Tech-Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

Latest Episodes:

#179 - Sindre Haaland, CEO of SalesScreen - A story about creating business software people love, not just like Sep 01, 2021

Show notes

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to create top-performing sales teams that live and breath their sales ambition - because they're highly motivated and their natural competitive instinct is supercharged. My guest is Sindre Haaland, Founder and CEO of SalesScreen.

Sindre is the CEO & Founder of SalesScreen. Born and raised in Norway, but today lives in Brooklyn, NY.

He believes that the success of every company is a result of their combined talent. That even the leading products and services fall short if the people behind them can’t perform at their very best.

That sparked the big idea behind SalesScreen. A tool that turns the process of selling into a team effort, combining individual motivational instruments with cultural aspects and a winning mentality.

In short, SalesScreen transforms the challenging work of sales into a professional, motivating, and exciting game. A game where all your employees will have fun whilst competing amongst each other for the top position!

This inspired me, and hence I invited Sindre to my podcast. We explore his journey as a tech entrepreneur. What he did wrong, that caused him to waste a full year. What it takes to break new ground in a highly competitive space like Sales Automation. We discuss why humanizing software (rather than automation alone) is key to delivering remarkable impact. Lastly, Sindre shares his experience about the importance of embracing emotion as a way to stand out in the market.

Here are some of his quotes:

At our first client, I remember one guy there, he took up the mobile phone application, went to the middle of off the sales floor, kind of demanded attention of everyone, and then he hits "sale." Then all the TV screens lit up with Eye of the Tiger playing. Everyone was just going crazy, the energy was so good.

We were like, "Okay, we found something here." And look and behold, a week later, this executive from a large insurance chain in Europe called because she had visited this particular call center and seeing the energy for herself. She said "I'm not sure what this product is called or if you're the right one, but we want to buy. We want this for our sales teams as well.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why making people love what they do rather than just like it can mean the difference between success and failure. A massive innovation opportunity
The journey to create a product that has a wow-effect that's too compelling to ignore
How to break new ground and defend your price tag when you're selling something people aren't necessarily looking for
Why investing in amazing people who have relevant experience and have done it before is the best thing you can do as an entrepreneur.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Sindre Haaland
Website SalesScreen

#178 - Ryo Chiba, CEO of Topic - On how the right content powers a turnaround Aug 25, 2021

Show notes

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable creative thinkers and storytellers to create content people actually want to read. My guest is Ryo Chiba, Co-founder and CEO of Topic.

Ryo started his first business in 2012 at USC. While in college, he co-founded a marketing technology company called TINT which he grew to 40 full-time employees, millions in annual recurring revenue, and 1000+ customers in 172 countries. In 2018, he sold the company to Filestack.

Today, he's working on his next venture, Topic, which he co-founded in 2019.

Their mission: Helping organizations produce better content.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Ryo to my podcast. We explore what's broken in content creation and how current solutions are obsessed with metrics and creating more content, not content that people want to read and engage with. We also dig into the key learnings Ryo took away from his entrepreneurial journey, why he stopped obsessing about the competition, and what's required to create a business that can accelerate growth based on word-of-mouth.

Here are some of his quotes:

We were working on a Pinterest clone because social media and visual social media were a big trend at the time. However, we struggled to gain users, pivoted to turn it into a b2b product, and we almost ran out of cash.

But then, with about two months of runway left, we were looking for some way to create a sustainable business. I'd self-learned SEO and sort of taught myself how to produce content. And we ended up taking that business and growing it and bootstrapping it to around 40 employees and hundreds of customers. And we were able to do that all through our SEO program and the content that we were producing.

What I found during that journey was that the actual act of scaling up content is extremely challenging, even for highly technical and analytical people.

So you can imagine how much more difficult it is for people who don't have that kind of mindset, who are more creative thinkers and storytellers.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why building relationships with your competitors can be extremely handy as you evolve your venture
Why being supercritical with yourself on 'who's it for', i.e., which persona to become your ultimate ambassador is critical to securing product-market fit and creating momentum
Why, even if you're loaded with funding, you should keep a bootstrapper's mindset and be disciplined and legitimate about deploying them
How it's possible to operate in a highly competitive space and still find space to succeed and stand out.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ryo Chiba
Website Topic

Free Content Tools by Topic

#177 - Dennis Kelly, CEO of Postalytics - On the power of unifying digital marketing with direct mail Aug 18, 2021

Show notes

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give marketers the freedom to leverage the combined power of direct and digital marketing while removing the compromises. And my guest is Dennis Kelly, CEO of Postalytics

Dennis is a serial entrepreneur. He started off as a sales guy, spent time building products, and running data centers. Late 90's he co-founded Anyday.com, which was sold to Palm in 2000. This immersed him into the world of wireless.

After leaving Palm, he co-founded Adjoin to tackle some challenging Webservice management problems.

In 2006, he became the co-owner of Wireless City - a chain of 37 Verizon Wireless stores. He sold this company to Go Wireless in October 2011.

From there, he switched his focus to researching startup ideas, angel investing, and helping local startups with strategy & advice. This led him to become the CEO of Boingnet, a software platform helping direct mailers generate personalized, multi-channel campaigns across mail, web, and email channels.

This is where he saw a big disconnect in the market between direct and digital marketing, and that sparked the idea behind Postalytics, of which he's now the CEO

As digital marketing channels get more crowded, and marketers are all using the same playbook, they’re increasingly looking for new ways to put their messages directly into the hands of their audiences. That's why they are giving direct mail another look. The problem is that the direct mail industry hasn’t kept up with changes in technology. It feels very… 1990s - it's slow, costly, disconnected from the marketing technology stack, and impossible to track. That's what Postalytics solves.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Dennis to my podcast. We explore the opportunity for value creation by blending the online- with the offline marketing world, and how this can create a 1+1=3 concept because you're combining unique strengths into one. We also address the lessons Dennis learned to create growth and momentum in B2B technology, and what it takes to build a great software business that customers just keep talking about.

Here are some of his quotes:

We started having some brands come to us and say, "Hey, I just invested in Salesforce, you guys are living in this kind of a hybrid between digital and direct. Can you help us deploy direct mail more efficiently, more quickly, as a part of our Salesforce as a part of our HubSpot?"

And it took a few of those conversations, let's realize there's a bigger opportunity out here to take some of this measurement and analytic work that we've done and to solve a problem that is far more pervasive and has a much bigger scope.

That was happening in 2015, and 2016, and we spent about a year just heads down building Postalytics. And now Postalytics is our primary focus.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why limiting your focus on a highly specific audience is essential to maximize buzz and fuel the growth and momentum of your software business
The positive things that happen when you decide sales is actually part of your onboarding process
Why killing something early is often the best move - and what early signs you should be highly sensitive to
Why the goal of a startup should be to create a great business instead of focusing on a great exit

For more information about the guest from this week:

Dennis Kelly
Website Postalytics

#176 - Elena Agaragimova, Founder at Bessern - A story about a startup that's transforming individual learning Jul 28, 2021

Show notes

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to take our personal growth to new levels in a way that's not only fun and easy to accomplish, but also highly accessible and affordable. My guest is Elena Agaragimova, Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Bessern

Elena is both an entrepreneur as well as an engaging, skilled trainer and talent development specialist. She is known for her ability to drive change within individuals and organizations that are looking to reach their potential and maintain their competitive edge in the business world. She has started her career in higher education but then shifted towards corporate learning and talent acquisition in the last few years of her career, providing talent onboarding and development to multinationals across the MENA region.

Elena has a strong passion for L&D, promoting creative and engaging workplaces, and all about optimizing performance through the development of others with a keen interest in neuroscience.

In 2019, she co-founded Bessern - and is on a mission to fast-track behavior change and disrupt the way people learn. They believe the future of learning is individualized and that learning is about action and consistency. Change is not easy for most of us; unless we create consistent routines (micro-actions) so that change does not depend on our motivation

This inspired me, and hence I invited Elena to my podcast. We explore what's broken when it comes to the traditional approach to Learning & Development. We dig into how people learn, and how technology can help people learn more, faster, and with more joy by taking a radically different approach. We discussed their journey from idea to go-to-market and how this could be done in a way that was financially attractive. Beyond that, we explore how they overcame one of their biggest challenges to creating app-stickiness - a critical ingredient to their growth strategy.

Here are some of her quotes:

Being self-funded, b2c is a very expensive market, a very saturated market. To spend the kind of marketing that you need to get noticed in a b2c market is very high. We purposely tried to avoid investments for as long as possible.

So we said; "How can we make/create a product and how can we test it in a way that makes sense for us financially?"

What we know and what we practice is that at the end of the day, it's about creating processes. Just like when you're building a startup - you're going through that agile methodology, where you're just continuously experimenting, like the lean methodology for startups.

And we apply the same for the personal growth, whether it's leadership development, etcetera. So it became more interesting for organizations, and we already had the network. So it was a much easier market entry for us to be honest with you.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How you can deliver transformative change to any industry even if it has not changed in decades
How, by offering a solution that's delivered through a blend of both technology and people can give you a highly defensible advantage.
That stickiness grows once individual users start to realize they get nuggets of value that they'd miss if they were gone
That creating new products to take to market can accelerate if you're architecting for reusability

For more information about the guest from this week:

Elena Agaragimova
Website Bessern

#175 - Sean Heiney, COO at SignalWire - On making online experiences feel truly live Jul 21, 2021

Show notes

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the virtual experiences we have today into near-live experiences. My guest is Sean Heiney, Founder and COO at SignalWire.

Sean is an experienced entrepreneur and product marketing/management start-up executive with extensive expertise in SaaS, network security, communication, and VOIP. He has 18 years of startup experience as a serial entrepreneur.

In the early 2000s, Sean formed and built Periscan, a pioneer SaaS-managed security software company specializing in VISA/Mastercard PCI Compliance. The company got acquired by Catbird Networks in 2006.

Sean then led, developed, launched, and marketed new products at Barracuda Networks to over $300M in revenue and IPO.

In December 2017, he co-founded SignalWire. He drives strategy and business around the SignalWire products and services as well as the FreeSWITCH open-source project. SignalWire has, in the meantime, become the technology backbone of modern communications applications like Amazon, Netflix, and Zoom.

Their mission is a simple one: To empower you to build whatever you can imagine utilizing software-defined telecom capabilities.

SignalWire wants its customers to do one thing: To focus on their ideas instead of worrying about developing, scaling, maintaining, and, of course, overpaying for complex communications technology and services.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Sean to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the telecom industry and what’s kept it behind for so long. We also discuss why the video communication tools we’ve become used to, like Zoom and Teams, are very degrading, demoralizing, or even soul-sucking. Sean elaborates on ‘what can be’ – that it’s up to our own imagination to create the experiences we hope for, and how they are growing a global community of developers from the grass-roots up to enable this. He finishes by sharing his beliefs about what it takes to build a software business that people keep talking about.

Here are some of his quotes:

Everything we're doing with our tools, we're enabling developers to do. We don't claim that we're gonna have the best ideas around the best way. But we know that the world's changing, and the current video and audio products that we're left to collaborate with are soul-sucking. And what we hope to do is enable the next developers, the next product builders: “hey, you don't have to worry about the technology on the audio-video side. SignalWire has that taken care of. I have to just think about the interface, how I'm going to creatively interact with people using this new technology and make something more human than the current options.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

That business resilience can be hidden in simple things – like productizing elements that underpin the power of your own infrastructure
That to build virtual experiences people keep talking about is about understanding the essence of what people truly value from the non-virtual experiences
How giving away some of your product can help you build a vending machine for growth, and give you the platform for true leverage
Why it’s key to break away from the pack, i.e., have an x-factor, and how that can be achieved with very simple, but very lucrative ideas.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Sean Heiney
SignalWire Website

#174 - Helen McGuire, CEO Diversely - On making workplace D&I measurable and actionable Jul 14, 2021

Show notes

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give underrepresented groups a fair opportunity in the workplace while helping businesses attract 70% more diverse talent and twice the relevant talent, in half the time. My guest is Helen McGuire, Co-founder and CEO of Diversely

Helen is a champion of underrepresented groups. She’s an international speaker on the topics of diversity, equality, and inclusion and has meanwhile become an award-winning entrepreneur in the diversity space.

She founded the first women’s careers platform in the Middle East – Hopscotch.work – in 2016, which grew to a worldwide community of over 80k working with businesses like Facebook, Mastercard, and Nestle.

Still, she experienced frustration with the lack of impact of its in-person business model and the fact that 75% of businesses say they are committed to improving diversity, yet just 8% have the tools in place to measure hiring improvement.

This led her to found Diversely in 2020 together with her co-founder Hayley Bakker.

The vision for the company is clear and compelling: A global workplace that’s freed from bias for all those from underrepresented groups – not just women. Their mission: to provide an integrated solution to the issues around diverse hiring.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Helen to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the workplace when it comes to hiring the best people for the job, and how this bias is actually impacting the performance potential of many businesses around the world. We discuss Diversely’s approach to solving this massive global problem at the very core, and what obstacles they had to overcome to ensure a rapid go-to-market.

Here are some of her quotes:

You don't see representation of real-life within those offices in those boardrooms, or those shop floors, or those restaurants or wherever it might be, you're not seeing a genuine representation of even the customers or the clients that you're trying to serve. And that really puts you on the back foot in terms of attracting the right employees to your business, but also in terms of being able to serve those people in the best way you could possibly serve.

And if you don't have the perspective of 50% of the population where women are concerned, or 20% of the population where disabled people are concerned? Or whatever the percentage population is of your specific race and ethnicities in the location that you are, then how are you really understanding what your client or your customer wants? And are you actually limiting your sales revenue because of that?

During this interview, you will learn four things:

That teams that are slightly uncomfortable with each other, come up with much better solutions.
How starting with solving the essence of the problem, not aiming to reinvent the wheel, and changing behavior in that very moment can spark momentum
How pricing can be used as a lever to get to market quickly
Why taking a rebellious mindset and looking at the problem from a completely different perspective is the recipe to create something remarkable (and not burn out along the way)

For more information about the guest from this week:

Helen McGuire
Website Diversely

#173 - Coen Olde Olthof, CEO of Alpha One - On using neuroscience to predict market response Jul 06, 2021

Show notes

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help creative people know upfront whether their Creative will work – and with that produce work that has an exponentially bigger impact. My guest is Coen Olde Olthof, CEO of Alpha.One

Coen started his career at KPMG in information risk management. He then moved to Getronics, where he became responsible for digital identify management and later on IT Services Sales. When Getronics got acquired by KPN, the largest Telco in the Netherlands, he was asked to lead the process to turn KPN into an online organization. Shortly after that, he added Marketing to his portfolio as well.

Today, he’s ranked as one of the top 10 Marketeers in the Netherlands and the CEO of Alpha.One. Alpha.One is a fast-growing consumer neuroscience company that’s on a mission to ‘Helping good companies make better decisions.’ Coen has a fascination for decision architecture. What drives people in their day-to-day choices? And how can we use neuroscience to decode this? Together with a team of scientists, he analyzes the brain’s reaction to content to predict market-level outcomes.

And that inspired me, and hence I invited Coen to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the creative media & marketing landscape. We discuss why the traditional approaches don’t work, and why it’s not technology but an open mindset that prevents the route to success. Coen shares fascinating wisdom about what drives the behavioral change that lead to adoption and more sales. He also explains how exponential thinking helped them create the remarkable solution they have today.

Here are some of his quotes:

“I was brought up with an understanding that if your NPS scores are higher, people are more likely to buy from you or more likely to stay. If you look at the research, that's not the case. People that give you high NPS still are not likely to buy more. The only thing that you can really measure from that measurement is that if you have a very low NPS, that's a solid basis for people going away.

Byron Sharp, an Australian Professor of Marketing, who looked at 10s and 10s of years of data, concluded that if you have a product that is physically available, and mentally available, you will do very well. Those are very data-driven, solid insights that most of the marketers should know, but not all of them do.”

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How driving momentum is highly dependent on your ability to hit the right nerve, i.e., creating positive tension and desire with the right people
Why making things memorable is essential to influence behavioral change
How exponential thinking puts you in the right mindset to create transformational change in a market.
That if your customer doesn’t say ‘Exactly’, you won’t have a deal. And that’s all about finding the unfair thing that hurts your customer most.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Coen Olde Olthof
Company Website Alpha.One
Platform website: Expoze.io
Coen’s Ted Talk

#172 - Gordian Braun, CEO of onetool - On how taking a contrarian approach helps create defensible differentiation Jun 30, 2021

Show notes

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that enables small & medium businesses around the world escape the chaos of managing their software subscriptions. My guest is Gordian Braun, CEO and Co-founder of onetool

Gordian is bilingual, analytical, and a highly creative leader experienced in entrepreneurship & innovation. He’s got a strong passion for product marketing, performance marketing, product management & development, and business development.

He started his career as a financial analyst, and quickly after that became the co-founder of a music record label startup in 2010. In 2015, he co-founded his second startup, Locana. He went back into the financial world in by joining G51 Amplify Venture Capital, after which he became the director of growth and business acceleration at CleverShuttle in 2017.

In 2019, he then co-founded onetool – where he acts as CEO. onetool is on a mission to solve the daily chaos and outrageous fees small & medium sized businesses encountering when it comes to managing SaaS subscriptions, software usage and access rights.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Gordian to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the SaaS market when it comes to managing subscriptions, usage and access. The sheer simplicity of adopting SaaS solutions is growing the problem every day. We discuss what’s missing, and what’s required to solve the problem. We dig deep on what it took to create a solution that stands out from the pack, and what mindset tech-entrepreneurs need to embrace to shape a software business that creates products their customers cannot live without.

Here are some of his quotes:

The first strategic choice that we had to do is: “Do we do long sales cycles with a lot of consulting effort, or do we do, what I call, funnel automation?”

A lot of people will say, especially in the VC industry, if you are a b2b Enterprise product, then do Enterprise Sales. Whereas we decided to do the opposite – saying “No, we want the more customer centric approach around this. We want to make it so easy that people can start using the whole thing in 10 minutes.”

That's obviously a very challenging decision. Because on the one side, you spend endless hours optimizing your product, and you cannot really sell something if it's not perfect. On the other side, you have the highest demands on yourself, and you know what you would like to be using, rather than what our competition is offering.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

Why approaching things differently gives you powers that are hard to beat by competitors
That becoming a great entrepreneur is about shipping fast (not perfect), being open-minded, and not worrying too much.
That just because you spend five years on something, trying to make it perfect, doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect eventually
Why it’s essential for every CEO to not have one mentor, but to surround themselves with a lot of the right people around key aspect

For more information about the guest from this week:

Gordian Braun
Website onetool

#171 - Ryan Green, CEO Gridwise - On thinking big, starting small, to reshape urban mobility Jun 23, 2021

Show notes

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the way we experience commuting for all of us. My guest is Ryan Green, Co-Founder and CEO of Gridwise.

Ryan is a driven, self-starter with a passion for building businesses that positively impact the lives of millions. He co-founded his first business, FXConnection back in 2012. FXConnection was a platform that provided tools to educate people on the Forex Markets, and connects them to trading coaches. He then joined PNC in FX Sales and trading, after which he co-founded Gridwise in June 2016 to turn an idea that sparked during his time at the US Navy into reality.

Their mission: To impact the global society by improving the way people and goods move in cities. How? By creating a smarter mobility grid that empowers on-demand drivers, cities, and mobility stakeholders to plan ahead by understanding transit patterns across the major service providers in real-time.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Ryan to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in mobility, and all the problems that leads to. We then dive into his founder story, what sparked the big idea, and how persistence helped Ryan succeed when no one believed in his idea upfront. We discuss his extremely lean approach to innovation and what he believes is required to build a software business that your customers just keep talking about.

Here are some of his quotes:

What was really important was – and I think a constant battle for people who are starting out a new concept but also just people at different stages of growing a product in launching new features - is always taking initially a minimal and iterative approach to product development.

We started with an email that we manually produced every week and a text message service that was us manually typing alerts to drivers. There's no automation to it at the start. And we did things that didn't scale. But it allowed us to prove out, and just save a lot of time and a lot of money by being able to learn from our users, before we built something that nobody wants.

And so I think that was that approach and that mindset, we applied to the first concept, and then the next version of the app, and the next version, we just continued to maintain that mentality. And I believe that really led to our success and enabled us to grow Gridwise to what it is today.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

How taking an abundance approach to problem-solving can help you make an impact on a global scale
That just because people don’t believe in your idea at the start doesn’t mean it has legs. Just start – start small, validate, iterate and evolve your vision from there.
Why our assumptions are sometimes totally off – and that can stop us from achieving our biggest breakthroughs in creating value
How giving something of value away can help you unlock and accelerate much larger value monetization opportunities.

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ryan Green
Website Gridwise

#170 - Karim Hijazi, CEO of Prevailion - On using cyber defense to gain a competitive advantage Jun 15, 2021

Show notes

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give every business the intelligence to anticipate hacker attacks before they happen. My guest is Karim Hijazi, Founder and CEO of Prevailion

Karim is a cybersecurity veteran who has worked closely with the US intelligence community for many years. He’s been at the forefront of attacker counterintelligence and infiltration research for the last decade, developing new ways for security teams to clandestinely monitor hackers and anticipate attacks before they happen.

His previous startup, Unveillance, was acquired by Mandiant (now FireEye) in 2012. Karim noticed a vulnerability in the way businesses have begun to rely on their third-party partners. The size of a business’ perimeter had increased along with the size of their third-party ecosystem, and there was no clear way to monitor that vast new space. That inspired the start of Prevailion.

Prevailion envisions a world in which the adversary no longer has the benefit of stealth and surprise, but is instead openly tracked and monitored through a real-time intelligence platform that all companies and organizations have access to. Through clear visibility and real-time tracking, we can turn the tables on threat actors and give network defenders the upper hand.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Karim to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the market of cybercrime protection. Why the typical reactive approach of traditional solutions is more a hindrance than a help – and why, to really tackle this problem, we have to approach it by taking an outside-in perspective. We discuss the challenges of solving this problem – not only technically, but most of all also commercially, since so much is in changing perspectives and behaviours. You’ll be inspired with some fresh thinking and true entrepreneurial mindset.

Here are some of his quotes:

What makes us uniquely different is that instead of looking at the victim organizations, and determining, by way of investigations and looking through their data to see if they have anything that can be considered malicious, we actually chase down the adversary back to your point about that we look for the infrastructure that these criminals setup.

Those servers are intended to be the equivalency of what would be like a dumping zone or drop zone for something. That dumpster is effectively the equivalency of what we're looking for online to infiltrate and sit and wait to see what actually gets dumped there. And we do this without the adversaries understanding of that.

So what's really powerful about that is that because it's digital, everyone that gets impacted by these adversaries all communicate to that digital dumpster, and we are able to see who's victimized by it, just like the adversary can see. So our perspective is that of the adversary. And that does exactly highlights the fact that the security technologies in these organizations may or may not be working.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

How creative spirit combined with highly technical science skills can give you an advantage that’s hard to beat
Why instead of creating solutions that are about repairing something that’s broken, we should aim our efforts at taking out the root cause.
That we’re too focused on communicating how we help reduce cost, while we can easily flip the narrative around how our solutions accelerate growth
How to create critical mass by changing behaviour of people

For more information about the guest from this week:

Karim Hijazi
Website Prevailion

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