Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast By cover art

Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

By: Evergreen Podcasts
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  • Summary

  • Welcome to the Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission podcast. My name is Ton Dobbe. I am the founder of Value Inspiration and the author of ‘The Remarkable Effect’. I envision a world where every B2B SaaS business succeeds because they're creating software their customers would miss if were gone 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝘆: Research consistently shows 90% of all startups fail. That's bad. What's worse however is that +75% of SaaS Scaleups fail - companies that are supposed to have product-market-fit. Far too few Scaleups create the traction they aspire for and fail for the wrong reasons I believe this should stop - and hence I started my business and this podcast The goal I have with this podcast is two-fold: to inspire new forms of value creation by sharing compelling ideas and stories about the potential we can unlock when technology and people blend in the right way. Share experiences from tech entrepreneurs like you about what it requires to create a remarkable software business and how to overcome the roadblocks to do so.
    All rights reserved 2022-24
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Episodes
  • #322 - Jim Yu, Founder BrightEdge - on his system to grow from $0 to $100M ARR

    #322 - Jim Yu, Founder BrightEdge - on his system to grow from $0 to $100M ARR
    Jul 17 2024
    This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to turn a startup into a +$100M ARR growth business. My guest is Jim Yu, Founder & Exec Chair at BrightEdge Jim Yu is the visionary. He started his career at Mercator Software (now IBM), serving as Director of Product Development, and then moved to Salesforce.com, where he was a Director of Product Management. He graduated from university when he was 16 years old, and holds an MBA from Stanford University, a Master's in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of South Dakota. In 2007 he founded BrightEdge where he's been at the helm as CEO for 16 years. He grew BrightEdge into a global leader, helping more than 8,500 of the world's largest brands drive measurable, predictable revenue from their websites and search engines Their mission: to help marketers deliver content that resonates with their audience and drives business impact. More specifically, BrightEdge aims to transform online content into tangible business results, such as traffic, revenue, and engagement. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jim to my podcast. We explore his journey of building BrightEdge into a successful SaaS company that crossed the $100M ARR bar. He elaborates on his first principles when it comes to building core differentiators, being intentional about market choices, and setting clear milestones for each growth stage. Lastly, he shares his advice on managing go-to-market investments and staying driven by a strong mission to scale intelligently. Here's one of his quotes It really paid off was when we found the big box retail segment. So if you think about social networks, they have a lot of web pages that represent musicians or people or things like that. But on the retail side, they have a lot of products, they have a lot of categories. And if those show up well on search, it leads directly to purchases and revenue. So the next use case we built into our technology was connecting the dots back to purchases and orders. And so then you could see, as you optimize for organic search, what was the impact on revenue, and then that's when we started to really get forth. We ended up getting most of the big retailers. During this interview, you will learn four things: Why he has been intentional about certain GTM techniques and how he's picked his verticals to bet on. His first principle on making strategic choices that are aligned with the core capabilities and DNA of the company. His approach to scaling, and when to step on the gas and when not. How he defined their unfair advantage and what makes them different as a company For more information about the guest from this week: Jim on Linkedin Jim on Twitter Website: BrightEdge Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    45 mins
  • #321 - Max Fischer, CEO of Deltia - on building for business scale.

    #321 - Max Fischer, CEO of Deltia - on building for business scale.
    Jul 10 2024
    This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to solve the most challenging productivity challenge in Manufacturing: human action. My guest is Max Fischer, Founder and CEO of Deltia. Max is a mechanical engineer. In 2014 he was a founding member of HackZurich, the largest hackathon Switzerland has ever seen. In 2015 he co-founded Actyx and digitized 40+ factories. In this startup, he led product management, sales, and marketing teams. Meanwhile he has established himself as a thought leader in the space of digital transformation for the factory floor. In November 2022, Max founded Deltia, a startup focused on helping factory operators track, analyze and improve efficiency by identifying the best possible processes and assisting workers with digital tools. Their mission: to make human work in manufacturing more productive and less error-prone by taking out the guesswork. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Max to my podcast. We explore what's broken in identifying productivity opportunities in manufacturing. Max explains how for the first time ever - this is possible. He shares some of his big lessons on building the company, especially when it comes to foundational questions like "who's it for" and 'what's it for' - and how that helped them remain highly focused. He elaborates on his first principes for building the platform - and how that helps them stay resilient and offer scalable solutions. . Here's one of his quotes There are a lot of decisions that you take both on the technical level and what customers you're serving. Who is the user that you're trying to focus on? We decided quite early on to not specifically target the Toyota's of this world. The automotive OEMs are basically the best-run manufacturing companies in the world. There are use cases, obviously, also for technology, no doubt about that. But I think a big opportunity is to help the 98% of other factories to come to a similar level to where Toyota of Volkswagen are today. During this interview, you will learn four things: Why functionality is important - but not as important as system design How to go about building for business scalability rather than just technical scalability of your solution. Why the dream is not to help Toyota or Volkswagen - but companies much smaller and weaker than those brands. What they are doing differently to accelerate stakeholder buy-in from IT, legal, and Unions. For more information about the guest from this week: Max Fischer Website: Deltia Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 mins
  • #320 - Ruban Phukan, CEO Goodgist - on creating business resilience

    #320 - Ruban Phukan, CEO Goodgist - on creating business resilience
    Jul 3 2024
    This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to redefine the way we learn and solve the growing skills gap. My guest is Ruban Phukan, CEO of Goodgist. Ruban is a serial entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience building technology products that solve real-world problems. He's written books about AI and holds several patents in this field. He was part of Yahoo's first data scientist team, collaborating closely with co-founder David Filo to use data to address complex business problems. In 2005, he co-founded Bixee.com, India's first vertical search engine employing patented technology. This company then merged with market leader MakeMyTrip and DataRPM, a pioneering Enterprise AI platform for industrial IoT, which was then acquired by Progress Software in 2017. He 2019 he co-founded GoodTrade.AI, an asset management and investment analysis platform centred around Generative AI. Most recently he co-founded GoodGist, an AI startup for upskilling and research that tackles the challenges of scaling corporate skill development. Their mission: To organize the world's knowledge and make it universally accessible, conversational, and digestible in bite-sized chunks on demand. Their belief is that this creates a significant moat for their clients against competitors in today's fast-paced landscape, And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ruban to my podcast. We explore the challenges of continuous learning in today's fast-paced technological environment. He explains his first principles for making his strategic bets and why he opts to take a platform approach rather than a point solution approach. Last but not least, he explains his lessons from niching down and verticalizing his GTM approach around the platform. Here's one of his quotes We don't try to build a custom solution for a custom problem. We try to look at the problem and say, 'Okay, so we are not trying to only solve for a gas turbine failure, how do we build that technology, so that now instead of just only solving for data coming out of gas turbines, it can also look at data coming out of smart cars? How can it also handle data coming out of smart televisions? So, the focus has always been in trying to understand the problem and try to generalize, so that it can solve more business use cases, without having to recreate something new every single time. During this interview, you will learn four things: How he's accelerating traction by packaging his horizontal platform around highly valuable & business-critical problems. How he goes about successfully serving the mid-market and large enterprise companies in their own unique ways. His approach to identifying new value possibilities in the market that are worth building solutions for. How he makes decisions on what to invest in, and what not. For more information about the guest from this week: Ruban Phukan Website: Goodgist Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 mins
Leadership Economics
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