Ep 19: Leveraging Data to Optimize the Business with Corsair CIO Tom Cullen

Evan Reiser: Hi there, and welcome to Enterprise Software Innovators, a show where top technology executives share how they innovate at scale. In each episode, enterprise leaders share how they’re driving digital transformation and what they’ve learned along the way. I’m Evan Reiser, the CEO and founder of Abnormal Security.

Saam Motamedi: And I’m Saam Motamedi, a general partner at Greylock Partners.

Evan Reiser: Today on the show, we’re bringing you a conversation with Tom Cullen. Throughout his storied career, Tom has been a CIO at several large and defining companies, including Peet’s Coffee and Tea, Driscoll’s, and today at Corsair, one of the world’s premier gaming hardware companies. In this conversation, Tom shares how Driscoll explored blockchain to optimize food traceability, how Corsair uses data analytics to personalize gaming, and his advice for startups collaborating with enterprise companies.

Saam Motamedi: Hey, Tom, maybe to begin, can you give our audience a bit of background on your career and your current role at Corsair?

Tom Cullen: Sure. So currently I’m the CIO at Corsair. I’ve been there for about a year and a half. Prior, I was the CIO at Juul labs for about three years. So I was there through the hypergrowth all the way down to restructure/downsizing. Prior to Juul, I was at Driscoll’s for about eight years, helping the company globally expand. And then my first CIO job was actually Peet’s Coffee and Tea for about four years. And then prior to that, it was with Electronic Arts and a few other companies. But what’s interesting about my career, I started out as a programmer years and years and years ago. So a computer science programmer guy. And what was interesting to me as it progressed through my career is really technical leadership roles, CTO type of roles. I really enjoyed the people aspect. And so what migrated me to the CIO role is two things. Number one is you get to get more business focused and driving not only business outcomes, but helping drive efficiency and perspective, but then also applying technology to solve business problems while also building culture with people. I really started enjoying the people aspect of technology and enablement and creating an environment where everyone can actually be focused on delivery. So a lot of people don’t like that. I tend to love it. So for me, that actually helped me progress in my CIO career.

Evan Reiser: I share a similar background to you, right. Was a good software engineer. In software engineering, there’s a lot of systems design, systems architecture. Does that kind of influence how you think about deploying technology or kind of building technology systems to power businesses?

Tom Cullen: Always. I think it’s a really good question, Evan. For me, when I think so, I’m a component part kind of guy. I think in frameworks, I think in patterns. And I’m always thinking about what the outcome is of what we’re generating. So having led enterprise architecture teams, for example, in the past, when I look at business problems, I’m always thinking about enabling architecture. And we all love to tinker and do technology for technology’s sake. But as you know, in a CIO role, you can do that for experimentation, you can do that for innovation, team motivation, but your primary job is to solve business problems. That said, to me, what I always try to do is look at the broader enterprise architecture and the specific component parts you’re working with that could be a new ERP system, re-platforming all your e-com, looking at your data repository, your data tools, security as an example, near and dear to your heart. And so as you look at those problems, simply they need to all architecturally fit together. Because when you’re looking at the impacts of change over time, it’s really important to me anyway to take an enterprise architecture view, but really from a technology sake, but also a business outcome sake. And so one of my guiding principles is to keep it simple. Easy to say, hard to do. Technologists, and I used to love to do this. Technologists love to overcomplicate things, build a big Rube Goldberg design just because you can. And so the goal here, for me anyway, is always to try to keep it as standard and as simple as possible. And oftentimes there’s a convergence of business speciality, I’ll say, where the business needs to do something special because it’s the secret sauce of competitive advantage. But oftentimes what you’ll find is many businesses want to do it because that’s the way they’ve always done it. And so I think your job as a technologist, as an architect, as a CIO in my case, is to bridge that gap between process standardization, business enablement for scale and leverage and growth in the future, while also keeping your technology stack as standard as you can.

Saam Motamedi: One of the things, Tom, that I think is super interesting about your career is you’ve helped lead technology and worked at companies that I think to listeners of our show, both companies that are obviously technology companies like EA or Juul or Corsair. And then also companies that people may not naturally think of as technology companies, whether it’s Driscoll’s or Peet’s. And so it’ll be super interesting for us to double click on both of those kinds of buckets of companies. But maybe one framing question to start. How is the role of technology both similar and different? If you think about those two different segments of companies you’ve worked at.

Tom Cullen: Yeah, sure. Part of it is that if you look at the technologies that are available to enable companies like that and the things that you need to experiment and innovate with, there’s a little bit of a difference, but most of it’s similar, to be honest with you. What it ends up coming down to, at least in my experience, is the organizational ability to take on new technology and change. So what I mean by that is organizational readiness versus change management. How ready is the organization to embrace technology, to better enable, simplify, scale their business. If you’re a technology company, but you’re kind of thinking you’re design thinking like Juul, for example, well, it’s all about innovation and speed. And so if you come to an executive session where you’re talking about innovation and speed, well, the company is kind of wired that way, so it’s an easier conversation. If you’re talking about coffee or berries, then it’s about supply chain, velocity mix manufacturing process. You get into more than six sigma types of things. However, it becomes market differentiating. So I’ll give a couple of examples at Peet’s. When I came in there, most of it was around revamping the entire enterprise architecture portfolio of enterprise apps from manufacturing, fulfillment, supply chain, and all the channel systems. And so when you look at doing something like that, again, starting with the end state in mind, it’s figuring out where do we want to go as a business? What are the channel enablers to get there from both a differentiation velocity and market-share standpoint, and how do you ensure both stability and standardization in your core so you’re actually serving all the different channels. And so in this case, it may be direct store delivery people, delivering coffee, managing shelf space in grocery stores. It could be direct to the consumer. It could be food service, office coffee. It could be 192 retail stores, which is where we were at the time. Each one of those consumes product at different rates in different configurations. But one of the premises that we had way back when, which still exists today in differentiators, is freshness. So it’s all about producing the freshest possible product and getting it out to market as soon as possible in different formats. And so that needs to go all the way back to your manufacturing planning system that says, all right, what do we roast when? What are some of the constraints? For example, you have to do organics before others. And then as we built a lead certified roasting plant, it really came down to how do you build efficiency by design in a new siloing system, in a new roasting configuration, to make sure you’re optimizing product velocity, product flow to distribute to those channels as efficiently as possible?

Evan Reiser: I think one thing that Saam and I’ve been really just impressed and also interested in is how a lot of companies that people may not classically think of as a technology company, actually have a lot of technology behind the scenes, right? And it’s a good reminder that there’s just a lot of innovation in ways that people maybe don’t expect. So maybe it’s kind of a follow up question. And I think most people are probably familiar with the king of the Driscoll’s brand, right, and maybe had some delicious raspberries last week by them. But there’s probably some ways in which the organization uses technology in ways that the average customer or consumer may not expect.

Tom Cullen: Absolutely. And I believe what most people don’t realize is technology is a differentiator and consumes more of the addressable market from a tam consumption standpoint. But also looking at how the company grows and scales globally. What’s interesting about Driscoll’s is that they develop proprietary berry genetics and patent them. That’s why the berries are so good. It’s not your university variety that’s just replicated, they’re special and they’re actually patented. So there’s a big microbiology program that is actually developing that. So that’s a fun group to work with. But when you look at the differentiating aspects of the company and one of my favorite things to say while I was there, just for impact, which is mostly true, is Driscoll’s is a multibillion dollar berry company that doesn’t grow any berries. So what do I mean by that? They do grow berries, especially in emerging markets or to augment certain markets, and they are expert from an agronomy standpoint. However, what they had built is a non vertically integrated supply chain. So what that means is that their differentiation is superior genetics. Their differentiation is best-in-class at supply chain cold chain management, which I can talk about in a minute. And what they’ve done is created independent grower partnerships and coops around the globe to partner with independent growers to grow the fruit. And if it meets quality standards, it’s sold, distributed under the Driscoll brand name. But that IP is owned when it’s in the ground by Driscoll’s. So if you think about it, it’s really contract manufacturing. Going back to what I was talking about earlier, it’s really contract manufacturing with proprietary genetics. And so given the fact that it’s a premium product, and given the fact that nothing good happens to a berry once you pick it, it’s all downside management. It’s all about time and temperature. So as soon as that berry is picked, you need to get it into the cooler, cooled as soon as possible, and get it out the door as soon as possible. So all of the distribution centers were really about velocity. But I’ll give you one example of innovative technology that you probably wouldn’t guess is deployed or was deployed at a food company. So back in, I think it was 2017, 2018, we partnered with other companies in IBM to do a blockchain experiment. And what we did is we started looking at, this is at a time, and still is at a time where people care where their food comes from, and there’s different traceability mechanisms around food and certification of food. Is it actually organic? Is it shade grown? How are the workers treated? Is their child labor deployed? And so there’s a lot of factors that play into that in any type of global manufacturing. And so we started a blockchain pilot with IBM and a couple of other food companies to look at food traceability. So you could trace your product all the way back to the farm harvest date and what are the certificates and certifications of that farm. And what was interesting, it actually worked quite well. Now this is back when blockchain was new and the chasm was still quite big to cross to get to productionalization. And to this day I think IBM is still trying to figure it out with hyperledger. But what’s interesting is that it was super fun to be involved in a pilot like that because you’re using what some would consider a cryptocurrency at the time, technology, to solve a food traceability product issue and so deploying that gave full traceability, but also immutability as you know. So once it’s on the blockchain, you can’t change it. And so it’s interesting if you look at large scale production that was really tough at the time because proof of work was still the name of the game, right. To certify you are who you are. But now if you look at the different certifications and validation mechanisms that are in place without relying on a central trust, then I think you’re going to see more commercialization of blockchain technologies out there. But that’s just one kind of fun example of experimentation for the business purpose of an emerging technology.

Evan Reiser: That’s great. I really appreciate sharing, Tommy. I’m always interested to hear about the surprising ways organizations use technology that the average person would have no idea.

Tom Cullen: Yeah, and I can give one more example too, which is kind of fun. So if you look at cold chain management, again, it’s all about time, temperature and speed. And so when you’re shipping berries around the globe, you have to think about logistics. Berries at the time and probably still don’t do well on trains. There’s too much vibration, you create juice at the top of the stack. So trucking is very important. But what you find with trucking is that your quality of trucking in cold chain management varies from country to country, especially if you’re crossing borders like the Mexican border or moving fruit from Morocco into southern Europe. And so what was interesting about that is we wanted to know well, what’s happening in the truck? And so we started deploying Bluetooth sensors that would tell you not only when things were deployed, when the truck was sealed, but what the temperature was along the way. And the team, the supply chain team, actually built a map that showed not only where the product was, but what the temperature was so we could actually reach out proactively to say, hey, the fruit’s warming up, what’s going on? Tell that truck to pull over and service their cooler. Or in one case we saw that trucks were stopped at the border, but not in an area you’d expect them to. So part of it is, hey, what’s going on there? Because unfortunately, cartels love to commandeer trucks and put drugs underneath them and let them go through thinking, hey, it’s just produce, let it go through. So lots of crazy stories happen in the global produce world, but having that level of traceability and visibility by deploying fairly simple technology, but aggregating the data in a way that’s super meaningful was a lot of fun.

Evan Reiser: That’s really cool, Tom. I like that example just because, again, there’s surprising ways technology is being used and it’s not just for technology’s sake, it’s enabling a better product and a better customer experience.

Tom Cullen: Exactly.

Saam Motamedi: Maybe zooming forward to some of your more recent work. Let’s talk a little bit about Corsair and actually a similar question, which is are there one or two interesting examples of how technology is leveraged at Corsair that you’d like to share with us?

Tom Cullen: Yeah, one of the things I’ll mention is re-platforming all of our e-com systems. So if you look at Corsair, Elgato, Origin, which is high-end custom gaming machines and Scuf, which are controllers, what we’re trying to do is build a common stack that they can all sit on, but then allow an individual storefront for each individual brand so it can express itself the way that’s conducive to generating activity, obviously purchase, and engagement from the consumer base. And so that project is moving along. The goal is releasing MVP in April. But the reason, without diving too deep in the technical stack, what we find is that you’re using Autobacs technologies, which is a commerce engine, a content management system. But given the ability to, I would say, express content in a way that is conducive to growing the business across the world like you want to, there’s always customizations that need to be made like a persistent web application that’s serving out based on device and based on location. Really important. But what’s really interesting about this is that part of what this is driving is a data exercise. So if you look at consumer or customer journey mapping, I call it, what we’re trying to figure out is not only that technology moving forward is really standardization for growth, scalability, and being able to be more self-sufficient in the business and less dependent on it. That’s kind of table stakes right these days, especially with evolving technology. But as you get into data, a lot of what we’re trying to do is understand how our customers behave? So what are the cohorts, how are they behaving, how do they engage with us based on purchase but also research? And then how do we further engage them and through our entire lifecycle with them. And so with that, what we’re doing through our CDP, a customer data platform, is looking at how people currently behave and how we could use that data to influence how we want to express either products on the site, promotions on the site, or just brand expression. And then we’re working our way backwards to figure out some of the products that they may download. So we have software products, one in particular called iCue that sits on the computer and controls all of your devices. So for example, if you had iCue, right now in a session like this, it could control your microphone, your lighting, your computer, and if you’re a gamer, everything interacts at once, which is super cool. But what’s interesting about it is it throws off a lot of data and a lot of important data about how you’re using products and what you’re actually doing. So what we’re trying to do is ingest and correlate data that shows not only product usage, but consumer behavior online. And we’re hoping to get into the social aspect as well and ingest that data to better understand how customers use our products, what type of activities they do, and how they engage in the further community.

Evan Reiser: I’ve been a gamer for a long time where I’ve bought many Corsair products over the years. One observation I have is that the kind of gaming market has also changed. Corsair has changed, right? It’s kind of moved in different dimensions around the value chain. Corsair has gone from more hardware folks now, like there’s software, there’s a breadth of different product lines. Gaming is a submarket that changes really quickly. And so I guess my question is, as you’re thinking about leading your team, you want them to innovate, to get ahead of the next trend, to think about where we need to go. So it’s a little bit ambiguous because the market is changing, the technologies are changing really quickly. How do you activate innovation inside the team to make sure you’re kind of focusing in the right areas to get ahead of the next thing without maybe accidentally going in the wrong direction?

Tom Cullen: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. And again, Evan, what I start with is what business problem are we trying to solve? So I’ll give an example. So if you look at custom configuration being a gamer, as you know, custom configuration is getting more and more popular, whether it’s a custom controller, whether it’s a keyboard, whether it’s your actual machine, et cetera. And so keeping up with that custom configuration need is important. So when we look at building a custom configurator, whether it’s the K70 keyboard or other things that we’re doing, part of what you want to do is think about, well, you don’t want to build a custom configurator for every product out there because that’s a nightmare to manage from a code standpoint. Is there a way to build a standard configurator framework, for lack of a better term, and build on top of that so that it's leverageable. And I would say you can replicate it throughout those product groups to provide that business capability. But again, what I do is I say based on the business problem that we’re trying to solve, what’s available internally, what’s available external. I’m a big fan of looking outside first. So the benefit of being a CIO in Silicon Valley is that I have access to a lot of great smart people like yourselves and other VCs where I get to see pipeline, what’s in your funnel? And sitting on advisory boards also gives me the opportunity to say, hey, what’s coming next? And so having influence on that from a conversation standpoint is not only fun, but meaningful because what we’re trying to do, at least for folks in my role and even CTO roles, is figure out what’s around the corner and anything I don’t have to build, I don’t want to build. And I’m okay taking an early adopter stance on certain technologies as long as it makes business sense.

Saam Motamedi: We have a number of other CIOs who listen to this podcast as well as startup founders. Given your vantage point as a technology leader at so many large and impactful enterprises, do you have any lessons that you want to share with startup founders on how they can best approach collaboration with enterprise companies?

Tom Cullen: One of the biggest pieces of advice is sitting on technical advisory boards and also being part of CIO advisory boards for a couple of firms in the Valley and one based in Israel is make sure you’re going-to-market messaging is clear on what problem you’re solving and what differentiates you. Because I think what happens is that I’ve seen it many times. You get a startup that has fantastic technology and really smart, innovative people, but they don’t quite know how to form a go-to-market message. That is the, AHA, this is why I need you. So my biggest piece of advice is to define your why. Put yourself in my seat and define your why. Why do I need you? And then what do you do? And what do you do well? And then how are you different from your competitors out there? And my other piece of advice always is to be really clear on what your market position is. You don’t want to boil the ocean and go after every market because startups tend to be lean and they won’t have enough people to really focus on that. So be super clear in your product roadmap around what’s an MVP, what you’re going to build on, and hopefully you’re building on MVP based on customer feedback and actual real-life examples. And if you look at your total addressable market, what piece do you want, what percentage, and how fast? And if you go start looking at that, at that point, how do you measure yourself to make sure you’re heading in the right direction? Or do you need to pivot? Most startups that I’ve seen and most startups I know have to pivot at some point. That’s okay, know your pivot point, know what metrics that are going to drive that pivot point. Because at that point, if you’re looking at what percentage of the addressable market you want to achieve, then hopefully that gives you at least critical mass in that market from both a revenue customer and reputation base to then scale up to other parts of the market. What I’ve seen happen sometimes is over ambitious groups that try to hit multiple parts of different markets, but they get spread too thin and they aren’t differentiated, and they can’t go deep enough to get critical mass. Those are usually the biggest pieces of advice based on my own usage of technology and some of the problems I’ve run into. But now that I’ve been part of some of these advisory boards, honestly, for almost a decade, you see the same problems come up.

Saam Motamedi: Yeah, Tom, I’m going to take that fact, Cert, and share it with all the founders that we work with, because I think that is some really sage and well put advice.

Evan Reiser: So at the end of each episode, we like to do a bit of, like, a lightning round and so trying to get a couple, like short one-tweet type answers. So Saam I’ll turn it over to you to kick it off.

Saam Motamedi: Tom, as someone who’s been a seasoned CIO at different companies, how should companies measure the success of a CIO?

Tom Cullen: To me, if you’re delivering business value and good partnership to the business, then to me that’s a good measure, because CIOs are the bridge between the business and technology. But you have to be a business leader first and a technology second in order to be effective in most companies.

Evan Reiser: Makes Sense. I kind of want to ask, like, the inverse maybe of Saam’s question. Are there maybe common mistakes that you see new CIOs make?

Tom Cullen: Yes. They’re technology first driven. So it’s the other side of that coin where I’ve seen many new CIOs be technology focused, and they don’t partner with the business, and they start distributing technology throughout the organization that they think is the right fit, but doesn’t solve the business need. That’s an age-old problem that new CIOs have.

Saam Motamedi: And maybe one more question around CIOs and the role of the CIO, which part of a CIO’s responsibility do you think is most underestimated and its importance?

Tom Cullen: People leadership. Because I think, again, any CIO who has kind of been through multiple iterations knows you need to be business focused and business first. But unfortunately, many leaders out there, I feel, don’t spend enough time on leadership development. And that is your secret sauce. That is your differentiator And I think for CIOs that spend time building culture, building strong teams, those are the ones that end up being differentiated.

Evan Reiser: My answer really resonates with me as someone that’s kind of personally made that mistake in the past. So it feels like great advice for the world.

Tom Cullen: Well, I think we all learned the hard way. Myself included.

Evan Reiser: Those are the most memorable lessons if nothing else.

Tom Cullen: Yes.

Evan Reiser: So I wanted to turn maybe a little more on, kind of like the personal side. Is there, like, a recent book that you’ve read that’s had a big impact on you? Love to hear what it is and maybe why it resonated with you.

Tom Cullen: That is interesting. There’s lots of choices. And I was asked this question recently, and actually it wasn’t a recent book, but given the fact we just talked about leadership, I’m going to refer to a book that I read many years ago, but I think it’s still relevant today. Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last. I don’t know if you guys have read it. I’m a big Simon Sinek fan. And really what it comes down to is that it’s a great story of servant leadership and he really walks the walk in the book and gives really great examples. And so to me, any book that challenges you to think about how you behave personally, how you show up every day as a leader is important. For everyone it’s different. And for many of us, like we just talked about, we learn the hard way. But I think if you learn and grow from those examples, then every book you read and every time you apply it, you get better and better and better as a leader. One of my favorite quotes is, the true test of a good leader is how you show up on a bad day. And if you’re managing through transition or downturns, there’s quite a few bad days. And so if you’re showing up consistently, that’s all about driving what I call shared accountability to the outcome while empowering people and building trust and resilience, then you’re probably heading in the right direction. So any book that kind of references any of those topics that help you grow as an individual, and there’s a ton of them out there right now, they’re worth reading.

Evan Reiser: I love that. Actually, a quick funny story about that particular book. There’s a mentor of mine who’s an executive at a big enterprise software company. The first time I ever met him, I met him at his office at this company, and he asked me, hey, Evan, have you read this book? I was like, no, I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t read it. He pulled off his bookshelf, he’s like, hey, take this. You can give it to me next time we chat. Go read this, then we can have the next conversation.

Tom Cullen: Oh, I love it. I love it. After I read it, I actually bought copies from my whole team and said, hey, read it and let’s have a book club on it and let’s talk about it many, many years ago.

Evan Reiser: That’s also a great opportunity, just like activating some critical thinking, whatever the new topic is.

Saam Motamedi: Absolutely.

Evan Reiser: So maybe Tom's final question. What do you think will be true about technology’s impact on the world that maybe most people today might consider science fiction?

Tom Cullen: That is a good one. I’ll go back to AI. AI could be, if ethically governed, I think AI could be a differentiator in automating and achieving some of the more mundane things that are done in society today. That once there is a safety barrier, for lack of better term, from both personal safety, data safety and I’ll say society safety wrapped around it, then I think it could really do interesting things. And I think part of what we’re going to have to do as an evolving society is not only make it safe to use, but make it safe to consider. So people aren’t fearful of losing their jobs, losing a market, because part of it is that as humans evolve, the emergence of technology is not new, but how society evolves to not only keep up leverage, but upscale itself. By having technology take care of the things that humans don’t need to do anymore can be quite enabling and quite accelerating. And I think part of what it is, is technology moves faster than the human ability to consume and actually adapt. So if you look at neuroplasticity as an example, so if you look at the brain’s capability to rewire itself and its conditioned responses based on new stimuli, whether it’s acquired knowledge, whether it’s experience, trauma, meditation, there’s lots of different things and they’ve mapped it out right. And so much more is known about the human genome. However, what we do know is that the human brain can’t adapt as quickly as we would like it to. Some people can. But as a society, you can’t adapt as fast as technology does. So I think it’s finding that right convergence to say how do you actually solve interesting problems that aren’t threatening while putting a layer of safety and governance over it, so you don’t actually create bigger problems because you could easily get down that route too.

Evan Reiser: Yeah, I totally agree. I think AI in particular is kind of on this trajectory where the technology is almost outpacing our readiness to how to apply that in different ways. So it’s going to be an exciting couple of years right ahead of us.

Tom Cullen: Yeah, it certainly is. Sure.

Evan Reiser: Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us and looking forward to chatting again soon.

Tom Cullen: Likewise. A lot of fun. Thanks, guys.

Saam Motamedi: Thanks a lot, Tom.

Evan Reiser: That was Tom Cullen, CIO at Corsair.

Saam Motamedi: Thanks for listening to the Enterprise Software Innovators podcast. I’m Saam Motamedi, a general partner at Greylock Partners.

Evan Reiser: And I’m Evan Reiser, the CEO and founder of Abnormal Security. Please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find more great lessons from technology leaders and other enterprise software experts at enterprise software.blog.

Saam Motamedi: This show is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer. See you next time.

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