Business
Stories, insights, and resources covering various aspects of business in technology for leaders, entrepreneurs, and c-suite executives.
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Stories, insights, and resources covering various aspects of business in technology for leaders, entrepreneurs, and c-suite executives.
Browse other topics:
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Alex Behrens, Director of Engineering at CWT is an experienced builder of technology and culture with experience in a number of different industries. It's no small feat to build an entirely new tech startup inside of a legacy IT organization. Alex discusses introducing Agile, building internal partnerships, and helping teams across the enterprise innovate faster while still honoring the original thinking that served the company well for many years before this effort.
When you reach an executive position, you need to understand all of the functions of the business. That’s been the experience of Cheada Lao, EVP of Operations at Allied Administrators, a leader in the benefits administration field. The firm’s primary objective is 5-star customer service, which from an operations standpoint touches internal and external software systems, data privacy, and even UX.
Business and technology leaders face consistent pressure to bring products to market faster. SlashBlue CEO Tom Dodds discusses how to build technology that's aligned with the people, process, and purpose of the organization. Does it help people do their jobs better? Is it impacting the company positively? Is it helping the company with its lasting purpose? The answers to these questions contribute to a holistic view of technology implementation.
Practitioners turned tech founders to give us a unique view of the customer discovery process because they usually start their companies in order to solve a problem they've experienced themselves. Such is the case for attorney turned startup founder Alex Nordholm, CEO of DealWIP, a legal tech startup whose product is a SaaS due diligence project management and workflow tool for corporate attorneys, investment bankers, accountants, and other transaction advisors.
Christine Spang is the CTO and Founder of Nylas. The Nylas APIs power applications with email, calendar, and contacts sync from any inbox in the world. Christine got involved with software engineering by contributing to the free software operating system Debian GNU / Linux when she was 15, earned her B.S. in Computer Science at MIT, worked as an early Linux kernel engineer at Ksplice (acquired by Oracle), and then started Nylas in 2013 to fix IMAP, MIME, and the fragmented world of email systems.
CTO of Labdoor, Helton Souza, has stories to tell. Stories about moving to America to learn English, about selling pigs (yes, pigs) online, about pitching for Startup America, and ending up in Silicon Valley. He's also got insights about taking scientific lab data and making it consumer-readable, about saving 46% on infrastructure costs with smart cloud moves, and about countless hours around a kitchen table coding like madmen in an Airbnb in Milan.
Tyler Foster is the Senior Vice President of Technology at Evolv, a cloud platform on the bleeding edge of evolutionary algorithms for automation and optimization. Tyler discusses how optimization and automation engines like Evolv improve user experience and business results, and how to effectively organize multi-disciplinary teams of data scientists and engineers.
Kevon Saber is the CEO of GoCheck Kids, a mobile app that helps to detect early vision disease in children. Kevin started his tech career developing mobile games, later making a personal pivot to focus more on the cross-section of business and people. Kevon discusses the importance of a people-first mentality, how to grow a business faster by learning faster, and how he instilled an effective Agile strategy across the entire company to take GoCheck Kids to the next level.
How do you make application changes when you have 120 million active monthly users? James Colgan, Microsoft’s Director of Product Management for Outlook Mobile discusses how his Outlook team achieved growth from zero to 56 million active users in just 2 years; and then how to engage enterprise customers as the product matures and you're looking for greater scale.
Serial entrepreneur, and engineer-turned AI marketer, Olin Hyde, started Leadcrunch to do the same for B2B marketers, a group of buyers who behave in totally different patterns than consumers. Olin discusses how engineers can learn about product-market fit for their ideas, and how SaaS subscription billing might not be the best fit for all businesses to unlock value-based billing.
One of the most difficult transitions an organization can make is moving from “how much will that cost?” and “how long with that take?” to “how quickly can we deliver first value?” That’s the essence of Agile transformation. Jeff Despain, Sr. Director Engineering at CHG Healthcare discusses the company’s relatively rapid and intensive transformation to Agile product teams -- a full 80-person org in just over 9 months.
Oksana Shmaliy, scientist turned technologist, currently leads IT Strategy and Architecture at Grange Insurance, where she led the DevOps transformation company-wide. Oksana discusses systems thinking, organizational scale, and how fractal theory can help us understand the complex human organizations.
Most of us have engaged with, and even built, products and platforms that make heavy use of messaging. But how does anyone know if those messages convert into sales or other actionable metrics? David Galante, SVP of Marketing and Product Management at Mobivity walks us through the answer. David recently moved on to Oracle where he currently serves as Senior Director of Food and Beverage Solutions Management.
Global enterprise IT leader Dipanjan Choudhury who has almost 20 years of experience in software development, platform, and consulting leadership roles, tells us his perspectives on risk mitigation so smaller companies can learn from the best practices of larger companies and prepare themselves for growth. Dipanjan argues convincingly that as QA and Security shift left, so should Risk Management.
Tech conference veterans Sarah Withee and Colin Dean joined Ledge in this episode to talk about their combined dozen years of organizing tech conferences, what they personally get out of it, and the value the events provide when done well. We talked through all the stakeholder groups, how to take good care of them, and how to think about budgeting, speakers, and more.
Gun.io’s founder and CEO, Teja Yenamandra, for a first-time telling of the history of the company. It's an epic that goes all the way back to the dorm room days and traces a winding road of pivots and relationships to today’s premium developer and client experiences.
Ryan Yockey has accrued an enviable résumé, after over 15 years of working with a wide variety of cutting-edge companies. A self-taught dev, Ryan founded his own art business, DNA Imprints, in 2006, and currently works as Director of Engineering at FabFitfun; an innovative firm that dispatches boxes packed with health-related goodies.
Video ads for B2C are all the rage in 2019: we expect our favorite brands to reach out to us through engaging, high-quality video content. But what about B2B? Can video help move your customers through your funnel faster? Graeme McLaughlin is the Head of Strategy at Explainify, where he helps B2B companies communicate better with their audience to drive sales.
Entrepreneur Michael Dash had it all -- a multi-million dollar business, cars, real estate, you name it. He also had a compulsive and addictive personality that led him to gambling, drugs, and a destructive path that brought it all down. In his new book, “Chasing the High,” Michael lays out his path to recovery in a raw, honest, framework that he’s turned into a program called “F.A.T.E” -- From Addict to Entrepreneur.
Do we take software demos for granted? Should we be investing more energy and attention into demo UX? CEO and founder of Omedym, Greg Dickinson, believes so. Omedym’s solution helps companies craft interactive software demo experiences, intelligently delivering answers to would-be buyers’ questions in real-time. As Internet culture wreaks havoc on our attention spans, would-be customers ashew the traditional solution evaluation process.
Technology co-founder Matthew McDonald is no stranger to rapid change. He joined a Startup Weekend event, met some contractors there with an idea to change the construction equipment rental industry, and built a prototype -- booking their first validation client the same weekend. When a friend suggested they apply to Ycom, his co-founders and he were shocked to be accepted and moved together to California after having only known each other for 6 weeks.
Mike Kritzman, CEO at SkillNet, joins the podcast to discuss how Skillnet is helping companies to do better with their HR by upskilling and reskilling to retain talent. Mike guides vision and direction based on insights from his leadership roles at Oracle, Ernst and Young and others where companies lacked effective tools to bring out the best in their people. SkillNet collects skill data to help managers coach and develop staff.
Donnie Goins, CEO of Software Development Europe is accomplished in delivering software and hardware products in various technical areas. He has led small to large teams (up to 500 engineers) to develop products from concept to profitability. Donnie shares his story about how an MBA project to redefine outsourcing by tapping into Central and Eastern Europe became a successful business venture.
lexis Panagides is the CEO of mxHero, which specializes in improving the email experience for businesses and end users through easier access, better control, and enhanced safety. Alexis shares his vast experience around email, from his beginnings in Brazil to his ongoing challenges as an innovator in this space.
Jason Nochlin is the CTO, and Co-Founder at GaggleAMP who are helping their clients increase the impact of your social media marketing efforts. Jason joins Ledge in this episode to talk about jumping into the leadership, the balance of management and coding, hiring the right pieces to grow your organization.
Matt Stone is an accomplished Customer Experience professional with a broad scope of industry knowledge ranging from Fortune 100 to leading SaaS private vendors, and he joins Ledge in this episode to shares his insights on growing companies in the CX leadership seat.
