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The Exit. Liquidity. Acquihire. Merger. No matter the name, it’s a milestone in any entrepreneurs life. Today we take a look at the real stories behind acquisitions, when the outcome isn’t quite what you read about in Techcrunch with stories from Andy Sparks, former COO of Mattermark, Courtland Alves VP of Product & Mentorship at Bloc and Morris Wheeler, DrummondRoad Capital founder and principal. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos by going to logianalytics.com/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Path was created in 2010 by former Facebook employee Dave Morin as a sort of anti-Facebook. It stood out with one good idea: limits for friends. You couldn’t add more than 50 people to your network when it first launched. As Facebook ballooned in size and our friend lists grew with it, Path sought to be the place where you chatted with only the people you were closest to. And for a little while, the idea seemed to work. Quickly, Google reportedly tried to gobble it up. By mid-2013, Morin proclaimed that people were checking the app “over 1 billion times per month.” But after years of irrelevance, it decided to finally shut its doors in 2018. What went wrong and what could have been? We explore that and more on today's episode. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos by going to logianalytics.com/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2000, Reed Hastings, the founder of a fledgling company called Netflix, flew to Dallas to propose a partnership to Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and his team. The idea was that Netflix would run Blockbuster’s brand online and Antioco’s firm would promote Netflix in its stores. Hastings got laughed out of the room. Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010 and Netflix is now a $28 billion dollar company, about ten times what Blockbuster was worth. So what happened that led Blockbuster's demise? We explore that and more today on the show. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. LinkedIn Jobs will match the right talent with your open roll, fast. Head to Linkedin.com/rocketship to get $50 off your first job post. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get a free wireframe workshop by going to augusto.digital/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From creating unsafe driving conditions to aggravating spouses across the globe, todays failure is a lesson in what happens when your team lacks diversity, especially of lived experiences that help build empathy for your customers. Today, we take you behind the scenes of Audibles iOS7 redesign that overhauled the design of the app, but forgot to take several key use-cases into consideration. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos by going to logianalytics.com/rocketship. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On September 11, 2001 two American Airlines airplanes were hijacked. One was flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center and the other crashed into a field on it's way to the White House killing everyone onboard. As people scrambled to find out what happened to their loved ones, the American Airlines automated phone systems failed as they refused to included what is known as the Mayday codes. Today we talk with Blade Kotelly, who built the automated phone system for several Airlines, including some affected by the September 11 hijackings. His systems didn't fail that morning - so what happened at American Airlines? This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos by going to logianalytics.com/rocketship. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've been talking a lot about well known product failures, but at this point in the series, we're going to take a little pause. Today, we remember that there are very real people behind these failures. These people have feelings and the failures they’ve experienced, they’ve probably affected them in different ways. Today we sit down with Jerry Colonna. Jerry is an American venture capitalist and professional coach who played a prominent part in the early development of Silicon Valley. He is known as the CEO whisperer and is famous for being Alex Blumbergs executive coach at Gimlet captured for the Startup podcast. Jerry get's personal with Mike Belsito about his own failures and helps to put our work accomplishments and our personal worth into perspective. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos by going to logianalytics.com/rocketship. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Raising $41 million dollars before launch, Color should have been an instant hit, but instead met a swift demise. When it launched, the application had around 1 million downloads. By September 2011, the service had a little under 100,000 active users. Founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Nguyen and successful operator, Peter Pham, Color had one of the best teams in the business. However, in the weeks following Color's initial launch, controversy surrounded the startup's $41 million funding and mixed reviews on the product. The initial launch left users confused with the application's user interface and purpose. Its initial rating in the App Store was 2 out of 5 stars. In an interview with Robert Scoble in April 2011, Pham and Nguyen admitted that Color's launch was a wasted opportunity. But it wasn't just the launch that would sink the company. Today we take you behind the scenes of Color's rise and fall. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Google+ was an ambitious project to take down the social networking giant Facebook, unfortunately we all know how it ended. What went wrong along the way that prevented a company like Google, with seemingly endless resources and internet reach, fail to create a product users actually wanted to use? This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the early 2000's eBay was in direct competition with Amazon but they had very different methodologies when approaching the market. Today we dive into some of the mistakes eBay made in this time where they caught themselves focusing on the wrong metrics and ultimately the wrong side of the market. These mistakes ultimately led to the huge differences in the trajectory of where these companies are today. We talk with Ben Foster, the CPO at GoCanvas, about his time at eBay from 2001-2005 where he lead the "findings" team internally. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was November of 2014 and Brian Crofts was preparing for a meeting with two senior executives at Intuit. One was his boss, CeCe Morken, who ran Intuit’s Professional Tax (ProTax) business line, the $422 million business that sold tax preparation software to professional accountants. The other was Sasan Goodarzi, who ran Intuit’s $1.8 billion TurboTax business (TurboTax) that sold software to consumers.  Crofts had devoted three years to a new product-- TurboTax PersonalPro -- that was a stepping stone in between these two business lines. The company’s leadership had decided it was an appropriate time for a major roll-out of the product and the purpose of the November meeting was to discuss and decide upon a go-to-market plan for PersonalPro.  But not all launches create hockey stick growth. Find out what happened behind the scenes when Intuit rolled out TurboTax PersonalPro the led to its initial failure. This episode is brought to you by: DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos by going to logianalytics.com/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business schools around the nation study Webvan’s overly ambitious rush to the biggest IPO to date in Silicon Valley, as a prime example of what to avoid doing while scaling.While it’s true that the impatience to go public helped steer Webvan off a cliff, the once darling company made three critical, but often overlooked mistakes when it came to revolutionizing home grocery deliveries. We'll talk with Ben Foster about his experience leading product teams at Webvan. This episode is brought to you by: DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos by going to logianalytics.com/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everyone fails at some point in their career. Small failures, big failures. We're going to cover them all on this season of Rocketship. Today Michael Sacca and Mike Belsito are going to discuss some of their own product failures - from eFunneral, to Crew to Brandisty they've learned a lot from these mistakes. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com. Augusto Digital. Augusto Digital is a product engineering team that creates web, mobile, and cloud based digital products. Rocketship listeners get $1,000 off by going to augusto.digital/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Right before we kick off Season 8 of Rocketship, we wanted to go back and look at some of our favorite episodes of the past 6 years. From relationships to product love, the history of the baseball cap to the first ever e-commerce website on the internet today we have something for in this episode. Listen to the full episodes: Relationships http://rocketship.fm/episodes/chapter_7_relationships/ Twitter Confessionals http://rocketship.fm/episodes/twitter_confessionals/ The Evolution of the Baseball Cap http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_evolution_of_the_baseball_cap_product_ep_1/ The Untold Story Of Books.Com http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_untold_story_of_books_com_part_1/ http://rocketship.fm/episodes/the_untold_story_of_books_com_part_2/ Mental Models for Product Managers http://rocketship.fm/episodes/mental_models_for_product_managers/ Mastering Jobs to be Done http://rocketship.fm/episodes/mastering_jobs_to_be_done_interviews_the_preparation/ Interview with Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt http://rocketship.fm/interviews/ryan_hoover_of_product_hunt_on_how_product_hunt_was_launched_in_less_than_1_week/ This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With companies such as Google and Facebook we are trading our data in exchange for the benefits of their product, is the solution to stop giving big companies our information, or is it about recognizing how companies are using our data and making a conscience decision of what information we give away? We tackle these questions and more on this week's episode. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the second part of our series on data we talk about the origins of Hadoop, the technology that formed the very foundation of what we know as “big data”. The emergence of Hadoop represents perhaps the single most important development in our lifetimes for storing, processing, and retrieving big data. And not only is this technology behind just about everything you touch on the web, it’s now even being used in the medical field to save lives. Including interviews with Vas Natarajan of Accel Ventures and Amr Awadallah of Cloudera. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we talk with Ben Foster the Chief Product Officer at GoCanvas and former product manager at Ebay. Ben is a wealth of Product knowledge and experience and today we discuss the topic of A/B testing and how he's evolved his focus to be vision driven so that he doesn't miss the big opportunities to solve customer problems. This was a hard learned lesson and we hear about his experience A/B testing features with moderate success and what caused him to shift if focus. This episode is brought to you by: Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresner – to help you navigate the BI landscape. Visit logianalytics.com/rocketship to claim your free reports today. DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. App & Flow. If you're a startup founder, App & Flow will help you build an app that's ready for takeoff. Rocketship listeners get 25% off of their first month by going to rocketshipfm.appandflow.com. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we explore the history of the Product Manager from it's early ideation by Neil McElroy to it's growth at Hewlett-Packard thru it's maturation at Microsoft and into today. We talk with former Microsoft Project Manager, Ellen Chisa, Former Microsoft Engineer (and 55th hire), Mark Zbikowski and Matt LeMay, the Author of Product Management in Practice, about this evolution over the past 80 years.  For Neil McElroy the Brand Men were essentially his manifesto on what would become a product manager today. Their responsibilities ranged from tracking sales to managing the product, advertising and promotions. They were to “take full responsibility” for the brands implementation of advertising and sales and take a ‘huge weight’ off of the sales managers who were both ideating and implementing growth strategies. Bill Hewlett and David Packard interpreted the Brand Man ethos as putting decision making as close as possible to the customer, and making the product manager the voice of the customer internally. In the book The Hewlett-Packard Way this is credited with sustaining Hewlett-Packard’s 50 year record of unbroken 20% year-on-year growth between 1943 and 1993. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all think we know everything there is to know about our customers, but data shows that we often know a surprising little amount about who our customers really are. We tend to get complacent and continue building for the personas that we think use our product, but is there a better way? We talk with Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups and Build Better Products, about methods for better user research practices we can all start doing today. This episode is brought to you by Gusto, making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. Rocketship listeners get three months free at gusto.com/rocketship. This episode is brought to you by Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresner – to help you navigate the BI landscape. Visit logianalytics.com/rocketship to claim your free reports today. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Love isn’t rational. It doesn’t always make sense. But when love is in the air, nothing can come between you and a public tweet. Today we talk to people who’ve professed their love, publicly, for products they love. We discuss why they love the products they love, and what about these companies and brands gets them so excited. We dove into tech brands like Slack and Intercom as well as roll-on deodorant brand Phresh and personal fashion brand Stitch Fix. Huge thanks to our guests today: Lindsey Smith: https://twitter.com/LindseySmithHHC, Jordi Romero: https://twitter.com/jordiromero, Natalie Gerke: https://twitter.com/Ngerke, & Alys Gagnon: https://twitter.com/AlysJ This episode is brought to you by Phrase. Do you have a product that you want to take to a global audience? Phrase will be your single point of truth for all of your translation projects. Go to phrase.com/rocketship to get your free Phrase account today. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would it look like if your company built a boat? Would your customers know what to expect? Launching your first product is punishingly hard. Getting to the second one often even more so, as everything will change: Distribution, brand, product strategy, organization and psychology. Learn about the challenges of growing your product family and how to overcome them.  Georg Petschnigg, Chief Innovation Officer from WeTransfer, and co-founder of FiftyThree, the company behind the popular Paste and Paper applications, will draws from his extensive experiences building award winning products used by millions around the world. Learn how to set up your team and product strategy for success. This episode is brought to you by Logi Analytics, which is offering 5 free reports – from analysts like Gartner and Dresner – to help you navigate the BI landscape. Visit logianalytics.com/rocketship to claim your free reports today. This episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that simplifies the hosting experience, Visit Cloudways.com and use the promo code RSCW to get 30% off for 3 months on Cloudways managed cloud hosting platform. This episode is also brought to you by DigitalOcean, the cloud platform that makes it easy for startups to launch high-performance modern apps and websites. Learn more about DigitalOcean and apply for Hatch at do.co/rocketship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices