Latest Episode
10/02/2017
By Peter High, published on Forbes
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?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
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.
ADP has been referred to as one of the original cloud companies, as it has long run other companies’ payroll off-premises as a service. Now, the $12 billion human capital management company has become colossus in the industry. It does not lack for competition, however, both among traditional players like Paychex, and among digital native companies like Workday and Zenefits. ADP still enjoys the advantages of scale, producing one in every six paychecks for all non-governmental employees in the United States.
Stuart Sackman has spent the past 25 years at ADP, running various businesses within the company. He has spent nearly two and a half years running Global Product and Technology for the company. In that role, he has enormous influence over the company’s products, but also the methods of delivering them to an increasingly technology savvy customer base.
Sackman also leads an innovation lab that has been branded Lifion. The lab was founded in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, 15 miles east of the company’s Roseland, New Jersey headquarters. Sackman explains the rationale behind the branding of the division, the advantages of its geography, its path forward, and a variety of other topics in this interview.
08/07/2017
Julia Davis began her career in information technology at the Air Force. She had attended college on a ROTC scholarship, and worked as a software engineer, rising to the rank of captain in the process. For the past 16 years, Davis has been a chief information officer beginning as a divisional CIO at General Electric and eventually becoming CIO of American Safety Insurance a decade ago. For the past four years, she has been the CIO of AFLAC. That depth and diversity of experience has served her well as she has helped transform that $22 billion supplemental health and life insurance company.
AFLAC is based in Columbus, Georgia, a location that can be challenging for hiring millennials. Recognizing that Atlanta is in driving distance, and a more attractive spot for recent college graduates to join, she has developed a robust intern program while also developing an innovation lab of sorts in the company’s Atlanta satellite office. She has also used the opportunity of rethinking that office in creating an “office of the future” concept there. She describes all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Julia, you have been the Chief Information Officer of Aflac for four years. Before that, you were with American Safety Insurance for almost six years. Based on your decade of experience, what role does technology play in the insurance market, particularly from a customer experience perspective and what are some of the strategic ways your IT team brings value to Aflac?
Julia Davis: Insurance was one of the last holdouts to recognize the need to approach the customer in a different way. Historically, we relied heavily on our agent channels and direct customer interaction, which was either face-to-face or phone-to-phone. However, customers began to want to interact with us differently. Property & casualty was the first company in the insurance sector to embrace automation and to leverage technology to expand the opportunities for the customer. Currently, the health and life space is exploring how technology can improve the customer experience. We recognize that folks expect an Amazon-like experience; they want an easy way to do business with us. For Aflac, this means our customers expect their claims to be paid quickly, and want it to happen with limited direct interaction with a person. This is the basis of our One Day Pay initiative. Finding the best way to deliver claim money quickly to our clients drives our technology investment strategy.
High: From our past conversations, I know you put a lot of thought into developing your team. Please describe the apprenticeship program you developed at Aflac and the benefits it has provided the organization.
7/17/2017
Chris Corrado has been an IT leader at many esteemed financial services companies such as Morgan Stanley, UBS, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank. He has also held CIO and CTO roles at technology companies such as eBay, AT&T Wireless, and Asurion. Along the way, his purview has grown from traditional CIO responsibilities to non-traditional ones, such as product development. Currently, he serves as the Chief Information Officer and Chief Operations Officer at the London Stock Exchange Group, a $2.2 billion British-based stock exchange and financial information company. It is headquartered in London.
He notes that CIOs need to be much more cognizant of the “I” In their title. Information is the key to garnering better insights on behalf of the company and its customers. Those CIOs who harness information effectively will take on greater and more strategic responsibilities. Corrado is optimistic that more CIOs will follow in his footsteps to become COOs.
Peter High: Chris, you are the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Operating Officer of the London Stock Exchange Group. Please provide a brief overview of the organization and explain your purview.
Chris Corrado: The London Stock Exchange Group is a collection of complementary businesses. We have a core strategy called Open Access, which reflects our philosophy of transparency and choice. The Group directly runs the London Stock Exchange and the Borsa Italiana. We provide the infrastructure, operations, and technology for the Oslo Stock Exchange. We also run clearinghouses and information businesses that produce indexes and analytics. The firm has experienced remarkable growth since Xavier Role became CEO, in 2009. The existing businesses have grown significantly and we have made 22 acquisitions. Today, the Group is comprised of diversified and complimentary businesses that provide a robust value chain that enables our clients to manage their investment processes. To achieve this goal, we maximize cost effectiveness, time to market and the quality of information. Technology is the fulcrum of this.
There are some unique aspects of the firm that, in turn, make my role as the CIO unique. For example, we sell hosting services because our customers want their technology in our datacenters because this makes our services more robust and less latent. The hosting services fall under me. When Xavier took over, he realized that technology is critical to what we do. However, he was not satisfied with the performance of our technology, which was being outsourced pretty significantly. Since his focus is on time-to-market, we bought technology companies. The companies have maintained their existing clients and have grown their client base as commercial enterprises. We have scaled and stabilized them internally. These fall under me as well. As we continue, I will touch on some other aspects of my position. As an overview, my role is running the company day-to-day operationally, and helping to determine the best client experience for our customers, by leveraging our capabilities.
High: It seems like the best CIOs are thinking about their job more along the lines of being a chief operating officer of technology, as opposed to the traditional order-taking, back office type of role it once was. Do you see this as a natural evolution for a strong CIO?
06/28/17
Brian Lillie set his sights on the becoming a chief information officer early in his career, and he carefully planned the moves necessary to get there. He determined he would lead each of the functions that make up a traditional IT department. Through his beginnings in technology at the Air Force, to time spent at Silicon Graphics, and then at Verisign, he gathered the necessary experiences. Then he took a left turn and spent a year getting a master’s degree in Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business. When he came back to Verisign, it was as Vice President of Global Sales Operations. Through this experience, he gained invaluable customer-centric experience and insights.
When Lillie joined Equinix in 2008, he finally realized his dream, becoming CIO, but he made this role a much more customer-centric one than is typical. As a $3.6 billion leader in the global colocation datacenter space, the company’s customers are often CIOs and their IT teams. As such, he was able to serve as a empathetic peer to his company’s customers, while also making the case for the use of Equinix’s offering. He also established an Equinix-on-Equinix program, ensuring that his team was the first and best customer of the company, making his team’s insights sharper when working with customers.
In September 2016, Lillie was promoted to chief customer officer and executive vice president of Technology Services. In that role, he leads the Global Customer Success Organization, which includes Global Customer Care, Global Customer Experience, Global Customer Process, and Global Technology Services, including IT and Interconnection Product Engineering. In many ways, this role was simply a continuation of what he had already been doing.
Now he has a CIO reporting to him, and as such he has had a chance to reflect further on the nature of the role and what separates those who succeed in it versus those who do not. He has defined “Four Pillars of Excellence,” which he believes to be the four cornerstones for building a career as a CIO. He believes CIOs must be operational, transformational, innovational, and organizational. He covers all of the above and more in depth in this interview, and more.
Peter High: Brian, you are the Chief Customer Officer and Executive Vice President of Technology Services at Equinix. Your current role is interesting, as is the path that led you to it. Can you share a few highlights from the journey you took, how you managed your career, and the goals that led you to where you are today?
Brian Lillie:I started my career in the Air Force. I was an officer for almost a decade. My last two jobs in the Air Force, as a commander of a communications squadron and as a captain in a mission control center operating satellites, prepared me well for IT. My first civilian job was as the network manager at Silicon Graphics (SGI). In this position, I gained both communications infrastructure and international experience because after a while with the company I moved to Switzerland and ran IT infrastructure for Europe for two years. At this point in my career, a mentor told me that a strong CIO should have experience in every box on the org chart. I have used this advice to guide my career.
When I came back to the U.S. with SGI, I transitioned into apps. When I joined Verisign as VP of IT, I picked up apps and infrastructure, and worked on integrating acquisitions. During this time, I thought I wanted to become a CEO, so I took a year off and attended the Stanford Graduate School of Business where I earned a master’s degree in management. After I earned my degree and came back to Verisign, I knew that I wanted to get in on the business side. The CEO was reorganizing the company and asked me to organize the sales force, along with a colleague. Ultimately, this led to me running Global Sales Operations.
When I knew it was time for a change, I took six months off, drove around the country with my family, and ultimately landed at Equinix as CIO. They were rapidly growing and needed a CIO to scale the company’s systems with the business. Equinix is a phenomenally good place to work.I want it to be my last place. Once I got the CIO role under control and had a solid team, I started adding to my remit. I picked up product engineering, that is the technology part of my job. Last fall, I took on the chief customer role to get in front of and roll up our new Global Customer Organization.
High: You started on a standard CIO path, which is to say you sat in all the different chairs in IT, presumably on the past to becoming a CIO. Instead, you rounded out your experience in a way that few CIOs have by pursuing a graduate degree to increase your business acumen, as well as by spending a period in Sales, which gave you deeper customer-centric experience. How did those experiences color your thinking about what could be achieved in the role of CIO?
05-01-17
Quest Diagnostics Chief Information Officer has never thought of IT as a cost center. She knows that there is gold in the data that the company collects, and synthesizing it better so that the company and its customers can make better decisions ensures better healthcare outcomes ultimately.
She has been a driver of the company’s Quanum suite of technology and data analytics solutions, which provides clients with a better understanding of how the company can provide critical insights in healthcare and help the healthcare community overcome pressing analytic, clinical and financial challenges. As she notes herein, “Ultimately, Quanum strengthens the overall Quest Diagnostics brand promise of Action from Insight with a robust suite of technology and data analytics tools that allow patients, payers and providers to better analyze, connect and engage.” This has led to a nearly nine figure revenue lift of the company, and for that, Fonseca has been awarded a 2017 Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
When asked for comment on Fonseca’s contribution, Quest Diagnostics’ President and Chief Executive Officer Steve Rusckowski noted, “As the leader in diagnostic information services, we are in a unique position to connect patients, providers, payers and ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations) with actionable insights based on lab, clinical, quality, claims and other health data.Our Quanum suite of solutions reflects this new way of thinking about Quest and our broader ability to harness insights and technology to deliver better healthcare. With our national connectivity, big data, technology and clinical expertise, we’re able to provide the kinds of technology solutions that will improve quality, lower costs, engage patients and optimize financial performance.”
Peter High: Please describe the innovative idea that you and your team in IT pursued.
Lidia Fonseca: The innovative concept our team pursued was an end-to-end digital experience for our customers with our comprehensive Quanum suite of technology and data analytics solutions. Launching Quanum in early 2016, our objectives were to make it easy for customers and consumers to select solutions that are beneficial to them. The new Quanum brand provides our clients with a new way of thinking about Quest Diagnostics. It offers a better understanding of how we can provide critical insights in healthcare and help the healthcare community overcome pressing analytic, clinical and financial challenges. Ultimately, Quanum strengthens the overall Quest Diagnostics brand promise of Action from Insight with a robust suite of technology and data analytics tools that allow patients, payers and providers to better analyze, connect and engage.
Click here to read the full article on Forbes
By Peter High, published on Forbes 3/27/17
Yvonne Wassenaar has been the Chief Information Officer of digital intelligence platform company, New Relic, for a bit more than two and a half years. She represents a rising trend among fast growing, Silicon Valley technology companies who reach a certain size after nearly a decade in business, and determine they need a CIO for the first time. (Recent interviewee, Mark Settle of Okta is another example of this.)
In choosing Wassenaar, New Relic’s executive team brought on someone with the killer combination of a technical background as an undergraduate coupled with an MBA followed by an extended period as a partner at Accenture. She brings equal measure of technical and business acumen together with deep problem solving skills. Not surprisingly, she has also gained board access, serving on the boards of multiple organizations, as well. We cover all of the above and more herein.
Peter High: For a little more than two and a half years, you have been the Chief Information Officer of New Relic, a software analytics company founded in 2008. In your own terms, please describe the business and the roles that IT and the CIO position play within the organization.
Yvonne Wassenaar: New Relic is what I call a digital intelligence platform, which in this age of every business becoming a software business, is vitally important. New Relic technology provides a company with insight into what people are doing with their software. For example, because most people bank on their phone or maybe on their laptop, but less at the retail branch, a digital intelligence platform is critical because what matters then, is not how long the teller lines are or how warm the coffee is, but rather, questions like: “How quickly did the app load? How many people were trying to do what type of transaction? Where are people spending their time?” The insight offered by New Relic’s technology is valuable from a developer-operator perspective for designing and running great software. Furthermore, this type of technology is increasingly important from a business perspective because, if done effectively, it offers us new eyes into consumer behavior which will provide us with more insight than we have ever had.
My role as CIO is an interesting one because New Relic is a technology company that was “born in the cloud.” As such, there is some question as to why New Relic even needs a CIO. However, more companies like Octa, DocuSign, and other similar companies “born in the cloud,” have been adding a CIO role to their docket. The reason being, as amazing as technology is, it does not quite run itself yet. The way that I look at my role within New Relic is to, internally, help the company take advantage of the technology that is available to run the business services of the company; things like sales, billing, and so forth. Even more importantly, externally, to get insights into customers; into how we can better serve those customers and to ensure that we are providing the ultimate digitized customer experience. My role is founded on those two principles of ensuring that internally we can leverage the technology well in a decentralized way but with guardrails, and then externally, that we are bringing the best of our insight from technology to bear in partnering with the CTO in thinking about the products we develop and offer to customers.
High: Do you foresee a time, and if so how soon, where the technology will “run itself” to a degree where the CIO will become obsolete?
Wassenaar: I would say if we turn the clock back five to eight years ago, there were some that believed that the CIO role would become extinct because you had data centers in the cloud, you had SaaS applications, you could credit card swipe your way to nirvana in technology. Now I see a resurgence in the role of the CIO for two reasons. The first is that companies today are structured in a functional fashion. This creates a tendency for them to see things only from one angle. That works fine if you are doing a point solution or something that is working in isolation, but few things in a public company fit that mold. For example, technology such as Salesforce, which may have been fine when they were a small company just supporting a sales organization, however, now it is not just a SaaS application, it is a SaaS platform –and it impacts the value chain across the company. First and foremost, you need someone who has a horizontal viewpoint across functions that is geared toward outcomes. The CIO is a perfect role for that because we have cross-function visibility for large applications, for large investments in AWS and Azure, and elsewhere.
The second reason is there is a lot of work to be done around “basic hygiene” when it comes to running technology at scale. There are certain principles that are important to think about whether you are designing for velocity, or for different use cases, or for size and dispersion of transaction; all of these factor into how you might want to structure your enterprise architecture. I have found that the basic functionality of a SaaS app or AWS is easy to get your arms around, but as you augment, and you build on it over the years, unless you have some understanding of how technology runs most effectively, you will start to create a lot of technical debt. You might be blind to this debt, or you may not necessarily understand or appreciate the investments, or the value of things like staging an environment, or how you actually do agile development in a robust, quality, and effective way. I believe the need for both a horizontal viewpoint and the need to bring a technological mindset to how you architect the ecosystem of solutions that is increasingly not just running your business but serving your customers is going to put increased focus on what people call the CIO role, the CTO role, or the chief digitization role. Somebody has got to play that role, and I think for the next five to ten years, it is going to become more important.
High: You began the description of New Relic as a digital intelligence platform. Digital and intelligence are increasingly the domain of other organizations as well, either in concert with IT, or in some cases superseding IT’s involvement. Given your network and your knowledge of the kinds of companies where the CIO leads the conversation on digital intelligence, versus those where they are reacting to it, what differentiates the former versus the latter category in your mind?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 2/27/17
Keith Collins has been with SAS Institute for most of the time it has been in existence. He rose through the ranks to be an early leader of research and development, and was a long time chief technology officer of the company. As such he became a leading influencer, not only at SAS, but more generally in the emerging field of what would be known later as big data and analytics. This was a field that SAS founder Jim Goodnight pioneered.
Across Collins’ time in SAS, he has taken on new responsibilities roughly every half decade. When he helped lead the search for a new chief information officer for the company a little less than four years ago, he realized that the challenges and opportunities present in that role would be an interesting step in his career journey. Since taking on those responsibilities, Collins has helped IT become a driver of revenue and efficiency-centric value, helped develop a mentality on his team of being “customer zero” to the company, and led a major shift to the cloud, all of which we cover in depth in this interview.
Peter High: Keith, you have been the Chief Information Officer at SAS for three and a half years, though you have been with the organization for thirty-three years. Before becoming CIO, you were the CTO, and you have run R&D within the organization. How did those roles color your experience as a CIO?
Keith Collins: I am of this new generation of CIO that comes from the line of business. My perspective is not understanding the business of IT. I came into it knowing the business of SAS. Running R&D has a strong technology bent, but it was about the business of SAS not running SAS from a technology standpoint.
High: There are a lot of CIOs and a lot of IT teams that have a distance from where value is created for the enterprise. One of the significant advantages you have from leading a line of business is that you were deeply enmeshed in the products that the organization offers. How have you oriented IT towards how the company develops value for its customers?
Collins: When I was CTO, we always wanted to make sure that we were first movers with SAS products. The CIO reported to me. When she retired, I interviewed CIO candidates. I have a habit of changing roles every four or five years. I started to realize that being CIO was something I had not done. I got a chance to hire myself and fire myself. It was a fantastic journey. I brought knowledge of our customers to the team, how to integrate the customer, and how to work with the different business units. What I bring to the team is that connection. What they bring is their expertise about bringing IT value to that connection.
High: The big challenge for a lot of IT organizations within companies where technology is the business, is finding some form of unique value that can be contributed. There is a joke that in a technology company, everyone believes they can do the CIO’s job better than he or she can. How do you think IT organizations within a technology company can contribute that unique value?
Peter High
10/11/2016
I first learned of Clara Labs co-founder and CEO Maran Nelson when she was among those noted as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Pioneering Woman:Forbes 30 under 30 Pioneering Woman. When a member of her extended communications team named Justin suggested I meet her, I told him that I would be in San Francisco – where Clara Labs is based – on a certain date. The next email I received was from Clara, herself. The message read,
Hi Justin, Thanks! I’ll get this set up with Peter. Hi Peter, Happy to help get a meeting on the calendar for you and Maran. Can you meet at Stable Cafe (2128 Folsom Street, San Francisco) on Friday (Sep 23) at 10am or Monday (Sep 26) at 11am PDT? Also, what’s the best number for Maran to reach you? I’ll add it to the calendar event description for reference. Best, Clara
Hi Justin, Thanks! I’ll get this set up with Peter.
Hi Peter, Happy to help get a meeting on the calendar for you and Maran.
Can you meet at Stable Cafe (2128 Folsom Street, San Francisco) on Friday (Sep 23) at 10am or Monday (Sep 26) at 11am PDT?
Also, what’s the best number for Maran to reach you? I’ll add it to the calendar event description for reference.
Best,
Clara
Clara Labs was a Y Combinator company that now boasts the likes of Sequoia Capital as investors.
There is a lot written about the paucity of women founders of Silicon Valley companies, for good reason. I was interested in learning more about what drew Nelson to entrepreneurship, why she focused on a digital personal assistant platform, and how she sees the offering evolving. We covered all of that in more in this interview.
Peter High: Maran, I thought we would begin with how the idea for Clara Labs came about. What was the need you saw that was not being met? Also, I am curious as to how much of what exists now was in your vision during the early stages.
Maran Nelson: Clara was conceived of when I first had to interact with email at a high volume. I thought I was going to be great at this professional stuff, and in the vast majority of cases I was. I started out trying to sell my product for a startup I previously had. I went right into Y Combinator right after earning my undergraduate degree. Every time we got on the phone, we were able to sell them our product. I remember looking back at the end of this very stressful, intense summer and thinking, “Where could I have been better? Where was I failing?” My intuition said – and my research confirmed – it was in the number of times I dropped the ball just on forgetting to send a calendar invitation, or did not follow up, or mis-converted a time zone. All of that was a huge cost to me, just over a few months of work. Outside of the time that I spent trying to build this new startup, get this thing off the ground, and invent something, the amount of that time that I spent coordinating was huge as well.
That stuck with me as an initial, deep frustration. Most business people at some point just accept it as part of doing business. That probably would have happened for me as well had it not been for an early introduction into entrepreneurship with that mindset, and my co-founder, who has been my longtime best friend, coming on and encouraging me in my obsession over several months with solving the scheduling problem.
Nelson: My mother named a company right after me when I was born because I pulled her out of the workforce. She called it “Maran Made Me,” because Maran made her stay at home. Both my parents are pretty entrepreneurial. [My co-founder] Michael [Akilian]’s family, though, is especially entrepreneurial. His dad has been building businesses since Michael was little. Michael and I both looked at our parents in this act of self-creation. It is a lot like writing where you get to take this empty space and a lot of you gets imprinted in that space – a lot of values. It was a model that we were lucky to get to watch. In our early relationship at 15 or 16, we were already pitching crappy startup ideas to Michael’s dad, who usually told us that reality did not work the way that we thought it did. But it was definitely core to both of us.
High: Why did you study psychology and neuroscience?
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