Cristina Fonseca, VC at Indico Capital Partners, Co-Founder of Talkdesk on: How Product Development has Changed in the last 10 years
I was so inspired by my guest today, Cristina Fonseca. Cristina was one of the founders of Talkdesk, a cloud-based help desk software that became Portugal's third "unicorn" after raising US$100M in series B funding at a valuation of over US$1 billion in October 2018. Then she went on to co-found the early stage Portuguese VC firm, Indico Capital Partners, and now is starting her next venture, an AI-driven platform for customer service agents. She talks about her childhood and what helped her be successful in her ventures and how developing products has changed since the time she built Talkdesk.
On becoming an entrepreneur and Talkdesk
- [1:15] - What were some people or events that influenced you in your early days before Talkdesk to become an entrepreneur?
- [4:04] - What was the hardest growth stage of Talkdesk and why?
- [6:57] - What advice would you give founders who are thinking of stepping down from something they started?
Cleverly.ai
- [10:48] - On cleverly.ai - what does Cleverly.ai do?
- [11:48] - What is the gap in customer service management that Cleverly.ai is trying to solve?
- [16:42] - How has product development changed from your days at Talkdesk to now at Cleverly?
- Engineering and data science
- Design and UX
- Distributed teams
- AI embedded
- [26:32] - How do you make remote development work? Any advice or tips for entrepreneurs?
- [29:41] - Does product development differ if it is for DevOps vs a business user?
Go-to-Market
- [31:24] - How are you taking Cleverly to market?
- [33:46] - How are you determining pricing?
- [35:19] - How has the pandemic affected your strategy? What changes have you made to deal with it?
- [37:00] - What is your advice on seeking funding - when you should seek funding, how you should seek funding?
Book recommendation
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