A WINDOW ON UTAH TECH COMPANIES: Five Utah entrepreneurs talk about business leadership
Tim Cook, the chief executive officer at Apple, was the headliner at the recent Utah Tech Tour, organized by U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. But several other tech giants — all from Utah companies — also took the stage and presented words of wisdom to a crowd of more than 1,200 that included young entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial wannabes.
The highlights of their quick presentations offered a window into the world of tech industry leadership.
James’ talk focused on three metrics he believes every business leader should measure. The first is customer retention.
“Customers are the most important part of your business, the lifeblood of your business,” he said. “You’ve got to have them if you want to pay the bills, and if everyone is centered around your customers, then things are going to be good.”
At an earlier company, Omniture, James had the company call customers it had lost to determine why. The replies ranged from “my credit card doesn’t work anymore” to “I went out of business” to “I shouldn’t have bought it in the first place.”
“My favorite one was, ‘My mom won’t let me use the credit card anymore,’” James said. “I’m like, ‘That’s my business? That’s a problem.’”
But in the enterprise space, Omniture had 100 percent customer retention. When he founded Domo, he found the company was losing some customers but compensated for it by having higher same-store sales at customers that remained.
The second metric is employee retention. James said he is notified every time a worker leaves the company. He was able to retain two salespeople comtemplating leaving by having them tell James about things the company was “screwing-up, that we were shooting ourselves in the foot. … Thankfully, it was mostly self-created problems, which is embarrassing but most of time is stuff you can fix,” James said. Not only did Domo fix those problems but the employees now feel the company listens to their concerns.
Lastly, James stressed looking at competition and “how they feel.”
“I want to get in the heads of my competition. I want to screw them up in the head so bad,” he said. That can take the form of cherry-picking their customers or best salespeople. One competitor — one-fifth Domo’s size — made fun of Domo, and James responded by offering a $10,000 bonus for customers Domo employees could pick off from the competitor.
“We took a lot of their customers, we took their best salespeople, and they died,” James said. “Sorry. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. I’m going to feed my family; you’re going to feed yours. That’s the way that it is.”
Smith spoke about women’s role in the technology sector. His mother was an executive for a Utah university and would tell stories at home about her difficulties in that realm.
“I’ve got three little girls myself … and I hope they don’t have to go through what my mother’s had to go through,” Smith said. “This is a hard problem, and I think the first part of talking about women and tech is [that] it’s a tech problem, which means it’s got to be solved by the tech community.”
The second element is that the problem varies by geography. “But the good thing is, we’re in tech and we solve problems, and we do hard things in the state of Utah,” he said.
The first step is to recognize problems exist, in part through inherent bias, which can manifest itself in men talking over women or men claiming that assertive women are bossy. “If we understand that there is that bias, it actually makes life a lot easier,” Smith said.
The second step is trying to make a company family-friendly, in part by having work/life integration. “If our organizations are not family-friendly, then we are running an old-school work environment, because it’s about integration,” he said.
Third, structural issues must be solved. He noted that only 28 percent of students involved in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) are women.
“It’s not a problem that we can solve with one effort. It’s a problem that we’ve got to solve from the top and the middle and the bottom,” he said. But in Utah, many women are inexperienced as executives and “have not been on a ride like this before, so we need to grow our talent,” he said.
Fixing that issue will be “a 10-year journey,” Smith said, but it should not involve ever compromising high standards. “This is what we’re trying to solve. It’s a flow problem, and we can solve this in Utah by growing the talent and solving it from the top.”
Tetro discussed what she calls “the fourth Industrial Revolution.” It features the integration of digital and physical elements.
Currently, people have digital devices that allow them to get rides, answer complex calculus questions, sign documents and take selfies. “It’s easy to imagine the innovation that’s taking place in the digital world, but what’s happening in the physical world is just as compelling and innovative,” she said.
She saw that integration at work while working at Disney, where she was able to learn about 3D modeling, data, programmable LED technology and robotics while also learning from Disney’s storytellers. What resulted was an integration between the digital and physical worlds, she said.
“Ultimately when we build products, we want our users and our customers and guests to have a magical experience for how they integrate those two together,” she said.
A major trend in the move has been the personalization of products, where technology has allowed people to, for example, not just be a spectator at a show but to be part of the show. Personalization of products led her 3D printing company to produce toys that allowed the customer to become Iron Man or a “Star Wars” stormtrooper or a big-league baseball player.
But personalization won’t just transform consumer products. Its application in the medical realm has resulted in personalized prosthetics, vastly changing the lives of the users.
Pedersen focused on how companies must always work on reinvention.
“As you’re building your company, I think that people need to remain focused on the fact that if you build a successful business, other people are going to copy you,” Pedersen said.
“You may think you’ve created something new and different and it’s not replicable, but it probably is to some degree. And if you are not thinking constantly about reinventing your business, someone else is doing the same thing to you. It’s going to happen to you and it’s going to make your company irrelevant.”
His own company, for example, has moved from a focus on security to smart home technologies. And the future is always on the mind of its executive team, he said.
“What we’re talking about doing is always something very, very different than what we’re doing right now. We’re laying the groundwork, we’re laying the plans, for what’s going to happen in a year, 18 months, two years, five years, whatever the case might be,” Pedersen said.
“What we’re doing and the way we look right now at Vivint, if we execute, if we perform properly, [the company] is going to look very different in three or four years than the way the company looks right now.”
One complexity in undertaking a reinvention lies in internal communication, he said. “It’s difficult to communicate and message to an entire company, especially the bigger it gets. … It’s absolutely critical, because you have to have complete buy-in into what you’re going to do, because if you’re not communicating properly and [your] people don’t understand what they’re doing or why they’re doing it, they’re probably not going to be committed to it.”
Skonnard emphasized three skills that young entrepreneurs need. The first is to “learn how to learn.” He was 8 years old when his father brought home an Apple II personal computer. They grabbed the instruction book and learned how to use the new technology, along the way igniting a passion for technology and the process of learning, Skonnard said.
“It’s probably the most important thing you can learn in school, in universities or even if you don’t go there,” he said. “If you can learn how to learn, and you can learn how to learn fast, and faster than other people, you will find success in your life and in your business and in your startup and in your vision of what you’re trying to create.”
He also encouraged audience members to “live an unconstrained life” as a way to open up possibilities.
“We see the world through the lens of what’s currently possible, what we currently know, and when we look at solutions, we look at all the options that we’re familiar with,” Skonnard said. “And when you start to live an unconstrained life, you let go of all of that and you actually can envision and see possibilities for a new future that no one else can see. And that’s when the magic happens.”
He also spoke about having an intentional organizational culture. That involves taking those first two principles “and infusing that into the fabric of the company you’re building, and any other precious or sacred thing that you think is going to drive to a healthy and productive work experience for all the people you’re going to inspire with your vision.”