Startups' Roundtable

Miriam Schwab is Co-Founder & CEO of Strattic, a serverless publishing solution for WordPress websites that makes them more secure, faster and scalable. In this episode, Miriam takes us through Strattic's technology and business model differentiation in the WordPress world. The lessons are many and include the importance of technical depth combining with business savvy, but never in isolation to a connected understanding of the customer.

Tracie Thompson is a co-founder and CEO of HackHunter and they protect organisations from malicious WiFi networks. To hear this story is to understand how deep experience and insight can translate into a unique product. What you may find of great interest, is to hear Tracie explain how, where and why they pivoted from their original go-to-market and in doing so, found a niche that has scale. B2C shifting to B2B - it is a wonderful part of the HackHunter evolution.

Laura Francois is a Co-Founder of The Spaceship Academy which is an online entrepreneurship masterclass taught through impact strategy, to enable more entrepreneurs to solve for the Sustainable Development Goals by aligning the entrepreneurs' life purpose and the global challenges we face collectively. Laura is also a founding member of Open Door Policy, a not-for-profit focussed on upskilling marginalized communities that lack access to traditional employment, such as refugees and stateless people, for remote digital employment. With a focus on collaboratively designing systems for sustainable development while leveraging the startup ecosystem, philanthropy and the creative economies, we had a lot to explore in this conversation.

When helping premature babies breathe is your purpose, and your pathway is to empower clinicians through innovation, there must be a number of cultural and process experiences to share at the Startups’ Roundtable, and that is exactly what Amy Yu, the CTO at Ventora Medical did for us on this episode. Amy is a biomedical engineer with a passion for problem solving, innovation and engineering and from her perspective as a co-founder of Ventora Medical, she talks about the founders journey and the bridging of health, technology and business.

In this episode, I am joined by Sushant Shekhar, who is the founder and CEO of mails.wtf who takes me inside their full-stack cold sales outreach platform. Specifically, he explains the process, research and roadmap decision behind their solutions, including LinkedIn Automation, Email Leads, Automated Cold Email Sequences. As all sellers are working overtime to generate new pipeline, it was great to get this fresh perspective from Sushant.

Cynch Security’s Co-Founder and CEO, Susie Jones, joins me at the Startups’ Roundtable to discuss how the Cynch team is finding ways to support small businesses protect their livelihood from cyber risks. These small businesses are some of the most at-risk and underserved parts of today’s economy, despite being the backbone of every society, which makes the Cynch Security story timely and of great interest.

Lamia Pardo is the founder of Journify - the audio-first app designed for millennials.  The app allows users to record voice notes on the go, organize them with tags and comments, and track their burnout score. Already, 7 in 10 millennials are suffering from burnout, and the World’s Health Organization estimates this is costing companies a total of $550B in productivity losses. This is a problem needing to be solved, and Lamia takes us inside the Journify evolution and shares data that is shaping their go-to-market.

Teamworki is built to help companies solve pain points and empowering teams and on this episode of the start-ups roundtable it was my pleasure to speak with Diego von Söhsten who is a co-founder and the CEO. At Teamworki, Diego’s on a mission to help teams build alignment and psychological safety by leveraging their product generated AI-based insights on team morale and potential blockers. Diego is in charge of product strategy and marketing/demand gen and he shared details around their design and feedback processes.

I experienced an incredible level of generosity in this conversation with Daniella Boutros, founder and CEO of Buttercreme Lane, which is famous for the most amazing cakes. Daniella provides real-life experiences and motivations that started as a 16-year old with dyslexia who left school to chart her own course. Daniella shares stories and experiences, including the origins of her journey, that leave no doubt as to her resiliency.  Her encouragement to embrace life’s challenges and make something from the experience is well beyond rhetoric. I know you will agree once you have had the change to meet this amazing leader.

BindiMaps is changing the lives of people with vision impairment by enabling them to navigate public spaces independently and safely, and it was a pleasure to speak with Dr Anna Wright who is the CEO and co-founder of BindiMaps on this episode of the Startups’ Roundtable. Anna developed the idea for BindiMaps after undergoing years of major surgery to save her eye-sight, and in this conversation, she shares valuable experiences and perspectives from ideation through to a completed funding round.