Series: Exploring the Cloud

Shane is a deep expert in the search and indexing space having started his career at Autonomy working on early search indexing algorithms and setting up solutions for customers before and after the HP acqusition, later leading Product for the Elasticsearch side of the Elastic product suite. Now he’s Head of Product at Vectara building out the next generation of semantic search and retrieval augmented generation platforms. In this episode we touch on benchmarks for gauging the relative performance of difference search algorithms and how it applies to LLMs for doing things like preventing  Read More

Francesca Krihely-Price is an expert in the space of SaaS Marketing and Growth, having built several multi-billion dollar businesses with explosive growth at MongoDB and Synk. Now she’s doing the same thing as the Head of Marketing at Oso, and also investing and advising companies along similar lines on the side. Francesca joins us to talk about her lessons learned growing those successful businesses like how to hire or set KPIs for DevRel teams differently for different stages of the company and her approach to angel investing and advising early-stage startups. Also, watch until the very end when Steve drops a knowledge bomb out of nowhere right before we have to leave the studio!

Matt Riley was the co-founder and CEO at Swiftype, a startup which was acquired by Elastic in 2017. Now Mark is the VP and General Manager of all Search at Elastic and is focused heavily on the new Elastic Search Relevance Engine (ESRE) and Retrieval Augmented Generative AI (RAG). Matt goes through all the ins-and-outs of various components like Vector Databases, LLMs, Retrieval Augmented Generation and how Elastic is solving the problems caused by LLM Fine Tuning in a better way.

Mark Green is the Director of Presales and Buyer Enablement at Consensus, a SaaS platform for automating the execution of presales demos and playbooks. He’s also the co-host of two of his own podcasts, “Two presales in a pod” and “Burning Presales”. Mark shares a ton of insights into how he thinks about the sales process, not just in terms of showcasing your product or offering correctly but also on coaching your coaching the champion at your prospective customer on how to sell your product and navigate the procurement process inside their own company. In sales we  Read More

Earl “Mitch” Mitchell is the SVP of Predictive Analytics at Hard Rock Digital, the online gaming arm of the Hard Rock Restaurant and Casino Franchise. Have you ever wondered about the ins-and-outs of how online betting works, how the lines are set, and how these companies get and process data feeds for creating real time proposition bets? Come listen to Mitch’s insights and rare behind-the-scenes discussion about all this online gaming stuff and why Hard Rock has some unique business value since they can comp you rooms at the real-life casinos for your online action! Also,  Read More

Tanya Bragin is the VP of Product at ClickHouse, a very fast open source OLAP databases used by some of the biggest companies in the world. Tanya was hired to lead the effort to build a SaaS offering of ClickHouse, having previously served in similar roles as a VP of Product at Elastic. Come listen to Tanya’s unique insights about how to take an open source project to market with a SaaS offering including how to engage and motivate the engineering team, deciding which features to build, acquire, or buy, how to hire and set goals for IC PMs, and most importantly HOW TO SET PRICING.

Stormy Peters began her journey into the world of open source in 2002 when she created and managed HP’s Open Source Program Office and ever since then she’s been high-flying in various open source ecosystems. She was the executive director and later a board member of the Gnome Foundation, a director of the Mozilla development network, she sat on the board of directors for the Software Freedom Conservancy, she was VP of Developer Relations for the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and she was Director of the Open Source Programs Office at Microsoft. Currently she is on the board of directors at the  Read More

Will LaForest is the Field CTO @ Confluent, creators and maintainers of Apache Kafka. Before joining Confluent, Will held senior technical and sales positions at very successful companies like SPSS, Mark Logic, MongoDB, and Red Hat. He joins us to discuss his journey to the Field CTO position and why he sees an increasing need for that position in the software space. We also talk about Kafka, why people love it (and nobody is trying to get rid of it), and what he’s excited about as the new generation of pre-sales professionals enters their careers.

Rasmus Makwarth is the Founder and CEO at Bucket. He was formerly the Co-Founder and CEO at Opbeat which was acquired by Elastic in 2017. According to Rasmus, “We see Bucket as a love story between Product and Engineering, a tool where CTOs and CPOs can come together and have a conversation about what’s working in the product and what isn’t”. Bucket is a tool designed to help SaaS companies track and evaluate features much more quickly than the usual months-long product feedback cycle that goes through sales teams and customer feedback. Come hear Rasmus' hot takes on why he thinks startups shouldn’t have a free tier and how he approaches pricing decisions when launching new products.