Chapter 1: What inspired James Davies to transition from the auto industry to tech?
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Organizations, they've been for the last 10, 15 years going through this quote unquote digital transformation. And what we've stood back and noticed is you get kind of pockets of modernization or transformation in different areas of the company. And HR will buy their own system and IT will buy it and facilities will buy their own systems, etc.
And before you know it, you've got tons of different systems within an organization. And now we're trying to apply and use AI to make business decisions and the data is all over the place, etc. And over the last couple of years, what we've noticed is this big shift in the market towards, hey, let's consolidate all of our tools into one big mega platform.
My name is James Davies, and I'm the CEO of Kinetic Data.
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Chapter 2: How did James Davies become the CEO of Kinetic Data?
to reduce headaches so that our customers can stay on latest versions of our tool, even though they can build their own worlds on top of our tool.
So then as you step out on the balcony, you look across all that you've built thus far with Kinetic Data, what are you most proud of?
It's an easy one for me, but it is one I touched on already. But frankly, it's the team. I think it's really hard to come by an organization that's got a culture that's so customer success driven. It's one of our core values. They put everything aside to make sure that our customers stay happy. And they do it with a great attitude. And they also root for the company. They root for our successes.
I don't feel like anyone's kind of a punch-in, punch-out style employee. So I'm most proud of the culture that we've built. When you go through a founder to new CEO transition, sometimes you'll get turnover, etc., especially from long-term employees. And we've managed to really not have anyone leave the company and have a really smooth transition.
I think part of that was because I was involved earlier on and they knew I was a known quantity, so to speak. And then just leading with transparency has helped a lot with that as well.
Okay, let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.
One that comes to mind is just figuring out how to make leadership hires. This is prior to me being CEO, but when starting to establish a more formal leadership team, I think we went into the hiring process not really knowing exactly what we needed and made some mis-hires that were both costly, but also caused some turmoil and then loss of trust from other employees within the company.
So what we've done to overcome that is just really establish good practices for, which sounds basic, but good practices for how we hire really anyone within the company. We leave with our core values and here's what it is that we do and here's why we do it.
And then just a series of making sure if we're bringing in a leader of a team, at this point, we have the benefit of being able to have them interview, frankly, with their whole team that they'd be working with. And we were able to get feedback to make that integration smoother. Yeah, the biggest mistakes that I can think of have really been in mishires.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does Kinetic Data address in business process management?
Well, let's move forward and this will be fun. You know, 13, 10, 13 months ago, however long ago you stepped into the CEO role. I'm curious about the future for kinetic data, you know, for the product, for what you offer and for the team.
We see a pretty big shift happening within the markets that we serve right now. And I'll give a little bit of background as part of the answer. Organizations, they've been for the last 10, 15 years going through this quote unquote digital transformation. And what we've stood back and noticed is you get kind of pockets of modernization or transformation in different areas of a company.
And HR will buy their own system and IT will buy it and facilities will buy their own systems, etc. And before you know it, you've got tons of different systems within an organization. And now we're trying to apply it, use AI to make business decisions and the data is all over the place, etc.
And over the last couple of years, what we've noticed is this big shift in the market towards, hey, let's consolidate all of our tools into one big mega platform. And there's a couple of big names out there that do CRM and IT and ERP, etc., all in one platform.
And our approach has really been over the last couple of years to position ourselves as the opposite of that and really an enabler of a best of breed kind of composable architecture within a large, complex organization. It gives you a lot of benefits.
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Chapter 4: How does Kinetic Data's orchestration tool improve workflow efficiency?
And so some of those benefits are you're not locked into a single vendor and frankly, then their roadmap. And if you ever want to make a change, it won't be massively disruptive to your business. And so to answer your actual question, our roadmap is to really evangelize that message and get it out there. And I feel like we've been a... I'll use auto terms to describe this.
We've had a Ferrari engine with a Toyota Corolla body on the outside. And establishing this growth team, that'll actually get the message out there. I think that we're going to have a lot of success and very rapid growth over the next couple of years, just given some of the shifts in the tech environment too. I see some longstanding vendors that have been out there for a long time.
They charge a lot of money for their software. And with AI, we're seeing new vendors pop up all the time. And Customers, I believe, are going to want to be able to take advantage of those tools. And so they'll need a way to have a plug and play architecture to make it so that they can.
And I think our story is the timing is great for it as organizations wake up and take a look at their IT spend and the ROI that they're getting out of it.
James, let's switch to you. Who influences the way that you work? Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why.
I got to throw one out there to my dad. He instilled just an incredible work ethic in me. I'm one of five kids, grew up in New York. It's not cheap to live there. And he worked actually for a family trucking business for the majority of my youth. And he had to work sometimes three jobs to make ends meet.
But he also did a great job being a dad and making sure that I knew that he loved me and all of that stuff. So I get a lot of my work ethic from him. So I would say that he's the number one that I look to as far as inspiration. And it's something I want to pass down to my kids as well with hopefully having a little bit better work-life balance.
Okay, James, last question. So you're getting on a plane. You're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world. And can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person, you know, having been leading Kinetic Data in multiple facets so far?
My biggest advice, especially in the tech world, is to once you get to at least close to MVP, start showing it to customers and prospects and getting feedback as early as possible. And in our case, we built this just extremely powerful platform. But thinking about product market fit and taking it to market after the fact has been definitely been a struggle.
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