Raya

It's great to be in NYC for another Flybridge Founder Week -- one of my favorite events of the year. What I love about this annual event is that it's packed with high-value contents from founders to founders and the opportunity to meet high-caliber people who are building scalable businesses. These have been the highlights of the events for me: ❇ I loved seeing my friend and incredibly inspiring founder, Shiza Shahid, taking the stage and sharing stories about how to build a substantial business, Our Place, in a short few years. Building a 9-digit revenue business and having people like Selena Gomez getting behind your product in 5 years are impressive milestones -- to say the least. 👏 😍 ❇ What she shared very much resonated with me (and I often provide the same advice to companies we work with): In order to build a great business not only you need to have the best products, but all parts of your business including design, operation, customer service, marketing, etc have to work well together in synchrony. You need to keep the bar high on all fronts to keep the momentum and drive results. ❇ It was great to hear the panel of investors from A16Z, Insights Partners, Craft Ventures, and Threshold talking about what they look for in founders and startups for Series A and beyond. The gist of it is that what drives investors' interest is "sustainable and repeatable growth". The "perfect" founders and companies don't exist. Own your mistakes and focus on building a business and delivering sustainable growth. ❇ Love hearing some growth hacking tips on marketing and sales processes from James Theuerkauf, Julisa Salas, Will Greene, and Zach Shefska. ❇ Spending time with people I admire including Jeffrey Bussgang, Chip Hazard, Jesse Middleton, Katie Kirsch, Zina Ajlouny, and many others was great. I also very much enjoyed the walking dinner tour last night -- organized by one and only Cherae Robinson. 👏 👏 P.S. I missed the names of some of the amazing people I met last night/today. Please tag your name below or comment, so we can stay connected. #founders #entrepneuers

Recently, I had the opportunity to share insights about the executive search process and hiring trends in collaboration with Vidur Dewan (Partner @ Artisanal Talent) and Sam Wallace (Partner @ Wilton & Bain) hosted by one and only Jessica H.. 🤩 Below, I shared some of the takeaways from the panel. I hope these help more people who are looking for their next leadership role and trying to navigate the executive search process: ✅ AI roles are surging: Not only there's a high demand for technical AI roles, but also there's an emergence of business AI roles. To take advantage of this trend, engrain yourself into understanding the AI nots and bolts, be the user of AI tools, shape your point of view, and be a champion of change/adopting AI in your organization. ✅ Leadership roles have been consolidating: We see the emergence of CPTO roles; we also see more companies rolling up product, design, and engineering under one leader, would it be CPO, CTO, or COO. As a leader, work on upskilling your hardskills and sharpen your leadership skills, so that you can take on broader scope. ✅ Middle management is shrinking: From large companies such as Meta and Amazon to smaller players, the organizations are getting flatter with the goal of gaining more efficiencies. Focus on delivering real value and solving real problems to make yourself indispensable. ✅ Landing a great job is half skills & half story-telling: Only YOU know your own story; you are the best person positioned to help others understand your story and the why behind every career decision. Work on the "art of story-telling" to help hiring managers and recruiters understand the greatness in you and your skills. ✅ Networking, networking, networking: That's always been a golden rule for landing a great job. That's even more important given the current imbalanced demand and supply in the job market. So don't just submit resume and hope someone will get back to you; identify and reach decision makers and influencers (internal recruiters, executive search partners, hiring managers, etc). I'm sure you are reading these and thinking: "This is a lot of work! How do I do that!?" I agree these steps need work, but if you approach your job search "strategically" and continuously working on your own upskilling (by learning AI and other skills), you will have a much better result in landing your dream job! #hiring #executivesearch #recruiting #gethired Raya

The power of the Community of Like-Minded People is incredible... Recently, I had the opportunity to join the Product Leader Summit and gave a talk with my friend and one of the most amazing leaders, Ha Nguyen, to some of the most brilliant executives and leaders out there. It was truly an honor to be among this group. The learnings, growths, and deep connections were what I walked away with, and I'm beyond grateful for those. Here are a few highlights of the day: ❇ The summit started with a "shake it off" dance to get the energies out, loosen up, and be fully present. It's great to introduce creativity and unconventional things to make professional events more personal and fun. ❇ The caliber of attendees and how the multi-day summit was organized enabled deep conversations and close connections. I felt I could talk for hours with each colleague I saw there or any new leader I met. ❇ Ha Nguyen & I co-presented and co-led a workshop about the importance of Building a Portfolio Career to Live a Fulfilling Life and Augment Your Income Streams. We had a great participation and engaged audience, who were all keen to learn about how to diversify their risks and build a more liberating, full-filling career. ❇ I enjoyed hearing the thought leaders in the product management including Tatyana Mamut, Todd Yellen, Marily Nika, Ph.D, Gibson Biddle, and Dan Olsen. Each of them extended my way of thinking about the role of AI in product management, team building, and the challenges/opportunities of product management leadership. ❇ I truly enjoy deep conversations with Priyankka Mani, Amit Fulay, Disha Patel, Madhur Aggarwal, Thomas Fenrich, Deepinder Gulati, Ely Lerner, Prashant Mahajan, Jessica Chen Riolfi, Ken Sandy, Lacey Picazo, Matt Lindsey, Shishir Agrawal, and many others. Huge kudo to the thoughtful organizers of this summit: Sarah Bernard, Ha Nguyen, Gibson Biddle, Dan Olsen, and Vidya Dinamani. I'm already looking forward to the next year's event. #productmanagement #productleaders #PLS

Recently, I had the opportunity to share my learnings and insights from "Launching Products Globally" with an amazing audience at Plug and Play Tech Center with the presence of global audience including entrepreneurs from HKSTP - Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. Here are a few learnings and insights from the evening: 1) You need to "localize" your product & go-to-market strategy: This doesn't only mean just translating or localizing your product. It's a lot more than that. You need to localize your "go-to-market" motion as well. You may have product-market-fit (PMF) locally, in the first country/region you launched, but that doesn't mean you can take the same product and go-to-market strategy to launch in a new country/region. As an example at Fitbit, we learned how the French think about fitness (they count walking to a restaurant to get a glass of wine as their "fitness") is very different than how Americans define workout and fitness. So all our marketing and go-to-market strategies had to align with the way locals will see benefits in our products. 2) Having boots on the ground is essential for successful global expansion: You need to have boots on the ground who truly understand the nuances of how to go-to-market, how to sell, and how to deliver your value proposition to customers in different regions. There are a lot of nuances of how to do business locally that will take outsiders to any market a long time to learn. At Cleo, where we had global customers like Salesforce, Redbull, Pepsi, and Uber, we had to have local health Guides to deliver our services with an intimate understanding of customers needs and approaches in that region. 3) Understanding local, cultural, and social aspects is critical to a global expansion success: Even though at the surface things may seem similar in each region, there are a lot of nuances that make your go-to-market strategy and the way you deliver your services resonate with the local customers or not. At Teladoc, we've learned that people in different countries think about their mental health and how to get support for that "very differently" than each other. Huge thank you to my hosts Rahim Amidi, Dr. Yahya Tabesh, Amir Amidi, Ahmadreza Masrour, and Akvile Gustaite, and HKSTP leaders, Albert Wong & Pheona Kan, who are interested in continuing these conversations. It was awesome to meet great entrepreneurs and see old friends: Reza Moghtaderi Esfahani, Daniel Lo, Houman Homayoun, Wayne Chang, Golnaz (Naz) Moeini. #product #gotomarket #globallaunch #globalbusiness

🔥Exciting news, updates, metrics from launching a business. 🚀 Check out the video. Last part has a big announcement and bonus point. 🍪 #buildingbusiness #OKRs #metrics

💰 💸 Fed slashed interest rates for the first time in 4 years! 🤩 Why this matters and what it means for you: * This is a huge news! This is the first interest rate cut in 4 years. * This is a jumbo-sized interest rate cut! Fed cut rates by 50-basis-point instead of 25-basis-point which is more common for interest rate changes in an effort to head off a slowdown in the labor market. * That's great news for job seekers and companies who are eager to open new roles. * Lower rates are typically associated with a friendlier hiring environment as employers’ bottom lines get a boost from cheaper borrowing costs. * Not only do lower rates help with a more appealing job market, but they also help the cost of your car, home, and credit card loans be less. * It's expected that this is the beginning of multiple rounds of rate cuts well into 2025. The very next cut will probably occur after the Presidential election. #hiring #openroles #recruiting #jobmarket #fed #interestrrate

Recently, at Raya Advisory, we held a panel to discuss "How to Position Yourself for AI Roles & Navigate the Current Job Market" with talent and recruiting experts, Nathan Hirsch (from Pear VC), Nazli Nadem (from HopHR), and Ren Young (from Orby AI). Here are the takeaways from that conversation for you: 1) The demand for AI talent is skyrocketing! Not all AI roles are technical roles. Many AI business roles are emerging in companies of all sizes. AI business roles are meant to bridge the technical world with customer needs, market trends, and business needs. 2) AI teams need creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving skills that extend beyond technical expertise. The future of AI isn’t just in code—it’s in people who can bridge the gap between innovation and real-world application. 3) To land an AI role, you need to demonstrate that you are adaptable, have a growth mindset, can be an agent of change and lead others through that, and can collaborate effectively cross-functionally. 4) There's no better way to learn than by doing! If you are interested in AI roles, but your resume doesn't reflect that today, take AI courses, complete AI projects designed in those courses, offer pro-bono work in small startups, or utilize existing open-source LLMs like Llama to build prototypes for various use cases. 5) It's okay and encouraged to show vulnerability at an interview -- needs to be done effectively! Being able to effectively talk about your experience with a layoff or getting fired, what you learned from that experience, and why you are excited about this role and future, can go a long way -- especially as a leader, it's critical to be able to do this. 👉 Check out the link in the comment for the full panel discussion. ♻ If you like this, repost this content for others' benefit #AIjobs #gethired #hiring #recruiting

"God Mother of AI", Fei Fei Li, raised $230M for World Lab -- spatial intelligence AI startup. What you need to know and why this is so fascinating: 💰 This is one of the largest funding rounds for an AI company -- especially as a first round. 🚀 Funding comes from top investors including Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Radical Ventures, NVentures (the venture capital arm of Nvidia), Marc Benioff, and Ashton Kutcher. 🌍 Language models changed how we interact with computers. They enabled software to speak and understand natural languages. However, language is just one way humans reason and communicate. We understand the physical world is spatial -- by seeing images and gestures, walking in spaces, or interacting with things. World Labs aims to create that spatial world via AI. 💻 Per Li, the physical world for computers is seen through cameras, and the computer brain behind the cameras. Turning that vision into reasoning, generation, and eventual interaction involves understanding the physical structure, the physical dynamics of the physical world. And that technology is called spatial intelligence.  🕶 If World Lab's vision comes to reality, you could imagine taking your favorite book, throwing it into a model, and then literally stepping into it and watching it play out in real time, in an immersive way. 🤖 The most relevant applications of spatial intelligence could be in gaming, visual effects in AR/VR, and robotics (longer-term). World Labs aims to ship its first product in 2025. * Building a 3D world model is really, really hard; hence, it hasn't been done by any other company yet. It requires overcoming key problems in adjacent but disparate areas such as data, graphics, and AI. * What to expect? Competition (OpenAI, Figure, and others) will attempt to get into the same domain (if not already have some projects in the work). 👉 What are your thoughts about Worlds Labs vision and ambitions? 👉 Will the World Labs team succeed in making spatial intelligence a reality? 👉 What will be the biggest challenges they have to overcome? WorldLabs #artificialintelligence #spatialintelligence

Last night our Pear Persian Founder Circle (PFC) community learned from Yasaman Baiani , Co-Founder and CEO of Raya Advisory. As a longtime entrepreneur, product innovator and leader, and operator, she talked about the power of being customer-obsessed, understanding challenges with empathy and advancing your competitive advantage. Yasi’s valuable insights are informed by her long-standing track record of building products people love at Fitbit, athenahealth, Teladoc, and Cleo. Thank you, Yasi, for your time and the learnings you shared with our PFC community! Roya Soleimani Winner Athena Shiravi

🔵 Are you a CEO, Founder, Chief People Officer, C-Level Executive, or Head of Talent? 🔵 Do you and your team consider how to build and retain 10x teams in this environment with the fast-moving AI evolution and tighter budgets than before? 🔵 Do you think about if and how to upskill your team to be ready for AI era? Then this panel is for you! 👉 Come join our panel of sought-after Talent Experts who built 10x teams at LinkedIn, Benchling, Maven Clinic, Zynga, The Climate Corporation, Hired, AppNexus, and Zocdoc. This event is hosted by Raya Advisory, which is a recruiting firm supporting startups series A-E to find them the right talent for product, engineering/AI, and go-to-market roles. Panelists: Steve Cadigan: LinkedIn first CHRO and a highly sought-after talent advisor to executives and organizations globally. His clients include Google, Salesforce, The Royal Bank of Scotland, and the BBC. Top Venture Capitalist and Consulting firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and McKinsey regularly retain Steve for his insights and advice. Throughout his career, the teams, cultures, and organizations he has led have been recognized as exceptional, “world-class” performers by the Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine. Karsten Vagner: Define Ventures Head of People since 2022. Prior to joining Define, Karsten led People teams at Maven Clinic, Hired, AppNexus, and Zocdoc. Karsten is a member of the Forbes Human Resources Council and has been recognized by Crain's New York, Business Insider, and Employee Benefits News for his leadership in HR. Dean Talanehzar: Head of Talent at Benchling where he was instrumental in scaling the company to over 750 employees. Prior to that, as a Head of Talent at The Climate Corporation, he helped scale the company from 200 to 700 employees and gained significant experience in change management and leadership through multiple acquisitions. Earlier in his career, he experienced Zynga during its hypergrowth, scaling from 100 to nearly 3,000 employees.