From a Hackweek to Cisco’s Keynote: business development for start-ups
A team of 4, a week-long hackathon, and a paella: the ingredients for our biggest exposure to date
This is the story of a start-up that fought above its weight class, built two integrations with a key partner and managed to get featured (twice!) at one of the biggest events in the industry. Thousands of eyeballs on-stage and tens of thousands in live streaming. And it started with a Hackweek.
Start-ups must always fight above their weight class.
SOME CONTEXT
At Redbooth, we’re on a mission to make people all over the world work smarter with our Task Management Platform.
Your humble narrator is a hacker and exec at Redbooth who leads Business Development and Platform, helping the company grow through partnerships.
THE RELATIONSHIP
An often undervalued asset for a start-up (or any business, for that matter) is its ability to form strong personal and professional relationships.
Relationships need to be authentic and based on personal connection as well as a shared professional interest.
At Redbooth we built a wide and strong network combining analysts, potential partner companies, investors, and others. Through this network, we were able to engage with Cisco and explore where our technology and product could be of value so that we could grow our distribution muscle.
THE OPPORTUNITY
A few months ago, after an initial reach out to Cisco’s Business Development team, we got introduced to a Director of Product Management at Cisco. The intro said something like “you guys need to meet.”
We met and quickly realized there was a real opportunity here. Cisco is the clear leader in the Collaboration space, and they are making a big bet with Cisco Spark, a communications platform (messaging, voice, video, and more) that’s out there competing with Slack and Microsoft Skype for Business. To do so, Cisco needs to make a clear statement on differentiation from the other solutions, who already have a massive market share are growing rapidly.
For a company as big as Cisco it’s very hard to innovate and implement at the speed of a start-up. We put ourselves in their shoes and brainstormed on how we could help Spark win.
We enabled a critical initiative by providing productivity through Task Management inside of Cisco Spark.
Knowing that we wanted to get Cisco’s attention to build a strong partnership and grow our business through their platform, we started hacking.
THE HACKING
With already 36 people in R&D, we wanted to foster innovation while maintaining quality and reliability. Hackweeks were born.
Every few development cycles, the teams go into a Hackweek which last (you guessed it!) a week, and the teams (4–6 people) are encouraged to hack on any creative ideas they may have without being constrained by product owners or our roadmap.
There’s one simple rule: whatever the team builds needs to be demoed in front of the whole company on Friday.
Hackweeks at Redbooth have yielded epic innovations, introduction of new products, cutting edge technologies and jaw-dropping experiments.
THE PRODUCT
Barcelona, June 3rd, 2016 — Platform Hackweek
The Platform Team (Fran, Alexandr, Juan and Xavi) — usually responsible for building integrations and messing with APIs — started hacking.
The team came up with:
- A bot for Cisco Spark that allows Spark users to manage their work from a chat room. Think: “Redbooth, what’s Sarah’s workload?” or “Redbooth, create a task: Publish Medium article.” The bot understands natural language because it leverages api.ai, an API for Natural Language Processing.
- A Proof of Concept for our iOS App that integrates Cisco’s video-calling capabilities and cloud infrastructure. We integrated Cisco’s WebRTC SDK that was in Alpha version and it turns out we were the first company ever to integrate that piece of code successfully.
Wow, all that in just one week! Remember when we talked about speed of innovation and implementation?
You might be wondering why the team decided to build these two integrations. Well, it’s a combination of learning from Cisco’s challenges and priorities through our relationship and sharing it all with the development team.
Then, the team found the intersection between important and interesting and magic happened.
I made some slides explaining what we did:
After sharing the demo of our Hackweek with a GM and others higher up in the chain at Cisco, we got invited to Cisco Live.
Cisco Live US is the company’s biggest event, hosting almost 40,000 people interested in Networking, Collaboration, IoT, Security, etc. Cisco sponsored our booth at the event to present our new integration with Cisco Spark.
Note: The team spent several long days and nights making the hack ready for the big stage.
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS
Las Vegas, July 11th-14th, 2016–Cisco Live US 2016
That was one of the most intense weeks I’ve had in a while. Cisco Live started great, and it only got better every day.
We built some great relationships, expanded our partnership inside the Cisco organization, and made significant progress towards exposing our platform to Cisco Spark customers and distributors.
THE SURPRISE
Three days into the event, a small team from the Business Development group at Cisco came by our booth with great news:
The CTO of the Collaboration Business Unit, Jonathan Rosenberg, had just decided to demo our bot in the main keynote.
This would mean that the entire industry would hear about Redbooth, and we would be included in a select group of companies, along with Apple and IBM, that add value to Cisco’s new collaboration ecosystem.
We rushed to help Jonathan prepare a Redbooth workspace and Cisco Spark room to demo it live on the main stage the following day.
THE KEYNOTE
The big moment finally arrived. Thursday, July 14th, 9 am.
Jonathan Rosenberg went on stage and demoed our bot. A small glitch during the demo almost gave me a heart attack, as you can see in the video above, but it eventually worked out. Anecdotally, I thought of using “The longest 39 seconds of my life” as a title for this article, since 39.94273355 seconds is how long it took for the bot to reply.
To our surprise Jens Meggers, SVP and GM for Collaboration, also mentioned us when talking about their brand new SDK for Cisco Video on the iOS platform.
We couldn’t have gotten more return out of the Hackweek.
Are you building great relationships for your business? Are you putting yourself in your partner’s shoes and brainstorming how to help them win? Is your speed of innovation jaw dropping? If not, why?
Jordi Romero spent the last 12 years building and selling Software. Most recently at Redbooth, a SaaS platform for task management. He also helps great companies such as Camaloon or Quipu, both founded at itnig, a venture builder where Jordi is a partner.
