The Thread Podcast

Kicking off our Future of Finance series ahead of Money20/20, Justin sits down with Michelle Beyo, founder and CEO of Finavator, president of Open Finance Network Canada, and author of the newly launched Mastering the Future of Finance.

Michelle spent twenty years in telco, online shopping, and prepaid before running WeChat's first QR payment pilot in North America and realizing the future of finance was being built somewhere else. She walks through why she quit her corporate job, what Money20/20 Rise Up had to do with starting her company, and how she organized the entire fintech landscape into a periodic table of nine elements across data, trust, and tech.

Then it gets practical: 

-  why Canada is one of only two markets without regulated open banking and why "a date and a mandate" matters more than the legislation itself. 

-  Why she wants her payments to be frictionful, not frictionless, when real money is moving. 

- Why KYC has to be continuous and why "know your agent" is the next layer as AI starts transacting on our behalf. 

- And the advice she gives every fintech founder trying to land a bank: don't go there first.

Michelle is moderating the agentic payments panel at Money20/20 (Tuesday, 10am, main stage) and signing books Monday at 10:45. Come find Thread at SU9 in Startup Alley!

Chapters

00:00 Intro and the Future of Finance series
 00:53 Twenty years in telco, online shopping, and prepaid
 02:00 The WeChat QR pilot that changed everything
 03:22 Money20/20 Rise Up and starting Finavator
 04:42 The periodic table of finance: data, trust, tech
 05:53 Open banking: what Canada got wrong and Brazil got right
 11:28 A date and a mandate
 13:19 Frictionful payments
 14:27 KYC is not one and done; enter KYA
 15:50 Personal AI agents and who owns your data
 20:13 Selling to banks: don't make them your first customer
 22:09 Where to find Michelle at Money20/20

Hiring didn't break all at once. It broke one year at a time.

This week on the Thread Podcast, Justin sits down with Euan Cameron, CEO and co-founder of Willo, the global candidate screening platform built to make hiring faster, fairer, and more human. Euan walks through the year-by-year evolution from 2019 to today: remote work upending where companies hire, AI handing candidates a resume machine, employers responding with AI of their own, and application volume tripling, then tripling again, until both sides stopped trusting each other.

They dig into Willo's Insights product, which scores every candidate video against an employer-specific "blueprint" instead of chasing a perfect hire that doesn't exist, why interview cheating apps actively hurt the people using them, and what's coming next: a verified global community of candidates matched to employers at a scale that wasn't physically possible before AI.

Euan grew up in Scotland and has been building companies for eighteen years. Willo is his fourth startup and the first he's ever raised for, launched in the middle of COVID and now spanning forty people across twelve time zones.

Check out Willo at willo.video (fifteen-day free trial, every feature unlocked) and connect with Euan on LinkedIn.

TimeChapter

00:00 | Intro: why hiring is a staring contest right now
00:38 | Meet Euan Cameron: Scotland, dyslexia, and eighteen years of building things that pay invoices
02:45 | Forty people, twelve time zones: building a COVID-era global team
04:55 | The year-by-year breakdown: how 2019 to 2026 rewired hiring
07:30 | 2024's turning point: 3X application volume, fewer jobs
09:00 | 2025's trust problem: everyone looks and sounds the same
10:06 | Willo Insights: video applications and the employer blueprint
12:40 | There's no perfect candidate (and founders are unemployable)
15:53 | The Disco "Backdoor" story and why cheating apps backfire
18:30 | What's next: verified communities and many-to-many matching
21:51 | Upskilling for the new job market
23:32 | Where to find Euan and Willo
24:10 | Justin's takeaways and sign-off

Cold outreach is dying....so what replaces it? This week Justin sits down with Olivier Roth, co-founder & Chief Growth Officer of The Swarm, the go-to-network platform backed by HubSpot Ventures ($10M raised to date). The Swarm started as a network recruiting tool in 2021, but customers kept pulling it toward sales, and a category was born: go-to-network, using the combined relationships of your team, investors, advisors, and customers as the first motion in your funnel instead of going cold.

Olivier breaks down what go-to-network means in practice, how The Swarm became the "who knows who" data layer under tools like Clay and HubSpot, and the unfiltered lessons from dogfooding their own product, which now drives 30–40% of their pipeline.

Key points:

• From recruiting to a category. The Swarm launched as network recruiting; design partners kept asking to use it for sales. The term "go-to-network" was coined by Mac Reddin (Commsor, which The Swarm has since acquired).
• Go-to-network, defined. Before spending on ads or cold sequences, look at who your investors, advisors, partners, customers, and team already know. It's full-funnel — warm intros at the top, endorsements to unstick deals, even retention.
• It's not a volume game. The opposite of 10,000 intro requests.  It's finding the needles in the haystack that were always there, with a data layer that finally makes it scalable.
• The new SDR morning. A Slack or email digest: "here are three intros you can ask for today." Phone calls move to the afternoon.
• The ecosystem play. Clay tables run the workflow; The Swarm powers the data underneath. CRMs are customers, distribution partners, and via HubSpot's MCP you can ask in plain language: "find intros to unstick my deals that have been sitting 90 days."
• Dogfooding lessons. 30–40% of Swarm pipeline comes from their own motion. What works: short lists of 5–10 names (never a single yes/no ask), a once-a-month rhythm, and building process + incentives around the tech. What flopped: their own cold email experiments and LinkedIn ads.
• Try it yourself. The Swarm's MCP connector is live on Claude and ChatGPT: "who do we know at this company?" is one query away.

Connect: Olivier Roth on LinkedIn · The Swarm at theswarm.com

Most voice AI startups today are thin wrappers on someone else's models. Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa went the opposite direction and built the entire stack.

In this episode, Justin sits down with the CTO and co-founder of Aethex AI, who along with co-founder Mariama is building the voice layer for emerging markets across Africa and the Middle East. This is the AI that banks, call centers, and telcos use to reach the customers a human team never could, and it's already running 17,000 calls a day.

Ayooluwa takes us through her path from Caltech physics to Meta to Stanford to founder, and unpacks the decision that defines the company: in her markets, you aren't competing against other software, you're competing against the cost of human labor. That single reality is why Aethex owns everything from data collection to model serving to deployment, so they can pull every lever on cost and latency.

We also get into why building for the harder market first reveals things a Western-first founder never sees, how the forward deployed engineer became their most valuable role, and why in a market this new, what you're really selling is trust.

A conversation about infrastructure, conviction, and betting on the markets everyone else overlooked.

Catherine Blackmore has spent nearly two decades building the programs that wrap around technology, from the early days of customer success in 2007 to her current role as Group VP of Customer Programs and Employee Success at Oracle. In this episode she sits down with Justin to unpack what the discipline got right, what it got wrong, and what survives the shift to AI.

Catherine makes the case that the high touch model was right all along. It buys a company time to build its moat. But the obsession with the golden record, bridging every data silo, and the red, yellow, green health score was a costly detour, because customers live in their own tools and every account ends up yellow anyway.

From there the conversation turns to the question on everyone's mind. If agents can scale the work, what is left for humans? Catherine's answer is that human connection becomes the scarce, valuable thing, and the next generation of CS leaders will manage teams of agents while doing the relational work no agent can fake. She also reframes customer advocacy as the true end state of customer success, the double funnel where your strongest customers become your most believable salespeople.

She closes with the career advice she is giving her son as he enters a reshaped workforce. Adaptability beats raw talent, the sum of your experiences equals your existence, and you should always watch the game within the game.

What we get into: The high touch model and defending the moat Why the golden record and the red, yellow, green health score never delivered Human connection as the new scarcity model The CSM of the future leading a team of agents Customer advocacy and the double funnel Outcomes over seats and consumption Career advice for the next generation entering an AI-shaped workforce

Guest: Catherine Blackmore, Group Vice President of Customer Programs and Employee Success, Oracle

Andy Mowat has run RevOps at four unicorns, and between every role he's gone out and built something new. His latest is Whispered, an AI platform that helps top GTM execs build their careers through shared insights, warm introductions, and access to the roles that never get posted.

In this episode, Andy and Justin get into why the entire GTM tech stack is heading for a two-year rebuild, what the move to a data-warehouse-first model means for RevOps teams, and why smaller companies are suddenly more nimble than the enterprise. Andy shares hard-won lessons from scaling Culture Amp, including the speed-to-lead system he built around time-critical leads and the market-maturity question he buried in the win-loss forms. They also dig into whether the fractional exec wave is real, why thoughtful gifting and distinctive events still beat automated outbound, and what it actually feels like to run a proactive job search at the VP level for the first time.

A candid conversation between two friends about category strategy, positioning, and building a career in go-to-market when the ground keeps shifting.

Buzzsprout Chapter Markers

00:00 — Intro: how Justin and Andy met around Culture Amp 

01:40 — Andy's background: RevOps at four unicorns, and why he keeps building 

03:30 — Founders as a hiring profile, and the trap of "ambiguous roles" 

05:30 — Rebuilding the GTM tech stack: data warehouse first, the semantic layer, and two years of turmoil 

07:00 — The give-to-get ratio and why AI-era outbound still comes down to better emails 

08:30 — Strategic gifting, distinctive events, and the Wisconsin business school cold open 

11:00 — Podcasts as relationship engines, not just content 

11:30 — Inside Culture Amp: 180 events a year and the speed-to-lead system 

13:00 — The multi-prospect demo experiment, and the market-maturity question that predicts a category's breakout

14:45 — The fractional exec wave: real shift or euphemism for "between jobs"

16:15 — Why early-stage marketing needs people to "grok what you do" before top of funnel 

18:00 — What's next for Whispered: the network, the community, and the roles that get whispered

Justin sits down with Nils Vinje, business growth guide and longtime customer success leader, to talk about the single biggest thing holding most growing companies back: everything still depends on the CEO.

Nils spent the early part of his career on the leading edge of the customer success movement — convincing his first employer to ditch the "account manager" title back in 2011 — and has since coached hundreds of CS and CX leaders through the challenge of making their function legible to the rest of the organization. These days he works with CEOs and their leadership teams using the Pinnacle system, a five-principle framework built around people, purpose, playbooks, performance, and profit.

In this conversation, Nils and Justin get into what running a CX org teaches you about leadership that no other function can, how to read the label from outside the bottle, and why the hardest decisions in any company are usually the ones everyone already knows need to be made.

He also shares what he'd ask anyone standing at a crossroads in their career — and why the answer has nothing to do with money.

Chapters

[00:00] Intro and What Nils Does Now 

[01:42] What Leading a CX Org Teaches You About Leadership 

[03:30] The Single Biggest Challenge Every CS Leader Faces 

[05:01] Who Nils Works With and When to Bring in Outside Help 

[07:08] The Pinnacle System — Five Principles for a Well-Oiled Machine 

[09:38] Delivering Hard Truths with Grace 

[11:00] The People Problem Most CEOs Won't Solve 

[13:08] Why Being Inside the Bottle Kills Objectivity 

[14:29] The First Question Nils Asks Anyone at a Career Crossroads

 [16:25] What's Next for Nils and the Growth Bottleneck Blueprint 

[18:34] Never Stop Adding Value

Justin sits down with Sanjay Pal, Worldwide VP of Professional Services at IBM, to explore what it really takes to lead services at global scale and why the role is more strategically important now than ever before.

Sanjay draws on his journey from Cisco to Accenture to IBM to break down what has fundamentally changed about services delivery in the AI era, and what has stayed the same. He shares how IBM thinks about standardizing delivery across 16 global markets without sacrificing client experience, why the forward-deployed engineer model is gaining momentum, and how professional services leaders need to evolve from deployment executors into trusted business advisors.

He also shares a personal story about his father, who wrote 52 books with pen, paper, and a stack of research clippings, and what that means for what's possible now.

Chapters

[00:00] Intro and Sanjay's Path to IBM [02:33] What's Changed in Services, and What Hasn't [05:00] How AI Amplifies Delivery Without Replacing Judgment [08:01] Standardization vs. Customization at Global Scale [10:38] The Evolving Role of the Services Leader [12:44] Forward-Deployed Engineers and Leading with Services [15:02] Breaking Down Silos Across Pre-Sales, Implementation, and Post-Sales [16:05] What's Top of Mind Heading into 2026

Justin sits down with Jessica Chiew, Global Head of GTM Strategy and Operations at Canva, to unpack what it really takes to evolve from a beloved PLG product into a full-fledged enterprise sales machine without breaking what made it great.

Jessica shares how Canva navigates the complexity of multiple handoffs across a PLG-to-SLG journey, why time to value is everyone's job (not just CS), and how she's thinking about marrying product usage data, CRM structure, and conversational intelligence into something actually actionable. 

Plus, both Justin and Jessica geek out on the AI and vibe coding moment we're all living through and why it changes everything for revenue teams.

Chapters

[00:00] Intro & Jessica's Path to Canva Justin welcomes Jessica and she traces her journey from Melbourne to San Francisco, through Asana, and into Canva's B2B buildout.

[02:57] Who Owns Onboarding and Time to Value? Jessica breaks down Canva's take on ownership across PLG and enterprise motions — and why success in the first hundred days is a team sport, not a CS problem.

[05:57] Moving Upmarket: What Changes (and What Doesn't) From solo users with credit cards to C-suite transformations with change management — how Canva's onboarding approach shifts dramatically as deal size grows.

[09:40] Using PLG Signals in an Enterprise World The Asana flashback: how rich end-user data and human relationship context can finally live in the same place, and what that unlocks for enterprise sellers.

[11:47] The Tech Stack Behind the Motion CRM alone isn't enough. Jessica walks through how Canva combines structured CRM data, product usage signals, and a full conversational intelligence database to build a real picture of account health.

[14:00] AI, Agents, and the Vibe Coding Moment Justin shares his own revelation using AI agents for GTM workflows, and Jessica drops that she recently vibe coded a weekly forecast interface. Neither of them is going back.

[16:21] What's Ahead for Canva GTM in 2026 Canva Create in LA, platform updates Jessica can't fully share yet, and the team's focus on becoming the gold standard for enterprise go-to-market.

Justin sits down with Allison Skidmore, Chief Customer Officer at Optimizely, the world's first operating system for marketing teams.

Allison brings a rich perspective shaped by stints at Adobe, Stackla, Gigya, and SAP across Asia Pacific before landing in the US to lead customer success at Optimizely. This episode explores how AI is fundamentally reshaping the marketer's daily workflow, what great onboarding looks like in an AI-native world, and what the CCO role must become as organizations race to stay ahead.

Episode Notes & Key Topics

1. Allison's Career Journey

• Started in SEM at a Sydney agency later acquired by Adobe, rode the wave of digital marketing's early SaaS transition.
• Spent six years at Adobe running customer success across Asia Pacific, building offshore teams and subscription services models.
• Moved through Stackla and Gigya (acquired by SAP nine months in), then scaled the CS role across all SAP lines of business in APAC.
• Joined Optimizely two years ago after reconnecting with CEO Alex Atzberger, bringing global enterprise CS experience to a fast-growing martech platform.

2. What Stays the Same in Customer Success

• The sales-to-CS handover friction is timeless: it never goes away regardless of company size or stage.
• Digital-first customer engagement (email, offshore teams, automation) has been a constant scaling challenge for decades.
• The shift from time-and-materials professional services to subscription models remains a dominant trend.
• Tech advancements create the inflection points:  AI is today's example.

3. AI and the Marketer's Day-in-the-Life

• Allison paints a vivid picture: by 10 AM, an AI-enabled marketer has completed a full week's worth of work.
• Optimizely's Opal AI product is provisioned across the entire team, enabling agent building, workflow automation, and access to tools like Claude and Gemini.
• The opportunity is not just efficiency, it's the ability to pull forward backlogged work and shrink implementation timelines (e.g., from 12 months to 3).
• The companies moving fastest are the ones blocking calendar time to train their teams on prompting and agent-building, not just giving access.

4. Reimagining Onboarding and the Customer Journey

• Allison's framework: great onboarding is the seamless alignment of three channels, human-to-human touchpoints, email marketing, and in-product experience.
• Customers now expect to self-serve answers (just like asking AI instead of calling a mechanic), human-heavy onboarding alone no longer cuts it.
• Consistency is the key: the message the customer gets in the product, in their inbox, and from their CSM should be identical, no basic repeats, no skipped steps.

5. The Evolving Role of the CCO

• The C-suite fundamentals don't change: stay curious, solve problems, skate to where the puck is going.
• Today, the puck is AI.  If you can't build an agent, you can't expect your team to.
• Allison is actively realigning roles, KPIs, and commissions around AI-native execution.
• The CCO who can't leverage AI to scale themselves and reimagine their business will become extinct, just like Blockbuster.
• Lego is the positive model: reinvention again and again.

6. What's Top of Mind for 2026

• AI continues to dominate, but the customer journey evolution is a close second.
• Consumers are shifting from Google to ChatGPT and similar tools, which means brands must optimize for GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), not just SEO.
• Personalization is entering a new era:  every touchpoint, not just the website.