Meeting Title: Operations Role Sync Date: 2025-12-11 Meeting participants: Clarence Stone, Lauren Ford, Uttam Kumaran
WEBVTT
1 00:00:54.390 ⇒ 00:00:56.230 Lauren Ford: Hi, Clarence, how are you?
2 00:00:56.360 ⇒ 00:00:57.709 Clarence Stone: Hello, hello!
3 00:00:57.710 ⇒ 00:01:00.970 Lauren Ford: One second, I’m gonna get my camera working and all that.
4 00:01:01.190 ⇒ 00:01:04.489 Lauren Ford: Yeah, I know, I just, like, ran in from…
5 00:01:04.709 ⇒ 00:01:12.509 Lauren Ford: from letting my dog out to… to… to go potty, as he’s a year old, so that’s a big part of our lives. Hey, Utom!
6 00:01:12.510 ⇒ 00:01:13.450 Uttam Kumaran: How are you?
7 00:01:13.720 ⇒ 00:01:21.229 Lauren Ford: Good, I was just saying, I was a little frazzled because my dog was, like, decided to beg to go out 3 seconds before this call.
8 00:01:21.380 ⇒ 00:01:27.210 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, no problem. Yeah, my, my dog, who you’ll see here, is doing the same thing.
9 00:01:27.210 ⇒ 00:01:28.510 Lauren Ford: They love it, right?
10 00:01:28.510 ⇒ 00:01:31.409 Uttam Kumaran: I’m gonna let you out right now!
11 00:01:31.410 ⇒ 00:01:33.629 Lauren Ford: What a cutie!
12 00:01:34.110 ⇒ 00:01:36.260 Uttam Kumaran: Then he races out. See ya!
13 00:01:36.260 ⇒ 00:01:36.650 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
14 00:01:37.390 ⇒ 00:01:44.100 Lauren Ford: Have a good time. See, mine won’t do that yet. He’s dependent on me. He can’t possibly go potty without me.
15 00:01:44.100 ⇒ 00:01:48.830 Uttam Kumaran: This one was, he just used to live in an apartment, he’s my girlfriend’s dog.
16 00:01:48.830 ⇒ 00:01:49.550 Lauren Ford: Aww!
17 00:01:49.550 ⇒ 00:02:03.880 Uttam Kumaran: And so he never, like, had a lot of place to roam, so for the first 6 months, like, after they moved in, I would leave the door open, but he, like, wouldn’t go outside. And then now, he… now he just goes outside and, like, will just sit out here.
18 00:02:04.180 ⇒ 00:02:07.710 Lauren Ford: Aww! He’s like, it’s nice.
19 00:02:07.710 ⇒ 00:02:10.740 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, he’s not used to just having space to roam, but…
20 00:02:11.640 ⇒ 00:02:14.539 Lauren Ford: That’s awesome. Clarence, where are you based out of again?
21 00:02:15.530 ⇒ 00:02:16.700 Clarence Stone: San Antonio.
22 00:02:16.700 ⇒ 00:02:18.900 Lauren Ford: Oh, cool! Okay, awesome!
23 00:02:19.610 ⇒ 00:02:20.220 Lauren Ford: Nice.
24 00:02:20.220 ⇒ 00:02:23.870 Clarence Stone: Not too far from Utah. How about you? Where are you based out of, Lauren.
25 00:02:24.400 ⇒ 00:02:26.270 Lauren Ford: Asheville, North Carolina.
26 00:02:26.270 ⇒ 00:02:27.170 Clarence Stone: Oh, cool!
27 00:02:27.170 ⇒ 00:02:31.869 Lauren Ford: Yeah, so, I moved back. I was in New York for 15 years, and then.
28 00:02:32.270 ⇒ 00:02:33.339 Lauren Ford: just, like, posts
29 00:02:33.660 ⇒ 00:02:40.880 Lauren Ford: post all the things, so I was like, okay, I just want to be closer to my folks, and a little slower pace. I do miss it, but, you know.
30 00:02:40.880 ⇒ 00:02:46.960 Clarence Stone: I don’t miss it at all. I used to be in New York as well. I grew up there, too.
31 00:02:46.960 ⇒ 00:02:56.089 Lauren Ford: Oh, that’s why. See, I feel like if you grew up there, sometimes it’s like, no more. No more pace. Although you do have a Monster Energy drink, so there you go. That’s some pace.
32 00:02:56.090 ⇒ 00:02:57.760 Clarence Stone: It’s one of those days.
33 00:02:57.760 ⇒ 00:02:59.110 Lauren Ford: Oh, boy!
34 00:02:59.110 ⇒ 00:03:01.730 Uttam Kumaran: Clarence, I didn’t know you were big energy drinks.
35 00:03:01.730 ⇒ 00:03:03.339 Clarence Stone: Oh, yeah, yeah.
36 00:03:06.070 ⇒ 00:03:14.000 Clarence Stone: Everybody’s got a… everybody’s got a fatal flaw, you know? I’ve got a lot of vices. I got some LaCroix, too, at the table.
37 00:03:14.000 ⇒ 00:03:17.880 Lauren Ford: They don’t really compare. They don’t count, they don’t count.
38 00:03:20.510 ⇒ 00:03:30.710 Lauren Ford: Sorry, guys, I’m just making some coffee, but I am listening. Oh, you’re totally fine. At some point, I may have to… or my dog may join us in my lap, because he’s, like…
39 00:03:31.020 ⇒ 00:03:34.139 Lauren Ford: begging right now, but we’ll see. He’s, right now, he’s jumped away.
40 00:03:34.460 ⇒ 00:03:35.520 Uttam Kumaran: No problem.
41 00:03:35.520 ⇒ 00:03:38.739 Lauren Ford: Oh… And then, how did you guys get connected?
42 00:03:40.450 ⇒ 00:03:42.070 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, Clarence, can you tell the story?
43 00:03:42.070 ⇒ 00:03:42.550 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
44 00:03:42.550 ⇒ 00:03:43.639 Uttam Kumaran: Finish this up, yeah.
45 00:03:43.640 ⇒ 00:03:49.379 Clarence Stone: So, I guess from my side, when I got to San Antonio, I… I was…
46 00:03:49.380 ⇒ 00:03:52.380 Lauren Ford: previously a CrossFit coach, so… Oh!
47 00:03:52.380 ⇒ 00:04:12.470 Clarence Stone: I joined a CrossFit gym, just to make friends, and, you know, I happen to be still certified, and the owner said, hey, can you take over and do some coaching for us? We’re just kind of, like, you know, in a bind for some coaches. So I started coaching, and one of the people that would come to my regular training block was John Metcalf.
48 00:04:12.470 ⇒ 00:04:16.540 Clarence Stone: who happened to end up, connecting me with you, Tom.
49 00:04:16.540 ⇒ 00:04:23.240 Clarence Stone: John McCalf has his own, startup, and he’s in Austin all the time. I think he eventually moved to Austin.
50 00:04:23.430 ⇒ 00:04:39.359 Clarence Stone: And, what he was doing when he first got there was just connecting people he knew on LinkedIn. So, the group chat is still there. There’s, like, a group chat with, like, 8 or 9 different people he’s super… John’s really friendly with that he just threw into a group chat, so that’s how I met you, Tom.
51 00:04:40.070 ⇒ 00:04:42.779 Lauren Ford: I love that! That’s so awesome!
52 00:04:43.710 ⇒ 00:04:54.569 Uttam Kumaran: I think I CC’d you and Rico on an email, but John runs a company that is actually gonna help us get devices for people.
53 00:04:54.780 ⇒ 00:04:57.390 Lauren Ford: No, that’s the leasing company! I was wondering.
54 00:04:57.390 ⇒ 00:04:57.810 Uttam Kumaran: That is…
55 00:04:57.810 ⇒ 00:04:58.190 Lauren Ford: You…
56 00:04:58.190 ⇒ 00:05:01.710 Uttam Kumaran: So that is John… that is the… that is John Metcalf. I…
57 00:05:01.710 ⇒ 00:05:02.820 Lauren Ford: So cool!
58 00:05:02.820 ⇒ 00:05:08.750 Uttam Kumaran: I know him through another friend that I just happened to meet,
59 00:05:09.150 ⇒ 00:05:20.290 Uttam Kumaran: just randomly at a conference here, and then I met John at, like, one of his events, and then I was like, yeah, we’re sort of small now, but, like.
60 00:05:20.290 ⇒ 00:05:32.680 Uttam Kumaran: give me a year, year and a half, I’ll probably call you for devices, and then… they weren’t in, sort of, B2B before, and then recently they started doing, like, B2B, and I was like.
61 00:05:32.930 ⇒ 00:05:37.780 Uttam Kumaran: hey, we… like, I called him the other day, and I was like, we need devices, probably soon. And I was like.
62 00:05:37.780 ⇒ 00:05:38.190 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
63 00:05:38.190 ⇒ 00:05:51.130 Uttam Kumaran: But I told him, I said, I’m not gonna be figuring this out, but I think we could leverage you guys, because it’ll end up being way cheaper than us buying tons and tons of devices, you know, and it’s a friend’s company, so I was like, cool, yeah.
64 00:05:51.130 ⇒ 00:05:52.240 Lauren Ford: That’s awesome.
65 00:05:52.240 ⇒ 00:05:52.680 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
66 00:05:52.680 ⇒ 00:05:57.310 Lauren Ford: At least for U.S, I’ll never get over how crazy it was to try to just…
67 00:05:57.420 ⇒ 00:06:06.879 Lauren Ford: ship a, ship a laptop to India was, like, the most insane thing. I was like, okay, and we’re not doing this ever again. That was flow code.
68 00:06:06.880 ⇒ 00:06:11.480 Uttam Kumaran: So these guys said they can do… they said they could do wherever. I said, look.
69 00:06:11.950 ⇒ 00:06:18.010 Uttam Kumaran: let’s, like… price matters, you tell me what you guys can do, I don’t care, like, whatever.
70 00:06:18.010 ⇒ 00:06:18.780 Lauren Ford: Yeah!
71 00:06:18.780 ⇒ 00:06:19.480 Uttam Kumaran: That’s amazing.
72 00:06:19.480 ⇒ 00:06:21.110 Lauren Ford: That’s amazing!
73 00:06:21.110 ⇒ 00:06:28.059 Uttam Kumaran: So we will end up doing some business with him, but I do owe him, I do owe him business for introducing me to Clarence, so this was…
74 00:06:28.480 ⇒ 00:06:31.980 Uttam Kumaran: fruitful introduction. Fantastic!
75 00:06:32.560 ⇒ 00:06:41.990 Uttam Kumaran: Cool, well, I think both of you guys have a lot of the context. I’m sort of curious, Lauren, just to hear about, like.
76 00:06:42.240 ⇒ 00:06:49.649 Uttam Kumaran: you’ve now been sort of, like, we’ve been… I feel like, I don’t know when I reached out to you, maybe it was… I feel like it was, like, a month ago or so, it could have been.
77 00:06:49.650 ⇒ 00:06:50.080 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
78 00:06:50.080 ⇒ 00:06:58.879 Uttam Kumaran: whenever, but I, I’m just curious, like, what you think, like, how you feel when I first reached out to, like, now that you’ve seen a lot of the company, you’ve…
79 00:06:58.880 ⇒ 00:07:10.089 Uttam Kumaran: you’ve… you’ve met, sort of, the cast of characters, including Robert, I know people internally, you talked to Vishnu, one of our advisors. Yeah, I’m just interested in, like, a reflection of, like.
80 00:07:10.190 ⇒ 00:07:18.300 Uttam Kumaran: you know, since you’ve… since you’ve seen things, like, what do you… what do you think? Both can be from the operations angle, but also just, like, you know, just in general.
81 00:07:18.600 ⇒ 00:07:24.749 Lauren Ford: Absolutely! I mean, I think it’s just so exciting. Like, you guys are clearly at, like, such a…
82 00:07:24.800 ⇒ 00:07:38.920 Lauren Ford: precipice of, like, momentum, right? Like, I mean, it’s a scary moment, of course, because now you have to, like, make that next big leap, but it just seems like everything’s headed in such a great direction. You already have, like.
83 00:07:39.200 ⇒ 00:07:50.349 Lauren Ford: a good, you know, a good market fit with the services you’re offering, clearly, or you wouldn’t be where you are, and I think it’s just, like, it’s exciting to see, like, the next…
84 00:07:50.690 ⇒ 00:07:54.789 Lauren Ford: The next plateau of, like, building something,
85 00:07:55.910 ⇒ 00:08:12.819 Lauren Ford: like, with that more long-term in mind. I… I… yeah, I’ve just been really excited to see it all, and I was honestly just kind of… I was sad when I started my role at my current company, because I sort of had to drop off right as I was starting to get a sense of what it is, but I mean…
86 00:08:12.930 ⇒ 00:08:30.630 Lauren Ford: I… I try to, like, kind of check in throughout the day on Slack, and it’s just… I’m just like, okay, there’s so much going on, it’s exciting, it seems like there’s… there’s… there’s so much more to tune into that I haven’t had the bandwidth to… to pick up on, but it… I’m just… I’m excited to see…
87 00:08:30.750 ⇒ 00:08:35.149 Lauren Ford: The next steps and your next chapter, it seems like it’s gonna be really, really big.
88 00:08:35.740 ⇒ 00:08:51.229 Uttam Kumaran: No, I appreciate that, and I also think, you know, both of us have a shared experience, Clarence, in working at Flowcode, which was this, you know, pretty fast-growing startup in New York, but this place was fast, but, like, also kind of, like.
89 00:08:51.500 ⇒ 00:09:04.590 Uttam Kumaran: a lot of, like, fear-based tactics, like, a lot of stress for people reasons, and I feel like we… we’ve… I’ve brought a lot of the urgency that I learned from places like that here, but really not any of the, like.
90 00:09:04.710 ⇒ 00:09:12.790 Uttam Kumaran: or else, like, type stuff, or be like, oh, I’m just gonna kind of sow chaos. Like, I… I feel like…
91 00:09:12.920 ⇒ 00:09:18.250 Uttam Kumaran: people are surprised at how fast we move, and how flexible we are. Like, I don’t know…
92 00:09:18.490 ⇒ 00:09:36.909 Uttam Kumaran: you know, even when you were like, look, I think I’m not going to be able to support, I said, well, just stick around, and just see what you can do, whatever. I’ll just see, because I know I want… I wanted you to still be able to get a sense of, like, what the company does, and our growth, and… and we can use all the help we can get, and so…
93 00:09:36.910 ⇒ 00:09:51.850 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I mean, I’m really glad to hear that. I think the next chapter for us revolves, like… I mean, it did, you know, a lot during this period, but it is increasingly gonna be, like, about people.
94 00:09:51.850 ⇒ 00:10:11.639 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t think we… I think we will do a lot of innovation on the business model side. I think we will innovate a lot on how we execute our services, but nothing, you know, nothing can get done without hands on keyboard in our… in our business, and… Yeah.
95 00:10:11.700 ⇒ 00:10:19.200 Uttam Kumaran: The smarter people we can get, the longer they stick around, and the more skilled they are, and the faster they learn is…
96 00:10:19.270 ⇒ 00:10:34.320 Uttam Kumaran: is that that’s all… that’s our product. And so, you know, one thing that Clarence and I are working on, and, you know, I think is a big highlight of sort of, like, you know, what… what we hope that someone who takes over in this world, you know, works on, is just, like, how do we…
97 00:10:34.570 ⇒ 00:10:44.770 Uttam Kumaran: get people ramped up, how do we keep people excited, and make this, like, an awesome place to work? And in turn, we’ll, you know, make it a better service for our customers, we can charge more, like, it’s a really…
98 00:10:44.930 ⇒ 00:10:50.190 Uttam Kumaran: you know, nice feedback loop. So, that’s, like, that’s what’s on… on my mind.
99 00:10:50.580 ⇒ 00:10:51.680 Lauren Ford: Yeah, completely.
100 00:10:53.490 ⇒ 00:10:54.700 Uttam Kumaran: Cool, I mean, I…
101 00:10:54.700 ⇒ 00:10:55.080 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
102 00:10:55.080 ⇒ 00:10:56.289 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
103 00:10:56.430 ⇒ 00:11:03.510 Lauren Ford: I was just gonna say, you even said, like, the more you can get people to stay, they just, their value just…
104 00:11:03.900 ⇒ 00:11:04.980 Uttam Kumaran: triples…
105 00:11:04.980 ⇒ 00:11:06.959 Lauren Ford: Yeah, I mean, I saw that, so it makes sense.
106 00:11:06.960 ⇒ 00:11:10.069 Uttam Kumaran: I think there’s a few… only a few business models where they’re, like.
107 00:11:10.430 ⇒ 00:11:19.689 Uttam Kumaran: good with people leaving. Like, I don’t have any… I don’t hire people for them to leave. I actually am very clear with, like, this is a tech… you… this is a tech company, you may be used to, like.
108 00:11:19.720 ⇒ 00:11:21.980 Uttam Kumaran: Joining and leaving in 2 years, but…
109 00:11:21.990 ⇒ 00:11:41.080 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t want to hire you if you’re about to do that, because what’s the point? Like, I’m gonna give you all the answers, and then at least tell me, even if your price goes up, just tell me, and I’ll see what I can do. But the churn that exists in the technology industry, like, 2 years and leaving is, like, not a company. This is not, like, a revolving door.
110 00:11:41.130 ⇒ 00:11:44.129 Lauren Ford: I would like everybody to stick around, and then we all…
111 00:11:44.130 ⇒ 00:11:45.969 Uttam Kumaran: you know, grow this thing, so…
112 00:11:46.270 ⇒ 00:11:56.299 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I mean, I feel really, really clearly about that, but it takes a lot of work. Like, similarly, like, for our clients, we talk a lot about, hey, like, you know, you…
113 00:11:56.650 ⇒ 00:12:11.519 Uttam Kumaran: you sell a customer, but then you need to work to also keep them, and I think it’s very similar, you know, with our employees. I think we still do a great job, but we can always do better, and I think
114 00:12:11.610 ⇒ 00:12:27.079 Uttam Kumaran: We’re thinking about also how we can do more with less, but not in sort of, like, a frugality way, but more about… the more people you have and the more people that are involved in things doesn’t necessarily lead to better outcomes for… for clients, and so…
115 00:12:27.120 ⇒ 00:12:45.130 Uttam Kumaran: we’re… we’re just… I don’t know, Clarence, in particular, is working on sort of a little bit of, like, what is the new model for how we deliver services for clients, and you know, also, that’s sort of the first objective, and then also thinking about, okay, what is, like, the operating crew for the company, so…
116 00:12:45.540 ⇒ 00:12:46.230 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
117 00:12:49.400 ⇒ 00:12:56.409 Uttam Kumaran: Cool, so I don’t know, Clarence, where you’d like to start, like, if you… I think the goal for this is, I would like to just…
118 00:12:56.410 ⇒ 00:12:59.860 Clarence Stone: How the three of us work to define, you know, what…
119 00:12:59.860 ⇒ 00:13:08.789 Uttam Kumaran: like, what the goal of, like, the operations lead, or even figuring out, like, a title, you know, I… I know…
120 00:13:09.130 ⇒ 00:13:09.920 Uttam Kumaran: what…
121 00:13:09.940 ⇒ 00:13:29.700 Uttam Kumaran: operations is now, like, it’s because it’s basically just me and Rico, and so I do a lot of, you know, operations stuff. I think I’m starting… trying to think about, like, what is a fair expectation for someone in this role, what are the responsibilities, like, what are the metrics, but also how to enable
122 00:13:29.700 ⇒ 00:13:46.670 Uttam Kumaran: them to succeed. And of course, Lauren, going to this whole conversation, we’re hoping that you are that person, like, and we want to make an offer, and we want, you know, to define the role and success with you. And yeah, that’s sort of the impetus for this, you know, conversation.
123 00:13:47.250 ⇒ 00:14:02.619 Lauren Ford: That’s awesome. Well, I’m stoked. I’m definitely, like… I’ve been telling people about how excited I am for this potential opportunity, so I’m… I’m all ears. I’m ready to… ready to dive in and figure out how we… how we’re gonna set it up.
124 00:14:04.190 ⇒ 00:14:07.760 Uttam Kumaran: Awesome. I don’t know, Clarence, do you wanna… any thoughts from… from your side?
125 00:14:08.300 ⇒ 00:14:13.129 Clarence Stone: Yeah, so I guess, hang on, maybe…
126 00:14:14.690 ⇒ 00:14:18.490 Clarence Stone: I’m trying to see where I can start injecting, because, like.
127 00:14:18.490 ⇒ 00:14:43.390 Clarence Stone: It’s been a flow of conversations, and the slide deck is already getting super long, but I think I know where I can just help jump in. So, when I first started interviewing people at Brainforge, what I really noticed, and the reason why Brainforge is super successful in this marketplace is, externally, it’s being presented as a consulting solution, or a service that solves a very specific
128 00:14:43.390 ⇒ 00:15:06.000 Clarence Stone: problem, right? The workflow that you, Tom, and team do when they’re supporting those clients has a very consulting feel. And that’s really great, because clients have, like, a level of expectation, because they already work with other vendors, right? So, externally to them, it’s really no different. But the secret, really, is this internal operations is lined up around
129 00:15:06.000 ⇒ 00:15:22.120 Clarence Stone: a product-based organization. And that’s great, too, because product-based organizations make really darn good products, right? Me coming from consulting, I know we don’t make the greatest products, right? So, this is a really niche fusion of, like, these two operational models, one externally, you know, facing
130 00:15:22.220 ⇒ 00:15:25.890 Clarence Stone: Where, it’s really familiar to customers, and…
131 00:15:25.890 ⇒ 00:15:49.310 Clarence Stone: you know, operationally, internally, you know, UTOM’s hired a lot of product, you know, organization-based people, so they know how to operate in that. But connecting those two things together, is a gap. There are some difficulties. And the way I kind of broke it down is, like, if you think about a product organization versus a consulting organization, a consulting organization, you know, top bubble is that overall relationship with the client.
132 00:15:49.310 ⇒ 00:16:06.030 Clarence Stone: Right? In a product realization, it’s the CEO’s vision, right? You go one layer down, it’s like project timelines and objectives on, you know, the consulting side, and then the product owner’s direction, right? There’s, like, these product verticals that end up getting built out in places like Google or Meta.
133 00:16:06.110 ⇒ 00:16:10.929 Clarence Stone: And then, you know, in that lower level, it’s, what do you need to get done today, right? And…
134 00:16:11.110 ⇒ 00:16:29.059 Clarence Stone: when you get to that lower level, you understand what you need to do, because if you look up, you see the whole stack, and you see the reason of why, when, where, you know, how we do things. Now, here’s a unique problem for Brainforger, like, the challenge that we want to make sure that we’re covering ourselves in. In a product organization, there’s only one set of these bubbles.
135 00:16:29.690 ⇒ 00:16:47.009 Clarence Stone: Right? But in… at Brainforge, as consultants, there’s many companies and many bubbles, right? So the team is kind of holding together all of these complex bubbles, right? In comparison to, you know, a different environment where you just only have to have one.
136 00:16:47.040 ⇒ 00:16:57.589 Clarence Stone: Right, so I wanted to create a solution that, you know, responds to this challenge specifically. And, I put together, you know, some sort of, like.
137 00:16:57.880 ⇒ 00:17:21.389 Clarence Stone: design rules on how we should implement those changes, right? It’s like, first off, like, first principles, you know, observe, identify, and then shape. Like, I want to validate what I’m seeing first before I propose any changes. And we want to use AI whenever possible, so instead of creating a new role, like, let’s say, hey, what tools can we build out to smooth out these process gaps, right?
138 00:17:21.390 ⇒ 00:17:24.849 Clarence Stone: And then, like, if we’re gonna build something today, let’s…
139 00:17:24.849 ⇒ 00:17:45.380 Clarence Stone: focus on how it’s gonna work in the future as well, right? So it’s like, I don’t want to create a solution that just solves a problem for the next 6 months, and then there’s more growth, and then, okay, we gotta do another op model change, right? And all of these things are kind of inspired by a lot of principles, you know, in leadership and management that I think I personally, you know, really love. Like, one.
140 00:17:45.380 ⇒ 00:17:54.000 Clarence Stone: skin in the game, right? We’re gonna start asking people to do more things, right? So we need to make sure that we make the incentives clear, that this isn’t just us
141 00:17:54.000 ⇒ 00:18:17.589 Clarence Stone: you know, asking you to do more things, this is also, you know, gonna be a benefit to you in X, Y, and Z ways. Increased collision. One of the biggest pieces of feedback I get is, like, people saying, like, hey, I don’t know who to talk to who. I don’t even know who other people outside of, you know, the pods that I work in are, unless I see them at coffee, which is great, like, Tom started doing that, coffee hour, or, like, morning stand-up.
142 00:18:17.590 ⇒ 00:18:18.390 Clarence Stone: Right?
143 00:18:18.390 ⇒ 00:18:26.219 Clarence Stone: And then, that eventually gets to this level of everybody, somebody, anybody, nobody. Because, like, you don’t actually know
144 00:18:26.510 ⇒ 00:18:42.580 Clarence Stone: who’s kind of in charge of something beyond you, Tom, and Robert? Like, they become the first point of contact, right? And now, like, they’re stressed trying to handle all of these bubbles, right? So, you know, the goal is we’ve got to define
145 00:18:42.580 ⇒ 00:18:53.610 Clarence Stone: somebody for a lot of these things. And, lastly, just because we’re defining additional, like, responsibility roles, I don’t want it to be new, entirely, like, like.
146 00:18:53.720 ⇒ 00:19:15.719 Clarence Stone: new entire, like, team members that we’re hiring, right? Because I… by the way, like, one of the best books, and I think you, Tom, already mentioned it, these were written back in the 60s. This developer wrote it. It’s like 32 pages long, really quick read. The whole premise of it was him making diagrams proving to you that if there’s a really tough technical challenge, you can’t keep throwing people at it.
147 00:19:16.070 ⇒ 00:19:16.430 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
148 00:19:16.430 ⇒ 00:19:34.600 Clarence Stone: there’s, like, a curve that happens, right? At some point, when you throw too many people at it, you’re actually adding to the noise and actually slowing down the project. So that’s never the answer for me, you know, in my mind. So those are sort of, like, the, you know, guardrails that I put in on this ideation that, you know, you’re about to see. So,
149 00:19:34.660 ⇒ 00:19:52.779 Clarence Stone: Really, the gist of it is, you, Tom, and Robert have been doing the client success ownership. They’ve been engagement planning, and then they’ve been, you know, slowly, they’ve been finding great competency leaders, so, you know, they’re swapping that off, but they’re still running those daily stand-ups, right? So, let’s…
150 00:19:52.780 ⇒ 00:20:03.259 Clarence Stone: you know, break those three major duties down and pass it on to team members who, Lauren, by the way, I think have been already doing it themselves in some ways. They just.
151 00:20:03.630 ⇒ 00:20:07.530 Clarence Stone: Don’t, you know, have that labeled ownership, so they don’t chase it.
152 00:20:07.530 ⇒ 00:20:32.080 Clarence Stone: Right? So, this is such a long way to answer your initial question, you, Tom, of, like, what do I think an ops person should be? I think they’re the ones that are holding this all together, right? Painting those lanes and smoothing out the connections as people are talking to each other in these roles, right? They’re monitoring utilization, they’re looking at those project margins as a whole, not just, you know.
153 00:20:32.080 ⇒ 00:20:38.490 Clarence Stone: one-to-one, right? And looking at the pipeline health overall, right?
154 00:20:38.610 ⇒ 00:20:58.880 Clarence Stone: So, you know, Lauren, what I imagine this looks like in a breakdown is something like this, where you, Tom, and Robert may have a client success owner that tags along with them in that initial meeting with the client. You know, they have multiple meetings, whatnot, they sign it, right? There’s an SOW, there’s work one, everybody celebrates, but that’s when the work starts.
155 00:20:58.980 ⇒ 00:21:12.930 Clarence Stone: UTOM should be able to turn to a client success manager or an owner and say, hey, this is the client we’re working for, these are the deliverables that we have, here’s the key functions your solution needs to have, and this is the stakeholder you’re building this for.
156 00:21:13.080 ⇒ 00:21:18.790 Clarence Stone: Right? The who, what, where, when, why, and how, right? And what is, you know, that end state that you’re chasing?
157 00:21:18.790 ⇒ 00:21:43.689 Clarence Stone: From there, that client success owner should be partnering with that engagement planner to come up with a plan. Here are the milestones, here’s the resourcing, here’s the project plan overall, here’s the tickets we need to spawn, here are the epics, right? And then, that engagement planner starts to work on that day-to-day, making sure that they’re working with the service leaders so that their tickets are prioritized in the right way, they’re getting done in
158 00:21:43.690 ⇒ 00:22:00.509 Clarence Stone: the right sequence, right? They can raise a flag when they say, hey, you know, we’re just bottlenecked, we need some more people, right? That’s the person that, you know, can kind of raise the flag early, have a conversation with the client success manager, because maybe, you know, some things aren’t as urgent as you think they are, or maybe they are, and we’ve got
159 00:22:00.900 ⇒ 00:22:23.919 Clarence Stone: about resourcing, right? So I think in this, like, picture I just painted, you would be a really great, you know, point of contact throughout this whole process, right? You know, Utah’s gonna just say, hey, I want you to start breaking down this problem and give me a project plan, but if that doesn’t happen with, like, within, like, 2 or 3 days, like, it’d be amazing to have someone like you to say, like, hey, let’s all sit down and actually do it. Like, where are you stuck?
160 00:22:24.910 ⇒ 00:22:32.479 Clarence Stone: Or like, hey, based on your plan, you committed to, you know, a weekly check-in with the client, showing X, Y, and Z.
161 00:22:32.800 ⇒ 00:22:35.829 Clarence Stone: You know, that didn’t happen last week. What happened?
162 00:22:36.950 ⇒ 00:22:43.079 Clarence Stone: Right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, those kinds of things. So, I hope that’s…
163 00:22:43.270 ⇒ 00:22:58.390 Clarence Stone: that kind of explains it, right? Like, you’re the one that makes sure everybody’s kind of on those rails, and when it doesn’t happen, you just start a great conversation, because, you know, a lot of the team members say they don’t get to talk to people. I created a structure where they have to talk to people.
164 00:22:58.390 ⇒ 00:22:58.830 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
165 00:22:58.830 ⇒ 00:23:11.709 Clarence Stone: Right? Here is your collisions. Like, in order for you to succeed in this next version of the roles that we’ve created, you’ve got to talk to the engagement planner. Engagement planner has to talk with their service leader, right? And there’s some tension in between those roles. There is.
166 00:23:11.710 ⇒ 00:23:35.389 Clarence Stone: For sure, right? But, you know, you get to be that additional party that takes a look and says, okay, are these, you know, two sides, you know, rational? And you also have the bigger picture to say, well, if the engagement planner keeps saying this is super hyper important, is it really, right, in the grand scheme of all the clients, right? Is it super important on this $50,000 engagement versus, you know, the
167 00:23:35.390 ⇒ 00:23:46.090 Clarence Stone: million dollar engagement that’s over there that we should probably focus on. That really is, you know, so you get to be that tiebreaker as well in these moments, because all of these roles are under tension somehow.
168 00:23:47.070 ⇒ 00:23:49.840 Clarence Stone: Right. What do you think? Just your initial thoughts.
169 00:23:50.430 ⇒ 00:23:55.350 Lauren Ford: I think it’s really smart. I mean, it’s interesting, because I’m… I…
170 00:23:55.650 ⇒ 00:24:02.279 Lauren Ford: I both benefit and, am limited by having worked, like.
171 00:24:02.380 ⇒ 00:24:14.039 Lauren Ford: I have, like, a non-traditional background, so I don’t even know totally, like, what is existing in most tech stacks, but this makes sense to me. It’s, like, sort of almost like project managing it
172 00:24:14.180 ⇒ 00:24:19.840 Lauren Ford: but being the glue between people, essentially, right? Am I understanding that correctly?
173 00:24:19.840 ⇒ 00:24:22.830 Clarence Stone: Yeah, it’s like the projects of projects, right? Yeah.
174 00:24:22.830 ⇒ 00:24:23.180 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
175 00:24:23.180 ⇒ 00:24:27.530 Clarence Stone: The layer above all the projects, like, are ALL the projects happening, so yeah.
176 00:24:27.530 ⇒ 00:24:27.920 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
177 00:24:27.920 ⇒ 00:24:28.490 Clarence Stone: Absolutely.
178 00:24:28.490 ⇒ 00:24:45.000 Lauren Ford: Yeah, no, no, it… I think it’s really smart, and it makes sense, like, it can also create another… another face so that it’s not always funneling everything through Robert and NewTom, so that you guys can just go sell. So that makes a lot of sense to me as well, like…
179 00:24:45.000 ⇒ 00:25:00.349 Clarence Stone: There’s some really critical, amazing things. I think in the, like, most powerful version of your role, I imagine you being able to look across all of these, you know, projects that are happening and say, hey, you know, that team’s been keeping those, like, three data analysts for, like, six months now.
180 00:25:00.350 ⇒ 00:25:05.940 Clarence Stone: I don’t think they actually need them, right? You can double-check on the story points.
181 00:25:05.940 ⇒ 00:25:09.189 Clarence Stone: You know, hey, this was given, like, 5 story points, but…
182 00:25:09.340 ⇒ 00:25:12.940 Clarence Stone: I’ve seen work like this done for one story point. What’s going on?
183 00:25:12.940 ⇒ 00:25:13.970 Lauren Ford: Mmm.
184 00:25:13.970 ⇒ 00:25:15.310 Clarence Stone: Yeah, yeah.
185 00:25:15.310 ⇒ 00:25:38.190 Clarence Stone: Or, like, hey, everybody is working as they should, and we just need more people, I think we’re probably gonna need it in, like, two months. You can have that conversation with, you know, Robert and you, Tom, really super early, right? You get to be on the pulse of a lot of the things that are happening. It’s sort of like looking at a command center and making sure all of those links are flowing as they should, and if they’re not, you know, picking up the phone and having a chat.
186 00:25:38.540 ⇒ 00:25:39.290 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
187 00:25:40.090 ⇒ 00:25:44.989 Lauren Ford: Totally. Awesome. Do you feel like…
188 00:25:46.070 ⇒ 00:25:56.900 Lauren Ford: So, obviously, I haven’t been in… in the weeds day-to-day with Brainforge. I mean, I’ve been… I’ve been with the company, but, like, I’ve been sort of on the outside for a while now. Do you… do you…
189 00:25:56.900 ⇒ 00:26:15.719 Lauren Ford: feel like the resources to sort of start identifying these trends are already there, or do you want this person to build them, or do you want to guide it, UTAM, and then it’s something that is learned and inherited? How do you feel about that process, in terms of, like, owning what… what normal should be, what these processes should be?
190 00:26:16.210 ⇒ 00:26:24.970 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I think, like, what… it’s just tough, like, for operations, you know, I think we just have to come up with metrics that both balance
191 00:26:25.220 ⇒ 00:26:29.089 Uttam Kumaran: You know, the operations of just, like.
192 00:26:29.090 ⇒ 00:26:32.790 Lauren Ford: What the client experiences, but also…
193 00:26:32.790 ⇒ 00:26:44.720 Uttam Kumaran: you know, it’s, like, the experience of sort of every partner that sort of comes and, like, leverages Brainforge or gets a service out of Brainforge. Like, for example.
194 00:26:44.720 ⇒ 00:26:56.659 Uttam Kumaran: right now, Rico and I manage, like, employee contracts, partner contracts, client-related contracts. We’re working… we’re, like, the liaison between sales and delivery.
195 00:26:56.660 ⇒ 00:27:10.349 Uttam Kumaran: You know, we’re also running, like, the project, like, the overall company rituals. So I think there is, like, some ownership over, you know, also looking at delivery and finding out, like.
196 00:27:10.350 ⇒ 00:27:19.479 Uttam Kumaran: okay, what are better ways for us to, you know, operate? But I think it’s something that we’re gonna have to define. I think, like, the scope right now is…
197 00:27:19.480 ⇒ 00:27:32.399 Uttam Kumaran: you know, pretty big. And so I think that’s what… that’s for us to kind of understand, like, what metrics we want to set up for operations. Like, right now, the… I mean, the easiest thing is there are tons of activities
198 00:27:32.400 ⇒ 00:27:51.120 Uttam Kumaran: that I am owning on the ops side that I just shouldn’t be doing. And additionally, there are a bunch of activities that nobody’s owning that should be owned, right? Second there is, we don’t have leadership on the operations side. We don’t have leadership to define, like, is our company operating well or not?
199 00:27:51.120 ⇒ 00:27:52.679 Uttam Kumaran: You know, and…
200 00:27:52.680 ⇒ 00:28:01.179 Uttam Kumaran: we have, like, revenue metrics, we have, you know, cost, but we don’t have, you know, anything otherwise. And so that’s also, like, what’s…
201 00:28:01.320 ⇒ 00:28:03.379 Uttam Kumaran: You know, what’s helpful to think about.
202 00:28:03.830 ⇒ 00:28:04.560 Lauren Ford: Awesome.
203 00:28:04.810 ⇒ 00:28:05.600 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
204 00:28:05.660 ⇒ 00:28:23.089 Lauren Ford: No, I think it’s really smart, it makes a lot of sense. And then, so this is sort of the glue between all the… all the projects, all the pieces, all the projects going simultaneously. What… how do you envision, like, what does success look like for this role?
205 00:28:23.150 ⇒ 00:28:31.449 Lauren Ford: when you’re looking at that, like, 30, 60, 90, like, how quickly do you want it to scale? Is it, how quickly do you need it to scale?
206 00:28:31.540 ⇒ 00:28:34.150 Lauren Ford: All those things.
207 00:28:34.900 ⇒ 00:28:36.650 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I mean, I think,
208 00:28:38.160 ⇒ 00:28:41.170 Uttam Kumaran: like, you know, I was talking to,
209 00:28:41.910 ⇒ 00:28:45.040 Uttam Kumaran: Vishnu a little bit about this, which is just, like.
210 00:28:45.150 ⇒ 00:29:04.509 Uttam Kumaran: what is the first 30, 60, 90s? Like, where the company is easy to get into versus others? You know, and I think, like, we were talking about, like, people operations versus business operations, and so, like, for example, on the business operations side, she mentioned, like.
211 00:29:04.820 ⇒ 00:29:08.499 Uttam Kumaran: There should be 100% of active, like, initiatives or tasks.
212 00:29:08.650 ⇒ 00:29:13.199 Uttam Kumaran: On, like, a linear board, as, like, a good first step, right?
213 00:29:13.200 ⇒ 00:29:17.950 Lauren Ford: Another thing is that there should be, like, less than 10% of tasks should be stale, meaning, like.
214 00:29:18.280 ⇒ 00:29:26.689 Uttam Kumaran: Nothing should be, like, sitting on the board for more than, like, 5 days. Another item is, like, we should be… we should be documenting core workflows, like.
215 00:29:26.980 ⇒ 00:29:32.970 Uttam Kumaran: 90% of tasks have, like, SOPs, or workflows, or redundancy, you know, or things like that.
216 00:29:33.000 ⇒ 00:29:34.989 Lauren Ford: So those are all…
217 00:29:35.110 ⇒ 00:29:37.530 Uttam Kumaran: You know, like, items we discussed.
218 00:29:39.090 ⇒ 00:29:39.720 Lauren Ford: Awesome.
219 00:29:40.130 ⇒ 00:29:53.080 Uttam Kumaran: You know, we also talked about, like, people operations. So, like, taking a look at all of the policies, that we have as it relates to people, understanding, like, you know, trying to get a sense of
220 00:29:53.330 ⇒ 00:30:05.899 Uttam Kumaran: like, the EMPS, try to get a sense of, like, employee happiness, doing things like donuts and things like that to… in order to boost that, right? Whether that’s through, like, structured surveys or… or otherwise.
221 00:30:07.300 ⇒ 00:30:22.279 Lauren Ford: That part I have… that part I feel like I have a solid grasp on, at least. Like, the PeopleOps is, like, my… I’ve been doing that for, like, the years now, so that part, at least, I feel confident. The overall, like, project management, I just know that it’ll be,
222 00:30:22.280 ⇒ 00:30:41.709 Lauren Ford: it’ll be a big, it’ll be the… it’ll be a leap into a new foray, which I love doing. I mean, I love growing in that way. It’ll just be, you know, new and different. So it’s like, whether you… I can either, like, learn your method, or I can make up my own, or I can, you know… or I can just see what… what is, what is…
223 00:30:42.530 ⇒ 00:30:47.110 Lauren Ford: the norm, but it will be new for me. Some of it is… is basically the…
224 00:30:47.110 ⇒ 00:30:53.510 Clarence Stone: What I can say with high confidence, after speaking with, like, at least a quarter to a third of the team at this point, is.
225 00:30:53.510 ⇒ 00:30:53.960 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
226 00:30:53.960 ⇒ 00:31:12.039 Clarence Stone: a lot of the challenges you’re gonna face, even with this, is gonna be entirely people. Like, the team is incredibly technically excellent. That’s great. So, it’s more of a question of, like, you know, here’s some quotes. One of them said, like, hey, I like to batch my tasks.
227 00:31:12.040 ⇒ 00:31:15.060 Clarence Stone: Right? And, you know, prioritize them so that, like.
228 00:31:15.060 ⇒ 00:31:33.990 Clarence Stone: I’m doing my deep thinking tasks in the afternoon, but sometimes, like, I’m not aware of the priority of those tasks in reality, and people ask me for something that I had planned to do later on. Yeah, this is, like, totally people problems, right? Yeah. Like, and then, like, too, it’s like, it’s hard to tell where we are in the life cycle with our client relationship, right?
229 00:31:33.990 ⇒ 00:31:34.350 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
230 00:31:34.350 ⇒ 00:31:39.560 Clarence Stone: I’d love for you to be that point of contact where someone says, like, hey, I need to learn more about ADC Home.
231 00:31:40.000 ⇒ 00:31:40.550 Lauren Ford: Hmm?
232 00:31:40.550 ⇒ 00:31:55.349 Clarence Stone: like, who should I talk to? Oh, well, this person has been on that account, they’re the client success owner, they can tell you a lot about it. Here’s the notion. Have fun, right? Go and talk to them, right? That way, like, nobody’s just, like, sitting there, kind of, like, skewing and trying to find the right doctor.
233 00:31:55.350 ⇒ 00:31:55.850 Lauren Ford: Twittling.
234 00:31:55.850 ⇒ 00:32:04.669 Clarence Stone: linear notion, or whatever, whatnot. I mean, all of these things, like, that I identified, like, I don’t think I found a single technical complaint at all.
235 00:32:04.670 ⇒ 00:32:05.659 Lauren Ford: That’s awesome.
236 00:32:05.660 ⇒ 00:32:15.659 Clarence Stone: Yeah, it’s like, oh, see, like, what’s technical-ish, like, I get a task, I don’t know… I know exactly how to do it, but I don’t know how to… how it fits into the broader objectives of the project.
237 00:32:15.700 ⇒ 00:32:33.770 Clarence Stone: Okay, well, we’re gonna make that role, and they should be having that conversation, but, you know, it’d be great if they can pick up the phone, call you, and say, like, hey, this is what I was told to do, this is, you know, like, I’m looking at, you know, how does this impact the client’s goals, you know, how does it fit into the big picture? Oh, okay, it’s this person, right?
238 00:32:33.770 ⇒ 00:32:35.579 Lauren Ford: Yeah. Right? Yeah.
239 00:32:36.580 ⇒ 00:32:37.150 Clarence Stone: Totally.
240 00:32:37.150 ⇒ 00:32:55.320 Lauren Ford: That absolutely makes sense. Yeah, and it’s such a dynamic company. That was something I even experienced, on, you know, during my… during my time, is just, like, every, you know, priorities change and things shift, and it’s, like, making sure you’re attuned to the right… to the right slide deck.
241 00:32:55.660 ⇒ 00:32:56.470 Lauren Ford: today.
242 00:32:56.850 ⇒ 00:32:59.880 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I think this is where, like, I’m…
243 00:33:00.380 ⇒ 00:33:04.839 Uttam Kumaran: I think Clarence, you know, and has the vision for…
244 00:33:04.950 ⇒ 00:33:08.290 Uttam Kumaran: like, where our company can go, like, Clarence?
245 00:33:08.290 ⇒ 00:33:08.659 Lauren Ford: It’s comfortable.
246 00:33:08.660 ⇒ 00:33:27.410 Uttam Kumaran: from a background of, you know, really, extremely large enterprise consulting. For me, I only know what I learned today about the future. So, like, I am in some ways, like, the person with the flashlight in front, and I’m, like, finding more people that have, like.
247 00:33:27.610 ⇒ 00:33:41.439 Uttam Kumaran: maybe gone down this path and can tell us what’s at the end. So, I think even… it’s even hard for me to, like… we’ve been sort of talking about this new program, and it’s even hard for me to understand
248 00:33:41.720 ⇒ 00:33:50.709 Uttam Kumaran: like, what the world would look like if this was the case. Which is not… it’s not… it’s like, not… it’s often… it’s not often the case. For the most part.
249 00:33:51.210 ⇒ 00:33:59.340 Uttam Kumaran: I’m able to kind of understand the business, like, in the next, like, 2-3 months, but looking at things 6 months a year down the line is really hard.
250 00:33:59.440 ⇒ 00:34:16.390 Uttam Kumaran: But I do think that if one thing our business has shown is that people, you know, given the right tools and structure, are able to accomplish, like, 3 to 4 times more than, what I’ve experienced in my career with, like, with peers.
251 00:34:16.610 ⇒ 00:34:22.029 Uttam Kumaran: And I do think that… Part of the goal of operations for me is, like.
252 00:34:22.250 ⇒ 00:34:25.770 Uttam Kumaran: kind of, like, greasing the wheels everywhere.
253 00:34:25.770 ⇒ 00:34:26.190 Lauren Ford: Hmm.
254 00:34:26.190 ⇒ 00:34:38.469 Uttam Kumaran: You know, and I don’t necessarily… I think, like, easily you can be sort of fixated on, hey, leading operations means, like, I’m sort of head of HR, head of recruiting this. I actually think it’s… it’s, like, actually more tuned to, like.
255 00:34:39.060 ⇒ 00:34:57.770 Uttam Kumaran: someone may come in and lead recruiting, but how… how come that when they come and lead recruiting here, everything is, like, 10 times faster, right? Yeah. It’s… it’s almost like that, like, are we… for example, are we using the right tools? Like, I… I think ops owns, basically, all of the tools that we use.
256 00:34:57.770 ⇒ 00:35:06.520 Uttam Kumaran: You know, internally, like, it uses, like, how people get signed up. It uses, like, the fact that those people need to be using those tools.
257 00:35:06.520 ⇒ 00:35:20.340 Uttam Kumaran: And then I do think that there is this component of, okay, understanding that we are here to support clients, and so how can we make sure that client teams, you know, are supported by the operations team as well?
258 00:35:20.380 ⇒ 00:35:21.370 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
259 00:35:21.450 ⇒ 00:35:24.930 Uttam Kumaran: But I think, I don’t know, I’m wondering, Clarence, like, how you’ve seen.
260 00:35:25.320 ⇒ 00:35:29.570 Uttam Kumaran: Like, the quote-unquote, like, ops team at… like…
261 00:35:30.210 ⇒ 00:35:38.350 Uttam Kumaran: other consultancies, or at EY, like… I don’t know, I just feel… I feel like I’ve… in my startup career.
262 00:35:39.270 ⇒ 00:35:52.200 Uttam Kumaran: operations kind of in, like, nothing. Like, I don’t know, it feels so ambigu- like, ambiguous, and then it feels like everything and nothing. You know, it feels like wherever you can… where the fire is. I kind of don’t want to fall into that trap.
263 00:35:52.660 ⇒ 00:35:55.519 Uttam Kumaran: You know, but, yeah, I don’t know, what do you think?
264 00:35:55.520 ⇒ 00:36:19.989 Clarence Stone: Yeah, so, I’ll give you the most large-scale example I have for you, and it’s for this concept that EY had called Future of Work. And, so, Lauren, like, long story short, the goal was, hey, instead of having these pods of people that are incredibly expensive, dedicated to a client, doing repetitive things, like, hey, we know this client’s gonna have to do a federal tax return, they’re gonna have to
265 00:36:19.990 ⇒ 00:36:37.599 Clarence Stone: do, you know, Schedule K1s. Like, these are things that, like, we don’t want all the smart people tying up their time to do. Let’s scale this. Let’s create, like, these centers of excellence where we’ve got teams that are credentialed to do it, create work item tickets so that they pick it up, and they produce those outputs.
266 00:36:37.600 ⇒ 00:36:58.999 Clarence Stone: Right. And by the way, at scale, today, Lauren, it’s 1.4 million work items. So it could be 1099 reporting, notice responses, federal tax returns, state tax returns, all of that. There’s silo teams that do that, but I, you know, I created the operational software that does the routing, and by.
267 00:36:59.000 ⇒ 00:36:59.440 Lauren Ford: Wow.
268 00:36:59.440 ⇒ 00:37:18.349 Clarence Stone: 24-7 across Buenos Aires, India, Europe, and the U.S. teams. So, like, that work item’s, like, flowing across the world and back. So the ops lead had a lot to manage, right? Their biggest thing was making sure, hey, we’ve got an SLA, right?
269 00:37:18.480 ⇒ 00:37:35.349 Clarence Stone: what’s happening with each of those tickets? Where are they getting stuck? How common is that happening, right? And then they find the root cause and connect with the actual team that owns it, and says, hey, maybe dev team, you need to build out these things. Or maybe,
270 00:37:35.370 ⇒ 00:37:44.839 Clarence Stone: workflow, or, like, you need to think about adding this functionality, because X, Y, and Z, you know, like, these two people aren’t getting that information, right?
271 00:37:45.340 ⇒ 00:37:56.790 Clarence Stone: So, at scale, it’s like looking at a huge, you know, like, flow monitor and saying, is everything working as it should, right?
272 00:37:56.790 ⇒ 00:37:57.160 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
273 00:37:57.160 ⇒ 00:38:02.300 Clarence Stone: And… You know, that ops team had 4 people, and it…
274 00:38:02.620 ⇒ 00:38:17.349 Clarence Stone: It was the thing that kept things together, because as, you know, work increases and decreases and… because tax is seasonal, they’re able to actually anticipate that and scale back
275 00:38:17.350 ⇒ 00:38:18.700 Clarence Stone: the resourcing.
276 00:38:18.700 ⇒ 00:38:42.530 Clarence Stone: Right? Saving, you know, the organization a ton of time and money, and then scale up as they anticipate those needs. So, it took a while, right? It’s a journey, right? So, I guess, like, to answer the initial question that you had, Lauren, was, like, what does success look like? What does my time gonna look like? I think, you know, just here’s the general outline. First 30 days, I think, like, you’re gonna spend time looking at
277 00:38:42.580 ⇒ 00:39:01.949 Clarence Stone: all the different solutions that BringForge is using, like linear, Operate, right, and cursor, and all those things, and just understanding, you know, how they’re being used, sitting in on those engagements, or, like, each of those project teams, and seeing how they operate together.
278 00:39:01.950 ⇒ 00:39:26.840 Clarence Stone: those first, you know, 30 days as you’re sitting in it, you’ll automatically start to understand how things are happening, and while you’re doing that, you’ll start documenting, like, hey, this is how this team works, this is how this team works, this is what this tool does, right? You… and all you’re doing is collecting the current state, because I think in the next 60, you’re going to start saying, hey, this could work better. What we need to do is, you know, get this tool instead, or hey, these two tools are redundant.
279 00:39:26.840 ⇒ 00:39:31.000 Clarence Stone: Let’s just pick one and go ahead with it, right?
280 00:39:31.060 ⇒ 00:39:49.270 Clarence Stone: And then you’ll start saying, I need to see these reports or dashboards, because, like, I know these are sticky situations that these teams get themselves into, and, like, there has to be some sort of data or metrics that are available for me to take a look at, so you might start building your own dashboards and reports, right? You might start
281 00:39:49.420 ⇒ 00:40:01.280 Clarence Stone: creating a more standardized way to get documentation, because, like, hey, some of the documentation’s not capturing X, Y, and Z, right? So you’re starting to create standards. And then lastly, like, hey.
282 00:40:01.380 ⇒ 00:40:25.700 Clarence Stone: team needs to cross-train on some sort of capabilities. Like, there’s too many people that know too much about this, but not enough about that. Let’s create a training program to make sure that people know what’s going on. Or, you know, we’ve got this really amazing, expensive tool like Cursor, and only half the devs are using it. Let’s start creating a program where, you know, we’ve got peers that are helping each other with… and developing that skill.
283 00:40:25.700 ⇒ 00:40:30.130 Clarence Stone: Right? Yeah. Because at the capability level, you’ll start to notice, like.
284 00:40:30.190 ⇒ 00:40:35.679 Clarence Stone: These are very niche kind of projects sometimes, and
285 00:40:35.790 ⇒ 00:40:46.529 Clarence Stone: it’ll sometimes be locked into just maybe one or two or three different options, so it becomes a Rubik’s Cube, right? Like, if you thumbstash this person on this.
286 00:40:46.530 ⇒ 00:41:02.389 Clarence Stone: He can’t staff that person on that, and yeah, it becomes, you know, a really difficult thing to do, so to reduce that stress, let’s do some cross-training, right? But you can identify that within those first 30 days, and in the 60, you’re starting to build out those programs to actually, you know, plug those gaps in.
287 00:41:02.400 ⇒ 00:41:12.090 Clarence Stone: Right? And then overall, now that you’re seeing everything kind of fit together, like, I think large-scale process optimization comes into play, where you go, hey.
288 00:41:12.110 ⇒ 00:41:22.369 Clarence Stone: all these client success owners are doing great, I mean, but we’ve got these two standout players, let’s create a, you know, a weekly program where they get together, they talk to each other, right?
289 00:41:22.370 ⇒ 00:41:22.760 Lauren Ford: Hmm.
290 00:41:22.760 ⇒ 00:41:34.520 Clarence Stone: And, you know, here’s the format that I think this meeting should be, and this is what they should get out of it, right? And maybe what they should get out of it is, like, sharing how they interact with clients, sharing.
291 00:41:34.520 ⇒ 00:41:34.960 Lauren Ford: Mmm.
292 00:41:34.960 ⇒ 00:41:47.340 Clarence Stone: how… best practices on how they manage, you know, expectations, things like that, right? But another way to bring people together when they’re saying, hey, we don’t have a chance to talk to other people, right?
293 00:41:47.340 ⇒ 00:41:47.870 Lauren Ford: example.
294 00:41:48.050 ⇒ 00:41:56.049 Clarence Stone: So that’s… that’s what I think, like, 30, 60, 90 is, like, learning the environment, and then, you know, and documenting what you see, and then…
295 00:41:56.070 ⇒ 00:42:09.859 Clarence Stone: building that tooling, dashboard, you know, training and documentation that you think you might need, and then in the 90s, like, larger scale changes that’ll kind of make even bigger movements. You know, core KPI, I think, really is about
296 00:42:10.030 ⇒ 00:42:27.979 Clarence Stone: how optimized, you know, are each of these deliveries happening, right? Each of these projects. Did we over-resource? Did we underutilize certain people? Are we just, you know, tiring certain people out because, you know, they’re, like, the one-stop shop for X, Y, and Z capability, right?
297 00:42:27.980 ⇒ 00:42:28.360 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
298 00:42:28.360 ⇒ 00:42:44.509 Clarence Stone: It’s hard to spot unless you’re sitting there looking at the data, right? So, I truly believe that you’re going to end up, you know, coming up with ideas on what you want to see, you know, almost immediately when you start sitting in these calls. Yeah.
299 00:42:44.570 ⇒ 00:42:53.110 Clarence Stone: And yeah, so you, Tom, you said you have an eNPS system, right? So, like, internal, like, Net Promoter Score for your… for your team?
300 00:42:53.640 ⇒ 00:42:54.290 Uttam Kumaran: Well, we don’t.
301 00:42:54.290 ⇒ 00:42:55.060 Clarence Stone: Okay.
302 00:42:55.060 ⇒ 00:42:56.969 Uttam Kumaran: Oh, that’s what we would basically establish.
303 00:42:56.970 ⇒ 00:43:08.019 Clarence Stone: Yeah, so I think that’s something that sits in your 60s and 90s. It’s a new program where you get a pulse on how everyone’s doing, and then externally, I would do the same. Like, after the end of a project.
304 00:43:08.020 ⇒ 00:43:24.180 Clarence Stone: the client should get, you know, a quick feedback email. How did it go? You know, and just fill those things in. And that’s going to be a great way for you to kind of keep track, right? So, you have all the power to create these programs to find the data if it doesn’t exist today, right?
305 00:43:24.180 ⇒ 00:43:24.670 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
306 00:43:24.670 ⇒ 00:43:30.320 Clarence Stone: But you won’t know what you need to go find until you kind of live it with them for a little bit, in my mind.
307 00:43:32.460 ⇒ 00:43:35.680 Lauren Ford: That’s awesome, yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense.
308 00:43:35.870 ⇒ 00:43:38.850 Lauren Ford: just, like… I get it, yeah.
309 00:43:39.000 ⇒ 00:43:47.410 Lauren Ford: the gathering it, documenting it, and then scale… essentially getting to that 10,000-foot view, so you can start to see where to optimize. Yeah.
310 00:43:47.410 ⇒ 00:43:52.000 Clarence Stone: Yeah, and I think, you know, you’ll probably start a dashboard in the first
311 00:43:52.000 ⇒ 00:44:09.209 Clarence Stone: you know, 30, 60 days, and then realize, oh, I need to see more, I need to see more, and you’re gonna just end up having your own dashboard command center, which is gonna be awesome, right? Because you can just say, hey, you, Tom and Robert, I see this metric, here’s some suggested, you know, changes that I’m thinking. I like this one best, by the way, here you go.
312 00:44:10.950 ⇒ 00:44:13.190 Lauren Ford: Interesting. Okay, awesome.
313 00:44:14.020 ⇒ 00:44:27.749 Uttam Kumaran: So, I think it’s a little bit of, like, the same old, Lauren, and then I think it’s a little bit of, like, okay, what is… what is our spin? I don’t think typical, like, I think this does cover typical
314 00:44:27.870 ⇒ 00:44:35.560 Uttam Kumaran: you know, people ops, and recruiting ops, and biz ops, but I also think our business is the fact that everybody
315 00:44:36.030 ⇒ 00:44:41.159 Uttam Kumaran: kind of comes to their pod and crushes it. Yeah. And so, how does…
316 00:44:41.390 ⇒ 00:44:56.990 Uttam Kumaran: our team, like, the operations team, support that. And it’s not all, you know, on you, me, or one person. I think what we just need is, like, a plan, like, a understanding of, like, resourcing, budget, and then sort of, like.
317 00:44:57.050 ⇒ 00:45:05.810 Uttam Kumaran: a way to measure whether the things we’re doing within operations are working right now, and that’s sort of, like, what we are trying to establish across
318 00:45:05.910 ⇒ 00:45:08.270 Uttam Kumaran: The company, so…
319 00:45:11.170 ⇒ 00:45:11.830 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
320 00:45:14.100 ⇒ 00:45:15.420 Lauren Ford: Awesome. I mean.
321 00:45:15.520 ⇒ 00:45:26.600 Lauren Ford: For me, it will all be new in a certain way, because it’s like, I’m used to the PeopleOps side, which just measures everything in a different way, and the dashboards are different, the metrics are different, but I mean.
322 00:45:26.600 ⇒ 00:45:38.769 Lauren Ford: it’s all just ultimately solving a problem. So, I mean, that part of it is exciting, and I like that it’s something new and different. It’ll just be… it’ll just be a learning curve for me, but I’m excited about it.
323 00:45:42.730 ⇒ 00:45:49.170 Uttam Kumaran: I think, the only thing… so I shared this little document. I think I’ve… I put in some notes that I got from…
324 00:45:49.400 ⇒ 00:45:55.770 Uttam Kumaran: Vishnu in there, which she kind of mentioned sort of, like, her thoughts on just…
325 00:45:56.070 ⇒ 00:46:03.189 Uttam Kumaran: okay, what are options within each of these? I think Clarence is… I think we should maybe work with Lauren to kind of think about
326 00:46:04.040 ⇒ 00:46:10.519 Uttam Kumaran: like… what else, you know, we want to cover here, and sort of, like, timelines.
327 00:46:10.530 ⇒ 00:46:25.389 Uttam Kumaran: you know, I also want to… I was talking to Robert in that I see this role as, like, you have, like, an… basically, like, a budget. Like, there’s a budget for the people, there’s a budget for tools, like, I actually think, for example, like.
328 00:46:25.660 ⇒ 00:46:29.410 Uttam Kumaran: the budget that goes into using a platform like Zoom
329 00:46:29.820 ⇒ 00:46:36.490 Uttam Kumaran: it’s, like, not really, like, a client-specific thing, right? It’s just, like, how our team operates, but I also think, like.
330 00:46:36.490 ⇒ 00:46:50.810 Uttam Kumaran: the operations team should consider that part of, like, their ownership. I don’t think there is another… there is no other owner right now, like, there’s no IT department, and I often think when IT owns stuff like this, they don’t care, and it sort of dies, and so…
331 00:46:50.830 ⇒ 00:46:52.449 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I’m like.
332 00:46:52.450 ⇒ 00:46:53.670 Lauren Ford: You’re not wrong.
333 00:46:53.670 ⇒ 00:47:02.139 Uttam Kumaran: I’m, like, the enemy of IT. I don’t know what… we’re all, like, computer people, so I don’t know why we even need IT. But, so…
334 00:47:02.450 ⇒ 00:47:05.200 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t know, I think maybe, Clarence, we…
335 00:47:05.520 ⇒ 00:47:07.290 Uttam Kumaran: In this list, we have, like…
336 00:47:07.560 ⇒ 00:47:11.640 Uttam Kumaran: BizOps, we have, like, people ops, we have recruiting, maybe we gotta think about…
337 00:47:11.940 ⇒ 00:47:16.859 Uttam Kumaran: velocity… you said velocity Ops, or something about, like.
338 00:47:17.120 ⇒ 00:47:34.179 Uttam Kumaran: you know, how we support the delivery framework, you know, and how the operations team owns metrics around that. Like, I don’t want to get it confused, Lauren, with, like, you have to know everything about all the services we’re doing. What I want to…
339 00:47:34.290 ⇒ 00:47:52.530 Uttam Kumaran: what I… what I think this has to shape into is how is the operations team supporting the fact that all those get done, and the fact that people know where to go when they get questions, the policies, or even the way people can create them, like structuring Notion or structuring, like, forms and things like that, so…
340 00:47:53.120 ⇒ 00:48:01.760 Uttam Kumaran: I feel like looking at this document, you know, with our conversation in mind, you know, I feel like we should carve out something that’s more around
341 00:48:02.160 ⇒ 00:48:06.250 Uttam Kumaran: Delivery operations, you know, or something like that.
342 00:48:06.480 ⇒ 00:48:08.350 Lauren Ford: Mmm… yeah.
343 00:48:13.550 ⇒ 00:48:16.820 Lauren Ford: That makes sense. Essentially, just how to facilitate
344 00:48:17.130 ⇒ 00:48:20.380 Lauren Ford: The work getting done so that the actual
345 00:48:21.670 ⇒ 00:48:29.799 Lauren Ford: Return on investment is… is more… the margins… improving the margins by… Smoothing the delivery processes.
346 00:48:29.800 ⇒ 00:48:33.790 Clarence Stone: Yeah, there’s so much opportunity for you to add that structure, right?
347 00:48:34.130 ⇒ 00:48:36.019 Clarence Stone: I’ll just throw at you, let’s say, like…
348 00:48:36.020 ⇒ 00:48:36.370 Lauren Ford: Okay.
349 00:48:36.370 ⇒ 00:48:50.839 Clarence Stone: like, one of the teams is just crushing it, and the customer success owner talks to the client, and the client’s like, hey, this is so amazing, we’re doing an intro conference for our own company, like, can you guys come and present? Like, we’re all the way in California, right?
350 00:48:50.840 ⇒ 00:49:04.739 Clarence Stone: I mean, one, they could say, okay, I’m gonna check in with Robert and Utom, right? And then it’s gonna be at least four conversations, right? Because, like, they’re gonna ask Robert and UTom, can we do it? Robert and UTOM are gonna say, well, tell us more.
351 00:49:04.740 ⇒ 00:49:05.300 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
352 00:49:05.300 ⇒ 00:49:23.329 Clarence Stone: Right? Like, how is this going to work logistically, and this is, like, what you’re allowed to do. And then they’re gonna go back to the client, and then go back to Robert and Utah, and then they’re finally going to get to an answer, right? Yeah. But the behavior I want to build into the team is, if they’re going to come and ask for something like this, what is the information they should collect? There should be
353 00:49:23.670 ⇒ 00:49:32.529 Clarence Stone: template that they can come in to say, like, hey, actually, like, yeah, I’m gonna go ask Robert and you, Tom, but here are all the details that I’ve collected using Lauren’s template.
354 00:49:32.790 ⇒ 00:49:33.750 Lauren Ford: Mmm…
355 00:49:33.750 ⇒ 00:49:52.670 Clarence Stone: these kinds of things, right? And then now, like, you guys can have one meeting, right? Lauren, you can say, like, okay, I checked this, like, it sounds good that we have the resourcing, you know, so let’s have that meeting, and it’s you, Robert, you, Tom, and the person asking for it, and then you guys have a conversation about whether that should be done or not, right?
356 00:49:53.090 ⇒ 00:49:57.270 Clarence Stone: It’s really the things that sit outside of the flow
357 00:49:57.270 ⇒ 00:50:21.679 Clarence Stone: that starts to add a lot of confusion and chaos into, you know, the… Yeah. Yeah, because I… you, Tom, you tell me, but, like, I think your team actually is really good at the daily tactical. They know what tickets they need to do, they know how to deliver it, but it’s the curveballs that really, you know, throw them for a loop. And so, not naming names, like, I had a conversation with somebody today, they were like, hey, Robert asked me to do this.
358 00:50:21.680 ⇒ 00:50:32.569 Clarence Stone: Which was, like, find new opportunities to create ROI for this client, right? You have all the data, you know, get creative and figure this out. Well.
359 00:50:32.920 ⇒ 00:50:37.130 Clarence Stone: What ended up happening is they just needed somebody to bounce ideas off of, and a framework.
360 00:50:37.130 ⇒ 00:50:37.680 Lauren Ford: to think about.
361 00:50:37.680 ⇒ 00:50:57.270 Clarence Stone: this problem. And they were just staring at that data and not realizing, hey, let’s take a look at other organizations and how successful they are and how do they do it, right, and see if that template fits into this organization, right? So, right, like, it would be great if, you know, you were a great point of contact to say, let’s
362 00:50:57.350 ⇒ 00:51:13.780 Clarence Stone: let’s see, you know, where you’re stuck here, right? This is actually outside of the normal cycle. Let’s see how we can, you know, support that. And maybe you pull in the right people and just say, hey, maybe you should have a talk with Clarence, right? Here you go. Done, right? Because people are holding that. Like, I think my only upset with that meeting was.
363 00:51:13.780 ⇒ 00:51:24.440 Clarence Stone: why was it scheduled, like, two days from when I first touched base with you? Like, don’t hold that. Like, ask somebody right away. Like, you wasted, like, two effective days, like, not having the answer to it, right?
364 00:51:24.440 ⇒ 00:51:27.300 Lauren Ford: Hmm… Yeah.
365 00:51:27.470 ⇒ 00:51:38.620 Lauren Ford: That’s probably happening even more so… well, it’s either they’re going to Udam and Robert for everything in the moment, for little tiny things, or they’re waiting to ask you for 4 days, or whatever.
366 00:51:38.860 ⇒ 00:51:42.610 Clarence Stone: Yeah, I’m like, hey, just ping me next time, and we’ll knock.
367 00:51:42.610 ⇒ 00:51:43.410 Lauren Ford: Interesting.
368 00:51:43.410 ⇒ 00:51:50.270 Clarence Stone: this is stuff that I don’t want to sit. And you, Tom, I don’t know what your thoughts are on that, but, like, that was the directive that I gave.
369 00:51:51.170 ⇒ 00:52:11.070 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I mean, I think that we fall into the same issues. I think this is the thing, like, I just read a lot of books about running companies like these, and it’s just a peril of, like, you start the company, you do everything, it’s very hard to wean off of that. It’s not only hard for me to do… to not do that, although this is, like.
370 00:52:11.150 ⇒ 00:52:29.039 Uttam Kumaran: this is, like, the fourth startup, so I’m… I don’t really need to do everything. I’m not of no interest in that, actually. I should rather, like, get some sleep and hang out. So… but even if I wean off, I think still it’s important for there to be, like, a leadership class of people that can start to…
371 00:52:29.040 ⇒ 00:52:34.480 Uttam Kumaran: also push that narrative. Like, Clarence being here is actually very, very helpful, because
372 00:52:34.640 ⇒ 00:52:39.340 Uttam Kumaran: He is, like, the… another party that can ask questions, and…
373 00:52:39.510 ⇒ 00:52:43.690 Uttam Kumaran: there is tension when I direct people, because when I come in, I’m like.
374 00:52:43.970 ⇒ 00:52:48.689 Uttam Kumaran: we need to get this done this week, or I’m gonna do it. Like, there’s only two roads.
375 00:52:49.200 ⇒ 00:53:07.820 Uttam Kumaran: Instead, I think what I… what we need to… my… I need to focus on next is getting the right leaders, giving them the right budget, the right people, and the right ownership, and the right metrics, and then the right incentives. And we need to systematically do that across every part of the company. So operations…
376 00:53:07.840 ⇒ 00:53:10.199 Uttam Kumaran: I think this is the… this… this…
377 00:53:10.440 ⇒ 00:53:13.900 Uttam Kumaran: It’s both, like, extremely urgent, because…
378 00:53:13.910 ⇒ 00:53:33.370 Uttam Kumaran: it’s a lot of my time going to this now, but also, I think we got lucky with you being, like, available, and so for that, we are thinking about, you know, pushing this, but we will try to do a similar thing on the go-to-market side. We’ll end up doing a similar thing on, like, the delivery side, potentially.
379 00:53:33.740 ⇒ 00:53:46.060 Uttam Kumaran: And… but those people, I don’t want to bring people in with the expectation that, like, it’s the same… like, when we bring in people now, we do a lot of hand-holding. For these next crew of leaders, I’m like, this is yours.
380 00:53:46.070 ⇒ 00:54:01.680 Uttam Kumaran: like, run it like you would run it. I will… we will have principles, we will have goals to hit, and we’ll have all the support in the world. But, we… what we don’t lack, I think, people waiting for instruction at the company. I think we’re lacking a lot of, like, giving instruction.
381 00:54:02.060 ⇒ 00:54:02.470 Lauren Ford: at the company.
382 00:54:02.470 ⇒ 00:54:05.310 Uttam Kumaran: You know, so that’s what… that’s what I think a lot about.
383 00:54:05.740 ⇒ 00:54:12.299 Lauren Ford: Yeah, no, that makes sense, and I’ve… I feel like I’ve seen a little bit of that, too, just in tiny doses from…
384 00:54:12.880 ⇒ 00:54:15.229 Lauren Ford: Where I am, but that doesn’t make sense, yeah.
385 00:54:16.360 ⇒ 00:54:22.200 Lauren Ford: So you’re starting with this role. I know it’s going to be one of, like, four different,
386 00:54:22.580 ⇒ 00:54:37.300 Lauren Ford: were, like, 3 or 4 different operations leads, right? But with these different focuses, the go-to-market, the delivery, the biz ops, which is the part I would own, and then what was… is the fourth just the maybe, or is the fourth another delivery one?
387 00:54:38.260 ⇒ 00:54:54.270 Uttam Kumaran: I think that’s… that’s what I kind of want us to… to think about, and I think that’s the biggest wrench, Clarence, is for us to think about. Outside of the normal business operations, people operations stuff, how does Lauren’s team take on some of the, like.
388 00:54:55.030 ⇒ 00:55:02.720 Uttam Kumaran: work on supporting this new framework. And it doesn’t have to all happen on day one, but I do think that it’s…
389 00:55:02.940 ⇒ 00:55:12.070 Uttam Kumaran: I do think that’s… that… that will fall under… that will fall under your purview for the time being, and so I think that’s what I want us to decide.
390 00:55:12.570 ⇒ 00:55:18.389 Uttam Kumaran: And… and honestly, the main thing I want us to think about is, like, if we were to do OKRs for…
391 00:55:18.760 ⇒ 00:55:25.380 Uttam Kumaran: this next quarter, like, what would… what could some of the operations ones be? And, like.
392 00:55:25.770 ⇒ 00:55:39.789 Uttam Kumaran: what… what incentives can we sit… can we set up so that it, like, helps you drive towards that, and there’s, like, real rewards around achieving some of those. And that’s, like, what I want to think about. And I don’t have a lot of structured operations experience, except for the fact that I just know
393 00:55:39.960 ⇒ 00:55:53.040 Uttam Kumaran: what operations that we’re doing today. So even seeing you implement… like, the conversation we had, where you’re like, oh, I can easily implement donuts, we can start doing these things, like, I think that’s exactly the speed at which we work. I want to just make sure that
394 00:55:53.590 ⇒ 00:55:59.960 Uttam Kumaran: We have, like, a measure by which we’re trying to… affect or achieve.
395 00:55:59.960 ⇒ 00:56:00.310 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
396 00:56:00.310 ⇒ 00:56:16.750 Uttam Kumaran: Because then you can achieve that, and then, like, that’s how I want to tie, you know, incentives. And so for the leadership group and the company, we are going to do our best to actually have, like, really clear financial incentives to achieving, you know, those outcomes, which I also don’t think is, like, super common.
397 00:56:16.990 ⇒ 00:56:27.650 Uttam Kumaran: in most companies, like, I think for most people, like, OKRs are kind of, like, a fake thing, and then the salespeople are the only ones with, like, true incentive programs, like, I can’t, like, I can’t stand stuff like that.
398 00:56:28.020 ⇒ 00:56:28.740 Lauren Ford: Hmm.
399 00:56:28.740 ⇒ 00:56:34.679 Uttam Kumaran: But it does take, like… that’s how I want people to… but I want people to be involved in the goal setting.
400 00:56:34.840 ⇒ 00:56:38.239 Uttam Kumaran: process, and I want us to actually set goals for operations this quarter.
401 00:56:38.440 ⇒ 00:56:39.530 Lauren Ford: Hmm…
402 00:56:39.760 ⇒ 00:56:54.889 Clarence Stone: Yeah. So, Lauren, like, piggybacking off of, like, this framework that I created, I started, you know, outlining some of, like, what I think that role should be, but that’s… this is not fully conclusive, and I’d love to work with you on just finishing the build-out of this, right?
403 00:56:54.890 ⇒ 00:56:55.240 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
404 00:56:55.240 ⇒ 00:57:05.120 Clarence Stone: Step two is, like, I, you know, getting your help and your perspective on who might be fit to sit in some of these roles. And then, I mean, you probably have
405 00:57:05.120 ⇒ 00:57:25.639 Clarence Stone: a better line of sight than me on, you know, how we can set aside time to train and, you know, define what the success criteria is for these rules. So, there’s some outline, there’s some frameworks for a lot of, you know, different things already, and I’m happy to work with you on, you know, kind of creating out the structure. So you’re not alone in this, I guess.
406 00:57:25.640 ⇒ 00:57:26.210 Lauren Ford: Okay.
407 00:57:26.210 ⇒ 00:57:27.060 Clarence Stone: thing.
408 00:57:28.380 ⇒ 00:57:43.140 Lauren Ford: Well, that’s good. That is helpful. I mean, it’s so exciting, because I am at a point in my career where I do really want to own something going forward. It’s just knowing… I… I’m just aware of my own blind spots, so it’s like, just…
409 00:57:43.310 ⇒ 00:57:51.460 Lauren Ford: as long as I have clarity on, like, what problems I’m trying to solve, that… that… that will be a big part of it.
410 00:57:51.670 ⇒ 00:57:55.459 Lauren Ford: As long as I’m clear on those, then, you know…
411 00:57:57.050 ⇒ 00:57:58.430 Lauren Ford: I feel like I can definitely…
412 00:57:58.430 ⇒ 00:58:01.299 Clarence Stone: And back to the fourth ops role that.
413 00:58:01.300 ⇒ 00:58:01.630 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
414 00:58:01.630 ⇒ 00:58:09.759 Clarence Stone: Thanks for bouncing back and forth to you, Tom. I don’t know what you think, but, you know, my personal impression is it should be someone who’s, like, 50-50 platform team.
415 00:58:09.760 ⇒ 00:58:10.570 Lauren Ford: Interesting.
416 00:58:10.570 ⇒ 00:58:18.170 Clarence Stone: Because platforms should be always looking at how operations works and says, hey, this is an AI tool we can make for that.
417 00:58:18.580 ⇒ 00:58:28.800 Clarence Stone: put it into the platform backlog, right? Interesting. Lauren, you will inevitably, like, find, like, hey, it could be a $600 a month tool, or we.
418 00:58:28.800 ⇒ 00:58:29.150 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
419 00:58:29.150 ⇒ 00:58:30.530 Clarence Stone: how to build it.
420 00:58:30.530 ⇒ 00:58:30.900 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
421 00:58:30.900 ⇒ 00:58:46.840 Clarence Stone: And, you know, there’s gonna be immense value in that $600 tool, definitely, because it commands that price, but it’s not worth building in the world of AI, like, we can have our own thing. So if you have a good direct line of sight to people who aren’t on that platform, and, like, because, I mean, the platform’s awesome.
422 00:58:47.170 ⇒ 00:58:47.600 Lauren Ford: Yo.
423 00:58:47.600 ⇒ 00:58:51.259 Clarence Stone: kind of built out, somewhere up here, I had it.
424 00:58:51.390 ⇒ 00:59:09.329 Clarence Stone: Boom. So there’s tools already, there’s agents already, but if there’s agents that you want, or agents that you think we can implement that can really smooth out each of the processes, we should, you know, speak with the platform team and build those things out, right? So somebody who kind of splits
425 00:59:09.330 ⇒ 00:59:21.939 Clarence Stone: those two lanes, I think, would be super powerful, you, Tom. Like, just half the time looking at how operations works, and then raising their hand, saying, like, hey, I think we can build that into the, you know, platform itself.
426 00:59:22.820 ⇒ 00:59:30.269 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I just think we’ll… this is where, like, I think we’ll just have to car… like, I think, Lauren, for you, I think this is just where we’re…
427 00:59:30.380 ⇒ 00:59:33.960 Uttam Kumaran: We’re gonna try to do operations in a way where
428 00:59:34.210 ⇒ 00:59:53.930 Uttam Kumaran: every step of the way, we’re thinking about doing the… making the widget once, and then finding a way to, like, do it 50% faster next. I don’t think this is gonna run like a traditional operations crew, where, okay, everybody’s just doing tasks. There has to be some part of the… of the week or the month that is, like, more…
429 00:59:53.980 ⇒ 00:59:57.929 Uttam Kumaran: Like, retrospective, or, like, looks at the work and is like.
430 00:59:58.010 ⇒ 01:00:02.600 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, what was sort of, like, something we could either buy tool to automate, or hand off.
431 01:00:02.600 ⇒ 01:00:03.030 Lauren Ford: after the AI.
432 01:00:03.030 ⇒ 01:00:08.560 Uttam Kumaran: team to build for us, and so that’s the thing, is, like, I think you’ll end up working very closely with
433 01:00:08.750 ⇒ 01:00:16.679 Uttam Kumaran: Our… we have people that are dedicated, like, have their… some of their time dedicated to building stuff like this just for the company.
434 01:00:16.930 ⇒ 01:00:30.680 Uttam Kumaran: You know, so you’ll be, like, just like, I think I’m a client, of for… I’m a client of them, like, you will be too, where you’ll ask, like, hey, we… I need help, like, figuring out, like, how to automate this thing.
435 01:00:30.680 ⇒ 01:00:37.459 Uttam Kumaran: You know, and that’s… that’s… they’re gonna be at, basically, like, your disposal to do so. But I think that’s, like, very unique.
436 01:00:37.460 ⇒ 01:00:50.890 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t think many companies our size end up with this sort of approach where they’re consistently trying to automate things internally, but what happens is just bloat in the company, you know? Like, you do things the same way. Like, for example, there’s… I know there’s, like.
437 01:00:50.890 ⇒ 01:01:00.900 Uttam Kumaran: tons of ways we can speed up contracts and the negotiation process. There’s a lot of ways where we can speed up onboarding people and giving them resources and, like.
438 01:01:01.120 ⇒ 01:01:06.150 Uttam Kumaran: So I just think that’s what we want you to keep in mind through this process, is, like.
439 01:01:06.660 ⇒ 01:01:10.939 Uttam Kumaran: really think about, like, okay, I’m running an ops team.
440 01:01:11.010 ⇒ 01:01:17.969 Uttam Kumaran: in 2026, with, like, AI everywhere, like, how do we do this differently, you know? Yeah. Like, how do you do it with…
441 01:01:18.020 ⇒ 01:01:31.179 Uttam Kumaran: how do you do with less people, achieve a higher outcome, and don’t burn out along the way? Like, I think all those three things are totally possible, but I think that’s, like, we have… it’s gonna be hard. We can’t look
442 01:01:31.490 ⇒ 01:01:34.850 Uttam Kumaran: Sort of, like, left and right about how other companies do
443 01:01:35.040 ⇒ 01:01:38.049 Uttam Kumaran: things. Like, I think there will be standard ways of doing
444 01:01:38.400 ⇒ 01:01:54.219 Uttam Kumaran: things across, you know, those typical operations fields, but then naturally, what the challenge for me is always going to be is, like, okay, how do we innovate a little bit? Yeah. You know, and I think innovation can happen in every group in the company. It’s not just the innovation that we’re doing for clients.
445 01:01:54.220 ⇒ 01:02:06.420 Uttam Kumaran: It’s also not just the AI team’s innovation here, it’s, like, every team… innovation comes in, like, just, like, a better meeting structure, a better set of incentives, a better way, a better set of tools.
446 01:02:06.430 ⇒ 01:02:13.420 Uttam Kumaran: So that’s, like, kind of, like, what I hope, you know, you can kind of think about, and that’s, like, short of what we’ve tried to do across the whole company.
447 01:02:13.780 ⇒ 01:02:14.630 Lauren Ford: Hmm.
448 01:02:14.790 ⇒ 01:02:15.740 Lauren Ford: Totally.
449 01:02:17.230 ⇒ 01:02:28.510 Lauren Ford: I like that. I like that it’s something new, and, like, you’re not married to doing the same old format that a million businesses have done before you. I think… I think we are in a real moment of, like.
450 01:02:28.550 ⇒ 01:02:37.399 Lauren Ford: It can be better, and so many people in jobs these days are just phoning it in, and this is a really op… an opportunity to not do that, to be, like, truly engaged.
451 01:02:37.930 ⇒ 01:02:49.659 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, and I also think my… the only way I can, have a company worth working for, where I can pay people way more, is by trying new things. Yeah. And so…
452 01:02:49.700 ⇒ 01:02:58.280 Uttam Kumaran: like, without… if we just do the same thing, the outcome’s gonna be the same, and people are gonna leave the company the same, and I… I don’t… I just think we have to challenge.
453 01:03:00.360 ⇒ 01:03:14.019 Uttam Kumaran: So, yeah, I just think, like, that’s why whenever people enter the company, it’s sort of like, we just try to share that this won’t be very similar to places we’ve all worked at, like, it’s nothing similar to any place I’ve worked at.
454 01:03:14.050 ⇒ 01:03:21.839 Uttam Kumaran: But a lot of that is, like, because we, like, shed a lot of the… the way people were doing things before, they’d never thought about it.
455 01:03:22.020 ⇒ 01:03:26.200 Uttam Kumaran: Like, it was just the way it’s always been, and stuff like that. Like, that’s so…
456 01:03:26.320 ⇒ 01:03:31.459 Uttam Kumaran: Nothing cannot be by design, and not designing something is like a design, you know?
457 01:03:31.460 ⇒ 01:03:31.790 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
458 01:03:31.830 ⇒ 01:03:35.080 Uttam Kumaran: So that’s how we kind of think about things, you know?
459 01:03:35.330 ⇒ 01:03:36.250 Lauren Ford: That’s awesome.
460 01:03:37.110 ⇒ 01:03:56.900 Clarence Stone: Yeah, here’s a quick vignette on, like, how valuable great ops, you know, leaders could be. There was a, do you know about Google’s material design system? I’m trying to find the slide that I had, about it. Okay, yeah, so Matthias is the UX designer. He was assigned to the Android project.
461 01:03:56.900 ⇒ 01:04:06.980 Clarence Stone: And Android needed a UI, so he created something called Material Design. But he noticed that across all of Google’s products, there was no cohesive design system.
462 01:04:08.080 ⇒ 01:04:21.889 Clarence Stone: So he said, I’m not gonna stop here just for Android, I’m gonna make a scalable design system that’s consistent across everything that Google built. Now, Matthias can actually realize that and say, that’s what we should do, but without the help of ops to say.
463 01:04:22.000 ⇒ 01:04:30.020 Clarence Stone: heck yeah, you’re gonna do that, and on top of that, I’m gonna support you by saying this is a requirement for everything that Google releases, right?
464 01:04:30.350 ⇒ 01:04:54.030 Clarence Stone: email team, you’re going to use the material design. You know, YouTube team, look at material design. That is your design library. So you have that capability to enforce that and also nurture this kind of behavior that scales across the entire enterprise, right? And if somebody wasn’t there to look at this, Matthias would have just sat in a seat, made material design for Android, and, you know, he would have gotten great ratings, he was a great employee, he built a great system.
465 01:04:54.130 ⇒ 01:04:54.610 Clarence Stone: But…
466 01:04:54.610 ⇒ 01:04:54.960 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
467 01:04:54.960 ⇒ 01:05:03.970 Clarence Stone: That wasn’t leveraged to the max unless somebody could have spotted that and saying, like, hey, this is great, and I love your idea of scaling this, I’m gonna support you and actually do it across the board.
468 01:05:04.200 ⇒ 01:05:06.830 Lauren Ford: Right.
469 01:05:07.340 ⇒ 01:05:21.570 Clarence Stone: Because that’s really, like, the challenge. Yeah, it’s the biggest, yeah, exactly. And the crazy thing is, like, I will tell you emphatically that the people I’ve talked to at Brainforge see this. There are moments where they go, yes, I could scale this, but they go, like, but I have work to do.
470 01:05:21.750 ⇒ 01:05:32.279 Clarence Stone: Right, so they’re like, okay, I’m gonna do it, you know, just, like, push my tickets, because, you know, tactically, that is, like, the biggest way I can, you know, help Brainforge move the chains today. But, like.
471 01:05:32.280 ⇒ 01:05:55.499 Clarence Stone: you know, they don’t have that moment to step back and say, hey, I think we should do this across the board, right? That… because you’re kind of signing yourself up for a lot more work that isn’t involving, you know, direct client work. And just because it doesn’t, you know, involve direct client work doesn’t mean it’s not worth investing in or, like, scaling into. So, you know, if an analytics team creates a really cool tool that can be used across other, you know, client
472 01:05:55.500 ⇒ 01:06:00.020 Clarence Stone: projects, let’s… let’s say, hey, let’s… let’s gold standard this, make it a little bit.
473 01:06:00.020 ⇒ 01:06:00.450 Lauren Ford: generalized.
474 01:06:00.450 ⇒ 01:06:05.070 Clarence Stone: So that you can implement it. Here’s the instructions on how to use it, here’s the link in the platform.
475 01:06:07.460 ⇒ 01:06:08.280 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
476 01:06:09.160 ⇒ 01:06:10.100 Lauren Ford: Awesome.
477 01:06:11.510 ⇒ 01:06:17.040 Lauren Ford: No, it’s really cool. It’s… it’s really cool. It’s… it’s so funny, like, these things, it’s all so…
478 01:06:17.810 ⇒ 01:06:24.299 Lauren Ford: It’s always just, like, a little bit hypothetical, but I’m just like, you know what, that’s fine. Like, I’ll see it when I see it.
479 01:06:24.300 ⇒ 01:06:26.839 Uttam Kumaran: I think you’ll just have to think about it
480 01:06:27.250 ⇒ 01:06:32.660 Uttam Kumaran: not in the usual way operations is, which is, like, what is just the next thing I have to do to check the box?
481 01:06:32.660 ⇒ 01:06:33.090 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
482 01:06:33.090 ⇒ 01:06:39.229 Uttam Kumaran: But, like, we’re trying to build… well, as I mentioned, we’re trying to grease every wheel.
483 01:06:39.230 ⇒ 01:06:39.630 Lauren Ford: Wow.
484 01:06:39.630 ⇒ 01:06:41.480 Uttam Kumaran: And so…
485 01:06:41.920 ⇒ 01:06:51.209 Uttam Kumaran: That… and you… so you have to create a system for… for, like, finding and greasing wheels systematically, and, like, that is a lot different than…
486 01:06:51.370 ⇒ 01:06:54.329 Uttam Kumaran: Just saying, oh, my job here is to just…
487 01:06:54.540 ⇒ 01:07:10.210 Uttam Kumaran: fix onboarding. It’s like, okay, that is a wheel that we identified, we fixed, we measured, and we moved to the next one. And I don’t… and I promise you, like, I know it may feel like this is sort of super… it’s, like, really hypothetical, but
488 01:07:10.210 ⇒ 01:07:29.540 Uttam Kumaran: part of, I think, the way… like, a lot of operations that I’ve seen, it’s, like, lost its way because it’s sort of just, like, the backstop for… for everything, instead of, like, the first team to I… to, like, almost… it’s, like, flipping that from the backstop to, like… it’s actually the first team, you know, that typically comes in, identifies, like, what’s going on, and then…
489 01:07:29.540 ⇒ 01:07:35.520 Uttam Kumaran: figures out what’s the framework, what is the budget we need to, like, actually attack a problem. And I know that, like.
490 01:07:35.520 ⇒ 01:07:36.570 Clarence Stone: diverse reactive.
491 01:07:36.570 ⇒ 01:07:37.830 Lauren Ford: Yeah, like…
492 01:07:37.830 ⇒ 01:07:52.650 Uttam Kumaran: Ops, I… yeah, ops is always, like, oh, who can take this? Oh, I don’t know, like, let’s just ask Lauren, or ask Rico on our team, or ask me. Instead, like, we are the people who, because we roll with the punchers the best, we’re always, like.
493 01:07:52.860 ⇒ 01:08:02.929 Uttam Kumaran: whatever the new thing, like, let’s go try a new tool for something. Like, oh, we’re trying to roll out a new service, like, we need… someone needs to just think through a plan here.
494 01:08:02.930 ⇒ 01:08:14.149 Uttam Kumaran: it’s always easier to do be the first, and then we figure out, oh, there’s someone better in the company that should own this, and those people, they benefit from us being first. Versus, I think, operations is always, like.
495 01:08:14.180 ⇒ 01:08:21.249 Uttam Kumaran: last resort, like, some work that no one ever needed to decide. And there is gonna be a lot of stuff like that, but it’s up to us.
496 01:08:21.370 ⇒ 01:08:34.349 Uttam Kumaran: on operations sort of fight to be more of, like, the people on the front lines on a lot of these things. But it will take, like, you know, we just have to dissect every process in the company, you know, and really think through
497 01:08:34.609 ⇒ 01:08:35.390 Uttam Kumaran: like…
498 01:08:35.810 ⇒ 01:08:48.019 Uttam Kumaran: how we are building the thing we’re selling, how we are attracting a client, and the full, like, sort of flow diagram. So in that sense, I think it’s a… it may or may not be a little bit different than
499 01:08:48.520 ⇒ 01:09:03.269 Uttam Kumaran: than the, like, the usual, like, operation stuff, but… I don’t know, I would rather, like, that… like, you coming… you’re coming from a really good foundation of, like, understanding how to roll with the punches, which is, like, more…
500 01:09:03.729 ⇒ 01:09:09.439 Uttam Kumaran: Which is the real job, and so learning this stuff, like, I have no… I think you’ll be just fine.
501 01:09:09.689 ⇒ 01:09:10.429 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
502 01:09:12.909 ⇒ 01:09:15.129 Lauren Ford: Well, I mean, it’s… yeah, it’s definitely…
503 01:09:16.079 ⇒ 01:09:28.369 Lauren Ford: I will definitely be coming at it from a more creative perspective, because I don’t have, like, the same, like, years and years of whatever the foundation of, this is how we do it, so it could be a really good thing in some ways.
504 01:09:29.010 ⇒ 01:09:29.590 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah
505 01:09:30.240 ⇒ 01:09:37.750 Uttam Kumaran: I think so, too, and also just, like, I think… I think the… I think, Clarence, maybe what we… what we… what we take is we start to break down…
506 01:09:37.920 ⇒ 01:09:40.490 Uttam Kumaran: Maybe, if even we could write…
507 01:09:40.630 ⇒ 01:09:45.489 Uttam Kumaran: maybe the best way, you know, I think some people do this, they sort of write, like, where would operations be.
508 01:09:46.050 ⇒ 01:09:54.149 Uttam Kumaran: like, a year from now. And maybe that’s what we work towards. We sort of write, like, hey, it’s December 2026,
509 01:09:54.320 ⇒ 01:09:58.489 Uttam Kumaran: This is the state of op… this is the state of, like, each of those functions.
510 01:09:58.840 ⇒ 01:10:03.260 Uttam Kumaran: And, like, that’s sort of how we work backwards. If that’s even easier, then…
511 01:10:03.380 ⇒ 01:10:18.720 Uttam Kumaran: doing things at the metric level, but I kind of just want us to have some clarity on, like, what is under your purview, what isn’t, like, what is the current state of things, and then, like, I think that’ll give, you know, me and Robert enough to start to set some goals, and then…
512 01:10:18.720 ⇒ 01:10:19.230 Lauren Ford: Mmm.
513 01:10:19.230 ⇒ 01:10:22.100 Uttam Kumaran: To drive towards, like, putting an offer, you know, up.
514 01:10:26.370 ⇒ 01:10:27.680 Uttam Kumaran: What do you think?
515 01:10:28.620 ⇒ 01:10:32.700 Uttam Kumaran: I’m excited by it. I’m a little bit intimidated by it. Okay.
516 01:10:33.640 ⇒ 01:10:40.930 Lauren Ford: I mean, it’s… it’s funny… I’m in a weird, like, crossroads in my own career, because I’m, like, about to get an offer from…
517 01:10:41.160 ⇒ 01:10:48.380 Lauren Ford: for, like, if I wanna… if I wanna continue down this super traditional HR path, I’m about to get an offer for that.
518 01:10:48.590 ⇒ 01:10:58.270 Lauren Ford: But I’m way more excited. I’ve been talking more about… about this with people, because I really like the idea of doing something
519 01:10:58.450 ⇒ 01:11:06.410 Lauren Ford: With just a lot more of a long-term growth plan, which I see here.
520 01:11:06.410 ⇒ 01:11:06.930 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
521 01:11:07.400 ⇒ 01:11:15.830 Lauren Ford: In my mind, when I think about this, the easiest way for me to conceptualize this is just to think about it as, like, okay, well, how can I make everybody at the companies
522 01:11:16.440 ⇒ 01:11:19.299 Lauren Ford: job, but especially you and Robert’s.
523 01:11:19.780 ⇒ 01:11:25.139 Lauren Ford: 20% easier. So, like, if I could… in my mind, it’s like, if I look at that.
524 01:11:25.770 ⇒ 01:11:40.120 Lauren Ford: thing of responsibilities, how can I free up 20% of your bandwidth? So that you don’t… so that these things are still being done, but you’re not having to think about them. To me, that… when I think about it that way, I’m, like, way less intimidated by it.
525 01:11:40.120 ⇒ 01:11:40.670 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
526 01:11:41.080 ⇒ 01:11:44.660 Uttam Kumaran: But see, my… because the next immediate ask is gonna be.
527 01:11:44.770 ⇒ 01:11:46.899 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, but now you’re doing those things.
528 01:11:46.900 ⇒ 01:11:47.260 Lauren Ford: Yep.
529 01:11:47.260 ⇒ 01:11:50.310 Uttam Kumaran: And so, how do we now do each of those things.
530 01:11:50.820 ⇒ 01:11:54.250 Lauren Ford: 20% faster. Yeah. And I think that’s where…
531 01:11:54.470 ⇒ 01:12:00.700 Uttam Kumaran: Like, you… because, like, one thing we do here is we don’t, like, hire for…
532 01:12:00.910 ⇒ 01:12:11.729 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t like to hire for, like, oh, this person is just good at this, so we hire them. We’re more… I’m looking for, like, creativity and sort of signs of becoming good at another thing quickly.
533 01:12:11.890 ⇒ 01:12:15.859 Lauren Ford: Right, right. You know, because a lot of our business changes very, very fast.
534 01:12:15.870 ⇒ 01:12:22.550 Uttam Kumaran: And, just because you’re good at something, it’s actually more important that you can get good at the next thing.
535 01:12:22.550 ⇒ 01:12:23.090 Lauren Ford: adaptable.
536 01:12:23.090 ⇒ 01:12:38.580 Uttam Kumaran: And so, what we’re looking for is that sort of ability to do the… like, I wake up and I just do, right? But then I also try to, these days not as much, I try to reserve some time to look at all the things we are doing and be like, okay, why? Or how do we do faster?
537 01:12:38.580 ⇒ 01:12:39.280 Lauren Ford: Sure.
538 01:12:39.590 ⇒ 01:12:45.190 Uttam Kumaran: what should we change, you know? And I think this moment, especially going into the end of this year.
539 01:12:45.310 ⇒ 01:12:51.759 Uttam Kumaran: Like, we’re about to add another two clients, so that would have been almost doubling the number of clients.
540 01:12:51.880 ⇒ 01:13:06.720 Uttam Kumaran: doubling the amount of money in, like, less than… it’s like two and a half months, maybe. And so we just really have to do… we have to make… we just have to challenge a lot of the ways things are done. And I haven’t run this business in a traditional way at all.
541 01:13:06.720 ⇒ 01:13:18.910 Uttam Kumaran: But not from the fact that, like, clients see anything different. It’s just the internals are… have been a little bit more unique. It’s like, it feels a lot more like being at, like, a flow code, in the sense of, like, we’re building, like.
542 01:13:19.050 ⇒ 01:13:35.239 Uttam Kumaran: we’re all building a system, like, you know, versus, oh, every client is like this, like, you know, and I think that’s what’s… that… to kind of go full circle, that is what has been the sauce of the business, is that instead of thinking of every single client
543 01:13:35.330 ⇒ 01:13:43.270 Uttam Kumaran: different… differently, and being like, oh, you’re on that client. Instead, it’s like, The client experience itself
544 01:13:43.420 ⇒ 01:13:47.410 Uttam Kumaran: And then outside of that, which is the experience of the employees.
545 01:13:47.410 ⇒ 01:13:47.920 Lauren Ford: Hmm.
546 01:13:47.920 ⇒ 01:13:49.309 Uttam Kumaran: Those are, like, products.
547 01:13:50.700 ⇒ 01:14:01.140 Uttam Kumaran: You know? And then wrapping around both of those is the entire, like, Brainforge platform. Like, I don’t know, Clarence, is that what slide 11 basically says? But, like, I like the concentric circles.
548 01:14:01.240 ⇒ 01:14:03.479 Uttam Kumaran: And for me, the concentric circle
549 01:14:03.500 ⇒ 01:14:22.780 Uttam Kumaran: I guess this is a little bit different, but concentric circles I’m thinking about is, like, the smallest one is the client, the next one is the people, and then the largest one is sort of the Brainforge platform, which are the policies, the way meetings are run, the tools we use, the way we treat each other, like, our goals, like, that is the…
550 01:14:23.300 ⇒ 01:14:40.649 Uttam Kumaran: that is sort of the glue that keeps everything together, and like, that’s how I’m thinking about it. So ops is really… you kind of have to think at that… at that level. Without the clients, we can’t hire people, and without the people, the clients don’t get anything. But without… but the people do need a lot of guidance, you know?
551 01:14:40.650 ⇒ 01:14:41.310 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
552 01:14:41.630 ⇒ 01:14:42.420 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
553 01:14:42.920 ⇒ 01:14:47.069 Lauren Ford: They need the structure and the rituals and the how you operate. Yeah.
554 01:14:47.510 ⇒ 01:14:50.540 Uttam Kumaran: So that is where I think there will be a learning curve, for sure.
555 01:14:50.540 ⇒ 01:14:53.749 Lauren Ford: Yeah. I, I, so I, I can’t say, like.
556 01:14:54.070 ⇒ 01:15:00.719 Uttam Kumaran: that’s, like, that’s something to learn. But again, it’s not like… you don’t have to learn, really, how the widget gets
557 01:15:00.860 ⇒ 01:15:14.870 Uttam Kumaran: you don’t really have to learn, like, the science of the widget. It’s more like, okay, I’ve learned enough about it to, like, know that there’s something wrong here. Yeah. You know, where I see the frustration, and you have a playbook to address frustration, right?
558 01:15:14.870 ⇒ 01:15:15.309 Lauren Ford: That’s the sort.
559 01:15:15.310 ⇒ 01:15:15.920 Uttam Kumaran: That’s gone.
560 01:15:19.690 ⇒ 01:15:31.069 Uttam Kumaran: And then, yeah, every… I mean, everything here is so AI, too, so I just don’t know a role where, like, it’s just this much AI stuff. Like, I… I find it so awesome that we get to do so much stuff with AI, and, like.
561 01:15:31.350 ⇒ 01:15:36.730 Uttam Kumaran: even the person so far from technical in our company is doing AI stuff. It’s, like, awesome.
562 01:15:36.730 ⇒ 01:15:37.130 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
563 01:15:37.250 ⇒ 01:15:44.480 Uttam Kumaran: Which just means, like, they’re using ChatGPT, or they’re, like, building, you know, quick little things to help them speed stuff up, or…
564 01:15:44.830 ⇒ 01:15:50.179 Uttam Kumaran: they’re like, hey, there’s an AI version of this software that we always use, can we buy that? And I’m like, yeah, perfect, you know.
565 01:15:50.180 ⇒ 01:15:50.720 Lauren Ford: Nice.
566 01:15:50.720 ⇒ 01:15:51.450 Uttam Kumaran: So…
567 01:15:51.720 ⇒ 01:15:53.080 Lauren Ford: Nice. Yeah.
568 01:15:53.750 ⇒ 01:16:01.400 Lauren Ford: No, it’s… it’s really exciting. I’m… I’m definitely… I’m definitely energized by the idea of it, for sure.
569 01:16:03.900 ⇒ 01:16:11.059 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, Clarence, what do you think? I think, anything else from you, otherwise I can maybe talk, like, some next steps, I think.
570 01:16:11.400 ⇒ 01:16:15.860 Clarence Stone: Yeah, I think that was all. I think we’re in a good direction, yeah. What do you think next steps are?
571 01:16:16.170 ⇒ 01:16:24.670 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, so I think, Lauren, I’m gonna take, I’m gonna take our notes from this, and if you want to put any notes in, or, you know, even think… Yeah.
572 01:16:24.920 ⇒ 01:16:31.730 Uttam Kumaran: Part of this conversation was even for the three of us to chat, because over the weekend, like, something will click in my brain, at least.
573 01:16:32.350 ⇒ 01:16:36.770 Uttam Kumaran: I think through this, and I’m just gonna write notes, and I kind of want to just, like, write
574 01:16:37.000 ⇒ 01:16:52.490 Uttam Kumaran: the job description together, you know, to put it really bluntly. And so that way, it’s something that you’re comfortable with, something… it’s something that we’re comfortable with. And then, like, we… we already have, like, sort of carved out the budget. Robert is, like, working on, like.
575 01:16:52.490 ⇒ 01:17:09.199 Uttam Kumaran: that’s kind of, I think, probably his weekend project or something, but he’s working on sort of, like, the actual budget outlay, but I think we can fit right into, you know, the range that you sent me previously, so I have no… I have sort of no problems with that. I think we’ll also outline that in this document for you.
576 01:17:09.200 ⇒ 01:17:14.520 Uttam Kumaran: As soon as I get with him, and that’s something that… I know you’re sitting on another offer, so if there is, like.
577 01:17:14.530 ⇒ 01:17:16.499 Uttam Kumaran: Timelines that you’re trying to hit.
578 01:17:16.860 ⇒ 01:17:17.380 Uttam Kumaran: you let.
579 01:17:17.380 ⇒ 01:17:26.790 Lauren Ford: I don’t have it yet, and I still need to meet their head of… their head of people who’ve just started there, so I think we have a little time. Oh, great. Okay, alright.
580 01:17:26.950 ⇒ 01:17:32.720 Lauren Ford: For better or worse, this is my sixth interview, and they had me do an intelligence test. Yes, it’s a lot.
581 01:17:32.720 ⇒ 01:17:33.880 Uttam Kumaran: Oh, wow!
582 01:17:34.360 ⇒ 01:17:39.230 Uttam Kumaran: one of those. That’s… I do, actually, I do one of those every 30 minutes here. I’m in… so, I’m in 8 or 9.
583 01:17:39.230 ⇒ 01:17:43.700 Clarence Stone: intelligence test. This was one of them for me, too.
584 01:17:43.720 ⇒ 01:17:50.539 Lauren Ford: Yeah, I was not a fan. I was like, oh, so the way this test works is I have to answer every question in 20 seconds, or I can’t get.
585 01:17:50.540 ⇒ 01:17:52.790 Uttam Kumaran: What was the test? Wait, wait, let’s do something.
586 01:17:52.790 ⇒ 01:17:53.470 Lauren Ford: CCAT.
587 01:17:53.470 ⇒ 01:17:54.400 Uttam Kumaran: I wanna do some…
588 01:17:54.760 ⇒ 01:17:55.480 Clarence Stone: Oh, dude.
589 01:17:55.480 ⇒ 01:17:56.170 Uttam Kumaran: What is that?
590 01:17:56.170 ⇒ 01:17:58.469 Lauren Ford: It was dumb. I… okay, here’s.
591 01:17:58.470 ⇒ 01:18:00.800 Uttam Kumaran: Is it, like, how many pianos in New York go?
592 01:18:01.020 ⇒ 01:18:10.290 Lauren Ford: Well, it’s like, you can’t use a calculator, and you should know this about me, this is a huge personality flaw. I am a rule-abider. It is… I…
593 01:18:11.280 ⇒ 01:18:11.930 Lauren Ford: It is…
594 01:18:12.050 ⇒ 01:18:27.610 Lauren Ford: I chalk it up to the homeschooling, because I never had a stupid teacher who was like, you have to do this stupid thing. And I was like, yes, and then I get… Yeah, so, like, I’ve always had people who, like, if they assign me to do something, I’m like, oh, this must be good for a good reason. So I’m a rule-biter by nature.
595 01:18:27.610 ⇒ 01:18:35.750 Uttam Kumaran: opposite. I really am not… I mean, it’s not like we can’t both live, but I am really… I get frustrated with rules.
596 01:18:35.970 ⇒ 01:18:36.350 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
597 01:18:36.350 ⇒ 01:18:38.100 Uttam Kumaran: And I just, like…
598 01:18:38.400 ⇒ 01:18:44.980 Uttam Kumaran: I can’t… I just don’t under… sometimes I… things… and you could tell, like, this is why we’re in the company, where everything’s sort of, like, a little bit…
599 01:18:45.080 ⇒ 01:18:52.449 Uttam Kumaran: somewhat backwards, but I’m like, I don’t get why we’re doing this. Unless someone can explain to me how we got here, and we’re not doing it this way.
600 01:18:52.450 ⇒ 01:18:55.020 Lauren Ford: It’s good! I mean, like, I like… I created.
601 01:18:55.020 ⇒ 01:18:58.699 Uttam Kumaran: So you need both. No, no, you really need both. Like, you can’t do much of me, it’s like…
602 01:18:58.700 ⇒ 01:18:59.190 Lauren Ford: Exactly.
603 01:18:59.190 ⇒ 01:19:00.330 Uttam Kumaran: Those are the two, like, yeah.
604 01:19:00.330 ⇒ 01:19:06.830 Lauren Ford: Exactly, but my take on this test is, like, here, yeah, you’re looking at it. This is one. This is like a pattern recognition test.
605 01:19:06.830 ⇒ 01:19:07.180 Clarence Stone: I…
606 01:19:07.180 ⇒ 01:19:07.620 Lauren Ford: And…
607 01:19:07.620 ⇒ 01:19:08.350 Clarence Stone: questions.
608 01:19:08.350 ⇒ 01:19:16.200 Lauren Ford: I know! I’m an over-thinker, so I will look at something like this, and my brain will overcomplicate it so fast.
609 01:19:16.580 ⇒ 01:19:23.980 Lauren Ford: And the only way you can get through 50 questions in 15 minutes is if you only spend 20 seconds on them.
610 01:19:24.160 ⇒ 01:19:28.169 Lauren Ford: And they don’t let you skip, so it’s not like the SAT…
611 01:19:28.170 ⇒ 01:19:29.800 Uttam Kumaran: Wait, A, is it A?
612 01:19:31.260 ⇒ 01:19:32.210 Uttam Kumaran: Did I get it?
613 01:19:32.210 ⇒ 01:19:35.219 Lauren Ford: I didn’t even look at it yet. I’m not even gonna. I already spent all.
614 01:19:35.220 ⇒ 01:19:36.949 Clarence Stone: All this time, or this fucker.
615 01:19:36.950 ⇒ 01:19:42.210 Uttam Kumaran: Oh my god, like, we should do, like, Clarence, we should do this with everybody at the meeting tomorrow.
616 01:19:42.210 ⇒ 01:19:44.170 Clarence Stone: He’s so loud!
617 01:19:44.170 ⇒ 01:19:44.880 Lauren Ford: Well, some people…
618 01:19:44.880 ⇒ 01:19:52.099 Uttam Kumaran: No, no, I don’t like… I don’t want the scores or anything, and I don’t want this to fuel people to feel stressed, but… Oh, God. It’s just so funny.
619 01:19:52.100 ⇒ 01:20:06.760 Lauren Ford: It’s crazy. It’s so bad. It’ll be, like, and then it’ll be basic math, but they don’t want you to use a calculator, and, like, I know how to do the math problem, but I’m like, I… it’s been so long since I did… there’ll be, like, calculating 24% of 70%.
620 01:20:06.760 ⇒ 01:20:09.440 Uttam Kumaran: What is that supposed to test? Am I not
621 01:20:09.780 ⇒ 01:20:11.249 Uttam Kumaran: Am I not intelligent, I guess?
622 01:20:11.250 ⇒ 01:20:17.300 Lauren Ford: I couldn’t tell you, or if I could tell you, I could tell you, why would you want somebody who just made snap decisions?
623 01:20:17.300 ⇒ 01:20:20.360 Uttam Kumaran: I use the calculator… I used the calculator app today for a couple days.
624 01:20:20.710 ⇒ 01:20:28.179 Lauren Ford: Exactly! It’s not even like when we were kids, and it was like, well, you’re not gonna have a calculator at all times. It’s like, no, asshole, I literally do.
625 01:20:28.180 ⇒ 01:20:40.820 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, no, for this one, if someone on their team takes this and doesn’t immediately just copy, screenshot, put into ChatGPT for every question, like, that’s probably more of the problem I have. It’s like, why would you not put this immediately?
626 01:20:41.170 ⇒ 01:20:45.470 Uttam Kumaran: People, like, this is why it’s frustrating, I think, for some people in the company, because they’ll be… people do some, like.
627 01:20:45.680 ⇒ 01:20:51.049 Uttam Kumaran: Did you just, like, try to ask ChatGBT? Like, did it give it a decent answer?
628 01:20:51.050 ⇒ 01:20:51.450 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
629 01:20:51.990 ⇒ 01:20:52.440 Lauren Ford: Yep.
630 01:20:52.970 ⇒ 01:21:00.810 Lauren Ford: Exactly. It’s a funny thing. I even… I did the training with ChatGPT, but the problem is it’s not time-constrained, so it’s a terrible way to practice.
631 01:21:00.810 ⇒ 01:21:01.690 Uttam Kumaran: Oh, yeah.
632 01:21:01.690 ⇒ 01:21:06.890 Lauren Ford: It’s more like, you should do it the way you do the SAT, and you just, like… yeah, there we go.
633 01:21:06.890 ⇒ 01:21:09.850 Clarence Stone: There’s more questions than time, by the way. I hate that thing.
634 01:21:09.850 ⇒ 01:21:10.330 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
635 01:21:10.900 ⇒ 01:21:24.480 Lauren Ford: Yeah, yeah, it was funny, though. I mean, but, you know, it’s… it’s a good moment for me, because it actually helps clarify, like, where I want to go, and I… I am way more excited about the idea of owning something. It’s just that funny thing of, like.
636 01:21:24.610 ⇒ 01:21:37.399 Lauren Ford: you know, there’s… I’ve… the last few years of my life, it’s been building on the things I’ve already done, so this will be something new, which is really exciting, but it’s… it’s also definitely a little intimidating, because it’s like, okay, can I do it? I think I can.
637 01:21:37.400 ⇒ 01:21:49.440 Uttam Kumaran: I would be surprised if you called anybody in the company, and this is what they thought, like, this is the same job they were doing when they joined, or this is what they thought the job would be.
638 01:21:50.300 ⇒ 01:22:07.790 Uttam Kumaran: I… I don’t… that’s not how I feel, like, I didn’t think this is what I was gonna be doing, and I don’t… which… which doesn’t mean, like, oh, our job… our roles are super ambiguous. It’s more about just, like, we evolve so often, so I’m more biasing
639 01:22:08.080 ⇒ 01:22:25.869 Uttam Kumaran: to find people that can evolve, and have shown… have shown that they can, versus… we have consistently struggled when we hired people who are just good at the thing we need immediately. They have never… it’s never worked. And we’ve made… I continue to make… I don’t…
640 01:22:26.020 ⇒ 01:22:35.680 Uttam Kumaran: really make the mistake anymore, but I’ve made it for, like, more than, like, a year and a half, where we were like, we just need this thing, and then we, like, find someone who can just do that, then we bring them on, and then…
641 01:22:36.090 ⇒ 01:22:42.900 Uttam Kumaran: they do that, but then the moment there’s ambiguity, or, like, they’re, like, not used to it, and so instead.
642 01:22:43.380 ⇒ 01:22:52.539 Uttam Kumaran: I’m sort of bringing on people with, like, a variety of experiences, and show that they have a growth mindset and interest.
643 01:22:52.710 ⇒ 01:23:09.130 Uttam Kumaran: some risk tolerance, but also, like, they know… they have some chip on their shoulder, also, is, like, usually where… I know… I know you built a lot of your experience from your time at Floka, but I know for sure you have a lot of opinions on how you would have done it differently had you had.
644 01:23:09.130 ⇒ 01:23:11.370 Lauren Ford: Oh my god, yeah. Budget.
645 01:23:11.370 ⇒ 01:23:21.469 Uttam Kumaran: time and ownership and, you know, so that’s what I, like, look for, is people who are like, I know exactly what I would have done. I’m like, okay, cool, like, here you go. Here’s, like.
646 01:23:21.590 ⇒ 01:23:23.840 Uttam Kumaran: As much scope as you want.
647 01:23:24.920 ⇒ 01:23:40.670 Lauren Ford: It’s funny, it’s like, I find nowadays, like, because I’ve gotten so used to doing the corporate thing, that even, like, it’s a… it’s a bad habit for me, too. Like, you asked me about performance reviews, and like, I built you the template, which I think is the best template for…
648 01:23:40.670 ⇒ 01:23:53.029 Lauren Ford: a performance review if you’re gonna do them, but then the other day, like, it came up in conversation, it’s like, why do we do these performance reviews? Like, it’s mostly performative. Most of the time, they’re not actually a good use of time. They…
649 01:23:53.050 ⇒ 01:24:05.909 Uttam Kumaran: there’s a version of them that I believe could be, but like… Well, most of the time is spent figuring out how to do the review than looking at the results, right? And so, like, for me, I would be like, okay, how do we, like, not… how do we, like, not fall in that same trap?
650 01:24:06.270 ⇒ 01:24:12.649 Lauren Ford: Don’t do the same thing! Like, there’s so many things in corporations that we just do on autopilot because they’ve…
651 01:24:12.760 ⇒ 01:24:17.169 Lauren Ford: been normalized, and it’s like, is it actually a good use of time? Probably not.
652 01:24:17.690 ⇒ 01:24:23.539 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, and you’ll find that also, like, I think people are used to being in meetings for everything, and if our.
653 01:24:23.540 ⇒ 01:24:23.890 Lauren Ford: a company.
654 01:24:23.890 ⇒ 01:24:35.160 Uttam Kumaran: shown anything, it’s like, you don’t really have to do that. Yeah. And you can build a remote company that, like, actually still functions really, really well, and there is, like, a connective tissue.
655 01:24:35.160 ⇒ 01:24:35.500 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
656 01:24:35.500 ⇒ 01:24:53.300 Uttam Kumaran: You have to design it, like, it doesn’t just happen, you know? Like, for example, like, after this, if I have even 10 minutes, I’ll just huddle with whoever’s online, just to say hi. That’s awesome. And I just try to do that as much as possible, because then it resembles, like, if I was to turn around and be like, hey, what’s up, you know? And that’s… those are the types of things that we…
657 01:24:53.300 ⇒ 01:24:56.809 Uttam Kumaran: I think we have to just think about this business and, like.
658 01:24:56.890 ⇒ 01:25:12.990 Uttam Kumaran: how do we build the same energy that you would have if you were in office together? Like, what are the benefits, and like, how do we try to simulate that in this environment? Like, with AI, or with better procedures, or cultural activities, you know?
659 01:25:13.580 ⇒ 01:25:19.250 Uttam Kumaran: It’s just tough, like, I don’t… I didn’t work at a remote company that ever thought about AI stuff.
660 01:25:19.610 ⇒ 01:25:26.739 Lauren Ford: Well, it’s not just remote, it’s remote async, and that part… that part, I will admit, is, like, the most intimidating to me, because I’ve done…
661 01:25:26.740 ⇒ 01:25:27.400 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
662 01:25:27.400 ⇒ 01:25:33.789 Lauren Ford: A little bit, but I’ve never been in an environment where it’s truly that async, or where you’re having people, like.
663 01:25:34.730 ⇒ 01:25:35.930 Lauren Ford: you know.
664 01:25:35.930 ⇒ 01:25:41.719 Uttam Kumaran: It just takes a lot of trust. It takes a lot of trust, and it takes a real,
665 01:25:42.220 ⇒ 01:25:47.200 Uttam Kumaran: You just have to have a really low bar for, like,
666 01:25:47.330 ⇒ 01:25:53.460 Uttam Kumaran: Bad behavior, like crappy behavior, or people that take advantage of the system, or basically, like…
667 01:25:53.660 ⇒ 01:25:57.410 Uttam Kumaran: The moment you see some of that, it has to be immediately sort of, like.
668 01:25:57.420 ⇒ 01:26:13.969 Uttam Kumaran: weeded out. Otherwise, a company like ours can be easily… you could easily take advantage of a company like ours, and there will… their people will consistently try to do that, and they… they do try to do that. Like, their people… some people come in, and they just don’t do anything, they AI everything, but because we do, like, these trials.
669 01:26:13.970 ⇒ 01:26:17.470 Uttam Kumaran: And we… we’re really on top of stuff. It’s very…
670 01:26:17.470 ⇒ 01:26:20.020 Uttam Kumaran: Very hard for them to get away.
671 01:26:20.020 ⇒ 01:26:29.950 Uttam Kumaran: Sometimes I blame them, sometimes I don’t. It’s mostly on us, like, why did we even… how did that person get past the interview process, right? So when people don’t work out in our company.
672 01:26:30.400 ⇒ 01:26:43.340 Uttam Kumaran: unless it’s really, like, they had some change of heart and it became, like, super nefarious, it’s usually that, like, okay, we made some mistake in our interviewing or recruiting, and we didn’t identify a trait. And that’s what allows us to, like, not…
673 01:26:43.340 ⇒ 01:26:52.510 Uttam Kumaran: do, like… I feel like in flow code and places, they, like, shut the door, like, kick the door on people, and then sort of blame people for everything that was, and I don’t like… that’s… what’s the point?
674 01:26:52.600 ⇒ 01:27:07.580 Uttam Kumaran: What’s the point of that, you know? It’s like you’re blaming this ghost for, like, all your issues. That person’s gone, you know? That person’s, like, never gonna think about you again. Let’s just blame… blame us, and, like, let’s get… let’s get better as a crew. We made a mistake, you know?
675 01:27:07.580 ⇒ 01:27:15.010 Lauren Ford: Yeah. Well, sometimes it’s not you. I mean, I can firmly say now, having done HR for many years, that there are some people who are just kind of assholes.
676 01:27:15.290 ⇒ 01:27:34.090 Lauren Ford: Or they’re just, like, they’re… I don’t know, it’s whatever it is, but, I mean, I think you’re smart to call it out fast, and I think that is true. Like, there’s a certain amount of it that you just kind of don’t know until you see whether people are gaming the system in the wrong way. Yeah, for sure. Because you want people who are gaming the system in that they’re trying to think about things differently.
677 01:27:34.090 ⇒ 01:27:49.200 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I want… you want to cultivate… yeah, exactly. Like, you want that type of gaming, the system, so for… like, I do want people to find… actively find ways to do their work faster. Yeah. You know, or, like, get their work done faster. And I want to… instead of, like… and I don’t care whether they…
678 01:27:49.200 ⇒ 01:27:57.190 Uttam Kumaran: I care just about the client’s success. I don’t care about them checking in every 10 minutes to be like, I did this thing, or hey, let’s do another meeting for me to tell you I did the thing.
679 01:27:57.190 ⇒ 01:27:57.590 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
680 01:27:57.590 ⇒ 01:28:03.109 Uttam Kumaran: You know, but also, you can give people a lot of leeway, and then they just go silent for, like, a week.
681 01:28:03.110 ⇒ 01:28:04.830 Lauren Ford: Yeah. You know? Yeah.
682 01:28:04.840 ⇒ 01:28:06.010 Uttam Kumaran: So…
683 01:28:06.020 ⇒ 01:28:20.989 Uttam Kumaran: This clearance reminded me a lot about this, and how, like, the way we run our company is, like, very… it’s actually a great place to work because of how much trust we put into people, and how little micromanagement there is, but also…
684 01:28:21.000 ⇒ 01:28:30.679 Uttam Kumaran: like, I tend to… I tend to bias towards giving people just more and, like, doing less, sort of, like, checking in on people, where I get reminded often that, like.
685 01:28:30.680 ⇒ 01:28:41.930 Uttam Kumaran: oh, we know, we need to have really high expectations. Like, people can step up, and they should step up, and we should require that of them because of all the other benefits we’re giving, and like, there’s no office.
686 01:28:42.020 ⇒ 01:28:48.610 Uttam Kumaran: kind of… we just… most of the people are only in, like, one or two meetings a day. Like, that’s, like, not how a typical, like, consulting company
687 01:28:48.840 ⇒ 01:28:56.459 Uttam Kumaran: And you’re not getting… there’s no one… there’s no yelling at the company. Like, that’s not at all most of these places are, you know?
688 01:28:56.460 ⇒ 01:28:57.060 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
689 01:28:57.250 ⇒ 01:29:02.059 Lauren Ford: Well, I do think this next chapter for you is gonna be, like, the biggest one, because I think…
690 01:29:02.570 ⇒ 01:29:15.109 Lauren Ford: The moment you start having people who are, like, completely bought in on, like, the long-term version of this, not contract work, but, like, true employees, like, then you…
691 01:29:15.270 ⇒ 01:29:23.069 Lauren Ford: you have the opportunity to hire people who are, like, there to help. I mean, not that contractors can’t help you win, but, like.
692 01:29:23.730 ⇒ 01:29:24.340 Uttam Kumaran: Different relations.
693 01:29:24.340 ⇒ 01:29:33.779 Lauren Ford: It’s more, exchange of goods. Like, once you start having people that are, like, full-on, full-time employees, you can really get.
694 01:29:33.780 ⇒ 01:29:45.009 Uttam Kumaran: There’s skin in the game, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s a different buy-in, I think, ultimately. And then… and knowing that that exists for people, that gives everybody a collective buy-in to, like, get to that level and be.
695 01:29:45.010 ⇒ 01:29:47.750 Lauren Ford: Yes. So I think there… there’s a lot of potential.
696 01:29:47.750 ⇒ 01:29:58.339 Uttam Kumaran: And that’s exactly what we’re talking about, is, like, how do we give everybody clarity into, like, what a role at Brainforge in leadership could be, and basically say, like, there’s only path is up.
697 01:29:58.490 ⇒ 01:29:59.400 Uttam Kumaran: You know? Yeah.
698 01:29:59.530 ⇒ 01:30:14.519 Uttam Kumaran: There’s no, like, down or… there shouldn’t be much stayed at the same level, you know? Yeah. You know, and we were just… you can tell, like, a lot of people started off one thing, and we just poured gas on them to kind of grow, you know? Yeah. So…
699 01:30:14.520 ⇒ 01:30:15.300 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
700 01:30:15.610 ⇒ 01:30:27.109 Lauren Ford: No, it’s very exciting. And then I asked Robert this, and he wasn’t quite sure. Are you promoting anybody who’s currently within the company to a… to a full-time employee role, or not sure yet?
701 01:30:27.410 ⇒ 01:30:31.209 Uttam Kumaran: We’re not sure yet. This is my… this is part of…
702 01:30:31.680 ⇒ 01:30:40.080 Uttam Kumaran: try not to weigh the scale and to let Clarence sort of meet people and also get his perspective. Great. But we haven’t,
703 01:30:40.390 ⇒ 01:30:41.509 Uttam Kumaran: I am not…
704 01:30:42.010 ⇒ 01:30:58.029 Uttam Kumaran: like, I… I had told the company, like, I would love for everybody here to be able to take all these roles we’re opening up, but it doesn’t mean we’re gonna lower the bar for what we expect. So if we don’t have anybody that is… fits the job description, or is, like.
705 01:30:58.160 ⇒ 01:31:15.530 Uttam Kumaran: a few, you know, one month or two months of managed hand-holding to there, but we can’t. I think oftentimes people get promoted into roles they can’t do, and… and we risk that whole person just being… wanting to be at the company if we do that. So we will… we work to create
706 01:31:15.580 ⇒ 01:31:21.780 Uttam Kumaran: The jobs to be done. And we will see, does anyone internally fit the bill, or is close?
707 01:31:21.870 ⇒ 01:31:29.069 Uttam Kumaran: And they will get first dibs, but otherwise, we will go to the market. And so, especially for this role in operations.
708 01:31:29.480 ⇒ 01:31:33.800 Uttam Kumaran: Like, there’s… there… it’s… there’s nobody that is sort of doing this, you know, right now.
709 01:31:33.800 ⇒ 01:31:35.140 Lauren Ford: Yeah, yeah.
710 01:31:36.370 ⇒ 01:31:37.360 Clarence Stone: That’s awesome.
711 01:31:37.770 ⇒ 01:31:52.069 Clarence Stone: Yeah, so I was gonna expand on that concept, like, when I stack these things together, I actually created future roles for these people, right? So, if you’ve been really great at owning client success, hey, maybe you own GoToMarket Pursuit.
712 01:31:52.070 ⇒ 01:31:52.860 Lauren Ford: Next.
713 01:31:52.860 ⇒ 01:32:11.279 Clarence Stone: So there’s a growth path for you, right? And, by the way, since the engagement planner knows exactly what’s happening on this account, you can actually take vacations, right? And the engagement planner takes over. Or, even better, you, Tom, and Robert, can take vacations and know that somebody is owning that relationship still.
714 01:32:11.280 ⇒ 01:32:28.140 Clarence Stone: Right? Yeah. Same thing for this person. Hey, if, you know, client success owner needs to go out, they know exactly what needs to be done, the clocks still run on time, the train’s still running on time, right? So we’re creating this sense of ownership on their piece of Brainforge.
715 01:32:28.140 ⇒ 01:32:28.520 Lauren Ford: So…
716 01:32:28.520 ⇒ 01:32:39.679 Clarence Stone: My suggestion was, like, hey, this should be this secondary function that full-time employees have, because that is their stake in owning something within the organization.
717 01:32:41.650 ⇒ 01:32:45.689 Lauren Ford: I love that. It’s its own form of succession planning, too.
718 01:32:46.070 ⇒ 01:32:46.430 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
719 01:32:46.430 ⇒ 01:32:52.500 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, exactly. And I think, Lauren, the one thing I liked about our initial conversations is how…
720 01:32:52.710 ⇒ 01:32:55.140 Uttam Kumaran: Crystal clear you on, on just, like.
721 01:32:55.420 ⇒ 01:33:05.860 Uttam Kumaran: I think you… you have a level of degree of separation on, like, people that is really needed at the company. Like, I see… I’m much too emotional about, like, everybody in the company.
722 01:33:05.860 ⇒ 01:33:15.839 Uttam Kumaran: like, if people are here, I’m very, very tied to them succeeding, and so we make mistakes all the time in where we try to keep people around for too long and try to make it work. And I think there’s a healthy amount of that.
723 01:33:15.840 ⇒ 01:33:18.210 Lauren Ford: But I actually do appreciate how much you…
724 01:33:18.630 ⇒ 01:33:30.790 Uttam Kumaran: you bring in that, like, okay, you have to have some separation, and, like, you have to build… you can’t build systems with, like, one person in mind, and you have to build in the assumption that people are gonna leave, people aren’t gonna work out.
725 01:33:30.790 ⇒ 01:33:40.979 Uttam Kumaran: And, like, I think this process of having, sort of, backups inbuilt is really helpful. I love the Brainforge, you know, buddy thing, which is… just helps people accelerate
726 01:33:41.060 ⇒ 01:33:43.740 Uttam Kumaran: As well, and I do think that…
727 01:33:43.920 ⇒ 01:33:48.270 Uttam Kumaran: certain… and I also think the unique thing here is we’re trying to get engineers to do these.
728 01:33:48.520 ⇒ 01:33:49.140 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
729 01:33:49.260 ⇒ 01:33:49.750 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
730 01:33:49.750 ⇒ 01:34:06.949 Uttam Kumaran: You know, and it’s not with, like, a full-time, sometimes maybe it’s 50%, sometimes maybe 30 or 20%, but as Clarence said, like, I don’t think he would have proposed this if he didn’t see that our engineers are actually doing these. Most of them are all client-facing and, like, are great, you know, communicators.
731 01:34:07.130 ⇒ 01:34:22.339 Uttam Kumaran: And so I don’t think this is out of, like, any of their realm to do. I think we just need to pattern match, and we need to incentivize. So I said, if you are in one of these roles, I think you should get more money, if you’re able to do it successfully. Like, I don’t want… I told them I don’t want to do this…
732 01:34:22.680 ⇒ 01:34:30.190 Uttam Kumaran: I can’t go with a straight face and be like, you have another job now, and you don’t make any more money. Like, I always think about what I would think
733 01:34:30.290 ⇒ 01:34:44.120 Uttam Kumaran: as an… like, as an engineer, if I saw this, I would immediately be like, oh, so now I’m getting a second job. Instead, I want a basic… I don’t know, that’s how I… so that’s what I would say. And instead, I’m like, okay, how can we set up the incentives.
734 01:34:44.120 ⇒ 01:34:46.539 Lauren Ford: So that if you do take Client Success Owner.
735 01:34:46.540 ⇒ 01:34:52.750 Uttam Kumaran: not only do you have that skill set, but you do get some points, you know, on your base, or something like that. And so…
736 01:34:53.210 ⇒ 01:35:01.320 Uttam Kumaran: It allows people to take on that role to actually make more money, and it gives a clear path on, like, here’s how you grow in the organization.
737 01:35:01.320 ⇒ 01:35:03.299 Lauren Ford: Mmm… interesting.
738 01:35:03.300 ⇒ 01:35:19.030 Clarence Stone: Yeah. And some additional context on how I see this end-state vision working, it’s… I was, so I’m helping another organization stand up their AI team, and they just recently made the decision that with… by 2030, in their organization, there will be no
739 01:35:19.030 ⇒ 01:35:29.150 Clarence Stone: people who aren’t managers. You will be managing something. It could be agents, it could be, you know, other people who are doing the workflow, it could be managing
740 01:35:29.160 ⇒ 01:35:33.079 Clarence Stone: You know, throughput of maybe robots that are actually doing things on the production line.
741 01:35:33.080 ⇒ 01:35:33.480 Uttam Kumaran: Wow.
742 01:35:33.480 ⇒ 01:35:33.800 Clarence Stone: Right.
743 01:35:33.800 ⇒ 01:35:34.350 Uttam Kumaran: No way.
744 01:35:34.350 ⇒ 01:35:45.969 Clarence Stone: with that in mind, right? Like, nobody at Bring… but the thing is, you, Tom, you can do that today, right? No full-timer should be in a position where they’re not managing something, some function. It should be.
745 01:35:45.970 ⇒ 01:35:49.520 Uttam Kumaran: No, I know, but it’s just so… it’s just so, like… I just think it’s…
746 01:35:49.990 ⇒ 01:35:52.969 Uttam Kumaran: I agree with you, but it’s still so hard to even, like.
747 01:35:52.970 ⇒ 01:35:54.859 Clarence Stone: Yeah, it’s hard to imagine, right?
748 01:35:54.860 ⇒ 01:35:58.949 Uttam Kumaran: I had never been part of a company that, like, thought that way, you know? Yeah.
749 01:35:59.060 ⇒ 01:35:59.860 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
750 01:36:00.590 ⇒ 01:36:23.269 Clarence Stone: Yeah, so, like, if you think about it that way, though, with AI, we should be able to weave these competencies into the engineers, because one, they’re already interested. These are willing parties who are already partially doing these things, and two, like, this will be less and less of a major burden as we create tooling to help them, you know, with this process.
751 01:36:23.270 ⇒ 01:36:33.060 Clarence Stone: Right? So, the vision also is that over time, we’ll have better assistance, better solutions, better software, so that it doesn’t take 8 hours, it comes down to 4.
752 01:36:33.060 ⇒ 01:36:34.619 Clarence Stone: Right? And, you know.
753 01:36:34.620 ⇒ 01:36:57.229 Clarence Stone: 20% year over year, we’ll eventually get there, right? To the point where maybe they’re just managing an agent that does all the engagement plan in you, Tom, and then just double-checks, like, hey, does this make sense? No, I have additional context, let me kind of tweak it, you know, ship it over to Lauren, CCU Tom, and say, hey, this is my engagement plan, you know, already signed off, but I,
754 01:36:57.230 ⇒ 01:36:58.709 Clarence Stone: Client Success Center, right?
755 01:37:04.230 ⇒ 01:37:05.140 Lauren Ford: Awesome.
756 01:37:05.500 ⇒ 01:37:12.190 Clarence Stone: Yeah, and lauren, I encourage you to watch this. It’s like a 30-minute podcast about Brett Adcock.
757 01:37:12.190 ⇒ 01:37:12.610 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
758 01:37:12.610 ⇒ 01:37:35.630 Clarence Stone: the CEO of Figure, it’s a robotics company, and they’ve already started deploying robots to BMW factories that are working on the stamped metal process. So they’ll take sheets of metal, bring it to the machine, it’ll get stamped, the robots actually inspect it, and actually move on. So they’re replacing humans on the dangerous parts, because there’s a hydraulic press and all that stuff.
759 01:37:35.630 ⇒ 01:37:41.230 Clarence Stone: And what he says, about how he manages his team, because this is his fourth major startup.
760 01:37:41.730 ⇒ 01:38:06.139 Clarence Stone: He’s like, I take that same core team from place to place to place, and everyone knows what they’re doing. We don’t have one-on-ones, because everyone already has this shared vision that they know they’re marching towards, right? Yeah. And I think when you’re telling you, Tom, this is, like, a really important moment for you, he’s starting to select those people that are going to hold that vision together, right? Yeah. And then, like, transform this organization towards this
761 01:38:06.140 ⇒ 01:38:12.379 Clarence Stone: type of model that’s going to be scalable, because it’ll be a portable team that really does understand, how to operate.
762 01:38:15.890 ⇒ 01:38:17.610 Clarence Stone: And I, you know, I think…
763 01:38:17.910 ⇒ 01:38:22.020 Clarence Stone: Your job and our job should be to create that scaffolding to enable that, right?
764 01:38:22.020 ⇒ 01:38:22.529 Lauren Ford: I mean?
765 01:38:22.530 ⇒ 01:38:29.670 Clarence Stone: create that growth? How do we create that environment? How do we give them the tooling and processes to grow into that kind of position?
766 01:38:32.190 ⇒ 01:38:33.040 Lauren Ford: That’s awesome.
767 01:38:33.610 ⇒ 01:38:36.940 Lauren Ford: What is… is… we… are you gonna share this deck with me later?
768 01:38:36.940 ⇒ 01:38:38.520 Clarence Stone: Absolutely.
769 01:38:38.520 ⇒ 01:38:40.259 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I just shared it with you, yeah.
770 01:38:40.260 ⇒ 01:38:42.879 Lauren Ford: Fantastic, thank you. Sorry.
771 01:38:43.390 ⇒ 01:38:44.420 Lauren Ford: Amazing.
772 01:38:44.630 ⇒ 01:38:45.549 Lauren Ford: Yeah, this is just…
773 01:38:45.550 ⇒ 01:38:59.260 Clarence Stone: It’s been, like, a bucket of my thoughts in the slides that I make every time I have conversations with you, Tom, Robert. So it’s… there’s not a set sequence, but a lot of interesting things along the way. That’s why we’ve kind of been jumping around.
774 01:38:59.470 ⇒ 01:39:06.160 Lauren Ford: That’s awesome. No, it’s really cool. It’s a… it’s really interesting, and yeah, so exciting for the next…
775 01:39:06.640 ⇒ 01:39:08.140 Lauren Ford: the next chapter.
776 01:39:09.220 ⇒ 01:39:10.230 Lauren Ford: Huh.
777 01:39:11.630 ⇒ 01:39:12.230 Uttam Kumaran: Cool.
778 01:39:12.590 ⇒ 01:39:27.410 Lauren Ford: Awesome. What’s your timeline? What are you thinking? So you’re… this weekend, you’re… you’re sort of nailing down what you… the description of the role. I’ve been taking notes, but I have… I’ve finally come to Jesus in that I’ve realized that I like taking physical notes and then transferring.
779 01:39:27.410 ⇒ 01:39:27.940 Uttam Kumaran: Fine.
780 01:39:27.940 ⇒ 01:39:31.870 Lauren Ford: Digitally, because that way I, like, synthesize them.
781 01:39:32.380 ⇒ 01:39:42.999 Lauren Ford: But I can use your mind or whatever. I am in, like, usually, like, 8 to 10 meetings a day. So I just gotta, like, dance. I just go meeting to meeting and just dance.
782 01:39:43.040 ⇒ 01:39:46.670 Uttam Kumaran: You know, and just figure out where I am, who I’m talking to, and then…
783 01:39:46.670 ⇒ 01:39:47.200 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
784 01:39:47.200 ⇒ 01:39:48.710 Uttam Kumaran: Go from there, but…
785 01:39:48.710 ⇒ 01:39:49.170 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
786 01:39:49.170 ⇒ 01:39:59.679 Uttam Kumaran: We will… so I will take some of our conversation, and start to write out a little bit of it. I’m planning on talking to Robert about, you know, budget, and I want to work,
787 01:39:59.950 ⇒ 01:40:06.939 Uttam Kumaran: Both on, you know, what a base could look like, as well as, like, if… what the incentives could look like for the role.
788 01:40:06.940 ⇒ 01:40:07.550 Lauren Ford: Awesome.
789 01:40:07.700 ⇒ 01:40:18.109 Uttam Kumaran: And so that… that’s… and that’s something I want to try to… I’m trying to finalize as… as soon as we can. I hope that next week we can put a formal offer in front of you for you to consider, certainly before…
790 01:40:18.350 ⇒ 01:40:19.039 Uttam Kumaran: All our.
791 01:40:19.040 ⇒ 01:40:21.360 Lauren Ford: I’ll let you know if they write me.
792 01:40:21.360 ⇒ 01:40:37.650 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, our company is technically off, like, the 25th until the next week. I will be working here and there, doing stuff, for sure. Like, that’s… I actually feel great, because then I have all this time to think about other stuff. But,
793 01:40:37.720 ⇒ 01:40:41.949 Uttam Kumaran: That… so we’ll try to do… get something in your hands at least before… by next week.
794 01:40:42.420 ⇒ 01:40:48.200 Lauren Ford: Fantastic, yeah, and I’ll… I’ll probably be on some, too, that week, too, because, like.
795 01:40:48.490 ⇒ 01:40:54.279 Lauren Ford: I mean, this past week I had, like, stuff all weekend, so now I can, like, get back to, like.
796 01:40:54.500 ⇒ 01:40:59.449 Lauren Ford: working on some of the stuff I was already doing, and… Sinking, and it’ll be good.
797 01:40:59.570 ⇒ 01:41:00.160 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
798 01:41:00.160 ⇒ 01:41:00.820 Uttam Kumaran: Perfect.
799 01:41:01.170 ⇒ 01:41:04.649 Lauren Ford: Awesome. It was so nice to meet you, Clarence, as well.
800 01:41:04.650 ⇒ 01:41:05.579 Clarence Stone: Yeah, great to meet you!
801 01:41:05.580 ⇒ 01:41:09.070 Lauren Ford: I mean, obviously we chatted on Slack, but it’s different when you actually have.
802 01:41:11.160 ⇒ 01:41:12.230 Clarence Stone: Absolutely.
803 01:41:12.230 ⇒ 01:41:13.030 Lauren Ford: Yeah.
804 01:41:13.400 ⇒ 01:41:30.090 Clarence Stone: And I’m around if you kind of want to, you know, another set of eyes or ears to bounce your thoughts on, as you write out, you know, what you think that end-of-year vision is, you know, a year from now, what does this role look like, or you kind of, like, outline what you think, you know, this role should be.
805 01:41:30.090 ⇒ 01:41:30.420 Lauren Ford: Okay.
806 01:41:30.420 ⇒ 01:41:45.289 Clarence Stone: Yeah, because I think what’s going to happen, really, is that there’s going to be some sort of convergence, right? Robert, you, Tom are gonna come with their vision, and, you know, there’s going to be some gaps that you guys both each, you know, fill in, and it’ll get written together.
807 01:41:49.400 ⇒ 01:41:51.289 Lauren Ford: Awesome. Okay. Very exciting.
808 01:41:51.960 ⇒ 01:41:54.479 Uttam Kumaran: Perfect. Okay, then we’ll be in touch over Slack.
809 01:41:54.480 ⇒ 01:41:56.849 Lauren Ford: Okay, sounds good. Thank you, guys. Have a great.
810 01:41:56.850 ⇒ 01:41:57.410 Uttam Kumaran: Thank you, Lauren.
811 01:41:57.410 ⇒ 01:41:59.610 Clarence Stone: Or whatever day it is, Thursday.
812 01:42:01.060 ⇒ 01:42:03.249 Lauren Ford: Okay, talk to you later. Bye.
813 01:42:03.250 ⇒ 01:42:03.850 Uttam Kumaran: Bye.