Author: dojo.live

Podcast: The Future of Sales: Authentic at Scale

Matthew Bellows is Founder and Board Chair of Yesware. He was CEO for the first eight years of the company’s life. Yesware is the leader in sales productivity, serving over 60,000 salespeople at companies like Box, Salesforce.com, Twilio and Yelp.

Prior to Yesware, Matthew was the Vice President of Sales at Vivox. Before that, he served as General Manager at Floodgate (acquired by Zynga), as Founder/CEO of WGR Media (acquired by CNET Networks), and as VP Sales and Marketing of Interstep (acquired by Flycast/CMGI). He earned his B.A from Naropa University and his M.B.A. magna cum laude from The Olin School for Business at Babson College.

Podcast: Simon Peyton Jones

Simon Peyton Jones is a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, where he started in Sept 1998. He is also an Honorary Professor of the Computing Science Department at Glasgow University.

He is a chair of Computing at School, the group at the epicentre of the reform of the national curriculum for Computing in England. Simon is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the ACM, and of BCS.

Podcast: Now What? Internet in the 2020’s

Vinton Gray Cerf is an American Internet pioneer, who is recognized as one of “the fathers of the Internet”, sharing this title with TCP/IP co-inventor Bob Kahn. His contributions have been acknowledged and lauded, repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize and membership in the National Academy of Engineering.

In the early days, Cerf was a manager for the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding various groups to \ develop TCP/IP technology. When the Internet began to transition to a commercial opportunity during the late 1980s, Cerf moved to MCI where he was instrumental in the development of the first commercial email system (MCI Mail) connected to the Internet.

Podcast: Managing an Engineering Team at a Startup

KP Naidu is the SVP of Engineering and CTO at Amava. KP is an accomplished Technology Leader, highly recognized for his technology vision, engineering and execution and has over 30 years of experience in technology.

KP, is an Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics expert from The University of Edinburgh, UK and rose early in his career to very high ranks at Sun Microsystems, where he was a VP responsible for their global Data Center Practice.

Podcast: AI-powered customer experiences

Ravi N. Raj is the CEO and Co-founder of Passage.AI. In this role, he leads a team of AI and deep learning engineers that have created the industry-leading AI platform that businesses can use to create a conversational interface for their websites.

Before co-founding Passage.AI, he led product for @WalmartLabs, Walmart’s hub for innovation around social, mobile and retail. Raj came to Walmart through the acquisition of Kosmix, where he served as the VP and GM of Kosmix’s sites, which included Kosmix.com, Tweetbeat.com, and RightHealth.com, then the second largest health site on the Web.

Raj has also played leadership roles at Yahoo, AltaVista, and Elance (now Upwork) and hold patents in search, social media, and retail.

Podcast: Building an Equitable Data Economy

Swish Goswami, 24, is the CEO of Surf, a tech company providing brands a better way to engage and understand consumers while compensating consumers for their data. Surf’s revolutionary browser extension passively rewards people for their everyday browsing and helps them save when shopping with their favorite brands. Surf’s brand division provides high fidelity data and commerce enablement opportunities to some of the world’s biggest brands like Netflix, NBA, Sony Music, L’Oreal, Electronic Arts, etc. Surf’s vision is to build an equitable data economy and the company has made two acquisitions and raised over $5M to date (from several NBA players, unicorn founders and venture firms).

Swish has given three TEDx talks, secured a publishing deal with Kogan Page and a sneaker deal with K-Swiss, and set up an angel fund called AGEX Capital. Through AGEX, he is an advisor/investor in popular social companies like FaZe Clan, Wombo, and Upstream. Swish has a personal following of over 200,000 and enjoys speaking around the world under North America’s prestigious bureau Speakers Spotlight. For his entrepreneurial and philanthropic achievements, Swish was inducted into Plan Canada’s Top 20 under 20 and Bay Street Bull’s 30 under 30, recognized as LinkedIn’s Top Voice and Startup Canada’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year and awarded the United Nation’s Outstanding Youth Leadership award.

Podcast: What if Privacy Had an API?

Anshu Sharma is the Co-founder and CEO of Skyflow besides being a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He co-founded Clearedin where he serves as Executive Chairman, and Suki, a digital assistant for doctors. Prior, he served as venture partner at Storm Ventures and was vice president of platform at Salesforce.

Anshu has invested in over 25 startups including Nutanix, Algolia, Workato, and RazorPay.

Software development: would YOU hire YOU?

Would you hire you?

I am always trying to understand what might trigger software product companies, or those that are pivoting into the digital realm from a traditional, brick-and-mortar type of setting, to consider working with software engineering teams beyond their office walls. I’m still befuddled by the realization that there is not a single, universal specific reason for this. However, the one that I think should stand out amongst many others, is this one:

It is not just a numbers game.

Beyond the financial benefits, there are many other reasons for working with a remote team. Leading technologies and practices, accelerating time-to-market, and adding the expertise that high-quality development teams bring to the table. And then there’s the quality of the results.

But beware when a software outsourcing company boasts mostly about “the lowest rates in the industry.” That might be true and their main competitive advantage. But how will they perform? Will they deliver the results you need? Will their work hold up in production? How much rework will your local team have to do?

You may have to pay a lot more than originally expected just to clean up the mess. Think of it this way: would you hire (and pay) you? If the answer is yes, replicating this experience as closely as possible is what truly works… beyond the numbers game.

LET US HELP YOU AVOID A CODING MESS!

Podcast: New Customers: a Fierce Competition Between Large and Small Banks

Laurence Cooke is the founder and CEO of nanopay Corporation, a technology company that offers business-to-business payments and liquidity management solutions to businesses and financial institutions. Active in the payments community, Laurence is a member of the Payments Canada Stakeholder Advisory Committee, FinPay and the US Federal Reserve Faster Payments Task Force.  Previously, he was VP of Wireless at Shaw Communications and COO of Bell Mobility.

Prior to starting nanopay, Laurence worked with WIND Canada and was Vice President of Wireless at Shaw Communications Inc. He was also Chief Operating Officer of Bell Mobility and Bell Distribution Inc (BDI), where he was responsible for all of Bell Mobility’s operations and led a team of 9,000 employees. At BDI, Laurence was responsible for all retail for Bell Canada.  Prior to joining Bell, Laurence was a senior executive in Accenture’s London Strategy Practice. Laurence co-founded two wireless data businesses in Europe, Melodeo, Inc. and Xtempus.

Pure technical gore: don’t read this

When it comes to software outsourcing, not everything is milk and honey.

It’s only fair to highlight some grim facts, too.

I asked a friend of mine, who happens to be a Sr software engineer in London, to elaborate on the most bizarre outsourcing story he’s gone through. My friend (we’ll call him Pete) was hired by a Fortune 100 company in San Francisco. His job was to develop an API system using Sinatra to integrate with software such as SAP and Oracle eBiz. By the time he started, he was the most Sr Ruby dev in the team. His first task was to review the Ruby work of an offshore team in Singapore. The team has been working on the code for three months.

As soon as he looked at the code, Pete told his manager that it wouldn’t work. There was no way on earth that such code could run. It even had basic syntax errors, a non-existent architecture, and bad practices. His manager did not believe him. Pete rapidly built a server and deployed the code, which quickly crashed and burned, as he predicted. He was accused of using wrong versions of Linux, Ruby and even Sinatra. He organized a video conference with the offshore team in Singapore. His plan was to SSH into their server to see if it worked there.

In the conference, it turned out that the Singapore team did not even have a dev server to deploy code. And here was the kicker: the offshore developers used MS Windows machines to write Ruby code, and they did not even have a Ruby interpreter on their computers. They used a text editor, wrote some terrible, pretend-to-be Ruby code, and submitted weekly reports. They managed to get paid for three months without delivering anything usable.

Pete didn’t blame the Singapore team whatsoever.

In the end, the fault lied with his employer in San Francisco. They were not even checking in the code to make sure it worked. It was either an excess of trust or just plain stupidity.

Stories like this do happen. Software product companies fall into this trap more often than not. Probably the biggest mistake Pete’s company made was to treat the offshore as “them.” They would have never fallen into this hole if they had integrated everybody as one team.

Quality is a function of personal relationships within the team, your company, and even your customers.

ARE YOU TRAPPED? WE CAN HELP YOU GET OUT!

Podcast: Building a One-stop Shop for Real Estate

Tyler Baldwin is Chief Executive Officer at Reali, a real estate and fintech company streamlining the homeownership journey. A strategic go-to-market leader with extensive experience successfully launching global products at scale, Tyler is an operation and tech veteran who brings a unique skill set and perspective to Reali.

With a strong background in blending sales, operations, and corporate strategy, Baldwin joined Reali as Chief Revenue Officer and was promoted to COO before becoming CEO. Prior to joining Reali, Baldwin was an executive at LinkedIn and led Elevate’s Mid-Market and Enterprise sales team, an employee advocacy solution that helps companies build their brand.

Podcast: Remote Visual Assistance: Democratizing Access to Expertise

Gary York is a serial entrepreneur with four successful software and services exits: three private sales and one IPO. He has spent his career at the boundary of what is possible and what is practical. He has held technical and executive positions with leading technology companies in Boston, Silicon Valley, and Alabama. Not only is Gary a winner of the Smithsonian Innovation Award and the EDPA Lifetime Achievement Award for Innovation, he also serves on the Boards of TechBirmingham, the McWane Science Center and Urban Avenues.

He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon and was a visiting fellow at UC Berkeley. Gary and his wife Cathy have two children. He is an avid runner.

Podcast: You Have Too Much Software

James Layfield is an entrepreneur and investor creating positive change through innovation in sectors ranging from property to financial technology. Most recently, James co-founded Clearfind, an easy-to-use, unbiased artificial intelligence platform that is changing the way companies manage and optimize software with data. James is a general partner in a fintech investment fund Treasury with the cofounders of Acorns, Betterment, and a board member of Paypal, and has angel investments across a host of technology ventures.

James has founded and led multiple successful companies including Rise, the world’s largest fintech innovation platform, with Barclays; Never Ever Limited, an innovation catalyst and consulting agency; and Central Working, a shared workspace hub for business professionals. James is currently an ambassador for CognitionX the AI event, London and Partners, and the ScaleUp Institute. He also serves as the New York Tech Ambassador for the Mayor of London.

You calling me a “diversity hire”?

You calling me a “friggin’ diversity hire”?

I was having a beer-framed conversation with a friend who happens to be the CTO – I will call him Mike – of a well known real estate software company. Mike is in his late forties, and he was telling me about the time he hired a Junior programmer. “He was a bright kid , came from a big well known school “ Mike said. This was his first development job, and my friend was really looking forward to telling him all about the company’s systems and work flow. The newcomer was completely green, and having known Mike for almost twenty years, I know for a fact that he has a soft spot in his heart for new software engineers. 

The new guy seemed to have a good sense of humor…at first . After a while his humor became quite a bit more snarky, a lot more passive-aggressive.  Mike assumed he was just getting used to working with people from different backgrounds and still adjusting to “ the real world” or whatever . One morning this Junior was particularly abrasive, hurling darts at everyone around him . He definitely enjoyed saying things for shock factor . Mike told me how the Junior made some comments about something innocuous and he retorted “Oh, Mike, you dang diversity hire!!” with a chuckle and then says “ sorry I don’t feel like pulling punches today “. Being a long-fused guy, Mike took some time to digest how demeaning, disrespectful, and frustrating a remark this truly was .

The situation was eventually resolved. The kicker being that months later Mike helped train two software engineering interns from another country who were extremely respectful , good natured, and several years younger than the offensive Junior programmer. Mike had assumed the green programmer was just an immature kid which was the reason for his comments . “I have met “kids” much younger , more tactful, and much more respectful than he was over our brief time working together”, Mike stated. “I eventually came to the conclusion that the issue was never his age or inexperience”, he concluded.

Long story short: the Junior was let go not too long after Mike reported his comments. Mike is now convinced that sometimes the best lessons come from the biggest mistakes, and that when creating an optimal work atmosphere, age is never a factor – neither too young nor too old. Attitude, empathy,  a sense of collaboration and respect beat even the purest of hard skills every single time.

CAN WE HELP YOU HIRE FOR TALENT?