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Laks is the co-founder and former CTO of Zenefits. Since the company's founding in 2013, Laks has led and helped expand Zenefits' business, which serves tens of thousands of companies. Prior to Zenefits, Laks served as a software engineer at SigFig and as a project leader at D. E. Shaw & Co.

Keith Krach has served as chairman of the board of DocuSign since 2009. Krach started his career at General Motors, becoming the youngest vice-president at age 26. He later co-founded B2B commerce pioneer Ariba; took the firm public in 2000. By the end of his tenure, Ariba had reached $34 billion in market capitalization.

Tony Ball is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) Business Unit at Entrust Datacard. He joined the company in 2016 to provide leadership, global strategy and innovation for the access control and authentication solution segments. Ball has deep industry knowledge and previously served as president of IAM for HID Global. He has held executive roles at HID, Gemalto and Schlumberger Technologies where he began his career with over 20 years in multiple leadership roles across the globe. Ball studied finance and business at Bournemouth University and completed the International Institute for Management Development executive leadership program.

Mr. Roth leads Dignity Health’s innovation efforts, which seek to create and test novel services, programs, partnerships, and/or technologies from within and outside of healthcare- that challenge the status quo and have the potential to reduce the cost of care, improve quality, and/or increase access to services. Working in concert with Dignity Health employees and physicians, Mr. Roth works to anticipate emerging trends and technologies with the goal of incubating, studying, and scaling efforts to improve care. Mr. Roth holds a Masters degree in Healthcare Administration from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelors degree in Public Health from West Chester University. Mr. Roth regularly advises venture capital organizations and co-manages Dignity Healths Strategic Investment Fund.

As Senior Vice President of Product and Design at Upwork, Hayden leads the product and design teams and oversees the company’s product across desktop, web and mobile. She is an expert in product strategy, innovation and fast-paced execution and revels in breaking new ground on challenges at the intersection of product management, product design and business management. She leads a team of 30+ product managers and designers in developing a product that enables freelancers and clients around the globe to work together in a new model that is radically changing the hiring and job-finding paradigm from a chore into a delightful and instantaneous experience. Learn more about her perspective by viewing a recent article she wrote on Medium about how businesses can outsmart the talent war by tapping into the independent workforce online. Hayden holds an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University.

As Senior Vice President of Product and Design at Upwork, Hayden leads the product and design teams and oversees the company’s product across desktop, web and mobile. She is an expert in product strategy, innovation and fast-paced execution and revels in breaking new ground on challenges at the intersection of product management, product design and business management. She leads a team of 30+ product managers and designers in developing a product that enables freelancers and clients around the globe to work together in a new model that is radically changing the hiring and job-finding paradigm from a chore into a delightful and instantaneous experience. Learn more about her perspective by viewing a recent article she wrote on Medium about how businesses can outsmart the talent war by tapping into the independent workforce online. Hayden holds an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University.

Trey is the Global Chief Product Officer for Mood Media, a leading in-store media specialist that uses a mix of music, visual and mobile solutions to help its clients communicate with customers and drive incremental sales in retail establishments. Trey brings 12+ years experience in technology development and professional services at both large and small companies. Prior to Mood Media, Trey worked in a variety of product management and professional service roles at companies like Accenture and eBay.

Our Guest Trey is the Chief Product Officer for Mood, a leading in-store media specialist that uses a mix of music, visual and mobile solutions to help its clients communicate with customers and drive incremental sales in retail establishments. Trey brings 12+ years experience in technology development and professional services at both large and small companies. Prior to Mood Media, Trey worked in a variety of product management and professional service roles at companies like Accenture and eBay. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Trey is most passionate about solving the retail challenge today with technology. This entails figuring out how to engage with consumers in a meaningful way – how you do that in the most efficient way, how you create that connection, and how you use technology, most specifically mobile technology.. When he was a kid, Trey wanted to be a National Geographic journalist and go take pictures around the world and write stories. He realized when he was in college that this may not be able to get him money, so he got a degree in Finance. He started his career at Accenture where he got to learn software development process to solve business problems. Trey joined Mood Media as a consultant to help with device strategies but ultimately joined full time as a technical product manager. They take content -- whether its video or audio-- curate it and deliver it to lots of different systems and his role was to figure out the platform component of it all. In the last couple of years, he focused more on being on the shadows and internally-facing to support what’s in the market and take ownership of the product. As a kid, looking back, it was all about telling stories for Trey. He loved to write and take pictures and ultimately, that is telling stories and he shares that it’s the same now in the media company; it is still just about trying to tell stories. But what gets him excited is using all these technologies to create that story, that experience. Mood is the world’s largest in store media solutions company whose goal is to create greater emotional connections between the brands and the consumers. They do this by using sight (video digital signage), sound (audio, music), scent, and social and mobile components. Mood had recently done a visually stimulating study entitled “The State of Brick and Mortar in 2017” which embodies a lot of the company’s learnings. What interested him most is the data showing that people want assistants so we need to augment technology so that associates will be provided with better tools.   Trey’s biggest learning lessons include not looking outward as much as they needed to which resulted to development of products which were simply wrong. They learned the hard way that if they wanted to develop something new, they have to have conversations with consumers. Network connectivity was also one of the bigger challenges that they had to overcome and speed, supporting different devices and platforms are things which they are trying to hone in on.

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Oji Udezue is the head of product for Atlassian's communications products, which just launched its first new product since IPO: Atlassian Stride. A product veteran with past roles at Microsoft, Bridgewater Associates, Spiceworks and his own startup, InterMingl, Oji is passionate about bringing new scalable products and ideas into the world. He mentors startups with a focus on companies with diverse founders, and drives startup investments in Africa as a passion project. His ultimate goal is productizing functional telepathy but for now will settle for transforming how teams and the people in them, communicate and process social data at work.

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Our Guest Jeetu Patel is Chief Product Officer at Box. He leads the company's overall product and platform strategy, driving Box’s long-term roadmap and vision for cloud content management in the enterprise. Previously, as Chief Strategy Officer and SVP of Platform at Box, Jeetu led the creation of the Box Platform business unit, overseeing product strategy, marketing and developer relations. He grew the team from a nascent product to a revenue generating business line and key element on Box’s overall suite of offerings. He also led corporate development & M&A strategy as well as Box for Industries. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: The thing that drives Jeetu more than anything else is the extent of impact of his ideas and projects that he had done. People spend a lot of time at work and their team’s mission is to ensure that people’s lives at work get better –there’s less friction, teams are more productive and dreams get attained. Jeetu grew up in India and come over to the US at 19. They were wealthy before but his family had gone through hard times. America has given him a break and with the help of mentors, he had the realization that whatever he has his mind on, can come to pass. These experiences had molded his way of thinking and drive him to look for the following characteristics in people that create a level of tenacity and success: a degree of curiosity of how things work, the ability to drill things down to the core and the most important of all of them, a hunger to fuel the passion. Box is a content manager company whose mission is to power how the world works together. Everything they do is around content: managing content, how content participate in business workflows, how you share it, how you collaborate around it, how you secure it, how you get value from your content. This started with a problem of taking large files and transferring them from one person to another as they are working on projects. Their solution was a system in the cloud which allows people to seamlessly share and collaborate and over time they delivered and built it to the enterprise. Box has a three-phased approach on problems: First phase is where they incubate an idea. The goal during this phase is to identify a problem that’s big enough to solve and come up with a solution that is meaningfully differentiated in the market.  After this, you maniacally focus on the product market fit. The second phase is identifying a repeatable selling motion, and once this is established, begin to scale. Don’t try to scale prematurely, that is for phase three. Get your product market fit first, get those flagship 10 customers, identify the successful, get a repeatable selling motion then scale. Don’t do it until then.   In finding talent, you have to have a good mix of people who has experience and the right potential. You can’t just have people who are high on experience because as you get more experience, you become a liability as you often get overly prejudice in your views and your experience of your past. You will then have to spend time unlearning the patterns of your past. So ensure that you are hiring people who are extremely capable and have experience in the right areas but do not over index on experience only as a fresh mind can challenge the status quo much more so that someone who is already tainted on how things work. Also, keep the size of the team small as they will spend their time actually doing the work done and not coordinating things. Jeetu also differentiated power users and marginal users and advised to focus on the latter so you can go out and drive growth. You have to deeply understand what the marginal user wants and how that might be very different from what the power users want, and you have to make trade off exercises between the two. When you are going out to determine market fit, look at your power users. But once you get past product market fit and grow you user base, make sure there is heavy emphasis placed on the marginal users and the way you build out their capabilities.   Jeetu also shares one of the powerful concepts that their organization has constructed which they have been doing to more and more of their teams. They brand this with a code name PEAPOD: Product Manager, Engineering, Analytics, Program Management, Online Growth and Design. Quotes When that lightbulb goes off, a world of possibilities opens up for you. It’s just a matter of ‘Oh, now, I can decide to do anything that I want to do because as long as I want it badly enough, I can go get it”. Failure wasn’t an option. Great leaders tend to be simplifiers. They drill down things to its core essence. The three things that I look for the most from the people that I hire: Are they hungry? Are they curious? Can they distill it down to moments of clarity which create tremendous amount of inspiration for people? Come up with a solution that is meaningfully differentiated in the market.  Do not have a solution that is 20% better than someone else has. If it’s not at least 10x better than what is available in the market, the chances of people moving to that solution is slim.   One of our cardinal rules that we use internally that is very counter intuitive is, start by doing something that don’t scale so that you can sustainably scale. Don’t try to scale something prematurely. The quality of the problem that you end up picking is directly proportionate to the success that you are going to have in solving that problem. The harder the problem, the higher the likelihood that you will succeed. As you get more experienced, one of the things that become a liability is that often times, you get overly prejudiced in your views and your experience of your past. The best work gets done when you have a small team. The single most important thing that you need to have is hunger. If you got the right level of hunger, you can move mountains. Rapid Fire Questions What is your definition of innovation? Innovation is building something that’s ten times better than what’s available in the market. Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why? One of the people I work for once said to me, “Strategy is super important but I’d rather take a mediocre strategy with excellent execution rather than an excellent strategy with a mediocre execution.” So, I would go as far as 70% to 30%. What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far? Don’t overcharge for your product. Leave some on the table and give customers more value than what you have actually charged for. This keeps that customers coming back. Don’t hire people who are not hungry. You won’t win. What is your favorite business book? The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz What is your favorite app? Facebook WhatsApp Twitter Mail Browser

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Our Guest Nate Fortin has served as the Vice President of Design at Evernote since November 2015, where he leads the team responsible for delivering user interface designs, providing user experience education, driving seamless experiences across product lines and supporting design thought leadership and execution company wide. Before joining Evernote, Nate was a Senior Director at Motorola Mobile Devices in Sunnyvale, California, where he drove user-centered design practices, high quality design execution and cross-functional design management through the conceptualization and creation of innovative and compelling experiences for Motorola mobile devices such as the widely acclaimed DROID™ by Motorola and the Moto X family of smartphones, as well as the Moto 360 smartwatch. Prior to that, he was the founding Director of the Visual Interaction Design & Branding practice at Cooper, the pioneering user experience design and strategy firm. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Design from the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Nate has a fascination for digital product and digital design and how this intersects with making things to solve problems. He grew up in a small town where it’s mostly trees and John Deere tractors and his love for design started with his interest in art. He did not see a career path in art but he saw one in graphic design. He went on and learned the basics and soon enough, the small town boy became immersed in the digital industry. During his time in Motorola, he became involved in big projects such as developing the droid experience and bringing it to the masses; and Moto X which was a shift in philosophy at that time as to how we thought of the mobile device. What captured Nate’s interest in Evernote is his belief that Evernote’s vision is powerful. How to extend the brain to work smarter and succeed in a world where information is the epicenter of everything we do, this challenge is what excited Nate and got him here. Evernote, at its heart, is a product which allows you to create, capture, nurture, and turns your ideas into action. The problem that it is trying to solve is the idea of information overload and our inability to tackle this problem on our own so that we feel more organized, productive, and ultimately, successful. They serve about 220 million users all around the world. Their team is responsible for all the product experience in Evernote. To accomplish their mission, they have to be where ideas and information are and they are very platform agnostic. Mobile is the game changer for them and when he joined the team, the first thing he looked at was mobile experience, particularly in iOS. He wanted to make the product more accessible to more people so they started talking to people who used the product and from there, developed hypothesis on how they can improve. They go in with a hypothesis but they focus and observe with the goal of proving themselves wrong rather than finding data to support their notion. You have to commit to this as Nate shares that this is the key to the process. This led to a series of experiments and a lot of learning experience for him and the team. Outcomes from this included a dramatic shift in engagement to the content and they considered this as a great gain. The nature of mobile is changing and becoming broader. There are new inputs and products coming into the market for voice and host of internet of things products, for example. This makes mobile ubiquitous and this changes the game. The development in mobile is exciting for Nate as she shares that this is an authentic way to further their mission to bring people back to being in control over the information and ideas in their lives.

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Our Guest Stephanie Tilenius is the Founder and CEO of Vida Health, a next-generation digital therapeutic and health coaching platform for chronic physical and mental health conditions deployed at Fortune 500 companies, large national payers and providers. Prior to starting Vida, Tilenius was with Kleiner Perkins Canfield & Byers, where she worked primarily with late-stage KPCB portfolio companies, with an emphasis on companies in the Digital Growth Fund. While at Kleiner, Stephanie invested in Nextdoor and MyFitnessPal. Prior to Kleiner, Stephanie was at Google, where she was vice president of global commerce and payments, helping build and launch new products and platforms including Google Wallet, Google Shopping and Google Express. Prior to joining Google, she was at eBay and PayPal for nine years, and in her last role was SVP of eBay.com and global product where she helped lead the eBay Marketplace turnaround. Prior to eBay, Stephanie was VP of Merchant Services at PayPal where she built the off-eBay PayPal business from the ground up into a multi-billion business. A co-founder of PlanetRx.com, she has also worked at Intel, AOL and Firefly. Stephanie sits on the public boards of Coach Inc. and Seagate Technology. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Stephanie is passionate in making an impact in other people’s lives and doing the things that matter. Everything that she had done in her career had affected millions of people and improved lives and now in Vida, she is focusing on health care and eradicating chronic conditions, which is a real problem in the country. She had worked with eBay, Google and PayPal and her experience in building products and platforms from the ground up and reimagining how things are done during her time with these companies had helped her in her current work in healthcare, which, in some ways, is one of the last industries to adopt consumer-facing technology. Vida is an app service for managing your health. They match you to a coach, a nurse or a health expert, and a digital therapy program, to work in the area that you are most concerned in. They cover both mental and physical conditions and programs focus on concerns such as diabetes, hypertension, weight loss, and smoking.  They use machine learning to personalize your programs to help you succeed. Stephanie shares an example of a mobile experience of one of their customers, Jenny, which led to great results. Jenny is a 49-year old, mom of three who lost 80 lbs. in 8 months. She had diabetes, cholesterol and hypertension and found profound benefits from Vida. The new movement today is that health care is being self-care. People are now trying to track their behavior in a more holistic way than they have done in the past and this is very beneficial compared to the traditional way wherein you only get one reading per year during an annual physical exam. Vida is connected to the most popular wearables and anything out there which will enable you to monitor your health. They connect to other apps as well so they can integrate your data into one place for your coach to see. The benefit of this is for your coach to personalize your experience and help you achieve your goals by knowing everything you are doing. This day-to-day insight helps people make the right behavior change and make decisions. Pure execution and scale, just like other companies, are one of Vida’s challenges. Things get more complicated as they scale so they continue to get customer feedback – from onboarding, retention, engagement with their coaches and programs, the use of different features inside the app – and just continue to iterate. They note that they should be mindful of population profiles and their use of the app. Building a two-sided market place is always complicated and one things that has been tough for Vida is balancing the supply and demand. In addition to this, they have to have tools for both their users and coaches so this is twice the work versus other apps.

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Our Guest Lisa Schneider is Chief Digital Officer at Merriam-Webster, where she is focused on strategy, product & content development, technology, and user experience. A lifelong word nerd who understands why words matter, she is thrilled to bring Merriam-Webster’s mission to life across all devices and screen sizes, anytime, anywhere. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: Lisa is most passionate about problem-solving and collaboration. Problem-solving is finding out a way on how to make something better for someone and this can include the usual challenges that a project manager encounters such as finding a technical solution or solving a UX problem but can also encompass solutions for opportunities found within the organization. Collaboration is what makes problem-solving possible. This means including people, being able to recognize when a good idea comes along, having diverse teams, and we combine these, you will be able to come up with good solutions as well as support people. She was a huge bookworm and could not believe that she will be given a degree from doing what she likes, which was reading books and writing about them, so she jokes that this was the reason why she pursued having a BA in Literature.  This curiosity and openness to learning was what enabled her to look at things in a different way and to transition to being the current Chief Digital Officer at Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, as many people know, is a dictionary company but not a lot knows that they have a robust digital footprint. They have about 300 million page use a month and most of this are from mobile. Definitions continue to be their core product but they have redefined their mission to better reflect who they are and why they do what they do. Their mission now is to propagate their rationale of the English language and to help people better understand language so they can better understand and communicate with the world. How do words make their way to the dictionary? Lisa emphasizes that as Chief Digital Officer at Merriam-Webster, she cannot get a word into the dictionary. There are rules and they are descriptive not prescriptive. They do not sit around and decide if a word is good enough or what it should mean, it is not a judgment call. They describe a language is actually used and to do that they follow evidence and have rules that a word has to have widespread, sustained, meaningful and organic used. They collect citations and these are considered data. Merriam-Webster has been data driven for almost 200 years. In the past when they were just putting out prints in hard copies, they do not have data on how their dictionaries are being used. Now that they are online, they are now able to track usage – what words are being looked at, when and how often. They did a complete website redesign which was more responsive, has more features, just something where people can go to have a good experience. They also worked in unlocking the company’s cultural personality which was inherent to the team members as well as focused on their trend watch feature to get real time insights on what’s hot and what’s not. This led to Merriam-Webster’s effective mobile presence. With their new engine in place, their social media following grew to a fun number – highly organic and very engaged. It is a vanity KPI which they celebrate but it is really important to understand what really will impact the business. They value clicks to their website or the build-up of the habit of preferring and trusting Merriam versus other content when doing searches as this creates a virtual cycle with search engines. This is where the real ROI is and they are watching these numbers.

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Our Guest Charlie Cole joined TUMI in 2015 as the Company’s Chief Digital Officer. In this role, Mr. Cole is responsible for overseeing and developing the brands’ national and international e-commerce and digital platforms.  Since Samsonite’s acquisition of Tumi in 2016, Charlie has also taken the role of Global Chief eCommerce Officer for Samsonite Corporation – which includes oversight of global strategy for brands such as Samsonite, American Tourister, Hartmann, Gregory, High Sierra and others. Mr. Cole brings a mix of entrepreneurial and institutional knowledge to the Company with success in both fields, and a focus on creating structures to empower creativity driven by energy and objectivity. Prior to joining TUMI, Mr. Cole held various leadership positions, including serving as CEO of The Line, and head of e-commerce for Lucky Brand and Schiff Nutrition, the largest acquisition of a VMS company in the history of Wall Street. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest: The thing that gets Charlie excited is when you enable people who think very differently to align in solving a problem. Your teams are only as good as how you can get people to think creatively, technically and analytically. The best teams have a way in getting the best out of each other while still encouraging those divergent ideas. Being the person in the center of this dynamics is what gets him excited in a day to day basis. Charlie has always been good with numbers and had a type A personality, a combination which he considered dangerous. He can look back on instances wherein he was the problem which caused the dynamics not to develop. He learned that overpowering people with just one area of expertise (in his case, analytics), will not arrive with the best answer. His arrogance drove him, broke him but ultimately, humbled him. TUMI makes the best products in the world. It is their job to help people perfect their journey whether it is across the world or from your house to subway to office. They make products across this ecosystem. They are known for their luggage but they also make amazing backpacks and electronics. They are the leader in premium travel equipment.   As Chief Digital Officer in TUMI, his team is assigned in online merchandising technology, operations, marketing and wholesale. If you are touching TUMI, the brand, in a digital sphere, then they are probably in the nexus of that. Two years ago, TUMI’s margins were really low so they took a look at the data which they had a ton of (30 – 40 years’ worth); they went back to the roots on why their customers fell in love with them in the first place, what drove their product value, and what caused that momentum which drove them to where they were before they took the downward turn so that they could incorporate some of these thinking and ideology into the digital shift that they were gearing into. The bigger formula which led to a lot of TUMI’s success included understanding the device, the marketing medium and the visit. From here, they segmented and personalized to get into deeper ways to connect with their users. Charlie also talked about their three core buckets: messaging, attribution and performance which are derived from understanding the bigger customer journey. Charlie shares that what sets TUMI apart is their ability to be generative creative through the brilliant minds that they have. This does not exist in computers yet and technology is not yet close to replacing yet. Iteration is the easy part because technology has given us unimaginable ways of reiterating and optimizing.