As the world becomes more digitally fluid—our lives more networked, our devices faster and smarter—change becomes evermore rapid. Trends that once lasted months or years are now as fleeting as fruit flies. And ascertaining the needs, wants, opinions, and attitudes of consumers is immensely challenging.

In the time it takes to assemble a focus group and rent a conference room, life can undergo dramatic transformation. The swiftness of change necessitates even faster business decisions—and a faster means of understanding consumers. This is why Rob Holland founded Feedback Loop, a company that generates consumer feedback in record speed.

On this edition of UpTech Report, Rob explains the difficulties of gathering consumer insights in the 21st century, and how his technology manages it faster.

A company may be well organized, productive, and efficient—and yet, just how it delivers results may remain mysterious, even to those closely involved. How do the kinks get resolved? Where does the information flow? When are employers at their best, and when are they falling short—and why are they falling short? 

These are the questions Bradley Killinger wished to answer with his startup, Sapience. He calls it “the Fitbit for the knowledge worker.” With an emphasis on ethics and privacy, Sapience monitors thousands of data points on employee workstations and uses AI and machine learning to generate transparent reports, giving management deep insights into where improvements are needed. 

On this edition of UpTech Report, Bradley talks about his inspiration for Sapience and how he’s developed the product in a way that benefits the entire organization.

Usually on UpTech Report, we interview founders about their SaaS startups. This edition is a little different in that we’re interviewing an investor who helps those startups—though his operation is every bit as innovative as the tech companies we typically feature. 

Kyle York is the founder, CEO, and Managing Partner of York IE, a vertically integrated strategic growth and investment firm looking to change the way companies grow. 

York stops by to tell us how he’s breaking the empty cycle of fundraising rounds and working with entrepreneurs and startups using data science, intelligent market analysis, and hands-on advising and services to help companies build real strength and profitability.

The IT era has in many ways become the ID era. Establishing your identity for security purposes has taken on serious importance and posed a challenge unlike anything our society has ever before experienced. 

We’re routinely forced to change the dozens (if not hundreds) of passwords we keep (often compelling us to write them on Post-It notes and slap them on our monitors, thus defeating the purpose of the password), we must upload photos of our driver’s licenses, install authentication apps on our phones, and generally continue to prove we are who we claim to be on an ongoing basis. 

And yet, it’s still not enough. Our guest on this week’s UpTech Report aims to change that. Arun Singh is the CEO of Ilantus, a cybersecurity company that simplifies identity and access management with a cloud-based solution. Arun tells us about the many challenges we face in gaining access to digital resources, and the innovative solutions offered by Ilantus.

If you operate a property management system, integrating your service with all the various third party resources can be a complicated and labyrinthine process. But it’s necessary if you want to get the most out of your listings. What if someone could manage the numerous rental, travel, and other booking APIs through a single platform? It could not only give property management systems the widest possible market, it would also open up opportunities to collect and leverage market data to ensure the best possible timing and price.

This is the mission of Channel Connector, a company that adds advanced channel management functionality to PMS platforms using their connectivity API.

On this edition of UpTech Report, Agustin Fiori, the Managing Director of Europe at Channel Connector drops by to tell us about the origins of the business, and how they’re solving the problem of managing and maintaining so many third party APIs and routing them through a single service.

As a young coder, Jan Arendtsz wasn’t so interested in coding. He was much more interested in why the code should exist to begin with—what problem it was solving, what it was trying to accomplish. So he moved from the coder’s cubicle over to the business side. As an early member of NetSuite, he recognized SaaS as the future, which may seem obvious now, but at the time this was a riskier proposition. 

“Looking back, you can say, of course you should have thought about that,” Jan says. “But that was a leap of faith to me.” After starting a consultant business, he realized his prescience was more profound than he could have realized. IT systems had become a spaghetti plate of SaaS solutions, and getting them all to work together was a major challenge for most businesses. 

So he started Celigo, a company that offers an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) to help companies connect all their SaaS solutions to create smoother automation. 

In this edition of Founders Journey, Jan talks about his pioneering years in SaaS, how he funded the startup, and he tells us the one thing he’d do differently if he could go back and start over.

France Hoang says if he had to choose one word to describe himself, it would be “unemployable.” And yet, his resume is unrivaled.   

A Vietnamese refugee, France is a military veteran who served in multiple operations, he served as the Deputy Chief of Police and SWAT Commander for Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he was appointed by President George W. Bush as an Associate White House Counsel and Special Assistant to the President, and he was also the founding member of both a law firm and an aerospace company.   

On this edition of Founders Journey, France takes us through his incredible history, how it led him to start his own company, BoodleAI, and how his experience has taught him to view entrepreneurship as a public service.

Over the past ten years, the explosion of SaaS solutions has fully transformed the way we do business, to the extent there’s hardly an individual out there, business user or general consumer, who doesn’t rely on at least a few SaaS products. And if your company is like most, it’s all SaaS all the time. 

The flexibility and scalability of SaaS has proven a huge benefit for growth and cost—but automating tasks between them, along with legacy apps, has become time consuming and expensive. 

As a business consultant, Jan Arendtsz saw this problem developing years ago and knew where it was headed. That’s why he founded Celigo, an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that connects thousands of SaaS products for both IT professionals and business users. 

On this edition of UpTech Report, Jan talks about how he came to see foresee this problem, and he walks us through the complex technology involved in his solution.

Chris Ronzio was running a video production company with employees scattered across the country—and he needed to ensure they were all following the right procedures to maintain the consistency and standards of their product. So he developed a software tool to assist with their training. After he sold the video business to a competitor, he continued to develop the software tool. 

As a consultant, his clients began to request it. Then friends of his clients began to request it. Soon he realized he had a product people would pay for. And his next company, Trainual, was born. 

Today they provide training software for some of the biggest brands in the world and serve companies in 120 countries. 

On this edition of Founders Journey, Chris talks about his early venture, selling his company, and how he funded his startup with $300,000 in credit card debt (it’s not a strategy he generally recommends).

Every year, companies evaluate the needs of their workforce to purchase their annual benefits package. This is an exceedingly complicated task, and it doesn’t always result in the best deal. As a consultant who helped companies navigate the healthcare market, Rodney Reasen saw these difficulties first hand. 

“That process we found was fraught with lack of information, lack of data, and almost a perverse incentivization in the market,” he says. He realized that if he could devise a way for companies to better ascertain the healthcare needs of their employees, they could make better decisions that both saved money and gave workers the best possible package. 

His solution became Springbuk, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze workforce data to give companies the deep insights they need to make informed decisions when assembling benefits packages. 

On this edition of UpTech Report, Rodney discusses some of the special challenges presented by the healthcare marketplace, and why he believes curation is the future.