One on One Interviews

After years of being a very successful CMO, last month Mike Volpe was named CEO of Lola.com – a company focused on making business travel easier for the travel manager and the traveler. I caught with Mike at Lola’s headquarters in Boston to learn more about making the transition from CMO to CEO, how being a CMO helped him prepare for being a CEO, and to get his take on how leading a startup in today’s environment compares to what is was like building HubSpot up more than a decade ago.

I’ve spent part of the summer catching up with a few folks that I’ve talked with for this series in years past. And although it’s been less been less than a year and a half since I last spoke with Opus Research founder Dan Miller, in the fast-moving area of conversational interfaces like chatbots and voice assistants, that’s feels more like a lifetime.

Dan, whose company is gearing up for their Conversational Commerce Conference next month, coined the phrase “conversational commerce” in 2011. So I wanted to catch up to him to ask him where we are today with conversational commerce on the heels of the reportedly low voice shopping numbers for Alexa on the eve of the conference. I also got his take on what impact the Cortana-Alexa integration might have on adoption of voice assistants in business.

It’s been nearly three years since I had the pleasure of speaking with Dennis Mortensen, founder and CEO of X.ai — the service behind Amy and Andrew - autonomous AI assistants who schedule meetings.

Since three years in tech is like 20 years in real life, and with smart/digital assistants being at the top of many hot technology lists, I wanted to get Dennis’ perspective on how things have changed since we last spoke and how he sees the intelligent agent landscape shaping up.

Back in June of this year Facebook pledged to train 1 million US business owners by 2020 and equip more people with the digital skills they need to compete in today’s workplace. To help them meet that goal, this week the company announced a partnership with the National Urban League (NUL) to offer free training in social media strategy and digital marketing at 13 NUL locations in the following cities: Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD; Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland, OH; Houston, TX; Jacksonville, FL; Kansas City, MO; Las Vegas, NV; Los Angeles, CA; New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia, PA; and Washington, D.C.

Monique Dorsainvil, public policy manager for Facebook, filled us in on some of the details of the program, why it’s important for Facebook to pledge this commitment to train small business owners, and why working with organizations like the National Urban League will help them accomplish their goal.

Amazon Prime Day 2018 started with a whimper, a dog whimper, due to the site going down causing Amazon to post pages with pictures of dogs on them while they tried to get the site back up. But even with that inauspicious start ( and an estimated $99 million of lost business), PD ’18 was still the biggest selling day in Amazon history – estimated at $4.2 billion by Wedbush Securities Inc. analyst Michael Pachter. And, according to Amazon, small and midsize businesses sold over $1 billion dollars on the platform in the first 24 hours of the company holiday.

While those are impressive numbers, my Watching Amazon co-host John Lawson and I dig in a bit deeper on what we thought of the results, and more to the point the lack of results Amazon has provided this time around.

, I was glad to speak with Tact.ai’s founder and CEO Chuck Ganapathi to hear his thoughts on these subjects. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear even more of the conversation check out the video below. You’ll notice in the video it’s just Chuck answering the questions. There was a little trouble on with my audio, but thankfully, and most importantly, Chuck looks and sounds great, so check it out!

In a conversation with Fred Studer, the company’s chief marketing officer, he explains why the company feels why a services-based business model is what needed to be successful today, and why they call themselves a customer-centric ERP company.

Business of all sizes spend a lot of time keeping track of what they spend and what they take in. And many have employees who travel to meet with customers and prospects in order to drum up business. And managing all of that is a tedious, but important task; and manually keeping track of all that could be costing you money.

I recently spoke with David Alexander, Vice President of Marketing and Market Development for SAP Concur, a leading provider of cloud-based integrated travel and expense management services and solutions. He shared how using an automated platform for managing travel and expense tasks can help small businesses not only be more productive, but also provides insight into how they’re spending money – which can help them save money in the end.

At last week’s Xerocon event I had the pleasure of meeting Steven Carse, who cofounded King of Pops with his brother. And what start as a natural ingredients popsicle company with a single cart in 2010 has turned into a company employing upwards of 250 people spread across eight cities in five states.

Steven shared with me how being laid off from his corporate job led to him discovering his business opportunity, the importance of being involved in the community is key to understanding customers, and how an employee who brings his ukulele to work with him is a good fit for the company.

I caught up with Keri Gohman, President of Xero Americas, after her keynote at Xerocon 2018 yesterday right here in Atlanta. One of the themes of her presentation centered on how automation will free accountants from the time-consuming but important tasks of collecting and processing data, allowing them to focus more of their time on more valuable advisory services – services small businesses want them to provide. And artificial intelligence, coupled with automation, is providing accounting advisors insight into creating their own specialized niches that can provide additional opportunities for growing their businesses while providing their customers with more reasons to stay customers longer.