Tech for Non-Techies

"There are things that are much more important about investing in technology companies than technology,"  says Colin Beirne, Founder of Two Sigma Ventures. TSV has invested in around 100 start-ups over the last 10 years, and funded 10 unicorns. They're part of Two Sigma, a hedge fund with more than $60 billion under management. Colin is surrounded by data scientists and programmers, but doesn't ha...

Real estate marketplace Zillow took $500 million in write downs and fired 25% of its workforce in late 2021, largely because a pricing algorithm made a mistake. Learn what went wrong and how to avoid it. Learning notes from this episode: Zillow started life as an online marketplace for real-estate in 2005, and monetised via advertising. The company decided to diversity and get into the business of...

AI is a great tool to help you make decisions, but it's often not sophisticated enough to make good decisions by itself. This is why companies often rely on AI to do  most of the task, but leave the final decision to humans.  Most tech initiatives fit into one of these three buckets: Reach scale Increase efficiency Increase c ustomer satisfaction Fashion retailer Stitch Fix uses a stylist algorith...

Today, I'm doing something a bit different. As our smart community grows, I know that some of you might not know much about me, my story or how I got into this tech thing. That's why today, I'm sharing a little bit about me. I'm sharing this with you so that you can see that the confusion you feel about tech, or the fear that your lack of tech knowledge will be discovered, does not have to be your...

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously wrote that "software is eating the world." While digital transformation is everywhere, and even your coffee shop has an app, this doesn't mean we all need to learn STEM subjects and become coders. The vast majority of jobs remain non-technical.  To succeed in today's economy, ambitious professionals need to learn how to become Digital Collaborators. This...

When an app has too many features and pop ups, most users get confused and frustrated. This is feature creep: when the product's core functionality becomes hidden in too many options and things to do. Feature creep happens when a team is determined to stay productive, but loses sight of its strategy. Sometimes stopping is better for the product than doing more. Learning notes from this episode: Fe...

Would you leave a high flying career in advertising to set up an adult content site? Most people wouldn't, but  Cindy Gallop  is not most people. After leading one of the world's top advertising agencies, BBH in the United States. Cindy decided to try her hand at tech entrepreneurship. Her venture,  Make Love Not Porn , is in the new category of "social sex" and aims to revolutionise how people ta...

Every company wants to be innovative, but how do you balance the risk of innovation with the need to keep the lights on? Listen to this interview with Kapil Kane, Head of Innovation at Intel China, to find out. Learning notes from this episode: Most tech innovations die because they do not have a solid business case.  As much as non-techies need to learn to  speak tech , techies need to learn to s...

Design is often at the core for why products go viral or flop. But, how can you tell good design from bad right at the start? How do you hire the right people and avoid costly mistakes? That's what you'll learn on this episode. Learning notes: User experience designers, not developers, should be your first hire in the vast majority of cases. Learning how to use design software does not make you in...

You've probably heard about network effects, but they aren't the only thing you need. Learning effects build the ultimate moat against your competition. Learning notes from this episode: You get better at speaking a language the more you practice and correct your mistakes. It is the same with  algorithms: they get better with time and training. The  more time and data  you have to train an algorit...

How do you get to the top of a tech company as a non-technical professional? How can you drive innovation, when you're not building the technology yourself? That's what you'll learn from this interview with David Wells, ex CFO of Netflix and chair of the board at Wise. Learning notes from this episode: " It's called tech, or working in tech, but the entire economy is going to be this . So calling...

On Airbnb, people stay at strangers' homes. On Twitter, people get trolled. Both are global tech platforms, but why do people treat strangers well on one, and badly on the other? The answer lies in platform governance: the rules you make to encourage good interactions and punish the bad stuff. Learn how to set up platforms where people are nice to strangers with this week's podcast episode. Learni...

How do you launch a dating app, if you have no men and no women on it? Or, how do you launch a market place with niether buyers nor sellers? This is the chicken and egg problem that all platforms have to solve to succeed. In this week's episode, you'll learn 6 methods for how to launch a platform when you have no users. Some are sneaky, some are fun and all are very clever. To get the full notes a...

Facebook disrupted the media market forever. The Apple App Store created the app economy, valued at $6.3 trillion today. What makes platforms like these SO successful? In this episode, you will learn the core concepts behind platform businesses, so you can identify platforms in the making or build them yourself. This is the beginning of a mini-series on platform fundamentals at Tech for Non-Techie...

Does having $2 billion in the bank account and celebrity backing guarantee success for a consumer app? Not necessarily. Listen to how one company burned through almost $2 billion and had to shut down their app after just 6 months. Learn what Quibi did wrong, so you can avoid their mistakes. Learning notes from this episode: Success in one field does not necessarily translate into another, especial...

Developers don't work in the same ways as non-technical professionals. If you don't know how to work with developers, you can waste thousands of dollars and get very frustrated, as you'll see from the story Sophia shares on this week's episode. Learning notes from this episode: A feature cannot be released when it is not ready. It is either ready to release, or it is not. There is no half way line...

Success in tech consists of two parts: making great products and using them to build a business. No matter how brilliant an app or algorithm is, if people do not want to pay for it, it is unlikely to live for long. This is why all tech innovators need to learn the core skills of commercialising innovation. Listen to this episode to learn how Salesforce, Starbucks and Xero commercialise their tech...

The terms coding and programming are ubiquitous, yet many non-technical professionals do not know what they mean in practice. Why are there different coding languages? What do developers actually do? This is what you'll learn in this episode. Learning notes: Data is information that you can use to do something with . For example, your  shopping list  is information that you use to remember what fo...

Nasi Rwigema doesn't have a background in software, but that didn't stop him from building his tech platform:  Umwuga , a social network for blue collar workers in South Africa. To his surprise, he found that figuring out what people want is much harder than learning about tech. Nasi  is one of Sophia's students from London Business School. He took her course three years ago, and used his knowledg...

"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer — that the designers are told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,"  - Steve Jobs  In this episode, you''ll hear from Sarah Doody, a UX designer who has worked for the likes of Vice Media and Dow Jones. Today Sara...

If you have an idea for a new product in a traditional business, you will probably have to work on an extensive plan before you do anything else.   This is not how it works in tech companies. When the likes of Airbnb and Slack bring new apps or features to market, they use the Sprint Method. It is a methodology developed by Google Ventures to bring new ideas to life and test them quickly and cheap...

Agile is now a ubiquitous management term, but few people understand what it means in practice. For some products, agile is THE BEST system, for others, it is THE WORST. Listen to this week's episode to find out what it is, how it works in practice, when to use it and when to avoid it. You'll hear how WhatsApp used this methodology to release its first product, and learn how to use it yourself. Le...

It's easy to put the tech sector on a pedestal, as we're constantly bombarded with its power and profits. But "technology is just a tool to affect business outcomes," says prop tech entrepreneur Sebastian Rivas. Sebastian runs Andes STR , a which uses machine learning algorithms to find property investments for short term rentals. If you want to invest in a property and rent it out on Airbnb, Ande...

The tech sector is massive and is set to get even bigger in 2022. As it matures, the number of non-technical roles increases. Listen to this episode to prepare for the non-techie jobs boom. Learning notes from this episode: According to research by Glassdoor,  54% of all jobs in tech companies are for non-technical roles. As the tech sector matures, it becomes more open to non-techies.  When a tec...

No code apps and outsourced product studios mean that there is more opportunity than ever for non-technical founders and traditional businesses to get into tech and succeed. But, as more companies enter the market, they'll be competing for a finite resource: our attention. Listen to this episode how to make the most of this opportunity and avoid costly mistakes. Learning notes: The prevalence of N...