Enterprising Empathy

 

Ocient CEO & Co-Founder Chris Gladwin reveals his methods for building businesses that meet the demands of Enterprise customers, and outlines his plan to help build Chicago into a major center for technology.

 

Episode Notes

Four-time-startup-founder Chris Gladwin is a Chicago guy, and he’s spent much of his career bucking the notion that game-changing tech solutions can only be nurtured to market maturity on the coasts. But if you ask him, it’s not lightning-in-a-bottle moments that have propelled his journey; it’s the idea that successful companies are built in increments, over what he calls “person centuries,” by constantly lending an ear to your customers and earnestly addressing their concerns and needs.

In his talk with Jesse, Chris talks about his journey as an IT customer and deliverer of user-friendly enterprise solutions. He describes why IT systems are becoming more complex, and why the need for adept IT talent isn’t likely to lessen any time soon. He reveals the ambitious plan behind P33, the organization he started to transform Chicago into a tech hub. He describes in detail how businesses can listen to the customer at scale. And he leaves us with a look at the future of data analysis - a future he’s helping to write as CEO of Ocient.

(2:51) How Chris’s early journey as a customer of IT products prepared him to build consumer-friendly solutions

(8:19) The rapidly accelerating complexity of IT systems and data ownership

(12:40) “We know what works” -- how to prepare more people to work in IT

(14:56) The allure of Chicago, and why Chris started P33 to help transform it

(21:17) Building organizations that know how to listen at scale

(25:36) Looking ahead: We can analyze more data than ever, but what will we do with it?

Guest Bio

Chris Gladwin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ocient, the Chicago-based company enabling rapid analysis and management of the world’s largest datasets. In 2004, Chris founded Cleversafe, which became the largest and most strategic object storage vendor in the world (according to IDC). The technology he started generated over 1,000 patents granted or filed.

Prior to Cleversafe, Chris was the Founder and CEO of startups MusicNow and Cruise Technologies, and led product strategy for Zenith Data Systems. He started his career at Martin Marietta, and holds a mechanical engineering degree from MIT.

Helpful Links 

+ Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Chris Gladwin: There's this ego thing that you can have because you've worked so hard and you think you're really smart, and so you think you know, but you don't. Listening involves setting your ego back and really learning from someone else and internalizing that knowledge. So I think that's one of the things that I am really good at. Having done this so long is I've learned how to listen and learned how to be taught. And culturally, I think I've also gotten good at building an organization that knows how to listen and knows how to be taught by the customer.

[00:00:34] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics Studios this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas fill some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences. I'm Jesse Purewal, head of brand at Qualtrics, builder, coach, storyteller, and your host.

One of the truths of the entrepreneurial journey is that it's rot with ups and downs, but sometimes the amplitude of those ups and downs can get a little dramatized. Just watch an episode of Silicon Valley or go back and read an issue of Wired from the early 2000s and you'll see what I mean. You ask entrepreneurs for advice, many will say, "Don't get too high on your success and don't get too down on yourself when things don't work out." The most accomplished builders have a way of keeping everything in perspective, but how? To help answer that question I wanted to talk to Chris Gladwin.

If you were Silicon Valley based, Chris would probably be called a serial entrepreneur. Over the course of his career Chris has founded four enterprise technology companies, a music subscription business, and a nonprofit. They've all created successful outcomes for employees, customers, and society. But Chris, he's a Chicago guy. He isn't in it for the hustle or the story or the drama, he's in it for the long haul. To build and grow teams that are willing to put in what he calls, "person centuries of work." To build and scale technologies that power the biggest, fastest growing companies in the world.

And through efforts like P33, the organization he started to help build Chicago into a global tech leader, he's scaling what he knows so that untold numbers of new builders can benefit from all he's learned along the way. Chris's secret sauce as you'll hear in our conversation is a lack of ego coupled with a desire to listen to and deeply understand enterprise customer's biggest challenges so he and his teams can build what truly matters.

So things went well at MIT for you I presume. You ended up at Martin Marietta out of school, which is a predecessor to what many listeners will know as Lockheed Martin. Talk about some of those formative years for you and kind of what you learned about the economy, about business, about customers, out of the gate.

[00:02:51] Chris Gladwin: I worked at the group at Martin Marietta that was called Corporate Computing Standards. And what we did is we would evaluate all the different kinds of computer products, particularly personal computer products and networking, that a hundred thousand or so people would use. And we would evaluate the best spreadsheets, the best printers. So I had this incredible opportunity to be a professional customer of enterprise IT products. I led a big email evaluation that was the first in the United States, maybe the first in the world, to connect together all the different email systems at Martin Marietta so everybody could email each other instead of having 10 different email accounts on all the different types of systems.

And so I learned a lot about what it means to be an enterprise IT customer. What's important to them, what kind of problems they have, what kind of solutions they need. And it's really informed me throughout my whole career, because everything I've done since then has been on the vendor side of making enterprise IT products. And that intuition I have, that judgment I have, from having spent five years as a professional customer has really been key to my success.

[00:03:58] Jesse Purewal: Yeah, it sounds like you were customer obsessed before being customer obsessed was necessarily a thing. Talk though for a minute about the balance of understanding competition and kind of some of the other dynamics in the market in addition to customers and why kind of keeping customers though at the nucleus of that or on the top of that heap ends up being the recipe for success in your view.

[00:04:20] Chris Gladwin: So I kind of see myself in those customers and I would actually get upset with me or my company if we didn't treat them with respect and didn't really understand what their needs were. And a part of treating customers like that, particularly enterprise customers, is it's they know a lot and they definitely understand competitive alternatives. And so we need to understand competitive alternatives and be realistic about them. We can't lie. I mean, it's easy to fall in love with your own company, your own products, because you're making them, but you also have to be realistic. Like, is it really faster? Is it really better? What's it better at? What's it not better at? Because obviously nothing does everything awesome. So really having an honest dialogue with customers, you have to bring to the table enough unique value that matters to them.

And then when you have that, it doesn't mean you have to be perfect in everything, but you've got to really be honest. And if you can establish that kind of honest communication, that's essential and that's something that I've really learned and at times it's been controversial. My company's like, "We can't tell them that we're not good at this," or "We can't tell them that they should use this other thing." But I've always been that way where if it really is a fit, we'll be all over it. We're going to go win that business. But if it's not a fit, we should be the first to direct them to where there's a better alternative.

[00:05:40] Jesse Purewal: There's a sense that if you come to the table prepared in these kinds of conversations, you're in enterprise software, I've spent a number of years in enterprise software, there's a lot to understand and appreciate about any given company's commercial opportunities and the dynamics of play in their category. And eight or nine out of 10 times I got to imagine companies are across the table from somebody where they're saying, "They fundamentally don't get something or other about the way we operate." And if you're that one you could really stand out in lots of interesting ways, not just in a sales cycle, but in the context of a long term relationship.

[00:06:15] Chris Gladwin: A sophisticated enterprise customer has been through this before. They've bought and deployed variety of different products from a variety of vendors and they understand that nothing's perfect and there's going to be problems. And what really matters is, do you have the kind of honest relationship where you can really understand the needs and how to address not only the opportunities, but also the challenges that are going to come up? They're buying a relationship. When you're providing an innovative new type of technology that's disruptive in a good way, that creates a lot of change for the customer and change is complicated. And even if everybody does it right, you can have situations that occur when just the change creates some kind of problem.

So sophisticated customers know this is going to happen. There's going to be challenges and how well you respond to that is ultimately the measure of the quality. It's not just like, "Yeah, it could go this super fast." Okay, that's valuable, but it could go this super fast and you manage to deploy it and deal with the challenges that's actually more valuable because the downside of something going really wrong is much greater than the upside of it's twice as fast as it used to be. So dealing with those downsides effectively is ultimately what defines the greatest amount of success.

[00:07:42] Jesse Purewal: And if there's somebody listening who's an enterprise software builder or an aspiring software builder, any kind of technology platform for that matter, what are the kinds of downsides as you look at, let's call it the next half decade or decade of technology innovation? I think about things like privacy and security. Talk to me from a more educated position around understanding the enterprise technology space. What are the negative externalities that if I'm going to have to think about deploying the solution I'm inventing, sure I'm going to promise that it's going to take you to the moon as a company, but on our way to the moon, what are going to be the air pockets that we go hit when we're in orbit?

[00:08:19] Chris Gladwin: One of the things that people talk a lot about is the effect of Moore's law or an accelerating change in some kind of IT capability. The network's getting faster, the storage is getting bigger, the computer is getting more powerful, and that's all true. And in some ways that's easier to deal with because it's just more of the same. What's happening at the same time for enterprise customers is the complexity that they are dealing with in their solutions is also accelerating and that is harder to deal with. I think the biggest kind of externality is that increasing amount of complexity just gets more and more difficult to deal with.

Now you can see it in the profitability and capabilities of these companies. I mean, they're doing incredible things in terms of serving their customers and creating value, but what it means for the enterprise IT operation is it just gets more and more complicated. And one way to look at this is the nature of the complexity of data ownership. 20 years ago or so you could look at data and say, "Who owns it?" And you do generally get one answer, "This person owns it," for any piece of data.

What's happened is the complexity of ownership has accelerated since then to where when you look at a piece of data or some data set and ask who owns it, you're going to get a very complicated answer. It's like, "Well, what do you mean by ownership? There's different aspects of ownership. Who can delete it, who can view it, who creates it, who has the ability to create derivative works?" So that's just one aspect. The data ownership aspect is also going through this accelerating complexity and everything else about IT systems generally has this accelerated complexity as well. So that's I think the biggest thing you're seeing.

[00:10:05] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. And you have this migration over time from the origins of data in the enterprise living more in backend operating systems like ERP, HRIS, FPNA, and then it gradually migrates up the stack into cloud and into analytics to now where for many companies data is the business, right? The thing I'm shipping is actually zeros and ones as opposed to atoms. And so you get to a point where potentially literally every employee in a company actually is a data owner because whatever new is data, that's how it's got to be.

[00:10:38] Chris Gladwin: Yeah, it's amazing what enterprises are doing. People generally talk in the macro economy about this labor shortage. You can see it in the unemployment rate. You can see it in the number of open positions, but as you zoom in on enterprise IT, people with these kinds of skills or the potential to have these kinds of skills, you see at both in new grads as well as experienced people, the demand for that kind of talent is so far above the number of people that have it. We're seeing like 1999-2000 level demand. You see it in compensation. But the difference is in 1999-2000, a lot of what field that was the stock market and the PE ratio for technology companies just went to a place that didn't make sense and eventually it normalized, the bubble burst. This time is different.

And that you're seeing that level of demand again with limited supply. But the difference here is it's all driven by the amount of profit being made by these companies, the amount of genuine value creation. You take the top five or six technology companies, the trillions of dollars of profit they create on a yearly basis, the tens of trillions of dollars of market cap they have, that's real. That's not just some speculative stock price and it's not going away. We don't expect to see a bubble burst. If anything, this is here to stay and you're going to see this demand for years to come.

[00:12:06] Jesse Purewal: And how can we as a society, if I take it all the way up to that level, make sure to be equipping to address that demand on the supply side? If I go back to Chris Gladwin the high school senior discovering the fit with MIT, equipping himself for a future in the '80s, '90s OTs, what's the next version of this look like? What role do universities play? What role do organizations, not unlike P33 which you to hand in standing up in Chicago, create, how do we develop the next cadre of talent to supply against those kinds of demands?

[00:12:40] Chris Gladwin: Well, the good news is we know what works. MIT is a perfect example. MIT is a factory that produces people with these capabilities period. And it's done it for century plus. So more of that. I mean, you could 10X all the top engineering schools and all that would result as 10 times many people getting these great jobs and creating this kind of great value. The other aspect of this is how do we do this in a more inclusive way? And the school that I've gotten very involved with is the Illinois Institute of Technology, Illinois Tech.

Their founding mission from a hundred plus years ago was to do that for all kinds of people. They're one of the most transformational schools in the country where they can take a person from a lower socioeconomic background across genders, across nationalities, across ethnic groups, and transform them into kind of these upper middle class and upper class households earners that are creating this value. There's example where that part of the template is known as well. And so it's just as simple as you do that 10 times as much or a hundred times as much you're going to get this output.

[00:13:51] Jesse Purewal: Since you mentioned Illinois Tech I want to ask you about your relationship with Chicago. It's no accident that you talk about the power of working hard and being in the customer's shoes. But talk about the relationship you personally have cultivated and discovered that you have with Chicago as a community.

[00:14:08] Chris Gladwin: Well, my first job, as we talked about it Martin Marietta, was in Washington D.C. And I felt like it really it's a federal government town and you can have tech companies there, but you're the sideshow. You're not the main event. The main reason I moved to Chicago is I wanted to be in a city where it was really a business city. I wanted my career to be in business and I felt like Chicago was a place to do it. Having gone through that now for 30 years, I have had a lot of success here and I've learned what the advantages are here. And I've really been able to figure out how to kind of create a world leading technology engine in the form of new companies that build a team that goes and finds a discipline and really becomes a world leader in that, and then translates that into economic value.

And I've learned that that is very possible here in Chicago, but we're really underperforming for the assets we have. I mean, Chicago, second to Boston, is the second most producer of college graduates of any city in the United States. Second to D.C., we have the second most software engineers. We have the best transportation infrastructure, really great cost of living, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We have the elements to really create technology enabled, tech focused companies in innovation and value, but we're underperforming. And we really should be a global tech leader. So that's why I help start P33 was to transform the city and we call P33 because it's going to take some time. And we're talking about getting this done by 2033 as to transform the city into a global tech leader.

[00:15:41] Jesse Purewal: Talk a little bit more specifically, if you would, about what moved you to start P33 and what P33's role will be in Chicago's growth arc between now and 2033.

[00:15:51] Chris Gladwin: Well, what motivated me to start P33 is really coming to understand these things we've been talking about. And I had started a company. My prior company called Cleversafe was the company that built the largest data storage systems in the world. And we really dominated that market in the most competitive of IT markets you can have. And our customers were the trillion dollar tech companies and the intelligence community and the telcos, really demanding buyers. And we did it. We were the world leader in that kind of technology competing against folks from Cambridge and Palo Alto and all over the place. And it proved that you can do it. And there were certain advantages to doing it here in Chicago. There are other disadvantages as well. And so we had to kind of form our approach to take advantage of the advantages.

And I knew coming out of that, that you could do that and not just Cleversafe, not just me, there were other people doing it in Chicago as well but I knew it could be done on a much broader scale. And as we were saying earlier, I knew Chicago was underperforming given the assets that we had. And I guess I also felt like for me where could I really have impact? And this is something I really knew. The credibility of Chicago because of the results I had had and others proved that it could be done. And I felt like this is the future of value creation. This is the future of job creation.

If you want to have culture and you don't have these kind of economic engines in your metropolitan area, you're not going to have as much culture plain and simple. You're not going to be able to do as much philanthropic activity. You need this kind of economic engine. So I knew I had that opportunity and I knew I could have this highly leveraged impact. And so I wanted to take advantage of that. And that's what led to P33.

[00:17:32] Jesse Purewal: To hear another episode of Breakthrough Builders where I talk to a CEO who's helping scale entrepreneurial talent in a community, check out my conversation with Lakshmi Shenoy. Lakshmi is the CEO at Embarc Collective, an organization that helps startup talent build bold, scalable, thriving companies in the Tampa Bay region. Lakshmi and I talked about how she drew on her experience within creative agencies and as a leader at 1871, the incubator in Chicago, to help get Tampa on the map as a rising hub for top tech entrepreneurs. It's Episode 7 of Season 3, and the link is on the show notes.

Now back to the rest of my conversation with Chris Gladwin. And the businesses you've started, you've built for scale, whether it's been subscription services or cloud storage or data platforms. And from a people standpoint, I've heard you talk about not just having great raw talent, but also harnessing patience and staying power so that you can go from not just zero to one, but also to scale in products and services. Can you talk about how you kind of cultivate and build a sense of, hey, be patient, stay the course?

[00:18:44] Chris Gladwin: Yeah. So that's been one of the areas I've focused on, partly because of that experience I had at Martin Marietta. So I had some expertise in that and then the four big startups I've done have all been focused on large scale enterprise IT. And that's also fit with Chicago in that the advantages in Chicago are that you do have the second most college graduates of any city in the United States. And then if you start adding in places a little bit further away like University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Purdue, Wisconsin, you just get to these crazy numbers of really talented people.

And so you can put together teams of a hundred plus engineers, and then you can have higher than Silicon Valley average quality in those engineers. And then you get retention rates that are significantly above the average for technology companies. So instead of two, three years average, you can get eight, 10 years average. What that set of things is well suited for is projects that require person centuries of work to bring to the market. When I mean a person century I mean a hundred person years of work and multiple of those.

So like at Ocient we're coming up on 300 person centuries of development. Okay, that's what it takes to build the world's largest data analysis platform. That's just the price of poker if you want to play. Because of the efficiency of doing that in Chicago, the retention, the lower cost of living, the higher quality of candidates, especially young candidates who've grown into that expertise, that then creates a structural advantage if you're doing large skill engineering.

[00:20:18] Jesse Purewal: Turning into maybe your personal perspectives on leadership, you talked at the top about being a professional customer. And when I hear that, I think a lot about listening and empathy, maybe talk about the role that empathy and listening to understand has played for you in your journey as a builder and how you would encourage people to develop that part of their DNA.

[00:20:39] Chris Gladwin: There's a myth that I think is fading that the way that innovation works is this really smart person sits in their garage and thinks big thoughts and outcomes, breakthrough innovation. There have been things like that that have occurred in the past, but all those ideas are done. The only things that are left are the really harder ones. It's not at all unusual to be, like I said, spending five, six years kind of learning what to build while you're building it. And not only does it require person centuries of work just to kind of build version one, it requires an extraordinary amount of communication with the customer.

I don't care how smart you are. I don't care how much experience you have. You cannot know in the level of resolution required what the market needs. One of the areas we focus on at Ocient is ad tech, digital ad exchange, data analysis, particularly on the demand side, people that buy these ads. With the initial customer we had there, we documented what they needed. And it was about 250 to 300 pages long of detail. That customer had to spend hours and hours talking to us and explaining, "Well, what kind of queries do you run? How's the data structured? Where does the data come from? What's the cardinality of the data?" And on and on and on.

And we needed that much resolution of information to build something that would be useful. And so how you do that, not just with that customer, but in any of these markets, I mean, that's very typical. You have to be really good at listening and learning. I mean, taking notes. And there's this ego thing that you can have because you've worked so hard and you think you're really smart. And so you think you know, but you don't. Listening involves setting your ego back and really learning from someone else and internalizing that knowledge.

So I think that's one of the things that I am really good at having done this so long is I've learned how to listen and learned how to be taught. And culturally, I think I've also gotten good at building an organization that knows how to listen and knows how to be taught by the customer and engaging in these conversations to where they will tell you. I mean, the way I started Ocient was very, very simple. Prior company made the largest data storage systems in the world, Cleversafe. We really focused on the 300 largest bit storing organizations in the world, period. And we knew them all.

We didn't have them all as customers, but we sure chased them all as customers. And we knew them and they all started to say the same thing. And the limitless scale storage systems that we were providing were working, but many the biggest of the big were saying, "Yeah, but it also needs some kind of limitless scale data analysis platform and I can't find it." And let me tell you when the biggest enterprise IT operating organizations in the world start to telling you they can't find something, get your pen out, start taking notes and take notes for as long as they'll talk to you, because they're giving you gold. Because if they can't find that, it doesn't exist. And if they need it, it is worth a lot of value. And so I just simply wrote down everything they said, asked them a lot of questions, and that led me to what we're doing now at Ocient.

[00:23:54] Jesse Purewal: I would just want to ask you a couple more here, Chris. Sometimes it's said that we're the average of the people we surround ourselves with, who are the kinds of people that you have tended to surround yourself with on your journey as a builder?

[00:24:07] Chris Gladwin: For sure one of the essential things is just the competence. You have to know how to do that job. We keep honing our process over 30 years to really figure out who could really do this work and we've gotten good at it. The other things you look for are they have to want to do the kind of work that we do. And as I was saying earlier, this is not easy. It's person centuries of work. And it's not going to work for someone who doesn't really enjoy it. I always have this fantasy and I know friends of mine who have started multiple companies, they always think, "Well, the next time around I won't have to work quite so much because I'm better at it. I've got all this experience," and that is a fantasy I can tell you from experience.

I see it not only in myself, but all the other people I'm working with who are either at Cleversafe or other companies. A hundred sales calls is a hundred sales calls and it takes 500 hours to set them up and prep and follow up. That is how it is. And so unless you really enjoy that grind, it's going to be difficult. You're not going to be good at it. You're not really going to do it. So we also look for are you driven to really do this kind of work because it's hard. So that combination of that really is something you want to do, you're driven, and you have the competency.

[00:25:25] Jesse Purewal: Chris as a lifelong technologist, what are some, either categories of technology or some innovation vectors that are really interesting to you right now?

[00:25:35] Chris Gladwin: As companies get into this stage that Ocient's in, where we have our initial customer deployments and now we're ramping up, it really becomes all consuming. Even for me the fourth time around. What you're seeing is a disruption, a disruptive breakthrough is going on where previously the scale at which people could analyze data was limited. And you had a separation of analysis or databases and storage because the analysis was so much more expensive than the storage. What's happening is those two worlds are converging.

What we're seeing at Ocient is we're able to deliver data analysis performance on par with DRAM. And right now it's about 15 cents a gig. So instead of $5 a gig, it's 15 cents a gig and it's as fast for large scale analytics. And the price of that is dropping faster than the price of spinning disk. So essentially you're going to have the cost to spinning disk at the performance of DRAM. So you'll be able to analyze at high performance, at hyperscale, all the data you store. It's just going to change things.

And the most interesting things are the things that are really the hardest to anticipate. Every time you have these kinds of disruptive changes, part of what it's used for is to make what was being done bigger, faster, cheaper. That's going to happen. Campaign management companies are going to analyze more data faster, but that's usually only 20% of the ultimate use of a disruptive technology. 80% is all the new stuff that's only enabled by the disruptive technology. I'm pretty sure that the engineers at Bell Labs when they invented packet switching and the internet were not thinking, "Yeah, one day we're going to have this thing called YouTube." And it's just always so hard to imagine what are going to be the 80% of the new uses of this disruptive technology.

If regular people can analyze an exabyte of data, a thousand petabytes, a million terabytes, if they could do it, what would they do with it? And some of it's going to be stupid and silly and some of it's going to be changing culture and some of it's going to be profound and it's going to be a whole range of stuff, but it's going to be new stuff that's hard to imagine. And that's what we're seeing in the data analysis world is we're just at the beginning. The first things we're doing at Ocient is making things better, bigger, faster, cheaper, that existed. And we see other database companies doing similar stuff. But what you're about to see is this whole world of never before, hard to wrap your head around new stuff that's about to happen with hyperscale data analytics.

[00:28:12] Jesse Purewal: If you're giving advice to somebody who is building for the first time, what would you say to them in terms of the wisdom you've had, the honor of accumulating over the years?

[00:28:21] Chris Gladwin: Well, that's easy. The number one reason new business, particularly something that's innovative, fail is that they don't last long enough. People are almost always right about the value that they're creating and the fact that it's valuable, but they're always wrong on how long it's going to take. Always. I've done this messed stuff I was like, "Man, I underestimated the time." You just don't last long enough.

And so you got to figure out how to last and it's not easy because you run out of money. Well, how do you make it last longer? How do you put yourself in a position to be there when the market's there? To be there for long enough to actually finish building it? To be there long enough to explain it, to sell it? It always takes longer than you think and you just got to find a way to last.

[00:29:03] Jesse Purewal: I love it. Well, I will have this conversation lasting between my ears for a little while, quite a lot to think about and reflect on. So Chris Gladwin, I'm better off for the connection. Thank you for the discussion today.

[00:29:14] Chris Gladwin: All right. Thanks Jesse. It was a pleasure.

[00:29:16] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review and tell a friend about the show. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull, the folks from StudioPod Media in San Francisco and VaynerTalent in New York.

From StudioPod Media, our executive producer is Katie Sunku Wood, producer is Sterling Shore, editing and music is by Ryan Crowther, and our show coordinator is Kela Sowell. From VaynerTalent, publicity and promotion support come from Samantha Heapps, Hanna Park, Lindsay Blum and Ivanna Lin. The show's designers are Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Our website's by Gregory Heydon and photography is by Christy Hemm Klok.

Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 5Jesse Purewaladvice for it professionals, b2b, enterprise solutions, chris gladwin, chicago, tech industry, product development, data analysis, customer experience