5/21/18 By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Stephen Gillett has had a remarkable career for someone as young as he is. At 42, he has been the CIO and General Manager of Digital Ventures at Starbucks, the President of Digital, Marketing, and Operations at Best Buy, and the Chief Operating Officer of Symantec. In 2015, after Symentec was split into two companies, Gillett exited. Soon thereafter, he joined Google Ventures (now known as GV) as an Executive-in-Residence. He would eventually join Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory” X (formerly Google X), and it was during his time there that the idea for Chronicle arose.
Chronicle is still largely in stealth mode, but Gillett took time to speak with me about his vision for the company, its progress in garnering customers, the process of graduating from X, and the advantages of growing a business within Alphabet as opposed to seeking funding from more traditional venture capital.
Peter High: When we last spoke, you were transitioning from your role as Chief Operating Officer of Symantec to Executive-in-Residence at GV [formerly Google Ventures]. You transitioned to X [formerly Google X], and in recent months, an idea that you have been pursuing, called Chronicle, was graduated from X. Can you talk about the genesis of Chronicle?
Stephen Gillett: First, let me provide some background. While at GV, as I met with entrepreneurs and talked to various categories that GV was making investments in, my goal was eventually to go to a startup having spent the last few years at bigger companies.
In 2015, while I was learning and understanding everything that Google was working on, Alphabet, the parent company, was taking shape. It gave me an opportunity to meet and talk to several of the now Alphabet leaders, at Google, Google X, and Google Ventures to understand what their future paths were.
In that tour of the new Alphabet, I learned about what X’s mission was, their concept of moonshot thinking, and how the “moonshot factory” worked. Rather than joining a startup that Google Ventures was funding, I pivoted and started to work within the X structure to figure out if there was a startup or a moonshot category that I felt compelled to work on. I realized that X was a great platform to achieve my goals, and I could get the support and the access to the resources I needed. That is how I landed at X.
High: Can you talk about the process as you were searching for that category? What was the process of elimination or inclusion? I would also be interested in the inner workings of X, such as how people work together across the organization.
Gillett: I knew one of the categories would be enterprise security, but I was not sure that this was the right place or the platform. X had been experimenting and looking at cybersecurity as a category before my arrival. When I got here, the question X was asking was, “Is this a problem worthy of the mission of X?” Which is to build moonshots, to create radical new solutions, and to touch a billion lives around the world. That is X’s broad framework.
X is not here to create widgets or a new point product. They are tasked with thinking about big problems facing humanity at large. I have spent over 20 years in IT, starting off on the help desk and working my way up to be CIO. Every year, security became a bigger and more important part of what I was doing in technology. Having spent a few years with Symantec – at the time, the world’s largest cybersecurity company – and dealing with the customer needs globally that they were facing, it quickly became apparent that cybersecurity was worthy of moonshot thinking.
X and Alphabet was a great place for us to focus on that because of the resources, thinking, and capabilities you need are not conducive to a quarterly earnings call or having to raise a round of funding. You can focus on long-term problems and assemble the best teams and the best technology to go after that by getting the permission to be curious and think about it at a huge scale. I do not believe there was a better place to start this than at X.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
4/23/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
From an early age as an Estonian refugee in the United States, Toomas Hendrik Ilves understood the transformative power of technology. He learned to code in BASIC in the 1970s. He would go on to study psychology at Columbia University and at the University of Pennsylvania, but as Estonia gained independence after the Soviet Union collapsed, Ilves returned to serve his country. Some of the earliest reforms that he ushered in involved the use of technology in schools. He also understood that the blank slate that the country had at its independence was a rare opportunity to rethink how a government interacted with its citizens.
Through many waves of innovation, the country not only made tremendous digital advances, but it also future proofed its technology. Ilves would become president of Estonia in 2006, serving for two terms through 2016. Along the way, he defended his country during the first cyber war with Russia, and ushered a number of radical digital ideas. He describes all of the above in this interview.
Peter High: You have an international background. You were born in Stockholm, Sweden to Estonian parents. You spent much of your upbringing in the United States in Leonia, New Jersey where you graduated from high school. You have degrees from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. I am curious what you drew from the international experience in the development of your thought process?
President Toomas Hendrik Ilves: To begin with, growing up bilingual often has an impact on people’s thinking and their ability to see things from different perspectives. I am also the child of refugees, so I was far more tuned to foreign policy issues than normal kids my age. I remember beginning to read the New York Times when I was nine because of the Soviet Union and how that was connected to my parent’s country being occupied.
A second major influence is that I learned to program when I was in ninth grade. I had a math teacher who was doing her Ph.D. in Math Education and decided to teach a small group of us how to program. At the age of 14, I was programming in Basic. This was a unique experience, and it had a huge influence on me. It was the inspiration for the first digitization program in my country. Finally, I am fundamentally interested in democracy, and that was fueled by the enormous course load that is required for a Political Philosophy degree at Columbia. These were all influences when I was in the United States.
Later, when I went back to Europe, I worked as what you might call a cold-warrior. I was an analyst for Radio Free Europe, and, later, I headed the Estonian Service. Through this, I met a lot of authors who were part of the underground dissent decades before Estonian independence. Eventually, we would lead the independence movement. That was also formative.
High: It was in the early to mid-1980s that you returned to Europe through Germany at Radio Free Europe. In 1996, you became the Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was during that period in the early to mid-1990s that this radical transformation of the country began.
Estonia emerged from the Soviet Bloc after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is remarkable how the leaders of the country had the foresight to recognize this tabula rasa and not waste the opportunity to do something special. I am curious, why Estonia? What was it about that environment?
President Ilves: There are a number of reasons. I was the first Estonian Ambassador before I became a Foreign Minister to the United States after the occupation. That is how I became Foreign Minister. In many ways, we had a number of alternative paths before us in the early ‘90s. If you look at the history of post-communist countries, they seemed to have chosen every possible variant from harsh authoritarianism to the very open, liberal approach that we took. Our government focused on economic reforms, privatization, and liberalization of the economy. We created a currency board system that allowed convertibility of our currency at the time.
Much of the digital push was largely my input into the government. I looked at the situation and it seemed so backward. As a point of reference, in 1938, the last full year before World War II, Finland and Estonia had the same GDP per capita. When we emerged in 1991 from the Soviet period, Finland had a GDP per capita 13 times that the GDP per capita of Estonia. Then, we had this direct contrast between them. One of the things associated with that was the enormous success of tech in Finland, such as Nokia.
4/9/11
Late last year, David Bray became the first Executive Director of the People-Centered Internet (PCI), an organization that has a vision of creating projects that help improve people’s lives using the Internet. Vint Cerf, the co-creator of the Internet, is a co-founder of PCI.
Bray has a remarkable career in government prior to PCI. He began his career in government as a 15-year-old working at the Energy Department in the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. Since then his experiences have included stints as an IT Chief for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response program, where he led the program’s technology response to 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, and as a Senior Strategist at the Institute for Defence Analysis (IDA) and a Defense Researcher at the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI), where he deployed to Afghanistan to help “think differently” on military and humanitarian issues. Bray spent the past several years at the Federal Communications Commission.
As he embarks on an entrepreneurial journey of sorts, I was curious how Bray’s government experience has helped prepare him for this role. He indicated that there are two advantages to government experience for an entrepreneur: first, it teaches one how to operate with resource constraints, and second, it provides experience in navigating across multiple constituencies.
Bray was once the most social CIO in the world, with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. A new path forward, a growing family, and a perception of a lower returns on the investment in social media have him curtailing his efforts in that realm. His vision for the future of the Internet is as ambitious as ever.
Peter High: You recently joined the People-Centered Internet (PCI) as Executive Director. Can you talk about the mission of PCI and your role there?
David Bray: The People-Centered Internet is a coalition founded by Vint Cerf, one of the co-creators of the Internet, and Mei Lin Fung, who we say is the mother of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The two of them came together with a vision of creating measurable demonstration projects that help improve people’s lives using the Internet. The idea is that if we are not careful, we may lose the hope and the enthusiasm the Internet had in the 1990s.
According to Pew, 20-somethings are less optimistic about the Internet than they used to be. They still say they cannot live without it, but they do not necessarily see it as a source of hope and freedom or as the uplifting force of people’s lives that we saw it as in the early ‘90s. If we can provide demonstration projects that measurably improve people’s lives using the Internet, these will serve as change agent case examples that local communities can then adopt, or policymakers can use. Even private corporations might be able to use these as a model going forward. It is easy to say, “This is not working,” or “This is bad,” and do the negative stories. The positive stories are harder, but we want to beat that and provide the support and expertise.
There is also the hope that we can espouse Doug Engelbart’s original vision. Doug Engelbart, who was the inventor of the mouse and graphical user interface [GUI], had the vision that technology was a way of bringing people together. If we think about our current lives, how many of us think the Internet is bringing people together versus polarizing and being divisive?
High: The emphasis on people is interesting because often when people think of the Internet they often leap to the technology behind it.
Bray: It is. Consider that just one presidential cycle ago, back in 2008, most people still had flip phones, not smartphones. Back in 2001, less than 2% of all households – meaning one family member in the household – had access to a mobile phone. Now, 98% of all households in the world have at least one family member with access to a mobile phone. That is a dramatic change in less than two decades. Not only is the pace of technology accelerating, but the adoption curves are shrinking. In some respects that is good because if something’s out there that can help uplift people and bring communities together, that is great.
However, there is also a challenge because technology is not neutral. It depends on how we use it, and it can be used for good or for bad. Vint and I often talk about how programmers and engineers rarely think about the second, third, and fourth order implications. In fact, it is not part of their training. Their expertise is making sure that devices do what they are supposed to do. Understanding the implications is another skill set, and it is partly a combination of vision, of artist, of sociology, and awareness of human history. We need to consider the unintended consequences that may occur.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
3/12/18
Fintech is a hot space at present, with many companies entering the space and threatening financial services stalwarts. It is an interesting time to check on the progress of the first ever global fintech company, PayPal. The company was famous for its early leaders such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, each of whom went on to make even bigger impacts in the world of technology.
I recently caught up with the company’s chief information officer Bradley Strock, who has been in his role for three and a half years. We discussed PayPal’s transformation into a more customer-centric company, giving customers more choices of funding vehicles. We also covered how PayPal has successfully navigated the shift to mobile finance, resulting in a 50 percent increase in mobile payment volume in 2017. Strock covered his priorities of security, stability, enabling the company’s business strategy, and improving the company’s ability to effectively collaborate. Strock believes that PayPal will play a big part in offering better financial options for the two billion people globally without financial services.
In January of this year, Strock joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, as he commenced a directorship with $700 million revenue Elevate Credit, Inc., which provides online credit solutions to non-prime consumers, typically defined as those with credit scores of less than 700.
Peter High: Could you provide an overview of your role as CIO of PayPal?
Brad Strock: Most people are probably familiar with PayPal. We operate in over 200 markets around the globe. We are on a mission to democratize money and have had a great deal of success over the last couple of years. 2017 has been a great year in particular.
For tech companies, the role of the CIO is a little different. My scope of responsibilities centers in two areas. One is what I call the more traditional, internal IT function, and this encompasses everything from our corporate networks, corporate data centers, and end-user devices, to most of the internal applications and services that employees use on a day-to-day basis.
The other half is the product development role for customer service. We service our customers globally. We take calls in 24 different languages over chat and email, and we manage the infrastructure and products that our customers interact with to solve their problems. In many cases, we have teammates who help them solve their problems. Those are the two parts of my role.
High: The product portion is the non-traditional aspect of your role as CIO. This gives you the opportunity to not only interface with the greater organization in fundamentally different ways, but also with PayPal’s customers. Can you talk about that collaboration internally and externally and some of the nuances to the ways in which you do so?
Strock: This has been a journey. I have been at the company for seven years, and I have been in this role for a little more than three years. Since our split from eBay the last two or three years, the company has been transforming in a number of different ways. One of those important ways is around a desire to be a customer-centric company, and to be a customer champion. That is true for both our consumers and our merchants, as we have a two-sided network. We have two sets of symbiotic customers.
Over the last few years, we have been diligent about moving away from things that used to be central to our strategy and instead now asking, “What do our customers want?” Part of that process has been deep discovery work, where we sit with customers and understand their day-to-day pain points.
11/06/17
Yoshua Bengio is one of the foremost thinkers in a field within artificial intelligence known as artifical neural networks and deep learning. Although significant progress has been made in recent years due to (among other factors) the combination of the proliferation of data, the decreasing cost of compute, and the tremendous amount of money and talent now devoted to artificial intelligence, Bengio chose this as a field of study during the 1980s, in the throes of what some referred to as the AI winter, seeing through a period when money and enthusiasm for artificial intelligence had dried up.
Bengio is the co-author (with Ian Goodfellow and Aaron Courville) of Deep Learning, a book that Elon Musk referred to as “the definitive textbook on deep learning.” On top of his growing influence in this field, he has also been enormously influential in shaping Montreal to become a hotbed for artificial intelligence. Bengio co-founded Element AI in 2016, which has a stated mission to “turn the world’s leading AI research into transformative business applications.” Element AI aims to foster partnership between the private sector and academia to help push the expansion of AI.
Bengio believes Montreal has emerged as a powerhouse due to the combination of great universities, great companies (including a number of Silicon Valley companies who have established offices in Montreal), and Canada’s ethos of cooperation among elite minds. We cover all of the above and more herein.
Peter High: Where does the field of deep neural networks currently stand in your estimation?
Yoshua Bengio: We have made amazing progress, but we are far from human level intelligence with computers. Most of the progress has been with supervised learning, which means machines are taught by essentially imitating humans. With supervised learning, humans provide the high-level concepts that the computer learns, which can be tedious and limits the ability of computers to discover things by themselves. Unsupervised learning, or what we call reinforcement learning, is when the learner is not merely passively observing the world, or how humans do things, but interacts with the environment and gets feedback. Humans are good at this. Combining unsupervised deep learning and reinforcement learning is one of the things that I am working on.
High: What steps are needed to reach the more fully realized version of unsupervised learning?
10/17/17
When Cerner Chief Information Officer Bill Graff joined the company in 2005, he was attracted to the fact that it felt like an entrepreneurial company. The company’s growth since that would certainly back up that assumption. in 2005, Cerner earned roughly $1 billion in revenue. Today, the company is a $5 billion revenue company. In that same period, associate count has grown from roughly 6,000 to over 25,000, and Graff’s team has grown from 35 people to over 1,500.
Graff has run the company’s hosting business for a number of years, growing that part of the business from 30 to 40 clients to over 500 clients today. His CIO responsibilities were added to his hosting responsibilities a year and a half ago, and he has brought that same revenue-centricity and customer focus to IT, as he highlights in this interview, among other topics we covered.
Peter High: Bill, you joined Cerner in 2005 as a senior manager of Infrastructure Operations. You have been the Chief Information Officer of Cerner for about a year and a half. Can you describe your thirteen-year journey, rising through the ranks, to become CIO?
Bill Graff: Prior to coming to Cerner, I held different roles in IT ranging from software engineering to operational responsibilities like running datacenters. When I joined Cerner, I took over the datacenter infrastructure for the hosting site. As we dramatically grew that business from a small startup business inside of Cerner, to a large-scale business across the board, my responsibilities expanded as well. As Cerner grew, it made sense to combine the infrastructure organization and the corporate IT organization. In 2010, many of the infrastructure components from corporate IT, things like the networks and server storage platforms, came into my organization. Soon after that, it also made sense, from operating and cost modeling perspectives, to pull some of the applications into my organization. This was because on the hosting side, we had built processes for a lot of tools, things like automation, ticket tracking, and support services. That was about a three-year process. For the past three years, I have had responsibility for corporate IT, as well as on the hosting side responsibility for all of the global datacenter operations and infrastructure. I have spent a lot of time, both globally and working in the trenches, leveraging technology to enable our associates to be more productive, to deliver great service to our clients, and to help build Cerner.
High: How has the business grown in the time that you have been with Cerner?
Graff: When I joined Cerner, in early 2005, revenue was right around $1 billion dollars. Today, we are a nearly $5 billion revenue company. In 2005, our associate count was around 6,000. Now we are at a little over 25,000 people, worldwide. One of the reasons I came to Cerner was because I had spent a lot of time working at startups, and Cerner felt like a startup company. You were expected to be entrepreneurial and to deliver results. The exciting thing about Cerner was we had good business leaders and the funding to do entrepreneurial things. Through US legislation and hard work on our part to deliver, the company has grown dramatically. I have had a great career over the last 13 years.
High: Can you describe your purview as CIO?
10/10/17
It has been a remarkably eventful couple of years for Symantec. In early 2016, the company went through one of the largest corporate divestitures when it spun out its Veritas business. In June of 2016 the company acquired Blue Coat, and then followed that up with the acquisition of LifeLock in early 2017. The rationale was to focus on being a pure play cyber security company, with end-to-end solutions. In the process Symantec has built itself into the largest cyber security company in the world by revenue.
Sheila Jordan has been chief information officer of the company throughout the journey. She came to the company nearly four years ago from Cisco. The latter is a legendarily acquisitive company, and Jordan has leveraged her experience to develop a playbook of sorts for the team at Symantec to integrate each of the major companies it has acquired. She also has developed the company’s CustomerONE program, highlighting her team’s use of the company’s products. Jordan discusses all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Symantec recently acquired Blue Coat and LifeLock. What advantages was Symantec trying to garner for the enterprise, your partners, and your customers through those acquisitions?
Sheila Jordan: With the Blue Coat acquisition, we were able to retain Greg Clark, who is our CEO, and Mike Fay, who is our president and COO. They came in and quickly established the vision and overall strategy for the company, which is what we call our Integrated Cyber Defense Platform. An integrated platform is important for CIOs and chief information security officers (CISOs) because fragmentation and lack of integration generate risk by creating white spaces where the bad guys hang out and cause damage. Acquiring Blue Coat gave us the opportunity to improve the security posture of our small, medium, and enterprise customers.
Improving operational efficiencies also reduces costs. Fixing technology sprawl by using an integrated solution, which allows you to remove some products, drives a lot of value. We have been implementing the transformation on cloud products and on-prem. We just had our earnings reports, the positive results tell us it is resonating with our customers across verticals and with small, medium, and enterprise organizations.
From an IT perspective, we want to make sure we are enabling the organization. It is important that CIOs think about run, change, and grow. You have to run the company and be efficient and effective, but that is table stakes. You also want to position yourself with the new technology to be able to help the CEO and the C-suite change and grow. The acquisitions of Blue Coat and LifeLock gave us the opportunity to not only integrate, but also to transform how we do our work and think about the future.
The combination of us moving into cloud products and IT having a stake in driving integration and transformation, allowed us to think about taking our global subscription platform to a new level. One of the things we thought about was: How do we make sure our customers can consume their products the way they want to? We created an end-to-end reference architecture for our global subscription platform. It starts with our engineering products; they have provisioning, metering, and monitoring in the cloud products. Then it goes all the way through to how we quote an order, configure an order, how we do quote-to-cash, and, ultimately, to distribution. We want our products to be widely distributed and our global subscription platform to be frictionless. Our goal is a process that only takes a few clicks. We are accomplishing that through the integration of our cloud products with our subscription platform.
High: Your clients are often IT departments. To what extent do you and your team spend time in the field working with CIOs and learning about issues that you can help solve?
10/02/2017
Taso Du Val had multiple experiences as lead engineer at start-ups, including at Fotolog, which was acquired by Hi-Media for $100 million, and at Slide, which was acquired by Google for $228 million. His first experience as CEO came while running a small engineering consulting firm. During this time, Du Val developed an international team of co-workers, and discovered that the talent he could access rivaled the best talent in Silicon Valley. US-based companies often have difficulty tapping this high quality and cost competitive talent, but as the war for talent in Silicon Valley and in other US and European tech hubs has become more acute, better alternatives were needed.
Du Val co-founded Toptal, a freelance engineer marketplace, in 2010 to fill that gap. The company’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. The company boasts a large and growing client list that includes Airbnb, Rand McNally, JPMorgan Chase, IDEO, and Pfizer. Du Val was selected by Forbes as one of its 30 under 30 in Enterprise Technology in 2015.
Among the most fascinating developments within the company has been both its virtual workforce (the company has no offices) and the technology it has developed. Toptal built its own enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and business process management (BPM) solutions to ensure that they seamlessly meshed, and that the company controlled the pace at which each evolved. These were major technical feats, which are quite unusual in this day-and-age given the fact that there are off-the-shelf versions of each that work quite well. Du Val claims that this provides an advantage in as much as each works with the other seamlessly, and the company is in control of all updates to the technology.
Peter High: Please provide a bit of a background into Toptal’s founding and mission.
Taso Du Val: When we started the company, about seven years ago, the talent marketplace was going in two directions. There were large players such as Pivotal, Accenture, Infosys, and other big shops that had expensive medium-high to high skilled labor within them. On the opposite side, there was freelancer.com, Elance, and a few other freelance marketplaces. They had high skilled labor, but it was difficult to find because it was mixed in with tens of millions of users of varying skill levels. We recognized the opportunity in the market and began our journey.
High: What market segments do you focus on? Are there certain sizes or industries that have been particularly ripe for Toptal?
9/25/17
What are microservices? In the first part in this series, I interviewed Matt Miller of Sequoia Capital. In this, the second part of the series, I interview Jay Kreps, the founder and CEO of Confluent, an open-source streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. Kreps developed Kafka while he was the Principal Staff Engineer at LinkedIn. Three years ago, he left that social media giant to develop his own company to develop real-time data streams leveraging microservices.
In this interview, he describes his entrepreneurial journey, highlights the opportunity that microservices offer to large and small companies alike, and offers advice on how best to harness the power of this trend.
Peter High: Jay, you were at LinkedIn for seven years; the last three as the principal staff engineer. You came to microservices through that experience, and then developed some key technology in the evolution of the topic. Can you talk about the opportunity as you saw it from your position at a fast-growing dynamic technology company?
Jay Kreps: When I joined LinkedIn in 2007, they were starting to figure out how to effectively break up a monolithic application that everybody put their code into. There had been an earlier wave of technology called service-oriented architecture, which is pretty much the same thing as microservices, that had died off. LinkedIn was born in the space between service-oriented architecture and the advent of microservices. Generally, to scale a software engineering effort, you add software engineers. However, when you add engineers you do get more done, but each individual engineer adds less capacity than the one before. This is a fundamental problem of big projects with lots of people and big applications; as you add people, you get slower. When people talk about microservices, they discuss scaling for more web traffic, reliability, and all kinds of other things. Microservices do not help those things.
Microservices only help one thing — scaling software engineering efforts. It lets you add more money and turn it into more software at a more constant rate.
LinkedIn made a lot of mistakes when they were trying to scale because not a lot was known about best practices. As a fast-growth company, one of the most important things was creating a product that could evolve quickly. Having agility and speed was critical because the social networking space was competitive. It ended up working out in the end because everyone could deploy their part of the application and move independently. However, there were a bunch of hills and valleys in between where we made changes that were supposed to make us more effective, but had the opposite effect.
A significant evolution in technology was needed to get the promised outcome. This is where Apache Kafka came in. People starting out today benefit from the knowledge of what works and what does not, and many of the tools around deployment and the communication between services are built up. There is now a whole family of technologies that solve problems around deployment, how you monitor your applications to make sure they are all running well, how they communicate with each other, and how you can ensure reliability and security globally when you have many moving pieces.
High: Apache Kafka is the open source data-streaming platform you co-developed during your time at LinkedIn. It is also part of the backbone of Confluent. What was the process of codifying that into open source technology?
9-18-2017
Under Armour used to be known primarily for its moisture-wicking t-shirts. In the 21 years since the company was established in founder and CEO Kevin Plank’s grandmother’s basement, the company has expanded its product line extensively to include hats, pants, shoes, gloves, bags, and the like.
In recent years, the company has made three strategic acquisitions that will continue to reshape the company. With the acquisitions of MapMyFitness, EndoMondo, and MyFitnessPal, the company has become the largest digital health and fitness community in the world. I recently spoke with Under Armour’s Chief Technology Officer Paul Fipps, who leads this digital transformation of the company. He sees the future as a combination of the physical and the digital, where one’s clothing and accessories provide better information on heart rates and sleep quality.
Peter High: Under Armour calls itself a digital health and fitness community. Please explain that concept and the role you play as Chief Technology Officer.
Paul Fipps: People move fast in the digital world. They get more information, have more choice, and find more deals. A downside to all of this information is people are bombarded with messages from companies that do not understand them. This happens everywhere in the digital world: on our mobile platforms, social platforms, and on the web. At Under Armour, we believe you need to approach consumers like a hotel concierge who deeply knows his or her guests. A concierge knows all of your preferences and the context. You have an incredible experience because it is highly personalized and memorable. At Under Armour, this experience means creating products that are relevant to our customers on both a personal and community level.
Another thing we recognize is that people spend a lot of time on their smartphones; they are on their smartphones as much as they watch TV. Smartphones are where consumers expect you to meet them. We recently acquired three companies that help us understand our athletes better and make it easier for us to connect with them. Our acquisitions of MapMyFitness, EndoMondo, and MyFitnessPal made us the largest digital health and fitness community in the world. These apps produce a vast amount of data; 215 million people have downloaded one of our apps. People tell us how much they sleep, how much they eat, how much they workout, and the types of workouts they do. We also get data from brand interactions, which are when someone comes into our retail stores, visits our e-commerce site, or interacts with us in some way that we can track. By combining the data from the apps with the brand interaction data, we can understand buying decisions. More importantly, we understand the behavior behind the buying decisions. That has been a huge success for us. We are creating a new digital experience for our athletes by combining connected fitness and our e-commerce engine and our global technology platform. It is game changing for us and our athletes. That is my primary role as Chief Technology Officer of Under Armour.
High: You provided a great overview of where things stand now and customers’ expectations for speed, customization, and transparency. Can you provide an example?
