10-03-2017
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Roger Martin has been a leading strategist and consultant for many years. He is consigliere to CEOs of many multi-billion dollar enterprises. He also spent a decade and a half as the dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, a post he took as an act of patriotism in the hopes of creating Canada’s first world-class business school. (He achieved that goal.)
Martin is also a prolific author, having written numerous business best sellers such as Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (co-authored with P&G CEO A.G. Laffley), The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, and Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking (co-authored with Rotman School Adjunct Professor, Jennifer Riel), which is his most recent book.
In this interview, he reflects on the future of social democracy, and posits that economic shifts have transpired that have altered the viability of the American Dream.
Peter High: Please describe the work you are doing with the Martin Prosperity Institute on the future of Democratic Capitalism.
Roger Martin: We are in the middle of a six-year project with the goal of answering the following mystery: Between 1776 and 1989, a period of a mere 213 years, the median family in the U.S. economy had a 95 percent probability of their income being higher, in real terms, than it was the year before. In those 213 years, they were two bad periods where this was not true. The first was the Long Depression in the late 1800s. People know less about that depression than the Great Depression, but it was equally bad. The second was the Great Depression, which began in 1929 and went for several years. Other than those periods, it was only the odd year or two where the median income did not increase. Additionally, up to 1989, the income of the top 1 percent dropped dramatically more than the median person’s income. That is American history up to 1989. Then, between 1989 and 2014, where we have the latest revised figures, median income was flat. 2014 was not higher than 1989.
There are two things to notice here. One, that is longer than any other time in American history, by far, and it is continuing. Two, in this period, the top 1 percent has done better than any time in American history. It is not even close, and it is accelerating. The mystery we are trying to solve is what changed about the American economy that makes the post 1989 period different from the period prior to 1989 whereby the median income person now has no expectation that their income is going up next year or the year after. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent’s incomes are getting better every year.
Why do I care about that? In Democratic Capitalism, the median income family is the swing voter. Unless the public vote’s for the status quo, you will have the government producing that negative result punted out. After the Great Depression, if we consider the industrialized democratic countries of that era, which was Europe and the U.S., virtually all of Europe went either communist, socialist, or fascist in response to that stagnation. The United States did not. In fact, the FDR administration took the country leftward, but still it was avowedly democratic capitalist. The reason that was politically plausible was the median family, the swing voter, could say, “At least we are all in this together. The rich are getting slammed super hard. We are getting slammed. The whole economy is getting slammed. Let’s try to work our way out of it together.” We do not have that condition anymore. The median family, if they are paying any attention, is saying “We are getting slammed and those guys couldn’t possibly be doing more awesome.”
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
10/02/2017
Taso Du Val had multiple experiences as lead engineer at start-ups, including at Fotolog, which was acquired by Hi-Media for $100 million, and at Slide, which was acquired by Google for $228 million. His first experience as CEO came while running a small engineering consulting firm. During this time, Du Val developed an international team of co-workers, and discovered that the talent he could access rivaled the best talent in Silicon Valley. US-based companies often have difficulty tapping this high quality and cost competitive talent, but as the war for talent in Silicon Valley and in other US and European tech hubs has become more acute, better alternatives were needed.
Du Val co-founded Toptal, a freelance engineer marketplace, in 2010 to fill that gap. The company’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. The company boasts a large and growing client list that includes Airbnb, Rand McNally, JPMorgan Chase, IDEO, and Pfizer. Du Val was selected by Forbes as one of its 30 under 30 in Enterprise Technology in 2015.
Among the most fascinating developments within the company has been both its virtual workforce (the company has no offices) and the technology it has developed. Toptal built its own enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and business process management (BPM) solutions to ensure that they seamlessly meshed, and that the company controlled the pace at which each evolved. These were major technical feats, which are quite unusual in this day-and-age given the fact that there are off-the-shelf versions of each that work quite well. Du Val claims that this provides an advantage in as much as each works with the other seamlessly, and the company is in control of all updates to the technology.
Peter High: Please provide a bit of a background into Toptal’s founding and mission.
Taso Du Val: When we started the company, about seven years ago, the talent marketplace was going in two directions. There were large players such as Pivotal, Accenture, Infosys, and other big shops that had expensive medium-high to high skilled labor within them. On the opposite side, there was freelancer.com, Elance, and a few other freelance marketplaces. They had high skilled labor, but it was difficult to find because it was mixed in with tens of millions of users of varying skill levels. We recognized the opportunity in the market and began our journey.
High: What market segments do you focus on? Are there certain sizes or industries that have been particularly ripe for Toptal?
9/25/17
What are microservices? In the first part in this series, I interviewed Matt Miller of Sequoia Capital. In this, the second part of the series, I interview Jay Kreps, the founder and CEO of Confluent, an open-source streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. Kreps developed Kafka while he was the Principal Staff Engineer at LinkedIn. Three years ago, he left that social media giant to develop his own company to develop real-time data streams leveraging microservices.
In this interview, he describes his entrepreneurial journey, highlights the opportunity that microservices offer to large and small companies alike, and offers advice on how best to harness the power of this trend.
Peter High: Jay, you were at LinkedIn for seven years; the last three as the principal staff engineer. You came to microservices through that experience, and then developed some key technology in the evolution of the topic. Can you talk about the opportunity as you saw it from your position at a fast-growing dynamic technology company?
Jay Kreps: When I joined LinkedIn in 2007, they were starting to figure out how to effectively break up a monolithic application that everybody put their code into. There had been an earlier wave of technology called service-oriented architecture, which is pretty much the same thing as microservices, that had died off. LinkedIn was born in the space between service-oriented architecture and the advent of microservices. Generally, to scale a software engineering effort, you add software engineers. However, when you add engineers you do get more done, but each individual engineer adds less capacity than the one before. This is a fundamental problem of big projects with lots of people and big applications; as you add people, you get slower. When people talk about microservices, they discuss scaling for more web traffic, reliability, and all kinds of other things. Microservices do not help those things.
Microservices only help one thing — scaling software engineering efforts. It lets you add more money and turn it into more software at a more constant rate.
LinkedIn made a lot of mistakes when they were trying to scale because not a lot was known about best practices. As a fast-growth company, one of the most important things was creating a product that could evolve quickly. Having agility and speed was critical because the social networking space was competitive. It ended up working out in the end because everyone could deploy their part of the application and move independently. However, there were a bunch of hills and valleys in between where we made changes that were supposed to make us more effective, but had the opposite effect.
A significant evolution in technology was needed to get the promised outcome. This is where Apache Kafka came in. People starting out today benefit from the knowledge of what works and what does not, and many of the tools around deployment and the communication between services are built up. There is now a whole family of technologies that solve problems around deployment, how you monitor your applications to make sure they are all running well, how they communicate with each other, and how you can ensure reliability and security globally when you have many moving pieces.
High: Apache Kafka is the open source data-streaming platform you co-developed during your time at LinkedIn. It is also part of the backbone of Confluent. What was the process of codifying that into open source technology?
As I work with chief information officers, the topic of microservices has risen in importance and curiosity. What is it? How does it differ from containers or service-oriented architecture? Is it primarily a weapon in the arsenal of start-ups? Given the level of curiosity, but also differences in understanding, this seemed like a topic ripe for further investigation.
Matt Miller is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, and he is among the foremost experts on microservices. He has invested in many leading companies in the space, and maintains a microservices ecosystem roadmap that highlights the various aspects of the topic and the leaders in each aspect. He seemed like the perfect person to ask the question, “What are Microservices?”
Peter High: As a partner at Sequoia and someone who has been investing in this space for some time, how do you define microservices?
Matt Miller: Microservices is the easiest way to go big by going small. It is taking what may have been a large traditional application and breaking it into many smaller autonomous pieces. Those pieces are defined as services that operate uniquely across the different use cases you have. Microservices provide a lot of benefits for the startup community Sequoia works with, as well as the corporate Fortune 500 Global 2000 community we work with, since many of our companies are our startup community’s vendors. Going to smaller applications makes you far more scalable because it is easier to scale smaller pieces. It is also significantly faster to iterate and make changes on small pieces. Additionally, the smaller pieces are far more resilient because the systems are designed to be completely independent. Meaning, if there is a failure in one of the pieces, the rest of the system continues to operate. The result of all of this is a better user experience. It is also significantly less expensive than maintaining the monolithic applications people have worked with for years.
High: You have argued that microservices represent the biggest disruption we have seen in enterprise technology this decade. Can you elaborate?
9-18-2017
Under Armour used to be known primarily for its moisture-wicking t-shirts. In the 21 years since the company was established in founder and CEO Kevin Plank’s grandmother’s basement, the company has expanded its product line extensively to include hats, pants, shoes, gloves, bags, and the like.
In recent years, the company has made three strategic acquisitions that will continue to reshape the company. With the acquisitions of MapMyFitness, EndoMondo, and MyFitnessPal, the company has become the largest digital health and fitness community in the world. I recently spoke with Under Armour’s Chief Technology Officer Paul Fipps, who leads this digital transformation of the company. He sees the future as a combination of the physical and the digital, where one’s clothing and accessories provide better information on heart rates and sleep quality.
Peter High: Under Armour calls itself a digital health and fitness community. Please explain that concept and the role you play as Chief Technology Officer.
Paul Fipps: People move fast in the digital world. They get more information, have more choice, and find more deals. A downside to all of this information is people are bombarded with messages from companies that do not understand them. This happens everywhere in the digital world: on our mobile platforms, social platforms, and on the web. At Under Armour, we believe you need to approach consumers like a hotel concierge who deeply knows his or her guests. A concierge knows all of your preferences and the context. You have an incredible experience because it is highly personalized and memorable. At Under Armour, this experience means creating products that are relevant to our customers on both a personal and community level.
Another thing we recognize is that people spend a lot of time on their smartphones; they are on their smartphones as much as they watch TV. Smartphones are where consumers expect you to meet them. We recently acquired three companies that help us understand our athletes better and make it easier for us to connect with them. Our acquisitions of MapMyFitness, EndoMondo, and MyFitnessPal made us the largest digital health and fitness community in the world. These apps produce a vast amount of data; 215 million people have downloaded one of our apps. People tell us how much they sleep, how much they eat, how much they workout, and the types of workouts they do. We also get data from brand interactions, which are when someone comes into our retail stores, visits our e-commerce site, or interacts with us in some way that we can track. By combining the data from the apps with the brand interaction data, we can understand buying decisions. More importantly, we understand the behavior behind the buying decisions. That has been a huge success for us. We are creating a new digital experience for our athletes by combining connected fitness and our e-commerce engine and our global technology platform. It is game changing for us and our athletes. That is my primary role as Chief Technology Officer of Under Armour.
High: You provided a great overview of where things stand now and customers’ expectations for speed, customization, and transparency. Can you provide an example?
09/18/17
An estimated 250 million children around the world cannot read, write, or demonstrate basic arithmetic skills. UNESCO estimates that the world will need 1.6 million more teachers globally, a number set to double by 2030. Enter Elon Musk.
Musk is famous for being the face of such organizations as Tesla and SpaceX. He is also the co-chairman of the AI research company OpenAI and the CEO of neurotechnology company Neuralink, among other companies that he is involved with. More recently, he provided $15 million to the Global Learning XPRIZE. The goal is to develop methods to teach the 250 million children who do not have access to primary or secondary education the means to teach themselves to read, write, and do math within 15 months.
Today, XPRIZE announced the five finalists advancing in the Global Learning XPRIZE and awarded each finalist a $1M milestone prize. XPRIZE awarded each finalist for the open source, cutting-edge learning software they have developed for the competition. The five finalist teams will begin field testing their education technology solutions this November in Tanzania.
“Universal access to education is a major priority for XPRIZE, and we are proud to celebrate the change-making teams making impressive strides to ensure every single child has the opportunity to take learning into her own hands,” said Marcus Shingles, CEO of XPRIZE Foundation. “The leading solutions born from this competition could provide the key to unlocking literacy for children most in need, giving them access to an education they otherwise wouldn’t have.”
Pegasystems has experienced tremendous success in recent years. The stock is up more than 100 percent in the past year, and enterprises are increasingly adopting the company’s software for customer engagement and operational excellence. It is tempting to think of the company as a start-up, perhaps run by a 20-something entrepreneur in the Bay Area. In fact, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company was founded by 61 year old Alan Trefler in 1983.
In many ways, Pegasystems has bucked the trend of a lot of software companies. Trefler did not accept venture capital early in the company’s tenure, and in so doing, he was able to dictate the pace of growth and mature the company in a way that has been sustainable. Likewise, though the company has been on the target of acquisition planning for several companies, including Salesforce, Trefler considers having an “exit strategy” as anathema to growing a successful company for the long term.
Trefler recently wrote a book, “Build for Change,” which highlights his philosophy and his advice for company’s, who he believes need to evolve with customers as the latter’s needs change or face extinction. He shares insights on all of the above and more in my interview.
Peter High: Alan, you have been in the software industry for multiple decades. You founded Pegasystems, in 1983. During your long tenure as a founder CEO in the software industry, you have seen many trends and competitors come and go. In fact, your own competitive set has evolved from your origins as a case management solution provider to a customer relationship management and business process management software company. Please share your perspective on how the software industry has evolved and where it is going.
Alan Trefler: Prior to starting Pegasystems, I worked for large New York banks as a systems integrator. Computers were getting faster, but we were still working in ways that seemed both grossly inefficient and not amenable to real customer success and happiness. I knew there had to be a better way to handle certain types of customer engagement and customer service issues. We came up with the idea of creating an infrastructure for managing work. Sometimes that is referred to as case management, sometimes it is referred to as business process management. I like the term digital process automation, which Forrester recently came out with. Digital process automation captures how companies become digital, connect to their customers, connect across channels, and bring together those intelligences, along with automation capabilities, into their software.
In the last several years, we have developed a CRM suite for Sales, Service, and Marketing that is built in digital process automation technology. It gives our customers an out-of-the-box application for service and has the power to execute effectively on the environments they want to, whether that is a Pega Cloud we service for our clients or a private cloud they might use in the future.
High: Pegasystems operates in a thriving field. How do you differentiate your organization?
09/11/17
When Cynthia Stoddard joined Adobe as chief information officer in June of 2016, she admits she joined an information technology division that was running reasonably well. She is a good judge of such things, having been a CIO multiple times over, most recently at NetApp for over four years. At Adobe, she joined a company in the throes of transforming itself into a cloud company, and an IT department that operated as “customer zero” for the company’s products. She took the game plan that was in place and added her own aspects to the plan.
She indicates in my interview with her that the first step of the IT transformation was making back-office systems real-time, responsive and highly available. Next, she facilitated a customer-experience-centric strategy for IT. A major component of that was leveraging the seven characteristics of the cloud. She explains all of the above while reflecting on her own career in IT, and the steps she has taken to encourage other women to walk in her footsteps, among other topics covered.
Peter High: You have been the CIO for about a year at Adobe, an organization that has been transforming itself into a cloud business. Please provide a brief overview of this journey and the role IT plays.
Cynthia Stoddard: Adobe began the transition to software as a service, away from box software, a number of years ago. It has been a successful transformation and we continue to be leaders in the market. We have three clouds: Document Cloud, Creative Cloud, and Experience Cloud. I am proud to be a part of the organization and to have a great IT team that enables the business, the organization’s journey, and the tremendous amount of growth Adobe has achieved. Since IT was solid when I joined the organization, I have been able to focus my strategy on the future.
Adobe did a fantastic job when they moved from box software to software as a service. When you enter the real-time online software as a service world, all of the back-office systems that were previously hidden, are exposed to the world.
High: How did the Adobe IT team manage that?
9/05/2017
The marriage between chief information officers and venture capital firms is a logical one, as CIOs are often the consumers of the enterprise portfolios of the venture community. There is a small but growing list of CIOs who are getting more involved in venture, including venture arms within their enterprises.
Eash Sundaram is one of those CIOs. In addition to being the Chief Digital and Technology Officer at JetBlue, he is also the Chair of JetBlue Technology Ventures. With this combination of roles, Sundaram is at the center of a tremendous amount of innovation through creative use of information and technology and through the digital transformation he has helped usher in. He also leads an innovation lab. In this interview, he describes his various areas of responsibility, the interplay between these functions, and reasons why he believes more CIOs will take on a wider array of responsibilities, as he has, among other topics.
Peter High: Please describe your purview as the Chief Digital and Technology Officer at JetBlue and the Chair of JetBlue Technology Ventures.
Eash Sundaram: I have three distinct functions. First, I oversee Digital, which encompasses all of e-commerce. Second, the core technology functions report to me. Lastly, I have oversight of JetBlue Technology Ventures, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of JetBlue that was founded in early 2016. JetBlue Technology Ventures invests in travel, hospitality, and transportation verticals that will enable, through technology, the next chapter of JetBlue’s innovation.
High: From our past conversations, I know that you are working on the next generation of the customer experience. What are some of the things you are developing?
Sundaram: From its founding days, JetBlue’s mission has been “to bring humanity back to air travel.” Our latest vision of inspiring humanity touches every part of the travel experience. For JetBlue, the core of the customer experience starts with the mission of being personal, helpful, and simple. Our mission is tied to two things JetBlue takes tremendous pride in innovation and a culture of hospitality. For example, we are exploring the use of biometrics for improving the travel experience. Working with Customs and Border Protection and our partners at SITA, we have launched a biometric boarding process for select international flights at Boston Logan International Airport. We have seen some early success. The traditional process at a gate is people come in, scan their boarding pass, and wait in lanes. Biometrics improves the process because now people quickly have their picture taken and walk on through; all of the transactions behind the scenes are automated. Not only is this simpler for customers, but it also lets crewmembers focus on meaningful interactions with their customers, instead of transactions.
High: You are the chairman of JetBlue Technology Ventures, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley. What was your rationale for that location?
8-28-2017
Jeff Pashalides is the Head of Corporate at Sequoia Capital, one of the most prestigious venture capital firms in the world. As such, he operates at the intersection between those who are shaping the technology landscape (investors and entrepreneurs) and the CEOs, COOs, and CIOs who would invest in those companies or who would articulate needs unmet by current technologies. As such, he has an unusually strong network and an unusually deep reservoir of insights into the future of technology.
Pashalides has had entrepreneurial experiences of his own, having run Finance and Corporate Development at TrueCar. He also led Blackstone’s software as a service advisory practice for a time.
In this interview, he provides insights into the symbiotic relationship between practitioners, the venture community, and the founding community, how to engage this ecosystem more effectively, and the biggest pain points and opportunities for the executives for whom he has served as a guide on all things Silicon Valley.
