Orbit - An Hg software leadership podcast

As CEO of IRIS Software, Elona Mortimer-Zhika has been a valued part of the Hg Orbit for 8 years and counting. In Orbit 39, she speaks to long-term friend and Hg's Senior Partner, Nic Humphries, about her unusal path to tech leadership: from Communist Albania to retail jobs in the UK and on to an audit career for Deloitte. Tracking the stratospheric progress of IRIS over the last decade and consid...

In the final Orbit recorded at Hg's recent 'Software Leadership Gathering', we brought together three perspectives all investigating the AI wave through a business lens. With the technology in an early phase, it can be viewed as an existential threat for businesses but without a clear path to commercialisation. Brent Hayward of Salesforce, David Carmona of Microsoft and Nagraj Kashyap of Touring C...

Inspired by watching the surge in space exploration during his childhood in 70s India, through the 80s microchip era and on into the internet boom and a 25-year career innovating software at a large enterprise scale - Netscape, Bang Networks and finally VMware – Raghu Raghuram can claim authority and perspective on close to the entirety of our industry. He has seen epochal change before and grown...

Born of the same crucible as Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale and Eric Poirier have been building and investing in software for over two decades. As the General Partner of 8VC and the CEO of Addepar respectively, they have seen industries evolve and innovate. Speaking at Hg's recent 'Software Leadership Gathering', Matthew Brockman asked them how - since software has allowed n...

Time for a conversation with one of the greats. As Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia, former senior banker at both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, and currently Senior Advisor at Evercore Partners, Jonathan Knee’s thinking is held in high regard across the business world. His recent book, ‘The Platform Delusion’, dismantles the long-held belief that a platform business which provide...

The advances in technology on the clinical side of healthcare were shown convincingly in the speed of our response to Covid and in the new discoveries and improvements we continue to see. Covid may have also had a part to play on the administrative side - breaking down old habits and prompting the green shoots of innovation - but there is still a long way to go as legacy systems continue to be exp...

After a year when the sudden leap forward of Gen AI and LLMs took almost everyone by surprise, it’s a good time to ignore the hype, take a step back and look at what we have. Guido Appenzeller is a special advisor to a16z, a former CTO at Intel and VM Ware and a leading voice in the current wave of software and technology. In part two of our conversation with Guido, we look at the ways the new gen...

After a year when the sudden leap forward of Gen AI and LLMs took almost everyone by surprise, it’s a good time to ignore the hype, take a step back and look at what we have. Guido Appenzeller is a special advisor to a16z, a former CTO at Intel and VM Ware and a leading voice in the current wave of software and technology. In part one of our conversation with Guido, we discuss where AI fits into t...

Always at the forefront of scientific progress, the world of healthcare continues to advance as technology and software are drawn in and adopted. But its uptake is uneven at best with some doctors having to cycle across cities with floppy discs in their bag while others experiment with artificial intelligence. With tightening budgets, the efficiency that comes with software and automation is vital...

The world of reinsurance may seem obscure to most of us, but it is an elemental ingredient vital in keeping the wheels of business turning. Insuring the insurers; managing the risk of those who manage ours and allowing them to react to the world with more agility. This is ever more important as covid has given way to increasingly frequent catastrophes, high inflation and disruptive world events. E...

“From this absolute belief that we could democratise an industry, to the belief that we can also help to democratise the society we live in.” A co-founder of Salesforce Europe, Dr. David Dempsey has been a standard bearer for sustainable business for many years. Taking a moment at our recent ESG Forum, David talks to Hg’s CSO, Caroline Löfgren, about the responsibilities of a “future ancestor” and...

As CEO of dbt Labs, Tristan Handy finds himself at the centre of the "modern data stack" of many leading businesses. But what defines the modern approach to data, what came before and where is it likely to go next? Tristan speaks to Hg's own data expert, Tim Harrison.  The past saw big data projects fail under their own weight: taking so much resource to build and redirect that needs could move on...

A catch-all term sweeping the tech world, 'Artificial Intelligence' couldn't be more exciting, daunting and, inevitably... vague. Thankfully Hg's Head of Data & Analytics, Amr Ellabban, learned his trade alongside Nebula.io Co-Founder and the host of the SuperDataScience podcast, Jon Krohn. From AlexNet's deep machine learning, to the human bias against self-driving cars and on to the opportunitie...

Hg sees the continued growth of software and technology as still just the early stages of a multi-decade trend. Combining ever-increasing performance, productivity and automation, this industry will make our work lives richer and more fulfilling for years to come. Nic Humphries, Senior Partner, and Matthew Brockman, Managing Partner discuss how the short-term fluctuations of economies are not to b...

A born problem-solver, a career spent around the trading desks of large banks meant that Philip Morgan’s efforts were often hampered by the status quo. Now, as CEO of Pirum, he has the freedom to address the inefficiencies of the industry from the outside in. From the days of wandering the City of London with a folder full of contracts; to the lessons learnt from the collapse of Lehman Brothers; t...

In the second of our conversations between Hg's Managing Partner, Matthew Brockman, and our Head of Research, David Toms, they once again dive into the state-of-the-market. With macro trends starting to bite, will the recent successes of B2B software and tech services show themselves to be cyclical or structural? How should investors in the industry adapt their approach? Is 2023 the year of the P2...

Ever since the mortality tables of the seventeenth century, the world of insurance has been a very early adopter in using data to illuminate the world. And yet, in spite of that, it has taken its time to fully catch up with the vast and complex current methods of applying it to the industry. From inferring the presence of a swimming pool based on seemingly unrelated factors, to the unexpected ways...

The role of a software Chief Growth Officer encompasses a range of functions, from product marketing to pricing to sales. Getting these functions to work together can create a growth engine for your business. But how do you measure it? How do you optimize it? In a dynamic digital world, we can look at revenue growth right through from lead to revenue, but many businesses are stuck reporting functi...

Even the notoriously resistant world of insurance has felt the influence of technology, data and software. Most recently, it has thrown open the doors for smaller operators to carve out particular specialisms or niches from the large providers, allowing them to nimbly push things forward and succeed where scale players are slower to move. From the low-cost digital distribution only too familiar to...

How do you talk about value in an inflationary environment? A new challenge for many who work within the shifting boundaries of sales, marketing and pricing. Specifically for those selling software-as-a-service, there are myriad ways to determine the price of your product but which models come closest to matching the value delivered to your customer, and which achieve high quality of revenue for y...

There can be no businesses left not having to address the challenges of climate change but the larger you are the broader and deeper your impact on the world. When faced with the complexity of a company of many parts, what do you do to clean your own house and that of your myriad supply chain. In this episode of the Orbit podcast, Hg’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Caroline Löfgren, speaks to Chri...

Today, nearly all businesses are using some form behavioral customer data to drive insight. There is a wide spectrum of sophistication emerging, from small businesses using basic website analytics to understand customer journeys, to SaaS businesses putting behavioral data in the heart of their product, processes and decision-making. In this episode of the Orbit podcast Tim Harrison, a specialist i...

"Tech is deflationary in an inflationary world…” in an Hg Orbit Podcast Special and the first of a quarterly conversation, Matthew Brockman (Managing Partner) and David Toms (Head of Tech Research) review trends observed across the tech sector during another eventful period in the world. They discuss a clear divergence of sentiment in tech markets, during which growth in earnings has proved to be...

An incredibly reactive and evolutionary software, Slack is constantly learning from its users and challenging its creators’ view of how it is used. Changes between different types of customer layered over changes in the wider world means continual vigilance and a continually refreshed approach. This episode sees Cal Henderson, Co-Founder and CTO of Slack, talk to Hg’s Jason Richards about how to j...

Initially developed as a direct digitisation of the inter-departmental memo, email has been long embedded into our work lives. The emergence of a new generation of workplace communication tools aim to get closer to how human beings actually interact and the exceptional growth of these solutions brings a host of challenges for their creators. This episode sees Cal Henderson, Co-Founder and CTO of S...