BoS Conference USA Online Session Leaders
Jason VandeBoom
CEO & Founder, ActiveCampaign
Jason VandeBoom is the CEO of ActiveCampaign, founded in 2003 as a means to fund his degree in fine arts. Heâs a self-taught software engineer and technologist.
Radhika Dutt Radical Product Thinking
Founder, Radical Product Thinking
Radhika is the author of the upcoming book Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. She is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in four acquisitions as a result of the products she built; two of these were companies she founded.
Paul Kenny
Founder, Ocean Learning
Paul Kenny has been a regular attendee at Business of Software Conference since it started in 2007 and has spoken several times before. For good reason.
Over the last 25 years, he has helped to develop salespeople and sales managers working in media, technology and the professional services sectors. Since his first talk in Boston in 2008, Paul has explored the many different approaches that you may take to developing a robust and sustainable sales effort. More recently, Paul has been running online workshops, coaching and training events for companies across the world. He is a keen cyclist and owns more bikes than there are days in the week.
Breakout Discussion: Thinking Through Your Sales Challenges
Selling can be tough. The process of winning a new client or even just getting the client interested enough to attend a product demonstration or engage in a business case exercise can be an exhausting process beset with many frustrations and disappointments. As you scale, the challenges change and evolve. What got you here won’t get you there – you need to adapt as you grow.
Join Paul to share your challenges, whether moving from founder-led sales to building a sales team, through to building effective teams across the globe, Paul has seen most things and been able to offer help and support to some of the most successful BoS companies over the years.
Rich Mironov
CEO/Product Management Guru, Mironov Consulting
Rich is a seasoned executive and serial entrepreneur – he has been the âproduct guyâ (as CEO/VP Product) at six startups. With deep technical roots in B2B infrastructure, SaaS and consumer online, Rich combines âwhat-we-can-buildâ with âwhat-markets-wantâ.
Alison Coward
Founder, Bracket
Alison Coward is founder of consulting and facilitation agency Bracket, helping teams in the creative and technology sector to collaborate better and improve their performance.
Matt Lerner
Founder, Startup Core Strengths
Matt ran growth at PayPal and has worked with countless startups since as an investor and coach. He’s also spoken at BoS to discuss how to align your org around metrics that matter.
Simon Wardley
Founder, Wardley Mapping
Simon is a former CEO, advisor of startups (all now acquired by US Giants), a fellow of Open Europe and the inventor of Wardley Mapping.
Sahil Lavingia
Founder/CEO, Gumroad
Sahil was the second employee at Pinterest but left before his stock vested to start Gumroad, an online platform that helps creators sell products directly to consumers.
Yodit Stanton
Founder/CEO, OpenSensors
Yodit has been a Software and Data engineer for over two decades, working to help people understand their physical space.
Scott Berkun
Author
Scott Berkun is a bestselling author, explainer and popular speaker on creativity, leading projects, culture, business and many other subjects.Â
Amir Salihefendic
CEO & Founder, Doist
Amir is the CEO and founder of remote-first company Doist, the company behind Todoist, and Twist.
Wade Foster
CEO & Founder, Zapier
Wade is the CEO and co-founder of Zapier (rhymes with happier), a workflow automation tool used by over 1.5 million people to connect the work apps they use every day.Â
Bruce McCarthy
Founder, Product Culture
Bruce founded Product Culture to help communicate the key principles underlying consistently successful product-focused organizations.
Joe Leech
Founder, Author, Coach, MrJoe.uk
Joe is the author of the book ‘Psychology of Designers’ and coaches startups and big organisations alike to do the right things in the right order for the right reasons.
Asia Orangio
CEO & Founder, DemandMaven
Asia and the DemandMaven team help founders makes sense of marketing and focus on things that count.
Stefano Mastrogiacomo
Founder, TeamAlignment.co
Stefano co-authored High-Impact Tools for Teams which explains five powerful tools to boost team performance and psychological safety in teams.
Tim Burgess
Founder, Shield GEO
Tim has been a BoS regular for ten years attending both the European and US events. In 2020, he got to attend from the comfort of home in his pyjamas while his family slep
Gareth Marlow
Founder, EQ Systems
Gareth has worked in Cambridge tech companies for 25 years. As COO of Red Gate he launched and scaled products, grew revenue and headcount, and developed (and occasionally fired) scores of peopl
Peter John (PJ) Marquez
GM, Apps, ServiceRocket
New Yorker by birth, Bostonian by choice, Peter loves to apply innovation to business, technology, and social challenges.
When he’s not working to develop products and services that drive software adoption at ServiceRocket, Peter is helping launch the ARTFarm for Social Innovation, a sustainable center for culture, urban-agriculture and small business incubation in Somerville, MA.
Breakout Discussion: Building a Successful Software Ecosystem
Software companies are often torn between meeting customer needs and product velocity. A well-designed ecosystem allows you to do both. Companies with flourishing ecosystems have several competitive advantages – moats, product development, customer advocates and more. Building and maintaining an ecosystem requires a clear plan and a systematic approach. Knowing where to begin, or where youâre going wrong, can be challenging.
PJ will answer your questions in a conversation about how to build a closer bond between you and your customers. Heâll share his experience building customer ecosystems, including Workplace by Facebook, Atlassian and Digital.ai, to help you understand where to start and how to build. You’ll learn about the role customer demand plays; the internal/external components of a thriving ecosystem; how platforms and ecosystems interact; how value exchange within an ecosystem works.
You’ll also work out, of all the things you should be doing, what you can do to make the biggest difference next.