Summary In the second conversation with Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing at Hubspot we talk about how we see AI really being used in tech and not just being a flashy thing you use once. From Sales, to Marketing to Product. Where are we today and where is all of this going? The conversation explores the role of AI in strategy, the potential for AI-dri…

Dennis R. Mortensen is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of LaunchBrightly, which makes money by automating the most annoying things in our work lives (through AI). We talk about why it’s important to own your own data set for competitive advantage and the misconception that successful entrepreneurs should become investors. Dennis refuses to do…

Summary I talked with the amazing Andrew Ettinger from Appen about community-led growth in enterprise sales, the importance of cross-functional understanding, and the transformation of content and community in the sales process. We are also diving into the impact of AI on the industry and the need for cross-functional understanding and collaboratio…

Summary Jam.dev created a tool called Jam that helps product managers and engineers communicate and debug bugs more effectively. The company has grown to over 100,000 users and has fixed more than 2 million bugs. They have adopted a unique approach to marketing, prioritizing community building and sharing their journey as builders. The company uses…

Summary Burnout and the pursuit of external validation in tech. The pressure to constantly achieve and the belief that success will bring happiness and fulfillment is driving some of us into ruin. It almost did with Andy Johns, he was never more successful and unhappier in his life until he his body hit the reset switch. Top companies, top jobs, to…

Summary Chess.com has grown from being a simple chess service to a thriving 150 million ARR business. The company has focused on making chess accessible to everyone through services around a product that hasn’t changed in centuries. We touch on the challenges of scaling a company and the role of titles and leadership in an organization and how many…

Motivation, forming habits, managing time, and why it’s important to know how much you enjoy solving problems with Jason Fried. Jason is really special to me and a 2nd time guest. Whenever we go at it, there are two worlds clashing in the best way possible. We are both never content with traditions and challenge the status quo; we just often disagr…

Summary The conversation with Mike Weir, former CRO of G2, focused on reducing churn and driving expansion revenue. At G2, they used a churn model with 14 highly correlated variables to identify at-risk customers and prioritize actions for the customer success team. We also discussed the importance of product and marketing in customer education and…

Anthony Pierry, partner at FletchPMM, focuses on messaging for early-stage B2B SaaS startups, and he brought a lot of actionable knowledge on how to do it right to the ProducTea. Summary I talk with Anthony about how to focus and narrow down your target audience and how to communicate it through your value proposition. How do we cross the chasm bet…

Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com & RB2B, is the CEO who builds in public on LinkedIn and is crushing it by discovering the power of product-led growth as he is doing it. He’s very specific about what works and what doesn’t and how he got started. He explains the power of organic reach through LinkedIn and building a personal brand through social…

Casey Hill is a Senior Growth Manager at ActiveCampaign, Institutional Consultant, and Founder. More importantly, he’s incredibly actionable and smart on LinkedIn around B2B Email channels, and that’s why I wanted to have him on the podcast. Summary We talk about how to approach Email, how to use it from the ground up to drive meaningful business a…

Julie Zhuo, Co-Founder @ Sundial, Author of THE MAKING OF A MANAGER, ex-VP Design @ FB Summary Intuition and hiring is an uncomfortable topic. We should be rational, have reasons for why we choose to work with someone or not. When should we trust our gut feeling? When is it time to step back and say, no. I go with the hard facts? In the end it’s al…

Summary Jamie Gier, - CMO at DexCare and former Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft - and I talk about the importance of understanding the customer and the challenges of marketing in regulated industries. We also touch on the process of learning marketing, the concept of account-based marketing in B2B, and how to connect it to revenue throug…

Summary Peter Walker, Head of Data Insights at Carta discusses with me various aspects of startup funding and investment. We explore the value of small angel investments, the obscurity of startup funding letters, the selectivity of startup advisors, and the potential of angel investments as marketing assets. We also touch on the excitement for the …

Why is ruthless focus the most important skill in B2B, and why is it so hard to get right? As the CEO of a banking service that focuses on the impact of cashflow mismanagement on small businesses, he knows what it means when people only focus on what’s fun to them in a business and the price they pay for that. We talked about the decision to seek V…

Jeff Gothelf, one of the most critical voices around OKRs and being outcome-driven, sat down with me for an hour-long amazing conversation: We touch on why using OKRS is useless if you can’t admit when you are wrong and be open to feedback from your teams. How do you set outcome-driven goals for exploratory research and the role of humility in orga…

Summary Melissa Kwan, CEO of eWebinar and serial bootstrapper, discusses the challenges and benefits of bootstrapping a business versus seeking venture capital funding. She is the poster child for urging founders to focus on real customer feedback and paying customers without loading up on VC problems. We discuss the importance of understanding the…

Chris Tottman and Richard Blundell joined me for a fantastic conversation about how they think from their own operators’ perspective when it comes to investing in successful businesses and their people. Why you should not talk to investors who never went through the personal pain of failing and why it most of the time comes down to the basics of ru…

A Journey I’m in the middle of as well: How to transition from senior leadership to taking care of yourself to the moment where you enter again. Casey Winters, ex-CPO Eventbrite, walks through the entire journey and how he thinks about our current markets; our technology is drastically changing while the new distribution channels have not developed…

John Cutler is the best systems thinker I know. Whenever we talk, there’s a beautiful meta-analysis around systems happening. Why do we work the way we do? Why can we not figure out how to run businesses efficiently if we do it so often? Why do inexperienced, brilliant people constantly get into trouble, and how do they get out of it? Individual vs…

Jason Fried, Co-founder and CEO of 37signals (Basecamp with a valuation of 100 billion, no really ;D), is one of the most positive, successful, forward-looking people that I got to know. He doesn’t care about retros and dwelling on the past and constantly pulls forward without looking too much at what others might think. This amazing episode ended …

Adam Fishman and I elaborate on how we look at the inevitable yearly planning exercises from an operative and leadership perspective. How to do a rolling planning instead of doing the depressing exercise of wasting everyone’s time for a month at the end of each year: Managing risks and the human component in planning The typical mistakes you should…

Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle, on the latest learnings on monetization and pricing. A topic that is still underserved because almost no one has good, conclusive data about it. Paddle does, and Andrew is sharing a lot of actionable advice on: - Willingness to pay - Changing monetization often - How to not incentivize anyone the wrong way One of my fa…

This episode gave me a lot of peace of mind. Intercom is dealing with the exact same problems that we all have when building around and with AI. Estimations are impossible and things that are feeling impossible are possible the day after. Brian sat together with me to talk about it all including Intercom’s coming-of-age story and how they look at c…

Season 3 of the ProducTea: We spill the tea on how to Go to Market through Product-led Sales and Product-led Growth in B2B and the realities of senior leadership. Mike used to be my manager and quickly became one of my most important mentors through the years. In this very personal episode with a lot of inside stories, we talk about it all. From ex…

Season 3 of the ProducTea: We spill the tea on how to Go to Market through Product-led Sales and Product-led Growth in B2B and the realities of senior leadership. Carilu’s wheelhouse starts where mine usually begins to end. She’s an accomplished advisor to big-scale hypergrowth companies and has a way with words. How do we think of problems at diff…

Season 3 of the ProducTea: We spill the tea on how to Go to Market through Product-led Sales and Product-led Growth in B2B and the realities of senior leadership. I followed David’s succinct learnings as a Gartner Analyst around PLG for quite some time and you’ll get to know why. He has a way with words. Talking about PLG in a B2B context usually l…

Season 3 of the ProducTea: We spill the tea on how to Go to Market through Product-led Sales and Product-led Growth in B2B and the realities of senior leadership. This episode is very difficult to summarize, we touch on highly tactical methods on how to combine offline and online methods to drive communities. Why they are key to breaking into diffi…

Season 3 of the ProducTea: We spill the tea on how to Go to Market through Product-led Sales and Product-led Growth in B2B and the realities of senior leadership. Benjamin Lamson had a great exit and no more sleep due to having a baby at home. His insecurities with rising success, how he manages to deal with it day by day, and how Jobs-to-be-done c…

Season 3 of the ProducTea: We spill the tea on Product-led Sales and Product-led Growth in B2B and the realities of senior leadership. Alexa Grabell shares honest perspectives on why she recommends every senior leader to have a product coach and how she accidentally ended up being a founder of a VC-backed gig to drive efficiency in go-to-market. Ti…

Season 2 of the ProducTea! Today with the growth wonder Shanee Ben-Zur, her unconventional career path into senior leadership at top brands like DropBox, NVIDIA, Crunchbase, and Salesforce, and her honest account for what happened to make her what she is today. A compassionate C-level that says things as they are. We talk about how an IPO feels. Eq…

Season 2 of the ProducTea! I’m joined by a silicon valley legend: Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital, independent consultant/advisor, and author of Kellblog. We delve into the pitfalls of building a product strategy on shaky foundations and highlight anyone’s job of designing effective experiments to facilitate learning. We speak about an inher…

Season 2 of the ProducTea! In this episode, we’re looking at how awful or delightful it is to work with your sibling. There's a deep dive into Superhuman and Leah's disdain for email, along with the importance of creating defensible moats in product development. We elaborate on what it means to be "exceptional" and give a glimpse into Superhuman’s …

Season 2 of the ProducTea! Elena Verna joins me to openly gossip about our diverse income streams: Advisory, consulting, and everything else in that word salad. We both dive into our different modes of engagement with an emphasis on what the ideal duration and conditions are for each of them. If you ever wanted to have an inside look into how growt…

Season 2 of the ProducTea! Kieran Flanagan is one of the most valuable things I read every day on LinkedIn, his incredible ability to connect the dots when it comes to AI and Business is the reason why it will stay that way for quite some time. He delves into the 'Content Paradox' explaining how AI is transforming content creation and curation and …

Season 2 of the ProducTea! For the first time, I’m joined by 2 guests and it’s none other than Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion We discuss the importance of leadership tied to people management and highlight the value of working from a unified knowledge base from C-level to operational teams. The conversation navigates through the realities of crises …

Season 2 of the ProducTea! Seasoned tech leader Ravi shares his insights on founding a business amidst AI disruption, the evolving capabilities of AI in empathy, and the challenges we faced of leadership post our careers at Microsoft. We also explore the concept of dual career ladders, some crazy pivots we both experienced as product leaders. Ravi …

Season 2 of the ProducTea! We discuss key distinctions in B2B contexts, notably between buyers and users, and individual versus team metrics. The importance of KPI design in product-led companies and why you can’t skip on this secret weapon, the critique of being in large tech corporations right now, and we explore the benefits of API-first compani…

Season 2 of the ProducTea! Patrick is the real deal, he ships more than a shipyard, is vulnerable and open with what most likely makes him successful. His unbending will to build something that lasts and how it all connects together with the last step of a buyer's journey: monetization. His personal framework on how to stay on top regardless of wha…

Season 2 of the ProducTea! Adam is funny, a friend, and a dad from San Francisco, and does not get any kickback for not recommending JIRA. He’s also an incredibly accomplished brain when it comes to anything Growth and Growth Leadership. We have both a united love for actionable metrics and we talk about those that we (almost) never touch because t…

Season 2 of the ProducTea! Tanja is the founder of Product Academy, a Mom, an Angel Investor, and someone that wrestled control over her calendar through years of experience, burnout, and other incredible lifehacks. Her family runs on OKRs and we both dive deep into how our understanding of behavior is driving everything. Timestamps: 0:00 Tanja’s i…

Season 2 of the ProducTea! Gagan is a serial entrepreneur who cannot get enough when it comes to enabling efficient learning. He co-founded Udemy and Maven, both huge learning platforms. We’re talking about the importance and future of learning and why it’s becoming more relevant than ever and the entire AI craziness around it. Timestamps: 0:00 Gag…

Season 2 of the ProducTea! Petra is an expert in coaching and wrote one of the most popular books on the topic “Strong Product People” which is a fantastic operative, down-to-earth guide to growing future leaders. Timestamps: 0:00 Petra’s Introduction 04:40 The issues with conferences 09:20 What do people get wrong about Petra? 13:30 The time is ri…

*This is a remastered, recut episode recorded earlier in the year with better audio and listening quality* Elena and I talk about everything product-led growth and particularly dive into product-led sales and what product-qualified accounts are all about when we combine sales and product. Leah on Linkedin / Twitter / Youtube…

*This is a remastered, recut episode recorded earlier in the year with better audio and listening quality* We're discussing what people may not see from the outside and our favorite topic: Impostor syndrome in a professional environment. If you want to hear a very personal perspective. In part 2 Remastered we talk specifically about product-led gro…

Season 2 of the Productea, product-led growth! April is an expert in positioning and she graced me with her presence to talk about it. Turns out we are quite fun together and spilling the tea with her was incredibly fun. She even managed to interrupt me at times. “Creating a safety net for me messing up unlocked me” What an incredible time and lear…

Season 2 of the Productea, product-led growth! Yuriy the advising legend. The man that crashes your browser memory because he has so many companies listed. He helped bring Grammarly to its legendary status and is an advisor to lots of prestigious companies like Airtable, Canva, Oyster, Whimsical, Flo, and many more. Timestamps: 0:00 Yuriys Introduc…

Timestamps: 0:00 Blake’s Introduction 03:15 What do people get wrong about Blake? 05:58 The effect of VCs suddenly knowing your domain really well. 08:15 When VCs tell businesses to focus 09:48 The effects of AI and how it changes the entire market 11:45 Market dynamics explained on the example of being a musician. 16:30 The difference between cons…

Season 2 is all about product-led growth! Ben Williams is a friend and an amazingly structured advisor in the product-led growth space. If you have ever wondered specifically how we structure our work, either as someone that looks into advising themselves or as a company that wonders how this episode is for you. Timestamps: 0:00 Ben’s introduction …

Kyle Poyar joined me on the ProductTea to talk about anything that makes businesses and VCs tick. I love this conversation for the simplicity of how Investors make decisions and what the future of our industry might very well look like. You should leave this podcast once you listened to it with some great insights into what makes product-led growth…