Notion Capital - exceptional founders, extraordinary journeys

Steve Brown is a Futurist, helping companies and organisations think through the digital challenges they were facing, and how new and emerging technologies could influence their own futures. Steve truly previously had a fascinating career, with the one and only Intel, moving through marketing, events, planning and labs, before finally becoming an Intel Futurist. For this season finale, hear Steve talk through what's next. He is also an author, and entrepreneur.

Parker Crockford explores how Fintech is developing and growing in the US and Europe, and what the breakout segments look like. He takes us through his thoughts on how to approach Fintech, the impact of Open Banking and the companies that are doing it well.

Rav Dhaliwal is probably one of the most experienced CS leaders there is, having grown along, and witnessed, the explosion of Customer Success, and having held senior CS positions at Yammer, Zendesk or Slack. A must listen for all founders and leaders as they build their business in the world of continuous selling.

Chris Bruce talks us through the extraordinary growth journey of Thomsons Online Benefits (now Darwin), from the early days to how the business was acquired.

David Quantrell talks about his road to becoming Chair of a number of tech businesses and how startups should think about developing their Board as their business grows. With two IPOs under his belt, four company sales through to running a large division of an IT giant, and having worked with well known names such as Box, McAfee and HP, it’s fair to say that David is a well respected figure in European tech.

With a non-traditional path into tech, Pat Phelan has been right in the middle of the evolution of the Customer Success function. In this podcast, Pat discusses how Customer Success aligns with the vision of the business, and at the same time, the needs of the customers.

Jonathan Gill, CEO at Panaseer, tells us how he plots the course of a rocketship company, delving into not just the sales and product direction, but also how effective leadership has the biggest impact.

John Kreisa has been in the middle of the data revolution for his entire career. He breaks down how to build your Marketing team around data products, and how to get the Sales motion humming along — an essential listening for anyone working in marketing and data.

Erevena have helped many of the most recognisable names in Europe Tech hire their leadership teams. Dan Hyde, CEO, unpacks his invaluable learnings, as the war for talent stays as strong as ever. A must listen for all those who don’t want to make the mistakes of founders before them, and end up churning their most expensive and valuable people.

Ingrid Burton, CMO at Quantcast, one of Silicon Valley's very best, talks through the relationship between Sales and Marketing, 'the squeeze play' and her hands-on experiences from Sun to Quantcast, creating whole new categories and communities around key Open Source technologies.

How founder Amandine Le Pape (with her Co-founder Matthew Hodgson) formed the vision for the missing layer of the web and created Matrix, a decentralised and highly secure open standard, which is now over 30 million users strong and powering communications at many large public bodies and private companies.

Jason Corsello on how HR Tech has evolved over the years, what trends he sees emerging, and how the pandemic has accelerated changes in the employee experience.

Kamal Kirpalani has an amazing record in sales, and shares his thoughts on how to solve big customer problems, how to get the exec team onboard and finding key superpowers to build your team.

Jennifer Bers, who lives and breathes sales excellence, on how she has developed her skills, builds teams, grown companies and figured out the Go-to-Market formula.

“The Art of Exiteering”, or taking the long term view, in order to maximise the value of an M&A or IPO — building long term readiness to have a significant and positive impact on that outcome.

Understanding a VC firm's investment strategy is critical as a founder develops their investment proposition, but so is understanding the individual strategy of each partner in a firm. Itxaso Del Palacio describes herself as a ‘product-led’ investor and lays out there thinking on what this means and why it is so important.

Within startups, internationalisation soon emerges as a topic, and typically the focus is on the US. We discuss this topic with Elizabeth Jamae the founding partner at Corporate Immigration Partners.

The three horizon mindset: the first horizon comes to: how are you executing on the promise of that thesis and to customers? The third horizon to: are you able to imagine how that market operates? Then there's a very grey area in between the two, that's where startups play, and execute.

The type of companies that Notion Capital invests in are redefining the rules of an entire industry. They become synonymous with a category which they solve uniquely well. Stephen Millard and Paul Papadimitriou discuss this fascinating topic with Naomi Allen, Co-Founder and CEO at Brightline.

Venture-backed businesses ultimately have to unlock capital efficient growth in order to achieve the goals that they've set for themselves and for their stakeholders. Paul Papadimitriou and Stephen Millard interview Carrie Dolan, CFO at Tradeshift.

Innovative, transformational pricing strategies and the biggest successes in tech and in SaaS: from value metrics, strategies to drive network effects and referrals, to freemium strategies to drive acquisition and much, much more. Paul Papadimitriou and Stephen Millard interview Rob Litterst, Pricing Strategist at ProfitWell.

Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy, with bestselling author, Cindy Alvarez, Director of Customer Research, GitHub.

Martina Lauchengco is a Partner at venture capital firm Costanoa Ventures, and also a Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, where she leads on product marketing — a critical function for any high growth SaaS business which she discusses here with Stephen Millard and Paul Papadimitriou.

Andy Leaver, Operating Partner at Notion Capital, on how do we build on the people, processes and tech to get to the next revenue boundary — the 1s and 3s. By Paul Papadimitriou, and Stephen Millard.

With Renn Vara, Co-Founder, SNP Communications Communication is critical in startups, especially as an organisation grows. Ensuring everyone across the business is aligned with the company's vision and values, the behaviors, what matters most, the path to success. The importance of communication is heightened in 2020 as we've all moved to an offline world and now an increasingly on-off world.

With Hiroki Takeuchi, Founder and CEO, GoCardless For any CEO, one of their most important challenges is to hire extraordinary people - Game Changers - to join their senior leadership team. Notion research has shown that one of the most fundamental differences between the most successful tech companies and the rest is largely to do with the quality of the hiring into the senior leadership team. Paul Papadimitriou and Stephen Millard discuss this with Hiroki.

Alan Millard, Principal Consultant at The Table Group, explains the principles of smart and healthy leadership and why smart and healthy companies have more fun and grow faster. With Paul Papadimitriou and Stephen Millard.

An in-depth interview with Hector Garcia, million bestselling author of Ikigai, the Japanese secret to a long and happy life.

In the final episode of our “Reimagining” podcast series, Sam Fromson, Co-Founder and COO at yulife, shares his COVID experiences, rescuing, recovering and ultimately reimagining his business and industry.

Nik Whitfield, Founder and CEO at Panaseer, shares his COVID experiences, rescuing, recovering and ultimately reimagining his business and industry.

Charlie Osmond, Co-Founder and Chief Tease at Triptease, shares his COVID experiences, rescuing, recovering and ultimately reimagining his business and industry, the most heavily impacted by the crisis.

Marius Luther discusses his vision for transforming the hiring and recruitment industry.

In the fifth episode of our “Reimagining” podcast series Andreas Brenner, the founder and CEO of Avrios, shares his COVID experiences of making the tough calls to build a better future for the business: this experience entailed a massive mind-shift from "growth at all costs" to "cash runway and certainty is King.” We are now far more focused and as a result we've become tremendously more efficient.

Futrli will not discover the cure to this pandemic, but we might just help overcome the symptoms of the recession and enable a massive increase in SMB productivity.

Mads Fosselius is the CEO of Dixa, and as a customer services platform it was only natural for them to double down on helping customers work through these challenging times.

Conor O’Loughlin, founder and CEO of Glofox, shares his COVID experiences, rescuing, recovering and ultimately reimagining his business and industry.

Richard Valtr discusses his internal struggles with the changes he had to make, but also why Mews and the Hotel Industry will withstand and indeed benefit from the COVID shock to the system.

Jennifer describes why category design is so important in our crowded technology markets and why category design goes hand in hand with company strategy.

Pavla Munzarova explains the importance of investing time in data quality, systems and reporting to give everyone in the business the information they need to make better decisions.

Exploring the profound importance of pricing and monetisation strategies for SaaS success.

The best tech companies invest in real product leaders and empower their teams to solve strategic problems.

Melissa shares her thoughts on the importance of professionalism, setting expectations and beating them and why you should never win quietly. Because the sum of every single small success will be huge successes long term.

Yvonne describes her experience in building high performing teams, hiring at scale and for culture and managing remote teams.

Founders must be prepared to take themselves outside their comfort zone if they want to continue to lead a fast growth business.

Tae Hea describes how startups can unlock growth (find "Go-To-Market Fit") and why that requires executives and founders to unlearn. Highlights: - Why surfing? Unlocking growth feels like the transition from paddling to surfing. - Surfing to growth is a 3 step process: Catching the wave, Riding the wave and Having the right surfboard - Unlearning is critical to executive growth.

Glofox mission is even bigger, Improving health and wellbeing on a global basis. That is something really worth doing. Highlights: - Building exceptional teams and an exceptional company in three different timezones is the big challenge. - The big question is “how do avoid getting so obsessed on the here and now that we miss where our industry is going?” - A business built on impact, purpose and pride.

Despite massive tech advances, 50% of small businesses fail, says Hannah Dawson. We want to play our part in helping those companies fulfill their potential. Highlights: - As a former small business owner, I know hard it can be when you are all alone. - We want to create a network effect of small businesses helping each other to succeed through our platform and community. - The one thing Europe desperately needs is a new generation of tech growth experts, if not we will all cannibilise ourselves.

Michael Grupp, Founder and CEO of Byter, the no-code automation platform shares his hopes, fears and desires for this new decade Highlights: - As a lawyer I was scared of the future and sold the status quo. Now as a tech entrepreneur I’m living in status quo and selling the future - We want Bryter to become the de facto file standard for lawyers around the world - My greatest wish is for Europe to realise that the future can happen here. But to do that we need more tech in our blood.

David Williams, founder of Arqit - the quantum encryption company Highlights: - Creating global scale, making a tonne of money and having a lot of fun doing it. - My biggest challenge? Hiring the very best and smartest people. - Building sovereign capabilities to solve strategic issues for the UK

Chris Tottman discusses his hopes and fears for the next ten years Highlights: - A new category of venture capital. It’s got to be so much more than just a fund. - For me, calmness is success and it’s changing the way I operate. - Spinning the flywheel of success ever faster.