FUTUREPROOF.

Send us a text

After years of working for a big bank including working as a financial advisor for Merrill Lynch, Shannon McLay was inspired to create a financial services company that actually cares for its clients (imagine that!) and provided them the services they needed. The result? 90% of their clients achieve their financial goals. Shannon provides a counterpoint to the argument that everything will be AI & automation: most of us still need a human to turn to for financial guidance.

Here, Shannon talks about how she's grown a startup with a human-backed approach, the problem with today's VCs, what the future of personal finance might look like, how to really understand scale from a business perspective, and the importance of the human touch - and why it’s not going away anytime soon.

If this is your first time here, please make sure to subscribe, rate and review - that's how we've grown and continue to grow. 

Send us a text

We're in Toronto for Collision, so naturally we wanted to sit down with Mayor John Tory to discuss how he brought North America's largest tech conference north of the border. We also discussed the type of environment that he's trying to foster to build a tech and innovation hub, how to work to get the right budgets in place, and where the city of tomorrow needs to invest in order to get ahead. It's a fascinating conversation, and we'd like to thank Mayor Tory and his team for making the time.

Send us a text

So today we’re talking to consumer behavior expert, professor of marketing, and prolific author Michael Solomon. This is a great conversation, where we talk about robotics’ adoption curve and who's doing robotics right, the possible negative impact of emerging technologies like AI and automation, what consumer behavior will look like in the future, the "Uncanny Valley" effect and whether it's permanent or something bound to go away, and cheesesteaks. 

As always, you can rate and review us on Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever finer podcasts are sold, and we thank you all so much for doing so. And if you want more of Michael's work, you can find his books here: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B001IGOM2M?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&sort=date-desc-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

Send us a text

Today we're speaking with Jay Baer, the renown founder of Convince and Convert/best-selling author/sought after keynote speaker. It's going to take about 10 seconds into this conversation to realize how sharp Jay's mind is (not to mention his wit). We talk about why he wrote his latest book, 'Talk Triggers', why word of mouth marketing is going to be increasingly important to the marketer of tomorrow, and how he continues to stay ahead of the curve as a marketer. And of course, we talk about alpacas, plaid suits, and fake IDs - because, why not. So let's jump right in, shall we?

Send us a text

Today we’re talking to Alex Kolicich, a founding partner at 8VC, which pegs itself as a different kind of VC firm. He focuses on IT and Bio-IT investments, and is known to be one of the more thoughtful, insightful VCs out there, which is why we wanted to make sure we got him on for you. 

We talk to Alex about how he started at Palantir, a mission driven company, how tech can be a driving force of change. We also discuss why healthcare is so incredibly resistant to change, how an investor needs to changes their way of thinking when the situation changes, and how poker helps you incorporate new data into your decision-making. It's a conversation you don't want to miss.

Send us a text

Today we’re talking to Zac Smith, the CEO of Packet. a bare metal cloud built for developers which recently raised $25M in Series B funding.

Some of what we cover today: Why can small companies move so quickly? Are we hardwired to like tactile, tangible things over intangible "unsexy" things like cloud infrastructure? And, how do we as a society deal with the workforce disruption caused by automation and advances in technology?

We wanted to speak to Zac because he's spent his last 16 years building, running and fixing public cloud infrastructure platforms.  As the CEO of Packet, he's responsible for not only the company's strategic product roadmap, but of talking to his customers and seeing what they're building on the infrastructure he's providing - giving him a good vantage point to see what the future may hold.

As always, please rate, review, and subscribe! And of course, tell your friends. They'll thank you later.

Send us a text

Today we're talking to the search and SEO pioneer Stephan Spencer. He's a 3-time author, avid blogger, international speaker, and consultant on all things SEO. Over the course of his two-plus decades in search career, he's done it all, and now he shares his wisdom and expertise, especially via his two podcasts Marketing Speak and The Optimized Geek.

We talk with Stephan about how full-blown AI will impact the future of search, how voice may impact search and why ranking #2 may not even matter anymore, the idea of moonshots and how to incentivize innovators towards taking them, and why SEO experts can no longer fool Google. 

Stephan's a fascinating guy with an interesting approach towards forecasting the future -  analytically, methodically, and rooted in what his history as a technologist has taught him. We hope you enjoy.

As always, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher to help more people find us - they'll be sure to thank you.

Send us a text

So this week we’re going to speak to someone who is doing fascinating work: Jenny Herald is the Chief Product Officer at GtmHub, a company that’s offers the most data-driven OKRs platform. In case you’re not familiar with OKRs, it stands for Objectives and Key Results. It's a framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes.

Larry Page, the CEO of Alphabet and co-founder of Google, has said the following about "OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of 'organizing the world’s information' perhaps even achievable. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most.”

Given that OKRs have their origins in the tech world and that no one really builds the future without a system in place, I wanted to talk to Jenny about OKRs and her approach towards innovation - side note, we spoke at Web Summit back in November, hence the background chatter. 

Jenny's been an Entrepreneur in Residence at Techstars, she's managed major projects for Microsoft…and we really had a fascinating conversation about innovation, how to move quickly and mindfully simultaneously, and the argument for Chief Product Officers having a seat at the table.

People who are interested in Gtmhub can check us out the company here: http://bit.ly/2DMWwgL.

Gtmhub is free for organizations working on causes we support via our Gtmhub Gives program. More information can be found at http://bit.ly/2RX1hXY.

Send us a text

Welcome to 2019, everybody! We thought this was a perfect time to post a conversation Jeremy had awhile back with John Coyle. John is the Founder of The Art of Really Living, and is one of the world's leading experts in innovation and Design Thinking. John’s an author (Design for Strengths - go read it - it's great), an Olympic silver medalist, NBC sports analyst, and SVP and Professor of Innovation. John has been applying "design thinking" to companies, careers, lives and leadership challenges for more than 20 years, so we really wanted to get him on the show to have a wide-ranging conversation. 

Send us a text

We're back for our next block of consecutive new episodes! At Web Summit, Jeremy was able to catch up with Reshma Sohoni, who co-founded Seedcamp 11 years ago. With some of the largest raises in Europe, acquisitions by major companies and $1 billion in valuations, Seedcamp's startups go on to achieve great things. Because of that, we thought this a great opportunity to see how Reshma navigates uncertainty and predicts the startups and technologies that are worth paying attention to.

Note: since Jeremy and Reshma are in a bustling crowd of 70,000 or so conference attendees, we apologize for this episode's less than stellar audio.

As always, be sure to subscribe, and rate and review us as well - every little bit helps your friends and the world in general hear about this podcast. Thanks in advance.