – So these companies are volatile – but further losses are possible if prices get pushed down further than $20 – which is what the market has priced in – Could hit their 2016 low prices or less - If they rebound? Depends on what happens to the price of oil and demand Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you want to get in contact you can do so here: http://financeandfury.com.au/contact/    

Today I’m talking with Daniel Hasselberg, the Co-Founder and CEO of MAG Interactive, a mobile games company based in Stockholm, Sweden. I met Daniel several years ago when they had just launched their hit word game Ruzzle. Since then, the company has IPOed and has been growing with more office locations and several launched games. We'll now discuss the learnings from that journey with Daniel.

Companies really need the best talent from all around the world. But what is more important when it comes to headcount and talent acquisition and retention than your budget? Today, we're talking about how to save money in the immigration process. This is very important for tech companies, whether you're a super early-stage startup coming out of somebody's garage and you're making your first hire. Or you're a founder yourself and you have a limited budget so you want to take your immigration into your own hands. Or if you're a large, scaling company or a company that's already IPOed.  Learn how this entire process works and how you can take control of this process. And understand what your investment is going to be to make sure you get a return on it.   In this episode, you’ll hear about: Things to consider during a strategy call  How much should you be paying an immigration lawyer How to organize your thoughts and stuff prior to hiring an immigration lawyer Why you should get a point person for immigration   Resources mentioned: Alcorn Immigration Firm www.alcorn.law/optionschart  https://www.alcorn.law/ILTSeBook     *** EPISODE CREDITS: If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment. He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com     

Joseph LiebermanDigital Marketing Director at Antlion Audio Bio: Founded the first indie game PR company and went on to be the marketing guy behind a successful casual game publisher, ArcadeTown, which was purchased by Demand Media and IPOed in 2013. At Arcadetown Joseph grew an eCommerce game network and subscription service to 13.5 million visitors per month with 8 million newsletter subscribers. Joseph joined Antlion Audio in 2016, where we revamped a small CE company with a generic Shopify template into what people think is a major audio CE player. Joseph's initiatives have focused on drawing more earned media and PR attention to the company and it's product line, focusing on growing the brand and allowing their distributors to take lead on sales, though direct sales still represent a sizable portion of the overall business. Sponsors: Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation Links: https://antlionaudio.com/https://discordapp.com/invite/ZqDGNFg Transcript: Charles:                        00:00                In this episode of The Business of eCommerce. I talked with Joseph Lieberman about how to deal with unhappy customers. This is the business of e-commerce. Episode 104, Charles:                        00:15                Welcome to the business of eCommerce they should have that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi and I'm here today with Joseph Lieberman. Joseph is a director of marketing at ant audio where he focuses on growing the company for brand awareness and earned media. Is Joseph on the show today to talk about how to deal with unhappy customers? So, Hey Joseph, how are you doing today? Doing great. I'm a happy customer currently. Well, I'm happy to have you on the show. This is one of those topics that I love chatting about and not many people, not many people talk about this side of e-commerce and I feel like it, it's one of those things as even the owner of the business or anyone customer service, you spend a ton of your time dealing with like the 1% of users that are unhappy. Most orders, you know, going out, things just work great. Hopefully. but those orders that don't cause us like a reduction in time and everything. So how do you deal with this or what do you know, what are some best practice for this? Joseph:                         01:18                So the, to be clear, to be clear, you know, as the marketing person in our company I, I view customer services of very different things and say maybe the customer service manager at our company who's in the trenches as it were. Like he's the one you know, emailing and talking to these people constantly and that kind of thing. So when it comes to the marketing side, my approach of dealing with might be a little different than, than the expectation of, you know, I need to send this guy an email. I need to, you know, get his shipping info. I need to figure out what the problem is. You know, those kinds of things. I'm thinking about more of the, the big scheme of things. What is going on here, right? What is caused somebody to be upset and what systems can we fix that will prevent this from happening again? So on the one hand unhappy customers are bad, but on the other hand, unhappy customers are good. And so I actually kind of want to talk about if I may that second part, which is how can unhappy customers be good? So rather than sort of get bogged down in the details of like, how do you fix a problem, I guess. Charles:                        02:35                Yeah, I like that. I feel like some of the, some of the unhappy customers, they're the ones that kind of push you further along to put like push you to do better, for lack of a better term though, where you, you have, you have to get better at dealing with certain issues and over time, you know, every time you set up

This week we speak to Gary Coventry, former Head of Product Development and Innovation at MELA Sciences, a biotech firm centered around melanoma detection that received millions in funding and even IPOed. Unfortunately, they eventually fell into a downward spiral and was forced to rebrand. Listen to the story of the downward spiral of MELA in this episode. 

This is the fintech track of Startuprad.io. Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/fintech_germany Learn more about us at www.startuprad.io This is from the archives of Startuprad.io. The podcast was originally published on April 4th, 2019. In this interview, we talk to Dr. Daniel Bartsch, COO, and Co-Founder of Frankfurt-based creditshelf. It is a novelty since it IPOed successfully in Frankfurt in summer 2018 with a volume of 16.5 m Euros and so became (as of October 2018) the first - and for now, the only - listed pure-play fintech from Germany to be listed. Creditshelf is a credit market place, where small and medium businesses can lend money up to 5 mn Euros. Affiliated Links Our Affiliate Partner Co-Working WeWork Marketing / SEO / Graphics / Sounds and more Fiverr Email service? G-Suite Looking for a bank account for your startup? Have a look at our partner Penta Penta Bank Account Learn more about our Affiliated Marketing here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/affiliate-marketing-at-startuprad-io/ During this interview we talk about the startup, the IPO process and Daniel describes why the preparations for an IPO need as long as a baby. In the interview, you will also learn why they are different from LendingClub or FundingCircle. If you speak German, you can also listen to the first interview from Joern with the CTO of creditshelf in the Fall of 2016 here: https://hearthis.at/startup/f09f948ainterviews-mit-3-gruendern-von-startups-auf-dem-letzten-coden-new-new-festival-in-karlsruhemp3refdown/ or here the interview with ZenCap, a Rocket Internet-backed startup, now part of FundingCircle: https://podtail.com/podcast/startupradio-de/zencap-im-interview/ Find the video here: https://youtu.be/GdY2pJeh1tE

Almi Invest is Sweden’s most active startup investor. With 3 billion SEK under management, they make about 50 new investments each year and have invested in 660 companies overall, some of which have been acquired by Google, Microsoft, and Apple or IPOed at a billion kroner level on the stock market.  Join us as we speak with investment manager Karin Ebbinghaus about Almi's GreenTech fund, which only invests in companies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The fund has about 650 million SEK under management or 60 million euro. Listen in as we talk about: 3:50 Almi's investment thesis  15:10 What a GreenTech model looks  17:35 How to measure a GreenTech model's impact 21:20 How Almi's GreenTech fund fits into Swedens' national strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 30:10 Almi's vision for FoodTech ecosystem in 10-15 years

Welcome to part 2 of our series on Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange based on real trading volume. Nomics has given Binance an A exchange transparency rating, which means that Binance provides highly audible and granular data about trading activities with complete history. On most days, they are the #1 ranked exchange on Nomics.com. In the previous episode, I had the honor of interviewing CZ, CEO and founder of Binance. In that episode, CZ gives us a "behind the scenes" look at how Binance grew to become the #1 crypto exchange only a few months after launching. In this episode, we continue our exploration of Binance by talking with Wei Zhou, CFO of Binance. Before joining Binance in 2018, Wei was CFO of several startups, including two companies that IPOed in the US. Wei was also instrumental in the 2018 Grindr acquisition. This conversation is broken up into 8 chapters: - Chapter 1: How Binance accounts for its revenue - Chapter 2: Binance’s fiat businesses (like Binance US, Binance Jersey, etc.) - Chapter 3: IEOs and the disruption of investment banking - Chapter 4: How Binance generates revenue (other than collecting trading fees) - Chapter 5: The burning schedule for Binance Coin / $BNB- Chapter 6: Stablecoins and pegged tokens - Chapter 7: Binance’s general operations - Chapter 8: The future In this episode we discuss: How Wei became the 1st CFO of Binance How Binance uses equity to recruit talent The relationship between Binance and its fiat businesses What Binance looks for in a partner What the IEO process looks like with Binance Why stablecoins and pegged tokens are crucial for traders How living in a country with a stable banking system can be a disadvantage What Wei would do if he could make anything happen in the crypto space Sponsors Crypto Loans By Nexo This episode is brought to you by Nexo, the only lender offering INSTANT crypto credit lines, which let you use digital assets as collateral to get cash in 45 fiat currencies and stablecoins. As of recently, the company has integrated the Binance Chain so you can instantly access cash without selling your BNB. Nexo is also a strategic partner of exchanges, OTC desks, and crypto funds through its portfolio of structured financial products. Institutional counterparties can earn up to 8% annually on their idle stablecoins, enter into asset swap agreements, or directly borrow crypto.So if you are looking to borrow, lend, or swap digital assets, Nexo is your GO-TO PARTNER. Definitely explore nexo.io or reach them on institutions@nexo.io. Nomics’s Cryptocurrency Market Data API If you found that you or your developer have to spend too much time cleaning up and maintaining datasets & ingesting market cap data, instead of identifying opportunities and if you want raw primary source trades delivered simply and consistently with top-notch support in SLAs, then check us out.

Samvit Ramadurgam is the Co-Founder & President and Kelly Rodriques is the CEO of Forge, a secondary market for private shares. Forge provides access to shares of virtually all of the top 50 privately held tech startups, including Slack and many more, and offered trading in the likes of Spotify, Dropbox, Snap and DocuSign before they IPOed. According to Crunchbase, Forge has raised $88.5m from investors including Peter Thiel, Tim Draper, FT Partners and others. Unlike earlier players in the space, Forge has focused on building out a robust technology platform, including institutional grade clearing and custody infrastructure to support global counterparties. Forge’s proposition is particularly relevant as companies stay private for longer. More investor value is captured pre-IPO, so access to private shares is important. Additionally, because IPOs happen later, early employees are often unable to access liquidity for years, making it difficult to buy homes or diversify risk. We dig into all of these issues with Samvit and Kelly. In addition to the insights we deliver through our podcast and newsletter, Rebank offers advisory services to fintechs, banks and corporates. Drawing on our experience starting, running and advising fintech businesses and our vast network of the most impactful fintech entrepreneurs, investors and innovators around the world, we help companies make sense of fintech, work through specific questions and optimize proposition and strategy. For more information about our services, please visit www.bankingthefuture.com. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Samvit Ramadurgam and Kelly Rodriques.

In this interview, we talk to Dr. Daniel Bartsch, COO, and Co-Founder of Frankfurt-based creditshelf. It is a novelty since it IPOed successfully in Frankfurt in summer 2018 with a volume of 16.5 m Euros and so became (as of October 2018) the first - and for now only - listed pure-play fintech from Germany to be listed. Creditshelf is a credit market place, where small and medium businesses can lend money up to 5 mn Euros. During this interview we talk about the startup, the IPO process and Daniel describes why the preparations for an IPO need as long as a baby. In the interview, you will also learn why they are different from LendingClub or FundingCircle. If you speak German, you can also listen to the first interview from Joern with the CTO of creditshelf in the Fall of 2016 here: https://hearthis.at/startup/f09f948ainterviews-mit-3-gruendern-von-startups-auf-dem-letzten-coden-new-new-festival-in-karlsruhemp3refdown/ or here the interview with ZenCap, a Rocket Internet-backed startup, now part of FundingCircle: https://podtail.com/podcast/startupradio-de/zencap-im-interview/ Find the video here: https://youtu.be/GdY2pJeh1tE Folge direkt herunterladen

Brent Frei credits his success to hard work and dedication, which he learned from his parents and from growing up on his family’s farm in Idaho. Though he never felt the need to be in charge, his desire to be in an environment where everyone is sinking or swimming on their own merit, including himself, led him to become the founder of three companies. Brent’s first, Onyx, IPOed in 1999, and his second, Smartsheet, IPOed in 2018. Brent reflects on the early days at Smartsheet, including the time they were almost out of money and the business model they bet on to be successful. He’s now hyper-focused on transforming the farming industry with technology and being the best dad to his five children. Find out what influenced him to start his current company, TerraClear, and what fuels him in business and in life.

Episode 39 of TechBuzz China is on a topic of special interest to our co-hosts, Ying-Ying Lu and Rui Ma: podcasting in China! It was sparked by two recent pieces of news within the podcasting industry. The first was the acquisition of Gimlet Media, a podcasting network, by the newly IPOed music-streaming service Spotify for $200 million; the second was the $100 million raised by the podcasting platform Himalaya. In fact, Himalaya's main investor, China's Ximalaya FM, boasts 23 million daily active users and is rumored to be going for an IPO soon. In contrast to our typical coverage here at TechBuzz, the above subject barely made a splash in Chinese media — but it was a big deal in English-language news, with quite a few articles mentioning China as a leader in the podcasting industry. One often-referenced article stated that the Chinese government estimated the “pay-for-knowledge” economy to be about $7.3 billion in 2017, with the bulk of it coming from paid podcasts. However, Rui and Ying-Ying ask: Is this an accurate reflection of the industry in China? Is it true that the notoriously frugal Chinese just love paying for podcasts? In fact, why are our co-hosts doing an English podcast and not a Chinese one? Rui and Ying-Ying begin by taking our readers on a short journey covering the history of podcasts in China. First, how do we define the “podcast” industry and how does it relate to markets such as the “pay-for-knowledge” sector, which is seeing explosive growth in China? Why has this market taken off? How does the expert-celebrity mentality fit in, as well as knowledge anxiety and the concept that information is money? Who are some of the top audio content creators in China today, and how have they generated such incredible revenue streams? How has the threat of censorship affected how content is created and distributed, and which platforms win out? Other than Ximalaya, what are some of the other companies in this space? What do Rui and Ying-Ying think is the future of the industry? As always, you can find these stories and more at pandaily.com. Do let us know what you think of the show by leaving us an iTunes review, liking our Facebook page, and tweeting at us at @techbuzzchina to win some swag! Thanks also to our listeners over at our partner, dealstreetasia.com. Special thanks to our awesome producers, Shaw Wan and Kaiser Kuo. Our intern is Wang Menglu.

Episode 39 of TechBuzz China is on a topic of special interest to our co-hosts, Ying-Ying Lu and Rui Ma: podcasting in China! It was sparked by two recent pieces of news within the podcasting industry. The first was the acquisition of Gimlet Media, a podcasting network, by the newly IPOed music-streaming service Spotify for $200 million; the second was the $100 million raised by the podcasting platform Himalaya. In fact, Himalaya’s main investor, China’s Ximalaya FM, boasts 23 million daily active users and is rumored to be going for an IPO soon. In contrast to our typical coverage here at TechBuzz, the above subject barely made a splash in Chinese media — but it was a big deal in English-language news, with quite a few articles mentioning China as a leader in the podcasting industry. One often-referenced article stated that the Chinese government estimated the “pay-for-knowledge” economy to be about $7.3 billion in 2017, with the bulk of it coming from paid podcasts. ...

Episode 39 of TechBuzz China is on a topic of special interest to our co-hosts, Ying-Ying Lu and Rui Ma: podcasting in China! It was sparked by two recent pieces of news within the podcasting industry. The first was the acquisition of Gimlet Media, a podcasting network, by the newly IPOed music-streaming service Spotify for $200 million; the second was the $100 million raised by the podcasting platform Himalaya. In fact, Himalaya’s main investor, China’s Ximalaya FM, boasts 23 million daily active users and is rumored to be going for an IPO soon. In contrast to our typical coverage here at TechBuzz, the above subject barely made a splash in Chinese media — but it was a big deal in English-language news, with quite a few articles mentioning China as a leader in the podcasting industry. One often-referenced article stated that the Chinese government estimated the “pay-for-knowledge” economy to be about $7.3 billion in 2017, with the bulk of it coming from paid podcasts. However, Rui and Ying-Ying ask: Is this an accurate reflection of the industry in China? Is it true that the notoriously frugal Chinese just love paying for podcasts? In fact, why are our co-hosts doing an English podcast and not a Chinese one? Rui and Ying-Ying begin by taking our readers on a short journey covering the history of podcasts in China. First, how do we define the “podcast” industry and how does it relate to markets such as the “pay-for-knowledge” sector, which is seeing explosive growth in China? Why has this market taken off? How does the expert-celebrity mentality fit in, as well as knowledge anxiety and the concept that information is money? Who are some of the top audio content creators in China today, and how have they generated such incredible revenue streams? How has the threat of censorship affected how content is created and distributed, and which platforms win out? Other than Ximalaya, what are some of the other companies in this space? What do Rui and Ying-Ying think is the future of the industry? As always, you can find these stories and more at pandaily.com. Do let us know what you think of the show by leaving us an iTunes review, liking our Facebook page, and tweeting at us at @techbuzzchina to win some swag! Thanks also to our listeners over at our partner, dealstreetasia.com. Special thanks to our awesome producers, Shaw Wan and Kaiser Kuo. Our intern is Wang Menglu.

Everything about employment in Japan is changing. Lifetime employment is gone.  Skilled workers are discovering that they have job mobility and large Japanese companies are increasingly confused by the fact that many new graduates don't want to work for them. Wantedly has been one of the companies that has changed the way corporate recruiting works in Japan, and today we sit down and talk with the founder and CEO Akiko Naka. We first talked with Akiko a few years ago when Wantedly was starting to gain traction, but since then Wantedly has grown, IPOed and become of the most highly valued public companies in Japan. We talk about her journey, of course, but we also dive into how the nature of work is changing in Japan, the best way to promote yourself and your company in Japan, and the one terrible piece of advice that women founders need to stop listening to. It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it. Show Notes Why Japanese companies can’t hire creative employees How to deal with startup copycats The advantages and dangers of diversification The secret to making change happen in Japan  How to brag about yourself in Japan The best advice for companies wanting to expand outside Japan Unconventional advice for women entrepreneurs Why Japanese millennials really are different Links from the Founder Everything you wanted to know about Wantedly Checkout Akiko's blog Friend her on Facebook Follow Akiko on Twitter @acanocic Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Today, we’re going to sit down with an old friend. Well, I mean, actually, she still a very young friend, but we’ve known her for years, so she’s – anyway, she’s Akiko: Today, we will be sitting down and catching up with Akiko Naka, CEO and founder of Wantedly. Of course, we will talk about Wantedly’s amazing growth and the IPO that has happened since the last time Akiko came on the show, but there is a much more important story here, and before we get to that, I should let you know at other than a brief overview of Wantedly’s business model, this show is all new content and conversations. If you want to understand the crazy ideas and questionable positions that led to Akiko creating Wantedly, and believe me, that’s a story you want to hear, I urge you to listen to the original episode at disruptingJapan.com/show008. I’ll have a link up at the site as well. But today, ah, today, we will be talking about the best way to sell genuinely new product to large Japanese companies, some practical advice for anyone trying to take their company into overseas markets, including into Japan, and why the most common advice given to aspiring female founders is actually terrible, terrible advice, but you know, Akiko tells that story much better than I, so let’s get right to the interview. Interview Tim: So, I’m sitting here with Akiko Naka, the fearless founder of Wantedly, so thanks for sitting down with me again. Akiko Naka: Thank you so much for coming. Tim: You know, it’s really great to have you back on again. So much has changed since we sat down over three years ago. Akiko: Yeah, I can’t believe it has been three years already. Tim: Well, listen, we have a lot to catch up on, but for my listeners who did not follow my advice during the intro and go back and listen to our old interview, why don’t you explain what Wantedly does. Akiko: Wantedly is a platform where we match users and companies based on vision and values, not only salary and benefits. When we compare our platform with traditional media, traditional job matching platform, traditional ones values more salary and benefits, but our platform focus on why the company do what they do, so more value and culture of each company. So, that way, we believe users and company can meet people casually,

We interview Ben Hu, Cofounder and CTO at Liulishuo, an AI-powered English learning solution with nearly 100 million registered users that IPOed in September 2018 (as LAIX). On Liulishuo's platform, AI technologies are integrated with learning content, well-established language learning pedagogies, gamified features and social elements to deliver an interactive and adaptive learning experience. Ben shares his perspective on a number of topics, including: his journey from China to NYC/SF and back, what is Liulishuo and how does its AI work, the importance of integrating cutting-edge tech with a keen understanding of consumers and quality education content, how Liulishuo compares to other edtech giants in China, Liulishuo's growth strategy, and more. Link to write-up: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/who-needs-an-ai-teacher-with-liulishuo-founder-cto-ben-hu

Here is our first live news ever! Enjoy merry X-mas and happy new year! You can find the video here: https://www.startuprad.io/news/startup-new-germany-december-2018-live-hangout/ Startup News December 2018This recording is in media cooperation with Gruendermetropole Berlin. Sponsoring MessageStartups.observer supports this program. Startups.observer is like online dating for startups and investors. It is by far the easiest and most efficient way to research potential investment candidates or look for potential investors. Learn more here: http://startups.observer/ Ecosystem First off, some Berlin bashing: Sebastian Diemer, calling himself “The Diemer”, founded a couple of startups , right now Farmako, a cannabis startup, has had it with Berlin. He wrote on Facebook: “I am not a fan of hipsters, excessive feminism, so I am looking forward to more conservative roles – men that act and look like men, vice versa for the ladies".” he writes and adds: “Drugs and Party. If you have never taken cocaine or any other chemical drugs like myself and don’t attend the “Berlin clubs” (I haven't made it to any of the trashy druggy places in 2,5 years) there isn’t much value in having 2147124 places around that allow you to party from Wednesday to Tuesday with fucked up people in fucked up locations :)” https://www.deutsche-startups.de/2018/12/17/derdiemer-wuenscht-sich-men-that-act-and-look-like-men-vice-versa-for-the-ladies/ First #German #Social #Entrepreneurship #Monitor (DSEM) published https://buff.ly/2STc9Xp - The #socialstartups are spread across Germany ( 22% #Berlin, 19% Hessen, 15,4% Bayern, Nordrhein-Westfalen (9,4%) and Baden-Württemberg (8,5%). - The biggest trouble is financing German #Fintech market matures - higher investments more international expansion and increasing number of cooperations - EY - Deutschland http://ow.ly/jSfu30n1NuN Fintech Revolut Receives EU Banking Licence | Finance Magnates https://buff.ly/2Ci0nk0 #fintech #Brexit #Banking Study of Comdirect shows, that #Berlin, #Munich and #Frankfurt are the leading #fintech hubs in Germany | heise online http://ow.ly/12AG30mXhDh Keep in mind all the international fintechs active in Frankfurt, who want to work with German banks. Also notice, that there is only an access to international capital markets in Frankfurt. ⇒ As Yassin said during the fintech review: Some competition is good, but it does not really matter where the fintech is located in Germany. European tech firm have raised a record $23 billion in 2018: The State of European Tech Report - Tech.eu http://ow.ly/IHc030mR1XX Mood on the German private equity markets are quite good says KfW. - Only early stage investments and later stage investments see a slight bumper. - Fundraising and exit environment are picking up http://ow.ly/RJnb30n2A9m #VentureCapital Media PartnershipsWe are media partners: https://www.techjobsfair.com/ April 2019 in Berlin and May 2019 in Vienna House KeepingWe have published a lot of videos in the last weeks. Just to name a view: We talked to the Winner of Blockchain Startup Summit, to the Fintech and Banking Lead Google Germany and many others. Check our channel www.youtube.com/startupradio Summarizebot uses AI for automated summaries of text, video and audio https://buff.ly/2PIzvNl #ai #summary #textmining #artificial_intelligence #ai #artificialintelligence #COSH18 #startup #startups #startupsawards #startupradio #Content #contentmarketing #bot Andreas König will be new CEO at ProGlove - Munich Startup http://ow.ly/gDkm30mVjxh learn more about this #Industry40 and #IoT startup in the interview here: https://youtu.be/dE76h-bKTH0 #wearable #startup #youtube #video #interview #glove HubsFrankfurtWeWork Labs: Starts in Frankfurt - Station Frankfurt http://ow.ly/Qy8z30n20qY “Ideal Location”: Asana expands to Frankfurt, even building their european data center here (planned start H1 2019) - Station http://ow.ly/x6x830n1W1k #startup #Europe #USA #SeriesE #VentureCapital #ToDoList #SaaS #WorkManagment #projectmanagement #Frankfurt-based #proptech co-living #startup homfully raised undisclosed amount #VentureCapital from Holtzbrinck Ventures and ru-Net http://ow.ly/inO030n1OvJ Frist #VentureCapital investment in the making for the #canabis #startup of Sebastian Diemer (controversial former co-founder of Kreditech) called Farmako | Gründerszene http://ow.ly/Os8330n0L6x Related: Sebastian Diemer, known as ousted co-founder of Germany's most valuable #fintech startup Kreditech. Currently three different companies complain he has stolen their ideas, according to an article in Gründerszene http://ow.ly/xqD330mQ0Zy IPO: Deutsche Familienversicherung a direct insurance company (think online), which sees itself as an #insurtech just sucessfully IPOed in #Frankfurt, raising more than 50 mn Euros http://ow.ly/CKSp30mTbOf CologneGerman on-demand staffing startup Zenjob raises €15 million - Tech.eu http://tech.eu/brief/german-on-demand-staffing-startup-zenjob-raises-e15-million/ ChemnitzStaffbase is a startup from Chemnitz, which enables companies on their platform to build apps for their employees. deutsche-startups.de reports they are doing great and only used 1.3 mn Euros of the 10 m #VentureCapital they have raised http://ow.ly/DpLm30mRXR1 MunichMunich had quite a run in large VC rounds: Fitlab, Causeway Media Partners, Jazz Venture Partners, Courtside Ventures, Elysian Park Ventures and Ward invest 40 m Euro #VentureCapital in #Munich based fitness #app Freeletics http://ow.ly/PUfh30mRXYhMunich-based Fineway raises an additional €6 million for its hyper-personalised AI-based travel service | EU-Startups http://ow.ly/zdSF30mR1Tw Idinvest Partners invests 7 mn Euro in #Munich #Telemedicine #startup TeleClinic. #medtech #tech #startups http://ow.ly/eK5W30mNPkr Companies#Fintech Serious financial situation at Germany’s formerly most valuable #fintech, #Hamburg-based Kreditech. In the last financing round the valuation went from 230 mn Euros down to the 14 mn Euros #VentureCapital just invested reports Gründerszene http://ow.ly/x9wt30mWhnb #Valuation #VentureCapital #Berlin based #fintech RatePay gets 83 mn Euro #VentureCapital as #VentureDebt from NIBC Bank https://buff.ly/2AyGZwR #Berlin #startup #startups #payments #Berlin-based #startup Contentful raises €29.5 million Series D for its modern content delivery infrastructure | EU-Startups https://buff.ly/2ASfL4C SIGNAL IDUNA, finleap, Engel & Völkers Capital, SBI Investment, SBI Insurance and Alma Mundi Ventures invest 23 mn Euro #VentureCapital in #Berlin based #Tech company ELEMENT. The startup was founded March 2017 and offers a B2B2X-tech platform http://ow.ly/jV8T30mNPdb LeanIX, the Bonn, #Germany based #SaaS that lets #enterprises map out their #software #architecture, closes $30M Series C | TechCrunch http://ow.ly/b5kg30mVg8s High-Tech Gründerfonds and Technologiegründerfonds Sachsen invest undisclosed amount of #VentureCapital in Dresden-based startup denovoMATRIX. The startup helps to grow human #stemcell http://ow.ly/4spF30mXdbq Lausanne-based AgTech startup AgroSustain secures €1 million funding for its innovative product that will decrease food waste | EU-Startups https://buff.ly/2QHxjLy #VentureCapital Deutsche-startups_de lists all #VentureCapital investments of the founders of SumUp http://ow.ly/o9bH30mTeTX CaroobiComtravoCreative.aidiscandoooflaschenpost.dei2xOrdaVermietet.deZenjob #CorporateVentureCapital Katjesgreenfood (the German #sweets giant) took over two of it's portfolio startups in crisis repots Gründerszene exclusively https://buff.ly/2ABdkD8 ==> Caté is no more permitted to sell its drinks, due to new regulations and Hemptastic as been dissolved #food #VentureCapital #Blockchain and Crypto Bitwala: #Blockchain #Banking starts in Germany. solarisBank and #crypto startup Bitlawa offer now a blockchain account in Germany, including a crypto debit card | BTC-ECHO https://buff.ly/2RRANrj #RocketInternet Corner Stephanus foundation rescues insolvent #RocketInternet company Pflegetiger - deutsche-startups.de http://ow.ly/50SE30mR1C9 #healthcare #startup #startups #insolvency #berlin #berlinstartups German e-commerce platform Westwing sells its Russian subsidiary to Elbrus Capital - Tech.eu http://ow.ly/N8ap30mR28S #Accelerators #Target will be joined by Germany's #Metro in next year's #Techstars program - StarTribune.com http://ow.ly/NBCx30mR1JH #Gaming Deutsche Startups checks the numbers of Travian Games: They turned 21 mn Euro profit (2009) into 1,96 mn Euros loss (2016) they write http://ow.ly/3cMt30n0KYR swedish Stillfront Group takes over #Hamburger-based #game developer Playa Games for 20 mn Euro. 14 mn are paid in cash, 6 mn in newly issued shares | Gründerszene http://ow.ly/xBGX30mY69R Playtika acquires #Berlin-based #games studio Wooga for a rumoured acquisition price of over €100 million | EU-Startups https://buff.ly/2SpVxpS #AllOtherNews Flixbus, the German startup offering bus transportation in several countries, is working towards it's IPO NGIN Mobility writes they could list in 2019 http://ow.ly/M7rO30mVg4O #transportation #coach #startup #germany #usa #bus #mobility German ADAC association wants to turn the #airtaxi Volocopter into part of the emergency medical service in Germany | NGIN Mobility https://buff.ly/2RmF0Tx Language learning app Babbel sold 1M US subscriptions this year, moves into language travel | TechCrunch http://ow.ly/80JK30mR1TG #Berlin-based HomeToGo Buys a Near-Death #SanFransisco based Tripping in Vacation Rental Rollup – Skift http://ow.ly/kFPy30mTk55 #Holidayhomes, at least platforms to find them, are currently hot in the German startup scene. Two of the players generated big losses, so far: Holidu = 7,8 mn Euro loss - HomeToGo = 13,1 mn loss, according to deutsche-startups.de http://ow.ly/GTlZ30mQ0WE Since 2011 myToys revenue increased from 240 to 421 mn Euros, losses amounted to 170 mn Euros writes deutsche-startups.de. Revenue growth has recently just been 5.5% http://ow.ly/9ClE30mWhyu A new start fro Popcornloop, known from the German version of #SharkTank. They re-emerge from insolvency writes deutsche-startups.de. The founder buys assets and starts again http://ow.ly/l6lV30mVmnu 3D camera #startup Staramba has troubles with their auditor. The auditor denies their test seal for the balance for the listed startup reports Gründerszene. The market value sunk already from 150 mn Euros to 20 mn Euros http://ow.ly/fPGR30mVjWK “Denn der ist Kern eines öffentlichen Streits samt PR-Debakel geworden. Im Mai hatten die Wirtschaftsprüfer von BDO bekannt gegeben, den Jahresabschluss nicht testieren zu wollen, weil keine ausreichenden Nachweise für die Jahresumsätze 2017 und Prognosen für 2018 vorlägen. „Wir teilen die Einschätzung der BDO nicht“, kritisierte Staramba-CEO Christian Daudert daraufhin im Interview mit 4investors.de die Prüfer, räumte aber eigene Versäumnisse ein.” Booking.com axes 350 jobs in #Berlin | Gründerszene http://ow.ly/5X6730mNQHh Europe’s most promising eSports startups | EU-Startups http://ow.ly/ghWj30mR1Nu Including German startups DOJO MADNESS and Streake Windeln.de is fighting for survival. They had to issue several profit and revenue warnings in 2018. They are valued at 12.5 m Euros and now are trading as penny stock – Exciting Commerce http://ow.ly/da3e30mRYb2 Know How for those with vision #Fintech: Advantages and Costs to Become a Bank https://buff.ly/2AFOYbs Should Central Banks Start Issuing Cyber-Cash? https://buff.ly/2BQOWj0 Almost Every Electric Scooter Comes From This Chinese Company http://ow.ly/406T30mTkuS #escooter #scooters #scooterwars #competition #rental #platform #startup #VentureCapital #manufacturing #Manufacturers The Most Active Investors In Banking Automation - CB Insights Research http://ow.ly/RgRT30mVmZC #CustomerService #chatbot #bots #CRM #fintech #automation #startup #startups #banking #processautomation #processing #VentureCapital Synergy and disruption: Ten #fintech trends http://ow.ly/NLps30n2zQm Folge direkt herunterladen

This is the audio track of a Google Hangout. You can find the video on our YouTube channel www.youtube.com/startupradio Welcome to the 2018 Fintech Review Germany by Startuprad.io. In the stream you will hear: Paolo Sironi – Crunchbase – LinkedIn – Website – Twitter – InstagramYassin Hankir - Crunchbase – LinkedIn – Website – TwitterJörn “Joe” Menninger Crunchbase – LinkedIn – Website – TwitterHere you can find the 2017 fintech review: https://www.startuprad.io/news/2017-fintech-review-germany-2018-outlook/ here is the 2016 interview with DWINS, the company behind Finanz Guru: https://www.startuprad.io/interviews/dwins-db-hackathon-winner/ Yassin talks about co-branding, for example, Finanz Guru (co-branded with Deutsche Bank, who owns 25% in the startup) https://finanzguru.de/ Paolo talks about regulations (referring to the last year). "The regulatory storm hitting 2018 PRIIPs – A regulation, forcing asset managers to disclose more of the content of their products in a more simplified way.GDPR – A regulation on the usage of customer dataMifid II – A regulation on the transparency of investments.PSD2 – A regulation, which forces banks to open up via API to other companies, including fintechs" Joe refers to the dot-com company Pets.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com Cost of capital for banks https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/costofcapital.asp Wealth Management https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wealthmanagement.asp Interview with CreditShelf, which is Germany’s only listed pure-play: https://www.startuprad.io/exclusive/do-you-know-creditshelf-it-is-germanys-only-listed-pure-play-fintech/ As Paolo said, we have been to the Christmas Market and celebrated 10 years of fintech in Frankfurt: https://www.instagram.com/p/BrVqaH4HsXl/ Below you will find all the news we have been discussing, touching fintech in 2018, as well as a transcript. “It will be really tough to bring Crypto to the masses” Yassin Hankir – at Startuprad.io’s 2018 fintech review “When central banks use the technology behind Crypto to transform fiat money, that will be truly revolutionary” Paolo Siroin – at Startuprad.io’s 2018 fintech review DecemberPan-European Leader: Moneyfarm acquires #Frankfurt-based #roboadvisor vaamo to accelerate growth https://buff.ly/2AaeANC #Germany #startup #fintech #investment #investments #startups #tech #frmstartupscene #rheinmainrocks Study of Comdirect shows, that #Berlin, #Munich and #Frankfurt are the leading #fintech hubs in Germany | heise online http://ow.ly/12AG30mXhDh Keep in mind all the international fintechs active in Frankfurt, who want to work with German banks. Also notice, that there is only an access to international capital markets in Frankfurt. Serious financial situation at Germany’s formerly most valuable #fintech, #Hamburg-based Kreditech. In the last financing round the valuation went from 230 mn Euros down to the 14 mn Euros #VentureCapital just invested reports Gründerszene http://ow.ly/x9wt30mWhnb #Valuation #Berlin based #fintech RatePay gets 83 mn Euro #VentureCapital as #VentureDebt from NIBC Bank https://buff.ly/2AyGZwR #Berlin #startup #startups #payments #Berlin based #fintech RatePay gets 83 mn Euro #VentureCapital as #VentureDebt from NIBC Bank https://buff.ly/2AyGZwR #Berlin #startup #startups #payments IPO: Deutsche Familienversicherung a direct insurance company (think online), which sees itself as an #insurtech just sucessfully IPOed in #Frankfurt, raising more than 50 mn Euros http://ow.ly/CKSp30mTbOf #Fintech #Insurtech #Startup #Startups #IPO #VentureCapital #RheinMainRocks The Most Active Investors In Banking Automation - CB Insights Research http://ow.ly/RgRT30mVmZC #CustomerService #chatbot #bots #CRM #fintech #automation #startup #startups #banking #processautomation #processing #VentureCapital NovemberEuropean early stage technology investment increases four-fold to 3.6 bn Euro in H1 2018 (4.1 bn US$). Investors like fintech and medtech startups. Germany scores No 2 in #Fintech investments with 402.2 mn Euros http://ow.ly/lBHq30mvOyj Meet The 100 Most Innovative Startups Of Germany In 2018 - Forbes https://buff.ly/2SimfAZ Frankfurt is present fintech heavy including @ginmon @ClarkGermany and #blockchain #accelerator @iconiqlab You find the interview with the CEO and founder of Clark Germany here: https://www.startuprad.io/interviews/clark-de-startup-germany-bloombergs-list-50-promising-startups/ Berlin-based incubator Finleap has raised €41.5 million to build more fintech startups https://buff.ly/2Biv87E Copycat behaviour is punished faster than ever before Klarna sues German fintech Sofortpay, which was founded by former employees of Sofortueberweisung. Sofortueberweisung was bought by Klarna | Gründerszene https://buff.ly/2FMJVvX #fintech #payments And even fintechs are conservative with their growth and risk #Berlin-based #banking startup Solarisbank can only show 1,9 m Euros in revenue in B2B, where it works with #fintechs. The bank raised 95 m Euros #VentureCapital and invested 24,5 m Euros already to build up the banking platform http://ow.ly/HMbl30mpmz3 The incumbents awake: "Patent Analysis: Top US Banks Prioritize Payments" - CB Insights Research http://ow.ly/KbCU30mLmJt #fintech #banking #payments #patents #strategy OctoberBerlin based fintech Penta raises 7 mn Euros venture capital. The fintech offers its services to German small and medium enterprises https://buff.ly/2EmyyKk Related: Interview Penta, also noted in “How 60+ Startups Are Disrupting Retail And Commercial Banking Around The World” by CB Insights https://buff.ly/2RKGJCJ including n26 and Penta Related: Our interview with Lav, CEO and Co-Founder of Penta https://youtu.be/M1ExxaijmfQ The twins from #Frankfurt-based #fintech dwins appeared in the German Version of #SharkTank - called Lion's den. They presented their app to manage your contracts https://buff.ly/2O1Gg0T Deutsche Bank is already a shareholder and Startuprad.io interviewed them in the past: https://buff.ly/2PaAKWp German billionaire and business angel Carsten Maschmeyer is a judge at Germany's version of #SharkTank. Now he invests 1 million Euros, a record amount for this TV format in #Frankfurt-based fintech Dwins, which pitched there. http://ow.ly/tgmG30m90lp https://www.handelsblatt.com/finanzen/banken-versicherungen/gruendershow-hoehle-der-loewen-carsten-maschmeyer-investiert-rekordsumme-in-das-fintech-dwins/23140920.html Mailbox @SocieteGenerale - opens Global Markets Incubator for #fintech #startups, working on capital markets https://buff.ly/2NHFJMu Startup News Germany Summer 2018 (July, August, September)This is a first! For the first time in Germany a German fintech listed successfully on a stock exchange! Frankfurt-based fintech Creditshelf listed successfully at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. This is the first IPO of a pure play fintech in Germany. The company raised 16.5 m Euros (almost 20 m US$) http://ow.ly/IpTg30l1tUz We have an exclusive interview for you! The recording is done. It will be published mid of October. #Frankfurt-based government-owned bank KfW and Frankfurt-based #FinTech CrowdDesk start pilot program for municipal crowdfunding http://ow.ly/8vOM30l1zn5 Deutsche Bank Pushes Digital With Second Fintech Deal This Year - Bloomberg Quint http://ow.ly/yFDn30lz35DB German fintech Wirecard to push Commerzbank out of DAX 30 https://buff.ly/2Q9B3Sc Finanzcheck.de a comparison portal for financial services is sold for almost 300 mn Euros to M-Dax listed Scout24 group. This is Germany's 2nd largest #fintech exit after 360T transaction, worth approx 750 mn US$ http://ow.ly/daW730l0jOL related https://www.deutsche-startups.de/2018/07/18/finanzcheck-exit/ Hamburg-based fintech Naga group gets a bad wrap from Finanz-Szene.de, since their ICO was not for themselves, but for a company, which will provide services to Naga. The money actually went to Naga Development Association Ltd. (NDAL) which is domiziled in Belize http://finanz-szene.de/exklusiv-wo-sind-die-50-millionen-aus-dem-ico-des-hamburger-fintechs-naga-gelandet/ #Hamburg-based #Fintech Deposit Solution raises 100 m US$ Venture Capital, valued at 500 m US$ - deutsche-startups.de http://ow.ly/uHk930lqr8p He used to be a Tesla manager, than he lead the German energy startup Sonnen to international successes, now he has his own #fintech #startup CapInside - a network were members can search investment opportunities http://ow.ly/wkG930lKwc5 German fintech Auxmoney is eyeing an IPO reports Reuters. The credit platform broke even (according to their own statement) in Q4 2017 http://ow.ly/No7430lD7ZJ #Fintech BBVA and ABN Amro invested almost 57 m Euros #VentureCapital in #Berlin-based Solarisbank. Now they published their annual results and generated only approx 2 mn Euros in revenue. This is for a 225 m Euro postmoney company | Gründerszene http://ow.ly/Mni630loIbq Finanz-szene.de calculates the number of customers, which really have their primary bank account with hyped N26. N26 claims 1 m customers, but FZ calculates only 250k - 300k have their primary account with them #Berlin #Fintech http://ow.ly/G17b30laSGs US #insurtech Lemonade sued German competitor WeFox. Now they seem to have an out-of-court settlement. Lemonade will withdraw the lawsuit, as soon as WeFox made changes. Yet the extend and nature of changes remain unclear | Gründerszene http://ow.ly/DKEE30liNga The fintech Deposit Solutions (a platform for fixed deposits) and the comparison portal Check24 cooperate. According to Finanz-Szene, parts of the "investment service" of Check24 is white labeled from DS http://ow.ly/AdMG30kXXb7 This is surprising, since Check24 originally wanted to take market share away from fintechs. Now they are cooperating. orderbird, the #Berlin-based #cashier system #startup stopped expansion - They have generated 9 m Euros revenue and 8.8 m Euros loss according to their 2016/17 balance sheet http://ow.ly/3aC330lduDZ Startup News Germany June 2018We talked to some of the winners of the “Golden Garage”, Germany’s investor side fintech award: https://youtu.be/KgRzjIi-Kr0 The 10 hottest fintechs in Germany. To the list made it the Frankfurt based insurtech Clark and microsavings app Savedroid, which recently completed it's ICO - Horizont.net http://ow.ly/NuK830kvL0Q Finanz-Szene sheds some lights on the Lendico ING transaction, where the bank bought the fintech. According to FZ calculations Rocket Internet burned almost 27 mn Euros with the startup. ING may have made a bargain in the transaction they conclude http://ow.ly/9puq30kClNZ ING Ventures invests in Berlin-based fintech FinCompare, as part of a series A financing round http://ow.ly/l9BL30kkgSK Startup News Germany May 2018We have two winners of the Benzinga Global Fintech Awards in the exclusive video interview, including one which wants to list 2019. According to calculations by consultancy Oliver Wyman - Fintechs already cut 1,5 bn Euros profits out of the bank business in Germany writes Gruenderszene.de, although 900 mn thereof are from retail banking https://buff.ly/2rt6pbq #fintech #germany #profit #Banking Startup News Germany April 2018Fist one was Savedroid, who pretended to be an ICO Scam for 24 hours just to draw attention to their ICO advisory business, which they wanted to launch with this PR stunt. So far we can say it fired back. They have been getting a beating in the national and international press, including CEO Yassin Hankir, who received multiple death threats. You remember savedroid, Yassin and the ICO from the video interview we had shortly before christmas last year: https://youtu.be/oEfX6knd-1o Here are some of the links to the national and international press coverage: German: Deutsche-Startups.de https://www.deutsche-startups.de/2018/04/19/savedroid-verkauft-yassin-hankir-den-miesen-pr-gag/Gründerszene https://www.gruenderszene.de/fintech/savedroid-pr-stunt-hack-exit-scam-aktion-werbungEnglish: Rhein-Main Startups https://rhein-main-startups.com/2018/04/19/and-its-not-gone-savedroid-is-safe/TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/18/another-day-another-50-million-ico-exit-scam/Hallo Frankfurt https://hallofrankfurt.de/savedroid-rekt-or-pr-stunt-a60d19e35eceWe have yet to see a positive coverage of the stunt and I personally wrote Yassin, that I am sure he will get a few less invites to parties this year. Yassin’s direkt statement: https://youtu.be/o5_bwFf_byo Germany's 2nd largest bank Commerzbank holds shares in more fintechs than the other top 10 combined reports the blog Finanzsene https://buff.ly/2HDZDKp this should not suprise anyone. Commerzbank was with its Main Incubator the pioneer of the large german banks to invest in fintechs. Related: Former CEO of Main incubator Christian Hoppe will be the CEO of the Frankfurt branch of the Silicon Valley Bank, which just announced plans to launch in Frankfurt, Germany https://buff.ly/2KyFvXD Kreditech, new CEO and one of the top managers leaves https://www.gruenderszene.de/fintech/kreditech-vorstandswechsel?ref=nl_b Still no fintech unicorn in Germany and some investors did not like the valuation of N26 or Number26, the Berlin-based fintech. Deutsche-Startups.de writes about the valuation of N26 of approx. 750 mn US$. It appears the valuation was too high for some investors and they dropped out http://ow.ly/myHL30jkhgF #Berlin-based #fintech savendo has brokered fixed deposit to Versobank in Estonia. Now the bank is closed for money laundry and terrorism financing. The money of savendo clients should not be in danger .... http://ow.ly/zqeM30jb4JL Finanzcheck.de, is the first German fintech to open a brick and mortar branch reports Finanz-Szene.de exclusively https://buff.ly/2ILrqo Startup News Germany March 2018Frankfurt-based #fintech Giroxx raises 900.000 Euro #VentureCapital writes deutsche-startups.de http://ow.ly/vdkC30j9wU0 The company offers transfers in foreign currencies. Frankfurt-based startup Acomodeo, a market place for serviced apartments, raises "mid seven digit" #VentureCapital reports @RMStartups http://ow.ly/wiLQ30iLdZ1 Meet the Frankfurt-based fintech FastBill, which sees opportunities in the US market and may look for another #VentureCapital round. Learn more here http://ow.ly/W4cy30iOv4v via RMStartups You may remember that we also talked to savdroid about their ICO? They are under scrutiny for their ICO since one of their advisors was blogging in favour of the ICO but did not disclose the connection. None the less the ICO raised somewhere between 35 and 40mn Euros https://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/savedroid-ico-krypto-roland-klaus Rocket Internet again Innolend - financed by Rocket Internet - the fintech for financing SMEs is in liquidation. The phone number on the website is already dead writes deutsche-startups.de https://buff.ly/2HEQ49B Startup News Germany February 2018Frankfurt-based online bank INGDiba (German arm of ING) buys Rocket Internet’s P2P SME lending platform Lendico writes Finanzszene.de exclusively. This is the first fintech acquisiton of a large Germany based bank http://finanz-szene.de/exklusiv-ing-diba-kauft-lendico-und-macht-als-erste-grosse-deutsche-bank-wirklich-ernst-mit-fintech/ Deutsche Startups has a more critical view of this - They quote ARD - ING only buys software it does not have and is not taking on the risk of its own software development. Lendico on the other hand never took off. What is your take? https://www.deutsche-startups.de/2018/02/20/ing-diba-kauft-lendico-soll-der-jubel/ Startup News Germany January 2018German fintech startups raised 716 mn Euros in 2017 reports FINANCE https://buff.ly/2EssWcI #German #fintech #wunderkind Naga buys shares in #Frankfurt based easyfolio writes deutsche-startups.de. Naga will own 25% with an option of up to 49%, buying shares from current owner, Frankfurt based bank Hauck & Aufhäuser https://buff.ly/2ncVC2X Kreditech, with an assumed valuation of 300+ mn Euros, Germany's most valuable fintech is not doing well reports Gruenderszene. According to press reports they collected the startup generated losses of 114 mn Euros in just 24 months. Also the CFO is about to leave. Gruenderszene writes that the revenue growth is pretty small compared to the invested sums they deduce from the losses http://ow.ly/970V30hQT6g We will keep an eye on the fintech for you guys Berlin-based FinTech startup Penta accuses TransferWise to have stolen its debit card branding writes EU Startups http://ow.ly/Z6n030hNYYP Learn more about Get Penta here on our interview: http://www.startuprad.io/exclusive/exclusive-berlin-based-fintech-penta-goes-live-open-beta-re-thinking-banking/ Folge direkt herunterladen

This dialogue with Jeremy Lent is chockfull of insights and guidance on how individuals can make lasting, positive impacts and change the collective current disastrous course humanity appears to be on. Jeremy is a modern-day renaissance man. Educated at Cambridge University and University of Chicago, he founded and IPOed an early internet company, and then due to distressful life circumstances, left the business world to engage in deep inquiry into the confluences of meaning and truth pervading modern science and ancient wisdom traditions. Jeremy is an award-winning novelist and the author of The Patterning Instinct, a non-fiction work which investigates the patterns of thought that have led our civilization to its current crisis of sustainability. He is the founder of the Liology Institute, a non-profit dedicated to fostering a scientifically rigorous and intrinsically meaningful integrated worldview; one that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth.  https://www.jeremylent.com/ https://liology.org Disclaimer: The information in this episode or on groundlessground.com is intended for information and entertainment purposes only, and does not claim to be or constitute therapeutic advice or mental health treatment.

Japanese thoughts on risk are changing, but they are changing slowly. Many people still consider failure to be a permanent condition, and that makes it hard to take risks, or in some cases even to be associated with risks. Today we talk with Hajime Hirose, one of Japan's new breed of serial entrepreneurs. Hajime has started companies in three different countries and several different industries.  We talk about the challenges and importance of going global and how a Japanese founder ended up running a Chinese company that IPOed in New York. And of course, we also talk about how difficult it is for startups to combat rumors in Japan, even when everyone knows those rumors to be false. It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it. Show Notes The road to China runs through Seattle Today's management crisis in Chinese and Indian companies Why leave Japan to start a startup Why not all publicity is good publicity in Japan Why the truth cannot fix lies How to survive when your competition is giving away their product for free What startups are best started outside Japan Links from the Founder Connect with Hajime on LinkedIn Hajime's latest project, Datadeck PTMind's PT Engine Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. You know, there aren’t many serial entrepreneurs in Japan. The reason for that is, well, the same reason why we don’t have a lot of angel investors in Japan. Until very recently, the idea of both startup success and startup failure was permanent. If your startup succeeded, you were expected to be running it until either you or the company expired, and if you failed, well, if you failed, you were done. Until very recently, failure was considered a permanent condition. No one was inclined to give you a second chance, but things are changing, and today, I would like to introduce you to Hajime Hirose, a Japanese serial entrepreneur who has built and sold startups and also bankrupted them. We talk about how Japanese attitudes towards startups are changing, but how in Japan, a bad rumor, even a completely unfounded rumor can kill and otherwise promising startup. We also talk about the importance and the difficulty of going global, and the unlikely tale of a Japanese man running a Chinese startup that ended up IPOing in New York, and we also talk about Hajime’s old startup story that wheezed its way through London, Shanghai, Redmond, Jakarta, and yes, of course, Tokyo. But you know, Hajime tells that story much better than I can, so let us get right to the interview. [Interview] [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey"  ] Tim: Cheers! Hajime: Cheers! Tim: All right, so I am sitting here with Hajime Hirose, the what the future founder of BuzzElement, and a few other startups as well, so thanks for sitting down with me. Hajime: Well, thank you. I’m really excited because I’m a big fan of your show and I’m really thrilled to be on this side of the show. Tim: Well, listen, I’m excited to have you here because there are relatively few serial entrepreneurs in Japan. So, I’m looking forward to this conversation. Your first real international business was in China, but before we get to that, let us back up and talk about how you wound up there. Hajime: So, I was born in Tokyo, grew up in Yokohama, and I went to CIO for university, and I’ve been living outside of Japan for the last 26 years. Tim: And, you ended up working for Microsoft, right? Hajime: That’s right. Tim: Back when MSN was still a thing. Hajime: That’s right, yeah. So, that was back when Microsoft just bought Hotmail back in 1998. Tim: Oh, the good old days. Hajime: Yeah, that was good, that was really fun. So, I was lucky to be the only two Japanese guys on the project.

Remember our fun live pilot episode back in January 2015? In case you forgot about it or missed it, it was on How To Build A Happy And Productive Remote Team with Ben Congleton the CEO and Co-Founder of Olark. In it, we debunked a number of remote working myths such as:   Remote employees won’t be as productive and progress will stagnate Communication between remote employees and remote teams will break down A remote team will be devoid of culture   It was great for teams, but then we got questions from individuals who wanted to know how they could get started. So last December, we revisited remote working and focused the conversation around How to Succeed In Your First Remote Working Position with Femgineer’s very own Community Manager: Meghan Burgain.   And it seems like we have only scratched the surface because we still get a lot of questions and concerns on the topic from startup founders and hiring managers.   Most recently, we’ve received questions and concerns are around the hiring process like:   How do you know someone is a culture fit without a face-to-face meeting? Can you hire a remote worker for any role or only specific ones? How do you test a remote worker’s capabilities and competence? What is the best way to onboard and train a remote worker?   So this month we decided to revisit the theme and created three more episodes on the topic, focused on recruiting, training, retaining, and managing remote workers.   To help us out, I’ve invited a pro on the topic: Holly Cardew the CEO and Founder of Pixc. Holly has grown and scaled her team across Australia and Asia. And has done so in a number of job functions spanning both the business side with roles such as virtual assistants and marketers, to the technical side hiring software developers and designers to build the product.   As you listen to today’s episode you’ll learn:   The benefits of remote working for employers and employees The criteria you need to set to source candidates Roles that are well-suited to remote work How to suss out culture fit without a face-to-face meeting What to watch out for—red flags to spot early on when hiring remote workers Why it’s good to give people a test or trial project and how to structure it Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   ## How To Recruit Remote Workers Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:        We've covered a number of benefits when it comes to remote working in previous episodes. If you've missed any of them, I've included links below. In today's episode, we're going to talk about how to actually go about recruiting for your remote team, so stay tuned.                     Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.                     Remote working is becoming the way of the future, and employers who have started embracing it are starting to see the competitive advantages. It's very attractive for employees. In today's episode, we're going to dive into the numerous benefits that employers and employees face when it comes to remote working, and we're going to talk about some of the best practices when it comes to recruiting and retaining employees. And to help us out, I've invited Holly Cardew, who is the CEO and founder of Pixc. Thanks for joining us.Holly Cardew:       Thanks for having me.   Remote working benefits for employersPoornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, thanks for joining us. You and I have experienced a number of benefits when it comes to running a remote team. For our audience out there, maybe you can share some of the benefits as an employer.Holly Cardew:       Running a company, a remote company, has been beneficial for us, or beneficial for any employer, because what you can do is, you can scale up and scale down depending on what task you need done. You can also hire from a remote pool...Sorry, global pool of talent, rather than a local one. We can also provide customer support 24/7, and in other languages, which is amazing. It's also great because as a company, we're flexible. If something goes down or something happens on the weekend, the employees or the team members can also jump online. They're not so constricted to a specific time.   Remote working benefits for employeesPoornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, and I'm sure there's a number of benefits for the employees, so let's jump into those.Holly Cardew:       I think, for the employees, they love it because it is flexible. At the end of the day, they can live and travel and be wherever they want to. They can work the hours that they want to work. I don't expect someone to be there 9-5. I didn't want to build a company and be in an office 9-5. The employees don't have to necessarily spend an hour and a half in traffic each way every day. So, they can spend that time really focusing on their task at hand.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. Another thing I learned recently was that people who are disabled, or an elderly population, can stay in the workforce longer because of having the ability to work remotely. So, I think that's another great thing, if we can keep maintaining the size of the workforce.Holly Cardew:       Definitely, fantastic. I've also seen that with mothers. We've hired content writers, proofreaders. They're mothers in middle America, or the Philippines. It doesn't matter where they are, they're now able to be with their children before and after school, be really flexible at home.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, we've got one, Meghan, who's been on an episode before. So, yeah, I think it's great for motherhood as well. These are great benefits. Let's talk about the types of roles that are conducive to remote work.   Types of roles for remote workers Holly Cardew:       I actually think anything can be remote. I mean, there are definitely times when you need to be on the ground with the customer, or you need to build a physical product, if you're in hardware or other industries. But really, we have, I don't like to use the word "outsourced," but we have people doing legal, accounting, bookkeeping, engineering tasks, design tasks, customer service, marketing. You name it, it's been done with us. So, I think you can actually use a remote or distributed team for any job.Poornima Vijayashanker:        But I'm sure there's some employees who are better suited for remote work versus others, so tell us what somebody should be looking for in an employee.Holly Cardew:       Yeah, definitely. I find that the people who are most proactive and take initiative are the ones who are better off when they're remote, because they don't need the guidance or the team around them to keep them motivated. I also find that someone who is slightly entrepreneurial, like they may...I had someone who was in the Philippines, and I said, "What do you do in your free time?" And she said, "I import things from America and I sell them at the market on the weekend." And doing that, it makes them think outside the box, as well. You don't have to train them as much.   What to watch out for when recruiting remote workersPoornima Vijayashanker:        That makes sense. And are there signs that you want to watch out for?Holly Cardew:       The signs I would watch out for are people who do need to be around others, and they do need that guidance and training, and they're waiting for you to tell them the next thing to do.Poornima Vijayashanker:        So, people who maybe aren't as self-directed, or possess some of the self-leadership qualities.Holly Cardew:       Definitely.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Which I think is necessary for any employee, but...Holly Cardew:       Definitely, but there are people who are starting out, and they're not used to taking the initiative to go find something. They're used to turning to the person next to them at the office, or university, or wherever they're starting out, and finding the answer.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, that's a good point. So, being proactive about being resourceful, and getting the answers that you need on your own.Holly Cardew:       Especially if they're remote, and I'm sleeping, and another team member's not awake, so they can't get help that way.   Criteria for sourcing and filtering remote working candidates Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, that's a good point. So, do you have a set of criteria for sourcing candidates that fit?Holly Cardew:       We have quite a, I wouldn't say strict, but a process that we follow every single time. Essentially, we always hire contractors straight away. The reason for that is that we don't have to onboard them for every single task.   So, what we do is, we put out simple things when we put out the job. People, nowadays, they're applying for absolutely everything. They just click the apply button. So, we'll put some sneaky question inside the job, even it's "start your cover letter with a smiley emoji."   And then you can clearly filter out the people who have read the job description. Because when you're remote, there's a lot of reading, rather than face-to-face conversation. So, that filters down some people.   Interview process for remote workers                    And then we make a short list, and we interview, and just have a Skype call, about 10-15 minutes. In 10-15 minutes, you can figure out if you're going to...if they culturally fit with the company. I think that's really important. They may be the most amazing person on paper, but if they don't fit with your remote culture, it won't work. And then we give them a trial task, and then after that, if they're successful, we hire them for approximately two weeks to a month to figure out how it works with the company, and then we scale up from there.   How to setup a trial project to test candidatesPoornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. The trial task is one that I do, too. I call it a "task project," and I time box it to about 5-10 hours. I limit it to maybe the two people that I feel have gone through the interview and done a good job, and I actually end up paying them for that trial time.Holly Cardew:       Yeah, that's exactly what we do. Exactly the same. We also do a trial task, about 5-10, depending on the role. If it's a social media thing, it might be, give me 20 posts that you would post up, or some advice on what you would change on our current social media. But if it's an engineering project, yeah, it would be 5-10 hours, maybe a page, and pay for that task, and then decide from there.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. And how do you communicate that to them? Because I know some people are immediately like, "I'm not doing this," and then some people actually take the effort, and I can tell just based on that, who's going to be a good employee versus, OK, clearly you're not interested. So, do you start to see signals like that?Holly Cardew:       We've definitely had the same thing.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah? OK. Why a trial project helps filter candidates   Holly Cardew:       It's sort of like a self-filtering mechanism for us. I think most people who have already...If they're local and they haven't had a remote job yet, they're probably a bit standoffish. But most people who are freelance, or have worked remote, they are used to that.Poornima Vijayashanker:        And then there are some people that think remote working is for them, even though they've never done it before. Like you said, someone who is new to remote working, and they might not know the criteria. Do you have any filters, or ways in which you recruit them?   How you can spot signs that a remote worker can be self-directed and resourcefulHolly Cardew:       I think, what we have looked at is that if people are entrepreneurial, they usually have done some small task by themselves. The other one is, I've asked if they've done any side projects, and I ask them to show me their side projects. Like, what do they do in their free time on the weekend? If they don't do something that is slightly work-related...engineers may build something. Marketing people might start their own website to self-promote. So, I look for those things before hiring someone who hasn't had a remote job.                     If they have started, it's really about trial and error, and talking to them, talking through. I have friends who are definitely, they say straight up, "I need to be around people." The other option is, you can actually provide them with co-working space.   How to provide remote workers opportunities to be around other people                     In some situations, I've either provided them with co-working space, or there was another situation where I had someone in Manila, and I knew the people at the Uber office in Manila, so I made a connection for her to go meet with the community manager at Manila, so she could learn from them. And then, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have to have the people in your company around them, they just need inspiration from other people.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Nice. Yeah. And that's a good point, because it does get lonesome, and coffee shops don't always have the best internet. The co-working could be great. Hiring sight unseen can be challenging. I know, when I initially did it, I wasn't as good, but over the years, I've gotten better. How have you managed to get the best candidates out of the pool?   What to watch out for—red flags to spot early on when hiring remote workersHolly Cardew:       I think, going back to my previous answer, is that really it's about the cultural fit of the person. If your values and the culture doesn't fit, it won't work. I had someone who I was interviewing, and they were so good. I really wanted them. They were an early employee at a huge company that's IPOed. They would have been...It would have been really beneficial to the company, but we didn't see eye-to-eye on hiring, growing the team. We discussed how we would grow the team, and how we would go about it, and it did not fit. Even though it wasn't an issue then and there, I could foresee, going forward, that it would be a huge issue when we wanted to expand the team. So, it was really about the values.                     The other thing is that you really need to trust your gut. At the beginning, you're early on, you're starry-eyed. You think everything is amazing, and you just want to get these people on board, but deep down, if you know that it's not going to work, don't do it.   Crucial conversations to have with candidatesPoornima Vijayashanker:        One nugget in there was having these crucial conversations, right? You said that you had the conversation about how they were going to approach hiring, and you didn't start to see eye-to-eye. So, maybe when it comes to the tasks, or whatever the next milestone is, have those conversations, and that way, you start to uncover what their philosophy is, to see if there's alignment and a good fit.Holly Cardew:       Yeah, definitely. I think, it's like any relationship. You need to be able to have a hard conversation. And sometimes, you don't...As a CEO, what's really challenging is, you don't actually get along with everyone perfectly. But as long as you can have a hard conversation, and come to a conclusion, then it's OK. But if something really doesn't fit in your values...Poornima Vijayashanker:        Better to expose that early on.Holly Cardew:       Yeah, exactly. Move on, rather than try and make it fit at the beginning.Poornima Vijayashanker:        Well, these are great practices, Holly. Thanks for sharing them with us.Holly Cardew:       Thanks for having me.Poornima Vijayashanker:        So, now, Holly and I want to know, if you have put a remote team in place, what was your process for recruiting? Let us know in the comments below. And that's it for this week's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where we'll talk about how to hold employees accountable and retain them. Ciao for now.                   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.

Download the MP3. Not to be called a one trick pony, Sam Wyly's turned himself into a billionaire by starting and growing companies in technology, oil, retail and even in the restaurant industry. Coming from a modest upbringing, Sam worked in sales at IBM and Honeywell before founding University Computing in 1963 at age 29 with just "$1,000 and an idea" as he puts it in his book of that title. The company IPOed and grew to over 5,000 people. Sam hired CEOs and stayed an entrepreneur. He's founded and acquired numerous companies including Bonanza Steakhouse (grew to 600 restaurants), Earth Resources Company, Sterling Software (sold for $3.3 billion), Sterling Commerce (sold for $4 billion), arts-and-crafts chain Michaels (sold for $6 billion), Maverick Capital (a hedge fund with over $10 billion under management) and clean-energy producer Green Mountain Energy. Despite being soft-spoken, Sam's fought and won several high profile proxy fights. Sam's been undeterred as several of his ventures have had visible failures over the years and he's lost audacious bids to take over Western Union and Computer Associates. On the whole, Sam's created a huge amount of value that's put him on the Forbes list of the 400 richest people. Hear how he does it. Show sponsor: FreshBooks - an easy online invoicing provider used by Venture Voice