Months and Millions

Nadia Deshkovets is a TED-speaker, ex-VP and CMO at Carlsberg and now is a certified executive business coach. Nadia started her professional journey as a marketing manager in Belarus in early 90ths and grew her career all the way to Vice President of Marketing at Carlsberg in Vietnam, while remaining active, enthusiastic and empathetic leader. For the last 7 years Nadia also helps global business leaders as an executive coach and business trainer.

In this episode we talk about curiosity as one of the key ingredients for successful innovators, entrepreneurs and executive leaders. We discuss how to nurture growth mindset, overcome rigidity and find the keys to make innovation possible, long term and meaningful.

Since Nadia is a certified executive coach, we discussed, how her clients come to an idea that they need help, what makes a good coach, discuss ups and downs and how Nadia builds an AI Companion to scale her coaching services.

We also discuss specifics of doing business in Vietnam, compare with other geographies and – as both of us are expats – talk about benefits and challenges of living and working in another country.

Our conversation also covers topics of incremental vs disruptive innovation, we discuss practical case studies of product innovation in consumer goods segment and how to build a proper business portfolio toward high-momentum segments. Please, pay attention to the segment where Nadia highlights:

“Meaningful longterm innovation is always disruptive and is based on customer insights”.

“Failure is one of the most important things for innovators and entrepreneurs”.

“Smooth sea never trained a skilled sailor”.

https://nadiadeshkovets.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadia-deshkovets https://www.facebook.com/nadya.deshkovets
https://www.instagram.com/nadyadeshcoach

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderbabko

Please, enjoy our conversation, subscribe, rate the show and share your thoughts with us at [email protected]!

Months and Millions is a podcast about big bold ideas and people who make them real with help of emerging technologies. The host of the show is Alex Babko, a professional tech leader focusing on innovation and emerging tech projects for more than a decade. As a Program Management and Innovation Director I bridge the gaps between strategy, innovation, design and engineering to bring futuristic ideas to life. With my guests we talk about lessons learnt from experience, human and business sides of innovation and how to deliver value with help of emerging tech.

This is a trailer for my new podcast Months and Millions where I invite industry professionals to have unfiltered, practical and inspiring conversations about emerging tech, innovation, personal stories and trade secrets of the design, business and engineering kitchen. We talk about lessons learnt, discuss what inspires us, talk about ups and downs and how to turn big ideas into profitable business. Each week I meet a new guest and together we discuss what’s next and search for the recipes how self-made professionals can invest months into making millions.

This is a personal podcast. The views and opinions expressed here are only those of the author and do not represent those of any organization or any individual with whom the author may be associated, professionally or personally.

David Nussbaum is an inventor of holoportation technology, a CEO and founder of a company called Proto. He built a solution that beams people from all over the world to phone-booth-size boxes as holograms. The teleportation (to certain extent) is no longer a science fiction and I tested it myself at SXSW in 2022 in Austin, Texas. This is by far one of the most prominent and breakthrough technologies in the field of next-gen communication and telepresence.

In this episode we discuss how David came to an idea of broadcasting people and made teleportation real, we talk about challenges of developing a physical product and building a team that could have worked in NASA, but chose Proto. We also envision when our avatars will be attending meetings and events instead of us and in a very practical manner make an overview of key lessons learnt while developing a sci-fi technology on the edge of digital and physical realms.

We also talk about the journey from being a podcast host and a salesperson to becoming a sci-fi inventor and how each step in the career counts towards building a successful product. I personally very much admire the part where David tells a very personal story about his pitch to an angel investor when everything went upside-down.

This episode also features a master-class on pitching an idea of a business around passion, future and wonder. And of course, we discuss how many months and millions it takes to build an innovation company and try to envision what’s coming next.

Please, enjoy our conversation, subscribe, rate the show and share your thoughts with us at [email protected]!

David Nussbaum: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dnussbaum

PROTO: https://protohologram.com

Alex Babko: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderbabko/

This is a personal podcast. The views and opinions expressed here are only those of the author and do not represent those of any organization or any individual with whom the author may be associated, professionally or personally.

Al King is a top-notch marketing professional who built rock solid brands for EA Games, 20th Century Fox and Wargaming. Al is a true marketing rockstar of video games, online and home entertainment, he stands behind the award-winning approach to understanding players aspirations and motives and helps game developers and online practitioners create compelling experiences and games that win players hearts without breaking a budget. I personally worked with Al at Wargaming for more than 6 years and together we collaborated on many global events, celebrated 100 Years of Tanks with real WW1 and AR tanks on Trafalgar square, helped win Golden Joysticks for World of Tanks and did a lot of high-level branding campaigns.

In this conversation Al shares plenty of interesting stories: how Electronics Arts agreed to publish a doomed from the start game to secure a contract with Shaquille O'Neal, how Al identified very niche and practically unnoticed audience for The Sims which resulted in massive overperformance; how he helped Wargaming leadership to build a proper brand instead of a logo and many others.

We also talk about differences between old-school marketing by the book vs digital marketing and AI-enabled marketing and how archaeology and ergonomics are linked to marketing, coming to very interesting conclusions.

We also talk about role of music in video games and how to build a video game brand that Iron Maiden lead singer would volunteer to become your brand ambassador. As a bonus the last part of the conversation features a live demo jam performance by Al with ad-hoc created music band “Serpentine Sibilance“.

Al King: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awking

Please, enjoy our conversation, subscribe, rate the show and share your thoughts with us at [email protected]!

Alex Babko: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderbabko/

This is a personal podcast. The views and opinions expressed here are only those of the author and do not represent those of any organization or any individual with whom the author may be associated, professionally or personally.

My guest is Ryan Douglas, co-founder and CEO of DeepWell Digital Therapeutics. Ryan is a therapy designer, previously – a top executive and board member in several med-tech companies, deeply experienced in creation of smart medical devices, neurosurgical robotics. Now with his team he creates an industry of immersive medicine, developing games and mechanics that help people treat mental health issues. Ryan believes such games need to be available both over the counter for self-assessment and can be recommended by your doctor as part of immersive medicine concept.

Find out about Deepwell DTx: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deepwelldtx/

Ryan Douglass: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanjdouglas/

Check the first Deepwell DTx game on Meta Quest – Zengence: https://www.deepwelldtx.com/zengence

Please, enjoy our conversation, subscribe, rate the show and share your thoughts with us at [email protected]!

Alex Babko: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderbabko/

This is a personal podcast. The views and opinions expressed here are only those of the author and do not represent those of any organization or any individual with whom the author may be associated, professionally or personally.