Our guest in this episode is Yakov Kofner, founder of C-Suite Counsel and publisher of FSI Digital Transformation Weekly. Yakov brings over two decades of hands-on experience in digital transformation across the financial services and insurance sectors. His background spans leadership roles at Gartner, Oliver Wyman, MasterCard, Bridgewater Associates, American Express, and McKinsey, as well as deep involvement in startups, operational leadership, and strategic advisory. In this conversation, we examine the key lessons Yakov has drawn from driving and advising on digital transformation initiatives—focusing on what has enabled lasting change, where transformation efforts commonly stall, and how financial institutions can better align innovation with business outcomes. https://csuitecounsel.com/ https://fsidigitalweekly.substack.com/

In this episode, we bring you Yuri Kolesnikov to dive into the growing issue of technical debt—a challenge that spans the tech industry, from startups to established enterprises—exploring its causes, consequences, and strategies for managing, mitigating, and preventing it. Yuri is an expert in building robust and scalable architectures from scratch for startups and growing companies. Most recently, he was the Head of IT at Skydio, the leading U.S. drone manufacturer and world leader in autonomous flight.

The future of cybersecurity isn't about better technology alone—it's about reimagining how humans and machines work together. In this episode, we're discussing with William MacMillan the potential of the human-AI partnership to transform defense against increasingly sophisticated modern cyber threats. William is a Chief Product Officer at Andesite, a cybersecurity company dedicated to delivering cutting-edge technology to overburdened cybersecurity teams.   https://www.linkedin.com/company/andesiteai/ thisishowtheytellmetheworldends.com/

A crippling decision-making gridlock that paralyzes companies when they need to move fast remains a constant challenge. As teams strive to create products people love—solving real-world problems—they are constantly hampered by conflicting priorities, limited resources, and a lack of clarity on what matters. Whether it's roadmap planning, backlog grooming, or deciding which features to prioritize, this indecision eats away at time, money, and, most critically, momentum. In this episode, we've invited Yan Grinshtein to discuss the realities of building a startup and leveraging design partnerships to improve the odds of crossing the proverbial chasm. Yan is the founder of Nsight Intelligence Corp. which addresses the problem of fragmented and time-consuming decision-making and prioritization processes in data-rich environments for design and product teams. Specifically, they solve the following challenges: Data Overload, Data & Analytics Disconnect, Inefficient Task Management, Predictive Insights, Productivity Bottlenecks, and Inconsistent Prioritization.   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nsightapp/ Yan's wWebsite: https://www.yangrinshtein.com/ Yan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yangrinshtein/

Hiring the right people is critical for startup growth. While startups often don't have resources to leverage internal recruiters, an alternative way could help solve that challenge.  In this episode, we invited Tiffany Sieber to discuss how startups can benefit from high-touch embedded recruiting.  Tiffany founded Embedded Recruiting which helps startups scale with full-cycle marketing, recruitment, and executive performance coaching.

External documentation is key to making products easy to use, but we’re always way behind in creating it. So can AI replace the need to create documentation altogether? In this episode, Puneet Arora joins us in exploring the future of product and user documentation in the age of AI. Puneet is an expert in building large-scale, user-facing, data-intensive systems. Most recently, he founded Ekline, an NLP-powered platform for automated content optimization and standardization.

In this episode, we are excited to bring on Dr. Kostikov, a doctor in neurophysiology and an independent researcher, to discuss one of his recent articles on the evolution of AI and particularly how we went down the wrong path.  Dr. Kostikov has spent the last 30 years developing the concept of individual AI based on the integration of the human brain and computer system into a single functional complex using a scanning-type brain-computer interface.  His concept of individual AI is based on the hypothesis of the existence of a dual system of initiation of nerve impulses in the synapses of the human neocortex and the dynamic concept of quantum spin in a new relativistic or high-speed model of our three-dimensional space. https://bdtechtalks.com/2023/01/06/ai-evolution/  

We live in a world where organizations are constrained by engineering resources and outsourcing is increasingly not viable. This has led to more product owners turning to no-code to build the software they need. In this episode, we are excited to bring on Prakash Chandran to talk about what enterprise-grade no-code should look like. Prakash is a co-founder and CEO of Xano, a low-code platform for anyone looking to develop a backend for their no-code application quickly and efficiently. This trusted scalable backend for the no-code community passes the strict enterprise security and compliance requirements handling millions of API requests and processing millions of transactions in over 84 countries each day.    https://www.xano.com/blog/ RadioMD.com

We’re on the verge of a generational change in the way we create content — fueled by AI.  In this episode, we are excited to bring Jay LeBoeuf on to talk about how AI will transform the entire field of audio and video production.  Jay is the Head Of Business & Corporate Development at Descript, an audio and video editing platform that uses “voice cloning” technology.  He lectures on media technology and business at Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Michigan.  Jay was featured as a Bloomberg Businessweek Innovator, and interviewed by 60 Minutes, Forbes, Billboard, and on Alec Baldwin's podcast.   X Meta Medium

One thing that some are betting on is that emotions and emotional intelligence is something that's very different than what everyone else is doing right now with AI.  We are excited to bring Ryan Benmalek on to talk about the rise of emotional AI and how machines are learning to understand and respond to human emotions.  Ryan is a co-founder and CEO of Daimon Labs, a partially remote, partially NYC-based team from the top AI research labs like Google Brain, Microsoft Research, and FAIR.  They are innovating a new type of language model that provides human-like empathy and companionship.   Waitlist: Join Blog: 1–7x Consumer GPU Scaling for Large Language Modeling Experiments LinkedIn: The Rise of Emotional AI: How Machines Are Learning to Understand and Respond to Human Emotions

It’s a misconception that using AI removes “the human part” of content creation. In this episode, we are excited to bring Lilly Chen on to talk about how AI tools help Enterprise customers reimagine and scale their existing technical content in new formats and without extra work. Lilly is a co-founder and CEO of Contenda, a content creation service that uses generative AI to repurpose technical content from videos into effective written content. Website: https://www.contenda.co/ Website: lillychen.com/ Blog: https://blog.contenda.co/

Large companies have built custom systems to move development tools and testing to the cloud, but this approach has often been out of reach for smaller companies. In this episode, we are excited to bring on Debo Ray to talk about applying his learnings at Uber to democratize what has previously only been available to elite, big-tech companies with cloud development environments. Debo is a co-founder and CEO of DevZero, a cloud-based development platform that makes it easy for organizations of all sizes to configure, secure, and scale development environments to boost developer productivity. https://www.devzero.io/blog https://debo123.substack.com/archive

Traction. What is it? How do you generate it? In this episode, we are excited to bring on Bruce Cleveland to talk about how founders can improve their odds of success while traversing the traction gap where most startups fail. Bruce is the author of the bestseller "Traversing the Traction Gap", a practical guidebook for navigating the tumultuous early life of a startup. He has been a Silicon Valley CMO and CPO holding senior executive positions at Oracle, Apple, Siebel Systems, and C3 AI, as well as a General Partner in two venture capital firms. During his VC career, Bruce was the first investor and a board member of Marketo and an investor in C3, Doximity, Vlocity, Workday, and many other startups. https://tractiongapbook.com/ https://twitter.com/brucevc https://medium.com/@bcleveland  

While Generative AI and LLMs grab headlines, it's the practical limitations of power consumption and cost — not capabilities — that often determine where AI is deployed. In this episode, we are excited to bring Sam Fok on to talk about the sparse future of AI powering the inside of consumer electronics. Sam is the co-founder and CEO of Femtosense, a startup developing an ultra-low-power AI processor for the real-time edge that is designed to make AI processing viable for low-cost consumer electronics.    

Fundraising is a numbers game, and unless you have Snapchat levels of growth or have previously taken two other companies public, you’re going to need to talk to a lot of investors. In this episode, we spoke with Nathan Beckord about how to improve the odds of success when raising venture capital. Nathan is the founder and CEO of Foundersuite, a software platform that brings structure, speed and efficiency to raising venture capital and managing investor relations. Also, Nathan is a host of a "How I Raised It" podcast where he and his guests discuss various matters pertinent to successful fundraising. If you plan to fundraise then subscribe to Foundersuite using the link below and get 20% off for 3 months on monthly plans applying discount code: angelneers http://www.foundersuite.com?afmc=Angelneers

What is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), its main components, and its benefits for data storage and backup? In this episode, we are excited to bring on Mo Tahmasebi to talk about how to navigate the world of hyperconverged infrastructure. Mo is the founder and CEO of StoneFly, one of the innovators of cost-effective full-featured storage appliances.   https://stonefly.com/blog https://twitter.com/stoneflyinc https://www.linkedin.com/company/stonefly-networks      

What does the future hold in store for retail? In this episode, we are excited to bring on Trevor Sumner to talk about how AI is changing the retail industry. Trevor is the Head of AI and Innovation at Raydiant as part of the Perch acquisition. He's also an Entrepreneur, Advisor, Angel investor, and Top 100 Retail And Top 50 RetailTech Influencer.   https://twitter.com/trevorsumner

How to achieve business value from AI? In this episode, we are excited to bring on Chris Surdak to talk about how businesses should tackle the challenges of elusive success with AI. Chris is an award-winning, internationally-recognized transformation expert leveraging leading-edge technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Blockchain to drive results-oriented digital transformation for organizations of all sizes, industries and regions. Books by Christopher Surdak Chatpocalypse Now https://surdak.com/ https://twitter.com/CSurdak  

How do you develop cutting-edge marketing strategies to achieve hyper-growth? We are thrilled to bring on Bill Macaitis, one of the most renowned marketing leaders, to talk about his experiences of creating marketing powerhouses for the three fastest-growing SaaS companies in history - Slack, Zendesk, and Salesforce - where he was a CRO/CMO, a CMO, and an SVP Marketing respectively. These days he enjoys helping and advising other companies on how to achieve hyper-growth, helping them build out their own world-class marketing team, and implementing modern marketing tech stacks.

Is AI generation the next platform shift? In this episode, we are excited to bring on Barak Turovsky to talk about how Generative AI is powering a new epoch in technology reinventing communication, content creation, and information access. Barak is a product and business leader with 25+ years of experience in Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI, LLMs, Computer Vision), Ads & Commerce, and Enterprise Software. He served as Chief Product Officer at a global retail tech leader Trax and led product management and user experience within Google AI and Google Commerce. Prior to that, Barak was Director of Product in Microsoft’s Mobile Advertising, Head of Mobile Commerce at PayPal, and Chief Technical Officer at an Israeli start-up. Twitter Framework for evaluating Generative AI use cases Barak Turovsky - Google AI | 2021 Shelly Palmer Innovation Series Summit Coming Soon: Exact Match Keywords to Match to Even MORE Variants The Great AI Awakening