Ben Monnie

🎨 📺 Sharon Roth is a Product & Design leader who’s built her career in the lab, across different modalities, to bring more creative product experiences to life 📺 🎨 It's W3 / Q3 / 2024 and this week in our MGMT Boston up & coming operator series we’ve got Sharon who serves as the Senior Director of Product Management at Quantified.ai, the AI-driven flight simulator for sellers. The app feels as real as your next video call, scales across teams, programs, and companies, and ramps reps 42% faster. Sharon is leading Quantified AI’s Product & Design team after previous roles in Product leadership at Tamr & Honor Education. She’s excited to be back working in an Enterprise focused company, leading Design alongside Product, focused on strategic & execution based discipline. ❓Questions Are Your Roadmap ❓ It’s popular to encourage new hires to ask a lot of questions. But it’s always a good time to ask questions! When a member of your team comes to you and says “we really need to build X feature”, they’re coming to you for good reason. Dig into the why to understand how often the issue comes up, when it happens in a customer conversation, and why they’re asking for it in the first place. Is there an even better way to build a solution? Also, people are always excited about getting to a solution. By delaying the solution discussion to first get everyone to agree on the problem, you can coordinate a better response. Sharon has been in rooms where stakeholders can’t agree on the problem they’re trying to solve, which can sometimes be even more painful! By asking better questions and articulating the underlying issues thoroughly, they can work together as an organization to chart a better path forward. 3 Career Insights / Learnings 🙋‍♀️ Seek New Challenges - “Trying new things is how you learn and grow. At a startup, there are so many opportunities to try new things. As startups evolve, you need to embrace all that’s going to happen and make it a positive thing. Otherwise don’t go to a startup!” 🤝 Act with Integrity - “Do your best, show your work. But also treat others with respect and kindness while doing it. How you treat people and how you show up every day will impact your work environment. You’re responsible for the energy you bring to the room, so be authentic and try to inject some positivity. It will help you build the type of network you want to have too” 🗣 Invest in Communication Skills - “It helps you ask questions well, advocate for yourself, have your ideas be heard. It also helps others understand your impact. It takes continuous practice to do well.” If you’d like to learn more about Sharon’s career, the full post is linked in the comments. Go ahead and sign up for the newsletter to see the operator learnings we bring you in the weeks ahead too, will ya? #bostontech #operators

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Back in 1997, The New York Times highlighted a “Roundtable in Multimedia” attended by senior media executives. They lamented that apart from a few exceptions like pornography websites and Amazon, no one had cracked the code for a viable 'interactive' media business model. Fast forward to 2024, and Fable has launched Showrunner, a revolutionary platform known as the “Netflix of AI" , which allows users to create their own TV shows with just a few prompts. 📺✨ The way we create and consume content has evolved dramatically. But what does "interactive media" really mean today? We break it down, exploring how it intersects with massive shifts in technology, culture, and new media. And how with a growing "Swipe before Type" generation, there is now an ingrained expectation of interactivity in all digital experiences. We dive into the future of interactive media and gaming and see where we're headed next! Link in comments. #InteractiveMedia #Gaming #AI #TechRevolution #ContentCreation #NewMedia

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Fully behind banishing the "double-click." Was incredible to be interviewed by The Wall Street Journal for Te-Ping Chen's recent piece. Buzz words are always going to have a place in the business world. And I don't have an inherent issue with the words themselves. I have an issue with how words can be wielded. So often, buzzwords and trendy terms can be used to intimidate, condescend and even bully. Is "double-click" an offensive term? No, it's totally innocuous. But as soon as business leaders start to throw out terms, acronyms and buzz words simply to sound smart or profound... that's where I have a problem. Words have power. So it's important to be mindful of how we communicate. Inclusive communication is that which invites and educates people into vocabulary that moves us all forward. Not stops people in their tracks to think... wait, what did they just say? What am I missing? What does this mean?! The number of syllables isn't what makes a word or term great. It's how well it can drive forward communication. Which is all about the right intentions and the right actions. https://lnkd.in/gRtj8UWg

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The Neighborhood Studios team spent the last few days thinking about our new idea pipeline and its output. Tons of thoughts on this after being in a venture studio for 2 years. Here are some summary stats... - 1,750 new (raw) ideas considered per year. - 110 of those are given a second glance. - 66 of those are seriously considered. - 10 of those become experiments...real products in the hands of customers. - 2 of those are spun-out into studio companies. What the studio team has been discussing over the past few days is that 66 number. That's the number of ideas that 3 people on the team can dig into every year. Venture studios can be perceived as a "startup factory"...an engine to launch startups. The reality is that venture studios are a machine to invalidate ideas. We invalidate many more ideas than we validate. We touch 1,750 ideas per year, seriously dive into 66 of them, build experiments for 10 of them and only launch 2 of them. All that work turns into 2 studio companies per year that have a way higher success rate than the average startup in the wild. Said another way...startups are hard. Talk with Tapan Patel Gabe Hart Whit Anderson IV Jonathan Brinson if you wanna talk about this. They are world class.

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🚨 The former CFO of Dropbox, Sujay Jaswa oversees the investment and operating activities as a founding partner at WndrCo, alongside media vet Jeffrey Katzenberg. He joins us for VC Wednesdays.🚨 🖋️  You recently closed a $460 million VC fund. Where are you looking to deploy that? Everything we do is around the idea of the future of work and helping people optimize how they get work done. That’s why we're investors in companies like Airtable, Figma, Databricks, Deel, 1Password and others. That won’t change, but now, you'll see us really focus on the applications of AI that will meaningfully disrupt how work gets done, like in finance, HR and customer support. 🖋️  Why should founders work with WndrCo? One thing that we do that's different is starting one to two companies a year in areas that we think have the potential to yield big returns. So, when we talk to entrepreneurs, our operating experience stays current, and that angle on venture is fairly unique. The second is that each partner at WndrCo has built something, so we have the empathy that comes from that experience. Third, we do only five to seven deals a year, versus bigger firms that do hundreds. Because we have a smaller portfolio, entrepreneurs can get a hold of literally every partner within a couple of hours, 365 days a year. 🖋️ Which startup pitch sticks out the most in your memory over others and why? My favorite is one that’s not a household name yet, even though the business is absolutely on fire. It’s Aura, an all-in-one product to protect you and your family online. The idea is that unlike the physical world, you have no idea what your kids are doing on their phones and devices. Aura gives parents the tools to navigate raising a kid in our mobile-first and digital-first world. When the founder, Hari Ravichandran, walked me through how he would take it to market, it was love at first sight. He's an extraordinary entrepreneur and the best go-to-market person I've ever met when it comes to consumer products. 🖋️ What’s one investment you regret passing on and why? At the end of the day, this whole business is built on being part of monster companies as early as possible. One of the best enterprise companies of the last decade is Databricks. The founder and CEO, Ali Ghodsi, is a very good friend of mine, and for whatever reason, it never occurred to me in the early years to twist his arm to try and let him take our money. We invested in Databricks later than I’d have liked to. 🖋️  What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned working with Jeffrey Katzenberg? The biggest thing I've learned is that you can't be him, and it’s impossible to keep up with him. He's relentless, and I have never met someone who works harder than him. If he says he's going to do something, no matter how hard, if it's within his capabilities, he'll do it. He's a doer, and he just gets stuff done. I admire that so tremendously. #VCWednesdays #vc #venturecapital #startups #TechonLinkedIn

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A really interesting and powerful performance management practice. "Use the “30-day test” to maintain a high-performance team. Create a reminder to ask yourself this question 30 days after someone joins the team: “Knowing what I know today, would I hire this person?” If the answer is yes, tell the person you’re excited about them and give them more equity—you’ll gain a lot of loyalty. If the answer is no, you need to fire them immediately, to avoid the inevitable damage they will cause to you, your team, and themselves." from Uri Levine Founder of Waze, via Lenny's podcast. https://lnkd.in/gyS2HzZP

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We just announced that Elizabeth Ahern, former CMO of Chamberlain Coffee, joined The Starters. A couple weeks ago we onboarded the former Head of E-Commerce of Olipop and Graza. We have creative strategists from Tubescience and Narrative, media buyers from CTC and Fabletics, and designers from Oddit and Kizik. And a lot more elite freelancers that I’m not even allowed to share publicly. There’s a reason the most incredibly talented people in e-commerce will only work through us, and not join any other freelance network. It’s because we were built from the ground up with them in mind. ✔️ Private profiles, in case they don’t want the world to know they’re consulting or freelancing. ✔️ Brands have to pay to access them, which eliminates low intent brands that would just waste their time ✔️ Companies reach out (or “apply”) to talk to freelancers instead of freelancers applying to jobs ✔️ We take no commissions, nor do we mark up their rate to brands ✔️ We’re building a community for them to get “company culture” benefits while freelancing, which can be a lonely endeavor at times. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We won’t win on price. We won’t win on tech. (Upwork and Fiverr will win on both those fronts) We’ll win on talent.

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Ten years ago brands like Zillow and American Express nailed it as pioneers of brands launching media companies - while hundreds tried and failed. Now we're in a new era for brand publishing... What's different? 🚀 The Journey For the brands mentioned above, the strategy was a success. But many brands struggled to find their footing, leading to the shutdown of countless content initiatives. Today we’re seeing a resurgence and a true new era for brand publishing, fueled by lessons learned from past challenges. 🔍 What’s Different Now? Today, successful brand publishing has 3 important components: 1. Distribution Focus 2. Strategic ROI 3. Measured Investment. More on this in my latest article - link in first comment. #BrandPublishing #ContentMarketing #BrandJournalism #EarnedMedia Image Credits: Roman Samborskyi - Shutterstock

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Ezra Klein opens his podcast, with AI Expert, Ethan Mollick, with an all too relatable preamble: “I consistently sort of wander up to the A.I., ask it a question, find myself somewhat impressed or unimpressed at the answer. But it doesn’t stick for me. And I think that failure matters. I think getting good at working with A.I. is going to be an important skill in the next few years.” In the next hour, Klein and Mollick go back and forth with some of the most insightful and practical AI guidance I’ve heard.  For example: Ethan Mollick: "A.I. is built like a tool. It’s software…But because of how it’s built, because of how it’s constructed, it is much more like working with a person than working with a tool. In fact, there’s some early evidence that programmers are the worst people at using A.I. because it doesn’t work like software. It doesn’t do the things you would expect a tool to do. Tools shouldn’t occasionally give you the wrong answer, shouldn’t give you different answers every time, shouldn’t insult you or try to convince you they love you. And I find that teachers, managers, even parents, editors, are often better at using these systems, because they’re used to treating this as a person.” See comments below for some of my other favorite sound bites. I definitely encourage everyone to listen. https://lnkd.in/gjmHCEvq

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After working with 100+ brands to drive editorial coverage for their existing content, by far one of the most effective strategies is to leverage your first party data to tell unique stories. 3 shining examples to steal from: - Lyft (anonymized rider data to show everything from where people are going late night, to comparing cities by how much they tip) - Payscale (leveraging both their own data for things like their gender pay gap data, as well as surveys for things like how orgs are thinking about annual salary budgeting) - Intuit QuickBooks - combining both external/government data + their own proprietary data to create small business indices In comments: our very own Emma R.'s take on how to create newsworthy features from public data.

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🌏 📊 Erica Kangas is an engineering leader, voracious learner, and feminist builder who seeks out the biggest levers to move the world. 📊🌏 It's W6 / Q2 / 2024 and this week in our MGMT Boston up & coming operator series we’ve got Annie Erica, part of a small but mighty team as the Head of Engineering at hyper curated investment connection & fundraising guidance platform Scroobious. Erica joined Scroobious as their Head of Engineering to help lead the technical efforts of this very early stage team shaping up capital markets culture for underrepresented founders. Erica is responsible for the entirety of their technical infrastructure. She is working every day to build out their marketplace product, making sure Scroobious Founders are having a smooth experience so they can effectively onboard their pitches onto the marketplace and connect with investors. Erica continues to spend time answering tough questions about the business and communicating effectively to equip founders with the resources they need to be successful. Scroobious’ founder community grew 75% in 2023 and is made up of 63% female founders. ✍ Cataloging Skills & Connecting the Dots 🔄 From nonprofits to startups, Erica has always cataloged her experiences. She keeps references & resources on hand from prior experiences to keep memorable frameworks from the earliest days of her career. Every time she embarks on a meaty project, the first question she asks is “what are our goals”? Then, what are we looking to accomplish? By having something to ground herself in, she can begin to move forward. That work has paid off in building a portfolio of experiences and an archive of resources. At Scroobious, she wants to understand the different attributes of founders and successful pitches to effectively connect founders with angels. For example, investors look for coachability as an attribute & trait, so she has thought back to her nonprofit days when they measured grit and growth in students and volunteers. It’s obviously a bit different but there are always overlapping threads to pull on. Problems Not Yet Solved Erica offered up three unsolved problems that drive her work as an invitation to think about and join in tackling these issues. Because learning never ends and we have a lot more to do in these areas! 🤖 How do we build AI that won’t just repeat the mistakes and mirror the worst facets of our past? 🤝 How do we continue to develop the field of software engineering such that it is sustainable, equitable, and accessible? 🤲 How do we effectively combat exclusionary systems when many of our institutions no longer have the appetite or have their hands tied from doing so? If you’d like to learn more about Erica’s career, the full post is linked in the comments. Go ahead and sign up for the newsletter to see the operator learnings we bring you in the weeks ahead too, will ya? #bostontech #operators #engineering

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This just came in from phyl terry via email and is VERY good approach for senior leaders to use to pilot, learn and track experiments with AI. --- 2. No Fear: AI & the 20 Year Curve? Regarding AI, I've now launched a "no fear" speaking tour to help senior executives, product leaders, and CEOs think through the challenges of AI. My basic message is this: take a breath, let go of your fear and instead invest in a) pilots, and b) in training employees how to improve their productivity with Gen AI. *And* remember it takes 20+ years to fully operationalize new technologies. In other words, massive disruption and job losses are not going to happen right away (nor is AGI) – that's why you can let your worst fears go. Along the way, I give a series of history lessons from tech, walk through the current trends, and challenges with Gen AI, and answer questions. This week I gave this talk to the CEO and executive/product team of one of our Bank members. They loved it. --- 3. No Fear AI Case Studies We are working on a number of No Fear AI case studies with our Executive Council members. The idea is to look at real-time pilots and products and see what's working and what's not – and how you can let go of your fears and roll up your sleeves and get some good work done. I just finished editing a case study where a CEO and his teams have created 66% to 95% improvements in productivity in a range of activities like copywriting (66%), photo retouching (95%), video editing (87.5%), photo-realistic AI and composites (87%), and music editing (90%). The bottomline: productivity improvements in everyday tasks are helping them do better work faster. There have been no layoffs – and this is key: the evaluation and testing of the tools has been bottom-up from the product teams not top-down from the executives (note: the full case studies are available to Executive Council members).

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I’ve found myself having a lot of conversations about AI with media companies and creators for the past several weeks. From publishers considering licensing to LLMs to content creators thinking about how different tools might enhance workflows or creative output, my overwhelming sense is that we’ve reached a moment of mass confusion in media. For media companies (from individuals to conglomerates), there is a cascade of questions. Will the output of a model one day destroy my business? Should I wait for a legal or regulatory response? Should I be dealing with these companies? And even if I wanted to, has the ship sailed and it’s now too late? I’ve been surprised by the consistency of questions across companies with different businesses, and in different verticals and sectors. The answer that comes up most is we just don’t know. And as a savvy media exec said recently to me, we need to have a good umbrella instead of just shouting at the rain. Across all this uncertainty, one thing remains clear: as AI becomes more a part of our lives, audiences, readers, and fans are going to be increasingly seeking craft, meaning, and connection. These are things that LLMs can’t quite replicate and as a mass of AI generated content floods the zone of our distribution networks, how will we find these vital and necessary values from the scarcity of authentic stories, information, and entertainment that we turn to? Well, we just don’t know. But, we do know that GenAI platforms need to understand the concerns and realities of creative work and the anxieties very much at play. At the same time, media companies and creators need to find the opportunities to use these tools to deepen their connections and refine their craft. Both are challenges, but there is opportunity if we look for the the creative tools that will enhance and enrich but not replace the people best equipped to be crafting the next generation of creative, meaningful work.

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Incredibly excited to share our newest case study featuring veteran social media marketer Saad Qureshi 🎉 As social media trends shifted to short-form video, Saad and his former team at Grant Cardone Enterprises found themselves at a crossroads. While short videos are vital in driving user engagement, repurposing long-form videos into easily digestible clips was time-consuming and ate into their bandwidth for other initiatives. They needed a solution to condense short video creation into a simple, streamlined workflow — so they used Opus Clip. With our suite of AI-powered editing tools, Saad reduced time spent on short video creation by 50% while also driving these results: ➤ 2x increase in videos produced daily ➤ 50% increase in social media engagement ➤ 4+ hours saved daily on short video creation 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧 *𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐥𝐲* 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐒𝐚𝐚𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬 𝐛𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐰:

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To all my #CPG friends being affected by the possible shutdown of Ampla's credit offering - please know that you are not alone. As the news about Ampla possibly facing deep financial challenges spread, I can't help but deeply sympathize with 100+ employees and hundreds, if not thousands, of brands that have been working with Ampla over the last few years. As a founder myself, I know how hard it is to build a long-term sustainable business. I also know how important it is to have a strong and reliable financing partner, that can help navigate an incredibly capital-intensive journey that e-commerce is. That's why - if you're looking for a stable, long-term alternative capital partner, I'd love to put Paperstack on your radar. We provide a flexible working capital financing to consumer brands to help them purchase inventory, invest in marketing, finance payroll, and other accounts payable. We understand the importance of accessing working capital early in the year and having a trusted lending partner to support you every step of the way. If you're a business owner affected by the news, please don't hesitate to reach out to me or any of our amazing team members: Assel Beglinova, Ivan Sukhenko, Maxim Grubyy 🙏

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Hey Friends, Today we're revealing the biggest launch in the history of Superhuman: reimagined for teams!! I would greatly appreciate your support if you could upvote us on Product Hunt https://lnkd.in/gX_b3PVi (if you haven't already, update your Superhuman version to get access the game-changing features)

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Can someone smarter than me please explain the following: Hubspot is now trading at $600 a share. They have a market cap of $30 Billion. They may now be bought by Alphabet. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, they have never once been profitable. In fact, in Q2 of last year alone, they lost $118 million. How does that work? I thought profit was something investors looked for. I have to think that most other businesses in this situation would collapse under their own weight - but these folks (and I'm a customer) are being rewarded. Is being profitable something only non-funded businesses have to worry about? https://lnkd.in/e2HTCxvr

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Ed Zitron’s opinion piece is really interesting. I had similar thoughts that I could never put together as effectively as he did. I remember thinking that Raghavan’s placement over Ads and Search was the end of Google’s original soul. A public affirmation there was **officially** no wall between search and ads.  Having experienced the poor quality of Google's results over the past few years, it's hard not to believe there was a reason for it. Do I need to read through 12,000 words of "content" to find the pancake recipe at the bottom of a site in some weird network of lifestyle yoga bloggers? However, I think his inability to see the upcoming storm (also mentioned in the emails) and allowing another company (OpenAI / Microsoft)to beat you (Google) to death with your own invention (transformers) is the much graver issue. This piece by Matt G. Southern is a good overview. https://lnkd.in/eVYCsHiD

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Not long ago Sequoia published the brilliant The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework* I mentioned that most #DTC brands thought of themselves as operating in the "Hair on Fire" space - solving a problem that’s a clear, urgent need for customers. While in reality at best they are in the "Hard Fact" space - the customers have resigned themselves to just living with the problem. They’re not urgently engaged with trying to solve it. That means 👉 Trying to go to market with direct response ads ONLY makes sense if the problem you are solving is availability and/or affordability. And your solution is cheaper and faster than a competitor or a substitute product. 👉 As they pointed out you fail when your solution is unconvincing. Aka customers don't trust your #brand. Launching into a community is a way to overcome it. 👉 The key challenges to overcome are habits and status quo. So any other friction points must go - i.e. free delivery, best UX, customer care access in 1 click, guaranteed returns 🔥 #growthstrategy *link is in the comment

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