Founding and Growing an Engineering Company with Dr. Olga Kubassova

Transcript:

Shane Hastie: Good day, folks. This is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture Podcast. Today, I'm sitting down with Dr. Olga Kubassova. We are going to talk about her journey of founding and growing an engineering organization. Olga, welcome. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today.

Dr. Olga Kubassova: Thank you very much for inviting.

Shane Hastie: So, my normal starting point is, who's Olga?

Introductions [00:50]

Dr. Olga Kubassova: Excellent starting point. So, I am president of Image Analysis Group. I'm engineer by background. I did my master in mathematics, my second master in computer science, my PhDs in computer science. That was the background with which I started the company. I was growing it for now 15 years, and we are moving rapidly from being a startup to a scaleup. So, I suppose that defines my professional journey.

Shane Hastie: So, 15 years ago, founding an engineering company in image analysis, what was the gap? What's the opportunity?

The opportunity in the marketplace [01:32]

Dr. Olga Kubassova: So, 15 years ago, radiology in drug development was a tool, but it was a bit of a blunt tool, to be honest. There were many smart PhDs and computer scientists applying their skills to develop novel algorithms for processing of the imaging data. And for those who are not familiar, for instance, MRI, CT, ultrasound, anything which is medical imaging. But by the time that processing or those methodology would get to clinical trials, they would kind of diminish in complexity. And at the end, clinical trials were done using pretty much radiology review. So, you would place an image in front of a radiologist and that would be described to say, "Okay, there is a tumor," or, "There is a change." Whereas we, engineers, are used to measuring things. So, that was an obvious gap.

My own PhD was in understanding medical imaging quantification for inflammation. So, inflammation is a driver behind many diseases. And when I showed results of the scientific research to radiologists, they were saying, "Oh, please, just don't stop. Just keep going. Because if you stop, we go backwards." So, with that kind of model, I started the company. And literally, my friends, who were with me in my PhD, became my first customers. Because, obviously, somebody had to buy barely working software at some point, so we could survive. And that was a real gap. And even till this day, it's fascinating for me to see how many novel methodologies come every day from academia, from smaller companies.

But it's incredibly difficult to break into clinical trial market, simply because the market is very specific, the sale process, very specific. Innovation acceptance is also specific. You have to know how to speak about innovation and not make it scary, but make it usable and useful. So, for 15 years, we've been, first, designing our own methodologies and using AI, using quantitative methods, using everything known to an engineer to build better tools. And then, bringing them in a compliant way into clinical trials. So, we figured out that having our own platform technology, DYNAMIKA, allowed us to manage data within the trial, and then also deploy something which would be of real value to a drug development company.

Shane Hastie: So, that was the market opportunity, the gap. Take those engineering skills into the medical science and drug development space. You said you started literally with yourself, and you had a group of clients. What did you do to grow from one person to a startup? And then, we'll talk further about the scaleup.

Growing from a single person to a startup [04:30]

Dr. Olga Kubassova: It's very interesting for an engineer to start a company. First of all, and probably the most interesting discovery, you probably have to forget your engineering skills to a level, on two levels. One is, when you're speaking to the customer, you have to be much less engineering. You have to be customer-focused and centric around their problem. Too technical does not sell. But secondly, obviously, the first person I hired was somebody who can write software, because I understood that that's what we need. But as soon as you hire the first person, you realize that you need to pay them salary, because they have family or whatever. And you become a natural business person in your own business.

I don't know how other engineers position themselves, but for me, it was obvious that it's easier to hire good engineers and good salespeople. Because to explain to someone how the product may work in the future, it's very difficult. And they have to translate that message to the customer. So, you become your own advocate, you become your own evangelist. You go out and learn how to speak to people. I do remember writing a lot of emails. And honestly, for the first six to 12 months, I think every day you think, "Oh, my God, am I wasting my time? Is this going to fly? Is it for real?" In my particular case, I honestly got to the point where I thought, "Okay, I really have no more energy writing this long, long emails explaining why this might be useful to everyone. I'm going to close the business."

And then, literally within days of that thought, which was really going on in my head, I was selected as Entrepreneur of the Year by an organization called Yorkshire Forward. And I thought, "Okay, I cannot, right now, foreclose the business. I'll get the award, then I'll wait for a little bit, so it's not embarrassing, then I close the business." And then, as soon as I got this award, the publicity actually and the awareness really was there. And my first customer came to be Abbott, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies developing drugs at that time for inflammatory rheumatoid arthritis. And they were the ones who bought the software and they bought the vision, and they were an amazing partner for two years. And soon, of course, if you have one customer, the stream of customers followed.

So, we were lucky to work with pretty much every pharmaceutical company which was in the space of inflammation. Until this day, being a player in inflammation is critically important. So, inflammatory autoimmune diseases, they stay with your body throughout your life. So, it's a chronic disease. It's very often, so you'll always have a stream of activities, stream of new drugs, stream of new innovation. And so, then, became our pillar for the business.

Shane Hastie: So, you spoke about employing a software engineer, somebody to write the code at the beginning. As a groundbreaking, leading-edge technology organization, obviously you grew to many more than one software engineers. What did you need to do from a team culture perspective to engage and keep people on board?

Trust and accountability are foundations for great engineering culture [07:54]

Dr. Olga Kubassova It's a very good question. Obviously, you do not build a groundbreaking, versatile technology at your first go, at your first version. So, now, DYNAMIKA is on version seven, and we've been building it for 15 years. And what we had as DYNAMIKA version one is dramatically different. Because if some of you remember, cloud happened in about 2015. So, I was the one explaining to people why cloud is way much better than installing software on your computers. And it's incredible how you have to have the culture of innovation within your team. Because it was my engineering team who came to me and told me that, "Time to completely redesign the software. You see this perfectly working software? That's not going to be useful in a year time."

And you have to trust your people to really make those strong engineering decisions, which allow your company to progress. Because, of course, as a CEO, you don't see the depths of technological innovation. You are aware and it's important to surround yourself with people who are aware, but you also need to trust. So, for me, from a very first engineer, I rely on people knowing engineering better than I do. And unless you can really place your faith in people who are surrounding you and trust them explicitly, you cannot progress the innovation. So, to me the culture of innovation is very important.

Accountability is probably another critical quality for any business to grow. Because you can't grow unless you split your tasks. And again, you know that that person owns it. So, if somebody tells you, "I own it," you can't go and check. You don't have time, especially in a fast-growth environment. From a startup or from a zero-people to a startup, you don't have that lay of management over someone. So, it's a self-mentioned in many ways. So, if someone owns a task, they are the owner, they are the manager, they are the checker, and they are the controller of everything that's going to happen there. And you rely on your people absolutely 100%.

Shane Hastie: And growing into that successful startup and now scaling it, what's changing?

Process becomes a key element as the organisation scales up [10:21]

Dr. Olga Kubassova: So, that's a fascinating time for the business. As a startup, as I said, you rely on every individual. An individual is the bearer of news, of accountability, of innovation, and the path forward in that particular direction. As a scaleup, you cannot rely on individual. You have to rely on the process, which actually powers you to bring more than one individual and plug them in. And they start being functioning within a very short period of time.

When you're a startup, you really don't consider that there is life outside the business. I think if someone wants to start a business, they have to forget about their life for the foreseeable future, few years for sure. As a scaleup, you realize that the team which surrounds you actually will expect work-life balance. For me, obviously, it was a discovery that somebody wants life outside the business. Seriously, what are you doing in my business? Only kidding, but still. So, it was necessary to bring someone who understands the process, not just the essence of the task.

So, we are in the process of scaling up the business and bringing together answers which would not be an answer to an immediate problem, but an answer in the shape of a process that would lead people to find a solution. And that goes across each of the teams. So, we have engineering team, operational team, sales team, marketing team and so on, but also cross teams. Obviously, what I feel as a founder and as a person who does it all, it's so painfully slow.

Because, first, you have to build the process. And honestly to build the process takes several iterations, just like you build your software, right? So, version one may not be perfect. Somebody has to take accountability for writing of the process, training people on the process, how all of this is actually going to work, make sure that they all follow the process. And that for entrepreneur very often feels very painful. So, I expect that within a few months, we have a book of processes and we can move with speed.

But I think the first point, which makes me realize that startup is very different from scaleup, culturally, it's, again, very different. Accountability comes in a very different way. Accountability is no longer about one person working long hours. Accountability is now one person is trustworthy to follow the process that was put in place. And actually, innovation in the process is also an important point. Because you also trust your people to challenge the process and to say, "That process doesn't work for me, and this process could be improved."

And I think that's the next step when you actually have an established set of processes, to make sure that you're still innovating, that you're not stale in your own process book. Because as you know, often you hear in big organizations, "That's not the way how we do things." And that's, I think, what kills the innovation. Because then, you need disruptors there, who actually could say, "Well, that wasn't how we do things. It's now how we're doing it right now."

Shane Hastie: So, keeping innovation flowing while bringing in process, it almost sounds an oxymoron.

Continuing to innovate while bringing in process [13:53]

Dr. Olga Kubassova: For sure. Well, so I think you need to realize that innovation comes in many shapes and forms. For me, as an engineer, innovation right now is bringing AI, bringing automation, bringing a better way of dealing with things. But innovation within operations, within looking after your clients, bringing the same AI for better client experience. Making sure that your innovation across organization doesn't just speak to engineering innovation, but it speaks much wider to an organization that everybody feels that they're innovating. And the tools enable you to do so.

I find fascinating how inefficient we were in clinical trials in just moving data around from A to B. When I started the business, it was CDs sent by post. And honestly, it progressed a little bit, but not dramatically. And you think right now, we have every protocol under the sun, security, novel mechanisms, novel technologies. Can we not just make it easy to just suck the data from the scanner, throw it on the cloud, make sure the technology is doing an organization of the data? Not that easy. Because every organization, like a big hospital, would have their own book of processes.

So, innovation is all around you. You just need to recognize what innovation for one team versus another. And every day, you need to think, what's new? What can be done better across the teams and within one team?

Shane Hastie: And culture, you've touched on it a few times. That shifting from the one individual who really works hard, the small team, to now we've got the bigger team, where we are in that scale-up phase. Is there a deliberate shift in culture?

Culture changes with context and growth [15:52]

Dr. Olga Kubassova: It's incredible to watch actually. Because, well, first of all, I start with the obvious, the COVID culture, post-COVID culture. I used to say to people, "Unless you be in the office every day, I cannot hire you. Because I want people to be here. We are moving so fast, I want to be able to speak every day to somebody." And I moved the business from north of England to London to have a bigger pool of candidates, so I can hire more people faster. And when I build US office, I was shocked to see that in the US they just don't go to the office. So, I was like, "How is that possible? My team will be in the office." And I build it that way.

COVID happened and we grew as a business actually 30% during COVID, which was very high gross, and everybody was at home. And we were figuring out how we're going to communicate and what's going to happen. Post-COVID, I'm still struggling to get my head around how to efficiently make people collaborate versus maintaining this work-from-home culture. And honestly, I feel probably more expensive to do the work from home than in the office, if you do it right. But then, how do you make somebody who works remotely or from home be part of your business? And I hate when people think it's just purely transactional. The business pays me. And if somebody say they, in reference to the business, it almost like hurting me. Because it's us. It's not they, it's just us. We are together on this.

How do you do it right? I think I'm starting to see a few things that we're doing correctly. First, we're building pride in the business. We are proud of what we do. And I think that recognition of us as a team should be stronger than physical presence. And if that stays within your soul and mind, and you feel like us and you voluntarily want to wear orange, which is our color, then we're starting to belong together

Secondly, I think that process book, it's probably going to help. Because you need to have efficient communication, so you can exchange ideas and recognize that many people are not extroverts. And perhaps they're not comfortable just being thrown and asked a question at that particular second. You need to give them time to prep, time to think. And perhaps their answers are way much deeper than extroverts' answers, but they need time to do it. So, a team call scheduled five minutes ahead of time with everybody throwing ideas will not work for everybody. So, you really have to have strong managers, who are deeply engaged with their team members, who also understand if their own team members are not all the same. And which is a good thing. You shouldn't have all the same people.

So, understanding how the schedules are at meetings, understanding how to hear your people, I think that's very important. I'm sure there are other little tricks and different things, so come back in here. I'll tell you more.

Shane Hastie: So, that pride in us, the efficient communication, that diversity, you're a woman in technology and a founder, it's, at the least, unusual.

Sadly, being a woman founder in the technology industry is still unusual [19:27]

Dr. Olga Kubassova: Yes, unfortunately still is. What helps me is never think of myself as a woman founder in technology. I just think of myself as Olga. And if anybody has a problem with that, they can call me Dr. Olga. But many people do stop themselves from going somewhere because there is a stigma, that if you're a woman, you're supposed to wear pink and go this way. And it's in our time. It's incredible.

But I do a lot to speak to young females and to be honest, male insecurity is as high as female. So, it's not unusual that a younger person would feel insecure about something, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, whatever other factors are there. And I think that overcoming your own concerns, what's in your own head, is so important. And I think your team members actually are there for you to prop you up and tell you you're fine.

I remember that when I started the business, I felt like I have to bring somebody older with me to the meetings. I was 26, and I would walk into the room of people who are way much older than me and tell them that now, we're going to do things differently. For the first five minutes, it was just a shock reaction, so I would not get any questions to anything I would say. And it would take a minute for people to appreciate that actually, maybe I'm saying some sense.

It really helped to have people who would say to me, "You don't need anyone. Just go and say what you think is right." And I think now, with our teams, we have all ages, we have all genders. I'm particularly proud when I see women in engineering. Obviously, that's just maybe a bias on my side, but it's great. And it's important that we all get together and address it if there is an issue. We cannot just sit there and hide from it. We just need to speak to it.

Shane Hastie: How do we start to have those conversations?

Dr. Olga Kubassova: Well, I was speaking at the QCon, and as you can imagine, the 90% of the audience is male. I think having female speakers sharing their experiences, because females are very good at emotions. There is no need to say that we are all the same, we act the same. No, we're not. We're different. But female strengths is often in sharing the emotions openly. And crying is not a sign of weakness. It's actually a sign of action, or a sign of frustration. Could be anything.

Maybe male engineers would go punch something, females may cry, but it's an expression of your passion, expression of what you think in the moment, how the moment affects you. So, if I can just understand that, that we react differently to the same problem, to me it's understanding of both sides, understanding of that individual, how they react to the problem. Because if reaction is aggression or tears, obviously not positive. But it is a reaction, nothing else.

Second thing I would do is, I would always center conversation around an issue, or around a challenge, or around something tangible which you can address, not around an individual presenting that issue. Because it's very important to recognize that we might see differently, but the issue remains the same. And when you win by tackling that successfully, by explaining to your teams how to deal with that, we reward people. And again, we need to recognize that different rewards appreciated by different people.

So, how would female really feel that she made a contribution? What would matter? It needs to be in a way that everybody understands that when we appreciate someone, we appreciate them for their achievements, not just because they were of particular gender. And once an understanding is there, then I think everybody can speak freer, express themselves freer, solve more issues, do not hide behind anything. Just be there, full on, 100% all the time.

Shane Hastie: Thank you. Quite a few of our audience are people who have moved relatively recently into leadership roles. For the new team leader, maybe the new entrepreneur or person thinking of becoming an entrepreneur, what advice would you give them?

Advice for new leaders [24:00]

Dr. Olga Kubassova: I think team leader versus entrepreneurs, probably different type of advice. Different advice. So, I start with the lead. I think if you need to lead someone, I always believe in leading by example. You are not perfect, but you are a leader. Somebody has chosen to believe that you are the one to lead that as a person. So, leading by example is not necessarily solving things, but being there, present, doing your best, bringing other people to help, making sure things work. That's one of the advice from me.

You have to really feel like you, as a leader, will eat last. You will solve the most problems, you will recognize the most people. And very often, this is your recognition. Nobody is going to applaud you as a leader. You need to push your people forward, empower them, but at the same time, you need to stay behind to make sure they can do the job.

Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs [25:01]

As entrepreneur, I think it's very different. Entrepreneurs are not necessarily leaders. They're like self-chosen leaders. Nobody told them they're going to lead anything. They just decided that there is a problem they're going to tackle. I think tackling and leading are different qualities very often. Because to tackle the problem means you're just going to hit that brick wall with all your strength and break through it. You're probably going to hurt some people on the way, and bricks probably not going to fall in exactly the way you plan them to fall.

But as entrepreneur, you have this unique quality. So, being force of nature. Because otherwise, first of all, you don't even recognize a problem. And secondly, if you recognize a problem, you can't do anything about it. So, entrepreneurs, if somebody is thinking of being entrepreneur, I think it's worth checking if they're ready for rejection, they're ready for not immediate success.

There are great stories of Facebook or Google or OpenAI, or anything like that of overnight entrepreneurs. It's never an overnight. It's always after 20 years of hard work. Finally, overnight, you become a success. And I think entrepreneurs versus leaders is almost a question mark for me. I hired so many great leaders, and I knew that I'm not the right person to lead in many of the different departments. My passion is not necessarily to lead. My passion is about solving things.

And I think when you know yourself better, you probably can position yourself right in your own company. It takes time to get to know yourself, because that's very difficult, to be self-critical, obviously, especially for entrepreneur who know everything and do anything and solve anything themselves.

Shane Hastie: Self-awareness.

Dr. Olga Kubassova: Oh, yes, big one.

Shane Hastie: Dr. Olga, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today. If people want to continue the conversation, where do they find you?

Dr. Olga Kubassova: Oh, I would be delighted. LinkedIn is the best tool, so I post. And I try to speak for myself, so I don't use extra people to post on my LinkedIn. So, everything I say is me. And they can come back with questions and comments, and let me know what they think. And I love the conversations.

Shane Hastie: Thank you so much.

Dr. Olga Kubassova: Wonderful. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Mentioned:

• Dr Olga Kubassova on LinkedIn
• QCon London