Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What does it take, in terms of infrastructure, on the back end to process that much information?

Penny Herscher: For us or for the customer?

SM: For you.

PH: We have a data center. We do it all in our data center.

SM: It’s a public cloud solution?

PH: No, we have a private data center. I don’t know what you mean by public cloud.

SM: From a customer’s point of view, the entire thing is happening on your data center?

PH: Yes, but we don’t use any of the other cloud services. We have our own data center because of some of the processing speed requirements that we have. We have a large data center. We’re processing many millions of Tweets a day and millions of documents a day. It’s a fairly heavy lifting algorithm-based system.

SM: What sort of algorithm? Who do you have on the technology side? What kind of team do you have on the technology side to develop this algorithm?

PH: There are multiple algorithms, as you’d expect. It’s a many-staged pipeline to do the level of analysis we do. Our leads are mostly mathematicians, so my number two in the company is a woman called YY Lee. She’s a mathematician originally from Harvard. Our VP of technology is Marty Betz, who’s a mathematician from Harvard and Stanford. We tend to hire people with math and computer science degrees, but with a sharp algorithmic focus because of the type of thing we do.

SM: Is this patentable?

PH: Yes, it’s already patented. We have a number of patents already [in] the system. And we continue to file more, as you’d expect. What’s interesting is for your group is that our development is split between the U.S. and India. We have a skilled team in Gurgaon [outside of New Delhi]. We don’t have an outsourcing mentality. We have a team of people who are our employees with stock options.

SM: A development center?

PH: We don’t think of it as remote development. It’s a subtlety, but this is our team. They are fully fledged, blue-bleeding rain makers. It’s no sense of outsource. We tend to do a lot of stuff around the clock, a lot of design work at night just because we’re working collaboratively with our Gurgaon team. We have a spectacular team in Gurgaon.

SM: Not all efforts at doing product development in India have succeeded. Those who have been able to make it work have done very well.

PH: Yes. I think to make it work, you have to decide that it’s going to be a strategic priority for the company. You have to put in the time and focus on developing the people. You have to give them control. You have to give them interesting stuff to work on and leadership roles. If you don’t, you lose them. But if you give them really interesting work and leadership roles, you get a low turnover. We have a very low turnover rate. When you do it right, it’s very powerful.

SM: Yes, very powerful. But it’s not easy to do it right. Most people don’t do it right. But that’s a different topic. Let’s play it out. Where you are today? You’re saying there is growing awareness in the customer base about what it’s possible to do with your technology.

PH: It’s growing. It’s growing pretty fast right now.

SM: How long do you think it will take to start getting significant awareness?

PH: We’re doubling. We doubled last year. We’re doubling this year. We’re going to double next year. I think within six to nine months, we’ll be firmly on the radar, with most sales enablement teams having heard of what we can do. And then it’s a matter of our sales execution or our ability to service the customer. Our challenge right now is scaling.

SM: Scaling on what side?

PH: Scaling our sales team. That’s our challenge.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain
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