Pre-Closing: How Founders Can Prevent Hiring Surprises and Secure Top Talent

We get it. You’d rather think about closing sales deals than think strategically about pre-qualifying or pre-closing leadership talent for your startup. It’s awkward and may even feel premature to have compensation conversations or address key motivators early on. Or maybe you’re avoiding it because you figure all that stuff will magically fall into place if the person is really invested in your mission and the problem you need to solve. But delaying these conversations often leads to heartbreak and makes it impossible to prevent hiring surprises, disrupting both your hiring process and the leader you are trying to recruit.

This was originally published in the Hooked newsletter on April 23, 2023

What’s going on?

This problem has been going on forever. But it’s not just a money problem. Sure, people decline an offer because of “money” all the time, but truth be told, it’s more complicated than comp alone. And, even knowing all these “hot buttons” or pre-qualifying compensation may still leave you empty-handed at the end of your process, given the competitive nature of the market. This just makes it even more important to get really good at figuring out what these things are as early as possible and then continuing to touch base and understand any candidate diversion from them along the path to offer close. It’s never too early to have this conversation. In fact, most recruiters will have it during the first call. The best recruiters will come away from the first call with a rough estimate of TTC (total target comp) and the top things standing in the leader’s way to reach offer acceptance.

Why does it matter?

As an early-stage founder, you don’t have the luxury of a recruiter. You also don’t have the luxury of time. Yet, taking the time to qualify the deeper-level motivations of potential leaders requires patience. Digging deep and gaining a clear, holistic picture of motivations is a must, as early as possible, because it plays a major role in your ability to close later. People are complex. Surprisingly, even they haven’t always taken the time to fully identify their own needs and objectives. Especially if they weren’t actively looking to begin with. Often you have to help candidates unearth these things through conversation. And, just as you can’t be satisfied with a surface-level interview response, the same holds true with motivators. It’s critical to take the time to understand the “career problem” or what someone is trying to solve for so you can help them validate that what they want can be found (or not) at your startup.

What do others think?

“Qualifying what matters most to your candidate upfront and assessing mutual fit of those criteria throughout the process, will minimize potential surprises and drive the desired outcome for both sides.” — Marcus Holm, CRO, Forter

What do we think?

There’s nothing more frustrating than getting down the path with a candidate only to realize there is massive misalignment in compensation or other key considerations of equal importance. To prevent hiring surprises, your most important goal is to ensure you get to the end of the process without gaps, misalignments, or impossible hurdles to overcome. Achieving this requires serious investigative work and pre-closing — not just once — but throughout the entire process. We’ve included several topics needing deeper validation in conversations early and often.

Take Action

  • Be transparent. Alignment begins with honest, open questions about the opportunity, the team, the state of the business, and a host of other things. Much of this is fed by the role spec and the employee value prop. This transparency is essential to prevent hiring surprises and ensure talent is opting in for the challenges they will face as they step into the role.
  • Negotiating compensation at the end of the process is so 2022. Discuss your compensation philosophy early. The new salary transparency laws can work in your favor, helping you prevent hiring surprises by setting clear expectations upfront. On the first call, provide narrow ranges and indicate where there is/isn’t wiggle room. If an external search firm is handling the first calls for you, then you should not be meeting any candidates who haven’t been pre-closed on your total cash and rewards package. Take the extra step to identify which aspect of total target compensation (and rewards) is most important and why. Listen. Often you must read between the lines or help people through a process of discovery. Resist punting this conversation when a candidate tells you, “Let’s talk about compensation later.” Qualify who else needs to buy in. Their life partner? Remember, other factors are usually at play, like being the breadwinner, bonus payouts, sign-on bonus clawbacks, equity vesting, etc.
  • Discuss equity. The equity story at an early-stage startup is one about building value. Framing ownership matters, especially in cases where liquid stock is a topic of consideration. If someone is excited to step away from quarterly cash in the bank for your value-building journey, be diligent in understanding why. Doing the math to frame what someone is walking away from in a year or over the next 4-year vesting cycle is a great way to show the tradeoff. The biggest key is to sell the vision and tap into someone’s innermost passion for builder/value creation.
  • Identify talent’s top motivators — the real ones (read more below). Many times, real motivators are camouflaged. Define terms. For example, “growth” to one candidate can mean the ability to quickly build out a team. But to another, growth could be defined as learning. Confirm what these things mean, why they are important, and what would happen if they were delayed months, a year, or even longer in reaching these goals. This level of understanding is critical to prevent hiring surprises and ensure the candidate’s goals align with the realities of your startup. We tend to operate in the best-case scenario when trying to court talent. Instead, operate in reality. Things don’t always happen as quickly as we’d like.
  • Keep your finger on the candidate’s pulse (and the influencers in their life) throughout the process. This will help you know if anything shifts or evolves. If this happens, work to re-establish alignment. Sometimes shifts are too big to overcome. In these cases, you may need to cut bait.
  • Throughout the process, leverage hot-button motivations strategically. One way to do this is to repeat these motivators during your conversations, reminding candidates about things they mentioned earlier and how they can achieve their goals at your startup. This also establishes trust because reiterating what they’ve shared validates you are listening.
  • More often than not, candidates are having conversations with multiple companies. Each of these conversations — especially the ones with founders or leaders who are really good at pre-qualifying and closing — will bring up other questions or thoughts. This is another reason to be intentional as you move through the process. Things can be in constant flux.

Pre-Offer Talk Tracks

You’ve reached a place where you have strong signals from the candidate that they are interested in the role and shared the compensation ranges at a high level. Pre-closing on potential objections at this stage helps prevent hiring surprises and ensures a smoother offer acceptance process.

  • If we put together a package that looks like X, what would keep you from accepting it?
    Then work through each potential objection: I’d have to speak with my significant other. Great, if they are supportive, are there any other reasons you wouldn’t accept?
  • I need to understand the valuation of the company.
    Great, let’s talk about that now. Given what I’ve just outlined, is there any reason this equity package would not be acceptable? Keep working through this until you get a positive outcome. It may take a few iterations and multiple conversations, so don’t expect to close them immediately. Speed is important, but allow the candidate space to percolate.
  • I need to talk to my current boss to see if there’s growth for me here.
    Great, let’s talk about that. What outcome are you looking for with your boss? Why don’t you have that convo now before we move forward?

And so on …

If a candidate insists on an offer letter before considering the questions above, that’s a red flag that they are shopping the offer internally or externally. Do not extend a formal offer under these conditions. The minute you extend a formal offer, you have given up control of the ball.

Extend a formal offer only after pre-closing on every single objection.

Onboarding starts before the offer is closed.

  • Always Be Closing (ABC) even after the close.
  • The no daylight rule: Don’t let one day go by without communication between the candidate offer and a successful start.
  • Many declines happen after the acceptance and before the start date (this is called fall out).

Events, Tools, Insights

Investment News —> Groundlight
Entrepreneur Community —> Leap!
Madrona Insights Newsletter —> Subscribe

Why Thoughtful Role Specs Are Key to Startup Hiring Success

As a founder, you are no stranger to navigating issues and solving problems. In fact, it’s what you do best. But when it comes to startup hiring, particularly for a new leadership role, the thought of sitting down and giving as much thought to a role spec as you would a product spec can sometimes feel unnecessary or like overkill at an early-stage startup. But why is that? You wouldn’t build a product without thoughtful consideration of the problem you are trying to solve. Why cut corners when building the right team?

This was originally published in the Hooked newsletter on April 16, 2023

What’s going on?

Startup hiring is hard. There is no silver bullet solution leading to a meaningful outcome when building a high-performing team. Literally, everything matters. But role specs sit in a class all their own. These “human product roadmaps” are often never fully realized in the most advantageous way. Many leaders tell themselves, “I’ll know it when I see it,” but will you actually? Recruiting by braille only circumvents the vital process required to fully understand why you are hiring in the first place and what the consequences would be if you didn’t (or, more commonly, if you hired the wrong person). These more profound and meaningful questions are the foundation for building out a role spec and aligning your early team so everyone agrees and stays in lockstep throughout the interview process. This, in turn, unlocks critical information for how you source, conduct talent outreach, and eventually communicate with the candidate as they assess your team, the problem, and how they can solve it — the magic of two-way fit.

Why does it matter?

Not convinced this matters? Consider the impact lack of role clarity can have during a 1:1 interview session in the absence of this. Those involved in the startup hiring process will fill in their own blanks and possibly undermine the goal of the process. Without even realizing it, everyone might be solving for different or competing things or speaking to a value prop that isn’t competitive or cohesive. When this happens, the outcome can be devastating. It can be the difference between finding talent that can accelerate your business, ensuring your startup hits quarterly goals, and having to extend your search for additional weeks or even months. Crafting a role spec for your startup is more than just compiling a list of qualifications and nice-to-haves. It’s a strategic roadmap, guiding you to consider every element necessary for finding the best leader. Taking shortcuts in this process causes friction within your team, slows the business, and produces underwhelming candidates. When you don’t do this important upfront work, the interview process becomes a way to indirectly spec the role, which leads to an arduous time suck. This haphazard approach can ultimately damage your startup’s reputation and negatively impact the candidate experience.

What do others think?

“Everything comes down to people. Whatever we build at Spotnana that delivers value in the world is built by the people we hire. Hiring is the most important decision I make every day, and skills are only one aspect of what I’m looking for. It’s essential that the people we hire help us build a culture where we rally behind the best ideas and execute well against our goals. A good spec helps save time, but even more important, it builds the skills needed to make great hiring decisions at all levels of the organization.” — Sarosh Waghmar, Founder and CEO, Spotnana

What do we think?

Don’t recruit blindly. Recruit with intention and transparency. Remember, people are your product. In startup hiring, the quality bar you ultimately hire ties directly into the quality of everything else: your culture, the product you build, your ability to sell, your relationship with your customers, and ultimately your brand. Thorough specs are critical. They aren’t just a roadmap for success — they hone sourcing efforts, feed into talent marketing, aid in candidate evaluation, inform interview/feedback/decision guides, onboarding, and even year-one performance management. Taking the time to thoughtfully build this now will save you time in the longer run and feed into creating your go-to-market job description. We’ve included the beginning steps below.

Take Action — Begin your talent spec

  • Define the problem: Just as you would when creating a product spec, start by defining the problem you’re trying to solve with this new leadership hire. Triangulate around the specific challenge — what needs to be solved in the business? Team, Product, Operations, GTM, Customer?
  • Identify the goals & outcomes: What measurable impact do you want this new leader to have on the business? Define the milestones. We recommend crafting SMART goals for at least six months — 8-12 months is ideal.
  • Identify the ramifications of not hiring: What is the business impact (missed opportunities surrounding growth, innovation, expansion delays, other costs)? What are the tradeoffs?
  • Pre-mortem: What is the impact of hiring the wrong person and creating talent debt? How does that impact customers, team, product, revenue, and fundraising?
  • What are the specific skills an individual must possess in order to succeed? Consider the difference between the required work knowledge and what can be learned. Can other people compensate for the shortcomings of an imperfect candidate?
  • Behavioral attributes: What soft skills are necessary to get work done and thrive at your startup?
  • Historic achievements: What have they done that will enable them to succeed, considering the unique constraints in your startup?
  • Motivations: What might be missing from their career trajectory? Who will they work with? Who can they learn from? Are they motivated to do the work you have to offer?

Tools, Events, Insights

Investment News —> Fixie
Aspiring for Intelligence —> The AI Watchdogs are Coming
Entrepreneur Community —> Leap!
Madrona Insights Newsletter —> Subscribe

How Founders Can Attract and Hire the Right Talent

The best way to find the needle in the haystack is to remove all the hay. In our previous issue of Hooked, we discussed how talent debt accumulates when your hiring bar is poorly defined. But why not take this further up the funnel and increase your odds of success before a candidate even pushes the “submit resume” button? We think the key lies in the already well-known practice of transparency in recruiting. Yeah, we know it’s nothing new, but that doesn’t mean you’re thinking about it or leveraging it in an impactful way.

This was originally published in the Hooked newsletter on February 26, 2023

What’s Going On

Founders and early-stage teams are tackling applicant overload, struggling to comb through hundreds of resumes to hire the right talent. In the game of quantity vs. quality, they’re losing. A founder put this into perspective for us recently when she shared her applicant-to-hire ratio — 500:1. Why is she rejecting 499 resumes? Because her job descriptions are attracting the wrong candidates. The real criteria for success at her company is not the list of qualifications she cuts and pastes into her job descriptions. What the role really is, what to expect, and what success looks like is a total black box to candidates. Is it any wonder that 499 candidates lob resumes over the fence? Some teams are making progress, telling the story about why talent should join their startup. Hyping up values, culture, and other elements of their employee value prop. That’s a great start. But what’s the point of showcasing all the pros if you aren’t open about the real challenges that impact someone’s ability to succeed in your interview process or thrive in your ecosystem — or even just make it through their first month? These are the real questions plaguing your ability to get the right talent in the door and on your team. You’ve got all this data. Leverage it.

Why Does it Matter

More is more when it comes to candidate transparency in recruiting. Some may argue that airing anything less than positive decreases your competitive advantage in recruiting great talent. But what’s the point of getting them in the funnel if they weren’t a good fit to begin with? Being direct and honest about these things sets candidates up for success and, in return, your business. Even if your early founding team has a solid understanding of the hiring bar, it doesn’t necessarily mean these realities are successfully translating to candidates. Accurately describing what’s to be expected in the interview process, how candidates can be successful, and what makes your environment hard provides candidates with a better perspective. This increases their probability of solving your biggest challenges because they self-select to do so. Some may suggest this practice gives candidates a leg up. But really, is there something wrong with setting candidates up to shine? A more transparent and detailed understanding of what works in your ecosystem and, more importantly, what doesn’t, sheds light on this experience in a whole new way. It’s the difference between taking a picture of the front of a hospital instead of the chaos inside the emergency room on a busy night. It’s the real deal.

What Do Others Think

“I fully agree that transparency plays a major role in getting the right talent into the recruiting funnel. At Coda, we believe in promoting transparency and do so in all areas of the talent lifecycle. This starts with being open about our interview process and expectations so candidates are set up for success and continues with demystifying the upside value of equity during our offer process to encourage ownership from the very beginning. We want to continue to push the boundaries of transparency in meaningful ways. It’s a big part of our culture and guiding principles.” — Kenny Mendes, Head of People and Operations at Coda

What Do We Think

Transparency in recruiting is your team’s competitive advantage. The more transparent you can be with your talent brand at all stages of your interview process, the better. We’ve come miles and miles from the archaic processes of even five years ago. We say push further. Embrace your entire startup identity — the one that kicks ass but also makes mistakes. The one that makes data-driven decisions but also a few that brought some heartburn. These are the stories and conversations that matter. This is what candidates need to know before even applying. Not just the narrative that shows up on Glassdoor lacking context. When you take control of the narrative, you can share how you overcame the pain and challenges and what you learned in the process. The amazing byproduct of transparency is that it builds trust internally and externally.

Take Action

  • Early-stage founders — You may not have a career site, but you do have channels like LinkedIn. In a recent issue of Hooked, we discussed leadership storytelling. This is the moment for you and your team to highlight not just the good but also times of struggle.
  • For founders with career sites — assess them through the talent lens. Do you get a clear picture of challenges? You live these daily, but would anyone else really know what they are? Is the story 100% shiny?
  • Solicit feedback from candidates who have gone through your interview process end-to-end. What are the themes in successful and unsuccessful outcomes? This feedback will guide you as you take steps to open source your interview process expectations and why people succeed (or don’t) based on your hiring bar. Add this candidate guidance to your careers site.
  • Have individual contributors on your team write a “day in the life” of a time they had to fix something that broke.
  • List the pros and the cons of the role. The real ones. Include 30/60/90-day expectations with outcomes. Share critical paths for the business tied to people’s work. Describe what onboarding looks like – this is sometimes non existent or unstructured.
  • If someone voluntarily leaves, take this valuable opportunity to do a thorough exit interview. Leverage these learnings.
  • Routinely re-recruit your top employees and ask them what struggles they face and how they have overcome them. This shouldn’t just be about the work they’re doing. It should translate into real-life topics that inform how someone has adapted to challenges in your environment.
  • Transparency considerations are directly linked to your values and culture. When taking steps to increase transparency in recruiting, remember to keep these things in balance.

Tools, Events, Insights

Great insights from Chip Huyen —> What we look for in a resume
Entrepreneur Community —> Leap!
Slack article —>Transparency in Business – the next wave in company evolution
Madrona Insights Newsletter —> Subscribe

Madrona Appoints Veteran Talent Executive, Shannon Anderson, Director of Talent

We are very excited to welcome Shannon to the Madrona team today as Director of Talent. The talent and recruiting role is crucial for startups and Shannon will supercharge Madrona’s recruiting efforts to help our companies find the right people to scale their businesses quickly.
Shannon will lead Madrona’s Talent function in three key areas:

  1. Power Madrona’s talent hub. Identify and develop top leadership talent and rising stars that will fuel Madrona portfolio companies, potential new investments, and enhance the Pacific NW startup ecosystem.
  2. Be a strategic HR business partner to portfolio companies, with a strong focus on bringing best-in-class talent acquisition practices to the portfolio.
  3. Be a Talent Advisor inside Madrona, providing a Talent perspective on the firm’s investments and decision-making.

In Shannon, we feel very fortunate to have found a proverbial “unicorn” given her experience in all of these areas. Very few, if any, other people have Shannon’s set of experiences that are so relevant to Madrona. She has been a hands-on recruiter, both in the “go-go” days of Microsoft and in running her own talent firm. She has recruited for leadership, engineering and business roles. She has been a Talent leader inside a VC firm (Ignition), and thus has experience with how a venture firm works and how to engage with portfolio companies. Most recently, at Recruiting Toolbox, Shannon has been training companies “how to fish” and become world-class at talent identification, acquisition and retention. All this is combined with Shannon’s massive network of friends and contacts made during her years contributing to the Seattle technology ecosystem.

We see how the right people can make or break a company – and when you get those people on board it can change growth trajectories – or conversely, can be too much overhead early in the game. Shannon is adept at not only finding people but understanding how companies grow and when certain roles are needed.

As Director of Talent at Madrona, Shannon and Talent Associate, Matt Witt, will partner with Madrona’s portfolio companies to define, develop and refine their talent roadmaps, create compelling employment branding, great candidate experiences and fully develop their recruiting and selection capabilities.

When Shannon approaches training for HR and recruiting teams at startups and mid-size companies, she focuses not only on teaching hiring managers and executives how to find and attract the best talent – but, equally importantly, she teaches methods that enable the interview and selection process to create a great 2-way fit, ensuring happy and productive employees that stay and grow with the company over time. As a recruiter, Shannon did this herself – which helped to create an 80% retention rate for key roles.

“I’ve been immersed in the greater Seattle ecosystem for many years. We are fortunate to have so much talent here – and a lot of new talent coming to the area,” commented Anderson. “My role is to help companies attract and keep the right Talent; that’s what gets me up and excited every day. Madrona has been a crucial component to the startup culture here for a long time, and I’m excited to be on the team and to get involved with our portfolio companies to create even more value and success for the Seattle region.”

Shannon is also a frequent speaker and entertaining blogger on all topics of recruiting, HR, and talent. You can find some of her work on Medium.

Every company is a technology company, but most don’t behave like one

In 2011, Marc Andreesen famously wrote a Wall Street Journal essay declaring that “software is eating the world.” Five years later, the five largest companies in the world by market capitalization are all software companies.

largestcosbymarketcap

However, in today’s information economy, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook are not the only important large technology companies. As technology becomes more and more pervasive across industries and functions, companies like Exxon, GE, Citi, and Walmart are all racing to become technology companies as well.

Today, we are less interested in the distinction between technology and non-technology companies (because there are very few successful companies that are not technology companies). Instead, it’s more interesting to ask questions like – Tesla is a technology company rapidly learning to become an automobile company, and Ford is an automobile company rapidly learning to become a technology company – which one is going to get there first?

In short, software is eating the world, but software companies aren’t the only ones taking a bite.

How do companies in real estate, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, or other industries that have traditionally not been recognized as technology industries become technology companies? What are some of the key learnings that we see from startups and companies that are successfully making this transition?

1. It starts at the highest level of leadership
Leading a transformation to become a successful technology company is not a job that can simply be tasked to the CTO or CIO. The level of engagement and investment to lead a successful transformation requires the CEO and board of directors to not only be fully bought in but to be the main drivers of the change.

Goldman Sachs has known for many years that technology is a key competitive advantage in financial services. In one recent WSJ article, a top Goldman executive valued a license for their risk measurement system at well over $1 billion, and possibly even up to $5 billion. They have since open-sourced the system in a move to attempt to drum up new business. More importantly, however, Goldman Sachs’ Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein has repeatedly stated that “Goldman Sachs is a technology firm” and highlights the fact that Goldman Sachs actually employs more engineers than companies like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn and often competes for talent and wins against top internet companies.

2. Talent is the most important asset of a technology company
One of the key drivers for the rapid growth of new technology companies is the low capital requirement to build a company today. New companies no longer need to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of servers and equipment; instead, they can pay for servers on demand from cloud providers when needed.

This dynamic makes it more important than ever for companies to hire great people. In fact, a recent survey Madrona conducted in conjunction with its annual CIO Summit found that 89% of Fortune 500 CIOs say hiring top talent is their number one concern today.

geyoutube
GE Youtube Channel.

GE has likely made the largest investment in this space to change the story that young engineers and college graduates hear about the company with a series of Youtube videos and television ads. Though it remains to be seen whether these videos work, GE has recognized that filling its talent pipeline with young engineers and technologists is critical and is investing accordingly.

3. Technology needs to be at the core of company culture, not an afterthought
At a company like Microsoft or Facebook, engineering positions are the most prestigious, highest status roles at the company. The founders and CEOs of technology companies are often engineers and may have even built early version of the products themselves.

For companies to successfully make the transition to become a technology company, cultures need to change to take into account the unique way that software development works and to highlight the importance of technology and the people who manage and build it.

One example of a move towards a developer friendly culture is happening at Walmart. WalmartLabs recently open sourced Electrode, the application platform that powers Walmart.com. Electrode is a modular platform that helps improve application performance, and Walmart is open sourcing the software to give back to the open source world and benefit from additional contributions from the community.

It is important to keep in mind that building a technology-driven culture is not just about free lunches and massages. As Joel Spolsky CEO of Stack Overflow said in a recent interview, “If you want to attract and keep developers, don’t emphasize ping-pong tables, lounges, fire pits and chocolate fountains. Give them private offices or let them work from home, because uninterrupted time to concentrate is the most important and scarcest commodity.”

4. Companies need to move fast and adopt agile practices
The pace of technology adoption is getting faster and faster every year. For example, it took decades for electricity and telephones to reach 50% of US households, but today it takes only years for new technologies like smartphones and tablets to reach a majority of the population. This underscores the importance for companies to continuously adopt new technologies that can enhance productivity and also to continuously experiment with new technologies that have the potential to be disruptive to the business.blackrock

An interesting anecdote from The Lean Startup, one of the manifestos for startup founders, is that Intuit holds themselves accountable to being innovative and agile by using two key metrics: (1) the number of customers using products that didn’t exist three years ago and (2) the percentage of revenue coming from offerings that did not exist three years ago. Historically for Intuit, it took a new product an average of 5.5 years to reach $50 million in revenue; at the time the book was written, they had multiple products generating $50 million in revenue that were less than a year old.

Particularly, as the world is moving towards cloud computing, continuous development and continuous updates are the name of the game. Agile development practices enable you to continuously deliver better experiences for your customers and waterfall development methodology is a relic of the past.

5. Companies need to look forward and avoid getting caught in the innovator’s dilemma
The classic case for why legacy competitors can do everything “right” and fail is the force of disruptive innovation described in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. Businesses can reject innovations based on customers’ current needs while innovative upstarts develop products in a way that meets customers’ future needs.

Stratchery
Stratchery

Recently, we have seen automakers take very innovative approaches to automotive technology as autonomous vehicles move to the front and center of the startup world with the acquisitions of companies like Otto and Cruise and public pilots of new technologies like Uber’s self-driving cars in Pittsburgh or Tesla’s Autopilot feature.

Ford, in particular, has been very vocal about the autonomous future and the importance of working differently in the context of today’s technology-driven world. Ford’s CEO, Mark Fields, has written that “As little as four years ago, our approach was aligned with the thinking of most automakers today, which is taking incremental steps to achieve full autonomy by advancing driver assist technology. This is not how we look at it today. We learned that to achieve full autonomy, we’d have to take a completely different pathway.”

Conclusion
The race to become the market leader across a variety of sectors and geographies is speeding up amongst older incumbents and promising, young startups. Startups have a lot to learn from the established management and financial practices of incumbents, but incumbents have a lot to learn from startups as well. The companies, young or old, that use technology to best create competitive advantages for themselves will win.

Technology needs to be a fundamental fabric of the company’s DNA and culture as companies truly internalize that “Every company is a technology company”.