Coburn Ventures Podcast

If you’ve listened to the series on digital transformation, you may be wondering how to pick companies that will adapt well, and avoid companies that are going to get run over! We need some new tools in our toolkit, and today, cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken is here to help us with the first potential tool to hone: today, we learn about Assumption Hunting.

We begin with some revealing signals that unearth the foundational assumptions of a corporation and end with helpful questions to pose to management teams or your internal teams to gain conviction in the company's ability to weather the storm. I hope you enjoy it. 

After all that has been presented, Rudy Karsan is here to offer his perspective on digital transformation. Rudy’s lens is of a former HR software CEO and current venture investor who has an incredible ability to zoom in on operations and zoom out on strategy, technology and reflections on decision making.

We are going to start with a part of the conversation that most podcasters would have edited out, but I think is probably one of the most useful portions of the conversation to guide us into the space of stepping back. And as we close out this series for now, Rudy takes us to the more fundamental questions surrounding the time and place we are in. It provides an excellent balance to the specific frameworks we have been offered by Tim, John and JP over the past month. And reminds me that as investors, our job requires this toggling between the seemingly certain prescriptions for the future that we base our investments on, as well as the aggravatingly uncertain reality that there is so much systems change happening all around us. To pick out the correct decision making tools for our time, its so helpful to get perspective from someone like Rudy, so let’s join him…as he jumps right in.

John Dillon has been a tech executive for over 40 years. When we asked him about digital transformation, he compared it to the advent of the steam engine or electrification…so that is certainly compelling. John's real-life examples put a finer print on this picture. Let's jump in.

Last week Tim Mattison helped us understand the different levels or phases an organization might go through as they experience digital transformation. Now, JP Rangaswami is going to help us understand the larger context that is required to assess whether any technology is about to be a major part of digital transformation or a real head fake.

JP reminds us that digital transformation is not about the technology being ready, but also whether less talked about factors like social norms and legal infrastructure will act as barriers or tailwinds.

Last week we introduced our series on digital transformation. Now that we have some context on its importance for investors, let's get some inputs from our friends who are practitioners and decision-makers with regard to technology inside organizations. Today we are happy to have Tim Mattison, an active practitioner of all things digital transformation at AWS, the company that first showed many of us what digital transformation is going to look like. (You will see he is representing his own, general ideas here, including a few on parenting, and not those of his company.) He will offer up his reflections including five levels or phases of digital transformation. I think it will help us identify and categorize digital transformation and how it shows up in companies that are either building competitive advantage from digital transformation or just falling further behind. 

Let’s jump in.

Welcome to our series on digital transformation. We are in a period in which every product or service we touch has already been defined in some digital way: each grain of wheat, each picture on our phone, each manicure, each life insurance policy has a digital marker, trail, story, or a digital facilitator.

"Digital transformation" can become a statement of the obvious, of the time and space we live in....except we don't see or experience many of these digital markers. We don't feel them so much, we don't sense them, all the way, really. Digital doesn't always "live" in our physical world as something easy to point to for concrete changes happening all around us. Instead, we have abstract ideas like the "cloud", (which is really one of the best uses of language we have thus far to describe something abstract in a way we can understand for this new age), and we have trouble translating what's happening digitally to our very physical world. This sounds like an opportunity to discover blind spots.

We are doing this series on digital transformation because we think it is grossly underestimated. Sometimes, we can’t always characterize the very water we are swimming in. Sometimes, we don't even know we're swimming in water. Over the next few weeks, we will put some concrete examples around this very big topic with a series of interviews. I hope you enjoy it.

In times of heightened uncertainty, what can we do to prepare for and handle the uncertainty rather than be tossed around by it? Is there anything we can adjust so that we can do our jobs well in these times? 

Today we are speaking with behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert on this exact topic. 

Matt will help us zoom out today and understand what the experience heightened uncertainty looks like from a behavioral perspective - it's not just the obvious looks of overwhelm or the on-edge feeling of anxiety – and we will discuss how it shows up in work that sets us up for falling prey to decision-making biases or just plain old mental paralysis.

There is good news: there is much we can do from the individual standpoint and for our teams and organizations, so let’s jump in. 

Special note: While this topic is perennial, we did ask Matt for his thoughts in light of so much uncertainty, fear, and dread recently, especially geopolitically. Thank you for being available on short notice to do this for our community, Matt. I hope that the conversation helps to re-center us so that we can do our part to be more effective in all our roles: investors, leaders, family members, and maybe even humanitarians. Thanks for listening.  

Today we flip the script as our friend and collaborator Jorgen Van der Sloot decides he wants to hear more about some of Coburn Ventures work on process and collaboration: what we do to help organizations go through change or make change last, and what is the difference between a community and a network that might hint at the future of work and collaboration for many businesses. By talking through the genesis of Coburn Ventures work on process and gatherings, you'll hear threads that are more universal and hint at the escalating need for investors and all types of businesses to improve and understand collaboration, community, and process in order to compete and thrive. 

Thanks for listening. 

At Coburn Ventures, the investment philosophy and process grew out of change investing. But to understand change investing, we might want to understand change.

One of the first steps of change investing is a simple recognition of how much we subconsciously anchor to what's going on today staying the same, whereas, in reality, change is happening all around us, all the time, in ways that we do and do not immediately recognize or want to recognize. We can really use change frameworks and pattern recognition to better understand what shifts are going on that we want to invest in, avoid, or cycle out of.

In that vein, today we are going to slow down and break change investing into some component parts. When we put it back together, we will be able to talk about what change investing is and can be. I think it will illuminate some elements of change investing that you might already incorporate and maybe even some new perspectives to add to your particular process. Let's jump in.