Tag: AI

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.

Jason A. Voss, CFA joins us to talk about the new software platform his company launched to analyze documents like corporate financial statements for deception. Backtesting for his algorithms show staggering possibilities for financial return (outperforming the market by 980%) by investing in companies that tell the truth the most. Along the way he also gives us some tips and tricks for detecting deception in your every day life as well. We end the pod with his breakdown of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the deception that his algorithms found in their financial reporting in the years leading up to the bank’s collapse.

William Dinkel talks with us about his experience launching and shutting down one startup, then hitting it big with Nova.ai, which was one of the early successful AI sales tools years ago before all the ChatGPT-inspired hype hit recently, and getting acquired by Highspot. He tells us the real details on what it’s like to startup a company, go through multiple incubators, get acquired, and integrate the product into a much larger suite of sales tools at Highspot

Chad and Steve talk about recent AI developments

Should engineering report to Product Management or should Product Management function solely through influence over other organzations? Listen to Alex Francoeur, Head of Product at Xata and formerly Director of Product Management at Elastic covering the Kibana Platform, talk about how to be a successful Product Manager and how your role changes as you move up to managing other Product Managers.

How are HR practices changing in the modern world of Digital-First employment? What kinds of skills are companies looking for in field-facing personnel, how do they interview for them and what analytics are being used in the HR Process? How should companies be utilizing new AI tools like ChatGPT to make their people more effective? Dawn Mitchell, Chief People Officer at HackerOne and board member at Happyly talks with us about all of these topics and more.

Are Sales Reps still needed? Should Sales Reps and SAs have a variable commission plan? Eric Heikkila, who formerly led all of GTM/Sales for AWS Databases Globally, is now the GTM leader for the hot new serverless data caching startup Momento. He sat down with us to really geek out about how they’re approaching the sales motion given that they can start from scratch and aren’t weighed down by existing legacy sales structure and process. Listen to see how he answers these questions, and many more like product-led vs. sales-led growth, selling directly vs. through a cloud marketplace  Read More

Your hosts Steve Mayzak and Chad Tindel are joined by Gaurav Gupta, General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners where he’s led investments into notable tech companies such as Grafana Labs, Clickhouse, Hasura and others. Before joining Lightspeed, Gaurav was VP of Product at Elastic and Splunk. Gaurav goes pretty deep into what it’s like to move into the Venture Capital space, and his process for how he decides to invest in a founder/company and how that varies at the different company stages (Seed, Series A, Series B). Also he gives us some real talk on the current state of the VC world during the current pull back.