The Tech Blog Writer Podcast - Inspired Tech Startup Stories & Interviews With Tech Leaders, Entrepreneurs And Innovators

Most CEOs have difficulty answering the most critical question in business: "Are we going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue?" Why? After more than $1 Trillion spent on ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence, spreadsheets, and collaboration software, there is no enterprise approach to revenue. As a result, there is no way for "Revenue-critical" people, processes, and systems to work together. Andy Byrne, CEO, and Co-Founder of Clari joins me on Tech Talks Daily to discuss how RevOps is a rapidly emerging concept in the UK. We talk about the importance of business unification and the end of siloed operations. Andy also shares how he put a deck on LinkedIn detailing his recommendations for how companies can not just thrive during the downturn but thrive and how it went viral. I also learned how Clari is helping companies including Zoom, Equinix, Atlassian, and Okta forecast revenue growth, manage operations efficiently, and how they have achieved a valuation of $2.6 billion.

Fehintolu Olaogun, the CEO of CredPal joins me on Tech Talks Daily to share his story. This consumer credit startup has offered BNPL infrastructure to African retail merchants since 2018 and has garnered interest insights in the niche. Fehintolu was just in DC last month at the Africa Fintech Summit, where his panel discussed embedded finance. For example, one exciting perspective he shares is that while BNPL is often regarded as a tool for impulse buying elsewhere in Africa, it's a necessity because many cannot afford upfront payment for essential items. Having served over 4000 merchants and now looking to scale across Africa, CredPal has a great vantage on BNPL and consumer credit in Africa.

Digital commerce expert Spryker recently released research into the grocery shopping habits of 2,500 UK consumers. The company found that 60% of UK consumers now order their groceries online, and 16% now do most of their food shopping via the internet. With the cost-of-living crisis shrinking consumers' budgets, shoppers at low-cost supermarkets are crying out for online services from the likes of Aldi and LIDL – with almost half (43%) of consumers keen to see their low-cost providers operate online. Other findings include: Spryker CEO and co-founder Boris Lokschin reveals more findings from the report with me as we explore the broader trends in the digital grocery space – such as checkout-less shopping and Q-commerce apps. About Spryker Spryker is a composable digital commerce platform that enables enterprises to future-proof their business and accelerate growth at any point in their commerce journey. Spryker's headless, API-first model allows companies to adapt, scale, and quickly go to market while facili

Sarah Larner, Executive Vice President of Strategy & Innovation, Wejo joins me on Tech Talks Daily. Sarah is responsible for the formulation and management of the strategic initiatives at Wejo. She has been at Wejo since 2015, playing an integral role in the organization's growth and success. Sarah shares her story and discusses the connected vehicle landscape across automotive and the marketplace. Wejo is a UK-headquartered company publicly listed on NASDAQ. It's also a global leader in connected vehicle data, revolutionizing how we live, work and travel by transforming and interpreting real-time vehicle data. The company enables smarter mobility by organizing 12 trillion data points from approximately 12 million vehicles and more than 59 billion journeys globally, across multiple brands, makes, and models, and then standardizing and enhancing those streams of data on a vast scale. Wejo partners with ethical, like-minded companies and organizations to turn that data into insights that unlock value for co

Tally builds tools for DAOs. The company helps people join decentralized orgs and help user-owned communities make decisions together. Tally CEO, Dennison Bertram is an avid futurist, artist, and serial entrepreneur with a keen eye for the future of technology and its social impacts. He's also an early block-chain technologist, having founded the first Bitcoin Exchange for Czech Crowns (BuyBTC.cz), a technologically advanced physical bitcoin wallet (Aeternum Key-Vault), and a paypal like digital currency wallet (Terrawallet). Dennison joins me on Tech Talks Daily to discuss what are DAOs? How do they work and why should you care about them? He also shares the most interesting uses of DAOs right now and why he believes DAOs will replace corporations and become the dominant organizational form for human capital and creativity. Finally, Dennison also shares his tips on how to invest in DAOs without losing your money or becoming a victim of fraud.

Semtech's LoRa device-to-Cloud platform is a globally adopted long-range, low-power solution for IoT applications, enabling the rapid development and deployment of ultra-low power, cost-efficient, long-range IoT networks, gateways, sensors, module products, and IoT services worldwide. Semtech's LoRa technology provides the communication layer for the LoRaWAN® standard, which the LoRa Alliance® maintains, an open IoT alliance for Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) applications that have been used to deploy IoT networks in over 170 countries. With the proliferation of LoRa devices and the LoRaWAN standard, the LoRa Developer Portal is a place to learn, connect, collaborate, and find resources to help accelerate your LoRa development process. Semtech is a founding member of the LoRa Alliance. Steven Hegenderfer, senior director of developer ecosystems at Semtech, joins me on Tech Talks Daily to discuss Semtech's LoRa Developer Portal. The portal allows developers of all levels to quickly build and test IoT devi

  Shawn Vo is the CTO and co-founder of Axle, the all-in-one financial platform for modern freight brokers. Back in May, they completed a $10 million Series A round of funding led by Crosslink Capital. This financing follows a record year for Axle, during which volume grew 850% on their payments and financing platform. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Shawn spent seven years in financial technology, building software for fast-growing startups and consulting for the top 20 largest banks before starting Axle with his longtime business partner and friend, Bharath Krishnamoorthy. He is also member of the Forbes Technology Council, as well as an angel investor in fintech and developer tools. We discuss the importance of digital transformation initiatives, integrations and personalization in freight brokers' tech stacks. I also learn how moving toward open platform tools will benefit brokers so they can continue to build a tech stack that's personalized specifically for their back-end, data-driven process

Rachel Berry of eG Innovations and Richard Faulkner from the Conversant Group join Neil C. Hughes on the Tech Fusion Podcast. They discuss the importance of performance monitoring for Citrix deployments. Rachel shares where eG Innovations adds value to Citrix customers and how it relates to Citrix built-in tools. Richard shares more about the problems they solve for businesses at Conversant Group and how they work with eG Innovations. We also talk about what changes they have seen from Citrix customers' needs in terms of monitoring throughout the last year.

Pave is on a mission to improve access to credit for millions of people by building the world's best credit builder. They already have close to 500,000 registered users and are helping their members improve their credit health. But I wanted to learn more about the company's story, and this is where things got interesting. Co-Founder and CEO Sho Sugihara spent the first half of his life in Japan. He started his career working for The Big Issue to help the homeless by delivering magazines to newspaper vendors. Then, at 18, he went to Brazil to work for an NGO, helping underprivileged families keep their children in school through a state-sponsored microfinance and daycare program. These experiences opened his eyes to the power of financial inclusion. After university, he worked at McKinsey for three years to save up cash to finally start his own business before leaving to co-found Pave out of Entrepreneur First in 2017. Fast forward to 2022, we're seeing extreme income volatility and an unprecedented surge in e

Payment Orchestration continues to be a hot topic in digital payments. It has become even more prevalent post-COVID-19 with increased demand from consumers for more digitized payment methods, combined with the push from merchants to drive global growth ambitions with efficient cross-border services. CellPoint Digital is a leader in payment orchestration and has a longstanding history of delivering payment orchestration services for brands in the air travel sector. One of the most complex markets from a cross-border payments perspective – it bosts Virgin Atlantic, Cebu Pacific, and Avianca (one of the oldest airlines in Latam) as its clients and has transformed their payment architecture. I invited Kristian Gjerding to share the company's story and explore how to navigate complex payments data with a payment orchestration's proprietary rules engine that can optimize existing payments relationships. We also discuss how they are on a mission to make life easier for organizations that take payments. For example,

Quantinuum, the largest full-stack quantum computing company, recently revealed its quantum chemistry platform. InQuanto makes it easy for computational chemists to explore and experiment with quantum computing. This quantum computing offers a path to rapid and cost-effective development of new molecules and materials, which in turn, could generate novel answers to some of the biggest challenges we face in sustainability, climate change, drug discovery, and more. Quantinuum's quantum chemistry team developed InQuanto to support collaborations with partners such as BMW, JSR, Nippon Steel Corporation, and TotalEnergies. Through these collaborations, InQuanto has already led to the achievement of many firsts. I invited Jenni Strabley and Simon McAdams to share some of these and talk about the opportunities that Quantum computing will unlock.

Ben Coffin is a Solutions Marketing Manager for PHY and ORAN emulators at Keysight Technologies. Having spent the last decade in the test and measurement industry, Ben has spent his time in business development, product management, and systems engineering roles across the wireless communications space. Ben is also enthusiastic about telling stories about how the technology in the wireless world is advancing and how the bleeding edge finds root through research and industry and academic collaboration. In a nutshell, he's a perfect fit for the Tech Talks Daily podcast. Is it too early to be talking about 6G? We discuss 5G, 6G research, Open RAN, academic research on communications, research, and policy initiatives. We also explore how wireless communications will evolve how we communicate and the type of partnerships needed to exist (private/public, government) to make research in the wireless space successful.

When the pandemic hit, the need to touch as few things as possible to slow the spread of the virus meant QR codes took off quicker than Netflix stock. Now that we as consumers are programmed to scan them without a second thought, we find ourselves in a vulnerable situation. The FBI has even issued a formal warning about faked QR codes. In his new research, Len Noe, aka 'the Biohacker' and White Hat Hacker at CyberArk, has revealed three ways that any QR code can be spoofed to provide an attack vector. Crucially, Len's research has shown how mobile devices can be taken over and used to provide an attack vector in corporate environments to launch advanced attacks. Len discusses why we should be wary rather than blindly trusting forms. For example, a fake job ad containing a malicious QR code offers a perfect opportunity to send all that personal sign-up information straight to an attacker, not a prospective employer. We also discuss the importance of vigilance when installing new apps from a QR code. Len shar

Moiz Janjua Built his first public website, a college news blog when he was 16. He started working as a freelance designer in 2014. He built a couple of indie mobile games for iOS and Android in 2016. His love and passion for design and problem solving paved his way in the startup world. In 2021 founded SplitTrip. Splittrip is a road trip-sharing app for verified university students. It provides a marketplace where verified Hosts with vehicles going on road trips offer extra seats to verified Riders. All participants equally share the trip cost, including the accommodation and fuel. I invited him on the podcast to share his story and how they raised their first pre-seed investment of £50,000 by delivering groceries door to door in a high-net-worth area in central London. I also learned how Splittrip is officially endorsed by Coventry University and one of 10 startups endorsed in 2021.

List Perfectly is an e-commerce solution for sellers to efficiently list and cross-post products on multiple major marketplaces and channels like Poshmark, Mercari, Instagram, Shopify, eBay, and more. The company was created by founders Amanda Morse and Clara Albornoz for sellers like them, who make a living from online sales, as a solution to the frustrating and laborious process of listing on multiple channels. However, there is an inspirational story behind the company. I invited co-founder Clara Albornoz on Tech Talks Daily to share how her arthritis prevented her from listing her products as a seller and how it inspired her to create something that would go on to save sellers an average of 80 hours per month. I learn how its member base has grown by over 600% and sellers have cross-posted over 20 million products using its software in the last year alone. We also discuss how they are leveraging technology to fulfill the company's sustainability-driven mission to keep products out of landfills.

Gen Z is transforming the way we consume. With a keen eye toward sustainability, they are influencing older generations to prioritize sustainability in their purchasing decisions. Aneesh Dhawan of Knit, joins me on Tech Talks Daily. The consumer insights startup appeared on my radar after learning it provides market data for Gen Z audiences and works with NASCAR, the Minnesota Twins, the San Antonio Spurs, and JBL Speakers, to name a few brands. Using the Knit platform, brands can upload questions and get 30-90 second "selfie" video responses from hundreds of Gen Z consumers in as quickly as a few hours. With their video analysis AI, brands can analyze hours of video feedback in minutes, helping larger brands rapidly learn more about what Gen Z audiences want. We discuss the three key 'takeaways' brands should keep in mind when looking to attract the attention of Gen Z'ers and what Gen Z data tell us about building thriving communities online.

Less than half of Gen Z have an account with a traditional bank revealing that non-traditional payment methods will dominate the future of digital banking. But Sanat Rao, Chief Business Officer, and Global Head, Infosys Finacle, believes many countries across the globe are falling behind in developing the infrastructure needed for a fully cashless, digital banking system. Sanat joins me on Tech Talks Daily to discuss the pros and cons of a cashless environment. Sanat shares how going cashless will create ease and efficiency, but to do so, countries need to digitize every step of transactions, including opening accounts with digital documentation. This is costly and requires a profound change in infrastructure, posing a significant barrier for many countries. We also explore Blockchain security considerations. For example, Blockchain combats security concerns of digital payments by recording digital transactions, and Sanat believes this will not only curb fraud but also allow for cross-border transactions to i

Left Lane Capital is a leading global venture capital and growth equity firm investing in high-growth internet and consumer technology companies that are fundamental to the lives of customers. The foundation of Left Lane's strategy is built on four main elements: specialization in internet-first businesses, proprietary sourcing at every level, deep data rigor and best practices, and a genuine philosophy around partnering with founders. Dan Ahrens (Managing Partner) joins me on Tech Tech Talks Daily to discuss Left Lane's second fund with $1.4 billion in commitments, how the firm is focused on growing the internet and consumer tech category by identifying and supporting category-defining companies, the market potential for consumer internet companies, and their recent investments in GoStudent, M1 Finance, iTrust Capital, and Tovala.

Logitech released the Logitech Pen in January, one of the first mainstream tech tools designed for and with students. The Pen is a USI stylus for Chromebooks, designed for learning, so students can unlock their full potential. Tech is not often built with kids in mind (but it should be). It's built for adult and consumer use. Children have smaller hands, different developmental needs, etc. Logitech took all this into consideration when designing the Pen, with students at the center every step of the way. Grace Lee is Head of Design for Logitech for Education. She is a leader in design who is passionate about creating user-centric education products that delight students and teachers. I invited her onto the podcast to learn more about the design process and discuss the development process of the Pen and what it can tell us about the future of tech design overall. We discuss how the future of learning (and life) is increasingly digital and why bridging the 'awkwardness' gap is so important. We also explore wher

Dr. Usama Fayyad is Executive Director of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. The Institute is a game-changing research center focused on researching and developing human-centric AI solutions that leverage machine technology to extend human intelligence. ​I invited him on Tech Talks Daily to learn more about their mission to solve core research problems centered on building real solutions in real contexts to make reliable and responsible AI that works effectively and cooperatively with humans. The world-renowned expert in AI and an industry leader joins me to discuss what the Institute will mean to the advancement of AI and experiential AI. We also talk about the development of AI talent, the creation of AI solutions for real-world problems, AI ethics, and the promotion of Responsible AI. Finally, I learned that he was the Global Chief Data Officer & Group Managing Director at Barclays Bank in London and the first person in the world to hold the Chief Data Officer title when at