Karl Mosgofian leads the IT & Security team for Gainsight, the leader in Customer Success software. With over 30 years of experience Karl brings a breadth and depth of business and technology understanding. From consulting, to startup adventures, through senior leadership roles at companies like Alta Group, Cadence Design Systems, and Harmonic he has always been passionate about making his customers wildly successful. In addition to his internal role, he loves connecting with our customers and serves as an advocate for IT inside Gainsight. He also volunteers and serves on the Trail Center board, building and maintaining hiking trails in the Bay Area.

Episode transcription:

K: Hi, I'm Karl Mosgofian, CIO at Gainsight.

J: Karl, thanks so much for joining us on the heavy podcast today. Can you tell us a little bit more about your backgrounds? Career, where you come from and maybe a little bit more about your role at Gainsight.

K: I've been in it for a very long time, maybe 30 plus years at this point. I was CIO previously at a company called Harmonic, a really cool video technology company in San Jose. I've been in the Bay area my whole life, and, prior to that, did a number of different things, both in consulting and corporate IT roles, spent many years at a company called Cadence Design Systems and had a great experience there doing a lot of different things. Mostly in the application space, but also around enterprise architecture. That really helped kind of broaden my portfolio of knowledge and really set me up well to become a CIO.

J: That's great. And as far as your current role in your current organization in Gainsight's, wha what is, what, what problem are you guys solving at Gainsight and what falls under your, I mean, I've got security IT operations and applications. So pretty standard. The one thing is that a SAS company sometimes CEO's own the tech ops function and the actually delivery. And I don't have that, thankfully. Because that's quite a big job. The one interesting thing for me about the security aspect of this, is that we are covering the security of the product itself. So I, in the past, have been responsible for security at the network and laptop level. But this is very interesting because we're actually engaged with the engineering team in making sure that our code is secure and that our product is secure. So that's been very interesting. I have enough of a background in software development that's been kind of a natural fit for me, but it's been really interesting to have that in my world and, Gainsight is a company, is solving customer success in all of its sort of permutations. So, customer success is not just about quote unquote making customers happy, but making sure they achieve their outcomes and so more and more, that's becoming a cross-functional effort in companies. So we've got our core software that supports actual customer success departments, but we're also now very involved with the product team. And how do you instrument your software so that you really know what people are doing? And how does sales fit into this and how do all the different departments essentially that are touching the customer and helping the customer achieve their outcomes? Have the information they need and coordinate their actions,to be able to do a really good job of that because that's becoming a major competitive differentiator.

J: Right, right. Absolutely. I love that. We can probably spend the entire episode talking just particularly on this particular topic where the product minded, CEOs and CEOs. I think that's how the successful ones really differentiate themselves from the, I guess, the average executive, whereas as a company-wide almost a culture like approach to understanding first, the problem that your customers are facing and then building the product around that. I think that's one of the one of the main recipes for success, as one of the concepts in marketing that I love is the whole Super

From the hours of 5am-8am, Frankie Iturbe is an Education Entrepreneur. Around 8am, he clocks in and works at Accenture as a Technology Consulting Manager.

At Accenture, he is part of the Customer, Sales & Service practice. He supports his clients in designing capabilities that accelerate revenue growth, leading the work with a human-centered design mindset. In other words, he leads engaging workshops, and makes pretty slides to communicate software and processes. 

As an Entrepreneur, he is building WeElevate, a K-12 Education service provider that supports at-promise students in bringing out the best in themselves with a basketball and post-its. WeElevate has supported over 100 students in developing social and emotional skills.

While early in his career, Frankie has experimented with multiple work arrangements — remote, part-time, sabbatical. This experimentation has enabled him to freelance, start a nonprofit and raise thousands of dollars. He’s passionate about sharing what he has learned on his journey, in hopes of getting people fired up about the work they do. You can follow Frankie on his blog and newsletter at: https://www.fit.la/.

Beth Elletson serves as the Chief People Officer for the Miami Marlins. She joined the organization in 2020 and is responsible for leading the overall people strategy to drive a championship-level culture and inclusive environment across the entire workforce. She strives to create continuous learning opportunities for personal and professional growth.A native of South Florida, Mrs. Elletson is SHRM-SCP certified with more than a decade of HR leadership with both corporate and start-up environments. She graduated from the University of Florida and was recognized as a 2019 40 Under 40 recipient by the South Florida Business Journal. An avid athlete and member of the Cardinal Gibbons High School Athletic Hall of Fame, Mrs. Elletson is the mother to two boys and passionate about giving back to those in need through sports.

From a very young age, Elon was taught the importance of hard work and applying oneself whole heartedly to the task at hand. Elon tried to replicate this mantra in every facet of my life and abide by these principles with his work ethic which has established my resolve and dedication to succeed.

In retrospect, each of Elon’s early endeavours online taught him invaluable lessons about the digital world and people’s expectations when paying for a service. These experiences compelled him to start Tapt By Hatch – a groundbreaking take on the business card in your pocket.

Tapt by Hatch is motivated by emerging technological innovations as proven by Tapt’s integrated and evolving capacity to not only save your contact details directly into someones phone but also to edit and update one’s card details on the fly. And of course at no further expense to the card holder! The card is an environmentally sustainable stainless steel slate finish that feels robust and smooth in the hand. Tapt by Hatch introduces a user friendly product which ensures seamless contact transferrals.

Maria Perrin is Chief Growth Officer for HMS, a healthcare technology company, where she is responsible for the company’s corporate strategy, marketing, government relations, business development, and oversight of the company’s more than 500 contracts with government and commercial clients. She has transformed HMS’ brand and furthered its industry impact through numerous thought leadership and innovation initiatives. Maria rejoined HMS in 2019, after co-founding a successful consulting practice that launched dozens of health tech startups and tech companies in emerging sectors. During her first tenure at HMS, as Chief Marketing Officer and EVP over government and commercial markets from 2007 – 2014, HMS revenue grew fivefold and the company successfully entered the federal government market, doubled their volume of state government contracts, and expanded services to commercial health plans.

Prior to HMS, Maria was Senior Vice President, Sales, Marketing, and Business Development for Performant Financial Corp. where she led Performant’s entry into the healthcare market and other business sectors. Maria has held financial and operational leadership roles for BestFoods, Nissan and other Fortune 100 companies.

Maria actively mentors start-up companies and entrepreneurs, working with programs such as the Venture Mentor Group, Springboard Enterprises, Florida Atlanta University’s Tech Runway and others. She also serves as Board Chairman for IntegirGuard, and is co-executive sponsor for HMS’ Diversity & Inclusion Council and Women’s Opportunity Network. Maria has a BA in Economics from UCLA and an MBA from the University of Miami.

Anu Bharadwaj is VP of Product at Atlassian. She is an accomplished executive with a track record of growing $500M+ businesses, building great teams and shipping blockbuster products.

Anu joined Atlassian in 2014 as the Head of Product for Jira. Prior to Atlassian, she built several products for developers in Visual Studio at Microsoft for over 10 years. She is passionate about making the world a better place through technology and effective philanthropy, and currently serves as the Chairperson of the Atlassian Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on global education.

Episode transcription:

F: I'm very excited to have you on with us today, Anu. Thank you.

A: Thanks for having me on the board.

F: Just to get us started. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in Product.

A: Yeah, that's an interesting journey. So right now I work as the VP of Product at Atlassian, a brilliant technology company.

We build the tools for our software development teams and all kinds of things that work in a collaborative fashion. I started out as a computer science engineer at school and I joined Microsoft straight out of school. I don't remember how they had recruited me off a campus and they said my first project was going to be writing video games on the darknet STT.

I was like, I'll do this job for free. You're actually going to pay me for it. That's awesome. So I really enjoyed being an engineer and getting to work on cool technologies at Microsoft. And over the years I became an engineering lead, while working at the developer tools division, which basically built products for software developers. Given I was a software developer myself, it was easy to relate to customers.

It was an advantage to be of the same customer persona. So I ended up talking to customers a whole lot, figuring out what does working with the product, what is not, and in general, find out whether the work we're doing is actually having an impact. And I do remember at one point of time, I was working on a product called Teen Bell and I was talking to one of our customers of Greenville.

And he said, because of your product, I can get home a couple of times earlier each day because your product is saving time on a day to day basis. So I actually get home in time. They will spend some time with their kids and play with them. And I was so moved by that, it was so enchanting to hear that something I work on a day-to-day basis is having that kind of an impact on the real person's life.

That was really the moment when I felt like, Oh, okay, that's kind of the point of doing this work. This is what moves me, that my work is really having an impact on users or customers that use our products, at which point of time the GMI basically said, Hey, you're already doing the work of a Product Manager. I think you should shift roles from being an engineering lead to a product manager. And that's how I all got into product management.

F: More and more product teams are going remote, especially in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic this year. I mean, it's good that we at least have a vaccine, but one thing that I wanted to get your take on is what challenges have you seen product teams face in this method of operation and what strategies would you recommend to ensure success?

A: Yeah, it has been quite the roller coaster different than any other year in my career. And I imagine many of your listeners' careers as well. So back in February, March, when we were hit by COVID like all other companies we switched to being fully remodeled last year, right away at the beginning of the pandemic.

However, we recently made a decision to move permanently to a distributed workforce, but before going there as COVID has unfolded through the year, a few things that have noticed not just across my own product teams, but product teams across the industry, it has been a uniquely difficulty or lots of burnout, difficult personal circumstances, difficult to

Martha Heller is one of the most widely followed voices on the role of the CIO. She has been a CIO.com contributor since 1999 and was founder of the CIO Executive Council, IDG’s professional organization for CIOs. Martha has written two books on IT leadership: The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership and Be the Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT. Martha is CEO of Heller Search Associates, an executive recruiting firm that specializes in technology leadership positions nationwide across all industries. Through all of these platforms, Martha has built a large, intellectually engaged network of technology executives, many of whom contribute to her widely read e newsletter, “The Heller Report.” Target Research recently named Martha as a top influencer of U.S.-based CIOs.

As Chief Operating Officer, Mark is responsible for the continued growth and evolution of the Westgate brand as the industry leader in experience-based, destination resorts. Mark is responsible for all acquisition, design, development, construction, resort operations, restaurants, retail and marketing for Westgate Resort properties. Mark has a very diverse background, including the development of over 50 restaurants ranging from fast casual to fine dining, and a variety of retail shops, entertainment venues, and destination health spas under the brand, Serenity Spa by Westgate.

Ablorde is the Co-Founder and CEO of 4Degrees, a Chicago-based technology company applying machine intelligence to help teams in relationship-driven industries manage their most important source of opportunity – their professional networks. Prior to 4Degrees, Ablorde has held various investor and consultancy positions at companies including Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Bain & Company and G2 Crowd. When he’s not doing that, you can usually find him lifting weights, reading books or eating BBQ.

GoGig is Chris’s second successful HR Tech company, and still holds a seat on the Board of Directors for the other venture: Timesly (mytimesly.com). In his 13+ years of experience, Mr. Hodges has accomplished the following before the age of 30: Co-Founded two and worked on three successful technology ventures with one successful exit, advised & invested in other startups, worked in B2B sales, built brands from the ground up, developed brands to the next level, increased customer retention and loyalty, promoted on all social media platforms and launched multimillion dollar products, both online and in retail. He likes to say that he “generally executes on his best big ideas instead of throwing tons of ideas out there with no execution.”Mr. Hodges is a graduate of Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management with a BS in Management, and holds an MBA from University of Florida’s Hough Graduate School of Business.

Episode transcription:

C: Hey, my name is Chris Hodges. I am the founder and CEO of gig.J: Chris. Thanks so much for finding time to join us on the Ivy podcast today this afternoon. Can you tell us a little bit more first about your background, where you’ve come from your career path and then I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about your current company?C: Yeah, absolutely. Going back, I graduated from Purdue out of management school there. And in 2010, I quickly just kind of accelerated my career into a sales path, where I found out that I was pretty good selling things and separating people from their money, working for a medium sized B2B software as a service company, out of Kalamazoo, Michigan, just due to some corporate culture things, and me wanting to make an advancement in my career. I ended up jumping into the prepaid wireless world, running and growth, you know, at a prepaid wireless company, marketing sales, customer retention revenue, for a brand that was doing just North of 650 million in annual revenue, there were about a million and a half customers. So we grew that company pretty quick. Obviously went through an exit and I managed the brand after, you know, post acquisition. And then I went back to school, got my MBA at university of Florida during that MBA program, conceptualized what is now GoGig, jumped out into that. And here we are. It's all she wrote.J: Awesome. Well, that's pretty exciting. Quite a path. So tell us a little bit more about GoGig. What more specifically, curious, what problem are you guys solving with your products and services currently in, what motivated you to start this company?C: The premise of the business, the underlying technology is that we thought of wanting to apply anonymity, or remaining anonymous, in talent acquisition. So, the premise of anonymity removes the implicit bias and hiring, so it removes all discriminatory practice. Based on age, race, ethnicity, gender, country of origin, religion, and veteran status. Sso that way candidates don't have to feel uncomfortable coming into our platform, feeling like they might be discriminated against in any way, shape or form with their protected classes. And, also at the same time, it focuses on upward mobility and career transition. So, you're an experienced professional, you're in a job, and you want to advance your career safely without your boss down the hall, breathing down your neck. So, using the premise of anonymity, it helps more of that experience, passive job seeker that wants to safely input their career desires, to focus on more the human elements of what makes somebody up for who they are and allow them to safely do that. So focuses on a different type of job seeker that would join our platform than what you would traditionally see on a typical job board site. Really the idea was conceived, sitting in the back of the room of a finance class in my MBA program, not paying attention. At the University of Florida, a lot of those people in an executive program are passive job seekers. I did