The following is the video transcript of Smith’s Panel Discussion at Columbia Business School’s 7th Annual WBLiT Conference.
Renee Lumley Hall
All right. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Shout out to all of you for getting here early. Beautiful day. Welcome fellow alumni, students and industry experts. My name is Renee Lumley Hall. I am a proud graduate of Columbia Business School’s class of 2006. And I’m also a board of director or board director I should say for the African American alumni association also known as Four A. It’s my pleasure to open the seventh annual Women’s Business Leadership in Tech Conference, “Shaping the Future of Tech and Business”.
Today’s program showcases the immense leadership and talent of women in the technology sector, including many of you, our successful alumni. Thank you to Vista Equity Partners and Robert F. Smith, thank you, graduate of the class of 1994 and Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners for this seven-year partnership with Columbia Business School. Robert, the impact of your support ensures that the future of technology remains accessible to women and we thank you for that.
Today’s program is a testament to the advancements that have been made while we continue to look forward to the future. In this opening session this morning, Robert Smith will moderate a panel with three wonderful leaders here. We’ve got a panel of Vista Partner CEOs Building Inclusion into Tech: Focusing on How Diverse Workforces will create more holistic AI tools. So joining Robert is Shannon Bracken, Senior Vice President of Vista Equity Partners.
Robert F. Smith
You’re not in order. Shannon raise your hand.
Renee Lumley Hall
That’s okay. Amy Kadomatsu, CEO of COMPLY, and Cory Munchbach, CEO of Blueconic. And the only person who has better shoes than I do today.
Cory Munchbach
As good.
Robert Smith
Thanks for coming. So with that, let’s jump right into the panel. Thanks, folks. Thank you. Great, thank you. I’m excited to be here to have this conversation. But first, I’ve got to give a shout out to my class of ‘94 classmates and section mates over there – you guys raise your hands – or your class and 93 was okay too. See that’s the way you support your classmates just so y’all know. You come to these things early in the morning. Thanks y’all, seriously. So before we get into it, I want to set a little bit of context, first. You know, when I think about where we are in this cycle, you know when we started Vista, we started with most of the software companies on premise. They were application software businesses, and then we hit this new wave of what we’ll call a public cloud. And so that was a major expansion, we had to adjust and evolve our strategy to take advantage of what was a more efficient way of developing software, distributing software, consuming software, and created a massive growth opportunity for us.
There’s a bunch of other little catalytic activities, you know, mobile force that all impacted, but that was kind of the massive wave that came through our market. We’re now at another one of those inflection points. And it is the introduction of Gen AI, really, into all aspects and elements of our world of enterprise software, you all will feel it first in the consumer world. But you’re going to feel it most impactfully in the business world as we will going forward. We have founded and put together a Gen AI Council starting I guess about a year ago, where we have about 14 of our CEOs who are focused on various elements of how we utilize this new technology in developing additional products, services solutions to our customers, and deliver those. In addition, how do we utilize it for forms of creating efficiency and code development. And then, of course, internally within Vista to ensure that we are utilizing these tools for not only communications and engagement with stakeholders in our universe, but also creating efficacy and efficiency in the way we do our underwriting etc. So there are multiple elements and aspects of this, some surrounded by some policy considerations, and configuration or compliance configurations. But make no mistake about it, this is going to be and will be one of the most impactful technologies introduced into the business economy for probably the next 20 or 30 years, and the way I like to think about it, the first wave of this will hit the hardware elements, hardware infrastructure, like all technology. There’s an impact, you know, that we’re thinking maybe two to six trillion. I know it’s a big range. But it depends upon what you include and don’t.
And then there’s going to be the next wave, which is the hyper scalars, which you’re starting to, they’re starting to express what is their opportunity, they’ve got a lot of build out to do. But once that happens, they’re going to provide a set of products and technologies that will be enabling technologies. And then there’s going to be the enterprise software vendors, who ultimately will be delivering Gen AI enabled solutions to their customers, you know, the average, small to medium and even large corporations not going to develop all these tools themselves, they’re going to look for people to deliver these tools to them. And those are their traditional enterprise software vendors.
So with that as a bit of a backdrop, let me let me start with Cory. And Cory, let’s talk a little bit about some of the work that you are doing and how you’re guiding your team. First talk a little bit about the company, what it is you’re doing and how you’re guiding your team, to embrace Gen AI and enable it to be a technology for your customer set, then ultimately, how are you looking to use it to be more efficient in the management of your company?
Cory Munchbach
You bet. Thanks, everyone for being here. So Blueconic is a marketing technology platform. So if you think about Salesforce, Adobe, sort of in the biggest enterprise space, we focus on bringing consumer data together for marketing and digital teams to use that data. So you can think about it as sort of a database very specifically oriented with an application oriented toward marketers. That’s important, because marketing is absolutely one of the areas that is confronting “What does Gen AI mean for us at a very existential level?” So we can think about it for our customers in a few ways. How is Gen AI going to be used in their context? So whether that is content, scaling, all sorts of that can be image, copy, right, all those sort of pieces of their day to day. But also thinking about more importantly, I think the operational efficiencies that come around from that, I don’t know that for the folks who are maybe marketers in the room, I’ve never, ever met a marketer who wasn’t told to do more with less. So waiting to find that rare unicorn, and I want to hear everything about it. And so that is both an opportunity and threat in a lot of ways for them.
And so how do we think about it from a product standpoint is really “what is the workflow of your day?” The jobs that you have, and where can we insert Gen AI into that? So in obvious places, we have all this data, you are creating refined segments insights, who should we be going after? One of the questions we’ve always gotten is can I have a segment of one? Sure, but do you have enough messages for all million individual people and up until now, the answer has been? “Oh, no, actually, we don’t.” So I don’t need a segment of one, I need a segment of probably a million that starts to flip on its head and really have this opportunity to do kind of true personalization at scale. So those are those big opportunities. And then internally, also working with marketers in the spirit of doing more with less, not necessarily the most adept when it comes to consumer data, right, that’s largely been a realm of IT or agencies. So as they’ve taken that on, that has been operationally difficult. So how do we put tools in to make it easier for them to get started? Faster time to value is a good thing for us. We all know, in software, that first year is the year. So how do we make sure that they’re seeing very quick wins, while also setting them up for long term value with the platform is really critical on the product side, and internally for us, when we think about our whole engagement model, “Can we cut implementation in half?” “Can we cut implementation down to 10% of that time?” That means fewer people that I need to hire, so that we can scale this up much more efficiently. So there’s really a ton of places externally, internally, that we see an opportunity to apply this, and we’re still in the early stages, of course.
Robert Smith
I’ll tell you, I hosted a conclave meeting this past weekend. Can you all hear me? Okay? Okay. And you know, one of the CEOs was in that meeting, and maybe 35 of us, maybe 30 in that meeting and total has a, call it a visual marketing company, and has now implemented Gen AI in the development of products that they’re selling to their customers, it’s about 80% consumer 20% on the enterprise. He said that he is now utilizing this for all of his marketing efforts and has reduced the size of his company and people from 350 people down to 32. And it has not changed his growth rate of the company, which is still over 50% year on year. Okay, that’s the implications of utilizing, you know, what I’ll call this generation of tools today in a marketing environment for an entrepreneurial company.
One of the elements that we all have to think about, of course, as your companies grow, is compliance. And Amy, let’s talk a little bit about what you’re doing. Well first, describe COMPLY’s side and what you’re doing and how you’re looking to implement Gen AI solutions across what is one of the most critical in this environment. Heavily rely or heavily, you know, compliance is increasing because of our economy. But anyway, but just if you would, sorry, this morning is early.
Amy Kadomatsu
Just take a little bit more coffee.
Robert Smith
Yeah, only had nine cups, actually, but if you wouldn’t mind just talking a bit about compliance, like what’s actually occurring in our marketplace, that is increasing the demand for the product and what you’re doing in leveraging Gen AI.
Amy Kadomatsu
Fantastic. And again, thank you for inviting me to the stage. And thank you for having me here. So COMPLY provides compliance technologies to financial services companies in a nutshell. So we provide technology, we provide services and solutions across the Financial Services marketplace for 7,000 clients globally. And so whether they are large multinational organizations, to small SMB wealth providers, you’ve got a wide variety of organizations who all have compliance needs, and we service them all, and different and sundry ways to provide education, you provide the kind of regulation which is happening, which you can read in Bloomberg, or you can read in The Wall Street Journal, you can see every single day. The SEC, FINRA, et cetera, et cetera, is really coming down on all of the financial services organizations in different ways. The amount of regulation is just increasing. And marketing in particular, is one of the ways and communications are two of the ways in which it’s becoming very, very complex.
And so it’s no surprise that those are two areas that are highly of concern to many of our clients today. And so we look at AI and, and we’ve done lots of surveys, because we talk to our clients all the time, about how they are thinking about using AI in their daily work. And what’s so interesting is that their ways in which they’re using AI or are worried about how they’re using AI within their organizations, and how they’re coming to us, so I’ll talk about it in a couple of different ways. One is “how are our clients using it?” and “how are they asking us to help them?”
One of the ways is really in the context of marketing. That’s the place where I think a lot of our clients are using it the most. Right? So how are they creating marketing materials and how are they making their marketing better, faster, cheaper, to your point. I’ll have them come to you. And then number two is then how do they contain AI within their organizations, governance within their organizations, and how do they contain what they’re doing within their organizations, because the policies are so important. Number two within our organization, governance, internal, external, so how do we then think about the governance within our organization, we have a lot of very important data within our organization, huge troves of data of our clients, that’s super important when you think about financial services organizations, and the amount of data that we contain, and the kind of care that we have to take with that data and the expectation of the care of that data, it’s really important that we cannot allow, you know, the public release of that data, and so I think that when we think about how to allow our employees to then use AI, it’s really important for us to think about governance first. And so we spent the most amount of time there.
Robert Smith
I think that’s a good thing, Amy to kind of double click on a bit, you know, COMPLY has, you know, critical data from literally tens of thousands of customers and companies. How did you from a policy perspective look to implement, I’ll call it the walls around this very valuable garden?
Amy Kadomatsu
Yeah. So I mean, bringing in people from all around the organization, including, obviously, technology, legal, we have dozens of people within the organization who – whether it’s our CSO or our CTO, our General Counsel – but not just those people from all around the organization to bring together our AI Council, to then create the wall around this and then to determine: what are the tools that we’re going to put into place to create the ultimate policy? I mean, that I think was the initial step to then determine what are the things and tools that we would allow the organization to use? That had to be the first step in the process to then take that forward? And that took a little bit longer than probably people would have wanted, ultimately.
Robert Smith
But you have to do it right on the front end
Amy Kadomatsu
Yes. Yeah. Unfortunately, yeah.
Robert Smith
I mean, you all know, there’s very little regulatory policy that’s written today around utilization of Gen AI. But I will guarantee you it will come and it will come fast and furious once our bodies in DC are fully “educated and informed”. I say that in quotes, as to what to do.
Amy Kadomatsu
But I think that what we see then is a huge amount of opportunity, especially within that middle layer, especially for our own employees to be able to work faster, to think about how to utilize technology for their own benefit, so that we can have efficiency within our own organization. I think we often point to “how can we produce products for our clients?” But I think, really the benefit, and I don’t know, Cory, if this is what you see, too, is how is it that we do our own business faster, better, leaner, better? And that’s where we’ll see the biggest bang for our buck today, for sure.
Robert Smith
Good. So Shannon is one of our secret weapons at Vista. And you’ll hear why in a few minutes. But I think one of the things, Shannon, if you wouldn’t mind, talk a little bit about how you are leading efforts within this to not only understand where Gen AI is across our portfolio companies, but how we’re going to utilize it internally. And what you believe to be the efficacy and opportunity of utilizing in our underwriting process.
Shannon Bracken
Yeah, so you know, the first as this technology was evolving, and it’s, you know, AI has been around for a very long time, Vista has been engaging with AI, our portfolio companies have been engaging with AI for a very long time, the evolution of these private and open source models poured an incredible amount of jet fuel on that movement very, very quickly. And so, as an organization, the first thing that we did, just from a risk management perspective, was focus on our portfolio companies. So where is their risk, where’s their opportunity? We looked at every single company and effectively sort of charted them. Now, the reality is where there’s the most opportunity, there’s generally the most risk and so understanding where our companies were and their maturity curve to innovate and act on this, this technology was an important first step.
So once we sort of understood that, you know, the next step was sort of twofold. One was how do we incorporate this technology into the value that our companies are delivering to their customers? So that’s how you stay in front of the innovation curve. That’s how you ensure that from a disruption perspective, you are the disrupter and not the disrupted. So that’s been very important, especially for businesses, candidly, in the front office space that are sort of more sales and marketing focused, we’re seeing a lot of disruption there. Call centers, a lot of disruption, there are some industries that are far more insulated, at least in the medium term.
The second pillar of that was, how do we use this to drive efficiency for our organizations and allow them not just within marketing organizations, but across the whole organization to do, you know, not necessarily more with less, but more with the same. And so a big push there, one of the places we went, immediately was Co-Pilot for our developers. And so, you know, I think the general perspective that we are taking is commercially viable, or commercially available products allow you to make progress really quickly, may not be the pieces that unlock the most amount of productivity, those may take time and more investment and more resources. But there’s a lot of things available that you can sort of implement quickly, that already have secure the right levels of security baked into them to actually make progress really quickly. So you know, our entire portfolio adopted Co-Pilot, really within months, we were able to measure and see the impact of that very, very quickly, which then allows our teams to be, you know, more innovative, or hopefully as innovative as they can be relative to their competitive set. And so that’s, that’s really, you know, the focus on the portfolio. And that’s a cross functional effort at this, that we have folks from legal compliance, our value creation team, our investment team, technologists, outside folks that we’re bringing in as outside experts, because everyone’s learning this sort of thing in real time.
And I think in those moments, it’s incredibly important to have collaborative efforts. And then at the same time, once we sort of had our arms around our portfolio, which is our, you know, crown jewel of Vista, we then looked internally and said, “Okay, well, how can we drink our own medicine here and actually adopt and enable ourselves in the same way that we’ve been engaging with our portfolio about how they should be enabling and adopting the solution.” And so they, you know, I’d say, there’s a few components of that.
One is our underwriting. So how should this change how we identify risks and opportunities and new potential acquisition opportunities, and that comes in the form of, you know, certain technology businesses that we probably just won’t touch right now. So there’s things like web scraping that feels like it’s getting commoditized in this new environment. But then there’s also companies where we feel like there’s the opportunity to unlock a new and really interesting value set. And that really, from our perspective, hinges on the data that they have available. And that’s not just data in the form that maybe Amy was referencing around, you know, your customers and where they have their brokerage accounts, but it’s also data in terms of the activities that people are doing within your platform, and actually being able to capture that to deliver value back. And so there’s some interesting companies that we’re evaluating where we think we can actually influence the growth curve, because there’s an opportunity to deliver more value to their customers, and then capture more of that, from a top line perspective. So that’s really our underwriting and you know, it’s incorporated into our Investment Committee discussions. It’s very top of mind for folks at all levels of the firm. And then there’s just the productivity gains. So how can we adopt this technology so that, you know, I can do my job more efficiently that the analysts and associates who work 120 hours a week can do their jobs more efficiently? Or maybe they can get a little bit more sleep.
Robert Smith
120? So you got half duty now or one?
Shannon Bracken
And again…
Robert Smith
Make a note to self.
Shannon Bracken
That’s still – I would echo what I said earlier around the sort of crawl, walk, run approach. And so, you know, when we’re dealing with public data – so we look at a lot of public companies, I read a lot of earnings transcripts, I read a lot of really boring 10Ks, that’s publicly available information. We’re going to treat that and experiment with that very differently than the private information that we have access to or some of the proprietary knowledge that Vista has accumulated. That’s part of our special sauce, over 25 years of investing. And so we’re trying to approach it where we want to get this technology in the hands of folks as quickly as possible and drives the most amount of productivity gains, but we want to do it in a way that’s thoughtful around the actual data that you’re working with and the outcomes you’re trying to drive.
Robert Smith
One of the things we’ve been talking about here in this room for I think over seven years, which is why this is set up, is the importance of diversity. And the reason is so we can infuse in everything we do an aperture of understanding that you only get through diversity. I think you’re seeing it exhibited, of course, from Shannon, Amy and Cory in the way they approach our business.
But I think it would be important – so I don’t want to just focus on that, what I want to focus on is why we do what we do, which is invest in enterprise software and why this aperture is important. And Cory, I’ll turn to you and talk about how you have engaged your teams in delivering an aperture of thought, which is diverse in many respects, which is forward leaning in many respects, and how do you actually do that from a recruiting perspective, development respective. So you, you hear it is part of the fabric and not just an instance that we do from time to time episodically, so maybe if we can start there?
Cory Munchbach
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I particularly benefited from in hindsight is that the co-founders of our company were Dutch. And so they moved to the US to Boston to found Blueconic in 2014. And so from the very beginning, we had, I was employee 17, we had half American, half Dutch employees. And it was challenging, in a lot of ways, and the primary way was like workstyles, and communications. I’ve learned to love Dutch direct.
Robert Smith
Anyone but Max Verstaapen.
Cory Munchbach
No we don’t like that guy, but that’s a different conversation, team Louis all the way. Which is, you know, again, that’s a form of inclusivity, we can support each other’s F1 drivers, look at us go. And so that figuring out communication, and so our founder, former CEO, who I took over from a year ago, we started with the two of us on “what is Blueconic going to look like, culturally as an organization? “We cannot just be a Dutch company, and another half of it as an American company. And we figure that out. What that has lent itself to over the years is being incredibly thoughtful about what it means to be part of the Blue Crew versus to be a pocket within that. And so one of the most important things about that is creating this sort of culture of belonging within the organization.
And so, for us, diversity really did start at more of a multicultural level. Now, in our office in the Netherlands, more than 45% of the folks there are non native Dutch speakers. Obviously, in the US, we also have a huge amount of diversity. And so being able to start somewhere was really important. And then that has led to, when we talk about our six core corporate values, and what that looks like, here, a lot of that has to do with cultural awareness, what your background is in how you communicate, right? And that can be across cultures. Aaron Meyers’ book, the Culture Map, is a big kind of Bible for us. And I think if you get good at communicating with a lot of different people, you open up this concept of having a broad perspective, different thoughts, being able to support different perspectives and lenses on things in a really healthy, constructive way.
And that has turned into a superpower of ours that started with me being like, “I kinda hate working here. You people are mean like, why doesn’t anyone give positive feedback? Wha that heck man?” Which literally was how it started. You can ask the guys, it was very uncomfortable. But being super intentional is really what it comes down to. We had those conversations. Bart and I, the last thing I’ll say about it was we had a lot of very constructive conflict over the years, sort of the two of us, the management team as well, the most essential piece to being able to have that productive conflict was that we always knew that the other person was taking the perspective of, I think this is what is best for this business. So it was not personal, and it got emotional, it got personal. But the seed of why we were having the argument was a disagreement about the best thing for the company. And if we could start from there, that is the place that we can kind of build from, and that has turned into something that works incredibly well for us. Our customers, obviously, we look like our customers, which is incredibly important. Again, I talked about marketing, largely female dominated, enterprise software, largely not, so that is a big competitive differentiator for us as well. So those are some of the ways that we’ve thought about it.
In recruiting I will tell you during the great recession or resignation or whatever we were calling it, we got a lot of pressure of like, you gotta price all the influencers on LinkedIn, you know. “If you can’t hire someone in a week, you know, you’re wrong.” And I’m like, “No, you’re wrong”. I haven’t gotten married after meeting someone in a week, and I’m not gonna hire someone after meeting you in a week. And so staying, I call it urgent but patient. Like, yes, we need the role filled, we need the role filled by the right person who understands why they’re coming here. And so that is an area where we’ve stuck to our guns, even when it’s been uncomfortable, or we’ve lost probably good candidates. It’s worth it for being and ensuring that the durability of the culture and what makes us special persists. Regardless of if we move people in and out.
Robert Smith
That’s a great leadership tenant, you just, you know, put a few nuggets out there. Hopefully, y’all wrote those down. If not, we’ll go to the tape. And Amy, maybe talk a little bit about how you are super intentional in driving your organization forward, embracing diversity in your workforce and embracing it as you involve, you know, Gen AI into the fabric of what is now COMPLY’s mission.
Amy Kadomatsu
One hundred percent. And I guess I’ll start with stats, right, because I think that the stats speak for themselves. We have women and people of color at every level of leadership. 50% of the senior leadership are women, 50% of the company are women. Those are the stats. How do you get there?
Robert Smith
Fifty percent of the world are women, huh?
Amy Kadomatsu
Oh, my God.
Robert Smith
How about that?
Amy Kadomatsu
You know, and we’re a financial services reg tech company, how does that happen? Well, it doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s not just a fluke. It happens because it’s the fabric of the organization. But I think that there were a couple of things that we did intentionally. So one is that we have a value, which is called respect for flexibility, we made a choice in the context of COVID. And let me tell you, I was not a work from home person back in the day. People I mean, I’ve got some people from the office here today, and my husband is here, I was not a work from home person. I did not know how to work from home, I did not have a desk at home that I could work. It was like I was in the office all the time. But everybody figured out how to work from home. And then I was a “not work from the office” person. And when I realized that I kind of – this flexibility for people and I understood from my team and we continued to understand from the team how they were working, one of the things that we realized was that this respect for flexibility was super important to the team. And we incorporated that into our values.
What that also meant, though, I think, really long term was that that has allowed us to attract people to the organization, and particularly women, as an onramp to the organization because it was a signal that we could allow people to have flexibility within their lives, that it might not be the same kind of financial services organization that they were afraid of. Right? And we’re not the same kind of organization in spite of the fact that we are in reg tech, because there’s a connotation, there’s a fear of reg tech financial services. And because you read that in the Wall Street Journal, you read that on Bloomberg, and so I think that has allowed us to hire people. That’s number one.
I don’t know, I didn’t do the survey of our employees. But the numbers speak for themselves. Number two, I did something that we learned from Vista, we created a HPEL program. It’s for all of you who don’t know what a HPEL program is, we’ll tell you all about it. But basically, we created an on ramp program, through our customer support organization, which was – we will hire you, you don’t need to know all the things about financial services. You don’t need to know all the things about compliance because guess what, nobody knows all the things about compliance – we know already!
So we’re going to teach you and by the way, we have on-ramped people from so many different parts of and backgrounds, people who have passed the CCAT, which is an assessment where, basically, you’ve got skills, you’ve got talent and knowledge. But people who have been teachers, people who’ve been park rangers, people from all walks of life who have been incredibly talented, but we will give you the training. If you have the drive, you have the motivation, you want to come on board, we’ll help you come on board to the organization. And they’ve become incredibly successful. They’ve had long term jobs with COMPLY site, not just in customer support, by the way, now they’re in customer success. They’re in marketing, they are in product, they’re in technology. They’re there all over the organization. And it’s just been an amazing success story. For us, and I’m just so proud of everywhere that they’ve got within our organization and to our clients. By the way, our clients have been so happy with that, they may try to steal them. You know, I kind of have to be like, “Okay, you can take them, I guess, like, we’ll try to help them.”
Robert Smith
First you have to sign a long-term contract.
Amy Kadomatsu
Yeah, exactly.
Shannon Bracken
Price increases.
Amy Kadomatsu
Yes. Three in a row, three.
Robert Smith
Got it. You got it. Right. Amy, just walked through a couple of, again, important aspects of being intentional about building culture in the organization that results in a high performing organization that is also diverse, right? So, I think we have to continue to evolve our thinking around “how do you just build it from the ground up, and ensure that we are intentional about what our outcomes are going to be?” And, typically, the performance is what you’re targeting. And ultimately, you end up with a highly diverse organization. You know, I’ll hit one point, then I’ll turn it to Shannon to talk about how we do our development and our training across our talent pyramids.
Just to give you a sense, Amy talked about HPEL hires – high performance entry level. Just to give you an example, last year, 2023, across the Vista companies there were about 87 companies as we sit here today, until Shannon gets one done next week, but we had 2.4 million people apply for jobs at those companies. Last year, we tested 489,000, to find a hiring pool of 60,000, in which we hired 15,000 people. This is ongoing all the time, from all walks of life, 180 geographies, countries. And that is an important part of casting a wide net, I will guarantee very few of them look like what you expect to work at a software company.
But what we’re able to do is find these talented, motivated people, and then identify that they will be successful in our businesses. And then from there, we put them into programs that actually accelerate their development. So maybe Shannon, talk a little bit about what you’re doing at the portfolio companies. And then how you’re thinking about that in terms of driving that into how we’re going to adopt AI in that thinking in our AI or AI fabric.
Shannon Bracken
Yeah, I think on the building of diversity, at least in the financial services industry, you see a lot of stats around the hiring classes. So the percentage of women, the percentage of people of color, the percentage of underrepresented minorities, that was necessary, because unfortunately, the organizations were so far behind where they should be, and still are, from a diversity perspective. But to me, that’s like 5% of what matters, because if you are hiring diverse classes, but you are not retaining and training and mentoring those people, it’s not only not good for those people, it’s not good for your organization. And so, so much of the focus to me goes on to 5% of the problem.
I think, you know, candidly, what attracted me to Vista 10 years ago was that it felt like, you know, 95% of the focus was actually on what happens once you get here. And I felt the intentionality in every part of my interview process, around how they develop talent, or how we develop talent, at the time it was they now it’s we, and really cultivate that talent.
And it’s everything from who we put first year analysts and associates with in their office and who we pair them with from a mentorship perspective, which by, the way, is not all women should be mentored by women. There’s so much more complexity to how you think about developing that skill set, setting expectations, performance, managing, driving accountability, and ultimately creating a culture where everyone feels like they can be successful. And part of that is you need to be able to look up and see a lot of different types of people finding success, and that’s again, it’s not just, oh, that there’s another woman I can be successful too.
It’s, you know, there’s a man who puts his family first and is very open about that, like there are tons of different pockets of being able to look up and say, okay, I see these patterns, I think I can be there too. And, you know, to Robert’s credit, it’s been a part of the firm since day one. And you see that and you know, we have the only female led, I guess both of you work with Renee and Rachel, the only female led technology investing strategy in our Endeavor fund. And you don’t get there overnight. You really have to be intentional about that.
Robert Smith
I think we’re gonna go to questions. So if you can just raise your hands? And I’ll try to try to answer in the order that I see them raised. But we have one in the front as we get you a mic. I think it’d be good. I think if you can maybe Cory start with you just quickly, things you wish you would have known?
Cory Munchbach
Oh, geez, yeah. Quickly?
Robert Smith
You know, graduating school, graduating business school, etc, that you wish someone would have told you, you know, then?
Cory Munchbach
We don’t have time to do that quickly. So I’m going to pick – I didn’t go to business school, I was a political science major, who is now CEO of a tech company, and there’s no linear path to that story. So I’ll save that for one further time. I think the thing that I wish someone had told me is that you spend a lot of time initially kind of thinking about yourself, and how you move up the ladder and put yourself in the right rooms, and all of that, which is important. But why you are wanting to be in the room is actually more important. And what I mean by that is, when I had sort of the realization that my being in the room, I was the first woman at my company, I was the only woman for a very long time. And unfortunately, probably for many of you, if you’re going to trailblaze on some of this, you’re going to have to get comfortable with being the only of something if that’s the kind of the crusading you want to do.
The thing I wish someone had told me is how much infinitely more gratifying it is to represent other people in the room than it is to represent yourself. And I spent a lot of time thinking I needed to be in the room when I made the mindset shift of like, when I get to leave this room and it opened it up so other people came in, that is so much more fun, entertaining, interesting, valuable. And I wish I’d learned that sooner.
Robert Smith
Great. Same question, Amy.
Amy Kadomatsu
So I might not answer your question, I’m going to answer a slightly different question because I’m a rule breaker. Which is to say, when I look back at the pivot I made, I did investment banking after undergrad and then I went to business school, it was a very kind of traditional path. But the pivot that I made right after undergrad was to go into a startup. And I took a huge risk, I actually made less after business school than I did coming into business school, going into startup and going into an operating role. And I would tell you that that pivot changed the trajectory of my life and has led me to this path.
And it was a meandering path that led me to become a CPO, a Chief Product Officer, a COO, a Chief Operating Officer, a President, and ultimately a CEO. I would say that risk, that first big risk, that first big step, then allowed me to take the next big risk and be less fearful of the next big risk. And then the next big risk. And if you are going to be the CEO, you have to be willing to take big risks, because you have to make big decisions. And so take those big risks when there aren’t that many other things that are relying on you. Because when you have a lot of mortgages and children and other kinds of things that maybe are relying on you and are on your shoulders, it’s harder to take those risks, I know. So take the risks, start to take those risks early.
Robert Smith
Great. Love it. Take the risk. Shannon, any thoughts, words of advice for students in the audience?
Shannon Bracken
And I’m gonna go back to the “you’re in the room” thing because I liked it. You know, I think when I started my career, I was very focused on, you know, I’m going to outwork everybody, I’m going to know more things than everybody so that when I’m in the room, I can be the smartest person in the room and people have to take me seriously. And I think what I have learned is that the goal is not to be the smartest person in the room. The goal is to surround yourself with people who are much smarter than you. And I think having a beginner’s mindset on how you approach all things. Once I realized that you open yourself up to so much more learning and growth and evolution and inclusiveness in terms of the ideas that you are incorporating into how you think about things. And it was, you know, we have a women’s conference called Miracle. And I remember the moment that I had that “aha” moment. And probably there were a lot of mentors in my life trying to, you know, bang that into me prior to that “aha” moment. And it just clicked at that point. But it’s been really important, not just for, I think, my own growth, but just my mindset that I bring to problems and, and the environment I crave for the team around me.
Robert Smith
My challenge is finding people who wish he isn’t the smartest one in the room. So we had a question here.
Attendee #1
About being in the Netherlands and in the United States. So how did you handle the language barrier? Because they could be?
Robert Smith
I think you mean this question for Cory.
Attendee #1
Sorry.
Cory Munchbach
I thought you meant her, I thought she knew Dutch. I was gonna be really excited.
Amy Kadomatsu
Okay, we got it. Don’t worry, just ask the question.
Attendee #1
So the question I have is, we have a team in the United States and in India. The biggest challenge, we lost an employee who was, when we started AI in the team, we lost him because of his language barrier. And I am in touch with him more as a friend. And he’s going to go work for Microsoft Labs now. And I’m thinking, what could I have done better? Because in India, I have always grown up in urban areas, but there are rural areas where people do not speak English. So even now, I have employees in my team, when I speak to them in their local language, I can see how smart they are. But all the other colleagues at work don’t see that. And I’m like, oh, my God, this guy is going to leave because they don’t see the potential that I see.
Cory Munchbach
Yeah.
Robert Smith
And actually, why don’t we change and you also address this piece of this in terms of how we do it, because you get you run a multicultural platform?
Attendee #1
How do you guys do the language barrier, and make sure the people see the potential and help them be part of your team? When the two people cannot speak the same language? How do you do that?
Robert Smith
Yeah, Cory.
Cory Munchbach
So I think, candidly, that is also you need to have a certain framework that like, for us as a small company, we standardized on English, like we just had to say your English has to be good enough to be able to interact, whether it’s with Dutch folks, American folks, British, whatever it might be. In a bigger organization, you might be able to have support. That’s a good example of Amy’s organization is much bigger and can do maybe more curriculum development than we could when we were early. But I think one of the things that we’ve been super intentional about is effectively thinking about that from the standpoint of a learning style.
So you may be also a visual learner, you may be dyslexic, you may have all kinds of other things that make it harder to process language out loud. How do we support that, whether it is making sure there’s written transcripts documentation. For my native American, native English speakers, it is slowing down, and being really diligent with those folks to say, you have people who are processing the information, and they are processing it, translating it, so you are giving them two cognitive challenges that I might not have.
So that is really just training for managers and training for presenters. How do we get, maybe it’s a pre read for those things. So it’s a lot of tactics. But I will also say that it does need to be probably a minimum level of ability to engage on some of that. But yeah, we’ve been super thoughtful, I totally get it if we need to have an all hands where folks are getting key points ahead of time, for example. So they’ve already been kind of primed for the message. That’s good for everybody for the record, but it’s definitely good if English is your second language, or a third language, or whatever the case might be. So tactically, that’s how we’ve tried to address it.
Shannon Bracken
Yeah. And I can talk a little bit about our Center of Excellence strategy that we have at Vista. So one of the things that we do at nearly every company that we work with is help them open up centers of excellence. And oftentimes when we have those initial conversations, the feedback is well, you know, this other company did an offshoring strategy and it didn’t work. And it’s like, well, we’re not talking about an offshoring strategy. We’re talking about a center of excellence strategy, and they’re very different.
And the difference is we approach – if you’re going to open an office in India, as an example– where we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of folks. You have to treat it as an extension of HQ. And there’s a lot that goes into that. It’s the job of the hiring manager to manage that office and having real leadership in place, it’s making sure that your CEO and other leaders are spending real amounts of time there. It’s building the development and career pathing infrastructure there, not just, you know, “Hey, you’re here to do this job in this box and then once you’ve outgrown that, you’re gonna have to go somewhere else,” which I think a lot of other offshoring strategies take that mindset. I mean, even small things like, you’re not just going to do the boring code, you’re not just going to do tech debt, you’re going to work on innovation, you’re going to be sharing in the fabric of being part of the strategy that the organization is driving. And, you know, I think honestly one of the most impactful things is getting people to spend time together, it really does make a difference when you can fully understand the cultural perspective that somebody is bringing, why they are who they are, why they may, you know, be more quiet or more loud, or whatever it might be. But there’s a ton of nuance to it.
Robert Smith
Karen, we got a question over here.
Attendee #2
Hi, there. Great to see you all. Question about Gen AI and getting companies to embrace it a bit more. And to overcome some of the obstacles that I think are amplified in the media. I was just working on a huge deal with a major retailer who had created a Gen AI Council, which I think a lot of companies are doing a COE, you know, a way to evaluate the Gen AI opportunity across a lot of different product areas. But this particular company, the council sort of came apart as the result of a reorg. And now there’s a lot of reluctance to embrace the technology. And I imagine that happens across other companies. So I wanted to know how you guys are dealing with that.
Amy Kadomatsu
And so is the question, how to put back together the AI Council or…?
Attendee #2
I guess it’s more coaching companies to take risks when it comes to Gen AI.
Shannon Bracken
Because we get to work with 87 companies, you know, first I mentioned Co-Pilot as an example. You know, it’s becoming sort of a household name, at least within technology in the world that I live in. But there were still many companies that had tremendous amounts of pushback around adopting it. And so we had companies that had adopted it, and they hadn’t, we didn’t even know it, they were like in the pilot program. And then we had, somewhere, it was a multi-week, multi-month conversation around the adoption, the approach we’ve taken in many cases is to start small. We started Co-Pilot with five developers. You’re not comfortable with ten, let’s start with five. Not comfortable with five? Let’s start with one. And that has actually, and, you know, again, we have a lot of resources around legal and compliance. And so we can actually, it’s probably not too similar to how you all train your sales, right? Of kind of identifying what is the point of concern, because there’s, you know, there’s some concern that’s just like hesitant to change, like, you know, I don’t want to do this, what if one day this cost me my job? That’s a real, that’s a real emotional reaction a lot of people are having to AI.
And so my advice would be start small and start where the reputation of whatever it is that you’re embedding is relatively proven, and obviously, nothing is super proven right now, but relatively proven. Microsoft, for example. Salesforce, they all have, you know, AI related tools to kind of get people over the hump.
Amy Kadomatsu
Right, I do think that it’s kind of to pinpoint an area of pain. So I think in the GitHub/Co-Pilot example, when you talk to developers, and you then pitch the idea in our case, it was like, “Hey, it can write your test cases for you.” Developers really like “Sign me up! I don’t like that,” you know. So you have to think about: “What’s the pitch,” right? “What’s the pain point and what’s the pitch?” How do you think about the ROI to the end constituent and how do you then create the, you know, POC that’s going to be appropriate for the organization in order to then get something out the door? But that’s really the question ultimately, and I think starting small and then trying to build on that success.
Shannon Bracken
By the way, I think that this movement specifically, there are gonna be some pockets we’re having, being the second mover is actually the right move for folks. There’s some pockets where first mover, let’s go, let’s move. There are some pockets where it may make sense to kind of watch and see, you know, to have a little bit of a different risk appetite. Maybe you’re a smaller organization, you have less resources to bear than then other organizations in terms of, you know, thinking through some of these problems or adoption. And I guarantee, you know, 2.0 versions of all these are gonna be a lot better than 1.0, and probably don’t end up losing a lot of time. But it’s balancing that bias to action with, you know, sort of watching and learning.
Robert Smith
Yeah, I would say, this is one that you can probably, and I’ll say wait in some respect for the second wave, but do not stick your head in the sand and ignore that the wave is coming. Because this will be a he or she who gets there first will be the only who gets there, in certain industries. And that is a true dynamic that you need to be aware of. Green suit, black dress, front row Roscoe. Okay.
Attendee #3
Good morning, so the question, just regular, I guess, as you’re adopting AI, how are you thinking about managing risks and I guess just protecting your downside as you’re putting all this sensitive company information. And just for background , my name is Owen Odigie. I’m a CBS alum of ‘22 and CBLT alum of ‘23.
Robert Smith
Thank you. Great. You pass the mic, go ahead.
Cory Munchbach
So I will say we are the category of technology, right, as a customer data platform. So all of our customers are putting their consumers’ data into Blueconic. So it is not even a discussion that that data goes into any models at this time, full stop and that kind of conversation. So for us, we’re thinking about the places where, Shannon mentioned earlier, sort of the assessment of like disruption for marketing, it’s the front end stuff on the data side. And so protecting that as a second wave kind of conversation, which, by the way, The Coming Wave book is excellent on this topic, as a side note. So that data is not being touched. So we’re focusing on some of that front end type of opportunity, that kind of more content and those types of marketing. And then the disproportionate impact for us right now is still in the company figuring out the operational efficiencies for ourselves. Because, you know, we have enough customers having a hard time figuring out how they navigate GDPR and CCPA. And all of these kinds of other guidelines and regulations.
The introduction of this for us is not “there’s no upside at this time.” But as we look about for the product going forward, it’s then incorporating Gen AI into our own product so that we have control over that, whereas there is no world in which that data goes out of there. And so that’s also kind of figuring out in your own organization, what are the types of data that you are dealing with? And that’s where coming back to what Amy said before, governance and change management, right? Take Gen AI out of this, and it’s a really boring old school leadership question around governance, change management outcomes that you seek and needing to make sure you’ve got that infrastructure in place for something frothy, like Gen AI, or something way less so.
Robert Smith
Black dress. I’ve got a two-minute warnings.
Farrah
Okay. Hi, I’m Farrah. I’m a CBS alum class of 2011. I have my classmates here with me as well. I actually ran strategy at AWS. And so very bathed and you know, deep into the era of AI revolution. Just wanted to test a thesis with this group here. Our thesis is that, you know, we focus on the computing capability, like the chips, etc. And large language models, which we’ve talked about here a little bit, because, you know, the models tend to be very different, wherever they are. And our thesis is, at the end of the day, there’s really only going to be five to ten models that work pretty much for everyone. And then we go on to the applications, for example, Chat GPT, Co-Pilot, etc. As you’re thinking about your portfolio companies and your individual businesses, where do you think is the highest exponential value in this sort of value chain? Because we think of it as a value chain proposition rather than creating the next ChatGPT or the next, you know, Nvidia?
Robert Smith
Yeah, I’ll hit that quickly. From our perspective, I think your presupposition is correct, there will likely be a dozen or so of these LLMs that will prove effective and that’s enough and so they’re gonna see a bunch grow and die and then a few that proliferate in the consumer business in the enterprise segment. You know, we have these walled gardens. And so I talked with Andy and your teams about, okay, how are we going to utilize these walled gardens that we have now 87 going to 200 of them with unique customer information, data, data that we created as this work has gone through our workflow and create some form of model. And it may not be a large language model, you may not need that, in some cases, it’s a small language model because of the defined nature of this garden, and use that to now create products and solutions and services that serve that unique product set, that unique customer base.
And we think that’s going to be, ultimately, what is the long term economic rent capture for the businesses that we buy, selling to their customers. We end up being a wholesaler, if you think about it, the AWS is, you know, Karen from with Google, who’s sitting right there, to your competitors to your right. You’ve got Oracle coming from the back end, you now have three or four hyper scalars that are going to emerge that are sovereign in nature, who were looking to provide that same sort of compute and GPU capacity into the theaters.
So that all is going to go through that series of waves, you’re gonna see the hardware vendors capture a bunch, and then we’re gonna say, guess what, we only need ASICs to do the kind of stuff that we need. And that’s going to create a whole other dynamic. And that is the fun of our world and the fun of the business we get to be in, but your presupposition is correct. But ultimately, in the enterprise world, there will be definitions around who the customer set is, where that data resides, who has the sovereignty and the meaning of that data and what model is actually being applied across that data set. Roscoe, you had a question?
Attendee #4
I am class of ‘94.
Robert Smith
Greatest class in the history of CBS. But anyway, go ahead.
Attendee #4
Thanks, man. So Robert, something you said earlier, really, really resonated here. So here’s my question for the panel: Robert, you said regulation of Gen AI is coming like it or not, so be ready. I am curious about two things. One is, I hope that social media is not a model for how we’re going to regulate Gen AI for some obvious reasons. It places, to me the Gen AI places certain individuals and communities at very heightened risk.
There’s some obvious communities that I think I’m referring to. And it strikes me that your approach, the approach of every person on the panel here toward an intentional culture has the potential to help us create a framework for this regulation. And so I’m curious about what you think that framework might look like and can you at Vista and your related parties, can you help us create a framework that will work for us all?
Robert Smith
Thoughts, commentary?
Cory Munchbach
It’s a great question. I mean, I think this is the tension. We talked, I think the panel title has something about leadership in it. Like this for me, it is a question of leadership in a very real way, and balancing growth and the sort of top line, we need to make a profit and be a core business and all this sort of standard with maybe there are trade offs to that. Maybe we need to find a couple of percentage points of growth that are instead allocated toward moving slower or more thoughtfully. And I think that part of the framework is where are the trade offs? And I couldn’t share your sentiment more that we have a reckoning, kind of ironically. I think right now with the evidence of what happens when we don’t take a thoughtful internally or externally regulated approach and trying to deal with the consequences when it’s far too late, at the same time, as we are seemingly poised to make exactly the same mistake faster with generative AI. And so on the one hand, that’s a little depressing. On the other, the fact that we have the so obvious, big opportunity to compare and contrast, let’s not do this, again, could serve as a really effective forcing mechanism to do that, because we know what it looks like when we don’t, but it is a leadership question for sure.
Amy Kadomatsu
Yeah, I think, you know, because our client base is within the financial services landscape, and the monitoring that we do of our, of our clients and their employees. I think that there is an opportunity for us to think about how to use our leadership within this to think about even the AI tools within it to help lead the way. But I think that that will also be part of that next generation of thinking about when you piece together bad actors within organizations, as they do exist. I think that the vast majority of people within organizations are good actors, and we have good intent. But we’re also, I think, always looking out to try to figure out who the bad apples and the bad actors are. And that’s what we’ll always try to help to look out for.
Shannon Bracken
I think as consumers, consumer level, but also consumers of this technology as business consumers alike, you can, you can and should play a big role in this. So for example, every company that is related to AI should have a code of ethics or a code of conduct that is made available to the people that use that product. And it should tell you how, what data they use, how they approach it, their philosophies around it. And if they don’t have it, you shouldn’t, don’t engage with them, demand it. Because I think that is part of what will drive this forward. And I think we’ve said the word intention, intentionality a lot. I think that to me, that is the key word here, being intentional about it. And also understanding that it is going to evolve and change. And so it can’t just be something that gets put on a wall and then walked away from. I think it needs to be continuously revisited, from you know, a lot of the smart people that are thinking about this, and we didn’t talk at all today about the biases that have been identified within these technologies, right. Like that is a real problem with this technology. You have to have intentionality around understanding that and knowing how it impacts what you’re doing and the outcomes that you’re driving. Yeah.
Robert Smith
So you see why my job is so great. I get to work with such great senior executives in this complex, ever changing and dynamic world. So thank you all very much for being part of this.
Renee Lumley Hall
Wow, we could go on and on all morning. This was fantastic. Thank you so very much. Couple of takeaways here are a couple of things that I synthesized from this talk, lots of leadership lessons, but also technology lessons, right. Like this is the reason we’re here today. Do more with less but be prepared to do more with the same. Go big and go scary. Have a beginner’s mindset, and the regulators are coming. Thank you, Robert, Shannon, Amy and Cory. We’ll now take a quick break and the next session will begin shortly. So stay tuned. Thanks.
