Would you leave a high flying career in advertising to set up an adult content site? Most people wouldn't, but Cindy Gallop is not most people.
After leading one of the world's top advertising agencies, BBH in the United States. Cindy decided to try her hand at tech entrepreneurship. Her venture, Make Love Not Porn, is in the new category of "social sex" and aims to revolutionise how people talk, share and watch sex.
As a non-technical founder of an adult content business, Cindy had to learn how to work with developers, get users despite being banned by advertisers and create a troll free online environment.
Learning notes from this episode:
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
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:
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...
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