Hi Everyone,
As a follow up to our June 4, 2013 meeting, we would like to extend a special thanks to our esteemed panel Marc Donner, Engineering Director at Google, Howard Morgan, Co-founder and Partner at First Round Capital, Michael Herskovitz, Senior Vice President and Partner at AllianceBernstein, Haim Pinto, Head of Client Experience at Morgan Stanley, Nicolas Spiegelberg, Engineering Manager at Facebook, Christopher Morace, Chief Strategy Officer at Jive Software and our fabulous moderator Joshua Levine, Managing Director of Kita Capital Management, LLC. This was an absolutely smashing and thought provoking event, with an amazing breadth of talent filling the room. Special thanks to everyone for the great ideas, thoughts, and questions. Your participation made it all that much more interesting. Very special thanks to Adriaan Bouten, SVP & Chief Information Officer of McGraw-Hill companies, Information and Media, for hosting our event. Everything was just magnificent!
Meeting Summary:
The following topics were discussed:
Financial Technology has been in the lead for years, is now less significant as the new action in NYC is the emergence of Silicon Alley 2.0
- Digital media has grown in the last five years
- For young developers, it is not just about the money
- Workers in NYC need more personal connection to their company, vs. workers in Silicon Valley, where both the company and the candidates have lower expectations
- Being an engineer at Google is much like being a banker at Morgan Stanley. “With authority comes responsibility”
- Attracting engineers to finance is harder in light of the increasing regulations. Millennials hate the pace that results from regulatory issues. Retention becomes an issue
- NYC is truly a great place for ecommerce and marketing
- The young generation of today thrives on being mission-driven, and on transparency. They share salary information openly and whether they are happy or not in their jobs. This creates an interesting challenge for companies slow to recognize and accept this new thinking
Education as a Recruiting Pipeline
- NYC is changing rapidly yet doesn’t quite have the intensity that is seen in Silicon Valley
- Hackdays attract both younger and older developers towards new technology
- Metro universities are getting smarter and are bringing in foreign talent to NY
- Internships are huge, they are easier due to centralized applications (like the colleges have done)
Younger Workforce
- The new world has people focused on solving problems, while not being wedded to specific technologies
- Technologists are now productive in months not decades
- Big move from suburban to urban, as younger people want to work in the city. This is harder for older candidates with families
- Quick knowledge gain today is done by “find and apply” vs. the historic “create”
Reflecting on the recent Bloomberg privacy incident, how do you keep this from happening at other companies?
- Google described “GCreep”
- Facebook has turned to more fundamental privacy thinking: code & data are separate. There is more focus on monitoring rather than on lockdown
- Financial services: Breaches are completely unacceptable
- Everyone is using “Big Data”, the good news, and the bad news
- Discussions on accidental leakage: Instagram, Dropbox etc.
Virtualization
- Value for agility and BCP
- How Economics drive the need while computing becomes electricity
- Using Private Cloud for regulated business. We will all be there
- Think of servers now as cattle, not pets. Just manage them in masse. Don’t name them, and you will be fine when they die
- Work costs keep driving down
- Regulatory is a key driver
- How long will providers exist? Backups are critical
- We are in a collaborative economy…..many retail models are at risk
- The Patriot act is the key new issue
Looking toward the future, What’s Coming up?
- Sharing of products (airbnb, citibike)
- Wearables (pebble, biometrics, Google glass)
- API-ification of everything will be a big trend in bringing everything together
- HTML5 RTC video app, ubiquity
- Gesture-based controls
- When you need a car, you will “Google car”. Ten years down the line, no one will own a car and motor vehicle fatalities will cause congressional hearings (due to how rare they will be)
- We will no longer have DR sites, laptops, power grids
Future Tips:
- Maintain technical agnosticism, nothing is permanent
- Next generations want to be passionate generalists
- Passion is critical
- Get a new phone every year
- Disregard barriers, stay positive
- Get a new app every week, they’re free or cheap
- Hire data scientists and absorb them into your culture
- Be ready for change including beliefs
- Keep innovating
- Remember, you are as young as you “ think “ you are!
Final Observations:
The evening was so incredible that we have been receiving multitudes of emails with additional thoughts, ideas, and comments. The meeting is best summarized by John Moloney of Moody’s:
“Tuesday night was one of those semi-rare events where you continue to think about the content discussed by the panel long after the event has passed…”
All the best for a fabulous summer 2013! See you all again in the fall.
-malka
Malka Treuhaft
Executive Director East Coast CIO Forum &
President
Truision Inc.
646.942.2625 (office)
917.589.1069 (mobile)
718.375.1529 (fax)
www.truision.com
The following companies are currently registered for the June 2013 meeting:
Google, First Round Capital, Facebook, Warby Parker, Morgan Stanley, Alliance Bernstein, Kita Capital Management, LLC, Jive Software, McGraw-Hill Companies, MSD Capital, Promontory Financial Group, LLP, McCann-Erickson Advertising, AEGIS, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Dunn & Bradstreet, Identity Theft 911, Capital District Physician’s Health Plan, SBLI USA Mutual Life Insurance, Investment Technology Group (ITG), Financial Guaranty Insurance Co., JP Morgan, Tradeweb, Deerfield Partners, World Education Services, Inc., HUB International, Imagineer Technology Group, Merck, Deutsche Bank, Ionic Capital, TPG-Axon Capital Management, L.P. , iQ Venture Advisors, L.P., GHF Group, General Electric, Moore Capital Management, Bank of America, Eton Park Capital Management, Bank Leumi USA, Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., Thomson Reuters, Moody’s, Charles River Development, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Angelo Gordon & Co., Bit-x-Bit, Richard Bernstein Advisors, Fir Tree Partners, NYSE Euronext, MacAndrew & Forbes Holdings Inc., Equinox, United States Department of the Treasury, Optinuity Alliance Resources, Harvard Management Company, Apollo Global Management, LLC, Viking Global Investors LP, New York Police Department St. John’s University, Yeshiva University, ASCAP, Mizuho Securities USA, Inc. and Good Energy.
Meeting Agenda:
The internet has upended the way we think about many things, including the companies which have profited greatly from having innovative and wide adopted products. Ten years ago we went through a massive valuation bubble and then a crash as many companies disappeared. Some of the current top companies may be around 10 years hence and some not. At our next meeting we’ll explore some ways in which current technology leaders are continually looking to maintain their edge and remain relevant. We’ll explore key topics such as :
- Innovation
- Building scalable and sustainable business processes without building stifling bureaucracy
- Attracting and retaining talent, including whether geography really matters
- Discussing if software companies have a cradle to grave life cycle or if they should be built to last
Marc Donner’s Bio
Dr. Marc Donner is currently an Engineering Director in Google’s New York City office where he is involved in infrastructure networking software. His previous assignments at Google have included Health and Finance and advertising software development. He looked after the integration of DoubleClick’s engineering teams and technical products and services into Google. He was also instrumental in launching the googleartproject.com site. Dr. Donner has over thirty years of experience in engineering of hardware, software, and complex systems. He has worked in basic research and in commercial development, where his experience has ranged from advanced robotics research to engineering very-large-scale infrastructure. His interests include high performance, real-time, security, privacy, and reliability. Prior to coming to Google, Dr. Donner was an executive director at Morgan Stanley where he led a series of projects ranging from the first corporate intranet, re-engineering of the broker-dealer back office systems, elimination of data center printing, and event-based simulation forecast modeling for individuals and enterprises. Before going to Wall Street, Dr. Donner was a research staff member at IBM Research where he developed a juggling robot, introduced UNIX and TCP/IP networking, initiated the Agora distributed computing environment, and wrote the Op Cit bibliographic markup system for IBM’s GML text processing system, an ancestor of HTML and XML. Prior to IBM, Dr. Donner worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab where he worked on planetary radar. Dr. Donner holds a BS in Engineering from Caltech and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University, where his dissertation work made Ivan Sutherland’s six-legged robot walk. Dr. Donner serves as associate editor-in-chief of the IEEE Computer Society magazine, “Security & Privacy” and he has been the organizer of the New York CTO Club. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and of USENIX. He is married and has a teenage son.
Howard Morgan’s Bio
Dr. Howard Morgan is co-founder and Partner at First Round Capital, a seed stage venture capital investment firm specializing in information technologies. He began working with Idealab in 1996 and serves on their board. He has more than 30 years of experience with more than two hundred high-tech entrepreneurial ventures. He serves on the boards of 33Across, Axial Markets, Fab.com, Intelligize, Waywire and a number of other private companies. Howard was Professor of Decision Sciences at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of Computer Science at the Moore School for almost 15 years. He a Trustee of Cold Spring Harbor Labs and Math For America and is a respected author. He received the Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1997. Howard received his Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University in 1968 and his B.S. from the City University of New York in 1965.
Joshua Levine’s Bio
Joshua S. Levine is a Managing Director of Kita Capital Management, LLC, providing information technology investing, operating, research and advice since 2006. From the spring of 2011, he lead the technology effort for Americans Elect, a non-partisan effort to nominate a presidential ticket to be on every state ballot via an online national primary. AmericansElect.org attracted over 3.5 million visitors and grew to over 450,000 registered users, 460,000 Facebook fans, 11,000 Twitter followers, and won the 2012 South by Southwest (SxSW) People’s Choice award and two 2012 CLIO awards for achievement in design and interactive. In 2007, he became the CEO of ESP Technologies, a broker/dealer providing trading and post-trade technology to asset managers. After growing revenues from $12 million to over $60 million, the company exited with Investment Technology Group (ITG) in December 2010. Before ESP, Levine was the Chief Technology and Operations Officer of E*TRADE FINANCIAL, a Managing Director and Global Head of Equity Technology at Deutsche Bank, and a Managing Director in Equities and I.T. at Morgan Stanley. Levine is currently a board member of FreshDirect, a leading online grocer; Fantex, a boutique broker/dealer; and Xceedium, a network security appliance company. His philanthropic work includes serving as a Director at DonorsChoose.org, connecting philanthropy and public education through technology; a Director of NPower, helping non-profits with affordable IT services; and Chairman of HappyDoll.org, connecting children in need around the world. He was a member of the National Academies “Committee on Improving Processes and Policies for the Acquisition and Test of Information Technologies in the Department of Defense”. Levine is a former advisory board member to the National Counterterrorism Center in the Dept. of National Intelligence and former Georgia Technology Authority member, appointed by their Governor for a 3-year term in July 2000. He co-authored a textbook, “Application Systems in APL”, published by Prentice-Hall. Levine is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and dropped out of Syracuse University to pursue a career in computing. Levine currently holds FINRA license Series 7, 63 and 24.
Michael Herskovitz’s Bio
Michael Herskovitz currently is SVP and Partner, Fixed Income Risk Operations and Technology at AllianceBernstein. In this role he also oversees Derivatives and Insurance Operations. Michael joined AllianceBernstein in late 2006 from UBS where he was the Managing Director of Risk and Finance Technology group. Michael has held senior technology management and research positions with Morgan Stanley, including the London based role of international CIO, Merrill Lynch and Zurich- Scudder Investments. Michael started his financial services career working on Merrill Lynch’s corporate bond trading desk as a hedging/arbitrage analyst before becoming a recognized innovator as a Mortgage-Backed Securities research analyst. Over his 20+ year career in financial services he has had extensive analytical and technical experience with fixed-income, commodities, derivative products and risk management. Michael has co-authored two books and several research papers on Mortgage-Backed Securities pricing and analytics. He graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University with a BS in Operations Research and an MS in Industrial Administration.
Haim Pinto’s Bio
Haim Pinto is the Head of Client Experience in Morgan Stanley’s Enterprise Infrastructure CTO group, driving the firm’s strategy and vision for client experience, unified collaboration, mobility and disruptive innovation in client technologies. Mr. Pinto has over 25 years of international industry experience as a technology leader, with deep knowledge in Communications. He has advised many Fortune 500 companies on the transition from traditional circuit-based communications to today’s state-of-the-art session-enabled collaboration environments. He is passionate about the way digital technology is shaping the way people interact, and how pervasive access to communication tools is changing our professional lives. Mr. Pinto is actively developing Morgan Stanley’s vision for how the corporate workspace will look in the next few years, and creating a unique perspective on market trends and opportunities for the firm. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Mr. Pinto held senior technology leadership roles with Avaya and Cisco Systems in Israel and the United States. Mr. Pinto studied at the Technion – Israel’s Institute of Technology, and is a Retired Lieutenant and veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Nicolas Spiegelberg’s Bio
Nicolas Spiegelberg serves as part of Facebook’s New York landing team to help start the new engineering office. Since joining in 2009, he has helped take the open source HBase database from concept to production on multiple critical, large-scale systems within Facebook As a storage engineer in the facebook messaging team, he helped implement the HBase storage solution for Facebook Messages from design to deployment. Additionally, as an HBase committer and PMC, he has contributed many critical features such as HDFS data reliability, Bloom filters, and an enhanced compaction algorithm. Nick is currently heading Facebook New York’s first production project: providing HBase multi-datacenter solutions. Nick has a masters in computer engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Christopher Morace’s Bio
Christopher Morace is the Chief Strategy Officer at Jive Software. Chris is responsible for turning Jive’s vision for Social Business into tightly aligned execution across departments. Additionally, he leads Jive’s thought leadership platform, analyst relations, and partner ecosystem. Chris joined Jive Software in October 2007 and led Jive’s product strategy and delivery for several years. Under his direction the company became the industry-recognized leader in Social Business Software by all of the major analysts. He has an 18-year track record for building high-growth, high-value businesses in the technology sector. Prior to joining Jive, Chris held executive positions including Vice President of Research & Development at Mercury Interactive, (acquired by Hewlett Packard) and Vice President of Product Development at Kintana. Chris is a recognized thought leader on social business topics and is frequently called upon as a speaker and advisor. He holds a B.S. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. He currently lives in the Bay Area with his wife and two children.
