A robust venture capital industry is one of the pillars of the today's tech boom, because it provides the funding for new companies to grow. But "venture capital is not a job for everyone," says venture investor Dr Itxaso del Palacio in this week's episode.
Itxaso is a leading venture capitalist. She launched Microsoft Ventures in Europe and is Partner at Notion Capital today. She also teaches Entrepreneurial Finance at the MSc Technology Entrepreneurship at University College London.
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Most start-ups fail, but founders and investors can still use this for career success. Learning how tech products get made and how the companies behind them make money, open so many doors to interesting and lucrative opportunities. In fact, many product managers and venture capitalists have transitioned into these jobs via start-ups.
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You can learn by listening to this podcast, reading books about the industry, and most...
“Come to developers with good research and understand your customer. If you don’t understand your customer, how can you expect the developer to build features for that customer?” says developer Ariana Waller, founder of Wally Tech.
Ariana works with non-technical founders and helps them bring their visions to life. But, many founders want to hire developers too early or make the wrong hires.
Listen to this episode to avoid falling into that common trap.
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“The biggest lie told in tech is that you that you need to be a coder. I think that being able to understand the user experience behind tech, being able to articulate technology, and being able to get other people excited about it, is what you really need to run a good company,” says Jenny Griffiths MBE, founder of Snap Vision.
Jenny is the founder and CEO of Snap Vision, a visual search company that works with the biggest names in fashion and publishing.
She has been featured on the World's Top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes lists. She was appointed MBE for Services to Innovation in 2015, and in 2019 was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering's Silver Medal for contributions to UK engineering.
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Making a prototype is a key step in your journey in bringing your tech idea to life. Begin with UX research, which we covered in last week’s episode.
With your research done, it’s time to move on to making a “fake product," which you will test with real users to see if there is enough demand to invest in creating the real thing.
To do this, Sophia takes you through the Sprint method developed by Google Ventures. Using this method, you can have a tested prototype in just 5 days.
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The prototyping process is the first step in the product development journey. To go from idea to live app, site or algorithm, you need to test it with target users.
A good prototype can get you funding, but more importantly, it can show you whether the concept is worth pursuing in the first place.
One of the biggest mistakes non-technical founders make is hiring developers before they have a tested prototype. Listen to this episode and avoid this costly mistake.
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When you make a payment, your money doesn’t reach the destination bank account straight away. Instead, it goes through an underground railroad of payment providers and intermediaries to reach its destination.
In traditional banking, this process is expensive and slow, but new fintech players are changing the system.
In this episode, you’ll hear from Justin Xiao how fintech company Railsbank is solving this problem, and how tiny snippets of code called APIs tie technology companies together.
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Every time you send a message on Whatsapp, it goes through the server. Every time you look back at your old Instagram photos, the server brings you your data.
Servers are a key component of almost all apps, and they work like the brains of the operation. Their main task is to enable communication and store data.
If you want to build tech products or invest in them, you need to know this key concept.
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The front end is a computer that speaks to humans. The bit of an app or site you interact with is called a front end. If you can touch it, swipe it or speak to it, it is a front end.
The back end (the server side) is the bit of the app that you cannot interact with yourself: it is a computer that only talks to computers.
The server is the brain of your operation: it enables communication and stores data.
The hemlines for skirts are not the only thing to be dictated by fashion. So is the experience of tech executives.
The fashion for developers turned CEOs like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg is giving way to designers at the helm. The founders of Airbnb and Snap were designers not developers.
Good design is always focused on the user. The human not the code is what matters.
This is an opportunity for non-techies to shine in tech, as founders, innovators and investors.
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If code gets written, that usually means that there's technical debt. If it isn't dealt with regularly, the product doesn't work properly, engineers leave and you'll have a rebellion on your hands.
In this episode, you'll learn from Alexandre Omeyer, founder of Stepsize, the core concepts that non-technies need to know about technical debt.
This is must know concept for founders, product managers and smart investors.
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