Rocketship.fm

What happens when your new boss wants you to share everything you know about your past employers' future plans? Or what about an interview process that never seems to end? We discuss our two confessions today with Rich Mironov, the author of The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we tackle awkward team bonding and an overbearing CEO with Rahul Vohra, CEO of Superhuman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we explore our first two confessionals with Ben Foster, CPO at WOOP and author of Build What Matters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Season 10 of Rocketship.fm, we’re turning the microphone on you - thats right. We’re making this entire season about your workplace confessions. Season 10 of Rocketship.fm is set to launch on February 11th. The new season will focus around workplace confessions. We all have that workplace story that's so hard to believe we're nervous to tell it in public. Sometimes we're not sure if this is normal behavior or if we're the crazy ones for thinking it's not. In Season 10 of Rocketship.fm, we’re turning to our listeners – collecting hundreds of anonymous stories of their worst workplace experiences and featuring the best of them all season long. 

 We’ll be discussing everything from overbearing bosses, toxic cultures, HR nightmares, failed office romances and so much more. Each episode we’ll be inviting on a celebrity guest to help us talk through these issues and bring a little sanity (and hopefully clarity) to each of these confessions. Guests include Whoop CPO Ben Foster, Superhuman CEO Rahul Mirnov, Product Influencer Rich Mirnov, Freelance Influencer Jay Clouse, and Founder of product Insitute Melissa Perri, among many others. It’s sure to be as entertaining as it will be educational. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Season 9 of Rocketship.fm featured a lot of great stories, however, two stood out to us and we wanted to put together a follow up to find out what has happened since we first aired. Earth Class Mail, the early 2000’s startup that was featured on it’s own reality TV show, staring Ron Weiner which has now been twice sold, has now found a new home and clear direction. We hear from Casey Shaeffer about what has been happening at the company since 2017. Plus, we sit down with Marcus Bullock of Flikshop, the founder who went to prison for eight years as a minor and now runs a successful company making it easier for families and loved ones to stay in touch with inmates.  If you missed the original stories, make sure to check out the full episodes on Earth Class Mail and Flikshop. 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. Metalab who since 2006, has helped some of the world’s top companies - like Uber and Google - design, build, and ship amazing products and services. Wondery, the creators of the Business Wars podcast. Sometimes the prize is your wallet or your attention. Sometimes, it’s just the fun of beating the other guy. The outcome of these battles shapes what we buy and how we live. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How meta is this?! From the first audio broadcast on the internet to the explosion of Serial, we explore the history of the Podcasting medium in our season finale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Signal is having a moment. The pandemic drove unprecedented sign-ups on the encrypted messaging app, as people started communicating more online. Then, nationwide protests over police brutality prompted another round of records. Signal saw about one million downloads world-wide in May, according to analytics firm App Annie. Protesters have flocked to the app. Even though people who organize and participate in protests are protected by the First Amendment, they often seek secure communication, out of caution. And if they do get into legal trouble, Signal is designed to limit the information the messaging service can give to the authorities. That is what initially attracted privacy die-hards to Signal. In a 2015 talk, the app’s creator, Moxie Marlinspike, declared, “Privacy is at an all-time low, and surveillance is at an all-time high.” Signal was intended as the antidote. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cyberpunk 2077 is a 2020 action role-playing video game developed and published by CD Projekt Red. The story takes place in Night City, an open world set in the Cyberpunk universe. Players assume the first-person perspective of a customizable mercenary known as V, who can acquire skills in hacking and machinery with options for melee and ranged combat. First introduced in 2012 and touting it's ability to be the leading RPG game, Cyberpunk 2077 built a huge cult following which was magnified when they introduced Keanu Reeves to a live audience and announced that he voiced one of the key characters in the game. These large ambitions all came crashing down in 2020, after multiple push release dates, controversies around working conditions and a launch so buggy that SONY pulled it from it's stores globally. This is the story of a hype machine gone wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships. These models are accumulated over time by an individual and used to make faster and better decisions. Today to explore Mental Models for Product Leadership and how to use them with your team every day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A mental model is any concept that helps explain, analyze, or navigate the world. As product managers, our mental models drive our decision-making, the way we communicate and collaborate with others, and how we prioritize. Today we explore some essential mental models for Product Managers. From opportunity cost to confirmation bias to Semmelweis reflex and even key failure. There are countless mental models that are essential for Product Managers to understand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mental models are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason. A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks. Today we explore some of Charlie Munger's famous mental models as outlined in his speech "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The fastest vaccine ever developed was the mumps vaccine and that took four years, from collecting viral samples to licensing the drug in 1967. This year, we watched as BioNTech, in partnership with Pfizer, developed the Covid-19 vaccine is under 11 months. Today we tell the story of how this revolutionary technology and partnership allowed for such rapid development at a time when the world needed it most. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of Nintendo traces back to 1889, when it was founded to produce handmade hanafuda. Nintendo Co., Ltd. (任天堂株式会社, Nintendō kabushikigaisha) is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It eventually became one of the most prominent figures in today's video game industry, being the world's largest video game company by revenue. Today we explore their 130 year history from making handmade playing cards to one of the largest video game console manufacturers in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zappos was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn who launched the company with Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin who invested $2 million through their investment firm Venture Frogs. The company was officially launched online in 1999 as "ShoeSite.com." In July 1999, the company's name was changed from ShoeSite to Zappos after "zapatos," the Spanish word meaning "shoes." In 2000, Venture Frogs invested in the business and Zappos moved into their office space. In 2001, Hsieh came on board as co-CEO with Nick Swinmurn. Tony helped Zappos.com grow from nearly zero sales to a company with a $1.2 billion valuation and an eventual acquisition by Amazon - allowing the company to remain completely independent because of the strength of the brand they had built from a relentless focus on customer satisfaction. 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 podcast is brought to you by: Digital Ocean is a cloud provider that makes it easy for entrepreneurs and startups to deploy and scale web applications with no issues and unplanned costs. Get started for free at do.co/rocketship. Teamistry is a new podcast brought to you by Atlassian. Teamistry is the chemistry of unsung teams that achieve the impossible. Season two begins on September 21st. Subscribe today. Gusto is a payroll management software with excellent benefits, technology, and support. Rocketship listeners get 3 months free at by going to gusto.com/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When it was launched in 2005, according to co-founder Steve Chen, Youtube was designed as a way for people to upload videos of themselves talking about the partner of their dreams. Co-founder Jawed Karim also talked about YouTube’s romantic origins. “We even had a slogan for it: Tune in, Hook up.” Despite offering to pay women $20 to upload videos of themselves to YouTube, nobody came forward, forcing Chen, Karim and co-founder Chad Hurley to adopt a different strategy. Today we explore the epic pivot Youtube took just ten days after launching, that set it on course to be the backbone of video on the internet that it is today. This podcast is brought to you by: Digital Ocean is a cloud provider that makes it easy for entrepreneurs and startups to deploy and scale web applications with no issues and unplanned costs. Get started for free at do.co/rocketship. Teamistry is a new podcast brought to you by Atlassian. Teamistry is the chemistry of unsung teams that achieve the impossible. Season two begins on September 21st. Subscribe today. Gusto is a payroll management software with excellent benefits, technology, and support. Rocketship listeners get 3 months free at by going to gusto.com/rocketship. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Long before Airbnb persuaded strangers to sleep in one another's homes and became a $31 billion company, it was just an idea to earn a bit of extra money to make rent. After their first guests, Airbnb's founders realized they were on to something bigger than a stopgap for rent. They faced rejection plenty of times — and created their own version of Obama O's cereal — but the three founders of Airbnb have built a big business in the past nine years. Here's how they turned their idea to rent out an air mattress into a business that has the hotel industry running scared. This podcast is brought to you by: Digital Ocean is a cloud provider that makes it easy for entrepreneurs and startups to deploy and scale web applications with no issues and unplanned costs. Get started for free at do.co/rocketship. Teamistry is a new podcast brought to you by Atlassian. Teamistry is the chemistry of unsung teams that achieve the impossible. Season two begins on September 21st. Subscribe today. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stark, a New York-based startup that lets designers others building with design software run their files through an integrated tool that checks it and provides color edits and other suggestions to help them meet guidelines for people who see less well, has picked up $1.5 million. Stark plans to use the funding to continue building integrations into commonly-used design apps and create integrations for developers (where it will read and provide guidance on code: next up is a Github integration), and continue building out its business with expanded pricing and usage tiers. Led by Cat Noone, who raised with no in-person meetings in the midst of a global pandemic and economic crisis, Stark is position to take over the compliance and accessibility market through a bottoms up, community first approach. Her story today on Rocketship.fm. This podcast is brought to you by: Digital Ocean is a cloud provider that makes it easy for entrepreneurs and startups to deploy and scale web applications with no issues and unplanned costs. Get started for free at do.co/rocketship. Teamistry is a new podcast brought to you by Atlassian. Teamistry is the chemistry of unsung teams that achieve the impossible. Season two begins on September 21st. Subscribe today. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in 2008, SEMrush started as a small group of SEO and IT specialists united by one mission — to make online competition fair and transparent, with equal opportunities for everyone. In 12 years, they've grown into one of the world's leading competitive research service for online marketing. Today we tell the story of that journey. This podcast is brought to you by: Digital Ocean is a cloud provider that makes it easy for entrepreneurs and startups to deploy and scale web applications with no issues and unplanned costs. Get started for free at do.co/rocketship. Teamistry is a new podcast brought to you by Atlassian. Teamistry is the chemistry of unsung teams that achieve the impossible. Season two begins on September 21st. Subscribe today. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rapid iteration, A/B testing, and growth hacking—these buzzwords have everyone’s attention in product management today. But while they dominate the current discussion, something even more significant has been lost in their limelight: long-term value creation for the customer. Product advisors Rajesh Nerlikar and Ben Foster believe that consistently delivering meaningful outcomes requires a deep understanding of your customer’s definition of success. Combine a bold customer-centric vision with a practical execution strategy, and you have a recipe that reveals product development priorities and the pathway to innovation. Purchase a copy of Build What Matters on Amazon. This podcast is brought to you by: Digital Ocean is a cloud provider that makes it easy for entrepreneurs and startups to deploy and scale web applications with no issues and unplanned costs. Get started for free at do.co/rocketship. Teamistry is a new podcast brought to you by Atlassian. Teamistry is the chemistry of unsung teams that achieve the impossible. Season two begins on September 21st. Subscribe today. Rocketship is brought to you by The Podglomerate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices