Chapter 5
Convergence, Crossover, and Beyond
Traditional technology buyers are learning to become technology vendors, as we saw in Chapter 1. Many vendors are replacing buyers as the new best practice leaders, as we saw in Chapter 2. Welcome to the world of the technology “buyor”—the switch-hitter, who is good at both sides of the baseball plate, like the legendary Mickey Mantle.
Ambidexterity is a skill valued in many other sports. There are the soccer players who can fire rockets with either leg and cricketers who have mastered the “reverse sweep.” They look as elegant as Bjorn Borg did, when he dazzled the tennis world with his two-handed backhand on his way to multiple Wimbledon titles. They are the drummers who can use all four limbs to magical effect in a band.
Not just in sports—Michelangelo is supposed to have painted the Sistine Chapel with both hands (and it still took him years).
Ambidexterity in technology can be just as dazzling.
The “Buyor” Phenomenon
We saw UPS as “part transportation, part technology” in Chapter 1. There are others like 3M, GE, and The Washington Post Company described below.
Go to the 3M website and you see a “periodic table” with 46 elements.1 Click on Bi, and it describes 3M in Biotechnology, Mf describes what it does with Mechanical Fasteners, and We with Accelerated Weathering. The company many of us know best for Post-it notes and Scotch tape has more than 55,000 products and has an uncanny ability to combine highly innovative technologies in new and unexpected ways. We cover the periodic table more in Chapter 18.
Then there is GE. “In sector after sector, we find that technology suppliers sometimes lack deep domain knowledge when it comes to vertical technology solutions. That has opened the door for GE Healthcare, GE Transportation, and other units to become technology leaders in their markets. We are a multibillion-dollar software and technology company in our own right.”2
Donald E. Graham, Chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Company, which dates back to 1877, says it has become easier for companies to become technologically ambidextrous in the past decade. While traditional media has been decimated by technology, the Post has become a diversified technology company. Its Kaplan unit is one of the largest online education companies. Its Cable One unit is one of the largest cable companies in the United States and services a number of rural communities. It has digital properties like Slate. It has invested in startups like Avenue100, which provides marketing analytics to institutions. Trove (previously iCurrent) is a social news site and aggregator, and SocialCode helps companies with Facebook advertising and user engagement campaigns.
When the Washington Post launched its iPad app in 2011, it created a humorous video of a befuddled Bob Woodward being pulled away from his trusty typewriter and asking his editor, Ben Bradlee, about the allure of the iPad. It was a throwback to the huge influence the newspaper had in the 1970s in bringing down the Nixon presidency with its investigative coverage of Watergate.
Graham also sits on the board of Facebook and is arguably more tech-savvy than the average CEO or chairman. Modestly, though, he says it has become a lot easier for companies to hire technology talent like Vijay Ravindran, his Chief Digital Officer. Ravindran was involved with Amazon in its formative years and with other technology startups.
Graham's view: “Increasingly we can offer talent like Vijay equally challenging problems to solve as do technology vendors.”
Vice versa, technology vendors have been hiring from the corporate world to streamline their own operations. “The conventional wisdom on high-tech vendor CIOs hasn't always been of the highest order. There are but a few ‘rock-star’ CIOs leading high-tech vendors’ IT efforts. Most notable are HP's Randy Mott and Microsoft's Tony Scott. However, when the right CIO falls into the right situation, the combination can be powerful for both vendor and customer: a peer CIO who knows the lay of the land (IT governance, project management, and political challenges that IT leaders face) as well as the guts of the vendor's software (what it can and cannot do). It's the proverbial ‘eat your own dog food’ situation, espoused by many technology leaders.”1
It Helps to Start Early in Life
If you talk to sports coaches, they will tell you “the earlier (in life) you start switch-hitting, the better.” It is a lot harder later in life to get the upper-lower body coordination needed to be comfortable hitting a baseball or kicking a soccer ball from either side.
In May 2011, The Thiel Foundation announced fellowships to 24 recipients “younger than 20 years old at the end of 2010—each will receive $100,000 and mentoring under the condition that they stay out of school for two years to build their businesses. . . . The grant winners are pursuing a range of businesses, from alternative energy to education and e-commerce.”2 That's Thiel as in Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and successful investor in a string of successes such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and others.
Thiel clearly subscribes to what the coaches say—“start them young.” The Thiel fellowship's requirement that the winners stay out of school for two years is, of course, controversial. Indeed, the mother of one of the winners, who will leave Harvard, was quoted as saying, “This is a different paradigm from what I grew up with.”3
Of course, talk to corporate IT folks and they will smirk at a budget of just $100,000. Chump change in a world of trillions in IT budgets.
Take a look at Spanning, based in Austin, Texas, whose stated goal is to become “the Norton Computing of the cloud computing era.” They want to be the provider of all the things that should have come “in the box” with modern cloud applications like those from Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com, but didn't. They are well on their way, with tens of thousands of customers in 58 countries and just six full-time employees.
Charlie Wood, one of the founders, describes the journey:
When Spanning got started, we did so with very little in the way of resources. There were two of us, and between us we had a couple of computers, a free hour or two here and there, and not much else. But we were able to use a broad array of free or cheap tools to help us get started. My business partner Larry Hendricks was in California and worked late nights while I was in Texas and worked early mornings, so we needed a way to work asynchronously. We found the solution we needed in the free version of Google Apps, which we used to communicate via email and collaborate on shared documents. We built our product on a stack of free software: LAMP on the servers, and Apple's free developer tools and an open-source framework called Cappuccino for the client. We built a mailing list of people interested in our product with Google's free FeedBurner system, and tracked visitors using Google Analytics. Once we started selling our product, we used PayPal to handle the transactions so we did not need to open a merchant account at a bank. None of the systems we used required more than $100 to get started.
Free and cheap tools allowed us to build a business from scratch with essentially no up-front investment. But for that business to succeed, we needed promotion and distribution, and we got it. We were early participants in the Google Solutions Marketplace, which has grown to become the Google Apps Marketplace. It's essentially a catalog of third-party tools and services that extend Google's products, and it provides customers an easy way to find our products and rate the products they've used. Now that we're selling products into businesses, it also provides IT administrators at those companies a way to integrate our products directly into their Google Apps installations, which allows us to provide more valuable functionality. Google also invests in the Apps Marketplace ecosystem by providing online forums for marketplace participants to report problems and discuss best practices.
Spanning is both a producer and heavy consumer of technology. The products we sell help individuals and companies work more efficiently. But without the vast array of technology available to us at little or no cost, we wouldn't have been able to create those products in the first place.
Entrepreneurs like Wood and plenty of others we discuss in Chapter 7 can work wonders with $100,000. Infrastructure and applications can be had on a pay-as-you-go basis with cloud computing options. There are open APIs to be leveraged from PayPal, Facebook, eBay, iTunes, Amazon, and so many others. Social networks allow for affordable viral marketing. There are ecosystems around Apple, Google, Amazon, and others that allow for pay-as-you-go selling costs.
Even the funding process has evolved. Phil Simon, author of The Age of the Platform, says, “Sites such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo allow creative types to raise funding and awareness without very much effort. I used Kickstarter to raise more than $4,000 and $7,500 for my third and fourth books, respectively.”
Simon uses a creative tier of incentives for his backers—as an example, if you “pledge $200 you'll get your name in the acknowledgments plus a signed physical copy of the book with an inscription. We'll also schedule a one-hour video chat to be recorded on Skype. You can ask me questions about whatever you like, up to and including how you can build a platform for your business.”
Says Simon: “Other Kickstarter projects have generated 10 or 20 times as much funding.”
Actually, the most successful Kickstarter funding has been for an iPod Nano watch kit that raised close to $1 million from over 13,000 backers—and the original goal was to raise only $15,000!4
This makes Simon's point: “The days of waiting to be ‘chosen’ are coming to an end. Equipped with sufficient moxie and simple websites, no longer do creative types have to suffer in anonymity.”
They cannot be guaranteed success, but they will learn to buy and sell technology, to switch-hit for very little. And do so while they are young.
Let's Not Underestimate—Switch-Hitting Is Not Easy
Whether you start early or later in life, switch-hitting is not easy. Ted Simmons, a coach for the San Diego Padres, has been quoted as saying, “I also have yet to find a person that completely, totally, unequivocally has bilateral symmetry. One side is always dominant” and “I've asked concert pianists if it helps them to be ambidextrous. They told me, ‘No. It's just that the left hand is trained.’ They don't switch pianos for left-handed people. But they switch guitars for left-handers. Jimi Hendrix was left-handed. He switched wires. But being ambidextrous doesn't help as a guitarist.”5
Of course, there is need for more practice. Not favoring either side means working out more. Then there are the mood swings as one side slumps from time to time. Lance Berkman, considered one of the best switch-hitters ever (and member of the 2011 Major League Baseball champions, the St. Louis Cardinals) is on record as saying, “If I could do it all over again, I would not be a switch-hitter.”6
Similarly, becoming a technology “buyor” is not easy. If you are in Indiana or in Indonesia, how do you acquire the DNA of Silicon Valley? On the other hand, how do you bring grocery chain frugality to a software company accustomed to 90 percent margins?
Take the example of Xerox, which many in Silicon Valley think made lots of others, including Apple and Pixar, wealthy by not commercializing what they innovated. “The multitude of technologies that Xerox threw away were later commercialized outside of Xerox's company, and enabled other companies to profit from some of these quite valuable ideas.”7
Bob Warfield, a serial entrepreneur, has seen even technology-savvy companies stumble digital transitions. “Before home theaters evolved, high-end audiophile gear was largely analog. The analog engineers were in charge at those organizations. They had to bring in digital/computer guys to deal with the largely digital home theater medium. Problem is, when the analog guys are king, they think they can call the shots, make the decisions, and hire underlings to do the digital. As a consequence, their gear was unreliable and not up to the standards of newer players that had empowered the computer thinkers to call the shots on that gear.”
He thinks as even less tech-savvy industries plan their own smart products, they risk underestimating the risk of their digital journey. “Computers are the only machines that can change their function. They are universal meta-machines. A phone without a computer is just a phone. A phone with a computer is a phone, and MP3 player, web browser, email client, calendar, and a thousand other things. A phone that is a computer can do new things. Aside from being universal meta-machines, computers remove friction. That's friction to change, to learning, and to growing. These are all massively disruptive to industries new to computing. Businesses that don't understand meta-machines have a terrible time succeeding in the digital world, and eventually all things turn digital.”
The Need for a New Breed of Ambidextrous Technology Executives
Today over 15 percent of Major League Baseball hitters are switch-hitters, They are switch-hitters not just to honor Mickey Mantle, but because there are significant advantages to switch sides depending on whether a pitcher you are facing is right- or left-handed. Every sport has a finite number of spots in team rosters, so multitalented players are valued.
Where do you find the “switch-hitter” equivalent of technology executives?
An InformationWeek survey showed “most CIOs still haven't embraced this idea of IT being part of the product, though the percentage is growing. Thirty-four percent of the more than 200 IT leaders we surveyed say introducing ‘new IT-led products and services for customers’ is among the top three ways they'll innovate this year. Two years ago, just 18 percent considered that a priority.”8
Bruce J. Rogow is a former head of research at Gartner and now runs IT Odyssey & Advisory, a private research and second-opinion practice. He annually visits with over 120 executives involved in managing IT. In an interview, Rogow says,
For the past fifty years, IT has been focused on the continuous improvement and automation of business functions and processes. Despite their rhetoric, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) have top- down designed and delivered systems to users and customers on a one size fits all, common global solutions basis. The emphasis has been on lowest IT cost and business efficiency. The systems were directive in that they were provided on a take-it or leave-it basis.
Since the summer of 2010, however, I have seen a massive shift in the role, expectations, focus, and activities of IT within enterprises. While there are still efficiencies, economies of scale, and incremental improvements to be gained for competitive advantage, the business is looking for three very different outcomes from IT.
First, the focus shifts from supporting broad continuous improvements of business process to a game of business arbitrage. Business arbitrage involves being able to quickly identify and fill gaps between what competitors provide in a market and a customer need, price point, service offering, or expectation. It may be diverting an existing product to a new channel to rapidly fill a gap left open by competitors. These gaps open and close rapidly.
Second, IT is expected to contribute business revenue through marketing, product enhancement or new service lines. This often moves IT from the back of the house to a customer facing role at the front of the house.
Third, the focus is also on IT to dramatically enhance business yield. CEOs I have interviewed consistently lament that their biggest issue was inadequate yield from the elements and assets of their businesses. IT is being asked to increase the yield of product development efforts, revenue from the clients, value derived from the intellectual property, impact of the shared knowledge, and assets of the firm. This is not about making people more productive so head count can be reduced. It is about making the assets and people more effective and impactful.
Another Model—Bypass IT When It Comes to Product/Growth Initiatives
Some companies are starting to emulate the Silicon Valley model. Let the VP of R&D or Product Engineering develop products and let the CIO focus on internal technologies. As an example, Daimler, the leading auto and truck manufacturer, has more than 1,000 software engineers in their R&D group, compared with hundreds of others who support internal IT systems like SAP.
There is another good reason to think of R&D more than IT when it comes to new product development. Gina Staudacher, partner at the accounting firm of Baker Tilly, advises clients about R&D credits and how to structure such product development projects. She says:
These significant technology investments are often eligible for the Federal Research Tax Credit and corresponding State R&D incentives. This gives companies a monetary payback via reduced federal or state income taxes. These research credits, although most often secured “after the fact,” provide incremental cash benefits to an otherwise necessary business IT spend. Unfortunately, quite often these R&D incentives are misunderstood and not claimed. These incentives vary among states and foreign jurisdictions but remain relatively consistent in their purpose. These tax and cash incentive programs are fundamentally based on “product improvements.” To the extent they involve a process or technology enhancement, those activities and costs can be defined as qualifying projects, eligible for these valuable incentives.
The key is to understand the business purpose and underlying technology necessary to achieve the desired outcome. Ironically, in all of these R&D incentive programs, the investment that is being “subsidized” via the credit or incentive program is actually the exploration or development of a new technology or product or process.
In evaluating whether a research credit is available, companies need to consider whether a technical advancement is being attempted, not necessarily achieved.
When we work with clients to monetize tax credits globally, we utilize a “concept through final completion” approach to consider all potential project costs that may be eligible for R&D credit inclusion from a global perspective. Hence, consulting fees incurred in a foreign country may not be eligible for inclusion in the U.S. R&D tax credit programs. Such costs and payments may, however, be eligible in the foreign jurisdiction wherein they were performed or where payment was made.
Enterprises Have Poor Track Record with Technology
No matter where the project resides, in IT or R&D, the enterprise track record with technology has been less than assuring. It would appear delays and overruns in technology projects are almost guaranteed. Embedding technology in products, in some ways, jeopardizes more than a failed IT project, which can mean painful write-offs. Failed smart products can tarnish brands, lead to customer dissatisfaction, and, worst case, even lead to product liability.
Take the example of the 2011 Ford Edge. Consumer Reports, a significant influence in auto consumer decisions, wrote this about its MyTouch console: “The bad news is that the MyTouch controls give a new meaning to the word ‘unfriendly.’ Most of the controls have lost their simple knobs and have been replaced with touch-sensitive buttons that give no tactile feedback. The system also has busy touch screens that force you to take your eyes off the road too much. All-in-all, it's an aggravating design.”9
It extends way beyond Ford. As J. D. Powers reports, “A variety of issues led to the unexpectedly poor performance of all-new 2011 models—the first time since 2006 that newly-launched products haven't improved in quality compared to the vehicles they replaced.” The most notable were engine/transmission problems, according to Powers Vice President David Sargent. But there were also significant issues with the latest audio/entertainment and navigation systems.12
Crossover Executives
Enterprises are finding that they need “crossover” executives who can bring a blend of skills—vendors are hiring talent from user organizations; user organizations are hiring talent from vendors and startups.
A good example comes from the continuing competition between Walmart, the largest retailer in the world, and Amazon, the leading online retailer. In 1999, while Amazon was still a fledging player, Walmart sued it for hiring several of its technology and logistics executives. While the suit was settled, it reflected Amazon's building of a strong team across various organizational areas. The previous year, it had acquired a startup called Junglee, which had pioneered Internet comparison shopping. That acquisition brought it two of the co-founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who were influential in its formative years.
Now, fast-forward to 2011 when Walmart, this time, bought Kosmix, another company that Harinarayan and Rajaraman had started. The two executives are now running @Walmartlabs “to speed with innovations such as smartphone payment technology, mobile shopping applications, and Twitter-influenced product selection for stores” to give Walmart a chance to narrow the widening lead Amazon has in online retailing.
Examples of other crossover executives—Tony Scott, CIO at Microsoft, went there after stints at Disney and GM, and in the other direction, Vijay Ravindran, the Chief Digital Officer at the Washington Post, who did stints at Amazon and other startups. Scott and Ravindran write about their crossover experiences in the next section.
Beyond Ambidexterity
Michael Cote, former analyst at Redmonk (since this interview, he has moved to a corporate strategy role at Dell), raises other issues regarding the state of enterprise technology both in corporate IT and at technology vendors. He says:
Enterprises had their chance to be the flagship of IT, as did the military and the scientific community before them. All of those leaders did really well and gave us relational databases, GPS, processors and memory that perform beyond our wildest dreams. All of these things were good, but then business got wrapped up in developing software that was not focused on being usable, but intended to be compliant, safe, and affordable above all else. With rare exception, business no longer looked at computers as a way to differentiate and drive business. Their speed at adopting new technologies belied any attempts. Businesses were dragged into e-commerce and banks took forever to do rational, online banking.
The consumer space is where interesting technology innovation happens now, and taking a consumer mind-set is what works when applying technologies. Consumers are not fixated on risk management. If I use Facebook, am I opening myself to privacy risks? If I sign up with the Sony Playstation Network, what's the risk/reward for potential credit card leaks relative to the enjoyment? If I use this Android phone, what happens if Oracle wins their lawsuit against Google? How did my new Galaxy Tab know about all the wi-fi networks I had connected to on other Android devices?
Instead consumers look at using computers to deliver functionality they need, not as part of some grand, management-chain plan.
Consumer tech is focused on the user, not the “stakeholder.” Enterprise tech has come to care only about the second.
Steve Jobs famously stood at the crossroads of liberal arts and technology, to summarize the breadth of skills that makes Apple so successful. That is, however, deceptively simplistic.
To get to Rogow's “business arbitrage” and to Cote's “consumer mindset,” a technology group needs to be far broader—focused on the 12 attributes we cover in Part II. They include elegance in product design, global orientation in customer nuance analysis and supplier diversity, ability to stand out in social media and in physical settings, dramatically increased “clockspeed,” and many more facets. The conversations in many technology communities these days are related to cloud computing, virtualization, “big data” analytics, service-oriented architectures, and security concerns around LulzSec. Clearly, every technology group needs a wide variety of technical skills, either on staff or contracted, but even that is not wide enough.
To continue with the switch-hitter analogy, players cannot just be good hitters; they are much more valuable if they are also good fielders, they are quick enough to steal bases, and they possess other athletic abilities. Similarly, a soccer player who can kick well with both feet is also expected to play good defense. The elite are multidimensional.
Conclusion
Just as in baseball, where only 15 percent of players are switch-hitters, the ambidextrous technologist who is good at both technology production and efficient at technology consumption is an elusive species. We need them and we need many of the crossover types who bring experiences from both technology vendor and user organizations. We present next perspectives of Scott at Microsoft and Ravindran at the Washington Post, both examples of crossover executives.
Guest Columns: Crossover Executive Perspectives
Perspective 1: Tony Scott (CIO, Microsoft)
Tony Scott joined Microsoft Corp. in February 2008 as corporate vice president and chief information officer (CIO). Under Scott's leadership, Microsoft IT is responsible for security, infrastructure, messaging, and business applications for all of Microsoft, including support of the product groups, the corporate business groups, and the global sales and marketing organization.
Before joining Microsoft, Scott was the senior vice president and chief information officer for The Walt Disney Co., where he led planning, implementation, and operations of Disney IT systems and infrastructure across the company. He also held the position of chief technology officer, Information Systems and Services, at General Motors Corp. (GM), where he was responsible for defining the information technology computing and telecommunications strategy, architecture, and standards across all of GM's businesses globally.
Today, every business is increasingly becoming a “digital” business in the sense that many or all of the critical activities that business engages in are digital in nature. Starting with product development and continuing through marketing, selling, the buying experience, and product support (and sometimes the product itself), the common thread is a complex “circuit board” of digital information flow and technology-enabled business decisionmaking. For consumers, it is crystal clear when an organization has embraced and exploited the digital terrain and when it has not. For the CIO and the IT organization, it is of the utmost importance and priority to get this done right and to keep up with the pace of change.
One of the most important digitization changes that is taking place in many businesses is the blurring of what were once very distinct and separate internal functions. A couple of great examples come to mind from my own experience. At Disney, as our creative process teams began to use digital technology to create films, TV shows, and consumer products, the support teams that used to process and edit film and magnetic tape, or physically move it around in bulky containers, began to use digital technology to record, store, edit, and transport content. Often, the servers, network gear, and storage devices that were used to support these activities were the same kind of gear that the IT department was buying, and sometimes lived in the same data center. We recognized that there were some big differences in terms of the work being done on these servers, but the underlying hardware technology was almost exactly the same. And the management tools and disciplines that are required to run these environments didn't vary much, despite the differences in workload. As time has gone on, much of what was once differentiated in terms of infrastructure has become commoditized, and the focus has shifted from hardware of various kinds to software.
At Microsoft, a similar pattern has emerged. We once shipped the vast majority of our products in physical form. Packaging, physical distribution, inventory management and returns have gone (or are quickly going) the way of the floppy (who needs them anymore!). We now sell, distribute, and support much of our software in digital form—bits over the wire. Indeed, some significant part of our business is software as a service (SAAS), where our customers don't actually own or license anything! The underlying technology that supported the physical oriented world has given way to content distribution networks and digital contact centers that use a ton of information technology as the base platform.
All of the above present new challenges and opportunities for the IT department, as we are all being asked to manage exponentially increasing quantities of servers, storage, and network bandwidth, along with a smorgasbord of consumer devices, and at the same time deliver high quality real-time information and analytics/business intelligence platforms.
It is quite clear to me that future CIOs and the IT organizations they lead will have to stretch to learn new skills to adequately support the digital brand experience that consumers and internal customers will expect, while still protecting important intellectual property and other information assets of the organization. I think it is an exciting time to be in our business, and every day I am energized by the creativity and imagination I see being applied to some really hard problems across dozens of industries and professions. And I am encouraged by the healthy levels of both collaboration and competition our industry drives. I hope that you'll find the journey as interesting and exciting as I have, and that you'll appreciate the progress we make together.
Perspective 2: Vijay Ravindran (Chief Digital Officer, The Washington Post Co.)
Vijay Ravindran joined The Washington Post Company as senior vice president and chief digital officer in February 2009. In his role, Ravindran focuses on digital news product development. Ravindran founded and leads WaPo Labs, which develops experimental news products, including the personalized news aggregation site Trove. Ravindran also serves in various leadership roles at SocialCode (the leading Facebook-dedicated advertising agency), The Washington Post's online initiatives, Slate, Avenue100 Solutions (a leading analytics-based performance marketing company), and Ongo (a Company investment).
Previously, as chief technology officer of Catalist LLC, a start-up political technology company that built a national voter database and data mining tools for political campaigns, Ravindran led all the technology aspects of developing the company's software products. He joined Catalist at its inception in late 2005. During the 2008 election cycle, Catalist clients included the Obama for America and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns.
Prior to Catalist, Ravindran was a technology director at Amazon.com. From 2003 to 2005, he led the ordering services group; the department was responsible for consumer purchasing on all Amazon properties. From 2001 to 2003, he built and led the teams that owned the core order-processing and identity services for Amazon and its partners.
In the late summer of 2008, I was approached by an Amazon director, my former employer, about my possible interest in a unique position being created by Don Graham, the CEO and Chairman of the Washington Post Co. The position would be focused on digital news, specifically of innovating beyond the quarter-to-quarter improvement all operating businesses hope to make, but instead on a “big swing” looking out five years and beyond, and seeing if we could “skip a generation.” So began the recruitment and my eventual hiring as Chief Digital Officer.
There are some reasons to stay away from “newspaper” companies. Their main business is deeply challenged, and while there are audience riches online, the same cannot be said of the current advertising models. Original content around “serious” news does not, at least at face value, seem like a good business to be in for this coming decade.
So why take the leap? I was leaving a startup, Catalist, that I had started at on day 1, built and shaped the product, hired the technical team, and been through the war of a presidential election. My time at Amazon prior to Catalist had given me the cushion to take chances and the skills and demeanor to constantly look for big problems to solve. This was a big challenge. Given my time in Democratic politics, my respect for the Washington Post newsroom was so high that to play a role in helping transition the essential good qualities of that newsroom to a new age of information delivery was something I could really believe in.
That by itself wasn't enough; I needed a role that would allow me to be both influential but not be bogged down. I wanted to be a game changer, but given the latitude to not always be focused on a P&L and free cash flow in the short or even medium term. And to be at a company where that sort of role could be supported and respected. Most newspaper companies do not have the balance sheets to support that financially. The Washington Post Company was ideal because it was financially strong, thanks to Kaplan and CableOne. Don and I developed a common shared vision of how innovation could work from outside the Washington Post operating unit while still being relevant and respected within.
My job description, “to develop next generation products, strategies, and investment to allow the Washington Post to skip a generation” was definitely vague enough to be considered flexible. When I arrived in February 2009 (I needed time off from the election to recover), I set out to understand the business, culture, and personalities. I was personally more interested in the investment side, and I had originally envisioned leaving Catalist for a venture capital firm to either be an executive-in-residence or join a firm itself. Quickly, though, I realized that the value of a technical team outside of the operating unit, built in the vision of the type of team I worked with at Amazon, could be the most effective use of capital to make a difference.
While I set out to begin hiring what would eventually become the WaPo Labs team, I also was given corporate oversight of one of the smaller businesses within the portfolio, CourseAdvisor, an education lead-generation company that has since changed its name to Avenue100. Thanks to the CEO of the Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth, I also had fairly open access to the Post's VP group and became a de facto member.
The biggest impact I had in the first year, and continue to have, is to reshape the image that technical leaders have to senior management both at Corporate and the operating units. They had only thought of technology as “IT” and the technical organizations were fairly subservient organizations. By Don's creation of my position, I've been able to showcase the level of product and business thinking that can turbocharge having a deep technical background. The kind of technology executive who is at Amazon and its peers had finally made it to a company that had never seen anything like it before.
This role demands tremendous breadth. I currently divide my time across a variety of initiatives and roles:
- The WaPo Labs team continues to grow and the team launched Trove, a personalized news aggregation site with associated apps. The team is mainly focused on growing Trove as consumer destination while componentizing aspects of the personalization technology to offer back to Washington Post and Slate. Trove offers cutting-edge personalization of news using users’ Facebook personas to help create a unique news reading experience.
- Using technology originally developed at Avenue100, we've incubated SocialCode, a Facebook advertising agency that leverages Facebook's self-service advertising platform but targets big brands and their agencies as clients. The business has gone from not existing 18 months ago to being a real company with dozens of employees working across many dozens of clients.
- I work closely with the leadership of Slate and Washington Post on new endeavors and selected business development. Both sites are undergoing major software infrastructure upgrades, including their core content management processes. In the case of the Washington Post, the entire online business was managed as a separate company until 2008, and the integration has been a complex process of people and infrastructure.
- I serve on an advisory group for Kaplan Test Prep's innovation efforts. Kaplan's Test Prep business faces a completely different set of challenges than a decade ago. While my current role is quite small, there are quite a few legacy parallels to the challenges faced by the Washington Post. For instance, just like Washington Post faces niche content challengers across local news and politics, every specific test prep area is a battleground for Kaplan with new startups.
- I help TWPC make several angel and Series A investments in technology startups, including those in Ongo and Fab.
While I do not have the luxury of 100 percent focus on a product like a startup CEO, I feel like the opportunity exists to do one part “pure innovation” and one part weaving in a set of assets in new innovative ways, and that the sum of this can be much greater than the parts if executed. The path I've taken, while fairly unique today, is something that I think carries great promise for leaders from the Valley and other high technology organizations. I have been able to go from being a one of many directors and VPs at Amazon to making a more dramatic, higher-leveraged impact at an organization that has lots of opportunity to be successful in this next decade across a variety of business lines.