Unleashing the Creativity in Big Business

Anyone who’s worked in a Fortune 500 company or any “incumbent” business knows the thrill of receiving that prestigious job. The early days and months are filled with excitement — tackling big problems, being a market maker, meeting your thousands of co-workers, being on every vendor’s must-call list.

Then, there’s an inevitable letdown when you realize just how hard it is going to be to get anything done. You understand what it means to be a cog in the bureaucratic machine, grinding through rote processes that make even the simplest task a project with milestones, approvals and endless status updates.

The way I saw it, process existed to ensure a consistently acceptable level of quality across a large organization, but this consistency was expensive. It came at the cost of nearly all the productive energy of the company’s talented, creative individuals and left very little time for the impactful work that people truly dreamed about.

So, like a millennial, I left corporate America for the startup world, to expend my energy in ways that could generate more results faster. And in the past 10 years, I helped more than 150 startups go to market and navigate their growth. I built systems to streamline people’s day-to-day work in software development, restaurants, real estate, recruiting, finance, shipping and many disparate industries. But, a common goal in all of this work was to create space for individuals to stop exhausting themselves just keeping the gears turning and to focus their energy on improving the machine.

Ironically, this entrepreneurial journey taught me to love process. Not because process homogenizes diverse abilities, but because I realized that an efficient process can be a platform to build on top of, it can enable creativity and success.

Along the way, I became friends with four other veterans of the world’s largest organizations. (One of whom is actually a veteran that spent most of his career in the Army and Department of Defense.) Over dinners and many drinks, we shared war stories from insurance and government and financial services. These group therapy sessions eventually turned into action, and we began working on a real-world problem faced by the DoD.

It turns out that a large division was grinding to a halt because their rigid processes relied entirely on people manually moving data between dozens of systems. They were essentially treating data like pieces of paper that shuffled from one department to the next. To solve this challenge, we hit upon a simple idea — connect their off-shelf enterprise platforms with their legacy systems and add a modern user interface.

We immediately realized how much better our past lives would have been with similar solutions and over the course of the last two years we founded A-Stryde. Our product is a process automation platform that runs alongside organization’s legacy systems, creating a common mobile-enabled user interface fed by cross-platform workflows and an integrated data layer. Our goal is to help people like us — the “cogs” who are smart, able, innovative and just trapped in a machine that saps their creativity and agility every day.

We’re at the beginning of our startup journey, but we aren’t leaving the world of the “incumbent” behind. Our past lives are always in our minds — working long hours just to try to prove a new idea could succeed, seeing our favorite co-workers leave for brighter opportunities, battling an old guard who couldn’t see the value of change. We believe it doesn’t have to be that way, and that everyone would benefit if complex organizations got just a little simpler.

Dave is the co-founder and CTO of A-Stryde, an automation platform dedicated to helping complex organizations run by addressing their legacy process and tech issues. Once upon a time he was a cog in the corporate wheel. Follow A-Stryde on LinkedIn and Twitter and connect with Dave, too.