About Raquel

Raquel received her B.A. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University. She worked in applied research at the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital's Icahn School of Medicine in New York, then performed User Research at Sailo, a startup part of the Columbia Startup Lab. She was then a part of Customer Success at Bloomberg working with clients such as Nike, Paypal and Ebay. Raquel has always been client-facing and customer focused.

UX Design fuses user-focus and business-focus into one field. She is particularly interested in the research at the foundation of Design decisions, talking to customers and creating around needs, wants, and feasibility.

How to balance Agile processes with user-centered design. How to drive and govern collaborative design. How to stagger UX and dev sprints, how to minimize documentation, run user research, and more!

About Marcin

Marcin Treder is the CEO and co-founder of UXPin, a collaborative design platform. Since co-founding UXPin in 2010, he has helped build and lead product teams in the Poland and Silicon Valley office. Previously, he was a UX Manager at Grupa Nokaut, an enterprise ecommerce platform. He holds an M.A. in Psychology from the University of Gdansk.

Getting hired is tough, no matter who you are.  Veterans face their own hurdles to finding employment, but there are people and organizations on our side, one of them is Ian Faison.  Ian has spent his post-service career helping leaders build amazing companies.  He’s been hired by companies to build better veteran hiring practices, and gives them the tools to connect smarter and faster with the 1% of the US population that serves in the military.

Beyond his work in the military hiring arena, he’s also an avid mentor when it comes to veteran entrepreneurs, often giving them valuable insights into sales and business development practices that can take their company to the next level.  Ian has taken this drive one step further, and joined a team of vets to create VETCON, the “veteran entrepreneur [vetrepreneur] conference, an annual gathering of visionaries, hustlers, and game-changers from around the world. We promote the international community of veterans who run their own businesses.”

VETCON takes place this year in Redwood City, CA on March 23rd-25th.  You can register to attend and find more information at http://www.veteranconference.com/

Ian and I dive into a lot in this interview, from the value of your experiences in garrison and training to some of the specific challenges we as veterans have in communicating out work experience to hiring managers and recruiters.  If you’re a veterans currently looking for work or vetreprenuer building a business, this is the Veteranology episode for you.

You can contact Ian Faison on LinkedIn, or find him on twitter at @ianfaison

David Nihill joins GrowthX Academy co-founder, Sean Sheppard, to share the principles of stand-up comedy and how they can be applied to all public speaking in a humorous talk based on his bestselling book Do You Talk Funny? 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (And Funnier) Public Speaker.

David Nihill is the Founder of FunnyBizz, a community, writer platform, and conference series, where business meets humor to abolish boring content. His work has been featured in Inc., Lifehacker, The Huffington Post, Fast Company, The Irish Times, WSJ, and Forbes. A graduate of the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School he calls San Francisco home these days (when immigration officials permit).

Hosted by Sean Sheppard, a five-time selling founder and a top influencer in sales and business development, How to Talk to Humans brings some of the most engaging and informed sales professionals to the mic. We also feature educators, authors, linguists and psychologists, all of whom share their insights and best practices on how we can genuinely connect with one another, creating meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships.

This podcast was recorded at the Hack Your Career event with Sean Sheppard, co-founder of GrowthX Academy from The Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center in San Francisco. Sean walks through a series of proven concepts and exercises to go back to the time when you knew what you wanted, where passion about it, and helps you identify what you want to be doing now, and (just as importantly) where. 

Highlights include:

Your Personal Vision Building a Career Funnel 90-day Action Plan

You can also download the Hack Your Career slide deck from Sean's presentation. 

Photo Credit: Fermin Alvarez

About Eli

Eli Schwartz is the Director of International Marketing for SurveyMonkey, the world’s largest online survey platform. He oversees SurveyMonkey’s marketing efforts outside the US. He just returned from nearly 2 years in Singapore where he lead SurveyMonkey’s marketing for the APAC region. Prior to his stint overseas, he was the head of global SEO at SurveyMonkey.

Eli has consulted with numerous startups and online enterprises helping them to build user acquisition strategies, and he is an advisor at Growth X as well as numerous accelerators and incubators across Asia. He has keynoted at search and marketing conferences across Asia and the US, and is frequent guest columnist on search and marketing blogs.

Dan shared insights from his book featuring best practices in achieving product-market fit. Although product-market fit is one of the most important Lean Startup concepts, it’s also the least well defined. Dan Olsen shares the top advice from his book including the Product-Market Fit Pyramid: an actionable model that breaks product-market fit down into 5 key elements. Dan will teach you his simple but effective process for achieving product-market fit. The Lean Product Process is a 6-step methodology that guides you through how to:

1. Determine your target customer
2. Identify underserved customer needs
3. Define your value proposition
4. Specify your MVP feature set
5. Create your MVP prototype
6. Test your MVP with customers

For those who are founders, come learn how to turn product definition and development into more of a science than an art to improve your odds of success. And for aspiring professionals, come learn how to you apply this methodology to a successful career in Product Management, Sales, Marketing or UX Design.

Dan Olsen is a product management and Lean startup consultant, speaker, and author. His passion is helping others create successful products that customers love. At Olsen Solutions, he works with CEOs and product leaders to build great products and strong product teams, often as interim VP of Product. His clients include Facebook, Box, Microsoft, Medallia, and One Medical Group. Dan is the author of the bestseller The Lean Product Playbook. Prior to consulting, Dan worked at Intuit, where he led the Quicken product team. He also led product management at Friendster. Dan was also cofounder and CEO of TechCrunch award winner YourVersion, a personalized news startup.

Original co-founder of marketing automation’s leading tool, Marketo, and current co-founder of ABM platform Engagio, Jon has authored the popular books Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing; the Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Sales Development; and Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation. Jon was also named one of the 10 Most Influential Tech Marketers in the world in 2016. The evening promises a lively and learned discussion.

Hosted by Sean Sheppard, a five-time selling founder and a top influencer in sales and business development, How to Talk to Humans brings some of the most engaging and informed sales professionals to the mic. We also feature educators, authors, linguists and psychologists, all of whom share their insights and best practices on how we can genuinely connect with one another, creating meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships.

Sean has successfully grown dozens of early stage companies across a wide variety of products and markets, As founding partner, he currently leads market development strategy for the GrowthX portfolio of companies.

A leader in strategic revenue planning and execution, he makes growth the Number One priority. Providing highly effective, long-term go-to-market strategies, Sean creates product demand and boosts revenue. He defines sales channels, identifies markets and aligns functional teams to support and compliment overall corporate strategies.

His broad experience in all facets of product validation, marketing, sales and commercialization instills confidence and ensures a level-headed yet innovative approach to growth.

Sean tells us about his incredible journey as an entrepreneur and how that lead to him becoming an investor and founding GrowthX.

We discuss when he usually gets involved with a startup in terms of traction and proof of concept as well as how GrowthX has taken a completely unique approach to the VC space.

Sean provides us with some notable examples of clients and provides our audience with some incredible insight as to what an investor is really looking for in terms of an investment opportunity.