Founders

Product & Design

Operators

Prod Mgmt

On this episode of the Seedcamp Podcast Series, Carlos interviews James Moed and explores some of the thinking behind his recent post on three things to think about before thinking about design (which can be read here: http://seedcamp.com/resources/3-things-to-talk-about-before-talking-about-design/).

A little more about James:

James Moed advises both innovation leaders and design teams, helping them to combine fresh insights around customer behaviour with inspiration from other sectors, new business models, and emerging technologies. James has worked with startups, governments, and social enterprises, as well as corporations in a range of industries - from retail to IT, luxury, and health care.

Previously Director of Financial Service Design at IDEO in London, James is especially passionate about making finances feel human again, through services that transform our complex relationship with money. His experience is broad, including insurance networks for Indian farmers, budgeting tools for US credit card users, and loyalty strategies for private wealth clients. Having worked with teams from Generali, Barclays, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Bupa, and the Government of Singapore, James helps organisations build a customer centered approach to innovation, drawing the connections between real-life user observations, new offerings, partnerships, and strategies for growth.

Expert-in-Residence James Moed on User-Centric Design

Gearoid O'Rourke, Growth & Design lead at Hassle.com joins Carlos to discuss the subtleties behind the different styles of design thinking, and how founders should start thinking about design early on in their company's journey.

During our chat, Gearoid mentioned a couple of resources, which included: 

Undercover User Experience Design by Cennydd Bowles
A Book Apart series - http://abookapart.com/
Design+Banter - http://designandbanter.com/

If you want to get in touch with Gearoid, feel free to follow him on twitter - https://twitter.com/gearoidorourke

Gearoid O'Rourke on Design

Dan Hill is Product Lead at Airbnb and Former co-founder and CTO at Seedcamp Company Crashpadder (http://tcrn.ch/1L3XiPM). He blogs at http://danhilltech.com/ and tweets at https://twitter.com/serenestudios

We had a chance to sit down with him and chat about his experience with Crashpadder and now at Airbnb and life lessons he's learned along the way.

Dan Hill, Product Lead at AirBnB

In this episode we were joined by Josephine Goube, Director of Partnerships & Communications at Migreat. She discussed her background, how she became involved in making immigration easier for companies, discussing Entrepreneur Visa options available to set up a business in the UK.

Listed as one the top 35 women in Business in Britain in 2015 by Management Today, Joséphine currently heads Migreat, the fastest-growing global platform for migrants to get access to information and immigration support. She previously worked at TechStars London and Rainmaking, co-founded the London School of Economics Business Incubator & graduated from the New Entrepreneurs Foundation.

Josephine Goube, Director of Partnerships & Communications at Migreat

In this episode we were joined by Dan Appelquist, Startup ambassador at The Open Data Institute. After discussing his background, Dan talks about Internet of Things, Privacy, and Open Data, giving insights in to how companies should explore data in a new way.

Daniel Appelquist works with the Open Data Institute startup program and the Open Data Incubator for Europe to build bridges with the startup and entrepreneurial community across Europe. Dan is a Mobile and Web industry veteran technologist who has been bringing innovative and disruptive services to market for two decades. He was an early Internet and Web pioneer, and has been a dot-com CTO and later a dot-com refugee. He helped to launch Vodafone Live! in the UK and has been instrumental in the development of industry standards initiatives and ventures such as dotMobi, the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, and device APIs such as the W3C Geolocation browser API. He has been a community instigator, founding MobileMonday London, as well as the Mobile 2.0 conference series in San Francisco and the Over the Air hack days in the UK. He worked as Open Web Advocate for Telefónica Digital and with Mozilla to bring FirefoxOS to market and build the ecosystem around HTML5.


Dan Appelquist, The Open Data Institute

In this episode of the Seedcamp Podcast, we were joined by Sheila Marcelo, Founder, Chairwoman & CEO of Care.com. 

Sheila joined Seedcamp on our US tour to meet with our Founders and talk about the personal life experiences and passion that led to her building Care.com, the world’s largest online care destination. She touches on everything from creating company culture and failing fast as a young Founder, to scaling the company and being coached as a CEO.

Sheila Marcelo, Founder of Care.com

Phil Libin, Co-Founder and Chairman of Evernote and Managing Partner of General Catalyst Partners, joined Carlos Espinal for a chat at Web Summit in Dublin. 

Phil and Carlos discuss everything from his long-standing career as a CEO, looking at his key advice for managers making the transition from early-stage leader to the CEO of a growth company, to the origins of Evernote and, in Phil’s new role in Venture Capital, what the future of apps looks like. Phil gives insight into the thoughts that led to him stepping down as CEO of Evernote as the company scaled. Debating when to recognise that someone skilled in running larger organisations makes sense for your business and that you can hire the best talent. 

Phil Libin, Co-Founder & Chairman of Evertnote and Managing Partner, General Catalyst Partners

Keith Wallington, Expert in Residence for Seedcamp and ex-Chief Group Officer of Mimecast, joins Carlos for this Podcast to explore key lessons learned from his experience helping operationalise businesses as a mentor, and internally at Mimecast through his multiple C-level roles. Looking at how these processes can be implemented in different organisations for their own benefit.


Keith Wallington, Expert in Residence, Seedcamp

Ben Drury, Founder of 7Digital, joined Seedcamp’s Dave Haynes for this interview talking through his journey as an entrepreneur. From starting in the first dot-com boom within early online music tech to building 7Digital during the dot-com crash, Ben discusses everything from building new services for a new era of technology, acquiring and selling other companies, to 7Digital’s own IPO. 

Ben Drury, Founder of 7Digital

Will Herrmann, Head of Commercial Operations for Hassle.com, joins Seedcamp's Dave Haynes in this podcast which follows Hassle.com's recent exit, having been acquired by Helpling. Following a session with some of our startups, Will discusses everything from scaling company operations following Hassle.com's Series A round to valuations and M&A.

Will Herrmann, Head of Commercial Operations, Hassle.com

Dimitar Stanimiroff, Managing Director of Stack Overflow Developer Insights at Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for programmers with over 4 million members, joins Carlos and Dave for this deep dive into hiring. 

Discussing everything from the hiring process, how to overcome challenges, hiring from within, and how to recruit technical talent if you're not technical.

Dimitar Stanimiroff, Managing Director, Stack Overflow Developer Insights at Stack Overflow

In this episode, Carlos was joined by Damian Kimmelmann, Co-Founder and CEO of DueDil, a fintech company that provides accurate, comprehensive and up-to-date private company data. 

After talking through Damian's background as a serial entrepreneur and the idea that built DueDil, we switch focus and talk through sales, looking at how to find and scale a b2b sales team.

Damian Kimmelmann, Co-Founder and CEO, DueDil

In this episode, Carlos sat down with Seedcamp Experts in Residence, Keith Wallington (previously at Mimecast) and Taylor Wescoatt (previously eMoov, Timeout and eBay), to discuss product hypothesis and getting to minimum viable product. Both have played roles in scaling businesses and worked with many of Seedcamp's portfolio, recognising that a lot of companies have more validation for a service than is actually the case. As EIR's they work to ensure startups are testing their theories to validate their products in the right way.

In this podcast, the three discuss the topic "winners recognise their startup is a series of untested hypothesis" a quote from Steve Blank,  author of The Startup Owners Manual. 

EIRs on Hypothesis & MVPs

In the latest episode, Carlos was joined by Jeff Veen, Design Partner for True Ventures, a Venture Capital firm that focuses on supporting the earliest stage Founders and their teams. In the podcast, Jeff and Carlos discuss how a Partner with a design background views potential investment decisions, unearthing a lot of advice on design for startups in the process. 

http://www.seedcamp.com
http://www.carlosespinal.com
https://trueventures.com/

Jeff Veen, Design Partner at True Ventures, on How a Design Expert Views Investments

Starting by scoring a first interview with Guy Kawasaki Harry Stebbings walks us through how he started his network from scratch and built his massive following for his 20 Minute VC podcast show. 

In this podcast, Harry shares his story with Carlos giving unique insights on to some of the amazing marketing efforts that he has created to drive user growth and retain his audience all while highlighting the accomplishments of his interviewees. Discover how he uses channels like Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter to drive his audience to the show and how he discovered which channels best converted for him.  

www.thetwentyminutevc.com
www.twitter.com/HarryStebbings
www.seedcamp.com
www.carlosespinal.com

Harry Stebbings, Founder of the 20 Minute VC Podcast

Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas is an entrepreneur, founder and executive focused on growth-stage tech businesses. Until recently Carlos was the Chief Product Officer at Skyscanner, the travel search engine. Previously he was founder and CEO at Fogg, a hotels metasearch startup that was acquired by Skyscanner. He also served as deputy CEO of the IT service firm Netfocus, where he led digital security before the company was acquired by Hewlett-Packard.
 
Speaking with Seedcamp partner Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Carlos provides an unparalleled insight into the art of product management and scaling tech businesses, as well as a first-hand view of the acquisition process – a process he went through at both Skyscanner and Netfocus.
 
Carlos addresses some of the biggest scaling challenges he faced when helping grow Netfocus, and discusses how at Skyscanner he saw just how important it was to empower product managers by removing obstacles and giving them freedom to meet goals – a tendency not, he argues, second-nature for engineers used to controlling all variables.
 
Learn more about product management as a discipline, and what sets it apart from engineering and design roles – and why ‘Running Team Operations’ and ‘The Rhythm of the Business’ would be essential chapters in any book on product management.

Show notes from the episode:
Carlos Espinal Website: www.carlosespinal.com
Seedcamp: www.seedcamp.com
Skyscanner: www.skyscanner.net

Related bio links:
Carlos Espinal: uk.linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal / twitter.com/cee
Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas: linkedin.com/in/carlosgonzalezcadenas

Mastering the art of product management with Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas

This Much I Know is the podcast from Seedcamp, Europe’s seed fund.

Tune into hear the inside story from startup founders, investors and leading tech voices: the people who’ve built businesses, scaled globally, failed fantastically and learnt massively.

Seedcamp invests early in world-class founders attacking large, global markets and solving real problems using technology. Seedcamp provides the infrastructure to fast-track a founder’s vision and create value through immediate access to smart capital, a lifelong community of support and a global network built upon a decade’s experience backing exceptional talent.

Mastering the art of product management with Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas

The Seedcamp Podcast