Operators

On this episode of the Seedcamp Podcast Series, Carlos (@carloseduardoespinal) & Dave (@dave-haynes) chat with Alex Trewby of Divide (now Google - http://read.bi/1I9JlTl) on how to grow a company, tackle M&A, build an enterprise sales strategy, and tackle selling into large organizations. 

Alex Trewby of Divide (now Google)

While visiting our offices to record a Meerkat video, we managed to hijack Vojtech, Communications Manager at Index Ventures to sit down with Dave and Carlos to chat about his background in PR and explored how startups can leverage PR as well as a content strategy to make an impact for customers and investors.

Vojtech Horna of Index Ventures

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

As Director of Developer Relations at Evernote, Chris plays an important role in evangelising Evernote's API as well as working to improve the tools, services, and outreach for Evernote's community of developers around the world. 

We had a chance to sit down with Chris and talk to him about how he's worked with companies in the past, what he has seen be successful (and not), and what he recommends for anyone wishing to create their own public API.

Chris Traganos, Director of Developer Relations at Evernote

We had the chance to sit down with Top Product Hunter & European Community Manager @producthunt, Bram Kanstein to talk about his @startupstash story and role within Product Hunt. 

During our chat he provides us with valuable tips for any company considering listing on Product Hunt. Having launched the #2 most upvoted product of all time on Product Hunt, it comes with a lot of weight!

Bram Kanstein of Product Hunt

While visiting Youtube's main offices in California, we had the chance to meet with Eytan Lerba, a Founder turned Googler (currently he's a Manager of Strategy at YouTube) who had some very interesting stories to tell regarding his journey starting Wizit (http://wizitapp.com/).

Eytan Lerba, Entrepreneur & Googler

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

For many of the young, ambitious founders that we back, starting a company might be the first time they’ve had to manage a team. Yet very quickly they’ll need to not only manage a growing startup, but also transform into leading an organisation that could easily grow from 2 to 200 people in just a few short years.

So for this month’s Academy we invited in Gillian Davis, author of 'First Time Leader' and Director of Leadership Development at ustwo, to talk about how to run your startup like a leader.

Gillian Davis, Author of First Time Leader, on How to Run a Startup As a Leader

In this episode we were joined by Bryce Keane, Founder & Director at Albion Drive. He discussed his background, how he created the brand behind 3beards, offering his insights on how to build a compelling brand and communications strategy.

Bryce Keane is an international communications professional with experience managing a wide variety of global campaigns throughout EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions, across a wide variety of sectors. Prior to joining Albion he worked for international WPP flagship agency Cohn & Wolfe. Bryce has a deep fascination with London's booming start-up culture and is known within the scene as one of the of 3beards, a start-up events company that runs a number of regular and iconic start-up events in East London including the weekly Silicon Drinkabout, monthly Don’t Pitch Me, Bro! and quarterly Digital Sizzle.


Bryce Keane, Founder & Director at Albion Drive

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

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

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 today's episode, Carlos from Seedcamp is joined by Alex Stephany, Tech CEO, Advisor and Author of "The Business of Sharing: Making it in the New Sharing Economy". Tune in to listen to Alex on how he hustled his way through the tech scene from scratch, after studying english Literature, ending up to became the CEO of Justpark. Alex and Carlos move on to discuss key advice on hiring and exchange views on job titles for early employees, how to keep your team motivated and how to understand if you have made a bad hire.

If you're interested in Sharing Economy, this is the time to turn the volume up. Alex explains that the reason why he's written a book focused on this topic was to offer a 360 degree view coming from the entrepreneurs when compared with other books which have been primarily written by scholars or economists. Listen to a discussion on the professionalisation of the supply side, it's impact on the sharing economy and their visions about the future.

Show notes from the episode:
Alex Website: http://alexstephany.com
Seedcamp: http://seedcamp.com
Book: amzn.to/1xA0Fq3

Related bio links:
Carlos: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal / @http://twitter.com/cee
Alex: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/alexstephany / @http://twitter.com/AlexStephany

Alex Stephany, Author and ex-CEO at JustPark

In this episode of the Seedcamp Podcast learn about Corporate Development from a strategic buyer and aquihires with Chrys Chrysanthou from Notion Capital and Carlos Espinal.

Tune in and listen to Chrys share how going through the military and managing 70 persons helped him get a job at Cisco where he ended up staying for 10 years and learned how corporate ventures work. After his time at Cisco he had the opportunity to join a promising young startup in the space of the Internet of Things space and manage their operations as the COO. Later on Chrys ended up joining Amazon Web Services where had the privilege to work closely with Amazon CTO - Werner Vogels leading Business Development efforts of the startup ecosystem. And finally, in 2014 Chrys moved to the Venture Capital industry joining Accel Partners first and later moved on to join Notion Capital where he is now and focusing more on early stage B2B Cloud & SaaS startups.

http://www.seedcamp.com
http://www.carlosespinal.com
http://www.notioncapital.com 
https://twitter.com/cchrysan


Chrys Chrysanthou, Principal at Notion Capital, on leadership, corporate venturing, & investing

In this episode, Seedcamp Partner Carlos was joined by Hugh Campbell from GP Bullhound. The conversation begins with Hugh explaining his time at Oxford where he studied "Physiology, psychology and philosophy". They then proceed into speaking about his work experience with City Bank and Goldman Sachs before his 3 co-founders decided to take the lessons learned in investment banking to create GP Bullhound. Since it's inception the company has now expanded outside London to new locations like Manchester, Germany and France to be closer to great tech companies because these come from all over Europe.

Speaking about the challenges of fundraising Hugh shares that in his view today's biggest challenge for founders in the UK is not to raise £1M early stage round given the existing tax benefits but it's much harder for businesses that are at 10 or 15 people and want to grow to 100 and need a larger round. He then proceeds to share his tips on fundraising and give examples on how to build better relationships with investors while explaining how trust plays a big part of an M&A deal.  Regarding exits they discuss the rise of private equity firms in the purchasing of tech busiensses and how those are different from traditional large acquirers like Google, Microsoft or Facebook.

During the podcast Hugh and Carlos also approach the state of enterprise software market especially regarding exit options. They then proceed speaking about the evolution of the European investor and tech scene during the last decade focusing in the IPO scene and how it is improving in Europe with IPOs like Auto Trader, Boohoo, Zalando and Rocket Internet. These have been impacting the entire European landscape including the German technology market fuelling it's incredibly fast growth - especially in Berlin all of which despite not having the tax brakes in the UK.

Finally they discuss the expansion strategies for UK based companies and Hugh shares his favourite book for young entrepreneurs so that they can evaluate if their idea is any good at an early stage.

Show notes from the episode:
Carlos Website: http://www.carlosespinal.com
Seedcamp: http://www.seedcamp.com
GP Bullhound: http://www.gpbullhound.com/


Related bio links:
Carlos: uk.linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal / @twitter.com/cee
Hugh: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/hucampbell / https://twitter.com/hugh_gpb

Hugh Campbell, Founding Partner at GP Bullhound, on preparing your company for an exit

Werner Vogels, CTO and VP at Amazon.com and a world-leading expert on scalable systems, didn’t have the traditional entry into tech one might expect.

Responsible for driving Amazon’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale, Werner is one of the architects behind Amazon’s approach to cloud computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Tune in to the 100th Seedcamp podcast special for a deep-dive as Werner talks to Carlos about his fascinating and varied journey from studying Computer Science aged 28 and a 10 year career in academia, to co-founding his own business before starting his first “real job” at Amazon in 2004.

Learn more about the core pillars that uphold Amazon’s approach to hiring, team work and commercialisation as well as how a relentless focus on customer centricity guides all product development.

With references to Seedcamp-backed companies such as TransferWise - improving customer experience and disrupting staid industries such as financial services - hear Werner’s thoughts on the need for enterprise to innovate to compete with younger companies or risk going out of business.

If the above player doesn’t work for you, you can also listen directly from our Soundcloud page.


Show notes from the episode:
Carlos Website: www.carlosespinal.com
Seedcamp: www.seedcamp.com
Amazon: http://aws.amazon.com

Related bio links:
Carlos: uk.linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal / twitter.com/cee
Werner: www.linkedin.com/in/wernervogels / twitter.com/Werner

100th guest special with Werner Vogels, CTO & VP of Amazon

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

On Cybersecurity, Mr Robot & how startups can stay safe online
with Jamie Akhtar and Mariella Thanner, Tresor Security 

As the UK government lays out plans to invest an additional £1.9bn to reduce cyber-attacks, and pressure mounts on US presidential candidates to prioritise cybersecurity, the world's attention is focused on how to stay protected online. 

In this week's Seedcamp podcast Carlos is joined by Jamie Akhtar and Mariella Thanner, founders of cybersecurity firm Tresor Security, for an intriguing dive into how startups can fortify their cybersecurity posture and minimise their digital vulnerabilities. 

This podcast is indispensable listening for startups considering how they can protect themselves going forward, with Jamie and Mariella touching on when the right time to start thinking about security policy is; performing proper diligence and the small steps companies can take to prevent their data from being being compromised.

Learn about the similarities between Hollywood’s glamorised depiction of cyber security in the drama-thriller television series ‘Mr Robot’ and the kind of incidents and breaches Jamie and Mariella have to deal with, and which part of the cybersecurity value chain is a strong bet to invest in.

Show notes:
Carlos Medium: http://sdca.mp/2entVR3
Seedcamp: www.seedcamp.com
Tresor Security: www.tresorsecurity.com 


Related bio links:
Carlos: linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal / twitter.com/cee
Jamie: linkedin.com/in/JamieAkhtar / twitter.com/jamieakhtar
Mariella: linkedin.com/in/MariellaThanner

Tresor Security on Cybersecurity, Mr Robot & how startups can stay safe online

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.

Operators

The Seedcamp Podcast