#211 - Ilia Zelenkin, CEO of Bitskout on creating transformational change

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give us back the energy and power to do the things where human intelligence and imagination shine. My guest is Ilia Zelenkin, CEO Bitskout. Ilia spent close to 15 years of his career at Nokia, ultimately as head of product & service innovation, Global Services. He then co-founded SafeRoom, a control center for Encrypted Data. In 2020 he co-founded Bitskout which he's heading up as the CEO. He's passionate about technology changing the world, excited to build Star Trek alike futures, and solving problems that matter. What gets him out of bed every morning is his passion to help people become happier doing their work. The thought that 83% of people who go to work today are disengaged makes him triple his efforts. Bitskout was founded to free people up to do creative and meaningful work and with that bring back passion and satisfaction to the job. Their mission is to give us the affordable tools to make it happen NOW. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ilia to my podcast. We explore what's broken in managing projects within small companies - and why we should not accept the waste that goes on with that. Ilia shares his vision about how to make the most advanced technology affordable and the journey he's on to turn his intelligence platform into an expert platform that could not only forecast your work but check it later on as well. We also dig into his first principles to create solutions that create a pull from users i.e. a desire for more. Here are some of his quotes "what I did, I wrote every any crazy, stupid ideas that I had in my head for six months, five ideas per day, anything crazy. Anything that comes to mind. And eventually, what happened, you start noticing patterns, and you start noticing things, how they're connected. They came up with the problem, and it was a combination, a sequence of problems. So number one was building solutions to help deliver teams' projects faster. And I noticed that we couldn't breach a certain kind of project waste percentage. So we always were losing around 30% of the project times on some stupid things." During this interview, you will learn four things:

That the ability to invent something is a skill - a muscle that you can train

That the best roadmap choices start with minimum viable experiments

How to optimize your pricing strategy so it incentivizes desired behavior

That it takes the same amount of effort to do something great - so why settle for something mediocre

For more information about the guest from this week:

Ilia Zelenkin

Website Bitskout

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Release date

Lydbog: 20. april 2022