Kathryn Harrison talks building things from scratch, working at a startup within a large organization, and ensuring women have a seat at the table at IBM
Kathryn Harrison is currently the Director of Global Offering Management for IBM Blockchain Platform, where she is the executive responsible for conceptualizing, developing and delivering IBM Blockchain software products. In previous roles at IBM, Kathryn served as the Payments and Blockchain Leader for IBM Middle East and Africa, responsible for developing and communicating the IBM point of view on blockchain and its impact on banking, government and supply chain across Middle East and Africa.
What got you into the blockchain space?
I have an interesting blockchain genesis story. I was on assignment with IBM living in Istanbul and I had student loans for my graduate degree that I had to pay every month in US Dollars. Living in Turkey, I was paid in Turkish Lira to my Turkish bank account and I sent money home every month to cover my student loans in US Dollars. I was frustrated because my bank would charge anywhere between $20 to $30 a month in wire transfer fees to process these transactions. One day, I was complaining about this to some friends and someone said to me, “Well you should just use Bitcoin, and then you won’t have to pay any fees.” I had heard of Bitcoin, and so I started getting really interested in the space.
When was this?
This was in 2014, so it was still pretty early. Bitcoin wasn’t something that everyone had heard about– there were certainly no ads in the New York City Subways about crypto.
What were your 2014 thoughts about crypto?
As I foraged deeper into the blockchain space, I realized that Bitcoin is powerful and compelling, but if you lose your private key or you send BTC to the wrong address, it’s gone forever. I was particularly interested in making the technology behind Bitcoin usable. At IBM I found a whole bunch of researchers and technologists who were experimenting and playing with blockchain technology and its applications. I decided that I wanted to help to build products on the blockchain that would transform industries, and I’ve been here ever since.
Could you tell us more about your role at IBM as Global Product Manager? How has the space and your role at IBM evolved over time?
My job is to understand the market opportunity for IBM, how to make money in the space, and where IBM has the right expertise. As product manager I really sit at the center of all of the different teams — engineering, financial, and marketing — that come together in order to put a product out into the market. I’m responsible for making sure that products work not only in the US, but also in Japan, India, South Africa, and Brazil. IBM has clients and teams all over the world, so it’s really thinking about how you fit pieces together in order to build a product that’s going to scale and be usable by diverse groups of people.
What kind of challenges do you face being a PM in the blockchain space vs. a PM position in an established industry?
I love it because it means I get to build something from scratch. We have to think about how we can use this technology to make industries and governments operate differently. It’s a tall order– you have to not only develop technology, but also envision the economic system in which it works. When working with an established product, there’s a clear set of existing business models and pricing mechanisms. In the blockchain space, there’s a lot of times people ask questions and we think through what we think the answers could be, but there’s still a lot to learn. It’s basically like getting to work on a startup at a very large organization.
What does it mean to “work on a startup within a large organization”? How does IBM Blockchain differ from the rest of the organization, structurally?
Firstly, we have a pretty small team which allows us to work in an agile way and pivot from one focus to another. Secondly, we end up having to do a lot of evangelizing and explaining about what blockchain is and how it works in a way that a traditional part of the IBM corporation might not have to. Ultimately our competition for talent is startups and single founders, so we work in a very collaborative and flat structure relative to the rest of IBM in order to drive results.
What advantages does IBM Blockchain have in regards to being a part of a larger corporations that startups may not have?
IBM has been in the technology business for over a hundred years, so we have very strong standards around integrity and making sure that we are following all the rules and regulations that companies need to meet. There’s a lot of anxiety in the market over a number of companies and organizations that took advantage of the ICO craze to run scams and do pretty shady things. If you work with IBM you know what you’re sold is what you’ll get.
We also have expertise around a lot of technological components that are essential to blockchain. We have advanced research centers and expertise in cryptography, transaction processing, and distributed computing. We understand what it takes to work at enterprise scale because of the relationships we have with a lot of major entities around the world.
What does the relationship between IBM Blockchain and startups in the space look like to you?
Let me be clear– I don’t see IBM necessarily as directly competing with startups. In most cases there’s a really strong opportunity for IBM to partner with small companies as they look to move into the enterprise space. In fact, we actually just launched the IBM Blockchain Accelerator where we are working very closely with 12 startups to help them advance and bring their products to market.
You spent a lot of time (and lived) in Middle Eastern and African Countries, before moving back to New York. What were the main cultural differences in attitudes towards blockchain technology and financial systems that you noticed?
When I worked in the Middle East and Africa I spent a lot of time in the United Arab Emirates (especially in Dubai), South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, and Turkey. What I think is fascinating is the extent to which those countries were constantly looking for ways to leapfrog existing technology. Sometimes in the US we have a bias that we do everything the right way, or that we know what the best practices are. Countries that may not have the same level of infrastructure are more open and watching to see how blockchain may start to revolutionize things like remittances, commercial financing, and supply chain. In Dubai in particular, they really put a stake in the ground that they’re going to be a government run on blockchain. This focus has allowed them to explore a lot of really interesting opportunities and to be able to create use cases around things like land development, inter-governmental claims, tourism, and transportation. There’s more of a willingness to explore and see how blockchain could truly impact industry.
Other than Dubai, what countries do you see as early adopters of blockchain technology?
A lot of countries in Asia have been really focused on building blockchain technology. Thailand Singapore, Japan, Korea, Estonia, and Malta are very interested in the potential impact. I think they’re all thinking about how to take advantage of this opportunity to incorporate a new technology into industry and government.
What kind of use cases are these kinds of countries focused on building?
It really depends. A lot of these countries are trying to look for ways to distinguish themselves from an economic perspective, so I think they are looking at education tracking because they’re trying to set themselves up as hubs for innovation. There are also a lot of use cases around citizen services and transportation, since these help to accelerate and drive economic development. I also see the number of use cases in the healthcare space, especially in countries that want to be a medical tourism destination. Central banks around the world are also really looking at how these technologies can impact them, because there’s potential for central banks to issue digital currencies.
What barriers do you see to global adoption of blockchain technology?
Obviously the technology is still in its early phases, but, to me, the human issues seem to be a bigger barrier. Blockchain is a fundamentally economic innovation– it changes and transforms how different entities interact with one another. A challenge to adoption is getting organizations to work together to agree to the government policies to set up the network.
How did your experiences abroad and the large number of IBMers around the world (the fact that IBM has a distributed team) affect IBM’s product strategy when building blockchain technology?
Let me get a little bit philosophical. My experience living in different countries where people speak different languages and think about the world in different ways is a huge asset in my career as a product manager. I’ve learned how to communicate across different cultures, and candidly engineering vs. finance vs. marketing, even within the same company, are different cultures.
I also work with companies all over the world. I work with central banks and governments to understand some of the different problems that they are dealing with. It’s easy to think that everything works the way it does in the US, but the way in which industries are set up and companies interact with their government can be very different across countries. There are places where the transparency that blockchain offers is a huge advantage because of corruption or other problems in the national system. My past experience really helps me to convey the value of blockchain in places where there are a different set of business processes.
I think that living abroad has also given me a kind of curiosity that makes it so much fun to learn about new technologies and to think about ways in which the world could be different.
What product initiatives at IBM Blockchain most excite you?
First and foremost, Hyperledger Fabric. IBM started on Ethereum like many other organizations and we found a couple of problems we couldn’t overcome, so that’s how we started our community around Hyperledger. The governance around Hyperledger has really shown that the decision made a lot of sense. We’re actually about to release the next generation of our IBM platform. In 2017, we released the IBM Blockchain Platform and we have worked with several hundred companies on that platform to help them build scalable networks in applications. We learned so much in the process, in terms of what it takes to actually get a network to production, to scale, and to process transactions. We built these improvements and enhancements into the next generation of the product, so we’re giving our clients and our users much more control over specific components.
You were a part of building Hyperledger Composer from the idea stage. A large focus of Composer is on integrating legacy/existing systems with blockchain technology. What are the most powerful use cases that you’ve seen come out of this? What are some use cases that surprised you?
Some things I’ve seen that are really compelling are around smart contracts and digital signatures. We did a challenge with Global Citizen last year and there were some really cool applications that came out related to tickets in entertainment sales, and helping independent truck drivers build more of a market and get better rates for their services. Cases that I’m most excited about are those that empower individuals with control over their data and their finances, and give more power back to entrepreneurs.
What are some use cases of Hyperledger you’ve seen in developing countries?
There’s a company called The Plastic Bank. They are predicated on trying to tackle two really big problems. First, is the problem of the amount of plastic that ends up in the ocean. Second, is serving the needs of the ultra poor, the people that live on $1 or less per day. These issues are closely tied, because in subsistence survival mode it’s not a top priority to think about where plastics end up, whether in an ocean or landfill. The Plastic Bank has created an ecosystem where people can collect plastic and turn it in for of a token that they can use at a series of Plastic Bank stores. At a store, they can buy any of the goods and services that they might need to live. Anything from food, to school supplies, to cooking gas. The Plastic Bank solves two problems at once– the advent of plastic everywhere, and providing economic opportunities for people to find new sources of income.
Why is it important that women are a part of the blockchain space?
Firstly, in the blockchain space, we’re reimagining how the economic systems of our world exist. Women have been shut out of power structures around technology for most of modern history, so it’s important that women have their seat at the table. We are more than half the population– we certainly should be exercising commensurate level influence and impact.
Secondly, the blockchain space combines finance and technology, which are two very “boys club” driven industries. It’s important to have diversity when imagining some of the moral and ethical implications in businesses or transforming industries– not that women do this better than men, just differently. Diversity is not just a gender issue, it’s a nationality, age, ethnicity issue.
You mention that “[you] have a direct reporting line that reaches all the way to the CEO of IBM that is almost entirely female” in this article. Why is it important for women in the blockchain space to have female mentorship?
At IBM I’m very fortunate because I have a CEO who’s a woman, Ginni Rometty. People can understand and acknowledge what it looks like to be a female CEO. Sometimes we think we know that a woman could be a CEO, but we might not realize what that means on a day-to-day basis. For example, questions might arise like how does she express anger? How does she give a keynote? I might not operate or have a similar personality or approach as Ginni Rometty or Marie Wieck, but it’s so much easier for people to believe that something is possible if they can see it with their own eyes. These women have worked incredibly hard, pushed through obstacles that I can’t even imagine, and I need to the same thing for the next generation of women. So that we are not so lonely. So that different voices are heard, appreciated, and understood.
Connect with Kathryn on her Twitter and Medium!
Write to Roshni Rawal at roshnirawal@berkeley.edu. The she256: Fireside Chats are sponsored by Upscribe.
