Full transcript: Sandy Carter on London Real
0:00 In London, technology is the silicone roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology start-up scene. Silicon Real. Each week, interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial technology, accelerators and incubators in an exciting three-person format. Learn about the people behind the innovation, locally filmed, locally sourced, Silicon Reel. It’s about the people. This is Silicon Reel, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I am Brian Rose.
0:47 I also host London Real. It’s the same studio, but we have not just tech people here. We get politicians in, some rock stars, some authors, some filmmakers, some whistle blowers, it gets a little crazy. It’s professional athletes now. Professional athletes, yeah.
0:59 We had an MBA guy in here recently, so check that out at LondonReal.tv, but today we’re here to talk tech. My co-host is Colin Pyle. You’re running coffee companies. You got new blends. You’re all around the world.
1:10 You got financing. What’s going on? Yeah, busy, busy times. You make the coffee business sound just so glamorous. So glamorous, yeah.
1:17 I fly first class in all of these flight nights, lie down beds. No, yeah, things are good, man. Just really, really busy. we’re launching our new website tomorrow so it’s been a huge push to get that in place and launching new blends and yeah it’s just really busy some new new staff starting next week as well so you know just slowly growing and yeah trying to try to be a success scaling up we could take the intros of each one of these shows and piece together like a documentary about the high stars of crew cafe one guy commented he’s like we always seem to be coming out with new blends and traveling to Italy yeah yeah that’s true like what are you gonna do three steps.
1:53 We’re working on it. That’s a little feedback to you. All right. Thanks for being here. No, love it.
1:58 On with the show, our guest today is Sandy Carter, who is Global General Manager at IBM in charge of ecosystem development and social business evangelism. You are a best-selling author and one of the key leaders responsible for setting the direction for IBM’s social business initiative. I want to hear all about this. The NAFE named you a social media star, a woman of excellence. You worked at IBM for over 25 years after graduating from Harvard Business School.
2:23 I think you hailed from the great state of Texas. Is that true? That’s right. You got it. We got to hear about that.
2:29 Sandy, welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you, Brian. It’s such a pleasure to be here. We were just so excited to hear that you were going to come. We usually have, it’s the Silicon Roundabout.
2:39 We usually talk about the startups in the community, the VCs, the journalists, and we’ve had some recently some big companies, which is some great series B rounds, 20, million, you know, dollars and pounds from companies like Do-Dil. We had Nutmeg on here. There’s a financial tech kind of trend going there. Yeah, Brandwatch, Transferwise. But we haven’t had anyone that really talks to kind of those Fortune 500 companies and finds out what they’re thinking, how they’re using social. So many questions to ask you. I also don’t know a lot about some of the stuff you’re going to tell me. So I might have lots of questions. But if you could just tell us, how do larger companies engage in in the social media space.
3:18 It’s something that we usually talk about consumers, and we don’t usually think about the corporate engagement. How do they do it, and what have you learned, and what do you usually tell people? Sure, that’s a lot of questions. I know. So let’s see what we can do here.
3:29 I do that a lot. It means I can give you any answer. You know, a lot of enterprise companies today are using social to better connect and engage with their clients. And so while they’re using some of the consumer tools, like a Twitter or a Facebook kind of tools, They’re also creating their own communities that are more private networks, which we see as part of the new trend out there, right? Having a private network, sometimes invite only, sometimes just for an open dialogue, but it’s on their terms versus on some other companies’ terms.
4:00 So we’ve really seen some great companies. In fact, I know that you hail Colin from the great country of Canada. There we go. TD Bank. Great example of leveraging social.
4:11 They’ve done some amazing things inside their corporation to better engage their employees, creating communities where they can thank their employees for great service. And you know, one of my favorite quotes is that a great company cannot have great customer engagement without great employee engagement. So folks like TD are using social to engage their employees, to get their employees empowered to shape the strategy and to help them go. So this WOW group at TD, they give all these great stories of great customer service.
4:44 Their company then recognizes that legendary customer service. They leverage that for training. They give awards to the employees. And they really then listen to what’s really happening on the front lines to learn more. In fact, some of their advertising slogans have also come from that community where they’ve gotten that input coming in.
5:02 So that’s just one example of how a top enterprise would leverage your youth social. You said you told a story where you were sitting on the tarmac in a plane And you struck up a conversation with a CEO. And he said, we don’t do social. And I think you were like, well, but it seems like that could be a lot of attitudes to an old school corporation is we don’t even want to engage. But you can’t not engage, is that right?
5:25 That’s right. In fact, it’s more dangerous not to engage than to engage. That same CEO that was sitting on the tarmac, actually, while I was flying to Toronto again, he was really funny because he thought that he could opt out of social. And the reason he wanted to opt out of social was he thought that that was the safer path, right? If I don’t get out there, if I’m not publicly chatting, then people can’t say anything bad about me.
5:51 Where in reality, if you’re not out there listening and you don’t know what people are saying about you, you can’t engage in that dialogue. You don’t understand what’s happening. That very day that I was sitting next to the CEO, one of his competitors had posted this really funny YouTube video about him and he was amazed. He’s like, how could this happen? And we opted out of social.
6:11 So I had to explain, well, this is how social works. And he didn’t get it. He was not a digital native, not a digital immigrant. He didn’t get social. And so once I explained it to him, he did get it.
6:23 He called us CMO, and actually we’re doing business together now. Yeah, because I read an article recently about talking about CEOs and actually CEOs having a social sort of profile, so not only the company engaging in social, but actually like an Elon Musk, engaging in social, and being able to cut through a lot of the red tape and, you know, challenge arguments, or, you know, he’s pretty famous for doing it against certain articles written about, you know, Tesla and stuff like that, but I thought it was really interesting, and I totally agree. Do you think it’s a generational thing where a lot of the CEOs, the average age of a CEO, may be at a point where they’re just not comfortable with it?
7:00 You know, I don’t think it’s age-related, because you do, I mean, while you do have digital natives, you have these digital immigrants, right? like myself, who just fell in love with it and started leveraging it to engage with my clients and my partners. I think it really has to do with, are you transparent and do you have a certain style about you that wants to listen to ideas and innovate with others, right? Combine that innovation and crowdsourcing, or are you more command and control, right?
7:28 Like I met Elon and he’s amazing. He is definitely, he is so innovative, but he listens. He likes to listen. He wants to hear other ideas, he’s not threatened by someone who maybe disagrees with him, right? He debates you.
7:41 So I think it really depends upon style, maybe more than age. You just published your 2014 business trends, tech trends report. Is that what’s here, right? Yes. Okay, we’ve got a copy hot off the presses.
7:54 What did you learn or what did you realize things when they’re going in social or just the way that kind of the big corporates or the winning corporates are, I guess, integrating or interacting with the rest of the community. Yeah, I love this year’s Business Tech Trends study because what we looked at is we looked at those pace-setter companies. So again, we looked at 1,500 companies. They’re not all big. They’re big.
8:17 They’re startups. They’re medium-sized companies. And what we wanted to know is those who are really excelling in the marketplace, who are pace-setters, about 27% of those folks, what are they doing that’s different than all the rest of the companies out there? could we learn from them? And we learned three really interesting things.
8:36 And the first one was my big aha, which was these pay setters are partnering in different and more creative ways. In fact, they’re two to three times more likely to partner with a university to innovate for skills. They’re two times more likely to partner with citizen developers. And they’re also more likely to partner with different types of folks, not just in universities and citizen developers, but across the board to use clients as part of that partnering community.
9:12 So they’re really looking at expanding their skill base through citizen developers, startups, universities, and really get that innovative power brought in. So if you think about it, today if you’re developing an app, it has to be mobile, it has to have some social in it, has to have analytics in it, where do you find folks who really know that space really well? Well, they’re probably in university, or they’re in startups, or they’re out there in the citizen realm.
9:40 And so the power of that, these pay setters have really harnessed in. What is a citizen developer? How do you define that? Yeah, great question. So a citizen developer could be a hobbyist, right?
9:51 Someone who codes for fun. Could be someone who has a tech skill, but maybe doing something different, right? like owning a coffee shop. It could be someone who is just really passionate about development, does it for their day job, but in the evening, they wanna do some coding for good. Like in the United States, we have a group called Code for America.
10:13 We have all kinds of citizen developers there working on projects that help the country out. So a citizen developer is really opening it up to any type of person who has technical skill. For instance, I’ll give you an example In Honolulu, Hawaii, which is I know in the United States, but I could use Lisbon or Sydney or many other cities as well But I love the Honolulu story because they have all this great data and they opened it up to their citizens to develop apps They created an app platform happens to be on IBM’s cloud But that app platform then enabled these citizens to write apps and let me give you some of the cool apps They did they did one called the bus and it really is called the bus I’m not just stumbling over my words, and it’s a it’s just a simple bus schedule. When’s the bus going to be on time?
10:59 When is it going to be late? They went on to also do a tsunami warning system, so they had community leaders. They created a community, checked the siren, you know, and in fact it’s so good that Japan now wants to leverage that tsunami. Now think about that. This tsunami system was written by a citizen developer.
11:18 They created an app called Tripit, so that local Hawaiians could provide walking trails for those folks coming as tourists to the city. It’s been so successful that Honolulu will now expand it. Similar things have been done in Stuttgart in Germany, who also leads in the space of using citizen developers. In fact, the University of Stuttgart opened this up to students, and they developed really interesting apps. of my favorites, which is actually going to turn into a startup, they develop an app for the iPhone where if it snows, it will automatically adjust your alarm. So 30 minutes early if it’s snowing. You can put in your normal route to work or to school, automatically adjust if there’s traffic on the route. So they’re anticipating different things that could impact you and making your life easier.
12:11 And how did London score in this report or what can you learn about our city? Yeah, it was really interesting and in London the interesting thing was we found that partnering with the universities was one of the lower scores. So UK and London had one of the lower scores, Germany pretty high, United States pretty high and we had a round table today actually down in Shoreditch to kind of discuss this. Why don’t we see more partnering with universities with startups?
12:40 Now I know there are some because today I met some that you know actually sit in a university campus. But overall, we saw, you know, even a lot of the research that’s done here in London or England with the schools, that research actually ends up in startups in New York City or in Silicon Valley. When was the last time we talked about a university here in London? I mean, seriously, 60 episodes and I have to say anecdotal evidence for you, but we don’t talk about the student that came from LSE or any of that, those kind of things.
13:08 Yeah, I guess, you know, Sherry is quite involved in, you know, she lives in Cambridge, Sherry Kutu. to. Cambridge is a different story but I think in London, so you just found there wasn’t that engagement. There wasn’t and today when we had our round table, we had a group of 25 influencers from London together, universities, startups, app developers, some entrepreneurial groups as well. We were brainstorming, does it start with the way that London, I guess the country maybe does education, where you select a major early on, when you’re 16, you kind of stay in that major and you don’t share, you’re kind of siloed.
13:47 So does it start there and therefore you don’t get a lot of sharing that’s done with companies? Does it have to do with IP? We just kind of batted it around. I also understand I think this week a startup manifesto was released here too and they called out the same thing, that we needed to do more here in London to partner with universities. So one of the things that we suggested is NYU in the United States, they’re doing a really interesting program to engage companies with universities.
14:19 We thought we might bring over some of the folks from NYU who have been partnering with IBM as well with some of the universities here in London and just have a dialogue and see if we could share some best practices. I don’t know, what do you guys think about that? interesting to hear that the research in London goes to New York and you know the Valley which is you know and we’re always of course talking by the Valley in New York here because you know they are the major competitors they’re leading the way so we’re always comparing ourselves but this is kind of interesting to hear surprising to hear but also some of the major tech centers in the States they were spawned from the universities you know there’s no you know Valley from Stanford and all the different peaks you know Austin all those things but London is you know the capital the financial capital government capital, but how many schools are really here? Yeah, I think I always thought universities would be so cool if they had like an incubator accelerator program for after you graduate to help foster their own students. I work pretty closely with my where I went to graduate school at HALT and in less of a tech way, but they’re always interested in what I’m up to and how they can help me in some way. So I think it’s a huge as a big customer, as a startup, It’s so important, but then also having you know universities help foster people’s ideas coming straight out of school
15:31 Yeah, I mean even if you think about NYU which is and you know New York City is pretty fun You know financial district marketing district pretty similar to London, right? Yeah, and one of the things that they’re doing which I love is they are one of the classes So the students actually get grades for it is they form student teams and then the student teams work with multiple companies, enterprise companies, startup companies, they get little projects, citizen developers, if you would, right, from a university setting. And those, you know, as I talked to NYU, that program is always sold out.
16:04 The students who participate in it are really valued because they’ve had some real-world experience. But also, the investment banks, you know, the digital agencies that exist there, they get so much value too because these are the kids who are using mobile and social. And they understand the next generation and the market. So everybody wins in that scenario. So I’d love to have something like that happen here in London as well.
16:28 Yeah. Yeah. My school did something where we had like an action project. And so we spent a few months where every week we would meet with the CEO of a company and try to help them out with whatever problem they may be having. But I think it’s not done nearly enough.
16:41 And is it done on the tech side? Yeah, exactly. I mean, we had 25 of your key influencers today. And there was only two out of 25 who said that they were experimenting with it. And one guy actually came in from Cambridge, so he was the guy from Cambridge.
16:57 And we had three folks from Ireland. And they also said they were going to take that back to Dublin to see if they could try to get something initiated and started around that area. I mean, look at our data set of 60 episodes. We haven’t even mentioned a university name that often, let alone talked about what they’re giving to the startups or how they’re influencing. So, okay, that’s good, put that on the list.
17:16 What else did we learn in this report, or what else kind of stuck out? Another big aha was analytics. So, analytics was viewed as being a core way that companies make better decisions. And these pay-setters not just used analytics, but they embedded analytics into their decision-making process. And it didn’t matter if they were a Fortune 500 company a startup, even the startups that were considered pay setters were users of analytic data, not just gut feel, you know, they trusted their data, they had the analytics, the predictive capability to use and leverage the data for advantage.
17:57 In fact, one partner here, Red Ant, I don’t know if you guys have talked to them, they won the Watson challenge with IBM, you know, and part of their competitive advantage is they have embedded analytics into their entire solution for retail. So while we do have great examples like Red Ant or even monetize here in London who are doing this, one of the big gaps we found was that companies in the UK, so this wasn’t London, but UK aren’t using analytics as much as other countries. In fact, a little bit behind Germany, Asia, and the United States.
18:33 So I found that also interesting. And in our roundtable today, we discussed perhaps it’s not trusting data. It’s a cultural thing that you know people in London are very creative and they go with their gut feel maybe more than data So I’d be curious. What do you guys think? I’m not surprised to hear that, you know, I don’t know I mean it is a cultural thing. I mean when you think of Germans you think about precision engineering and getting everything exactly right I don’t know in the UK. It’s interesting and maybe it has something to do that. We’re not next to these universities I don’t know. I’m I’m listening to this book called in the plex right now Which is the whole story of Google and they were always about the numbers, but they were PhD students So it just was part of the culture from the very beginning.
19:14 I don’t know. It’s a good question, but I’m not surprised to hear it. What do you know? Yeah, I think data is part of the DNA of a company. I don’t think you can do data for one area and not data for another.
19:24 So I’m surprised to hear that startups aren’t using data, because it feels like that’s just something you implement. And we’ve had guys on the show, Ometria and Ghost Squared, and it’s super easy now to get good data that you can understand Google Analytics. So I’m surprised at startups. I can see maybe a larger company that’s not in the tech space maybe wouldn’t have data, because they’ve always made decisions on relationships. So I’m wondering if it has to do with skills, to really be great at analytics, not just having data, but use analytics.
19:58 You have to have really good quality data scientists, but you also have to have good storytellers, right? So if you think about it, if you just do the math and science piece, and you’ve got that math and science piece down, and you’ve got the analytics, you’ve got to tell a story with it to take it forward to your board or to your CEO. And I’m just wondering, again, back to the training, given it’s more silo-based and not broad-based, is that maybe inhibiting the use of analytics?
20:27 Or is it a trend in startups, like we have Renant, we have Monetize who are using it, and others, using Watson Analytics and other tools, is it maybe some of more established companies? Yeah, I think the skill is for sure. I think it does take a dedicated person within sort of a company, even if it’s a relatively small company. Because yeah, again, it’s in your DNA. So making decisions on a bit of data is probably a negative impact.
20:55 You have to sort of make a story and look at it from a bird’s eye view and put together the data that matters and then action decisions based on your board or your CEO to actually use that data to make decisions, so. I think you need an analytic mind, too. I think the CEO has to be either proven that way or have been thinking that way, because startups have been in London for hundreds of years, whether it’s a merchant ship going off to get spices, but if you’re not used to making decisions by the numbers.
21:21 And trust the data. It’s like a GPS. You either trust it or you don’t. Or you don’t. In the middle, it doesn’t work.
21:26 That’s true, that’s very true. Sandy, you travel all over the world. What does it feel when you get to the London tech sector? What do you hear about London when you’re in the States? Is it part of the conversation?
21:36 Is it not? Is there certain sectors where people are like, OK, we’re taking notice? I just want to get your general feel, and you won’t offend us. Yeah, I’ve now traveled to 82 countries, which I love, because I get to experience so many different cultures and see the energy and the excitement that the startups have. I would say, if I had to really call out five centers that I think are really top of mind for me for startups.
22:00 Of course, it would be Silicon Valley, it’d be hot. In the Valley in San Francisco, are you putting those into one? I would, yeah, because San Francisco now is hotter than Silicon Valley, depending upon where you, yeah, where you lean. Yeah, I was just out in San Fran, we did an event out there, and yes, absolutely. I see a lot of startups in New York City.
22:20 In fact, I see a lot of push from New York City to take away kind of the crown from Silicon Valley with some of the new tax breaks from the state and from the city in New York. So I see a lot of excitement there. Israel, so Tel Aviv, you know, just amazing technology. India, lots of amazing startups there. In fact, we did a, we have something called a global entrepreneur program to help startups.
22:47 We did a hackathon there, a mobile hackathon. We had 200,000 people sign up. Whereabouts are you finding that in India mostly? Well, actually, well, Delhi has a lot. Mumbai, Chennai, kind of spread.
23:02 Those three are probably the three big biggies. Mumbai, of course, for more financial applications, Delhi, more government, obviously. But the energy and the excitement is just amazing there. And then the fifth one, I would say, is London. I spent the morning today down in Shoreditch, walking around the square and talking to lots of startups down there, lots of energy, lots of excitement.
23:26 And the word is out with what you guys are doing around entrepreneurs here. It seems like there is a renewed energy, I would say in the last maybe two years, that I had not seen coming from an entrepreneur attitude out of London. Yeah, no, that’s what we’re seeing as well. We’re kind of feeling it. Like I said, we’re seeing those Series B rounds.
23:43 We’re seeing the government get very well involved. Even if it’s photo ops, at least they’re involved and they’re talking about it. And you know, it’s a unique capital. There’s some real fintech stars here that I think will take over. But we had Debou in here a couple weeks ago, former Google employee, and he’s looking for the fintech company that will be the next Google.
23:59 Something of that scale, and he thinks we need a network effect, which I think we have here. A lot of support, government supporting, the banks are, what, one mile away. Yeah, exactly. That kind of thing. You know, the innovator’s dilemma comes up all the time.
24:12 Sandy, we talk about it, and all the companies I just listed, it’s the banks versus the new one coming up. It seems like your job is all about the innovator’s dilemma. I mean, it seems like you’re trying to teach people not to fall into these traps, to see if they can engineer their way around it. What do you think when you hear that term? I know it’s a simplistic term, but when you hear it, what are you thinking?
24:30 What do you tell people? Well, you know, it’s really interesting because if you look at, you know, even the study we just did, the BizTech study, you know, the word innovation actually never came up. But every one of the aha moments leads to innovation, right? Analytics leads to new innovative projects, maybe a new integrated market that you didn’t know about before. If you think about partnering in a new way, if your partner was startups or with a university or citizen developers, it’s leading you into a new market, it’s providing with new skills, providing with the innovation.
25:03 Even working with the technology, which was one of the pieces of the study, all of that’s about innovation. So I think that today, innovation is almost assumed, people have to have innovation to be successful, whether you’re a big company or a small company. And that’s one of the reasons why I love my job right now. I get to focus on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. We have an entrepreneur program, and we do smart camps.
25:30 So we help these young entrepreneurs focus on innovation. We provide business mentoring, technology mentoring, connection to VCs to help them through the innovator’s dilemma, to get them over the hump when they just have a great idea. There’s so much more, right, than just a great product. you need a company, you need to be an entrepreneur, not just an inventor. And so that’s part of what we’re focusing on today is how to really encourage, help to grow, because it’s easy to start a company, it’s hard to grow a company.
26:00 So really helping these companies not just get started, but helping them to grow and to take their innovation to the next level. And you’re working with these entrepreneurs on the front lines, what do you see? And what’s changed in the last couple of years? Are you seeing kind of a new breed? Are they well-versed?
26:14 Do they know all the terminology better? What are you seeing and what do you want to see more of? Yeah, you know, it’s really funny. We call it kind of like the, and I don’t know if you guys watch Shark Tank here, but like the Shark Tank phenomenon. Is it popular here?
26:27 We know of it. We know of it. You know of it. Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban, yeah.
26:32 So, but break it down briefly for people that haven’t seen it. What do they do? So, on Shark Tank, it’s kind of like a VC on steroids. These four or five entrepreneurs, millionaires and billionaires, listen to pitches. companies come in and they pitch their idea and then on the spot these guys fund the company and they take an equity position or royalty position in the companies.
26:56 It is right now the most watched TV show in America. It’s now going to go on five nights a week, not just one night a week, and it is the number one watch show by teenagers between 13 and 18. So more than all the vampire werewolf zombie shows out there is the Shark Tank. So it’s really this Shark Tank phenomena that we’re seeing from entrepreneurs all over. Even today at our, we had a session at Shortage with startups, people not as much pitching but sharing their idea and their thoughts, asking for help, really motivated to take what they’re doing, not just as a product, but to take it to market.
27:41 I think a couple years ago, you asked me some of the differences, you know, people would come in with a better mousetrap. Now I think people are getting, entrepreneurs are getting that it’s not just a better mousetrap, but it’s how do you take that to market, right? What are the elements to make it successful? You got to have sales and what do you need to think about because, you know, the best product doesn’t always win, right? It’s all the elements that surround the great idea that helps it to be successful.
28:04 Do you think the Shark Tank phenomenon will start conditioning young adults to just be ready to pitch all the time? Absolutely. I have two daughters and the other day, my one daughter, she came in and she’s like, mom, I’ve got a great idea. I’m like, oh, okay, great. You know?
28:19 And I was folding laundry or something. She goes, sit down. And she almost did like shark tank style, pitched me her great idea for, you know, something really cool that she wants to sell at school. And I thought, you know, she would never have done that a couple of years ago. She’s got the bug, that startup bug that I think is so phenomenal.
28:36 Because, you know, if you think about an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur just doesn’t happen. They kind of grow up, right? You have to get into the life cycle of the entrepreneur. So, you know, part of my job I told you is the startups, but I also have the academic program. So we actually start trying to reach potential entrepreneurs in high school, and then we take that all the way up because you can become an entrepreneur at 50, right? I mean, there’s no age that you can’t become an entrepreneur. So it’s really that whole mindset. I think that you grow up as an entrepreneur, you think that way, and then you become an entrepreneur hopefully one day.
29:11 I love now is it’s relatively cheap to get an idea or even a product, right? You know, you could make your own product at home and sell it on Etsy or, you know, do all these sorts of things. I think as a young kid to explore and learn and be an entrepreneur and try and fail, it’s such a great opportunity. Absolutely. And with the cloud technology out there, you know, we have something called Bluemix and, you know, you can get out there and try it for free, build your application, Which is the the new entrepreneur, right? You’re gonna build, you know lean startup, right style you get out there You build something quick you find out people like it you design it and then you move on and you develop and move and go I love that, you know kind of fast sprints as your lean startup grows and that’s what kids can do, too Talk to me about IBM and their own innovators dilemma I mean IBM has been around since for a long time, you know You were making you were you were the makers of hardware, you know in the 60s and 70s the only makers of hardware And then Microsoft came along and you had a famous, you know, kind of semi battle with them and you’ve seen come and go all of these innovators come along the way and You’ve been there for a long time. How does a company?
30:27 But I’m just fascinating I remember reading a book called big blues and it was all about the fight between Microsoft and IBM in the 80s and I mean You know you’re at this company and you’re you’re still enacting change How does it work when you’re steering a ship that moves slowly or doesn’t move slowly? What is the IBM like today? I don’t know, you know, I think IBM today is in it and it just continues to transform and I think today Especially with the new transformational leadership. We’re moving Really fast. We’re really big so you might not see it as fast as we feel it But you know the movement to cloud with bluemix. It’s an incredible cloud platform Just, you know, tens of thousands of developers are coming over to it, transforming the way we do business.
31:13 If you think about the shift in analytics, the shift that we’re seeing across the board, IBM really has set into motion some more big transformations. And just as we’ve done in the past, you know, we’ve been around for 102 years, you know, you have to transform, right? I mean, if you’re a startup, you’re going to start, and when you’re successful, you grow. But you can’t stay the same. You always have to change.
31:37 And that’s why people say to me, wow, you’ve been with IBM for 25 years. I have, but it’s been almost like working for multiple different companies, multiple different roles, because we constantly change to stay on top of the game. And is it difficult getting a message out there with all lots of other corporates getting into the spaces? We joke on the show sometimes, like not another incubator, because all these corporates seem to come to London and launch an incubator.
32:01 It’s almost getting a little crazy, because there’s so many of those. Is it hard to compete when every corporate tries to want to get into this entrepreneur space? Yeah, I mean, it’s always hard with a share of voice, but I think the real, you know, the real secret, if you would, is going to be around the engagement. You know, I really think, you know, part of the transformation, focusing with entrepreneurs, focusing with developers, making sure we’ve got that university piece in.
32:28 I think it’s going to be about that engagement. So I think the awareness of things that typically would come from advertising is good, but And I think the better thing is directly engaging as we go along. And for me, that’s how you break through the noise, right? I mean, look at your show. The way that you guys are successful is not just that you’re advertising things.
32:46 You’re engaging your audience. You’re telling a story. You’ve got a value prop. And that’s really the same strategy that IBM is using, is we’re engaging the audience at the right place at the right time. You know, if you think about entrepreneurs, even in the study, entrepreneurs and developers very influential. And what startups do, enterprise wants to do. In fact, if you talk to VCs, they’ll tell you. They’re overrun today with Fortune 500 companies. They all want to see what the startups are doing. And if the startups are using Ruby on Rails or Python, they want to use Ruby on Rails and Python. So there’s a lot of influence there. So as IBM transforms and we work with the entrepreneurs to make them successful, that engagement will just breed success as well.
33:32 And the pace setters are contacting these startups and engaging with them on their own. They’re not waiting until they have to buy them as a capitulation. They’re going out and engaging. That’s right. And partnering in numbers that we’ve never seen before.
33:44 So, you know, I think it’s interesting, an interesting time for startups now where, you know, startups used to say, well, you know, Sandy, help me get a call with an enterprise customer, right? I want to be in a fortune 500, a fortune 100 company. But today, I think the power really sits a lot with startups, and they should use and leverage that power. These Fortune 500 companies want to innovate, back to your innovator’s dilemma, they want to innovate, they see the innovation power in a startup, and so they’re hungry for that.
34:15 So I wouldn’t not go into an enterprise or a Fortune 100, 500 company, I’d be empowered to go there and to take that plunge, because I think that’s what those Fortune 500 companies are looking for. And just like IBM learns from entrepreneurs, like we run a lot of smart camps, and these are camps where we bring in entrepreneurs to pitch to pitch to us, right? And then we select the best and we have a global entrepreneur of the year. You know, we learn as those entrepreneurs come in.
34:43 So for instance, this year, we’re seeing that a lot of entrepreneurs and startups are entering around Internet of Things. And not just Internet of Things, like it used to be around sensors, but more around how you use the data and how you use the analytics. to that analytics term, how do you analyze the data that you’re getting from the shirt that you’re wearing or the Fitbit that you have on or the more B2B examples as well? How do you leverage and use that data and that’s analytics?
35:11 So we’re learning. Those startups are coming in. They’re getting funded. That’s giving us more insight into the market and giving us the ability to innovate. You’re speaking tomorrow at a conference.
35:20 What are you going to be trying to tell those people? What is your goal for the next year if you get a win? Is it getting these people to make some real changes in their businesses? Yeah, so tomorrow we’re going to be talking about the different trends, but we’re going to be talking to about 200 entrepreneurs and showing them, again, some of the, I think, the core things that are going on that they can make money with, you know, how they can improve their businesses and make money.
35:44 You know, success over the next year, I believe, is that entrepreneurs and startups see the value of working with IBM, and that IBM isn’t this, you know, big old slow company, that we’re fast moving, that we have a great platform called Bluemix that they can develop on, and that we have programs like this global entrepreneur program that can help them with business mentoring, technology mentoring, and connection with the VCs. That that’s, you know, that breaking through the noise that you talked about earlier, that we break through that noise with that great engagement that we want to do at a very local level. That’s important to come up with stuff like this.
36:16 Where does that take place, the entrepreneur sort of accelerate, yeah, that you have? Yeah, so we actually have, here in London, we have over at level 39, we have an innovation center that’s up 24 by seven, and you can go there as a startup and get help on the technology and business side. We also have a partnership with Shortage, the village hall, over here in a set of buildings for startups. And then we also run smart camps, and we run those all over the world.
36:47 So we do about 78 of those. In fact, I just met with a smart camp winner from here in London and we do those and then we host a global entrepreneur event. But we offer support for entrepreneurs throughout the year through this entrepreneur program so they can get mentoring. Think about IBM. I mean, we’ve acquired a lot of startups, right?
37:07 I mean, a lot of startups as part of our strategy is acquisition. And all those startups were entrepreneurs and so we have a breadth of great skill that used to leverage and mentor these entrepreneurs. And I think that value really shows through, and we do that globally. We had a partner in Africa called Modi, and they had this five-year plan. They wanted to go to two countries in five years.
37:32 They were growing rapidly in Africa. And they joined our program, and we were able, because we’re a global company, we were able to connect them up with different markets. They went to six, open six new markets for them, new countries, in the first year of their business. So we accelerated their business plan from five years down to a year and got them in six countries instead of five. So that’s kind of the power of, you know, working with a program like that.
37:56 And I know we have one as well as others as well that startups can join. You know, we’re talking lately a lot about women in tech. And you were probably one of the original women in tech. I’m guessing there weren’t that many women around. Back when I had covered wagons, probably not.
38:11 So we’re not that bad. But I’m curious, because you must have a perspective that other people don’t that that have been maybe around for five years or 10 years and they’re like, okay, this is the women’s at tech. But you’ve seen a trend going probably in different ways. What’s your read when you hear it talked about, how have you dealt about it through your career? Tell me.
38:28 Well, you know, we’ve seen a lot of progress, a lot more women in tech, but not enough women in tech, I would argue. And I would say that one of our particular focus areas are women entrepreneurs. I don’t know about London, but I would say globally around the world, We don’t have enough women startups, and we don’t have enough women entrepreneurs. So we in particular do some extra programs and extra things for women entrepreneurs. And we actually start early.
38:56 I talked about this shark tank phenomena that’s happening. We’re actually starting earlier and earlier. So if you look at the numbers, it’s really quite dismal for young girls in schools today who are taking tech classes who one day could start a tech startup or other startups. numbers have actually declined. As in lower, lower numbers of girls taking coding classes? Yeah, coding, yes. It’s been declining. In fact, I would tell you, believe it or not, per capita there are actually more girls in tech today in Cuba. That means, you know, young girls in high school that are, that really want to focus on math and computer science. In Cuba, per capita, than London or the United States. It’s really an issue. So in fact… Why decline do you think? You know as we talked to some younger girls they think that it’s you know if you’re gonna code or if you’re gonna be a startup you’re gonna be like working in a basement and there’s gonna be no light and you’re gonna be you know it’s not gonna be fun. Also there’s still a permeation of you know boys teasing girls when they’re good at math or science and so in fact one of my daughter’s got into an advanced math class and she’s like, I can’t do that because no boys will talk to me ever, right? At that teenage age. So we’re actually starting earlier. There’s a group called Girls Who Code and we’ve done a lot of work with them as well as a lot of other tech companies. Twitter’s
40:26 Been a big sponsor of them. Lots of startups are sponsoring them because we all see this dilemma that’s coming that there isn’t going to be enough diversity because a lot of startups, I mean well actually think about a startup, there’s probably not a startup that doesn’t need technology in some form or fashion, right? And so we do we do see this as an impact as we move forward. So while while we’ve seen at some of the levels that there are more women in tech, not enough women entrepreneurs, not enough young girls filling that pipeline. So we’ve done lots of things to try to you know to try to encourage that and I’d love for London to engage in that as well. You know girls who code is one effort. We do something called excite camps where we take girls in the summer for a week and we show them all the opportunities that exist with different types of start-up opportunities that they could go and the importance of technology and what that might be as they grow up. So when we do that around the world as well to really encourage young girls to grow up in this area. But I do, even today when we had 25 people at our round table only two shame on you London were women and so yeah I do think we need to do some more encouragement here as well how many women do you interview here a lot we’re on quite of a run lately aren’t we I think probably a quarter of our guests maybe a third of our guests are women probably a quarter yeah we’re on a
41:47 Bit of a run lately it’s something that’s definitely talked about here I don’t feel like there’s much of a stigma we had Claire from Code Club here which really encourages you know younger people to code and there are definitely some efforts where they’re really pushing that and getting women involved too. But I don’t know how we compare, I don’t know how we compare to the Valley and here. Yeah, I don’t know either. It seems, you go to sort of networking events around tech and it seems, it’s definitely male sort of heavy, but it doesn’t seem that outrageous.
42:20 And I think, I definitely think there’s an emphasis on it in London, there’s people are aware of it And they’re trying to encourage not only girls, but also women, right? It’s just because you’re in your 30s, we always say, easy at Google, they have a mothers in sort of tech thing. Yeah. Like Tuesday, it’s mothers, mothers in tech, and they can come in and get some hours and yeah. Don’t have to be 13, start to code.
42:44 You can be 35 and have two kids and start to code. Yeah, that’s true. Well, and then I love the event I’m going to tomorrow, Entrepreneur Country with Julie Meyer. I mean, she is a VC. She runs Entrepreneur Country, she’s a great role model here in London for folks who are looking to do this and I know has a lot of efforts around women in tech as well.
43:03 I’ll ask you a question. What advice do you have for some people leaving university? You know, we’ve always talked about it because we spend some time in banking and we’re always thinking maybe you should go to a large company and spend some time there, learn the ropes before you think about going somewhere else. We’ve also bumped into the 21-year-old that’s like, I’m a startup entrepreneur and you’re like, are you? And so, I was curious, when we get into grumpy old man votes, but I was curious what you think.
43:31 You know, you’ve seen the corporate side. Do you think it’s important to say go out of college and spend a few years at an IBM or a big company and then go your separate way? What are your thoughts? You know, I see, you know, if you’re thinking about starting a company, I mean, anybody can start a company. I think when you look at companies that reach that growth and scale, they all look for some experience.
43:52 So I think it’s really advisable if you get some experience at a company, doesn’t have to be as big as an IBM, but I do think it’s important to get some of that experience because I think then when you come up with that great idea and you have your startup, you’ve got that scalability in mind and you know how to scale your company. So you’re not going to be one of those startups that comes in and you’re the founder, but then when you start to grow, an external CEO comes in and takes your place, right? We’ve all seen that happen before.
44:20 So I do believe that if you get some of that experience, I even think business school, you said you came here for business school, I think business school is a great, another training ground, right? It gets you inundated to lots of different case studies and you don’t have to live through all the hardships, but you learn from those hardships. I think those things are really valuable for entrepreneurs. And you went from Duke, you went straight to business school, is that right?
44:41 I did. Well, I was, Harvard doesn’t allow you to go straight. I’m required to work for a year, so I worked for a year at IBM and then I went on to Harvard. Okay. Was there a rush to get in there?
44:50 Want to get the business school aspect? I did and if I had to do over again I would have probably worked for longer because I think a lot of the lessons I was pretty naive about it and Harvard typically likes to take you after five years they don’t really actually accept many people right out of school and so I thought it was a really cool thing I was gonna work for a year and go but if I had it to do over again I would have worked for five and then gone back the problem is just a nurture right when you really do it once you work for five years yeah yeah I went I had quite a bit of experience and I feel you know I could I can really take a case study and take what I learned in class and you you know reflected on my own experience which was very helpful in understanding things and how to improve I almost went straight to the Sloan School of Business after my undergrad and I remember when you’re 21 22 you don’t want to hear to wait wait they’re like go spend two years on Wall Street like two years you You don’t want to.
45:49 You don’t want to. I need my fancy car and you’re so materialistic at that age, I find. So immediately you just want to, let’s get school out of here and get the big paycheck. But to you, you’re in this undergraduate mode where you’re like, oh, it’s just another year of learning. But I think the business school degree is really a reflection on the mistakes you’ve made and then really applying that, oh, I should have done that instead.
46:09 And I don’t think you have that experience. I agree. I agree. I would say wait if you can. Yeah.
46:15 Okay. To anyone listening, there you go. Everyone on the show, a few questions at the end, I’m going to hit you with those. If you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Sandy Carter and give that young lady a bit of advice, what would you tell her? Wow, that’s a good question.
46:28 I would say, well first I would say, don’t go straight away to business school because that’s what I did. Don’t buy that red sports car right away, wait for a little while. I think the other thing that I would say is, you know, to be more confident right away. Not cocky. I don’t mean cocky, but I mean more confident in your ideas.
46:54 You know, when you’re younger, sometimes you think that you have a great idea and then someone says, no, that’s not right. You kind of back down because you think, wow, they’ve got like five years of experience and you don’t. But I think sometimes when you’re coming at something with a brand new, fresh approach that if you really push, the majority is not always right and you need to have more confidence with your ideas. That would be one of the things that I would say is really go out in that limb and push and take more risks.
47:21 Do you see this with the entrepreneurs or with your daughters or is this you seeing yourself in the past? Yeah, you know, the other thing that it is is I just was reading a couple books about successful leadership leaders, right? And one of the things almost all of them said, which I thought was interesting, was that they wish they had taken more risks earlier on. That they had to learn to take risks, they had to become more confident in themselves. And as I look back and really think about it, I think there might have been some risks that I would have taken that may have accelerated some of the things I wanted to do more quickly.
47:56 And that doesn’t mean taking uncalculated risk or, you know, when you are wrong, admitting that you’re wrong. You need to do that. Sometimes there’s really not a right or wrong. There’s multiple ways to approach something and sometimes just that extra push can get you over the line. We hear this a lot, don’t we?
48:13 Do you really? Yeah. We hear a lot of people saying, you know, make those, you know, make those mistakes and take those chances when you’re young. A lot of times before you have the overhead of the family and, you know, and in retrospect, you really could have done anything at that point. Unfortunately, when you’re there, sometimes it feels like your next decision is the biggest decision of your life.
48:31 But I do believe, even though I would have waited on going to business school, I would actually repeat that. I really think that was very helpful to me. And going to a business school that taught case study, I really like that a lot too. Not repeating the lectures, but really doing cases and having real companies come in. If I had to give myself advice, it would be repeat that.
48:53 Go back to business school, take that shot, because I do think that that has really enhanced my career. It gave me a great, strong group of people to network with. We actually have a Harvard reunion coming up. There’s some incredible folks who’ve done incredible things, and I still know them. We learn from each other.
49:11 And I just think it was an invaluable experience that I would not want to trade. Yeah, that’s a special place. I mean, they’re known for that case study mentality. I’ve heard the network is the most valuable thing about Harvard. Maybe it isn’t the most, but there it is.
49:23 One of the most, for sure, yeah. And I do think that one may be the other piece of advice would give people is to spend more time on networking and relationships. You know sometimes when you’re young you’re like well I’ve just got to get this piece of work done or I got to do that. But what you learn when you when you get older is that those relationships were the most valuable thing right? Not necessarily I you know killed that project or I did that great presentation or won that client but it was the relationships that you develop with the client. It was the relationship you develop with your peers that that turns out to be the most important thing. I was telling a young guy that and working at one of the YouTube multi-channel networks here in London.
49:59 I told him the same thing that I said, all those people around you, you’re going to be doing business with a large percent of them for the next 20 years. And he just had this glazed look inside. He was like, yeah, okay, whatever. I got to go to this other startup. And I was like, no, really, you’re going to bump back into them and they’re going to have new companies and then you might work for them.
50:15 You might hire them. Like, all this is going to change. And they’re like, The world seems big, but it can get really, really small. It’s true, right? It really is.
50:23 Especially within a certain industry or a certain city, it’s amazing how many people you bump into, even just around here, or I’m in coffee and I still bump into people I have seen before in the tech space or just never burn a bridge and always think about fostering relationships. Just to finish up the advice questions, best advice you’ve ever received, could be business, could be personal. Best advice I’ve ever received. I would say the best advice I ever received would be that your family is most important and to prioritize your family.
51:01 And I think that, especially if you’re really driven, I’m very driven, I’m very type A, it’s very easy to get engaged and involved in doing your work. I love my customers, I love what I do. And then to not give the right priority to your children, I have two daughters, and your family, I have a husband and just my extended family and friends. I think that was probably the best advice someone gave me was, make sure you’re doing the care and feeding then because one day that will be what you have left.
51:34 People tell you when you have kids, they’re like, it goes by like this and you’re like, yeah, right, I’ve got these kids for like forever, right? But now I’ve got a daughter that’s 16, I can’t believe it and it goes by so fast. So those moments are so important. So one piece of advice I got in making sure that you make that real was bringing your kids with you on business trips. And I know some people think, oh, that’s just crazy.
52:00 But it’s done a couple things for my daughters. I bring them, I brought one of my daughters to a conference called BlogHer. It’s the largest women’s blogging conference in the world. It helped us to bond. It helped her to see me in a work environment.
52:14 But it also, she actually won her blogging contest at school and she said she was motivated by seeing these businesses started by these women that were just bloggers. My other daughter, I took out to California with me, this is the unfortunate thing, is that now she wants to go live in California. But I took her out to Silicon Valley and San Francisco where all the startup things were happening and she felt the energy, she caught the bug. And so now, not long did she get to go with me, I got to spend time with her, but she saw, you know, why I was so excited about working with entrepreneurs and startups, and now she wants to be one.
52:48 And so a lot of people will say, you know, especially the school system, don’t take your kids out of school, they’re gonna miss three days. Or, you know, it’s unprofessional for you to take your child with you. Especially being a woman, that’s just the worst thing. But everybody, everywhere I’ve taken my kids to conferences or to, even to clients, I asked permission to take my daughters to clients. They’ve really embraced it.
53:10 It’s been great for my kids, And really a lot of the people around me have started doing the same thing. So I think it’s great. You should really think about it and consider it. Powerful. Probably makes a great impression on the client too, right?
53:22 No, it’s true. I don’t know if back where, you know, in Toronto, you have, you like, you take your kid to school day, but it’s like one day every year where you would go to, you know, your dad or your uncle or your mom’s, you know, office, but it’s like, you know, to do that more often, I think that’s phenomenal. Especially in your field is so relevant to, You know, you have a really cool job. Yeah, I do. I do.
53:45 And to get them, you know, it’s like, you know, they’ve traveled to London. One of my, you know, my daughters would come to, I mean, they’ve, they’ve traveled internationally. So they don’t just have a, you know, they’re not US centric. They have a global perspective on the world. They don’t just think about school.
53:59 They think about, you know, work someday. I think it really is motivating to them. Yeah. So I would encourage people to do that as well. Do you think the tech sector is getting better about separating work time from personal time?
54:09 Do you think they’re going that way? or is it always, no, okay. I don’t, I think it’s just all mixed together, right? And I actually like it better. I think it gives you more flexibility.
54:18 I have my phone with me. I happen to be an iPhone user. You know, I can get to everything I need. I can do FaceTime on my phone. I can do meetings.
54:26 I can get to what I need to do. And therefore, it gives me time to go to my daughter’s volleyball game, right? Because I’m not really out of touch. But I think the worlds are merging, especially with the millennials coming up. You know, they wanna be flexible.
54:41 When they wanna be flexible, they wanna take time. And I think the technology helps us to do that. Right, well said. Last part of that question is to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us somewhere in the world at one of these cities you’re talking about that are coming up the curve in tech, what advice do you give to them if they wanna get involved, if they wanna be part of a tech startup? What do you tell them?
54:59 Start now. I mean, start by, you know, depending on how young you are, you know, do a lemonade stand. see what business is really like. You know, I started my daughter, she wants to be, she wants to be a photographer, selling pictures online. I mean, there’s so many different places you can create crafts online.
55:17 You know, experience it, go ahead and get started. There are also a lot of organizations that have youth groups, so like TIE, I don’t know if you guys have TIE here, it’s an international organization, it’s one of the largest entrepreneur organizations. They have what they call TIE Youth and they do youth projects and youth pitches and all kinds of, so go ahead and get involved, Get engaged and experience it to see if that’s really what you wanna do and what your passion and your focus might be on.
55:44 Don’t wait. Don’t wait, very good advice. Sandy, thank you so much for coming. Thanks for the insights. If people want to find out more about this report or get the report or contact you or use your cloud services, how do they do it?
55:56 Well, you can always go to ibm.com. We have a whole feature today on cloud. If you do hashtag IBMBTT and request the report, we’ll send you the link, you can get the report for free. We have a bunch of digital assets on it, so you can use them all digitally. And then if you have a question for me, my Twitter ID is Sandy underscore Carter, and I’d love to hear from everybody.
56:20 Tweet away. Tweet, tweet, tweet. Tweet, tweet, tweet. Fantastic. This is a great show.
56:25 It’s such a nice change for us to get a different perspective and someone that’s not in the trenches here trying to create something but someone on a different level. Sandy, thanks so much for being here. Thank you. It’s nice to have a Texan in the house. There we go.
56:38 Look, I’m horned. If you’re watching us live, thanks for doing that. If you want to listen to us, we’re on iTunes, so you can click on that, and you can have it downloaded free and walk around with that. Somebody said he was mowing the lawn the other day and was listening to one of our shows. That’s all good, and we would love any guest suggestions, so keep that coming.
56:56 If you want to send us an email, it’s hello at siliconreal.com. And that’s it, right? That’s it. What can I say? Our tagline is, it’s about the people.
57:04 Sandy, you’re one of them. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you. Let’s go get some coffee now. There we go.
57:09 There you go. All right. All the best. Thanks.
