Sam Talks Technology

Sam Talks Technology

By Sam SethiBusinessEntrepreneurshipTechnology
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Sam Talks Technology episodes

  • Minter Dial talks about adding Heartificial Empathy to the future workplace post Covid-19
    Minter Dial serves as a keynote speaker, conference animator and consultant on branding, leadership and transformation for blue-chip companies, conferences and events around the world.
    Minter is an author and filmmaker of award-winning "The Last Ring Home" (Nov 2016). Co-author of the award-winning "Futureproof, How to get your Business Ready for the Next Disruption" (Pearson, Sep 2017).
    His latest book is “Heartificial Empathy, Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence” (Dec 2018) won the Book Excellence Award 2019 in the category of Technology and was a finalist for the Business Book Awards 2019.
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    Andrew Grill is a commercially focussed Digital Leader and trusted Board Technology Advisor, who delivers strategic digital transformation programs and has delivered $100M+ of new business across multiple industries globally.
    Over a 4-year period, Andrew influenced around $100M of sales via his external eminence and thought leadership with key IBM clients.
    He is recognised by his peers and clients as able to uniquely communicate the need for digital transformation and provide strategic leadership to any C-Suite or Board.
    Andrew is also a popular and sought-after presenter and commentator on issues around digital disruption, social selling, workplace of the future and digital diversity.
    He consults to organisations worldwide to develop their strategy in a world rife with digital disruption.
    An experienced corporate leader, Andrew has launched and run technology companies in Europe and Australia and worked with and for some of the world’s leading companies including IBM, Vodafone, Telstra, Nestle, BBC, American Express, John Lewis, and Unilever.
    He is also a seasoned TEDx speaker, having presented at 5 separate TEDx events.
    Andrew’s first-hand experience of the digital world and the power of social media networks spans three decades and can be traced back to the early 1980s when he found himself online via bulletin board and email.
    His passion and involvement in the digital world continued into later life, launching Australia’s largest commercial property website, PropertyLook, and Australian location technology company Seeker Wireless to the world stage.
    1 hr 11 min
  • James Mulvany talks about the future of podcasting and radio - transcriptions, search and monetisation.

    Sam Sethi talks with James Mulvany about how to get started quickly with podcasting.  We then talk about some of the challenges of recording, distributing and discovering a new podcast before we finally look into the future of podcasting. 

    Google have started to auto-transcribe and index podcasts making them easier to discover.  The next challenge could well be Podcast SEO.  We also talked about the different ways podcasts can be monetised.  

     

    41 min
  • Steve Pankhurst talks about the rise and fall of the UK’s first social network - Friends Reunited.
    Stephen Pankhurst was the co-founder of Friends Reunited along with his wife Julie.
    In 1999, Stephen’s wife Julie, was pregnant with their first child. She had just used the internet to track down her long lost Grandfather that she had never seen.
    Realising the power of the internet, and a desire to find out what some of her old school friends were up to, she came up with the idea of FriendsReunited, exploiting a gap in the UK market following the success of US website Classmates.com.
    Friends Reunited was officially launched in June 2000. The very first version of the site looked pretty horrible. Stephen was not a graphic designer, so he just knocked together anything.
    However, the functionality worked and very soon they started to get people coming to the site and registering themselves against schools. Nine months later, after a redesign, some hard work, lots of extra features, encouragement from users and the odd mention or two in the press, things started to get interesting.
    By the end of the year, it had 3,000 members, and a year later (2001) this had increased to 2.5 million.
    By December 2005, Friends Reunited had over 15 million members and was bought by British TV company ITV plc for £120 million ($208 million), plus further payments of up to £55 million based on its performance up to 2009.
    In 2007, ITV Chairman Michael Grade described the site as "the sweet spot" of the internet and stated that "Friends Reunited is one of the great undersung jewels in the crown ... one of the most important bits of ITV going forward, a massive presence, and profitable"
    That year the site made a profit of £22 million, but its market valuation had fallen sharply from the £120 million paid by ITV in 2005 and it achieved growth in UK traffic of only 1.2%, compared to Facebook's 2,393% and Bebo's 173%.
    In March 2008, after losing 47% of unique users in the previous 12 months, the site dropped the subscription fee required to contact members, but the decline continued.
    In 2009, Friends Reunited was sold for £25 million to Brightsolid Limited. By December 2011, Brightsolid estimated that Friends Reunited was worth only £5.2 million, a fifth of the price it paid to ITV two years previously.
    The company relaunched Friends Reunited in March 2012 with a new emphasis on nostalgia and memories.
    On January 2016, Friends Reunited revealed that it would be closing down the website after 16 years of operation. On February 2016 the site closed down.
    1 hr 21 min
  • Shaa Wasmund talks about her amazing career and her new book. “How to fix your sh*t”.

    Sam Sethi talked to Sháá Wasmund about where her name originated from and how she managed to work for Chris Eubank, Sir James Dyson, Sir Bob Geldof all before she was 30.

    We talked about how she turned down £45m by not working for Michael Birch and that surprisingly isn’t her biggest regret.

    We also talked about her current role as an online educator helping small business owners via her Facebook groups ‘Freedom Collective’ & ‘The 6 Figure Expert Club’.

    We finally talked about why Sháá joins other people’s masterminds in order to help herself grow.

    1 hr 21 min
  • Dr Al Pinkerton talks about the effect of social media in the UK & US elections

    Sam Sethi talks with Dr Alasdair Pinkerton and co-host Matt Hodges-Long about the recent UK general election where Alasdair stood in Surrey Heath as the PPC (Parliamentary Prospective Candidate) for the Liberal Democrats.

    Despite losing to Mr Gove, they managed to use social media to crowdfund £25k and increased the LibDem vote by 16%.

    We talked about the potential negative effect social media will have in the 2020 US election now that Mark Zuckerberg has decided not to fact check political ads.

    We also talked about the potential scenarios in a post-brexit Boris world given Alasdair’s PhD research work on ‘Global Britain’.

    1 hr 20 min
  • Dan Wagner talks about his rollercoaster career; from AIM listed at 30 to starting again at 50.

    Sam Sethi talks with Dan Wagner about his three startups MAID, Venda and Rezolve. We talked about how he started MAID in 1984, when he was only 20 before the web and search engines really existed. How he came to be the youngest CEO of Brightstation PLC which was listed on the London Stock Exchange.

    Dan talks about the struggles at the end of MAID with the dotcom crash before he sold it to Thomson Reuters.

    Dan being a serial entrepreneur was soon onto his next business called Venda but this was eventually sold to Netsuite.

    Dan took the core Venda technology to start Powa Technologies, "the Shaazam" for shopping. Powa Technologies, was praised by David Cameron and hailed as a British “unicorn”. Unfortunately it ended badly for Dan with investors and directors.

    Dan dusted himself down and has now launched Rezolve.

     

    1 hr 24 min
  • Andy McLoughlin talks about starting as an Entrepreneur before turning into a Venture Capitalist.
    Andy McLoughlin is a partner at Uncork Capital in San Francisco, focusing on B2B software opportunities.
    Uncork Capital is a seed-stage venture firm that commits early, helps with the hard stuff, and sticks around. Really.
    Andy's investments include LaunchDarkly, Coder, Crossbeam, Focal Systems, Human Interest, Pattern (acquired by Workday), Test.ai, Simplify, Fountain, GreatHorn, Bigfinite, and Identify3D, as well as a number of companies still in stealth.
    Andy was previously a prolific seed investor into many well-known startups. Postmates, Buffer, Intercom, Pipedrive, Hullabalu, RolePoint, Tray.io, Bugsnag, Thread, Calm, Secret Escapes, Apiary (acquired by Oracle), Import.io, Zesty (acquired by Square), Marvel, Cloud66 and more.
    Prior to becoming an investor, Andy is best know for co-founding Huddle with Alastair Mitchell. Andy had many roles at Huddle over the years - Head of Technology, Head of Product, Head of Marketing, Head of Strategy / Business Development, GM North America - but he was most passionate about building a great team and a great product.
    Andy stepped back from his executive role in 2015 but remained on the board of directors until the company's acquisition in 2017, when it was eventually sold to private equity for $89m in August 2017.
    That sum is far less than Huddle's reported peak valuation of up to $300M when it snagged a $51 million Series D funding round in 2014.
    1 hr
  • Paul Fabretti talks about Microsoft’s changing culture and his role in communicating the story.

    Sam Sethi talked with Paul Fabretti about how Microsoft's culture has changed since I worked for them back in the 90's. The insular Microsoft of Gates and Balmer, focused on Office and Windows, that I worked for has been replaced by a more open Microsoft focused on Azure and Open Source.

    But how did this come about? Paul and I talk about the impact of Satya Nadella on the companies new culture and focus.

    Paul and I first crossed paths over ten years ago when he was based here in the UK working for O2. Today Paul is based in Seattle working closely with Kate Johnson, President of Microsoft USA and the executive team.

     

    1 hr 7 min

About Sam Talks Technology

From the publisher's feed

Award-winning radio presenter Sam Sethi talks with some of the most brilliant entrepreneurs about their career highlights and current startup. He brings his lifelong passion for all things business…