UnitedEffect’s Motlagh is Redesigning the Notion of Enterprise Software
I had the pleasure of interviewing Borzou Motlagh (Bo) who was born in Iran and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He studied Computer Engineering at Lehigh University and graduated in 2004 with a Bachelor of Science. For 10 years, Bo traveled across the US and Canada to counsel business and technology leaders of all levels. Since 2014, he has orchestrated product and architecture teams to build technology platforms and emerging technologies.
Bo has 16 years of experience delivering highly scalable, quality, enterprise products. In 2016, he drove the enterprise architecture strategy at Frontline Education; a contribution that contributed significantly to their unicorn acquisition. In 2020, he designed a next generation globally available platform for tax calculation and compliance as Senior Director of Architecture at Vertex, Inc.
As the founder of United Effects, Bo seeks to challenge the stereotype that enterprise software can get away with being bloated, cumbersome, and ugly by instead simplifying and universalizing the architecture and tools needed most to realize a company’s aggressive product growth strategies.
Thank you so much for joining us!
What motivated you to launch your startup?
I come from a family of both entrepreneurs and revolutionaries. My parents were active in fighting for their freedoms in the 70s and 80s in Iran. They endured many hardships and fought for a better life. When we came to the states, I was very young. At first it was just my mother, my sister, and me. My mother worked tirelessly to ensure our lives had every opportunity. I think I’m stubborn like her when I get an idea in my head. My father survived horrible things in Iran before he and my stepmother could come to the states. They ultimately thrived and started their own businesses. Watching them as I grew up instilled in me the notion to “make your own way” in the world. Together they all showed me the meaning of sacrifice and endurance, and that with careful planning and grit, amazing things are possible.
With this background, it’s perhaps not surprising that I’ve always had an entrepreneurial bend. My first job out of college was a company I started that focused on writing custom software. It was an absolute failure, mainly because my ambition far exceeded my experience. But then, with some networking through close friends, I found myself bidding on projects and negotiating deals, which itself was an experience that served me well. I’ve never been afraid to fail. Each failure is an opportunity to try again and get it right.
As time went by, these experiences and opportunities allowed me to gain significant expertise in enterprise architecture, distributed microservice design, and technology platforms. I have become enthralled with the notion that a product can be built that then allows you to rapidly build other products, which is the concept at the heart of most enterprise technology platforms. I realized that this is both amazing on its own, and the key to my entrepreneurial bend, that with such a platform, every idea that pops into my head can become a reality. I also began to realize that very few people were being afforded the opportunity to design solutions like these, and I therefore was in a unique and privileged position.
As I began to imagine a Platform of my own design and mapped out the work, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to do this alone. That is where the name United Effects comes from. I knew that something revolutionary can only be built if amazing and talented people united. And with this concept I reached out to Chris Betz and Jason Koch to launch United Effects LLC and figure out our product. Things picked up speed when we were fortunate enough to add Josh Smith to the team.
What is it that excites you about what you’re building?
My team and I have a lot of individual experience building similar solutions for other enterprises over the years. In all these cases, the purity of the design has always been a compromise with the other factors of those businesses. Frankly, this is part of our value proposition: building software like this on your own is difficult because it diverts investment from core business and revenue, which means the result is never exactly what you’re hoping for or as robust as desired. We have a saying in our team, “Build it one more time”. The notion that we can build this solution correctly and do it just one more time while making it available to all enterprises is exciting.
When you get past the marketing and the mission statements, the thing United Effects will do is make it possible for product ideas to become a reality very quickly. To me personally, the most exciting possibility here is for startups. With this solution, we begin to level the playing field between small startup founders and their more established, often extremely large competition. Our solution will offer the same tools and technology these larger enterprises use, but in a very affordable pay-as-you-go model which any startup can use to quickly bring their product to market. That push toward innovation and increased competition excites me very much.
What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?
We are still in the seed stage, so the biggest challenge has been in how we discuss our product. Technology platforms are inherently technical concepts, and their users are often developers and product managers. Our happy place has typically been with the jargon of our industry, speaking to our features and capabilities with IT specific terms. But of course, this is a terrible way to sell your product to executives, investors, or anyone who is generally interested. The problem forced us to really dig into the nature of our value proposition and revisit our assumptions from a business perspective. In the end, this became one of the best things we could have done, not just for the language we use to describe our solution, but also because it influenced who the product was really intended to help. As we attempted to understand our core values, we realized that we had an opportunity to not only explain what we do to other people but redesign the notion of enterprise software to be about empowering them and not just about connecting machines.
What are your future plans for your startup?
We are heading into our first funding round. Our immediate focus is to bring our product to market as rapidly as possible. From there we hope to be a positive voice in the Enterprise Software-as-a-Service arena in general. Something our CDO Josh Smith likes to say is that “Enterprise Software does not have to be ugly.” We want to show that building technology that is designed to provide beautiful, immersive experiences ultimately helps empower innovation and productivity. We want to couple this experience with the ability to manage users, access, and your data streams entirely within a true Enterprise Operating System for Product Development. The next crowning achievement is to make it possible for businesses to stream their data anywhere and monetize it easily through subscriptions.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
https://blog.unitedeffects.com/
https://twitter.com/ueffectsLLC
https://www.linkedin.com/company/unitedeffects/
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
