Episode Transcript:

ADAM MCGOWAN:  [00:08]   Welcome to episode one of Ventures in Tech, a podcast brought to you by Firefield that tries to find the intersection of innovators, ideas, tech products and the upstart ventures they inspire. I'm Adam McGowan,  Firefield CEO. On today's show, we take this podcast on its maiden voyage. I'll be joined by my colleague, Henry Reohr, who will press me on what this new endeavor is all about. And with that, I'll let Henry take it away.

HENRY REOHR [00:28]: All right. So here we are, it's the inaugural episode of Ventures in Tech, the first podcasting endeavor from the team of Firefield. Are we ready? Are we feeling good?

ADAM [00:48]: Yeah, I am. I'm good to go Henry.

HENRY [00:53] Okay. So for those who don't already know, who exactly are you?

ADAM [01:00]: Well, I am Adam McGowan. I am the founder and CEO at Firefield. A little bit of background on who we are and what we do: Firefield is a company that helps tech enabled companies grow and succeed. We really do that by helping in three ways: one is strategic consulting, helping them answer big picture questions about launching and growing their ventures. The second is around design thinking, from ideation through testing and early stage product execution, and the third is software and app development work.

I'm also the host of a collection of events called The Spark Series. They are networking events in the Greater Boston area. They're focused on the innovation community. Everybody who comes, they really embrace a pay it forward model and I think our listeners should expect there to be an episode in the future where we actually dig in little bit deeper to Spark.

I am also a recovering investment banker and hedge fund analyst. I mention that because it was a decade of my life that provided a pretty unique perspective, a  – lot of deal-centric thinking that I like to try to bring to the work that I do now. And I also do a lot of mentoring and advising for numerous startups. That's given me the opportunity to really experience lots of ideas at a variety of different stages.

HENRY [02:33]: Thanks. Well, let's start with the name: "Ventures in Tech". How did that come about?

ADAM [02:40]: There's not a lot to it. It is not particularly creative and that comes from the fact that I don't think naming stuff is really our forte. So we wanted to do something pretty descriptive here. On an average day we are actually doing the creation of ventures and doing the building of technology, really in one way or another, and so I think that's generally what we find ourselves talking about most of the time.

So I think the name from that perspective made a lot of sense and at this point I can't really foresee too many directions that the podcast could go in where that name wouldn't still hold up. So I think for now I'm going with the hope that it stands up to the test of time.

HENRY [3:28]: What kind of listeners is this podcast for? Who should tune in?

ADAM [3:34]: Well, I would argue that it's really anybody who has even a loose connection or interest in the innovation space. A lot of the content and a lot of titles or episodes and some of the episode notes are probably going to sound very "startup-y", and so entrepreneurs and founders are definitely going to be a key demographic.

But I think that we could really have a broader appeal. I'm suspecting a lot of the themes are actually going to also apply to members of larger organization who just care about innovation, whether it's a mandate in their job or it's just something that they're interested in personally or on an extracurricular basis.

I also think that there could be some appeal from groups who help facilitate entrepreneurship for new ventures and intrapreneurship at larger or existing ventures. I'm talking really here about mentors, service providers, funding sources – a lot of the additional resource that makes entrepreneurship and innovation happen.

And, you know, I think that frankly a lot of the discussion that's going to follow any given episode will probably come from that last group, from those experts, those mentors, funding sources, service providers, because I suspect there's going to be some disagreement, maybe quite a bit of disagreement, with some of the opinions that get shared on the show. And so I think that collecting these various perspectives is going to be really important. And so I hope that we get a good deal of listenership and participation from that group as well.

HENRY [5:09]: Could you dig a little bit deeper into the types of topics that we're going to cover in future episodes?

ADAM [5:16]: Sure. So it is definitely going to be a mix and it may evolve over time, but I think at this point you should likely expect us to tackle things like raising capital; issues like team building, both from a technical perspective and otherwise; thinking about product market fit; validation of early stage ideas, lean and agile approaches to business building.

I certainly can envision us having conversations around pitching and positioning our venture, whether it's to fundraise or to apply to things like accelerators or incubators. I think we could definitely include a collection of early stage product success stories or maybe even cautionary tales on the other side of that, and also topics surrounding ideation, design thinking and early stage product and venture creation.

HENRY [06:012]: There's lots of ways to share content out there. Why podcast?

ADAM [06:16]: Well, I think this one really just comes from some self-awareness and from playing to our strengths. Anyone that knows me even a little bit would definitely concur that I have a lot to say. The thing is… I suck at writing. I mean, I could theoretically put out some palatable blog post but it's really the pace of doing that that just kills me. I'm slow at doing it and I think that is definitely evidenced by the not particularly prolific efforts that people have seen from me in my own blogging today.

And so, the thought here was, as somebody who loves to talk, this is a medium that actually plays right into my hands on that front. I think that it's an opportunity to hopefully share content some people will find interesting, and then be able to do it with a much higher degree of frequency. So ,that's the theory. Hopefully it plays itself out. I also mention this, it's very Adam McGowan-centric, but I do expect that the podcast is going to broaden out well beyond that and I hope that we will have enough momentum by that point where it continues to make a lot of sense.

HENRY [07:34]: Great. Well I can definitely vouch for you having plenty to say.

ADAM [07:38]: Yeah. Well, most people that know me can.

HENRY [07:41]: So what should your listeners expect when they tune in?

ADAM [07:45]: Well, if a listener is a regular podcast listener, they should appreciate that this is not Serial and it's not Startup. And I don't mean that with respect to the quality of the production because undoubtedly this is not going to have the production value of something like that. But what I mean is that there's not going to be a serial nature to the content. So over the course of a collection of episodes, we may have logical things follow other logical things, and there may be some order to it, but one episode won't string together along with another. There's not going to be kind of a tale that's told from one end to the other.

So I think what that really means is don't worry about missing an episode. You're probably going to be more inclined to take a look at titles, take a look at the notes, see if something's applicable. And you should be able to jump right into an episode without any context. You don't have to have listened to something earlier, you don't need to feel like you've got to engage for a whole collection of episodes. You should be able to kind of jump in and jump out whenever you want.

I think we are going to make an attempt to kind of kick off the first collection of episodes where I am sharing some of my own perspectives in this format, this interview style approach, but I think that that model is going to evolve over time for starters. It will certainly broaden out beyond just my opinions. That's going to include other members of the Firefield team for sure. And then I think it's also going to allow us to really start bringing in outsiders that could be other founders, could be innovators, could be investors, mentors, advisors, and I think that ultimately we'll love to be able to open it up to the listening audience to help this be a little bit crowd sourced.

So if we're able to create an opportunity to have our audience propose questions or topics, we'd love to be able to respond to those and hopefully have the audience drive a little bit of the content. So I think that's really what people should expect at this point. And again, we're going to try to stay true to the theme but this is very early and it's going to certainly evolve over time.

HENRY [10:03]: I know it's early but how often should listeners expect a new podcast and how long is each podcast going to be?

ADAM [10:15]: Sure. So I think, at least to start, we should have a pretty good handle on the volume of content that listeners should expect. So as much as I'm an avid podcast listener, I know that carving out 30 or 45 minutes at a clip, to be able to listen is really tough. We're going to try to make this more consumable.

The hope is to have episodes run 10 to 15 minutes, and maybe some special cases, we can go a bit longer. Hopefully, that's for a really good reason and hopefully it's captivating enough that people don't mind. But I think in general, we're going to try to keep it in that 10 to 15 minutes range.

I think that it's going to be hard at this point to really guarantee a particular frequency but I think the whole point now is that we're able to put out some new content every two weeks or so, and I think that we will certainly be able to confirm that soon. So stay tuned for a little bit more info on that front.

I also think we're going to batch together a number of episodes into seasons, if you will. So duration of the seasons… number of episodes per… Not sure yet, but I do think that those details are going to be ironed out and we'll be able to share them as soon as we have them.

And I'd say that lastly we've got ideas probably for the first 10 to a dozen episodes, so hopefully we'll be able to kind of pump prime this first season with a good bit of content over the coming weeks and we'll see how it goes. We'll see what kind of roster we can put together for potential guest content. We can also see what kind of feedback we're getting from listeners and we could very easily be tacking on a lot of additional content.

HENRY [11:57]: Well that's all I've got for now. Adam, thanks for sharing some details about this new project and to our listeners, we'd like to thank you as well. We promise to do our best to keep it interesting. I'm Henry Reohr from Firefield. You've been listening to Ventures in Tech. We look forward to catching up next time when we dive into Entrepreneurial Advice: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.