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Welcome to this transcribed edition of The Operators. TechCrunch is beginning to publish podcasts from industry experts, with transcriptions available for Extra Crunch members so you can read the conversation wherever you are.

The Operators highlights the experts building the products and companies that drive the tech industry. Speaking from experience at companies like Google, Brex, Slack, Docsend, Facebook, Edmodo, WeWork, Mint, etc., these experts share insider tips on how to break into fields like product management and enterprise sales. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs to hire and manage experts in fields outside their own.

This week’s edition features Whitney Sales, a general partner at Acceleprise, the leading enterprise SaaS accelerator, and Russ Heddleston, founder and CEO of DocSend, a fast-rising document management and sharing product.

Whitney brings sales experience from LoopNet, Meltwater, SpringAhead/Tallie, and People Data Labs, before starting her own sales consultancy aptly named “The Sales Method.” Russ brings experience from founding and selling his first company to Facebook, before becoming the first salesperson of the second company he founded, DocSend.

Neil Devani and Tim Hsia created The Operators after seeing and hearing too many heady, philosophical podcasts about the future of the world and the tech industry, and not enough attention on the practical day-to-day work that makes it all happen.

Tim is a Venture Partner at Digital Garage and the CEO & Founder of Media Mobilize, a media company and ad network. Neil is an early-stage investor based in San Francisco with a focus on companies that solve serious problems, including Andela, Clearbit, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Vicarious Surgical, and Kudi.

If you’ve ever had to convince anyone of anything, or are interested in a career in sales or starting a company where you will have to hire or manage salespeople, you can’t miss this episode.

The show:

The Operators, hosted by Neil Devani and Tim Hsia, highlights the experts building the products and companies that drive the tech industry. Speaking from experience at companies like Google, Brex, Slack, Docsend, Facebook, Edmodo, WeWork, Mint, etc., these experts share insider tips on how to break into fields like product management and enterprise sales. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs to hire and manage experts in fields outside their own.

In this episode:

In Episode 1, we’re talking about sales. Neil interviews Whitney Sales, an investor with Acceleprise, the leading enterprise SaaS accelerator, and Russ Heddleston, founder and CEO of Docsend.

Neil Devani: Hi and welcome to the first episode of The Operators when we talk to the people building the companies of today and tomorrow. We publish every other Monday and you can find us online at operators.co.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic’s Lion’s Mane Mushroom Coffee has all of coffee’s focusing bark with none of the jittery bite. Lion’s Mane provides productivity, focus, and creativity all while being a healthy alternative to that daily cup of coffee. Go to www.foursigmatic.com/operators-special to try out Four Sigmatic.

I’m your host Neil Devani, and we’re coming to you today from Digital Garage here in sunny San Francisco. Joining me is Russ Heddleston, founder and CEO of DocSend, a popular product for managing and sharing sensitive documents.

Also joining us is Whitney Sales, partner at Acceleprise, the premier SaaS accelerator. Whitney has 10 years of startup sales experience and is the founder of the sales method, a consultancy that helps startups with go-to-market and sales. Whitney and Russ, thank you for joining us. It’s a pleasure to have you. If we could start if just give us a little bit of your background that would be great.

Russ Heddleston: I’ll start. I’m Russ Heddleston, as you said, co-founder and CEO of DocSend. My background is not in sales it’s in software engineering. I was at Stanford for my Bachelor’s and Masters in computer science. And then I worked at a bunch of different tech companies over the years as an intern at Microsoft, as a PM intern, I was the first engineering intern at Trulia, I ran the engineering team in a company called Greystripe for a few years, an early intern at Dropbox. 

And then DocSend is actually my second company. I started the first one in 2010 while I was in business school at Harvard, and then ended up being acquired by Facebook. And I started DocSend about six years ago here in San Francisco.

Whitney Sales: Hi, my name is Whitney Sales. I’m a GP, general partner at Acceleprise Ventures. My background is an early stage sales. Before Acceleprise I actually started a sales consultancy called The Sales Method where I worked with founders in getting to $1M in ARR, really in the early stages of the problem solving of sales. 

Before that I worked for several startups. LoopNet in the early days, helped launch two products for them. I worked at a company called Meltwater before they were acquired. 

And I worked for a company called SpringAhead. They are now Tallie, they were also acquired. Ran sales for a company called People Data Labs. And then I just spun out on my own and started the Sales Method which ended up bringing me to Acceleprise. 

Devani: Awesome, really great story. Just to start, I would love to hear from both of you a little bit about your organizations and how you think about sales. And maybe you can give us a little bit of the definitions around different roles that you see in a sales organization, whether it’s your company or other companies you’re investing in or have worked with in the past. 

Sales: There’s a lot of different roles in sales. It really depends on the type of organization you’re running, candidly. But traditionally there’s an SDR, sales development rep. I usually recommend that being the first hire in a sales team for a founder, so they can scale up their own time.

Then there’s an account executive within an organization that’s typically doing a direct sale. There may be senior account executives or junior account executives, like a mid-market enterprise executive depending on the type of sales cycle they’re running.

Sales engineers, if you’re dealing with a complex dev tool, traditionally, or a more heavy enterprise implementation tool. 

Prosthetic limbs are getting better, but not as quickly as you’d think. They’re not as smart as our real limbs, which (directed by the brain) do things like automatically stretch out to catch ourselves when we fall. This particular “stumble reflex” was the subject of an interesting study at Vanderbilt that required its subjects to fall down… a lot.

The problem the team is aiming to help alleviate is simply that users of prosthetic limbs fall, as you might guess, more than most, and when they do fall, it can be very difficult to recover, since an artificial leg — especially for above-the-knee amputations — doesn’t react the same way a natural leg would.

The idea, explained lead researcher and mechanical engineering Professor Michael Goldfarb, is to determine what exactly goes into a stumble response and how to recreate that artificially.

“An individual who stumbles will perform different actions depending on various factors, not all of which are well known. The response changes, because the strategy that is most likely to prevent a fall is highly dependent on the ‘initial conditions’ at the time of stumble,” he told TechCrunch in an email. “We are hoping to construct a model of which factors determine the nature of the stumble response, so when a stumble occurs, we can use the various sensors on a robotic prosthetic leg to artificially reconstruct the reflex in order to provide a response that is effective and consistent with the biological reflex loop.”

The experimental setup looked like this. Subjects were put on a treadmill and told to walk forward normally; a special pair of goggles prevented them from looking down, arrows on a display kept them going straight, and a simple mental task (count backwards by sevens) kept their brain occupied.

Meanwhile an “obstacle delivery apparatus” bode its time, waiting for the best opportunity to slip a literal stumbling block onto the treadmill for the person to trip over.

When this happened, the person inevitably stumbled, though a harness prevented them from actually falling and hurting themselves. But as they stumbled, their movements were captured minutely by a motion capture rig.

After 196 stumbling blocks and 190 stumbles, the researchers had collected a great deal of data on how exactly people move to recover from a stumble. Where do their knees go relative to their ankles? How do they angle their feet? How much force is taken up by the other foot?

Exactly how this data would be integrated with a prosthesis is highly dependent on the nature of the artificial limb and the conditions of the person using it. But having this data, and perhaps feeding it to a machine learning model, will help expose patterns that can be used to inform emergency prosthetic movements.

It could also be used for robotics: “The model could be used directly to program reflexes in a biped,” said Goldfarb. Those human-like motions we see robots undertaking could be even more human when directly based on the original. There’s no rush there — they might be a little too human already.

The research describing the system and the dataset, which they’re releasing for free to anyone who’d like to use it, appeared in the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation.

Netflix Hack Day, the company’s internal hackathon, has a habit of producing some amazing gems — like a brain-controlled interface, a Fitbit hack that shuts off Netflix when you fall asleep, a Netflix app for the original NES, and a way to navigate the Netflix app with Face ID and ARKit, to name a few. At this year’s Netflix Hack Day, employees ventured into areas like voice technology and haptics — the latter, so your phone could vibrate right along with the on-screen action, among other things.

Project Rumble Pack, as the hack that used haptics was called, takes inspiration from mobile gaming. Some games vibrate, which allows players to feel the action — like a bouncing ball, a car on a race track, an object getting hit or destroyed, and so on.

Similarly, Project Rumble lets you feel the action in a scene from a show or movie — like a fight, battle or big explosion. (Imagine a Michael Bay movie with Rumble Pack turned on!) The team behind the hack, Hans van de Bruggen and Ed Barker, demoed haptics in an episode of Voltron where a huge explosion makes the phone shake in your hands.

The hack was created by syncing Netflix content with haptic effects using Immersion Corporation technology.

Another hack called The Voice of Netflix, taught Netflix to speak using the voice of Netflix’s favorite characters. The team trained a neural net to find words in Netflix’s content, which could then be used to create new sentences on demand.

A third favorite was TerraVision — a practical hack that sounds like a business opportunity.

The hack lets filmmakers drop a photo of a look like they like for a film location into an interface, then get back the closest results from a library of location photos. The hack used a computer vision model trained to recognize places for its reverse image search functionality.

The final highlight was a silly hack that plays “walk-out music” — like the music that kicks in when Oscar speeches go too long — when someone overstays their allotted time in a booked conference room.

Sadly, many of Netflix’s hacks don’t tend to escape the confines of the hackathon itself. But they can inspire real-world projects in other ways, and help to keep the creativity flowing.

An overview of this year’s Netflix Hack Day, which focused on Netflix’s studio efforts, is below.

Carnegie Mellon researchers working with peers from the University of Minnesota have made a big breakthrough in brain-computer interface (BCI) and robotic technology: They’ve developed a way for a person to to control a robot arm with their minds – with no surgery or invasive procedures required to make it possible.

The mind-controlled robot in this experiment also showed a high degree of motor control, as it’s able to track a computer cursor as it moves across a screen. This is obviously a huge step forward in the field, since it proves the viability of controlling computers with your brain more generally, which could have all kinds of potential applications, not least of which are providing people with paralysis or other kinds of disorders that affect movement an alternative way to operate computerized devices.

To date, successful, highly precise demonstrations and executions of BCI tech in people has depended on systems that incorporate brain implants, which pick up the signals from inside the user. Implanting these devices is not only dangerous, but also expensive and not necessarily fully understood in terms of their long-term impact. This has led to them not being very widely used, which means only a few people have been able to benefit from their impact.

The CMU and University of Minnesota research team’s breakthrough is to develop a system that can deal with the lower signal quality that comes from using sensors that are used outside of the body applied to the skin instead. They were able to employ a combination of new sensing and machine learning technologies to grab signals from the user that are from deep within the brain, but without the kind of ‘noise’ that typically comes with noninvasive techniques.

This groundbreaking discovery might not even be that far away from changing the lives of actual patients – the research team intends to start clinical trials soon.

Many roles inside of startups and tech companies are clear: marketers market, salespeople sell, engineers engineer. Then there are the roles like “product manager” that seem obvious on the surface (product managers “product,” right?) but in reality are very fuzzy roles that can be highly variable across different companies.

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch editor Jordan Crook interviewed J Crowley, who is head of product for Airbnb Lux and was formerly at Foursquare. Crowley came up in the consumer product world without a technical background, and he spoke to overcoming some of his own insecurities to become a leading product thinker in the Valley.

This week, I wanted to offer another perspective on product from Anjul Bhambhri, who is Vice President, Platform Engineering at Adobe, where she and her team conceived Adobe’s new Experience Platform for real-time customer experience management.

Across Bhambhri’s more than two decade career straddling the line between software engineering and product, she has worked on deeply technical, enterprise projects at Sybase and Informix as startups, big data infrastructure at IBM, and now at Adobe.

We discuss the challenges and opportunities of moving from an engineering career into product (and management more generally) as well as the ways she thinks about building compelling products that are sold B2B.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity

Scaling out product after product

Danny Crichton: Anjul, thanks for joining us. One of the major initiatives that we’ve been doing as part of Extra Crunch is to interview experts in their fields, talking about how they go about doing their job, and how you think about the decisions that come up on a day-to-day basis in the work that you do. So to start, I would love to talk a little about your background.

Anjul Bhambhri: Very nice to meet you, and happy to share my journey, Danny. I have been in the software industry now for really almost 30 years. I’m an electrical engineer, and basically, my entire career has been in data, databases, and big data analytics.

Apple this morning announced a “voluntary” recall of MacBook Pro batteries due to potential overheating and safety risk. The recall only applies to mid-2015 15-inch MacBook Pros with Retina displays. As the company notes in a press release, these models were primarily sold between September 2015 and February 2017.

Concerned users can see if their systems qualify for replacement by checking the Apple Menu in their system finder. The company is hosting a page where they can enter their serial number to see if it’s covered here.

Developing…

We’re nearing the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing on July 24, and to celebrate, there’s a new interactive augmented reality app called 321 LAUNCH that will bring a faithful recreation of the launch to your mobile device, and any surface you happen to have to hand.

Their are actually two AR experiences launches as part of this project, including the launch simulator that will start on July 16th and provide eight days of live broadcast content until the actual launch day of the 24th. The other will be part of the USA TODAY app, since USA TODAY is putting together the broadcast along with FLORIDA TODAY. This embedded AR content will focus on educational material about the technology behind NASA’s Apollo program, including the Saturn V rocket that brought the lander to the Moon.

The 321 LAUNCH app is available now, and provides a launch simulation ahead of the live broadcast that lets you follow step-by-step as the rocket is assembled, moved to the pad and ultimately launched. Helpful descriptions provide a great summary of what’s happening at each step, and you can do this anywhere you find a flat surface.

It’s a great way to easily and accessibly experience the launch and learn more about the technology NASA developed to make it happen, along with learning some general info about spaceflight and what goes into launching any rocket, plus it’s a free download.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Slack prices IPO at $26 per share

Slack is debuting on the New York Stock Exchange today. Trading hasn’t opened yet as I write this, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has set a price of $26 per share.

The enterprise communication company is pursuing a direct listing, eschewing the typical IPO process in favor of putting its current stock on to the NYSE without doing an additional raise or bringing on underwriter banking partners.

2. Waymo takes its self-driving car ambitions global in partnership with Renault-Nissan

Waymo has locked in an exclusive partnership with Renault and Nissan to research how commercial autonomous vehicles might work for passengers and packages in France and Japan.

3. UK age checks for online porn delayed after bureaucratic cock-up

Digital minister Jeremy Wright said the government failed to notify the European Commission of age verification standards it expects companies to meet. Without this notification, the government can’t legally implement the policy.

4. iRobot acquires education startup Root Robotics

Root Robotics is the creator of an eponymous coding robot, a two-wheeled device designed to draw on whiteboards and other surfaces, scanning colors, playing music and otherwise playing out coding instructions.

5. SaaS data protection provider Druva nabs $130M, now at a $1B+ valuation, acquiring CloudLanes

Druva has made a name for itself as a provider of cloud-based solutions to protect and manage IT assets.

6. Why all standard black Tesla cars are about to cost $1,000 more

Tesla will start charging $1,000 for its once-standard black paint color next month, according to a tweet by CEO Elon Musk.

7. Tally’s Jason Brown on fintech’s first debt roboadvisor and an automated financial future

We sat down with Tally’s founder and CEO Jason Brown to discuss a new funding round, Tally’s growth strategy and the company’s vision for an automated financial future. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

You surely know the whole deal about carts and horses by now. When Samsung’s first 5G handset, the Galaxy S10 5G, arrives on Sprint tomorrow, users will be able to get those blazing fast mobile speeds in all of four markets: Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Kansas City.

Those all launched last week, after the arrival of the carrier’s first 5G handset, LG’s V50 ThinQ. The good news is that a number of the biggest cities in the country will be getting coverage in “coming weeks,” including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix and Washington D.C.

The other good news, I guess, is that you can still use the phone in the rest of the country, albeit with 4G speeds. Of course, with an eye-popping unlocked starting price of $1,300, you’re probably not going to want to spend much of your time on LTE with the rest of us peasants. For those who prefer not to pay all up front, plans start at $40.28 a month.

Sprint joins Verizon and AT&T, which got the 5G Galaxy back in May and June, respectively.

Fintech startup Brex went from 0 to a valuation of $1 billion in less than two years. It is a fascinating company, and so is Brex’s co-founder and CEO Henrique Dubugras. He’s coming to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to tell us more about the company’s explosive growth.

Brex first started with a corporate card for startups. Compared to legacy corporate cards, there are a ton of benefits. First, it’s easy to sign up to Brex as the company doesn’t require any personal guarantee or security deposit.

Second, you instantly get a virtual card that you can use for online subscriptions and other online purchases. After a few days, you receive a good old plastic card that you can use anywhere around the world — there’s no foreign transaction fees.

And it’s not just about a better on-boarding experience. Brex is a great way to access credit as the credit limit is around 10 times higher than the credit limit of traditional corporate cards. At the end of the month, all expenses are consolidated.

Given that Brex attended Y Combinator and is a good product for startups, it became an instant hit in Silicon Valley. More recently, the company created cards for other verticals, such as life sciences companies and e-commerce companies.

And the company raised a new funding round last week — Brex is now valued at $2.6 billion.

This isn’t Henrique Dubugras’ first startup. Originally from Brazil, Dubugras created payment company Pagar.me when he was just 16. He sold the company after reaching $1.5 billion in transaction volume.

He then enrolled at Stanford University but didn’t stay long. He left school after eight months to found Brex. And I’m quite curious to hear how he knew for sure that it was the right decision when Brex was still just an idea.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt SF to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on October 2-4.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.