One on One Interviews

Smart Hustle Report -- Ryan Himmel by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends

Mike Fauscette, G2 Crowd’s Chief Research Officers, shares with us how review sites like G2’s is changing the buying process for small businesses, why so many of the reviews are coming from small business users, and what kinds of applications/technologies small businesses are looking for information and guidance on.

I saw Leah McGowen-Hare speak at last year’s Salesforce TrailheaDX conference for developers focused on building apps on the Salesforce platform. And after seeing her captivate a conference center of thousands of developers with her knowledge of cloud development platforms and coding tools/environments, I was struck by a couple of things. I have gone to countless tech conferences over the past couple of decades, but I had never seen an African American woman deliver a keynote to a group of hardcore developers. And she had the whole crowd eating out of the palm of her hands with her mix of experience, knowledge and passion for coding and developers.

In addition to being Director in Tech and Product for Salesforce, she’s also director of Developer Evangelism. And after seeing her present again at the Salesforce Analyst Summit this week, I was anxious to ask her a few questions about her journey to being a developer evangelist, and what it would take to see more folks that look like her get into coding and developing apps in the cloud.

Ramon Ray chats with the founders of the popular Wicked Good Cupcakes.

With this being the last Friday in 2017 we’re taking the week off from the usual weekly interview, but we’ll be back next Friday to kick off 2018. And speaking of 2018, my Watching Amazon partner John “ColderIce” Lawson and I wanted to see which company would give Amazon a run for their money in the year ahead. So we dedicated an episode to looking at the relationship Amazon has to companies like Apple, Facebook and Google, how those relationships have changed over the years, and which one of these companies is positioned to most effectively compete with Bezos & Co in ecommerce, cloud computing, conversational interfaces and anything else.

Smart Hustle Report -- Dana Donofree by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends

I caught up with Richard “Buzzy” Busby, Principal Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services, at Xerocon earlier this month to learn more about how traditional small businesses can use AWS to grow their businesses. Buzzy shares how a new product announce at AWS re:Invent, SageMaker, can help SMBs leverage the power of machine learning to find insights into important business areas. He also discusses how SMBs can get involved with using Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant to connect with customers, and how they can leverage AWS technology partners to get new business ideas quickly in action on the AWS platform.

Ramon Ray chats with Nicolaus Wolfrum.

One of the highlights of last week’s Xerocon event, put on by cloud accounting platform Xero, was meeting Marcus Lemonis of CNBC’s The Profit. And before he took the stage for his conference ending keynote, I had the pleasure of sitting down with him for a great conversation. Marcus shares how the impetus for the show was more social experiment than small business, how vulnerability is key to fixing people and business success, and how he won’t do business with someone, even as a customer, unless he knows that they understand their business.

Ramon Ray interviews Justin Finkelman.