Celebrated as Apple's 2017 iPhone App of the Year, Calm is a Bay Area unicorn that's helping people all over the globe find a little peace in a turbulent world. As head of lifecycle marketing for Calm, Sue Cho is tasked with keeping customers happy, and converting —from free to paid accounts. Armed with data, email and an endorsement that led to a content deal with NBA superstar LeBron James, Sue takes us inside the very busy world of Calm's success.

Few things frustrate online retailers more than abandoned shopping carts, or subscription customers who drop off for no apparent reason. It's more than a headache, it's a threat to your bottom line. If you sell globally, it's even more complicated as different payment systems come into play. Digital River's Vice President of Payments, Fraud and Financial Services, Eric Christensen, joins host Natalie Wires with insight on how merchants might make those pain points easier to navigate.

Big data is both feared and admired for its reach into our lives, and its promise for complex problem solving and machine learning. Databricks’ analytics platform allows data science teams and engineers to quickly analyze large data sets to drive innovation in their companies. Curtice Smith, corporate controller at Databricks, gives us a primer on the company’s start up roots, and the challenges he faces keeping up with a business that has twice landed on LinkedIn’s Top Startups list. One thing our team learned, a company that is one of the fastest growing tech companies in the Bay Area has no quiet spaces. Our apologies for less than stellar sound.

Ben MacAskill was a science major in college when his brother convinced him to drop out and join his company, SmugMug. What started out as an experiment after a family member lost all their photos on another platform lead to a company that helped pioneer the subscription revenue model for an ecommerce business and fill a need for photographers at every level. As COO of SmugMug and Flickr, MacAskill talks about the customer experience, what the company got right, what it initially got very wrong, and what he thinks SmugMug needs to do to stay ahead of the competition.