Welcome to the Tech for Non-Techies podcast

In this episode, Sophia Matveeva spoke to serial entrepreneur and NASDAQ company board member Alexandra Charters Zubko. Alexandra co-founded Triptease, a global software as a service company with offices in London, New York and Singapore, which has raised $28 million in venture funding.

This is a great episode for non-technical founders and investors, with practical tips on what you really do need to learn to build a tech venture (clue: it’s not coding).

Learning notes

• As a non-technical founder, you don’t need a technical co-founder, but you do need a web of tech experts to advise you.
• Learning to admit that you don’t have all the answers is a far more useful skill for non-technical founders than learning to code. “Put those engineering books aside and make sure you’ve got the strength to be vulnerable. That’s the most important thing,” says Alexandra.
• Working with an outsourced product team can be a great way to build your...

Sophia Matveeva spoke to Jung Seok Kung (JS) founder of Aizen, a fintech company which uses AI to support decision making and manage risk for banks. JS is a non-technical founder, who now leads a company that processes 10,000+ algorithms in real time.

If you want to learn what AI is in practice and how it's changing business this episode is for you.

We cover how JS went from spotting a market opportunity to creating an algorithm using a spreadsheet, and the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.

Learning notes from this episode:

• An algorithm is just a set of instructions that you put into a computer.
• JS created a prototype of his algorithm using a spreadsheet. The aim of his algorithm was to give out loans to customers. He bought lending data from the Lending Club and tested it against a control group. This means one set of loan applications was assessed by the algorithm and the other was done manually. By doing this, JS proved that his algorithm was making correct decisions....

After about a year of working with developers, a designer and a community manager to build Enty products, I started feeling pretty good about myself. After all, I started out with no idea about how apps or algorithms, and here I was with both. I even had a happy team. Go me!

So I decided that we should all do a review of our progress and team practices. Give me feedback, I said! Don't hold your fire, I encouraged.

Well. Ahem. They didn't.

The result - I wanted to crawl under my bed and quietly drown in my tears, surrounded by pizza crumbs and Twix wrappers.

The problem that everyone, EVERYONE, told me was that they didn't really understand what we were trying to achieve. We were all working hard, producing new features and pushing out new releases, but my team saw no direction. The chaos was further exacerbated by the total lack of documentation, which meant we created new things pretty much at random. Everyone was frustrated.

I realised I had a full blown rebellion on my hands, and...