Without Borders

Our guest in this 35th podcast episode with a unicorn start-up leader is the founder and CEO of FullStory, Scott Voigt.   FullStory is a technology company that focuses on creating the perfect digital experience. Their tech records the customer journey in a privacy friendly way, whether it's on a browser or a native device. The data is then reported back to the owners of those properties so they can understand exactly when, where and why their customers are receiving a lower level of digital experience, and how to rectify it.   Scott has been In the SaaS game for over 25 years. He worked at a number of companies over that time – but the FullStory story picked up in the early 2000’s when he was working on a startup (where he met his two co-founders) which was later acquired by Google. “The whole time we wanted to get the band back together, and so we finally got the courage, say, in 6 or 7 years after we had sold that company to Google to quit our day jobs, really to pursue this idea of perfecting digital experience by developing a very innovative piece of technology that didn't exist before”, says Voigt.   In 2021, the company achieved Unicorn status after securing an impressive $171 million in funding. Since then, it has continued to flourish, establishing a prominent foothold in Europe and Australia while also expanding its operations into Germany and Singapore.  When talking about his strengths as a leader, Scott said he is always sceptical of people who claim to know what their own strengths are, which is why it is important for people to communicate this to each other. Scott has always had the “gift of the gab” when it comes to talking in front of people, but revealed he has a weakness when it comes to writing: “For a long time I was very hesitant to put words on paper. And so, I think I probably would lean into to verbal communication. At some point I decided I wanted to go back to business school, university here in the States. And it turns out in order to get in, you had to learn how to write”, he jokes.   We asked Scott whether the culture at FullStory had changed since becoming a Unicorn. He made a conscious effort to ensure that it did not, and one way of doing this, he encouraged everyone to be proud and hungry to succeed, but not pay attention to the numbers. He says “nobody gives you a high five in the world when you refinance your house. That's just a financing event. And so, it is with FullStory.” Scott trusts that while it's gratifying to have some sort of recognition for their accomplishments, such as this big milestone, it's important not to become too fixated on that number since it is bound to fluctuate over time.  The FullStory founder and CEO believes that in order to be a successful leader, you must be genuine. He emulates this in every talk he gives to the company, by showing empathy and always encourages employees to “honour your inner sceptic”. In other words, questioning and testing that what he says is true so that the team can build real trust and be more aligned. Being genuine builds trust.  The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast. Alongside Holly Justice, Senior Partner at Tyto PR.    We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

Our guest in this 34th podcast episode with a unicorn start-up leader is the CEO of 6Sense, Jason Zintak. The B2B sales and marketing platform 6sense was founded in 2013, but Jason joined the company four years later. The company then achieved unicorn status in March 2021 and last year, after a Series E funding of $200 million, reached a valuation of $5.2 billion with over 1300 employees. Jason shares what it was like joining a company as CEO, having previously been led by the founder, with the challenge of achieving unicorn status. “It’s been quite a journey", Jason admits. “I joined the company and the founders at roughly $5 million in ARR [Annual Recurring Revenue] and today we're $200 million plus or minus, and that's just five and a half years later. So, we have quite a lot of experience together”, he adds. He goes on to talk about what it takes to build a successful management team, such as getting to know your team and how they work and complement your own skill set. “One of our values at the company is just a growth mindset, balanced with accountability, integrity, having fun, being one team, so to speak. And we've practiced that for the last six years.” These values have been a part of the company's DNA and play a significant role in their success formula. We then got onto the topic of ChatGPT, and Jason revealed that 6Sense has had this technology within the product for the past two years, but they feel fortunate to be “riding the tailwind”. The whole company is built upon the ability for AI to drive modern applications. “I think AI is embedded in increasingly more and more things and part of our [reason for] founding the company is that there's just too much data for any human to really process.”  Jason has always loved communicating with people, it’s what got him into sales and marketing in his early career, but will also often sit back and observe, and even feels nervous sometimes. He finds it harder to connect with employees, especially new recruits, due to a remote structure and rapid growth, but will always make a conscious effort to get small groups together on “workerversaries” to reconnect and stay in touch. In addition, he maintains an "open door policy" to encourage internal communication, inviting anyone who wishes to discuss anything at any time, regardless of location. Jason’s organization operates as a flat structure without any mandatory hierarchy, which he believes fosters this closeness and “helps keep it human.” Talking about his leadership style and who has had the biggest influence throughout his career, interestingly, Jason believes that we shouldn’t be trying to emulate a leader that inspires us. Instead, he urges people to adopt small parts of what those leaders do well, but to focus primarily on being your own authentic self.   The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast. Alongside Holly Justice, Senior Partner at Tyto PR. We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

Our guest in this 33rd podcast episode with a unicorn start-up leader is the CEO and founder of Envoy, Larry Gadea. Envoy is changing modern workplaces by making office life and work more meaningful, by redefining how people, places, and technology work together. Founded in 2013, the company reached unicorn status in January 2022 with a valuation of $1.4 billion. Larry has been a keen engineer from a very young age, writing scripts and learning about reverse engineering whilst his friends were in school. This early skill came in use when he was headhunted by Google to build software for them at the age of 17. Four years later, Larry moved to Twitter, which is where he gained the inspiration to create the original version of Envoy’s visitor management product. This same software is now used in over 20,000 offices across the world.  Amongst the high points of Envoy’s journey, Larry also shares some of the challenges faced over the years, namely the COVID-19 pandemic which was a pivotal time for the company. “Visitor management products and COVID. Let me just tell you, not a great mix”, Larry reflects. Despite the hurdles put in its way, the company still continued to accelerate during this time by becoming even more thoughtful about the future needs of the workplace, adapting their offering and putting the spotlight on the humans behind the technology.  Larry trusts it’s essential to surround yourself with experienced and tenacious people who are excited about scaling the business and changing the world. He acknowledges “it’s very easy to give up on something, especially in Silicon Valley” as opportunities – or recruiters – can come up unexpectedly. He claims he has been “given the gift of resilience”, and he believes this, as a founder or an entrepreneur, is one of the most important qualities he can have.   Larry is a passionate leader, who believes the key elements of successful leadership are clearly communicating your expectations, being able and willing to admit when you have made a mistake, and consistently repeating yourself until you are told to stop.  The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast. Alongside Holly Justice, Senior Partner at Tyto PR. We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

Our guest in this 32nd interview episode with a unicorn start-up leader is the CEO and Co-founder of Coalition, Joshua Motta. Coalition is the world’s first Active Insurance company, designed to prevent digital risk before it strikes. The company combines the power of technology and insurance to help organisations identify, mitigate and respond to digital risks.  Coalition was co-founded in 2017 by Joshua Motta and John Hering and has since raised over $700M from leading global technology investors. Coalition reached unicorn status in 2021 with a current valuation of $5 billion, trusted by over 104,000 customers worldwide. Joshua started his cybersecurity journey in two of the world's most prolific companies and organisations, Microsoft and the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Insurance, he jokes, is a very dangerous field and known for being ‘technologically adept’. But in some ways, this was the perfect preparation. Coalition is "what would happen if you combined a financial service - insurance - with a technology company and an intelligence community mindset." His previous experiences, including positions at companies like Cloudflare and Goldman Sachs, helped him bring disciplines together to tackle a problem in a novel way.  Coalition has reached unicorn status thanks to its focus on its customers. Joshua states “we’re really partnering with them to improve their cybersecurity to mitigate the risks that they face before the event happens,” he also mentions that they are not “just paying out a claim” but rather, they are “on the ground helping them to recover.” The commitment to client protection further extends to Coalition’s communication, where Joshua believes that effective communication comes from ‘putting yourself in the shoes of the customer’ and simplifying the message to make it as accessible to the customer as possible. Joshua also explores leadership and hiring at Coalition, with their recruitment process being that of a “stars attract stars” philosophy – hiring talented, ambitious people who want to work with other talented and ambitious people.  The second stage of this approach is embracing a ‘tribal’ philosophy, which means getting these top performers and talented individuals to work together in harmony. Loyalty, a sense of shared purpose and an egalitarian ethos are embedded into Coalition’s tribal culture and have helped them succeed. Being deliberate about culture is incredibly important, states Coalition’s CEO. At the end of the day, “culture is not what you write down, it is what you practice.”  The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast. Alongside Holly Justice, Senior Partner at Tyto PR. We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

Our guest in this 31st interview episode with a unicorn start-up leader is the CEO of Tealium, Jeff Lunsford.  Tealium is a leading customer data platform (CDP), connecting you with your customers, through your data. For companies to better connect with their customers, Tealium combines customer data across web, mobile, offline, and IoT. With more than 1,300 built-in connections supported by Tealium's turnkey integration ecosystem, brands can build a complete and up-to-date consumer data framework.     The company was founded in 2008 by Mike Anderson and Ali Behnam, with Jeff Lunsford taking the position of CEO in 2013.  The company reached unicorn status in February 2021, with a valuation of $1.2 billion. Today, more than a thousand top companies around the globe rely on Tealium to power their consumer data strategy.  Tealium have reached unicorn status thanks to their focus and care for their customers- with a company culture that is “one of winning”, Jeff states that they “win together as a team, holding each other accountable for performance,” acknowledging that although every deal can’t be won, you can still learn from these instances and keep improving. Thanks to this commitment to improvement, Tealium have built a culture of trust and an extensive portfolio of repeat customers.  Jeff Lunsford has more than two decades of experience as a technology and internet executive and leader. Jeff says “success in business is never a straight line. It is always ups and downs”, and highlights how important it is as leaders, to always have a “positive bounce” in your step. He also believes that the most important thing in business is not IPOs or unicorn statuses, but rather “building great solutions and taking great care of customers so they can deliver true business value.”   The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast. Alongside Holly Justice, Senior Partner at Tyto PR .   We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

Our guest in this 30th interview episode with a unicorn start-up leader is the CEO and co-founder of Chainalysis, Michael Gronager. Founded in 2014, Chainalysis is a blockchain data platform. It provides data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 70 countries. Their Chainalysis’s data powers investigation, compliance, and its market intelligence software has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. The company reached unicorn status in 2021 and is now valued at $8.6 billion.   Ever since Michel Gronager was a kid, he saw himself as an innovator. He started his entrepreneurial journey, before co-founding Chainalysis, as the co-founder of Kraken, a digital asset platform and prior to this, he had a decade of experience in working on big data projects. He points out that the first thing he looked at when finishing university was virtual reality, and distributed computing platforms to do virtual reality. That led him to data, which ended up being his passion, because at the end of the day “data is growing way faster than anything else, and the opportunity of analysing that is huge.”  Gronager analysed data for high-energy physics and big science projects such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. When he stopped working in the public sector, he was bitten by this innovation bug to build something himself and have a private company. At the same time, he stumbled upon crypto, and at a moment when the industry was transforming and growing rapidly, Kraken’s Jesse Powell asked him to join the team. It became clear to him that there was a path forward with his expertise in big data, so he created a company that didn’t exist at the time, with a fresh idea: indexing and understanding all the data that is in the crypto space as it is growing, and this is where Chainalysis began.  The cryptocurrency sector is a peculiar one, where everything changes constantly, says Chainalysis’s CEO. There is a vast amount of innovation happening around crypto, so it means that his company must be deep in the product side and be constantly innovating and spending their efforts in building the right tools and products around the DeFi space. At the same time, another peculiarity of the crypto space is that it’s global. As Michael states, “crypto is everywhere and was born being global”. This also means, for a company like his, that they need to focus not on one market or one jurisdiction but work and think globally.   One of the things that changed when the company reached unicorn status back in 2021 is that it allowed him to make certain high-profile hires that would have been hard to make otherwise. Unicorn status “opened the door for talent”, he says, and this is important in a quite crowded space as technology. But Chainalysis has a couple of unique aspects that have helped them differentiate over the years. First, what they’re building is unique, so they’re not one of many. They’re building the market for themselves and growing the TAM every day and working with new customers.   Secondly, their business is very mission driven. What joins their public sector clients, more than 150 in 35 countries around the world, is that they’re trying to keep society safe, keep nations-state safe, and protect these from terrorists and other negative actors. They need to ensure they’re gaining the trust of these institutions, and a huge part of their culture is believing in their work and delivering high-quality data while maintaining humility and building trustworthy relationships with all stakeholders and customers. Staff at Chainalysis have a purpose because they see that getting better at understanding crypto and indexing it, could make the world a better place.   Michael highlights that there are many individuals who have had an impact on him as a leader, including Todd Olson from Tyto-client Pendo, and Manny Medina at Outreach. His greatest strength, he says, has been prioritising empathy and “trying to understand the problems in a business, and the problems that the individuals are trying to solve.” He also believes that this skillset has a lot to do with communication, not about trying to understand all the different areas of the business, as he’s no expert in areas such as sales or in a product function at the scale that they have today. But he can talk to the people there and build relevant connections, and that’s a crucial asset in managing and leading a business.  He also points out that he has always enjoyed communicating, and admits has his own style. He’s much better at improvising than at preparing, as his communications style is best suited to improvisation rather than practice. If he were able to go back in time, he says, he would speak to his old self and tell himself that “when you communicate, you need to overcommunicate.” Looking at things from a different perspective is important, and in any communicational exchange you need to understand that the receiver might have a different viewpoint. “When you say it three times, you probably need to say it three times again after that”, states Michael. The company now has more than 700 employees, and he still does onboarding himself once a month and has weekly office hours where people can ask questions or simply come and chat to him. These types of strategies are vital to the successful growth of a company.   The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast.  We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

Our guest in this 29th interview episode with a unicorn start-up leader is the CEO of Mollie, Shane Happach.     Founded in 2004, Mollie makes it easier for small businesses and start-ups across Europe when it comes to connecting payment systems, banks and other providers of payment services. As one of Europe's fastest-growing payment service providers, Mollie reached unicorn status in September 2020 and is now valued at $6.5 billion.  Shane Happach started his leadership journey in a quite un-entrepreneurial way, as he likes to point out. He joined as an early employee for Global Collect when the company only had 35 workers. By the time he left, the business had a staff of 500 people. When he arrived at Mollie, the job wasn’t about optimising, but rather building the business from top to bottom.  Unlike other successful startups where the CEO is also one of the founders, Shane came to Mollie after the company was already established as a unicorn. He had to find a way to complement with his skills the work that the founder and the rest of the leadership team had done for the company. Now both work efficiently to leverage each other's expectation, having in their best interests the growth of the company. With Mollie being one of the most valuable start-ups in Europe, Shane says that this is a huge validation of their business model, but it is not the top measure of success that they look at.  Happach has big plans for Mollie, he wants to expand their financial services and fit their product into the Western Europe market, and finally go pan-European. But ultimately, he says: "We don't see any reason why this couldn't be a global category business as well.”   There is not a book that can teach you as much as experience does. Happach mentions that a lot of what he has learned comes from making mistakes and figuring out what you don’t want to become and how you don’t want to lead. For him, most of the achievements feel like team accomplishments, rather than taking and giving individual credit. Living in different countries allowed him to draw on from the American leadership style, Dutch style and even Latin American style: “I would say I'm a mutt, but only the best of breed.”  Understanding the complexity of their product as a payment service provider is key to getting it right for their clients, says Happach. There is no merit in pronouncing yourself as an expert and closing your mind to new ideas. “It's finding people that are really good at that and are willing to work at it incessantly in spite of personality differences, cultural differences, geographic and time zone differences that's always, I think, every leader's greatest challenge”, he points out.   “Be bold, be loved, be authentic” are Mollie’s values. Shane Happach says that the company wants to make sure people can express themselves in their work environment and feel there are opportunities to progress. The fact that the industry has developed over time does not mean that there will not continue to be disruptive developments, even if they have not yet occurred. “And those are likely to come from companies that allow people that kind of intellectual freedom”, says Mollie's CEO.   Shane says that to successfully communicate your views you have to respect that people consume information differently and you also need to make the leadership team more approachable. You will find Happach walking around the hallways at Mollie and having a casual coffee with workers. He explains that he’s not hard to find because “there's one coffee machine that serves at least 150 people”, and he drinks a lot of coffee.   The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast.  We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

Our guest in this 28th interview episode with a unicorn start-up leader is Exotec CEO and co-founder, Romain Moulin.   Thanks to its fleets of robots, capable of moving in three dimensions, Exotec has revolutionized the way its customers organise their warehouses and how their logistics flows. Exotec offers a clear alternative to traditional warehouse automation solutions: elegant collaboration between human and robot workers that delivers sustainable warehouse productivity. Founded in 2015, the company has since secured $477m in funding reaching unicorn status in January 2022 with a valuation of $2bn. Moulin’s business now supports 50+ industry-leading brands spanning e-commerce, grocery, retail, manufacturing, and 3PL sectors, now employing over 300 people globally.   Romain’s journey began as an engineer in a heavy goods vehicle company, he then moved to General Electric Healthcare. Romain’s experience in these two areas is extremely relevant to understanding how Exotec was born. That first period helped both him and Renaud Heitz, CTO and co-founder – as they share these career highlights – learn what happens inside the warehouses. On top of this, moving on to GE allowed them both to experience first-hand how a company was developing advanced robotics. They built Exotec based on these two experiences while also using their “willingness to bring something new and disruptive to logistics.”    Romain recognises how becoming a unicorn has particularly changed the public perception of Exotec and created a lot of awareness around their brand. The company was the 25th unicorn founded in France, and that achievement was built while sticking to a plan made by the French government to establish 25 unicorns within a certain time period. This brought Exotec, the first industrial unicorn in France, a lot of attention as it made a lot of noise within European markets. Exotec has also managed to successfully establish a reputation for itself within the US market after Goldman-Sachs became an investor.  To describe the culture at Exotec, Romain says they work with "two brains." On the one hand, they have that quite typical software start-up mindset which focuses on going fast and delivering to the market on time. But that part, he recognises, will not work for a hardware company. If you deliver hardware, it means you are an install base and you cannot update it. That means you need, on the other side, perfect execution and an industrial grade quality whilst also being able to deploy this robot in the field that will last for at least ten years. Playing with both sides of their job is probably their biggest defining aspect as a company. They cannot only focus on the industrial quality grade, as it would slow them down but also cannot focus solely on innovation either, as it would create a depth on their install base and at some point interfere with their customer success. That balance between the two, for Romain, is key to understanding Exotec.  When asked about his approach to internal communications, Romain states that at Exotec transparency is imperative. It can come as an obvious asset when your company is small, but Romain believes that keeping transparency in mind when you're over 400 employees and growing allows you to move much faster in the right direction because everybody at your business understands where you are going. And, as your complexity and departments grow, having everyone on board can really help you. This, Romain explains, also works externally. Having the same stories for his team, investors and customers, makes his life easier. What he loves more than anything is talking to his end customers, and he's more of a "personal communicator than a broadcast communicator" because he likes to be close to the end customer to build a strong relationship.      The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast.  We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

This is the fifth episode of our DE&I series. In these conversations, we want to explore issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and our hope is that these help to build a world in which people from all backgrounds and with different views can thrive. Our aim with these series is to chat with inspirational guests who can encourage us all to look at the industries we work in (media, comms and tech) from different perspectives. Our guest for this episode is Ella McCann-Tomlin, a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Consultant at Ardent with a passion for organisational change. She works with companies to transform their leadership cultures, the diversity of their teams, and their social mission. She spent almost a decade working in high-growth tech before setting up her own consultancy business. It was this experience in fast-paced environments that led her to want to work with other companies on how to get their culture right, and how to live by their values, as they scale. In this interview hosted by Tyto’s Shamina Peerboccus, Ella discusses her incredible journey of starting her own consultancy supporting the leadership of organisations. In the interview, Ella challenges the performative nature of companies when it comes to DE&I and discusses the need for companies to be held accountable. She recognises that many companies may not know where to start when it comes to DE&I strategy and transforming management culture and therefore leaves practical tips in the interview for companies to adopt. Ella emphasises on “working from the inside out” and focusing on strong internal processes by means of building DE&I strategies that leverage the voices of people most excluded within organisations. Supporting companies empathetically and focusing on long term strategies will inevitably produce meaningful results and transform society in the process.   You can watch the recording on our YouTube channel here:  https://youtu.be/mq6-flboZLY  

Our guest in this 27th interview episode with a unicorn start-up leader is Highspot CEO and co-founder Robert Wahbe.  Trusted by General Motors, Nestle, Twitter, Dow Jones and many more, Highspot helps companies worldwide improve the performance of their sales teams by turning strategic initiatives into business outcomes. Their unified sales enablement platform gives revenue teams a single solution to elevate customer conversations and drive repeatable revenue, bringing together native content and guidance, training and coaching, and engagement intelligence – all supported by actionable analytics. Founded in 2012, Highspot has raised a total of $648 million, with a valuation of $3.5 billion.  Robert's entrepreneurial journey began in 1993 when he founded his first startup, Colusa, which would be acquired by Microsoft just two years later. He then spent more than 16 years at Microsoft, working hand in hand with the current CEO, Satya Nadella, until he decided to create Highpost in 2012.     Robert acknowledges that the biggest challenge during the last ten years has been the initial stages of the company and the uncertainty of not knowing what will be next, but that he is now very proud of the company Highspot has become. According to him, Highspot is on a dual journey. On the one hand, the goal is to get people to understand the category and why it is a strategic lever for their business. To do this, they have created a society of sales enablement professionals that seeks to elevate the category and share best practices and methodologies. The other objective is to win the category and for that "we want to make sure we're doing everything we need to be doing from a product point of view and just as importantly, from a partnership and best practices point of view to be the very best partner to be in that category".     As Robert says, he has been fortunate to learn from great leaders with whom he has worked side by side over the years such as Satya Nadella, Eric Rudder or Bob Muglia. One of the things he has learned along the way is that there are never 100% right answers, there are always different ways to approach problems. For him, what differentiates successful companies is whether they are resilient, whether they are able to ride the tide and adapt to circumstances by making any relevant changes.  One of the aspects Robert emphasises the most is culture, "culture is everything. If you have the wrong culture, it's pretty hard to be successful." That's why he strongly recommends thinking deliberately about the company's culture from the moment it is founded. Inspired by Amazon and its 14 leadership principles, Highspot has created a list of its 11 guiding principles that define its corporate culture, something that Robert says works exceptionally well.     Google's internal communication playbook has also been an inspiration for Robert, which is why Highspot has been implementing weekly all hands from day one. This mechanism and the use of Highspot itself as an internal tool are two of the aspects that Robert highlights in this area.     One of the main communication tips that Robert points out in this episode is the importance of having a vision, a North Star to communicate, but that it is fundamental to meet people where they are and then build the bridge back to whatever vision you have. Leaders need to avoid being too blindsided by their own vision and put themselves in the shoes of whoever they are trying to communicate with.  The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast.  We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

Our guest in this 26th interview episode with a unicorn start-up leader, is Seismic CEO and co-founder Doug Winter. Seismic is the global leader in enablement, helping organizations engage customers, enable teams, and ignite revenue growth. The Seismic Enablement Cloud™️ is a unified enablement platform that equips customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to grow and win. Founded in 2010, Seismic has since raised $440 million and now has a valuation of $3 billion. The company is headquartered in San Diego with offices across North America, Europe, and Australia. Back in 2010, Doug got together with four other entrepreneurs to work from “basements, breweries and beaches”, leading to the eventual launch of Seismic in San Diego. Looking back, he says he is simply most proud of the ability that Seismic harnesses in providing growth opportunities to their customers.  It has been especially rewarding watching a lot of the people who had faith in his early vision join this journey, progressing their careers moving up into more and more senior roles and growing along with the company. That part, according to Doug, is the most satisfying .  In this Without Borders episode, the Seismic CEO explains how they are helping “marketing both support sales better and give them visibility into what’s actually happening in those sales, so they can improve and get stronger”. Fast-moving industries that have many products and complex sales cycles is where Seismic does best, according to Doug. Currently, their biggest customers are tech giants Microsoft, Google and IBM.  Doug also explains how the unicorn title was a big honour and a milestone for him and his company. He says it was very exciting to get there, but “you still have to keep moving forward and setting that next target and going after that next target is really what matters.” For Doug, the fun part is figuring out  the next mountain you are going to have to climb and setting those targets. In terms of future growth and investment, the Seismic CEO explains that right now there is a lot of capital available, but investors are sitting on it as they wait for the markets to stabilise and understand if valuations are reasonable or not. At Seismic, they are aware of this situation, and they continue to make growth-oriented investments as well as product-led investments, but at the same time they “try to keep a cushion” so that they can stay far away from the rocks. In terms of raising awareness and differentiating themselves on the market, Doug admits that “being publicly showy and high profile” has never been his personality, and the company has reflected that over the years. Fortunately, he says he has great people on the team, and on the day of our interview he was proudly sporting the new logo and colours of their fresh rebranded image.  When asked about the culture in his organisation, Doug Winter tells us that initially, it was easy for them to develop a good culture that fed on itself as people like each other and like working there, and genuinely enjoy what they are doing. But recently, the leader of his People team notified him that more than half of the people at Seismic joined after March 2020, which means most of them never met anyone physically, and it’s easier to drift apart when working remotely. Seismic also acquired a company called Lessonly, and this emphasised the need to unify the work culture. Consequently, they recently went through an exercise of developing and formalising it, through the process of documenting their culture. Doug explains that as a team they came up with  a goal that “brings the company together around things [they] all believe in, and [they] all believe are important”. The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast. We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here.

This is the fourth episode of our DE&I series. In these conversations, we want to explore issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and our hope is that these help build a world in which people from all backgrounds and with different views can thrive. Our aim with these series is to chat with inspirational guests who can encourage us all to look at the industries we work in (media, comms and tech) from different perspectives.  Our guest for this episode is Ritu Mohanka, Managing Director for EMEA at Syndio, a technology company that helps companies measure, achieve, and sustain workplace equity. Ritu is passionate about making workplaces more diverse, inclusive, and fair. She joined Syndio with over 20 years of experience in senior leadership roles with HR and talent-focused businesses, including leading business development and strategic growth efforts in EMEA at Glint (now a LinkedIn company).  Prior to Glint, Ritu worked at Kenexa/IBM Smarter Workforce to drive rapid revenue growth across the EMEA region. At IBM she was a highly regarded and lauded Diversity Champion and an Executive Sponsor for several diversity groups. Winner of multiple awards, our guest has been recognised several times on the Empower Top 100 Ethnic Minority Senior Executive rankings.   Tune in to learn about Ritu Mohanka’s incredible journey from a conservative Indian background to having spent over 20 years in leadership roles in the tech industry. Syndio’s EMEA MD highlights the importance of representation and how to encourage businesses to make it happen, as well as what the company is doing to help others offer opportunity equity in the workplace. In the interview hosted by Tyto’s Associate Director Shamina Peerboccus, Ritu also discusses imposter syndrome in women and how to help overcome it by “identifying allies and advocates in the workplace who believe in you and who are supportive of your work.” Recognition is a powerful motivator, and breaking barriers for women and acknowledging the professional achievements of the BAME community is something Ritu is hugely passionate about.   You can watch the recording on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/cFUdAhhtJgY

Our guest in this 25th interview with a unicorn start-up leader is Chargebee CEO and co-founder Krish Subramanian. Chargebee is a subscription management platform that automates the operations of over 4,000 high-growth subscription-based businesses. Founded in 2011, the company reached unicorn status in April 2021 and has now raised a total of $470 million in funding with a valuation of $3.5bn. Chargebee integrates with the leading payment gateways like Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal around the world to let you automate recurring payment collection along with invoicing, taxes, accounting, email notifications, SaaS metrics and customer management.   Krish is a software engineer by training, and he had the idea of learning to build a good company and to "fall in love with some good boring problems." Subscription management is one of those problems that is now growing in complexity and infrastructure. His mission continues to be the same, even if he couldn’t have foreseen that so many businesses would embrace subscriptions the way they have today.   In this episode, Krish explains how he has seen the SaaS business evolve, and how companies like Netflix or Slack have been changing their subscription models based on customer experience and driving other companies to follow suit. Krish himself constantly thinks about how he can integrate his customer’s story to his product roadmap, and he admits that at Chargebee they "strongly lean on listening to customers and taking feedback very seriously to build and solve the right problems." Krish also explains how they have built their culture at Chargebee around their employee’s experiences, and this led them to identify core values such as empathy, customer-centricity, bias to action and curiosity. They haven’t just been aspirational with their culture, they have built it around their rituals and habits, he explains. Now, Krish says, as he has a workforce of 1,200 people spread across the world, his job is "mainly focused on making sure that we are able to bring the right talent into the organisation and then communicating more often about what we are doing, and bringing that consistency internally and externally." One of the biggest challenges he has faced, as the company continues to grow, is learning "to hire people who are extremely better than you, who have been executives in other companies, and manage them as well." That is a journey most first-time founders as himself did not go through, as he was always a developer before founding Chargebee.   The Chargebee founder also highlights the importance of authenticity as a communicator. He explains how he is very grateful for the number of people who put themselves out there in an authentic way, without trying to look or sound different, and how he has learnt by listening to figures like Brian Halligan (Hubspot CEO and founder). Finally, Krish shares a connecting piece of communications advice to those wanting to succeed in business: invest time in educating yourself. "Watch more podcasts, listen to others talk... There is so much to learn!"  The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast.  We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

Our guest in this 35th interview with a unicorn start-up leader is Verbit CEO and founder Tom Livne.  The Verbit Company serves as an essential partner to 2,000+ businesses and institutions. Verbit’s vertical-built voice AI transcription solution that provides its partners with the tools they need to offer engaging and equitable experiences that not only meet accessibility guidelines, but make verbal information searchable and actionable.   Tom started his career as a lawyer, so he was directly facing the transcription problem in his profession. Eventually, his eagerness to solve the problem came from being a frustrated customer, so he imagined there was a better way of doing things. In just a few years since its founding in 2017, Verbit has grown into a unicorn company with a $2B valuation and a global presence. Verbit employs the largest professional captioner workforce in the world and has emerged as the leader in the $30B transcription industry.  In this episode, Tom explains how Verbit, which has a workforce of 600 employees and +35,000 freelancers across the globe, approaches communications and engagement. According to Tom, one of the most important lessons he has learnt over the last five years is you cannot build a company alone: it’s all about the people. He says, “always hire people that you feel you could work for them too.”  Two of the most critical areas that Verbit’s culture focuses on are creating more jobs for people to work from home and accessibility. Tom is excited about the opportunity that his business generates for people with disabilities and, curiously, that’s where his company name comes from too. He thought about the process of looking for verbal information, just as a transcription is, and “just Verb-it!” came to him. And the rest is history, he says.   Finally, Tom shares a piece of communications advice for those who want to succeed in business: patience is key. When he was younger, he states, he didn’t have as much patience, and he believes this ability to choose balance over impulsiveness in communications is one of the key factors that affect the performance of the business. Tom also explains that especially when working remotely, “you need to make sure you’re investing in tools, and you know how to communicate as a professional.”  The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast.  We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

In this special episode of Without Borders in collaboration with the csuite podcast we talk about influence and technology trends in Europe with a panel of experts including  three key European influencers identified in our Tyto Tech 500 Power List: Sophie Proust (CTO of Atos), Dr. Andreas K. Maier (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg), and Jonathan Symcox (Editor of BusinessCloud).   What does it take to have influence in today’s world? What trends will continue to shape the European tech landscape? What can we conclude about the representation of women in tech from this report? These and other questions are answered in this episode in which we look at the point of view from these three highly influential individuals featured in the Tyto Tech 500, our annual report on the tech sector, from our 3 focus countries: the UK, Germany and France.   Sophie Proust, our France business leader representative, has been the Chief Technology Officer of Atos since early 2019. Dr. Andreas Maier, our academic representative from the German Influencer list, is a researcher, professor and Head of the Pattern Recognition lab at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Jonathan Symcox is a journalist and our UK list representative. As an editor, he leads tech publications BusinessCloud and TechBlast UK.  Sophie, Andreas and Jonathan are joined by our own Zoë Clark, Head of Media and Influence at Tyto.  As well as presenting their point of view with these relevant questions, our selected country experts share how COVID has changed their outlook on tech or has impacted their work, from a business, journalist or academic perspective. Sophie, Andreas and Jonathan also share their predictions on future technology that will change the tech landscape in France, Germany and the UK respectively.   The interview was hosted by Graham Barreth of the csuite podcast.  Interested in the 2021 edition of the Tech 500? Here you can see the top 50 influencers in each country and download the full report: https://tytopr.com/tyto-tech-500-power-list-2021/   

Our guest for the 23rd interview with unicorn start-up leaders is Erez Galonska, co-founder and CEO of Infarm.  Infarm is a global vertical farming company that revolutionises the food supply chain and helps make cities self-sufficient in their food production. It was founded in Berlin in 2013 by Osnat Michaeli and the brothers Guy and Erez Galonska, who turned a 1955 Airstream trailer into the world's first mobile vertical farm. From this humble beginning, Infarm has since partnered with more than 30 of the world's top retail chains and is available in more than 1850 stores worldwide, servicing more than 2 million customers in 11 countries.   Infarm is the world's fastest-growing vertical farming company. By 2030, 20 countries in North America, Asia and the Middle East will enjoy Infarm's fresh, highly nutritious, chemical pesticide-free, locally-grown produce year-round, without fluctuation in quality or pricing. The company reached unicorn status in December 2021, having raised $200 million in Series D funding, and that took the total raised to more than $500 million from world-leading investors.  Erez believes that, for you and your business to excel in communications, you must build everything around transparency. Galonska says culture, for him and his company, is also about ownership clarity and helping people to build what they’ve been hired for. This is especially important in a start-up ecosystem, where rapid growth is a constant experience. This has led to Infarm to reorganise the business every half a year to create even more clarity around its needs. They are slowly structuring their culture and establishing a mission-oriented business that will also help them build a better farming network.  The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast.  We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

This is the third episode of our DE&I series. In these conversations, we want to explore issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and our hope is that these help build a world in which people from all backgrounds and with different views can thrive. Our aim with these series is to chat with inspirational guests who can encourage us all to look at the industries we work in (media, comms and tech) from different perspectives.  Our guest for this episode is Léa Lejeune, a French business journalist engaged in topics around equality. Léa recently left a leading business title in France to launch her own media outlet called Plan Cash, where she aims to educate and raise awareness on financial management targeting a female audience. She has also just published a book on what she calls “feminism washing”, “Féminisme Washing: Quand les entreprises récupèrent la cause des femmes”.  In this interview hosted by Tyto’s Shamina Peerboccus, Léa summarises some of the main aspects of her book, such as what "feminism washing" really is. She also gives concrete examples of this practice from large multinationals such as Dior, Amazon Web Services, McDonald's, IBM and BNP Paribas. But Léa also talks about the progress that is being made to achieve equality and points to the case of L'Oréal in France as an example to follow. If you are interested in how to improve equality in your company, Léa also provides tips on practices and policies that can be implemented. Finally, Léa shares her motivation for leaving her job to create her own media, Plan Cash, which is currently a newsletter and will soon also be a podcast.  You can watch the recording on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/iWXvxKPRbu0

Our guest for the 23rd interview with unicorn start-up leaders is James Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Electric Last Mile Solutions (ELMS).  ELMS is redefining the fleet transportation industry with its vertically-integrated approach to designing, manufacturing and customising electric last mile delivery vehicles. With proven technology, seasoned leadership and a vision of a sustainable future, they’re moving the needle when it comes to the expectations of fleet managers and business operators.   James Taylor is an experienced leader who co-founded ELMS in August 2020 and has served as ELMS’ Chief Executive Officer since its inception. Prior to co-founding ELMS, James served as Chief Executive Officer of SERES from May 2019 until August 2020. Prior to SERES, James served as an executive in various automotive companies, including positions of increasing responsibility at Karma Automotive, Dura Automotive Systems and General Motors Company (including with world-renowned General Motors’ brands Hummer and Cadillac).  Among his advice on how to excel in communication, James believes you must train your abilities like with any sport and always be ready for game day. Practice, practice, practice. He reveals why brand reputation is extremely important in the automotive industry, and, in many cases, the difference between making money and not making money. He also points out how you can invent some markets, but in the car business often if it doesn't exist, there might be a good reason for it. According to James, the biggest fundamental in his learnings is to make sure you're starting out with at least a shot by asking yourself: is this product sound, and is there a customer demand?  The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast.  We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here. 

Who were the most influential personalities in tech in 2021? What trends have shaped the sector? What role do journalists play in this area? Have we seen a greater representation of women in tech in the last twelve months? These and other questions are answered in this special episode of Without Borders in which we look at the key findings of the Tyto Tech 500, our annual report on the tech sector in the UK, Germany and France.  Sabrina Horn, award-winning CEO, tech communications expert, advisor/board member, and author of "Make It, Don't Fake It: Leading with Authenticity for Real Business Success", is in charge of moderating this discussion featuring a Tyto expert from each of the countries analysed: UK's Zoë Clark, Head of Media and Influence at Tyto, Germany's Silke Rossmann, Head of Practice, and France's representative, Shamina Peerboccus a Senior Consultant at the agency.  As well as presenting the highlights of the Tech 500, our Tyto experts share what a US communications person or marketer looking to bring their brand to Europe should take from the ranking, what an individual needs to do to be able to get onto this list, and what aspect from this year’s trends really caught their attention.  You can watch the recording on our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nQLHYmLcG0  Interested in the 2021 edition of the Tech 500? Here you can see the top 50 influencers in each country and download the full report: https://tytopr.com/tyto-tech-500-power-list-2021/  

This is our second episode from our new series of interviews with inspiring individuals from across the globe. Our aim with these series is to chat with inspirational guests who can encourage us all to look at the industries we work in (media, comms and tech) from different perspectives. Our guest for this episode is Rebecca Vincent, an American human rights activist and currently Director of International Campaigns and UK Bureau Director for our pro bono client Reporters Without Borders. Based in Paris, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is an independent NGO with consultative status with the United Nations, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the International Organization of the Francophonie (OIF). Its foreign sections, its bureaus in ten cities, including Brussels, Washington, Berlin, Tunis, Rio de Janeiro, and Stockholm, and its network of correspondents in 130 countries give RSF the ability to mobilise support, challenge governments and wield influence both on the ground and in the ministries and precincts where media and Internet standards and legislation are drafted. You should listen to Rebecca Vincent if you want to learn about the work Reporters Without Borders is doing across the world, their World Press Freedom index, the Julian Assange case, and how the state of press freedom stands today. In the interview hosted by Tyto’s CEO, Brendon Craigie, she explains why there is a worrying trend of violence against journalists in countries that are meant to be at peace, such as the UK, The Netherlands, Greece, Malta, and more. Countries seen as standard setters in terms of freedom of the press should be doing better, according to Vincent. You can watch the recording on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/M2nOIOFEOJI