#285 - Doug Camplejohn, CEO at Airspeed - on creating magic moments

Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to improve your team’s happiness, engagement, and collaboration. My guest is Doug Camplejohn, CEO at Airspeed.

Doug Camplejohn is a Tech-Entrepreneur on a Mission. Before his entrepreneurial ventures, he was VP of Marketing and Product Management at enterprise (Epiphany), security (Vontu), and consumer (Apple) companies.

Then he founded and and became the CEO of three startup companies. Myplay, who got acquired by Bertelsmann. Mi5 Networks, which was acquired by Symantec. Finally, Fliptop, which was acquired by LinkedIn. In January 2020, he left LinkedIn to become the EVP and GM of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

In July 2021, he founded Airspeed, a suite of Slack and mobile apps that provide fun and simple ways to connect with your teammates. Their mission: to help employees feel connected and celebrated

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Doug to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way businesses build culture in a remote-first world. Doug shares his vision of how to fix this by means of technology - creating an operating system for culture. As we discuss his journey, he explains what early decisions had been fundamental to avoid having to do a complete rebuild when his product hypothesis appeared wrong. He also dives into how he arrived at the perfect shipping cadence for his business and his customers, and how he embraced a language to encourage everyone to push the art of the possible. Last but not least, he shares their approach to creating momentum by leveraging customer stories.

Here's one of his quotes

We've seen tremendous traction, thousands of companies, and tens of thousands of users on the apps in the first few weeks. It's all about this understanding that employee connectedness is either the number one cause of retention if you're happy and you're really feeling connected to the team and the mission, or the number one cause of unhappiness and people departing when it's not. And so this is really about reinforcing that.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How do you build tremendous traction at the launch stage of your SaaS product
2. Why you should be firm on the destination but flexible on the path.
3. Why everyone should be involved in product - not only the product department - and everyone should be looking at the metrics.
4. How to accelerate growth by leveraging tech to serve product-qualified leads to Sales

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Doug Camplejohn
• Website Airspeed

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