Rocketship.fm

This episode originally aired on Jay Clouse's podcast Creative Elements. Rocketship.fm Host Michael Sacca is the VP of Product at Dribbble and cohost of Rocketship.fm. He started his career 15 years ago as a Product Designer, eventually founding a cutting-edge product agency that built applications for Scholastic, GE, Nike, Siemens, Kobe Bryant and more. In this episode we talk about building an agency, launching software products, working a 9-5 job, creative outlets, and the role that Constraints play in all of our decisions. *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.    Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like 

Hamilton founded Backstage Capitol, a venture capital firm, in 2015, when she was homeless. The firm seeks to address funding disparities in the technology industry by investing in companies started by undervalued but high-potential entrepreneurs who are women, people of color, and/or LGBTQ. To date, Backstage Capital has raised more than $10 million and invested in more than 130 startup companies. This episode is brought to you by: Digital Ocean is a cloud provider that makes it easy for entrepreneurs and startups to deploy and scale web applications with no issues and unplanned costs. Get started for free at do.co/rocketship. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos by going to logianalytics.com/rocketship. Earth Class Mail scans and digitizes you physical mail and makes it available to you on mobile or desktop or even Google Drive or Dropbox. Rocketshi

Kimberly Moore, CEO and Co-Founder of Go Together, is an entrepreneur completely passionate about building one of the most exciting companies in the mobility space. Go Together, an early stage startup, is on a mission to get people where they need to go through their trusted networks and via any transportation option available. First starting with education and political engagement. Two industries ripe for disruption in the transportation space. Go Together’s first product in the market is in 49 schools across the country and helps children attending the best school for them to succeed in life and removing transportation as the obstacle. Kimberly tells us her story of leaving Verizon Wireless right before her promotion to Vice President, her journey as a black woman founder and what VC's need to know about their own bias. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll rece

Diversity can be a difficult issue to discuss, but the truth is the tech industry has a problem. Even a brief look at the data collected by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reveals huge racial disparities in the tech workforce compared to the private sector overall. Tech companies and investors should be concerned: Evidence strongly suggests that a racially diverse tech sector could translate into stronger financial performance. A McKinsey report on diversity showed a correlation between racial and ethnic diversity and a company’s financial performance. “For every 10 percent increase in racial and ethnic diversity on the senior-executive team,” the report stated, “gross earnings rose 0.8 percent.” So why aren’t our workforces more diverse? Why is it so hard for companies like Apple and Microsoft to build a workforce that better represents the customers they’re selling to? *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage

In Part Two of our look at Diversity in Tech we hear from how Stripe increased their percentage of underrepresented candidates in their internship program from 10% to 40% in one year. How Crowdfunder fixed their gender pay gap problem and how VC Arlan Hamilton is investing millions into underrepresented founders at Backstage Capital. *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.    Since you're listening to Rocketship, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding entrepreneurship, business, and careers like Creative Elements and Freelance to Founder.

Shift is an online, peer-to-peer, marketplace for buying and selling used cars. Founded in 2014, Shift is an American company based in San Francisco’s Mission District. As of 2019, the company offers its services in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose and San Diego, California as well as Portland, Oregon. The leadership team includes Co-CEOs George Arison and Toby Russell, also co-founders of Taxi Magic; Sean Foy chief operating officer; and Christian Ohler chief technology officer. Shift was born out of a problem that the founders understood first hand and today we bring you their story. Want an ad free experience? Subscribe today at glow.fm/rocketship and get a private feed you listen to where ever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Participate builds and hosts online learning communities that inspi

PayPal was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Confinity, a company that developed security software for handheld devices. In March 2000, Confinity merged with X.com, an online banking company founded by Elon Musk. After watching PayPal become the premier choice of Internet auction shoppers, online marketplace giant eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in October 2002, then in 2015 PayPal was spun off into an independent company, but it continued to be used by eBay. While the companies history was often rocky it's effects will ripple for generations from the impact of it's early team, known as the PayPal mafia. Want an ad free experience? Subscribe today at glow.fm/rocketship and get a private feed you listen to where ever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscri

Earth Class Mail was founded over 16 years ago with the ambitious mission of “taking over the post office of the world." They were one of the first startups to launch on national television with their own slickly produced 8 part TV series focused on their CEO Ron Wieners fund-raising journey. But the journey hasn't always been smooth, they company was acquired in 2014 through a Bankruptcy resolution and then again in 2016. Today the product and team appear stronger than ever, publicly reporting 20% growth in 2018. We'll take you through their massive rise, eventual fall and a complete rebuild in a story that hasn’t yet been told in its entirety like we’re going to bring to you today. We've collected exclusive interviews with Ron Wiener himself, Venture Capitalist and eventual acquirer through Bankruptcy, Jonathan Segal and his appointed CEO Doug Breaker. Today we bring you the Product Journey of Earth Class Mail.  Want an ad free experience? Subscribe today at glow.fm/rocketship and get a private feed you lis

The story of Instagram’s explosive rise reads like a Silicon Valley fairy tale, with the company gaining staggering momentum within a few short months. The app itself took only eight weeks to develop before launching on the iPhone, and within a year and a half Facebook had acquired the company for $1 billion in cash and stock. But like all good tales, the process involved many twists and turns, failures and successes, conflicts and synergies, and a dose of fortuitous happenstance.  Want an ad free experience? Subscribe today at glow.fm/rocketship and get a private feed you listen to where ever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Participate builds and hosts online learning communities that inspire learning, connection and growth. Head to participate.com/rocketship for a free virtual learning workshop,

Founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google-and-Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein, who both worked on improving the productivity of employees at Facebook. They took their internal Facebook tool and commercialized it, launching publically in 2011. Since they, they've been trying to simplify the "work about work in Moskovitz's own words. Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling the world’s teams to work together effortlessly. Follow along as Anna Marie Clifton takes us through how Asana built their new Automation product, in an attempt to "Automate away the work about work".  Want an ad free experience? Subscribe today at glow.fm/rocketship and get a private feed you listen to where ever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Participate builds and hosts online learn

Square was founded to solve the pain point of a well known glass blower in San Francisco who lost a sale because he couldn't accept a credit card transaction. The prototype was built in a month, and Jack raised $600 just by charging VC's to hear his pitch. Today we walk you through the Product Journey that is Square with their Hardware Lead, Jesse Dorogusker, who left Apple to join the team in 2011. Want an ad free experience? Subscribe today at glow.fm/rocketship and get a private feed you listen to where ever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. LinkedIn Jobs will match the right talent with your open roll, fast. Head to Linkedin.com/rocketship to get $50 off your first job post. Participate builds and hosts online learning communities that inspire learning, connection and growth. Head to participate.c

The stock was tanking, and the company kept hemorrhaging cash. Investors sued. Some users even filed a suit. It was a losing battle from the start but what really went wrong at the beloved startup MoviePass. Today we tell the story of MoviePass's rise and ultimate fall on the season finale of Rocketship.fm's Product Failures. We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitu

Today we discuss another type of failure that is all too common, especially in young companies - team failure. We talk with Latif Nanji, the founder and CEO of Roadmonk, about his first startup Pokerspace.com and the many mistakes they made trying to move in the same direction as a team, but often failing miserably. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rocketship listeners get free access to the Logi Analytics library of product demos

The Exit. Liquidity. Acquihire. Merger. No matter the name, it’s a milestone in any entrepreneurs life. Today we take a look at the real stories behind acquisitions, when the outcome isn’t quite what you read about in Techcrunch with stories from Andy Sparks, former COO of Mattermark, Courtland Alves VP of Product & Mentorship at Bloc and Morris Wheeler, DrummondRoad Capital founder and principal. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. LinkedIn Jobs will match the right talent with your open roll, fast. Head to Linkedin.com/rocketship to get $50 off

Path was created in 2010 by former Facebook employee Dave Morin as a sort of anti-Facebook. It stood out with one good idea: limits for friends. You couldn’t add more than 50 people to your network when it first launched. As Facebook ballooned in size and our friend lists grew with it, Path sought to be the place where you chatted with only the people you were closest to. And for a little while, the idea seemed to work. Quickly, Google reportedly tried to gobble it up. By mid-2013, Morin proclaimed that people were checking the app “over 1 billion times per month.” But after years of irrelevance, it decided to finally shut its doors in 2018. What went wrong and what could have been? We explore that and more on today's episode. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. T

In 2000, Reed Hastings, the founder of a fledgling company called Netflix, flew to Dallas to propose a partnership to Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and his team. The idea was that Netflix would run Blockbuster’s brand online and Antioco’s firm would promote Netflix in its stores. Hastings got laughed out of the room. Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010 and Netflix is now a $28 billion dollar company, about ten times what Blockbuster was worth. So what happened that led Blockbuster's demise? We explore that and more today on the show. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 of

From creating unsafe driving conditions to aggravating spouses across the globe, todays failure is a lesson in what happens when your team lacks diversity, especially of lived experiences that help build empathy for your customers. Today, we take you behind the scenes of Audibles iOS7 redesign that overhauled the design of the app, but forgot to take several key use-cases into consideration. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product managers. Head to productinstitute.com and enter the code ROCKET at checkout, you'll receive $200 off your subscription. Logi Analytics is the leading platform for embedded analytics. Take your dashboard and reports to the next level. Rockets

On September 11, 2001 two American Airlines airplanes were hijacked. One was flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center and the other crashed into a field on it's way to the White House killing everyone onboard. As people scrambled to find out what happened to their loved ones, the American Airlines automated phone systems failed as they refused to included what is known as the Mayday codes. Today we talk with Blade Kotelly, who built the automated phone system for several Airlines, including some affected by the September 11 hijackings. His systems didn't fail that morning - so what happened at American Airlines? BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check it out today by clicking here. This episode is brought to you by: Product Institute is an online course for new and tenured product manag

We've been talking a lot about well known product failures, but at this point in the series, we're going to take a little pause. Today, we remember that there are very real people behind these failures. These people have feelings and the failures they’ve experienced, they’ve probably affected them in different ways. Today we sit down with Jerry Colonna. Jerry is an American venture capitalist and professional coach who played a prominent part in the early development of Silicon Valley. He is known as the CEO whisperer and is famous for being Alex Blumbergs executive coach at Gimlet captured for the Startup podcast. Jerry get's personal with Mike Belsito about his own failures and helps to put our work accomplishments and our personal worth into perspective. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 annually, and get access to exclusive bonus shows of Rocketship, previews of new seasons, and an ad free version of every episode of the podcast. Check i

Raising $41 million dollars before launch, Color should have been an instant hit, but instead met a swift demise. When it launched, the application had around 1 million downloads. By September 2011, the service had a little under 100,000 active users. Founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Nguyen and successful operator, Peter Pham, Color had one of the best teams in the business. However, in the weeks following Color's initial launch, controversy surrounded the startup's $41 million funding and mixed reviews on the product. The initial launch left users confused with the application's user interface and purpose. Its initial rating in the App Store was 2 out of 5 stars. In an interview with Robert Scoble in April 2011, Pham and Nguyen admitted that Color's launch was a wasted opportunity. But it wasn't just the launch that would sink the company. Today we take you behind the scenes of Color's rise and fall. BIG NEWS We've officially launched the Rocketship Premium Podcast feed! Join today for $5/month or $40 ann