Vishal Sikka has resigned as CEO of Infosys. In a blog post he says
“It is clear to me that despite our successes over the last three years, and the powerful seeds of innovation that we have sown, I cannot carry out my job as CEO and continue to create value, while also constantly defending against unrelenting, baseless/malicious and increasingly personal attacks.”
When he arrived from SAP I was excited he would bring an IP centric mindset to a company which, in many ways, carries the pride and the burden of employing ever increasing volumes of human labor in its populous home country. I was also concerned his enterprise software background would bring along expectations of sky high gross margins.
The reality is he tried to turn around a company which is caught in a time warp.
In the 90s and early 2000s, Infosys delighted its customers. Its CMM Level 5 and Six Sigma certifications showed in productivity in the form of tangible cost reductions and lowered code error rates. In my opinion, one of the worst things to happen to Infosys was the glowing coverage in Tom Friedman’s book The World is Flat. The Bangalore campus became a tourist spot to bring government leaders from around the world as a showcase of India’s software capabilities. This went to Infosys’s head, even as performance on customer contracts was declining and labor teams and cost grew more and more.
I saw this first hand when I took CIOs to Bangalore. Infosys would talk with pride about the campus and the accolades and usually pull in some of the founders and early executives. In moderation, nothing wrong with that but when it took a couple of hours out of the day, it did not help present their credentials for the specific projects the clients needed help on.
Then, you saw a wave of underwhelming presentations at Oracle Open World in the 2010-13 timeframe. After paying millions for the pole position just prior to Larry Ellison’s talk, the pitches, many by early executives would literally put the audience to sleep. You could see the firm was slipping while clinging to its version of a glorious past. (the keynotes at OWW improved a bit when Vishal took over)
All this while Amazon was redefining “continuous improvement” with 50 price cuts over a decade around its cloud storage and compute services. Workday was taking an average of 5 employees to support every customer, using its multi-tenant model and in-background upgrades to delivering every improving functionality to all its customers. Other SaaS vendors were delivering similar efficiencies. And Foxconn was delivering billions of high quality Apple and other devices under intense delivery and secrecy pressures. Even in a country like China which like India has to encourage labor -centric models, Foxconn was rolling out robotics and precision equipment.
In a comment, Infychallenger says the “world has changed from commodity to digital” and Infosys has not kept up. Actually, only a fraction of the world has. Even though I write plenty about innovation, most of IT is stuck in 15, 20, 30 year old tech. Way too many companies define digital narrowly – social media or web commerce. The truly transformative companies are making their own products and services smarter, turning their business models upside down and looking at new automation as they rethink supply chains, and move to advanced manufacturing concepts. These innovators are not using Infosys (and in fairness most other outsourcers). But they do want Amazon, Workday and Foxconn type efficiency in their back offices.
In 1995, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema wrote their best seller “The discipline of market leaders”. They argued dominant companies picked one of 3 focuses – operational excellence, product leadership or customer intimacy. Can Infosys become a product leader without beaucoup, particularly industry and geography specific, IP? Not likely. Can it become customer intimate? Possibly, but not with a headcount of 200,000.
Infosys could again become an operational efficiency leader like it was twenty years ago. But it would need to do that with a heavy focus on automation. Vishal tried that in small doses and even that met resistance. Its time for Infosys to become an operational leader like it used to be not just wallow in the glory of what it was.
I have written and spoken about Java’s staying power a lot over the years. It continues to be a thing. The rise of cloud native companies, disrupting industries, was seen by some as presaging the end of Java. But when startups grow up they turn into Java shops, or at least start extensively using Java. Why would a startup, built from the ground up to take advantage of the latest technologies for competitive advantage, even consider using Java? Apart from a couple of decades of virtual machine optimisation, a huge skills base, libraries for everything, and the fact it can be used to be build maintainable code, I mean. Our programming language rankings consistently show Java’s strength. One of the things that RedMonk identified some time ago is that frameworks drive programming language adoption. Without Rails, Ruby would never have grown so explosively. Node.js has a new framework of choice seemingly every week.
Recently Spring and Spring Boot have emerged as the key frameworks driving Java forward. Developer interest is off the charts. But alongside the data, a good anecdote or two can be helpful in understanding the landscape. A couple of stories caught my eye recently.
The first concerns New Relic, which was looking for a framework that best suited a containerised, microservices framework. New
Extensibility: Spring Boot uses convention over configuration, but customization is straightforward. (For example, we use Jetty over the default Tomcat container.)
Reduced friction: The framework handles boilerplate configuration and setup, such as logging, configuration, security, etc. That helps the team focus on business logic instead of plumbing.
Pragmatism: The core offering focuses on currently adopted technologies for integrations and doesn’t try to predict needs that might arrive years in the future. It leaves bleeding-edge extensions up to the community.
Familiarity with the underlying technology: Spring Boot is built on top of the Spring Framework and Java, both of which are strong suits of our team.
Support: There’s an active open-source developer community for Spring Boot, and it’s backed by Pivotal, which has a vested interest in improving and expanding the framework.
Spring Boot also meets our criteria for containerization listed above:
Easy builds: For application building, it provides first-class Gradle build support out of the box.
Self-contained distributions: It produces an executable JAR file with all dependencies included, so there’s just one executable JAR to deploy.
Simple application execution: The executable JAR does not require additional commands or permissions to run.
Supportability: For support, it provides a collection of “actuator” HTTP endpoints that expose environment/configuration information, health status, runtime stats, and other data.
New Relic has been around since 2008, so it’s not exactly a new company. But it was built for and on the cloud.
So what about another company of note – Tesla? Tesla is a very cool company, making a huge impact. A few months back I was in Germany for an IBM IoT event and was lucky enough to sit with a number of German auto industry people at dinner. Not one of them was dismissive of Tesla. The threat is real, and they know it. Circling the wagon isn’t going to work. Tesla is a profoundly disruptive company. With car-as-a-service business models, and autonomous vehicles, the revolution is coming, and it is going to be electrified.
Tesla’s Mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. Can you please just hurry up with that, Mr Musk?
6 to 10 Years of experience in web application design and development
Experience with micro-services architectures, Docker eco-system and API first approach with hands-on expertise in developing rest APIs supporting multiple versions
Hands-on design and development for customer facing applications that require high availability, concurrency, multi-tenancy, high scalability for a large global user base
Strong Core Java Experience with Expertise in enterprise Java technology eco-system including Spring Boot, JPA/Spring Data, maven, JUnit
Strong SQL Experience (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL)
Strong Web Services Experience (SOAP/REST)
Spring Experience (Spring Boot, Spring Batch)
Bottom line – there are some really interesting opportunities for Java developers out there. In the case of Tesla world-changing, even. Spring Boot is part of the skill set.
This piece can be read as a companion to my recent post about Dell, Pivotal and Digital Transformation. Being able to point at digital natives like New Relic and Tesla using your software makes it easier to convince enterprises of the value of making similar technical decisions.
full disclosure: Pivotal is a client. Opinions are our own.
Once dubbed the “Indian Accenture”, being the Indian heritage outsourcer with the high-end reputation, the firm now finds itself enduring, perhaps, the most difficult period of its history – and it could be poised to get a hell of a lot worse.
Vishal Sikka brought energy, fresh ideas, hope… and a Silicon Valley mindset to its leadership when he came aboard amidst his Design Thinking and jeans-to-work attitude just three years ago. However, all Sikka’s energetic ideas and innovations have been largely forgotten over the past year, as the public spat with Founder Narayana Murthy gathered irritating momentum and completely slammed the brakes on the momentum Sikka had sparked. Sikka had woken Infosys up to its potential and the Founders were more obsessed with his use of the corporate jet than making the acquisitions the firm needs to be competitive.
From the poster boys for innovative offshoring, epitomized in Thomas Friedman’s seminal “The World is Flat” through to the constant public interventions in corporate affairs by Murthy, Infosys has had a bumpy ride over the last decade of its short history. And to magnify its issues, all of Murthy’s interventions have been played out in public, with the Indian press the grateful recipient of endless reams of news fodder being provided by this corporate soap opera.
Vishal Sikka’s resignation grinds to a halt this public transition from the Founders’ generation to becoming a “normal” corporate company. Without a doubt, this episode will find its way into economics textbooks for future students to learn the lessons in strategy, corporate governance and beyond. However, at least decisive action has been taken, and Murthy and his founders can try and restore a stability that makes ends this public drama. This is just such a bad time to go through such a strategic leadership nightmare, when competition is at its most severe, with too many suppliers chasing too few contracts and margins under extreme pressure. This is especially troubling when you consider Sikka has kept the revenue and profitability ship progressing well, maintaining profit margins close to 25% and revenue growth over 5%, even at a time when the industry growth is flat and political stances towards offshoring are heated, with several US deals being awarded to “Western” suppliers:
So what are the lessons that can be learned from all this?
Murthy is the dominant father figure of Infosys and he has made that very clear with his actions. As founding CEO, he is synonymous with the early success, the culture but, more crucially, with the decision-making at Infosys. When SD Shibullah, another of the Founders, took over it was difficult for him to step out of Murthy’s shadow. Shibullah’s “Infosys 3.0” strategy was designed to address the over-dependence on the US market (see interview) and rebalance the portfolio by building out IP-based platforms, namely the EdgeVerve portfolio. But he took also the bold step to sign the first Intelligent Automation partnership with IPsoft at the time. Yet, the sales engine continued to stutter which remained the dominant feature of Infosys recent history.
This provides the background to the stage on which Vishal stepped, when he was appointed CEO in June 2014 (see post). Vishal was not only the first “outsider” but more importantly not part of the Founders’ generation to take over the reins at Infosys. Being Indian, yet working in California with a strong product background from his time at SAP he ticked a lot of the boxes in order to return Infosys to its erstwhile glory as the beacon for innovation that Thomas Friedman had so eloquently and prominently described. Vishal’s strategy focused on aligning Infosys around automation and AI to re-emphasize the heritage in innovation and Design Thinking, but also to boost the balance sheet as the industry is going through the secular shift towards non-linear growth and outcome based offerings. This was underpinned by an influx of executives from SAP that were meant in particular to help driving the platform and product business.
However, the narratives around automation and AI were never succinctly explained and, more importantly, not driven consistently through the organizations. For instance, the teams at EdgeVerve were waiting for guidance from the teams at Mana and vice versa. And without consistent narratives, it was difficult for the sales teams to leverage those capabilities in client discussions. Similarly, Mana was announced with great fanfare as the answer to all automation challenges. What Mana actually is, is a compelling analytics engine. It took another Confluence (Infosys’ main customer event) this year to finally launch a holistic automation framework called Nia. But at this year’s Confluence, Vishal appeared to HfS as being despondent and at times disconnected leaving us to speculate that he might resign or is being pushed to step aside. Yet, when he did at this conference an AI tutorial, he appeared to have his old sparkle back. Innovation and discussions with thought-leaders seem to be his passion. And his passion offered something different to an often guarded corporate world.
Undoubtedly, current clients will have questions about where this leaves them. Not only was the firm’s latest CEO the driving force behind the firms shift to analytics, automation, and AI, but Vishal’s appointment also saw the CEO’s office take personal responsibility for key clients in a bid to strengthen relationships and develop and solidify revenues from current client engagements. The whole corporate strategy will change dramatically, should the new incumbent come in with different ideas, and in the process likely shake and disrupt progress to solidify client relationships.
The Bottom-line: Re-igniting the sales and marketing engine is critical
Infosys has to reignite the sales and marketing engine and prove it has genuine distinctiveness when competing with the likes of Accenture, Cognizant, TCS, HCL and Wipro. Clients need to know what Infosys stands for, and why they should pay the top dollars to invest in this company, when there is so much intense competition making more impressive noises at present. While Vishal Sikka hit the ground running with a whole suite of ideas and innovations, these have largely dissipated over the past year amidst the public infighting. Without consistent financial performances, all the innovations will more or less evaporate and Infy will be left battling it out for low-margin transactional IT contracts. Infosys 4.0 (or whatever it ends up being called) needs a new dynamic CEO, it needs an aggressive sales leader, and a CMO that can articulate what the company is trying to do next and what it stands for. Merely parroting the insufferable fluff about digital and outcomes will not work – Infosys needs to lead India’s innovation, not merely to make up the numbers.
On the positive side, any incoming CEO will have a strong set of assets to build on, which have enjoyed significant investment. First and foremost, Infosys analytics and data management prowess, strong products including Finnacle as well as many automation assets integrated into the Nia framework. There has also been solid investments in its US delivery, most notably in Indianapolis and Texas. However, Vishal’s resignation is likely to complete the power shift back to Bangalore. Many of the California-based executives will either jump ship or be pushed out very quickly. The crucial question though is whether the group of Founders will continue to interfere in public or whether they finally take a back seat and demonstrate confidence in any incoming CEO and his executive team. If the latter is not being addressed, any new king will wear very old clothes.
The challenges and requirements around data and application integration are quickly changing. For starters, data increasingly lives and applications increasingly run outside of the four walls of the enterprise as companies embrace cloud-based compute and storage capacity, and as they replace on-premises software with software as a service (SaaS). The mobile, social and big data movements are also accelerating the trend due to these sources usually being outside of the enterprise.
Constellation Research estimates that by 2020, at least 60 percent of the data that the average organization considers to be mission-critical will live outside of the corporate firewall. Against this backdrop, the Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) is emerging as a one-stop, cloud-based choice for supporting both data and application integration. It helps companies integrate SaaS applications with other SaaS applications, SaaS applications with on-premises applications and cloud- based data with on-premises data. It also supports data- monetization scenarios, whereby data and insight pipelines serve multiple destinations.
Threshold Criteria
Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:
Accessible and manageable in the cloud
Addresses both data-integration and application-integration scenarios
Support ease of use with drag-and-drop or point-and-click functionality
Minimizes manual coding and encourages repeatability and reuse through prebuilt connectors for popular data sources and data targets; ready-to-run parsing, filtering and data-transformation options; and prebuilt templates or connectors for integrating popular cloud-based and on-premises applications
Addresses the publication and management of APIs, essential in business-to-business and emerging Internet of Things (IoT) integration scenarios
Real-time (streaming) options, as well as batch-oriented scenarios that meet modern integration demands
Addresses a range of latency requirements
The Constellation ShortList™
Constellation evaluates more than 15 offerings in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research.
These are the best-of-breed vendors that provide self-service advanced analytics offerings:
Dell Boomi
Informatica
Jitterbit
MuleSoft
Oracle
SnapLogic
Click here, to see all the Constellation ShortLIst categories
Your POV.
What are you doing for integration and orchestration? Are you still hand coding? Let us know!
In my book, Silicon Collar and in several blogs I have critiqued the 2013 study by two Oxford researchers which reached this alarmist conclusion about the impact of modern day machines on jobs: “According to our estimates, about 47% of total U.S. employment is at risk.”
I found several flaws in their study. With such a scary conclusion, it was irresponsible for them to not even lay out a timeline. They also did not appear to do a reality check for the job categories they analyzed. They calculated a high 0.79 “susceptibility to computerisation factor” (with 1.0 being the highest) to heavy truck and tractor-trailer drivers. This, when the U.S. trucking industry says driver shortages could reach as high as 175,000 positions by 2024 (even if the industry adopts autonomous trucks, regulations will likely require a driver as a backup). The professors had assigned an even higher factor of 0.84 to cartographers and photogrammetrists (who deduce measure- ments from images), which the Bureau of Labor Statistic projects as one of the fastest growing occupations over the next decade. They had assigned a yet higher 0.94 factor to accountants and auditors, whereas hiring at U.S. public accounting firms jumped to reach record levels in 2013–2014. What about new jobs from the automation and new digital businesses? The Oxford profs did not feel that was worth quantifying.
I could go on. My dissension paled compared to citations in 500+ academic journals which parroted that Oxford study without questioning any of its assumptions. Now, four years later, not a single job has been lost and yet, Oxford has chosen to not issue a disclaimer or mea culpa.
Instead, a more recent Oxford paper (in collaboration with colleagues from Yale) is much more realistic about “When will AI exceed Human Performance?”. The abstract says
“Here we report the results from a large survey of machine learning researchers on their beliefs about progress in Al. Researchers predict Al will outperform humans in many activities in the next ten years, such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high-school essays (by 2026), driving a truck (by 2027), working in retail (by 2031), writing a bestselling book (by 2049), and working as a surgeon (by 2053). Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of Al outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans.”
The chart below provides more “milestones” from the paper. It is much less alarmist than the earlier Oxford study – when the dates for machines being able to match human capabilties are years and decades away.
And yet, I wish this new study had surveyed practitioners, not just AI experts. They would have heard automation is still too expensive. That their industry regulators take a long time to approve technology in the workplace.
And I wish they had considered what I called in my book societal “circuit breakers” to rapid adoption of automation. While the pace of technology supply is accelerating, the acceptance rate is not keeping pace. As my book pointed out:
An early version of the ATM machine was introduced in 1960. Six decades later and even with mobile banking taking off, we still have over 90,000 bank branches across the U.S., employing over half a million tellers and other employees
The UPC code and scanner were patented in 1952. It took the grocery industry two decades to start to widely adopt it. The end result was not loss of checkout jobs. It improved inventory control and led to an explosion of SKUs. Even today, with self-check out kiosks in many stores, those jobs have not disappeared.
We have been predicting the death of “snail mail” for decades as email, texting, Skype, Facetime, and social media have become our preferred methods of communicating with each other. Unbelievably, the US Postal Service business has gone up — it sorts half the world’s paper-based mail and packages and keeps over half a million workers employed.
With digital voice mailboxes and most of us doing our own word processing and travel arrangements, who needs secretaries or administrative assistants? Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that category still employs nearly four million workers in the US.
As a technologist, it frustrates me that markets absorb technology so gradually. As a realistic analyst, I have learned we cannot force that pace too much. The more we hype technology, the more cynical are the adopters.
In any case, I am glad to see a more realistic Oxford paper. Hope they would publicize this more and distance themselves from the previous one.
Update: The World Economic Forum has transcribed the range of dates in this video
Jason Lemkin sits down with Stripe COO Claire Hughes-Johnson to discuss what it’s like to scale a fast-growing company and how to manage hypergrowth. Having over 10 years of experience with Google and being intrinsically motivated by Stripe’s mission certainly helps.
When you’re the COO of a global company that only continues to expand across borders, you need to make sure that you’re hiring the right people. But whether you hire globally or domestically, the key is achieving true retention among employees.
Listen on to discover what Claire has to say about the sales function within a company, how to get the word about your product out into the market and what’s got her excited about Stripe’s future.
And if you haven’t heard: SaaStr Annual will be back in 2018, bigger and better than ever! Join 10,000 fellow founders, investors and execs for 3 days of unparalleled networking and epic learnings from SaaS legends like Jyoti Bansal, Dustin Moskovitz, Jeff Lawson, and Michael Pryor. If you don’t have tickets, lock in Early Bird pricing today and bring your team from just $749! (All ticket prices go up September 1st.) Get tickets here.
TRANSCRIPT
Jason Lemkin: Thanks for coming.
Claire Hughes Johnson: It’s great to be here.
Jason: There’s a lot I want to chat about, but we were having a discussion backstage. Raise your hand if you’ve not heard of Stripe just I can know how we can do the first five minutes. Anyone not heard of…? OK. One, two…
Claire: Jason said it would be six people.
Jason: What’s that?
Claire: You said six.
Jason: Six people. We just wanted to make sure we framed the audience right. There’s a lot of stuff I want to chat about.
Let’s chat about it. Tell us about Stripe. What do you do, and where you’re at today? Then we’ll dig into some interesting stuff.
[crosstalk]
Claire: First of all, thanks for having me. Great to see everybody. If you’re not from San Francisco, welcome.
Stripe is a set of developer tools for building and operating an online business. We work with hundreds of thousands of companies around the world on accepting payments, expanding globally, and increasingly, on innovating their business models for the Internet and for mobile.
It’s relevant to the SaaS audience because it’s easy to underestimate how complicated a SaaS model gets with the number of billing plans, the number of custom fees and prices you want to add in.
We’ve increasingly worked to build solutions that you can just integrate with us and spend your time building the rest of your product. That’s what we do.
Jason: Let’s chat about a few things. Stripe’s, what? 500, 600 people today, something like that.
Claire: We’re a little over 600 people today.
Jason: Six hundred people. You joined as COO, how long ago, 18 months, 19 months?
Claire: Two and a half years ago.
Jason: Two and a half…How big was Stripe then?
Claire: We were about 170.
Jason: A hundred and seventy. Everyone in the room wants to hire a COO. I can guarantee you there’s almost no one here that’s pre revenue. It’s everyone’s dream. A couple of things, then let’s dig in.
Why’d you join? What got you to join? How did they convince you to join?
Claire: This is a good thing to think about because there’s a set of things which are personal to me. My criteria, my career ambitions. Then there’s a set of things that Stripe brought to the table, that were so compelling that I couldn’t, in the end, walk away from it.
On the personal side, it’s incredibly important to me that my next step be a company whose product and mission I really believed in.
A lot of the time I spent with John and Patrick in the interview process was understanding their vision for the company and the fact that this is a developer tools company.
It’s also about economic access. It’s about building economic infrastructure for the Internet. Still, less than five percent of consumers purchasing is happening online which seems shocking.
If you want to build a company in certain countries in the world, it is so hard just to accept payments. Then it is so hard to get into multiple markets. Even Google when I was there, this was one of the biggest struggles we had.
The billing and payments team was a roadblock to launching our products in markets.
Jason: You already had the visceral pain of…
Claire: I saw an opportunity for an impact, yes. There’s a mission there that, frankly, the founding team, the people you’re going to work with all day long.
When you’re building a company, you are working hard, and you’ve got to be aligned. The third part for me was the people I met in the company, the culture that was being built, the DNA. Then the product market fit.
Just starting to see the numbers and seeing, “Hey, I could have an impact here. I could have a chance to be part of building something.
Jason: That was still, remind us, that was 26 months ago you said, something like that?
Claire: Yeah. That was about two and a half years ago.
Jason: How crazy different is Stripe today versus then?
Claire: In some ways, it’s not so different. Some employees might disagree with me, but I actually think one of my philosophies on scale is, there are things you’re building which are like an organizational system.
Organizational systems tend to vacillate between chaos and bureaucracy. Early systems tend to be more chaotic.
The reality is if you build a strong axis on which that turns and evolves, every new person you add to your company is changing your organizational system, and you’re changing the way you do things.
How we communicate things at Stripe is different than it was when there was a couple hundred people. But the operating principles, the reasons we exist, the way we make decisions and what’s important to us hasn’t changed. That’s our axis. That’s what you want to make strong.
Jason: How was the company infrastructure when you joined? Was it a startup crazy mess, or was it fairly well organized? What kind of rigor were you able to bring to the company in the beginning that helped fuel hyper growth?
Claire: What actually surprised me the most was how complicated the business was already, given it was only about 170 people.
If you think about the work we do on the developer side, the engineering innovation, the industry, all the payments partnerships around the world to build our stack, it actually amazed me how many teams had started to grow and evolve already.
There were some things that needed more, and actually a lot of scaling, I don’t think is hiring per say. You’re looking at your user base numbers and they’re going like this, and hopefully your revenue numbers are going like that, you have an obligation to that user base to build the right infrastructure for them.
A lot of where I focused my energy was on the go to market piece, the sales organization, and also the internal recruiting piece. How are we going assess what things we did need to build, and then find the right people and be able to add the numbers without upsetting that culture?
Jason: Let’s talk about those two things. If we had infinite time, we could fill it all up just with those topics.
You joined Stripe at 100 and some odd employees. What did go to market mean when you joined and what changed?
I view Stripe as having a huge brand today, but maybe you think it is a 600 person company with five percent penetration. How strong was the brand then? What did go to market mean then versus now?
Claire: There’s a classic way to think about building the funnel. I actually had a lot to learn joining Stripe about the developer-out model. A lot of how the brand was built and what was important to the company, and is still important to us today, is staying true to the developer audience.
A lot of the virality of that was developer to developer communication. Occasionally, Stripe folks participate in IRC, Hacker News, and some of those forums, but we actually have an expression internally, which is the Collison Installation, which is one of the founders would often go in and sit in with our users and really understand how the product was working for them and evolve from there.
A lot of the early branding was about staying really true to the user base. When I came in, we had a ton…You may or may not know, but Stripe has a ton of self service. You’re going in. We’ve got great documentation.
You integrate the API. With a couple lines of code, you’re in 25 countries. That is pretty easy, and actually a lot of people do it and start testing our product without us ever talking to them.
We did increasingly have a lot of inbound demand. The first go to market step actually…
Jason: Inbound, “Contact me,” or what is it then?
Claire: Inbound, “We want to use your product, but we’ve got some questions.”
Jason: “Please call me.”
Claire: “We’ve got some questions. Please call me. Please answer my questions.”
We didn’t, at that point then, need marketing, because we had to get on top of that inbound demand. It’s a good problem to have.
One of the reasons we had that is because payments is so critical in the early stage when you’re getting ready to do that that people were coming to us. We’re lucky to have that reputation. Our technical excellence is what built that reputation.
The first thing I did was get on top of the inbound demand, which is, “What are the kinds of people we need?” We needed a really technical sales type of person who is super agile, able to adapt with a really rapidly changing product.
I was lucky enough to start to bring in the right folks who could build that.
Jason: Let’s break that down a minute. You come in and there’s already some change. In the early days, are these quota carrying folks, or are you still on this loosey goosey, happiness officer, “Do your best”?
I’ve invested and worked with a lot of developers and/or companies. You don’t want to break that culture.
Claire: You don’t, absolutely.
Jason: You break it, and it’s gone. As soon as you break that, the trust is gone. The trust is gone forever anywhere, right?
Claire: Yeah.
Jason: Sometimes, I wonder whether happiness officers are the perfect solution either.
Claire: I definitely have never called myself the happiness officer. Please don’t let me do that.
Jason: That is a very teal term. That has got around a lot lately. I get they’re developer centric sales folks.
Claire: Initially, to your question about quota carrying, that wouldn’t have been culturally appropriate.
Jason: Tough quick change, right?
Claire: It didn’t make sense. Quite frankly, when you’re in that hyper growth, your ability to predict, forecast, and set reasonable targets is not actually that easy. It’s unfair to the company and the salesforce to be guessing at what reasonable targets are.
You get these externalities of bad behavior that aren’t really what you’re looking for at that stage. Actually, we did something that I think was clever, and you can decide, which is we did start to hire people on a sales compensation plan, but we have been paying them mostly on target.
They understood that. They understood there was a long timeline to get to the position when the variable comp would start to kick in, but you also have a problem if you build a big salesforce and then try to switch them over to a more variable compensation. You’re clawing back expectations about their cash flow.
Jason: It is…
[crosstalk]
Claire: We do pay our sales folks quarterly so that they’re used to that. They’re ready for it.
Jason: Today, as you’re scaling, you’re still relatively small, certainly by Google scale. Do these folks still need to be as technical to do sales because this is always a challenge?
You watch what GitHub went through and other folks. At some point, every sales rep can’t be a hacker or a want to be engineer, right?
Claire: Yeah.
Jason: Have you reached that phase, or it’s not important yet?
Claire: One of the most important things to me in building any function that’s not an engineering function in the company is if you don’t know the product inside and out, you’re not doing your job.
Jason: Absolutely.
Claire: There’s an element of technical ability and knowledge that will always be in our salesforce, or else I’m not doing my job. To your point, if you think about Stripe’s user base, it’s really diversified.
We’ve got developers.
Jason: Regular people.
Claire: We’ve got early stage folks. We’ve got bigger companies. We have companies that are scaling like Slack, Lyft, Kickstarter. They’re our users. We’ve got partnerships with Macy’s. We’ve done work with Twitter and Facebook. We’ve got this huge range.
The thing that we have started to look at is a team that I call Field Engineering, which is a technical asset. We have very few of them. We’re not going to throw them…I don’t like that model of the salesperson comes in with the sales engineer.
Jason: With the sales engineer.
[laughter]
Claire: They don’t know the product.
Jason: What’s the answer to that question?
Claire: Yeah, that’s just not great.
Jason: That’s horrible.
Claire: They’re asking this person to demo. The person comes in, and the person who’s demoing the product is the one who actually knows the product. Why is the salesperson sitting there?
That’s not what we’re going for, but we’ve found that some of the larger more enterprise type users that we’ve started to talk to expect more in the onboarding. They want a contact that’s helping them do the work. We’re starting to satisfy that.
Jason: You even go on site? Have you gotten to that level? You’ll go?
Claire: We’ll visit with them. [laughs]
Jason: How much, because that’s another transition for a developer focused companies, right? You can start off and never meet a customer if you don’t want to, right?
Claire: Yeah.
Jason: Even if Patrick and John did meet ups and stuff like that, you literally…Do you want to meet all your bigger customers? How do you think about that at this stage?
Let me put it differently. How is your relationship with the customers changed since you started?
Claire: That’s actually back to the point about the developer audience, but it’s really in the DNA of the company to know the user base. Our initial engineers, all did customer support. That was part of their…
Jason: I love it.
Claire: That was part of their job.
[crosstalk]
Jason: …they hated me for it.
Claire: A few of them actually moved over to help start that team, which was amazing. Patrick and John have always…
Jason: How long does that last?
Claire: How long does that last?
Jason: Do you make engineers do customer support forever?
Claire: What we do today is we give them all an account so they can go in. We have company events where we ask people to go in and handle user issues. It’s actually pretty popular, but they do like to have someone from our user operations [laughs] team with them because it gets complicated.
Jason: It doesn’t scale forever.
Claire: It’s actually really good learning for an engineer. You’d be surprised at what users need and that explaining the product to them is a different challenge.
Back to your point, Patrick and John have always spent time with our users. Actually, everyone on the leadership team does. One of the things we do periodically is look across our user base, and talk about the relationships we have with increasingly our top users, but frankly, it’s really encouraged.
Patrick and John go in and do the user cases. They’re still in there, which is an example to everyone. It’s the kind of company I want to be at because you wouldn’t exist without those users. So if you’re not talking to them, you’re not in good shape.
We have built more dedicated teams, so the larger users, to your question, “How has it changed?” That was another change that we put in place when I came in, which is you start to respect that those users are at really different stages.
There are certain stages we’re seeing where we need to provide more dedicated account management basically.
Jason: On the go to market, before we move onto the next topic, I want to pick up on one thing you said. You come in, and join. It’s a lead rich environment, right?
Claire: Yeah.
Jason: First thing you do is you build a technical sales organization that can…You pick someone up. They can answer the phone. They can talk to customer.
Claire: Yeah.
Jason: When you’re in a lead rich environment like that, and you have an evolving brand, how do you think about marketing? What is marketing’s job over those 25 months?
Claire: Again, we’re really lucky that we have founders who go out and talk to the market a lot, which is…
Jason: There’s no lack of the founder PR stuff.
Claire: There’s a lot of good communication that comes from that. That helps with the lead volume. The way we started to think about marketing was in two ways.
One was being aware of markets where we might not be as well known and working initially with agencies and working through our PR team on, “How do we develop more of that understanding?” The best way to do it for us, back to the beginning of this story, was working though the startup ecosystem.
Spending time with developers, spending time with incubators, VCs, what have you.
Jason: Go there.
Claire: Go there. We’re in those markets. We’re in 25 countries now. We’ve got teams around the world, which is something I’ve been working on building out. We go back to our roots to build that market knowledge.
The other thing on marketing is understanding where it’s all coming from. You’ve got to start to build more sophisticated site analytics. We can use some of our users’ products, like Tableau and Mixpanel, and what have you.
Those are SaaS Stripe users, and they’re also products that we like to use so we can track where the leads coming from, how are they converting, get a better awareness before you start throwing marketing at it.
What’s working today is a good place to start.
Jason: It is a good point. There’s a couple of things I want to make sure we hit, but let’s talk about the second one on your list which was recruiting and team building.
What are the learnings? What have you done? What have you changed at Stripe? How have you helped? It’s Level Up Day. What are the learnings for Level Up? What are your tips and tricks for folks here for building the team?
Claire: Early on, you probably got your founders and engineers doing your recruiting, right?
Jason: Yeah.
Claire: That’s your core team.
Jason: You do it yourself.
Claire: You do it yourself.
Jason: The rest of your job.
Claire: You actually come up with very true to your company ways of doing that. Our engineering interview process was built by our engineers. That’s exactly how it should be done, right?
Jason: Yes, I read it on Quora.
Claire: You’re not going to have someone who comes in and tells you how to find great engineering talent that’s not your own engineering talent. The key to me was to take those assets and start to build internal understanding that you actually do need a recruiting organization.
We had a couple of recruiters, but we needed to get much more intentional about where we wanted to grow the company and what we could do to augment the assets we already have.
A lot of how we do it today is still very all company driven. People know that they have a role in it. They know that they’re part of the hiring process, but they do have recruiters they can lean on and help them through.
It’s like program management for recruiting, but you’ve got build it because there’s a point when you’re looking…Talk about Level Up, there’s a step function in your hiring that you can’t go from onesy, twosy up to…If you’re going to double your company in a year, you’re going to need people who focus on that full time.
Jason: You do.
Claire: You do. I believe you do.
Jason: In every company. Today, I don’t even know, are there a lot of layered titles at Stripe, or is that just like…?
Claire: No.
Jason: My guess is there’s not a lot them.
Claire: No.
Jason: There’s still team leads. There have to be that are in charge of recruiting, right?
Claire: We have a head of recruiting. We have some managers.
Jason: The managers, because it’s a learning for a lot of folks here, you’ve got a double next to your headcount or some crazy number, right?
Claire: I think more about, “How’s the business growing?”
Jason: Sure.
Claire: I think, “OK, what do we need…?”
Jason: Let me…sorry. Not to get…
Claire: We’re trying not to double, but say you have to double.
Jason: How do you coach folks to build these teams? You teach them how to bring in recruiters. A lot of founders find recruiters frustrating learning, in terms of, “What do I expect of an internal recruiter? How much work? How will they source candidates? How much does my team have to do it?”
What’s the balance? Is there any help you brought in there? What are the learnings?
Claire: The main learning is back to this partnership. We actually, and our recruiters learn this as they come in, and some of them have been in other companies that had the factory recruiting model is what I call it where it’s like…
Jason: Google had a real machine there, didn’t it?
Claire: Google, over time, built a very big machine, but actually I would say there was a point when it flipped into, “We’ll just take care of that for you if you’re a leader at Google?”
[crosstalk]
Jason: They’ll take care of that for you.
Claire: I’m not a believer in that model. I understand though. The empathetic part of me would tell you, “If you’re trying to grow to 60,000 people in that short amount of time, you do have to build a machine.”
But I think the right model is what we do is we do a meeting when we’re creating a new role. The hiring manger, which could be a manager or a people manager or not actually, but the hiring manager helps write the job description.
They help write the interview framework. They help meet with the group that’s going to be interviewing the candidate.
We come up with the rubric, the assessment together. They are part of the whole process. The recruiter is much more than informed. They even look at profiles like, “Does this profile look right?” You’ve got to get honed in on what you’re looking for because if you don’t, you’re going to burn a lot of candidates through trying to figure out what you want.
Jason: Burn a lot of candidates. Do you find that, when you have a brand like Stripe, it actually in some ways can be a detriment because you get so many tire kickers that they’ll always take an interview, won’t they, or maybe it’s not a known issue?
Claire: We’re very lucky that we have a lot of inbound job applicants.
Jason: A lot of inbound job applicants.
Claire: It is a lot of work. This is something the recruiting team does very well, which is they’re going through making sure those applicants have a good experience and screening them and helping us find the folks that we think should come in and meet us. I’m actually going to go with it’s a good problem to have.
Jason: It is a good problem to have.
Claire: I feel lucky that people want to work at Stripe.
Jason: In the market today, what are any tips you thought through on retention because especially in engineering it can be fatty? There are a handful of folks that occasionally leave after their cliff. Like besides culture, any learnings you’ve done because I’m sure you think about retention a lot. There’s no point in recruiting if you don’t have high retention.
Claire: Yeah, and we do think about it. I feel like retention is one of these things where you look at two buckets. One is extrinsically are people feeling compensated fairly. Are you competitive with the market?
I think that’s less important for the true retention. I’m just going to argue which is, are you hiring people who are intrinsically motivated? Look back at the first answer I gave you. I joined this company because I believe we’re doing something very important.
Jason: You did.
Claire: You’ll find a lot of engineers and people in the company, yeah, sure they care about the product we’re building, but they care about the global impact of what we’re building. I think part of our recruiting process actually tests for excitement and motivation to be part of that mission.
Our job once they’re in the door is to keep them involved and keep employees on the same page about why are we doing this. What is their role in it? I always say to people, “I run a spin up.” When new Stripes join us, we have an onboarding program which I really recommend.
If you’re a founder, you want to be part of that onboarding program. If you are leader in the company, you should be part of it. It’s your chance to talk and imprint like, “This is what’s important to us as a company.”
I do one where I say to the folks in the room, if any of you at any moment doesn’t know how the work you do every day directly connects to what we’re trying to do in terms of mission, then I want you to come talk to me because then you’re not in the right job or we’re not doing our job.
I think there’s a lot of that engagement when you’re there, and why people are there, and keeping them included. I think that’s when companies go through this weird thing where there’s some exogenous force that is somehow the executive team. No, you’re all in it together.
Jason: That’s one of the biggest risks of scaling.
Claire: I think it’s one of the biggest risks.
Jason: As soon as they become the other guys, the folk.
Claire: You are in it together. Any issue we have internally and we’re very transparent. We do employee engagement survey which I did bring in to the company. We share all the results and we talk about what can we do differently if there are things where people are unhappy. It’s all of our problem.
Jason: That’s good. That is super important.
There’s a couple of things I want to hit before we leave it. Some of the stuff you talked about on internationalization and going global. First of all, even with 500 employees, how do you handle all these countries?
Claire: I love it.
Jason: You love it?
Claire: [laughs] Yeah, I do. I love it. Actually I think one of the things I say to people is, scaling the US at the same time that you’re scaling around the world, first of all, is part of our proposition.
Jason: It’s part of the proposition.
Claire: That is what we’re offering to all of US users…
Jason: It’s part of the secret sauce too or the secret sauce.
Claire: …is we can bring you to any country, 25 today increasingly more every month. I think one of the reasons that Kickstarter moved over to Stripe after they’d already started scaling was because with a few lines of code, they were in 18 markets that they couldn’t get into in their old configuration. It’s part of why we exist.
Jason: It’s a different solution.
Claire: It’s a kind of different solution.
Jason: It’s a different solution.
Claire: How do you handle it? You hire really, really well because these folks on the ground building the country team are your company in that country.
Jason: You’re country by country?
Claire: Yeah. We basically have clusters of markets, and so we have folks we’ve hired in some key locations like London, Paris, Berlin, Melbourne. They’re building around them teams that can handle that. Increasingly it will become a region, but right now its clusters of markets. I spend a ton of time with them.
That is one part of what I think is the most important part of my job is to be them connecting to what’s happening here and me transmitting back what they’re experiencing and what their needs are. Some of those leaders come to San Francisco once a quarter and we do like a lot of time together both with product, engineering with me.
What’s our strategy? How are we scaling because I think the other thing that happens to the company is they start to like…you’re not actually being consistent with your go to market.
Jason: It is very hard.
Claire: It’s very hard. You’ve got to keep those people close. What are the things we’re going to do that are similar? What are the metrics that matter? That’s how you’re going to be measured? Where can you experiment, because they also want to have autonomy? I spend a lot of time on that.
Jason: In an API centric company, what is their job? What are their goals or KPIs? You could serve them from here all speaking native languages. That has been done before.
Claire: Yeah, that has been done before.
Jason: There are companies that speak every language on the planet, but they decide to get together in one time zone. It sounds crazy, but there’s examples all over.
Claire: No. There are examples of that. Again we think of ourselves as a global company. We believe having an on the ground presence in pretty critical. I would go back to my comment about the developer community. The startup ecosystem in that market needing someone they know at Stripe.
The folks who are leading in those countries are spending a certain amount of time on that work, which is market building work I think for us. A certain amount of time on the media, the government, the policy piece starts to get more important as you scale.
Jason: That is important.
Claire: They have a sales responsibility. They have a revenue responsibility. So their key metrics are on… For us, it’s our payment volume and our margin. We look at it together every quarter. I’m very transparent. You know your numbers. You show them in front of your colleagues and you talk about what’s working and what’s not working.
Jason: [laughs] They do have a revenue commit in each of these regions?
Claire: They do. They take it very seriously because really to them it’s just an indicator of we’re building the market.
Jason: When you go international, my limited experience is there’s… To make it overly binary, you can have folks that own a number and you can have folks that basically own customer happiness, customer satisfaction.
Claire: They do spend time with existing users.
Jason: They’re both important. If you have a revenue focused team, they’re going to get you more revenue. If you have a customer happiness, CSAT, NPS, whatever they’re going to be more like customer support. You just get different outputs based on what you incent. Maybe you haven’t experienced that, but they do have revenue growth.
Claire: No, I’ve definitely experienced that. It’s like the difference between recruiting and HR.
Jason: It is.
Claire: They’re existing users and growing user base. The way we’ve achieved that is more the teams under them. They have a responsibility to think across the entire revenue set which for us is we have a lot of users that are just staying with Stripe and growing an existing user base.
If you don’t add new on top of that, you’re going to hurt yourself three years down the line.
Jason: You’re going to hurt yourself.
Claire: They really have to pay attention to the existing user base and the sales, but the people under them or in hubs like in Dublin, their roles are divided between more of a customer success, we don’t call it that…
Jason: It’s a bigger teal.
Claire: …and then a new business role.
Jason: One topic I want to make sure we get so we’re on a timeline…
Claire: We’re really in the nitty gritty here. I hope this is helpful.
[laughter]
Jason: This is SaaStr. That’s where we will learn on how to scale.
We want to learn how to scale. When you talk about the Kickstarter example of why they switched from a homegrown solution or whatever, because of the 21 country support.
Claire: 25.
Jason: What’s that? 25?
Claire: 25. But it was 18 at the time.
Jason: It was 18 at the time. In your tenure at Stripe, talk about how it’s become a more important product, a bigger…
We talk about tools versus solutions. Whatever they used before was fine. It might have been worse, but I assume it’s a switch for Kickstarter.
Listen, I’ve got to be in 18 countries tomorrow. I don’t care if my tool, if my existing payment gateway, which we hacked together and it was terrible, but it’s six years old and it works. All of a sudden, you solve a problem for me.
I want to be…Kickstarter’s got to be. I’m sure that’s one of a few examples of how you’ve become more of a bigger solution and even more enterprise.
Claire: There’s two models of how we’ve evolved that way. One is the company in an earlier stage that is using our suite of tools and increasingly that suite is more interesting to them. If you think about multiplan subscriptions, which we just launched. That’s really interesting if you’re a SaaS business.
You can use our subscription logic…
Jason: It’s a problem everyone has here.
Claire: Everyone here has that. It would be nice if someone gave me some of out of the box logic. You can play around with that as you scale.
We’re building solutions for marketplace businesses, too. You think about business like Lyft, Instacart. They have multiparty payments which are actually very hard to do from a logistical point of view but also from a compliance point of view.
You want the reporting back to your finance team to be very clean. There’s a set of businesses that have an Internet new business model, Kickstarter’s a good example, that are looking for a solution that meets them, not just on the payments front, but on the tools they’re going to need to actually scale that business and scale it internationally, is one of them.
The other is what you’re getting at, which is the enterprise piece, and I have a lot of conversations with CFOs. Usually, we’re talking to the engineering team at a company, but sometimes now we’re talking to the CFO.
Jason: That’s a big evolution over time, isn’t it?
Claire: That’s a big evolution. One of my favorite conversations is one I had late last year with a CFO. They had acquired a few companies, and the companies they acquired were on Stripe.
He wanted to get on the phone with us, he’s like, “What are you, and why do I have this problem now where I’ve got these other companies in my orbit on Stripe?”
He said, “And I’ve got this product manager who’s telling me he can’t launch our mobile product without using Stripe,” because their internal billing and payments team was constraining this guy’s new initiative, which was to sell their product on.
I explained Stripe, [laughs] and he said, “OK, I’m hearing two things from you. One is, I have a business problem, which is I can’t launch my mobile product with speed, and you can solve it.”
The thing, that hadn’t occurred to me is, I have a business opportunity which is, we’re a much more agile solution for them than this legacy system where you’ve got…My experience in the past is, engineers who are at a company whose core product isn’t working on billing and payments systems don’t want to work on them.
He’s like, “I could free up those resources and move over to Stripe and also be able to play around through the API with the different business models,” which they’d been…they’re wrapped around the axle on one thing right now.
We’ve had a continued conversation because that’s a big switch, which is to say, “I’m going to take this legacy approach and I’m going to move through an API to do that core piece of business functionality.”
Jason: It is a big switch.
Claire: It’s increasingly happening, for the global reason and for the agility reason.
Jason: You’ll have a Lyft that all of a sudden becomes a huge customer, like magic, I assume, the example that you’re talking about, these more traditional companies require more traditional…you’re talking with the CFO, how does that change the team or the dynamics in any particular way?
Is it the same? Same sales team, same everything team or does Macy’s have the same needs as Lyft?
Claire: No, they definitely don’t have the same needs, [laughs] which is fun. It makes our job fun.
Jason: It is fun.
Claire: We increasingly have verticalized the sales team. They’ve got to know the users business models that they’re talking to, the space that they operate in. We have hired more of a range of experience, I guess, in sales.
This fits with our DNA. A lot of leaders, me included, and our sales managers are out talking to the larger users and doing the work themselves.
Jason: You’re out there.
Claire: I think that’s an important example for everyone, but it keeps us very connected. Many of our best products and we have evolved. The products have come from the user conversations.
We built a product with Lyft which they call expressPay which is paying out to the drivers debit card so they don’t have to wait for a payment.
Unbelievably popular, makes sense. I went and drove five hours, I want to get my money and spend it on a nice dinner tonight, that’s happening. We came up with that idea with them. John Collison did. We have many examples of that.
Jason: Those conversations of them evolved because the stakeholders in those customers change a lot?
Claire: Yes.
Jason: It may even be in some of those bigger accounts the developers are told to use Stripe or we are not there yet? Is the brand no so big that at some level…?
Claire: I’m thinking of one example where that has happened.
Jason: You’re getting there.
Claire: There’s this one example where that’s happened. A lot of our hypothesis…and you all must have a hypothesis. It depends on your business I guess, which is the developer is increasingly a decision maker. I think that we really believe that and that’s why our product is built. That’s the audience we really pay attention to.
More often than not, they’ve been the person who choose us. The conversation with the rest of the stakeholders is why and helping back them up. They are our advocate. I think that’s the position we want to be in. The good news is if it goes the other way, the simplicity of the product integration is in our favor.
I think we haven’t had too much of an issue there.
Jason: I want to keep going on this, but I know we’re over. One last question, just tell us one or two of the cool things you’re working on this year initiatives or over the next 24 months? What are some fun things you’re working on that we’re excited about at Stripe?
Claire: It’s like a softball.
Jason: It is a softball, but I want to know what you’re excited about. We’ll wrap up there. This is a passion project for you when you joined?
Claire: It is.
Jason: What has you excited over the next 18 months?
Claire: I think there’s a combination of a couple of things. One is we’re going to more markets. In particular, markets that we have a lot of demand for example in certain markets in APAC and we want to be in Asia Pacific region. We’ve been working on that with our teams there.
The other is we built a new way of planning our product, that is what are we going to release for our users and working our way back from it. When a company is scaling one of the hardest transitions you make is from, let’s use an analogy of driving, on a single road you can launch like, “Hey, a big initiative. We’re going to all rally and we’re going to get this thing out the door.”
Over the past year, but this year will be the proof, we have to move to a multi lane highway, which is can we across multiple product areas launch really strategic and important user facing changes? What I’m most excited about is us.
I’m an execution. I was like, “We had to execute on the plan that we made.” It’s going to make such a difference for our users. Since we talked to so many of them, we’ll feel it, I think, very acutely.
Jason: The multi lane highway transition is a challenging one?
Claire: It’s a challenging one, but it’s important and it’s exciting.
Jason: All right, this was great. Everybody, let’s put it up for Claire Hughes Johnson.
In 2008, blockchain technology was introduced to the world from the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. The paper, titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” shared how a network would maintain a time stamped immutable record of all cryptocurrency transactions to prevent double spend with no central umpire.
The core of blockchain is the algorithm used by the pool of participants to establish consensus about the state of the ledger. Consensus has been a field of computer science for many years, but blockchain stimulated a great new round of R&D. Different consensus mechanisms include: Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), Paxos, Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, Raft, and Proof of Elapsed Time.
Blockchain or Synchronous Ledger Technologies will play a role in transforming how contracts, digital assets, cryptocurrencies, and other digital goods will be created, controlled, and transferred in a digital world. With much confusion on protocols, standards, and approaches, the Constellation ShortList identifies the most innovative and commonly used platforms.
Organizations conducting their own strategic research & development have a wide choice of blockchain platform for experimentation and proof of concept.
Threshold Criteria
Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:
Creation of assets, contracts, objects and other digital objects
Control of assets, contracts, objects and other digital objects
Transfer of assets, contracts, objects and other digital objects
Permission model support
Transparency
Privacy
Public and private network support
Multiple currency (if applicable)
Consensus flexibility
The Constellation ShortList™
Constellation evaluates more than 20 offerings in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research.
These are the best-of-breed vendors that provide self-service advanced analytics offerings:
BigchainDB
Chain Core
Corda
Domus Tower
Ethereum
Hyperledger Fabric
Quorum
Stellar
Click here, to see all the Constellation ShortLIst categories
Your POV.
Have you started a BlockChain project? Where do you see use cases for synchronous ledgers? Let us know as we share these with our executive network.
Most managers, save for true sycophants, want to challenge their boss. Few managers want to be puppet yes-people to the boss. They’ve worked hard to get where they are. They bring years of wisdom and experience. They want to push and challenge. But many don’t know when or how. More importantly, they don’t know what they don’t know.
How often do you think you’re challenging the boss when he/she thinks you’re just being plain difficult? Challenging direct reports keep their positions and rise with the organization. Difficult ones get jettisoned along the way.
There are two great ways you can figure out how often you’re being which:
Think of things from the boss’s perspective
Ask the boss
Think from the Boss’s Perspective
Bosses want to get things done. Things generally fall into two buckets: easy and hard. Easy things may still entail a lot of work and planning, but there’s nothing really conceptually difficult or unknown about them.
Running the company’s presence at a tradeshow you attend every year might be a lot of work, but I’ll consider it easy for this conversation because that work is known.
Launching the new version of a product is easy. Yes, the positioning may be hard, but managing the overall launch process is easy. It’s hopefully done a few times per year. Yes, it’s a lot of work and planning, but there’s nothing conceptually difficult about running the process.
Difficult direct reports make easy things hard. How?
Complexification. When you ask someone the time you discover that there are three types of people in the world: those who tell you the time, those who tell you how to build a watch, and those who tell you how to build a Swiss village. Simplifiers go far in organizations, complexifiers get stuck.
Lack of follow through. Bosses want to talk once about a project, agree to it, and then have it get executed. As my friend Lance Walter always said bosses want “set it and forget it” direct reports. If you have a question, come ask. But otherwise I assume you are tracking our agreed-to objectives and they’re going to happen without me having to check and re-check. Ditto for feedback given along the way.
Drama. Difficult directs tend to take things personally. They turn criticism of work into criticism of them. They view a heavy workload as dramatic sacrifice and not a prioritization problem. They are sensitive to criticism, defensive when questioned or given feedback, and often unable to separate bad performance from bad intent.
Challenging direct reports keep easy things easy. They get shit done without a lot of supervision, complexification, or drama. On the flip side, challengers don’t just go along for the ride when it comes to inherently hard things like fixing a break in the sales pipeline, selecting company or product strategies, or working on a competitive campaign strategy. They weigh in, sometimes challenging the majority or consensus view. They provide good arguments for why what everyone else is thinking could be wrong. Their selective Devil’s advocacy helps the company avoid groupthink and the organization make better decisions. And they do this without going overboard and positioning themselves as the resident contrarian.
Simply put, when you say something to the boss or in a meeting, imagine how the boss will react and then count the ratio between the following two reactions
God, what a pain in the ass.
Wow, I hadn’t thought of that.
Ratios above 1.0 indicate you are a net difficult direct report. Ratios below 1.0 indicate you are a net challenger.
Ask the Boss
Since knowing is always superior to guessing, I’ll give you a set of good questions that can help you figure out where you stand.
If you had to rank your direct reports from top to bottom in terms of difficultly, would I fall above or below the median and why?
Can you please list 3-5 things I do that make it difficult to manage me so I can work on them?
To what extent do you find me difficult/contrarian for difficulty’s sake vs. genuinely challenging ideas and helping the company reach better decisions?
When it comes to strategic debates do you feel that I sit on the sidelines too much, participate too much, or strike a good balance?
If there is a pattern of skipped/cancelled 1-1’s (a sign of avoidance) or higher frequency 1-1’s with other directs, then ask why?
Sycophants know they are sycophants. Challengers usually know they are challengers. The risk is that you are a difficult when you think you’re a challenger — and that rarely ends well. So think about, ask, and take appropriate measures to correct the situation. Before your boss doesn’t want to talk to you anymore.
John Wiley released The New Polymath seven summers ago. Lots of readers tell me it is my best book. It inspired them as executives to build multi-disciplinary teams and multi-faceted products. Modern and ancient polymaths I described have inspired other readers to broaden their own skillsets.
They say Millennials treasure experiences over physical possessions. Book writing has made me feel much younger and similarly treasure experiences. Each of my six books has introduced me to hundreds of innovative executives and forced me to do lots of research and learn about subjects I knew little about or to surprises around topics I thought I knew a lot about. While I appreciate the compliment of Polymath as my best book, I take pride in all of them.
The big aha to me across the seven years since is how slowly technology matures, gets adopted and transforms societies. Us technologists constantly brag we live in a fast-moving industry. Silicon Collar forced me to look at a century of automation, identify circuit breakers which slow down adoption of machines and challenge the hysteria that the contemporary generation of machines will destroy tens of millions of jobs any time soon. SAP Nation 2.0 forced me to study next-gen products at Oracle, Infor, Microsoft, J.D. Edwards and SAP over the last quarter century and see how slowly enterprise software matures and sells. The excitement around healthtech and cleantech I described in Polymath has met the cold hard realities of markets and incumbent interests.
That frustration of slow change only spurs more innovation. The New Polymath was born out of patterns I had seen in the 2,000+ posts on my New Florence innovation blog in the preceding 5 years. In the seven years since the blog has cataloged another 3,500 entries. The next version of Polymath enterprises and innovators is analyzing the patterns in that knowledge base.
Vishal Sikka has resigned as CEO of Infosys. In a blog post he says
Most managers, save for true sycophants, want to challenge their boss. Few managers want to be puppet yes-people to the boss. They’ve worked hard to get where they are. They bring years of wisdom and experience. They want to push and challenge. But many don’t know when or how. More importantly, they don’t know what they don’t know.
A more realistic, less alarmist Oxford study on automation and jobs
By Vinnie Mirchandani on August 17, 2017
In my book, Silicon Collar and in several blogs I have critiqued the 2013 study by two Oxford researchers which reached this alarmist conclusion about the impact of modern day machines on jobs: “According to our estimates, about 47% of total U.S. employment is at risk.”
I found several flaws in their study. With such a scary conclusion, it was irresponsible for them to not even lay out a timeline. They also did not appear to do a reality check for the job categories they analyzed. They calculated a high 0.79 “susceptibility to computerisation factor” (with 1.0 being the highest) to heavy truck and tractor-trailer drivers. This, when the U.S. trucking industry says driver shortages could reach as high as 175,000 positions by 2024 (even if the industry adopts autonomous trucks, regulations will likely require a driver as a backup). The professors had assigned an even higher factor of 0.84 to cartographers and photogrammetrists (who deduce measure- ments from images), which the Bureau of Labor Statistic projects as one of the fastest growing occupations over the next decade. They had assigned a yet higher 0.94 factor to accountants and auditors, whereas hiring at U.S. public accounting firms jumped to reach record levels in 2013–2014. What about new jobs from the automation and new digital businesses? The Oxford profs did not feel that was worth quantifying.
I could go on. My dissension paled compared to citations in 500+ academic journals which parroted that Oxford study without questioning any of its assumptions. Now, four years later, not a single job has been lost and yet, Oxford has chosen to not issue a disclaimer or mea culpa.
Instead, a more recent Oxford paper (in collaboration with colleagues from Yale) is much more realistic about “When will AI exceed Human Performance?”. The abstract says
The chart below provides more “milestones” from the paper. It is much less alarmist than the earlier Oxford study – when the dates for machines being able to match human capabilties are years and decades away.
And yet, I wish this new study had surveyed practitioners, not just AI experts. They would have heard automation is still too expensive. That their industry regulators take a long time to approve technology in the workplace.
And I wish they had considered what I called in my book societal “circuit breakers” to rapid adoption of automation. While the pace of technology supply is accelerating, the acceptance rate is not keeping pace. As my book pointed out:
As a technologist, it frustrates me that markets absorb technology so gradually. As a realistic analyst, I have learned we cannot force that pace too much. The more we hype technology, the more cynical are the adopters.
In any case, I am glad to see a more realistic Oxford paper. Hope they would publicize this more and distance themselves from the previous one.
Update: The World Economic Forum has transcribed the range of dates in this video
(Cross-posted @ Deal Architect)
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