93. Lessons from the Netflix C Suite Apr 06, 2022

How do you get to the top of a tech company as a non-technical professional? How can you drive innovation, when you’re not building the technology yourself?

That’s what you’ll learn from this interview with David Wells, ex CFO of Netflix and chair of the board at Wise.

Learning...

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92. How to get people to be nice to each other on your platform Mar 30, 2022

On Airbnb, people stay at strangers' homes. On Twitter, people get trolled. Both are global tech platforms, but why do people treat strangers well on one, and badly on the other?

The answer lies in platform governance: the rules you make to encourage good interactions and punish the bad stuff....

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91. How to launch a platform when you've got no users Mar 23, 2022

How do you launch a dating app, if you have no men and no women on it? Or, how do you launch a market place with niether buyers nor sellers?

This is the chicken and egg problem that all platforms have to solve to succeed.

In this week's episode, you'll learn 6 methods for how to launch a platform...

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90. What makes platform businesses SO successful Mar 16, 2022

Facebook disrupted the media market forever. The Apple App Store created the app economy, valued at $6.3 trillion today. What makes platforms like these SO successful?

In this episode, you will learn the core concepts behind platform businesses, so you can identify platforms in the making or...

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89. How to burn $2 billion Mar 09, 2022

Does having $2 billion in the bank account and celebrity backing guarantee success for a consumer app? Not necessarily.

Listen to how one company burned through almost $2 billion and had to shut down their app after just 6 months. Learn what Quibi did wrong, so you can avoid their mistakes.

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88. You can't be half pregnant Mar 02, 2022

Developers don't work in the same ways as non-technical professionals. If you don't know how to work with developers, you can waste thousands of dollars and get very frustrated, as you'll see from the story Sophia shares on this week's episode.

Learning notes from this episode:

    • A...
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87. How to commercialise innovation Feb 23, 2022

Success in tech consists of two parts: making great products and using them to build a business. No matter how brilliant an app or algorithm is, if people do not want to pay for it, it is unlikely to live for long.

This is why all tech innovators need to learn the core skills of commercialising...

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86. What is coding? The quick guide for non-coders Feb 16, 2022

The terms coding and programming are ubiquitous, yet many non-technical professionals do not know what they mean in practice. Why are there different coding languages? What do developers actually do?

This is what you'll learn in this episode.

Learning notes:

  • Data is information that you can...
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85. "Don't be afraid of the tech," lessons from a non-technical founder Feb 09, 2022

Nasi Rwigema doesn't have a background in software, but that didn't stop him from building his tech platform: Umwuga, a social network for blue collar workers in South Africa. To his surprise, he found that figuring out what people want is much harder than learning about tech.

Nasi is one of...

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84. What UX designers do and how to work with them Feb 02, 2022

”Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer — that the designers are told, 'Make it look good! ' That's not what design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,” - Steve Jobs 

In...

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83. How tech companies bring new ideas to life Jan 26, 2022

If you have an idea for a new product in a traditional business, you will probably have to work on an extensive plan before you do anything else.

This is not how it works in tech companies. When the likes of Airbnb and Slack bring new apps or features to market, they use the Sprint Method. It is...

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82. Intro to agile for non-techies Jan 19, 2022

Agile is now a ubiquitous management term, but few people understand what it means in practice.

For some products, agile is THE BEST system, for others, it is THE WORST.

Listen to this week’s episode to find out what it is, how it works in practice, when to use it and when to avoid it.

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