Introducing “Boldstart CXO Connect” (and Six Takeaways From Our First Event!)
At Boldstart, we love to partner with technical founders on day one and help accelerate their path to product market fit. One of the keys to doing so includes our close relationships with many Fortune 500 CIOs, CTOs, CISOs and IT Execs who are willing to share their roadmaps and pain points and enlighten us on where startups may fit. While we’ve been hosting dinners for many years, we thought we would broaden the scope to share our learnings with others.
Enter: “Boldstart CXO Connect.” The concept is simple: a Boldstart Partner sits down with Fortune 500 IT Executives to ask all of our burning questions, directly. From software to industry and cultural trends, to market conditions and how enterprises are partnering, or looking to partner with startups, we have you covered!
On May 11th, we launched the first in our series, which centered around Digital Transformation in the Fortune 500. We were wondering if Covid-19 had acted as a forcing mechanism for acceleration of their plans, or if they had paused all major changes/upgrades/migrations, braced for impact and problem solved or shifted strategies from there. With many workforces going remote overnight, we wondered if/how large organizations could handle the strain of WFH on their infrastructures. Friends of Boldstart, Dean A. Del Vecchio EVP, CIO and Chief Of Operations at Guardian Life and Martin Brodbeck, CTO of Priceline gave us the details, first-hand. Here is a link to the recording of the event: https://bit.ly/2LHklZ2 and here are six big takeaways from our first Boldstart CXO Connect:
1.“WFH” was not a “transition” but rather a “flip of the switch.” Many enterprises (including both Priceline and Guardian Life) were already prepared for emergency scenarios where their entire populations would go 100% remote. For both Martin and Dean, the exercise was as seamless as pushing the “on” button.
“On the 10th (of March) we made a decision to work from home, and we’ve never looked back. It was a seamless transition. People brought their laptops home, plugged in and we’re up and running. So we really haven’t lost a beat in this process. I was going from 50% of people taking advantage of it to an entire organization, 9000+ employees working from home basically in one day.” said Del Vecchio.
Brodbeck echoed his sentiment “We made investments over the last couple of years around developer productivity, telecommunications, teleconferencing, video conferencing, as well as collaboration. So for us, it was really just ensuring we had the right level capacity to support everybody. It was basically “turning the key” starting in the middle of March and everybody’s been working pretty flawlessly. So for us, similar to Dean, we’ve been making these investments over the last couple of years and it was the best business continuity test ever, just having everybody go home. And it worked out really well for us. So we haven’t seen any productivity loss from our engineering organization at all.”
2. Developer productivity and enablement is front and center in the minds of the Fortune 500. If software is “eating the world,” we need to keep our engineering teams fed. Ensuring that they have the right tooling, systems and a near-frictionless experience is absolutely essential. Martin Brodbeck weighed in “I think we are more focused than ever on developer productivity. We’ve doubled down on modernizing our CI/CD pipeline, accelerating the move of our applications to twelve factor based architectures, and accelerated our move to Kubernetes. And now, more than ever since all of our engineers are remote, we really want to make sure that our developers are having the best engineering experience possible from their home.”
Del Vecchio agrees “From a true development perspective, we’re seeing productivity improvements. We’re pumping out more releases, more code with less errors and more higher quality. And then just draining the (tech) backlog across the board means we’ve got 17 trains running anywhere from two thousand people at any given point working on product delivery and releasing new code. So we’re measuring it from that perspective on the delivery side.”
And lastly, Brodbeck mentioned an engineering productivity measurement tool that he leaned on in the past. “We started building out an automated system from a company called Pinpoint that actually provided productivity measurements for engineering, which was fantastic because you could look at the value and productivity of every engineer in your organization.”
It’s worth noting that Pinpoint is a Boldstart investment as well!
3. Enterprises will continue to look to startup vendors/service providers for innovative solutions to problems, but a true understanding of the enterprise’s business is essential for getting a foot in the door.
“I think what sets a startup apart is having a really great idea that can solve several business problems. And so the people that I’ve partnered with in my career have always been people that understood my business and had a unique way to solve a problem, whether it was in the infrastructure or software engineering space. And COVID-19 hasn’t changed that. In fact, when I get one of those Covid-19 emails, it automatically goes into the delete bucket because it’s the same pitch from everybody,” said Brodbeck.
And in terms of how far along startups should be, before they reach out to Enterprises, Brodbeck noted “In certain cases zero customers is actually better because you have a chance to shape and mold the product based on a set of requirements that comes from your company.” He followed up by reaffirming his stance on the importance of how a startup reaches out “any startup company that leads with a licensing conversation, is a meeting that I leave within the first 10 minutes.”
Dean Del Vecchio agrees “I think you’re spot on about spending the time to understand our business so that when you come in, you can talk intelligently about the problems you’re coming to try and solve. One of the things we find quite often is, people really don’t understand the business that we’re in, so there’s no applicability. Put in the upfront time, as a little effort goes a long way.”
“If you’re a startup trying to do an enterprise deal right now, it’s going to take longer than it would to get a use case (with low, use case pricing) in place to just get in and get it off the ground to demonstrate your abilities and your product.” Del Vecchio said.
Key things for startups to remember:
- Test the “land and expand” approach: get in by running a test, prove value and then ask for more users/departments/licenses
- Ensure that you understand an enterprise’s business inside and out before you walk through the door, as well as the problem you are trying to solve for them
- Don’t lead with licensing agreements, lead with the problem set that you’ve identified and intend to solve, and just say no to Covid-19 being the reason for your outreach
4. Automation is key throughout the stack. From customer-facing recommendations to data architecture strategies for the sole purpose of supporting automation, enterprises are looking for opportunities to automate. Dean Del Vecchio of Guardian Life Insurance said “The area of real focus for us is in the automation space. We’ve been really focusing on UiPath for our basic RPA capabilities and functions, and driving out a lot of the bots. WorkFusion is what we would say is “smart automation” and on the A.I. front, Amelia (an AI-based “digital agent” developed by IPsoft) is the first one, but there may be others that we’re looking to roll out.” He later added “we’ve got a whole data architecture strategy to support our AI and automation initiatives along with a whole API strategy, both internally and externally-facing API’s.”
Martin Brodbeck double clicked “So our goal is to provide a very personalized and detailed user experience for our customer, to the point where we could start individualizing product offerings over time. In order to do that, you have to capture real time data about what your customers are doing on your website. And then that data has to flow into a streaming platform that learns about user behavior. You have to have the ability to train that user behavior and then pump that back into your website to start personalizing and recommending products. A lot of the core set of AI and automation capabilities are a combination of in-house development and using software to do that. It’s part machine learning, but it’s also part engineering to be able to really create a customer data platform where you’re tracking user events, but also enabling your customers to opt out from a compliance perspective with GDPR guidelines and CCPA guidelines as well.”
5. “Build vs Buy” is something enterprises with large engineering teams weigh often and when making a call, it comes down to the organization’s core competencies. Martin Brodbeck added some color “I would say for the CI/CD pipeline and our transformation there’s a lot of best of breed tools out there that we would much rather buy than build. There are core capabilities that we build that are specific to our e-commerce environment, but there’s a lot of best-in-breed tools out there, particularly in the cloud space (built by startups) that I would highly recommend companies look at. Also it’s the time to (build) and the total cost of ownership if you build something. Usually if you build something in-house, you’ve got to take into account the support and operations of that homegrown software and the brain leakage that occurs when people leave the company. And you have to maintain it over time. So we try to balance those items pretty carefully.”
Guardian Life’s CIO agreed “Yeah, we take a pretty simplistic approach to it. We build things that we think are going to be differentiators for us in the market and in terms of something that we can do differently than our competitors. We buy things that are commodities.”
6. Security first. . .and last. Security drives decision-making, strategic direction and should live in each and every layer of your stack as you build and deploy software. Brodbeck stated “If you’re just checking security before you deploy code, then you’ve already failed. Security needs to be a first class citizen when you’re designing software within GitHub. I would say design, build, test and deploy are all areas where you should have security already built into how your software engineers are working.” He also noted how Priceline approaches cloud security “we’ve accelerated our security architecture review on how we’re going to secure our container and Kubernetes workloads in the cloud.” Lastly, he touched on security related to WFH. “We have federated identity already in place using OKTA as our platform. For other sensitive data areas we’re instrumenting two factor authentication against those.”
Dean agreed “We’re two factor for all of our mission critical applications and we are looking to enhance that in certain cases with tools like voice signature, like voice print and things of that nature. As you can imagine, with some of the fraud detection tools and capabilities, we’re always open to new ideas of how we can enhance the security posture. We’re comfortable with where we’re at right now, but this is something that you can always get better at, so we’re always looking for opportunities there.” And finally the Guardian Life CIO said “our engineers have to go through security training classes, and they all know that this is part of their responsibility and their job as they’re designing and developing new code. And I would add operations (DevOps) as well. As I mentioned earlier, before we deployed anything into the Amazon environment, we made sure that all of the controls and the security posture (that we were comfortable with) was in place.”
So while the global pandemic has caused immeasurable damage thus far, many of the enterprises that had invested in (and started) their digital transformations, were set up to not only survive, but — in their eyes — thrive. And although most, if not all businesses have been impacted by the wrath of COVID-19 in one way or another, it appears that the “winners” (if you can call them that) had not only prepared for a WFH world, but had stepped on the gas.
If you didn’t get a chance to attend, the video of the event can be found here: https://bit.ly/2LHklZ2
