Lessons on Boiling the Ocean with WIC

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When I was accepted into the WIC accelerator, we had already sold a million-dollar solution.

Once!

Our solution had high development costs and was customized for a single line of business within a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. I was lucky, I found a visionary who understood the goals of our system based on minimal functionality use cases from other clients. He “got it” verbally and made a case for it internally. That year, He spent a large portion of budget and I earned a “Top 25 women entrepreneurs in NJ” award for the system. A year in, the company sold off that line of business and my contact moved in a different direction. Despite quick adoption by a cross functional team, the new division head preferred spreadsheets and working harder, not smarter. We achieved sales sustaining the status quo for the next two years.

Things had to change, my partner and I made a significant decision for 2020: we would walk away from our current client base to re-imagine our system. We would start from the ground up and find a way to turn clinical data into action with a multi-tenant solution that streamlines drug development for all the pharma companies. Reframing the system in this way would allow us to impact more scientific innovations that improve patient outcomes. We had enough money set aside to spend some time thinking, an absolute luxury for a bootstrapped entrepreneur.

A few days into January, I sat at my computer and I started searching.. what do we do? who could help us? I stared into the empty darkness of the internet with zero answers or even so much as a direction, I honestly didn’t know where to start. By simple chance, I came across a TED talk by this woman Chaitra Vedullapalli. Who was this woman and is she real when she talks about collective action and access for women? Here I am a woman who had sold a million-dollar solution but didn’t know how to take the next step and not quite feeling like there was much help out there, especially in pharma. Chaitra’s TED talk led me to Women in Cloud, and I noticed the annual summit was two weeks later! I did research and simmered on it for a day. It wouldn’t stop poking at me…. I just knew- absolutely knew I had to go, despite the fact I am the scientific side of the business and my male partner leads the technology. I wasn’t sure what “right” I had going to a technology summit at the corporate headquarters of Microsoft. However, my partner was supportive. Lesson 1: Never ignore your intuition! When I was (much) younger in corporate, I was on a VP track and had a boss who didn’t promote me because “I do all the right things successfully, but I can’t always explain why I do them”. I joked with him that I had women’s intuition. He told me that doesn’t fly in business, and my comment confirmed his lack of promotion (oddly my male equivalent got that promotion). Today, I am a strong believer that intuition is usually right- follow it! It stimulated a million-dollar sale and brought me to my first Women in Cloud Summit.

Lesson 2: Maximize your opportunities! The week before the summit, I planned. I took the agenda posted from the WIC summit and put a personal calendar together that maximized the day. I planned on attending individual sessions from both the business and leadership tracks- because that is what my company and I personally needed! My partner provided mini-crash courses, so I wasn’t walking into any one session completely unaware. I also reviewed the speakers list and planned who I needed to meet.

Planning ahead for the WIC summit absolutely maximized what I got out of it!  I tool an entire pad full of notes that day! Questions were answered, gaps were filled, and next generation tactics were developed for both my personal direction as a CEO and what we needed to do next for the product.

I positioned myself at tables with the people I most wanted to meet and walked away with new contacts. This was personal growth for me. I’m an introverted scientist at heart. Technology isn’t strong in my wheelhouse and meeting new people is not something that comes naturally. Despite the uphill battles being fought in my mind, I left this summit energized and excited for the business and my role in a way I haven’t been in years! I talked about it for days and let new plans form and churn in my brain.

But surely, this is one of those events that corporations support, get people excited and then back off into their own world. So, I tested my theory: I followed up on LinkedIn with new contacts and people who I heard speak at the summit. I started each note with “I heard you say XYZ at the summit and I learned XYZ.” Every – Single – Person – responded! Powerhouse women – Gavriella Schuster and Gretchen O’Hara from Microsoft, Patty Kuderer- WA State Senator and Gillian Musseig from Outlines Ventures to “name names” all replied with notes of encouragement. I was truly mystified; it is unrealistic to have such support from the industry I grew up in. Maybe this woman Chaitra is real, and this was not just a one-day of collective action. Maybe this group of women and their allies are truly different. Intuition poked at me again, but this time supported with experience-based evidence. I applied for – and was accepted into the Women in Cloud Accelerator Cohort 3.0!

On your mark, get set…. COVID! While all this momentum, excitement and planning was underway to start the WIC cohort 3.0, COVID-19 comes to America and hits the NYC and Seattle area hard! The opportunity for facetime with important, game-changing women was monumental then the news arrives that I will be part of the first digital cohort.

Lesson 3: Be Flexible and Reset the Course! While I was disappointed for the change to a digital accelerator, I certainly understood and agreed with the format given the state of the world. I’m still a scientist first, and after attending an international call of virologists around the world, I was thankful for the decision. We likely have more time to work within the accelerator and connect more frequently. When the contacts became weekly, this is when the value of the accelerator set in. Highlighting and solving problems as a team eventually became more natural. If we hadn’t been flexible, it is unlikely the accelerator would have even got off the ground by the summer. Resetting the course was an entirely different challenge. WIC itself had to take a live course and make it digital, which seemed like it hardly took any time, but I am sure it took much effort. Our business had to reset a course too. Our system focuses on emerging diseases, which are scientifically complicated, have a multitude of new therapies-in-development, and affect large patient populations with significant unmet medical needs. Before the accelerator, there were ten different diseases that qualified for this category and we were considering for our launch on Azure. However, we quickly reset the course to focus on COVID-19 as the first emerging disease within our solution, The Scientific Data Engine (SDE). To help with this pandemic, we need answers, therapies vaccines etc. Our system expedites development of these scientific innovations. We had to reset our course without doubt.

Lesson 4: Go Through the Steps of the Accelerator! As entrepreneurs, we are naturally geared to go-go-go and make it happen. Immediately, I followed my own lesson to be flexible and reset the course of our focus to be on COVID, so surely Microsoft will understand that our solution can help solve the problem and save lives during this awful pandemic…. Someone must want to talk to me, before the accelerator even starts-so let me reach out to some of those contacts I made earlier. Somewhat laughable now, but one of the earlier accelerator meetings Chaitra asked us not to reach out, that we are better collectively and if we try to do this alone, we will fail. Not only did this fail, which was at first frustrating, but I am now glad it failed- rephrased I had the opportunity to learn and fine-tune my business to be more enterprise ready.  Had I “sprang” earlier, I really think my business would have been set on a backwards course. The remaining lessons in this blog are hopefully part of the fine-tuning that not only makes our company enterprise ready- but also forward facing and more importantly, “sticky!”

Lesson 5: Challenge Your Current Knowledge Base with A New Lens: I’ve had a vision for a while that patient care could be optimized if everyone in healthcare just worked together. Instead, we have these silos with individual agendas which works but never excels. For more than a while, I have wanted to find a way to make my vision come to life. One of the first exercises we had to accomplish in the accelerator was to develop our business model. Ok, easy-peasy, I have one already! But when I tried to fit it into the homework sheet, it wouldn’t fit! It was wrong- terribly wrong! I spent weeks on this. I played with a couple of key changes to make my vision come to life. I worked hard. Then it came, my “in the shower” moment (you know those times when you aren’t thinking about the problem but the answer just appears) except I was at the end of online yoga class meditating in Savasana (corpse pose) my mind was empty and there it was- the hidden revenue model that meets the needs and unifies the critical stakeholders responsible for developing, implementing and guiding patient treatment. If you told me that I was going to spend the first few weeks of the accelerator working on a business model, I likely wouldn’t have joined- you know, because I had one. But seeing how it didn’t fit into an enterprise ready model allowed me to challenge what I thought I knew with a new lens.

Lesson 5: Learn How to Properly Boil the Ocean: Some of these “lessons” are actually best practices I’ve used prior to WIC and hope they hold some value for others reading this. Boiling the ocean however is a blatant and hard lesson I am learning at WIC. I owe this phrase to my mentor Chaitra. The first time she said “stop trying to boil the ocean” to me, I hesitated but didn’t really think much about it. C’mon, she didn’t mean me- I can handle A LOT. The second time I heard Chaitra say it to another cohort member, I thought to myself “yeah she is trying to do too much at once, it won’t stick” BUT…..The third time it was said to me I stopped in my tracks and I got it. She wasn’t telling me I couldn’t handle it, she was politely telling me that I was trying to implement a 5-year business plan in 6 months, and it won’t stick like that. Yes, I can handle a lot, but moving my business forward isn’t about what I can do- it’s about how much the world can take. My solution plus this amazing business model inspired during the accelerator requires changing the status quo and shaking up the way “things are done” in healthcare. Change often brings resistance and it will simple take time for it to be “sticky”- even if the solution is obviously needed right now! No change of this magnitude happened overnight. I need to break down my solution into manageable pots of water that together comprise the entire ocean and serve it over time in manageable components that foster real change. If I don’t, my solution will never work… or it will work but it won’t stick (which is what I now believe happened a few years ago)! Being sticky is like boiling the ocean, it is impossible, but boiling the water one pot at a time is the way lifechanging solutions come to life. I’m halfway thru the accelerator at this point in time…this is the biggest lesson I’ve learned and the biggest challenge I am working to address!

To be continued………….

About the Author – Donna Conroy

Donna founded SciMar ONE in 2003 with the objective of translating complicated Science to the healthcare Market. Under her leadership throughout the years, multiple challenged pharmaceutical products were transformed into viable and profitable therapies in competitive markets.  Donna’s long-term vision is to replace patient & caregiver fears and confusion with improved industry wide education for informed healthcare decision-making. Today, SciMar strives to disrupt the healthcare industry by unifying stakeholders thru a platform that standardizes medical knowledge with AI supporting this critical transformation in the patient experience. Donna believes that travel brings empathy and understanding to everyday life and enjoys trips with her husband and four children. Personal enjoyment is found in daily yoga, stand-up paddleboarding, skiing, and food and wine (science experiments one can eat)!

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Announcing #CloudExecConnect: A Highly Curated, Two-Day Cloud Business Builder Event

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Women in Cloud’s #CloudExecConnect is here to brighten your summer! #CloudExecConnect solves a specific need within the community to stimulate cross-pollination and bi-directional conversation that can make a meaningful difference in whether or not these businesses are able to succeed.

The two-day event is a curated virtual experience which will let you connect with industry leaders from Microsoft and tech giants. The #CloudExecConnect consists of two different events #CloudEnterpriseConnect and #FemaleCloudFoundersBrunch.

#CloudEnterpriseConnect will take place on 20 July, 2020. It is a four-hour event with meetings with tech buyers and providers together with a high likelihood to book real business with each other through pre-arranged face-to-face meetings via a digital platform. 

Our speakers for this event are: 

#CloudEnterpriseConnect is a perfect opportunity for entrepreneurs to meet and connect with procurement officers, executives, collaborators and industry leaders. Since this is a highly curated event, it is an invite-only experience, so please apply here and await your invitations.

The second event, #FemaleCloudFoundersBrunch is a mid-day event on 21 July, 2020. This virtual brunch is created to help create access for female tech entrepreneurs. The two-hour session will host a power panel on the topic, “Accessing Customers with Digital Marketing Excellence.” This brunch is hosting speakers like: 

At #CloudExecConnect is a great opportunity to connect, engage and grow your knowledge and scale your business with the right people supporting you along the way. We are so excited to bring this opportunity to our community through #CloudExecConnect. We are also thankful to our sponsors Microsoft, M12 – Microsoft’s Venture Fund, Meylah, AppFusions, Qumulo, Founders Live, Alley, Ideagen, EQUALS, New Tech, The Meeting Pool, CSS, Black Girl Venture, Microsoft Alumni Network, WIT Network, Unreasonable, UN Women, and Dell’s Women Entrepreneur Network for their constant support to our efforts. Click here to learn how you can partner with us on #CloudExecConnect!


For more information on #CloudExecConnect, visit www.womenincloud.com/cloudexecconnect  

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Drum Roll! #CloudInnovateHERxDigital Pitch Challenge Winner: B’zT

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Women in Cloud, is pleased to announce B’zT as the winner for the #CloudInnovateHERxDigital Pitch Challenge. This pitch challenge was designed to showcase enterprise solutions developed by women tech entrepreneurs. 

Women in Cloud is a community-led economic development initiative taking action to accelerate massive societal impact at an unprecedented pace. We are going to generate over $1B in net new global economic access for women entrepreneurs by 2030 through partnerships with corporations, community leaders, and policymakers. 

About B’zT

By wearing B’zT clothing, parents and teachers can be alerted via smartphone when their children wander beyond a pre-set distance (25-30 Feet) in crowded places such as shopping malls, theme parks, large parties and picnics. It is especially beneficial for teachers who have special needs children that are prone to running away unexpectedly.

Women in Cloud’s programs are designed to help female tech entrepreneurs to win enterprise opportunities, get access to cloud credits, get access to subject-matter experts & executives, a global network with the ultimate goal of creating economic growth and job opportunities that are aligned with the UN goals.

This experience was supported by industry leaders like The event is supported by Microsoft, International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners, M12 – Microsoft’s Venture Fund, EQUALS Global Partnership, Founders LIVE, Verbinden, Alley, New Tech Northwest, AirMeet, Speaker Engage, Headstart Network, and Meylah, who are also core contributors to creating access to enterprise business opportunities to more female tech entrepreneurs. We received many inspiring and innovative solution nominations.  Solutions were evaluated for originality, market feasibility, and use of Cloud and AI solutions. 

Although #CloudInnovateHERxDigital Pitch Challenge has concluded, the voting People’s Choice Award will remain open until 8 May, 2020. So please look at the line-up and tell us what solution you think needs to grab the spotlight.

Please join us on our other exciting campaign, #NominateAnEntrepreneur, where female technology entrepreneurs are celebrated on our network. Also, sign our Pledge by committing to create Economic Access for female technology entrepreneurs in your space. We would like to thank everybody for participating and supporting our mission. For more information about Women in Cloud and the join the Cloud Accelerator.

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Journey to the C-Suite and Boardroom: Smart Risk Taking

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Over the course of my career I have lived and worked in Europe, Asia and the US as a CEO, a general manager with iconic brand corporations, and served on Boards.  Needless to say, I have taken my fair share of risks over the years.  Currently I am on multiple advisory boards for FinTech and AI early stage growth firms, a venture partner with a Fund focused on women founders in technology, and actively support the missions of Women in Cloud (WiC) and the Athena Alliance. Since I am introducing myself, I will happily add that I am also a wife, mother and grandmother.

If you have read any of my earlier blogs, you know I have shared stories of success and failure along my career journey.  This blog focuses on taking high-risk decisions and highlights some of the lessons I have learned, including ones relevant to our current, unprecedented COVID-19 crisis.  

Takeaways

Despite the cliff-hanging experiences I have previously shared, I continue to take risks. In the dynamic, competitive landscape in which we operate, we need to exploit opportunities and rapidly confront threats. I must admit, the decisions related to this pandemic crisis are extraordinary, such as how long to “lock down,” whether it is possible to hold onto jobs, what benefits to provide employees or not, how to handle contract workers, when to re-open work and participate in the community… 

These are some of the questions I explore when taking a typical, non-life threatening, risk.  Yet, as I think about these questions, I realize they are crisis relevant also.

  • Is the potential reward worth the risk?
  • Do we understand the opportunity and/or the impacts of our decision?
  • Do we have a strategy and action plans and back-up contingency plans?
  • Do we have the right team in place and does the team have each other’s back?
  • When things go wrong, is it really time to declare failure or have we just hit the inevitable “messy middles” that one needs to work through? 
  • Are key players (e.g., leadership team, management, direct reports, investors/stakeholders,  Board) really open to a “fail fast” approach or is “success only” the real mandate? 
  • Have I developed a strong bench, so that when I confront an urgent situation and must make an immediate decision and own it, key players will trust my judgement?

These questions vary depending on our current situation, market, industry and options. They change and moreover they can evolve with time. 

Open and Transparent Communications

Despite all efforts, failure or high risk situations can happen. Sometimes due to events out of our control.  Regardless of the reason, open and transparent communications is very often the key to keeping or re-gaining trust and gaining the time needed to turn the situation around and achieve success.  Communications could mean:

  • Keeping the organization updated on the situation, sharing strategy and actions plans, and providing guidance on how to respond to clients and other external queries.
  • Sending communications directly to clients, acknowledging their feedback, and providing assurances that we are working on it and will keep them updated.
  • Providing frequent, on-topic, clear and honest communications to employees through the most commonly used and any new channels.
  • Finding effective ways to get employee and client feedback, and dealing with emotional impacts in addition to the business situation.
  • High visibility and engagement from the top executive leaders is very important, as well as  an effective cascade so more immediate managers can be in alignment with the organization’s philosophy and strategy when talking with their teams.

When taking on a planned high-impact initiative, make the time to gain the buy-in of leadership and key stakeholders.  Determine what are the shared rewards that make the risk worth taking – together.  It is equally critical to have the buy-in and ownership of the working team, whether direct reports, peers or collaborators. This is a continuous process, so if an unexpected crisis happens, there is critical support on which one can rely.  

Accountability 

Success (or surviving failure) involves:

  • Keeping the team continuously engaged, listening to them even if their advice will not result in action, and providing recognition; 
  • Engaging and seeking the advice and buy-in of those above and your peers, as well as finding sponsors and advocates;
  • Taking ownership and accountability for one’s decisions!

Taking risks includes accepting the risk of failure. The question is not if, but how one fails. In Harvard Business Review, James W. Harris the CEO of Seneca Financial Group, wrote: “Skipping out on colleagues when things look grim is the most common failing among super-charged executives. Lying about the true condition of a business is another. Failure is no excuse to chuck ethics out the window.”

Owning my failures has been extremely hard, and yet the lessons learned have led to far more success and skills to deal with ambiguity and the unexpected. My greatest personal success is seeing the people who joined me in taking risks and  rose above any failure that may have happened, move on to achieve their own success.

A wise and experienced executive told me at the very start of my career: “Karen, I am confident you will be successful in your career. As you climb up the ladder, just remember to step around people, not on them. You are sure to meet them again on the way down or in different circumstances. You may not understand this now, but you will.” 

It took some time, but I always remembered these words and did, indeed, come to understand them.  When it comes to fighting a crisis like this global pandemic, we clearly must all function together, as one team, up or down the “ladder”.

Karen Cone FORMER CEO, CORPORATE GM, & BOARD DIRECTOR

Karen Cone is the former Microsoft General Manager, Worldwide Financial Services Sector, and CEO and Board Director of the advisory research firm, TowerGroup. She currently serves on multiple advisory boards and is a venture partner for the MastersFund, focused on women founders in technology. Karen has also held senior executive positions with increasing responsibility and scope at IBM, MasterCard and Gartner, where she served on the Gartner International Board. She has lived and worked in the Americas, EMEA & Asia. Karen and her husband, Jeff, have three sons and four grandchildren and currently live in Seattle, Washington.

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Journey to the C-Suite and Boardroom: Fail Fast, Fix Faster

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After almost 20 years at IBM, I accepted an opportunity with Gartner, the leading IT advisory research firm. With a clean slate, I moved rapidly from a research director position to senior vice president and general manager, reporting to the CEO. Of course there were bumps along the way. I expect you have heard of the “fail fast” approach. Well, I have lived “fail fast” and determined that one also needs to “fix faster.” 

“Fail fast, fail often” became a Silicon Valley mantra for start-ups at the height of the dot-com era. Today, as we constantly stretch the edges of the digital world and the boundaries between digital and “brick and mortar” are blurring, “fail fast” has expanded from the start-up world into established businesses. But the business leader who executes on “fail fast” and succeeds in failing is often at risk. Ken Spencer, an innovation thought leader and CEO of Spyder Works wrote an article headlined: “‘Fail fast, fail often’ may be the stupidest business mantra of all time.” Can one “fail fast” without career failure?

The “monkey” is on my back

It was at the turn of the 21st century and e-commerce, dot-com, and the Y2K “bug” were all featured in Gartner research. I was head of Gartner’s technology and IT management research services; we were predicting the explosion of the internet and advising clients on the growing importance of the Web to their businesses and the need to be a player in the rapidly emerging digital world. At senior leadership team meetings, I frequently brought up the widening gap between our research and our limited web reality, and its impact on our credibility with clients. 

I must have been too vocal, because the CEO called me in and told me that I was now the General Manager of gartner.com and the problem was mine to fix.. 

I was blindsided—this was not expected. Like most business and technology leaders at this time, I had no internet experience. My CEO explained that an inside person was needed to lead the effort, someone who knows the business and who the Heads of the disparate acquisitions would trust to also take care of their interests.  Apparently that inside person was me.  So I took a deep breath and started pulling a team together.

We held multiple focus groups both with clients and non-clients who told us what they “hated” about the current gartner.com and research distribution, and shared their visions for the future of our product. This included a website that had contextual search capabilities to filter through the thousands of possibilities and return highly relevant results. We set to work designing a totally unique look and feel for the new gartner.com with ground-breaking functionality.

At Gartner all-company meetings, we promised a new website that would “seduce, sizzle, and stick”. Everyone loved it. I presented the approach to clients at the Gartner Symposium. When I closed my pitch with the words, “We will launch a website that gives you what you never knew you wanted but can’t live without,” I got a standing ovation. My team and I were convinced we had a winner. We were under great pressure from clients, senior management, and the board to launch. So we moved rapidly to get the lightly field-tested product to market. 

Learning the hard way

We launched a leading-edge website in January 2001. We gave our clients just what they asked for. And it bombed—badly! We quickly learned the meaning of the phrase—“give your customers what they ask for, but not too much.”

Usually, this means, “Don’t let your customers drag you down into the traditional and miss the next breakthrough innovation.” In our case, it meant our clients (customers) were not ready for the magnitude of change the new web interface introduced. We began to realize that our testing was focused on ideas rather than actual user experience. Additionally, we discovered that the excellent relevance of results did not compensate for the fact that the search engine was slow. In the Web world, response time is non-negotiable. I had failed and done it fast! Now we needed to fix it fast! 

 “I can do that…”

Thankfully, even when we felt our most confident, we put a contingency plan in place. Prior to the original launch, we were optimistic the new website was what our clients were asking for—yet we also knew that we might need to adapt quickly.

From the start, we held all-team meetings every week. During these meetings, we would challenge the team to brainstorm solutions to our most difficult requirements, the potential showstoppers. My favorite words to hear were when someone would call out: “I can do that…” So once again, we called the team together and explained what we needed to fix fast! This included “dumbing down” the user interface and changing it to something much more familiar. However, the far more complicated challenge was to significantly reduce the response time of the search engine, while keeping relevance. 

As soon as we presented the problem, conversations spread throughout the large room. The team was thinking out loud. They owned the challenge. We waited… And then we heard the magic words, “I can do that…” And we did. We embraced our failure, learned from it, and moved on to focus on the fix. Three months later, in April 2001, we launched the second version of gartner.com. And it was a great success. 

I surely prefer success, yet I must admit I did learn life-changing lessons from failure.  Some are specific to this scenario, like the incredible risks associated with short-cutting critical success factors, such as user experience.  Or, the fact that the “best” solution may not be the right solution.  Or, listening to your customers, but not too much. More profoundly, I recognized that if one looks to survive a “Fail Fast” risk, having the Team and key Stakeholders with you is essential to “Fix Faster.”

Karen Cone FORMER CEO, CORPORATE GM, & BOARD DIRECTOR

Karen Cone is the former Microsoft General Manager, Worldwide Financial Services Sector, and CEO and Board Director of the advisory research firm, TowerGroup. She currently serves on multiple advisory boards and is a venture partner for the MastersFund, focused on women founders in technology. Karen has also held senior executive positions with increasing responsibility and scope at IBM, MasterCard and Gartner, where she served on the Gartner International Board. She has lived and worked in the Americas, EMEA & Asia. Karen and her husband, Jeff, have three sons and four grandchildren and currently live in Seattle, Washington.


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