Data Leaders

Ivy Nguyen shares insights on:

1. Going beyond data - why data is NOT the new oil
2. Model-Market Fit vs. Product-Market Fit
3. Data Moat - a term she coined at Zetta Ventures - What does that mean and how can you build one.
4. AI product development strategy. A trifecta of:
   1. Performance Plateau
   2. Minimum Algorithm Performance
   3. Stability Threshold

About Ivy Nguyen:

• Investor @ Zetta Ventures Partners, VC firm that exclusively invests in startups leveraging Data and AI.
• Prior to Zetta, Ivy sourced and led investments in several companies including Constructor, NuCypher, Assembly, and Agridata.
• Ivy graduated with a chemical engineering degree from Stanford
• Fun fact about Ivy: Ivy loves to knit and is planning to make a hat from a neural net generated knitting pattern.

Follow Ivy on Twitter or LinkedIn to keep up with AI Product Development and her new AI Metrics Benchmark program.

In this episode, I invite Swaroop "Kittu" Kolluri to share his thoughts on:

1. His decision making process around early stage VC Investments
2. AI Startups - How to develop an unfair advantage in your AI Startup
3. Two Phases of Product Market Fit

To learn more about Kittu, please visit NeoTribe Ventures.

About Kittu:

• Founder and Managing Director of NeoTribe Ventures.
• Named as one of the Top 100 Venture Capitalists by New York Times/CBInsights
• Top 10 Indian VC's in the world.

In this episode, Tom shares his advice on:

• Building Data Startups
• Company culture and growth
• Future of AI

About Tom Reilly:

• Tom Reilly is the CEO of Cloudera.
• Tom has a distinguished 30-year career in the enterprise software market.
• Tom has led several tech startups through a successful initial public offering.
• Prior to Cloudera, Tom served as CEO of ArcSight, an enterprise security company acquired by HP in 2010.
• Fun fact: Tom is one of things in the Internet of Thing (IoT). More on that in the podcast.

In this episode, I chat with Savvas Zortikis about an Analytical approach to Viral Marketing.

• Hear Savvas talk about how he studied Word-of-Mouth like a mad-scientist.
• He turned his hard-earned knowledge into six digestible chunks of 'execution-ready' methods - and launched it on Product Hunt. No surprise, it went viral.
• SaaS product customer retention - how he figured out what it takes to have high retention and NPS.
• Round of rapid-fire questions on Growth and Retention.

About Savvas Zortikis

• Savvas is a CEO of Viral Loops, a venture-backed viral and referral marketing platform for building referral campaigns, ambassador programs, viral competitions, and sweepstakes.
• On his free time, he pursues his passion for understanding network effects, the science behind word of mouth and branding. He's been featured in Forbes, Inbound.org and Fortune.

In this episode, I sit down with Aaron to learn about how he and his agency creates engaging content.

Takeaways:

1. Focus on copywriting basics. Make every word valuable. This means not using words like "just" or "really."
2. People love a good narrative. Give them a gift of emotional engagement. Pull the strings of your heart without holding back.
3. Find personal stories from your daily work and translate that to something of value to people. This means approaching your day like a book, with each meeting as a chapter of a story.

I've always wondered if there were any patterns among the top writers when it comes to their writing process.

This episode takes a stab at answering that question.

Olof Mathe, the founder of Mixmax, one of the most well-renowned email communication products, shares his thoughts on:

• How he and his team discovered product-market fit for Mixmax...
• Key metrics for early-stage startups - how they changed everything for Mixmax
• What led Mixmax to spread like a wild fire...from 0 to 5000 customers without spending a penny on marketing
• How Mixmax discovered its vision and foundational purpose
• Attitudinal difference between millennial sales professional and the previous generations

References:

https://mixmax.com/careers

About Olof Mathe:

• Founder and CEO of Mixmax
• Prior to that, Olof led the team that built Inkling Habitat and Skype.
• Olof grew up in Sweden and finished his engineering degree in France.
• Fun Fact about Olof: He co-founded an art hackathon where Digital artists and hackers get together in an art space and create full-fledged art exhibit within 24 hours. This hackathon was featured in TechCrunch and FastCompany.

In this podcast series, I sat down with the top writers from SF, LA, and NY to learn how they create great content.

You'll be hearing their insights on attributes of the high-quality content.

This is a part I of a 10-Part Series.

In this episode, we hear from:

• Joe Escobedo @ Forbes
• Garrett Ruiz @ BlueJeans
• Riddhi Shah, Alum @ Medium and HuffPo
• KC Karnes @ CleverTap
• Alisha Paulsen @ Workday

Here are some of their top insights:

What are the attributes of high-quality content?

Joe Escobedo:

• High-Quality content should either educate or entertain your audience, or both.
• You never really know if it's good until it's published and you get feedback from your audience
• Provides a solution
• Ask "What kind of additional insights or information would they want."

Garrett Ruiz:

• Accurate
• Informative and insightful
• Leads the user to the next place in the buyer's journey

Riddhi Shah:

• High-Quality content is very intuitive. It's a mix of art and science.
• New or insightful information
• For virality, it should produce an element of surprise and strong emotions
• Relevant and addresses current concerns from the audience
• Distinctive tone of voice
• Delightful

KC Karnes:

• Go Deeper
• Understand the nuance of nurturing the relationship for the long haul, instead of generating eyeballs and clicks.
• "Inch-Wide Mile-Deep" Mindset.

Alisha Paulsen:

• Create unique content - informative and interesting.
• Grammar/Spelling errors or confusing sentences discounts the integrity of the piece
• Consistency
• Storytelling
• Personalization

I met up with Sean Sheppard to learn about his growth based product/market fit approach.

My takeaways:

1. Quickest path to product/market fit
2. Product Management Special:
   1. Skills, attitude, and mindset for achieving a great market fit
   2. Product Development Vs. Market Development
   3. A clear and actionable pathway to achieve the skills and knowledge needed to win as an early stage founder or a product manager
3. The new set of hard skills needed to succeed as a startup founder

References:

Market Acceleration Program from GrowthX.

About Sean Sheppard:

• Founding Partner at GrowthX - A seed-stage venture capital fund.

• Co-founder of GrowthX Academy - A training ground for tech sales, marketing, and design professionals.

• Contributor for Huffington Post and mentor to several high-growth start-ups

• Named Top 20 Sale Influencers in Silicon Valley

In this podcast series, I sat down with the top writers from SF, LA, and NY to learn how they create great content.

You'll be hearing their insights on overcoming their biggest challenges, the hottest tools they're using right now for content creation, and how they foresee the future of content creation.

In this episode, we hear from In this show, we have

• Mina Zivkovic from Canvas
• Arielle Shnaidman from Accello
• Nigel Stevens from BigCommerce
• Chris McCarthy from JetLore, and
• Kelly Johnson from Reputation.com

Here are some of their top insights:

Mina Zivkovic - Finding a balance between selling your products AND creating content that brings value to the reader.

Arielle Shnaidman - Figuring out and presenting the pain points, so they pull the strings of your heart, right away. And do it consistently.

Kelly Johnson - Showing ROI from content...We have to be judicious, strategic, and frugal. Being able to show how a blog post or a whitepaper contribute to the bottom line.

Chris McCarthy - Voracious need for content in general. Being able to keep up with the demand for new, unique, informative content is difficult.

Nigel Stevens - Creating content that is actionable, that tells a story and matches user intent.