Blackhawk Network

In this episode, I interview Anthony McNamara, co-founder of Digital Glue.

Digital Glue, the developer of the digital voucher engine, was founded in 2007 and he grew the business rapidly before being sold to Blackhawk Network Holdings.

Throughout the episode, Anthony talks about starting the company and the initial idea of selling movie tickets on a mobile phone.

He also discusses how the exit strategy came about naturally rather than planning for it and the importance of remaining involved while exiting.

So I started my career in sport, but entertainment, financial services, retail, lifestyle, hospitality, you name it, I've probably done it.

I started with the West Coast Eagles many, many years ago now, but since then I've had roles with event cinemas, cash converters, Subiaco Oval, Village Roadshow and Blackhawk Network.

I'm a certified practicing marketer and just really looking forward to being here.

So thanks for having me, Lucy.

And today, she's a senior product manager at Zoom, where she leads product initiatives around agentic AI.

And her broader experience includes building analytics and insights products at companies including Dialpad, RingCentral, and Blackhawk Network.

And what I'm especially excited to talk to her about today is the product side of agentic AI.

There's a huge difference between demonstrating that an AI system can do something and creating a product that people actually trust enough to let it take action, right? So we're going to get into product strategy, AI agents, context, conversational analytics, customer experience, measuring AI products, and what product teams are learning as we move from AI that simply answers questions to AI that can increasingly understand, decide, and act tangibly.

So we reconnected about three years ago.

And I said, what do you what you've been up to? And before I go there, I should say that Don was the founder of Blackhawk Networks.

He invented the retail gift card.

He also started, launched Atari in North America, as well as Nintendo.