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 notes from this episode:
Lots of smart people want to transition into careers in tech, but don’t know how to get started. If that sounds like you, then listen to how Alexandra Soroko went from finance to tech leadership.
Today, Alexandra is Head of Merchant Sales at Visa in France, and connects fintech companies, banks and Visa’s technologies to help some of the world’s largest companies process payments. In her role, she combines tech knowledge, marketing and finance skills. She started her career at JP Morgan, but didn’t let her lack of tech skills stop her.
Learning notes from this episode:
Andi Govindia has gone through three accelerators on her start-up journey. This helped her build a business model, find co-founders and get her first major clients.
Andi leads Riviter, a visual search company that uses AI to predict fashion and beauty trends, and counts L'Oreal amongst its clients.
If you’re interested in entrepreneurship and how non-technical founders can succeed in tech, this one is for you.
Learning notes from this episode:
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.
Learning notes from this episode:
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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:
A career in venture capital is lucrative and exciting. Yet, it is also hard to get into, and once you're in, staying successful isn't easy.
Sophia Matveeva spoke to Silicon Valley venture investor Nilesh Trivedi principal investor at J Ventures and Chicago Booth MBA.
They talked about what makes a good VC, the different pathways into venture capital and why many early stage VCs aren't as rich as you think. This is an especially useful episode for angel investors, VCs and founders.
Learning notes:
In this episode Sophia Matveeva talks to Rags Vadali about what product management is, what PMs do and what you need to get a job in PM.
Rags Vadali has managed product at Google, Facebook and various start-ups, and like Sophia, has an MBA from Chicago Booth. This interview is an excerpt from a PM masterclass Rags taught on Tech for Non-Techies.
Learning points from this episode:
David Segura is a perfect example of how non-techies can thrive in technology. His first venture, Giant Media, was a native video advertising exchange which David sold for millions to an ad tech company backed by TPG & JMI in 2014. Since then David has invested in almost 50 startups, many of which have technology at their core.
In this interview, David talks about what he had to learn about tech as a non-technical founder, whether you need a co-founder and why learning to code is a waste of time.
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