Partnerships between large corporations and startups can be advantageous for every company involved. These partnerships can uncover the latest technologies, deliver the best outcomes for customers and transform and modernize business. And the benefits to startups is the opportunity to learn from large, established organizations. But what is the impact for the global community? While large corporations have a duty to corporate responsibility, startups may not think about their global impact in the earlier series of the business. But what if a partnership with a large corporation included encouragement and guidance and required a commitment to think about their global footprint? What if a startup had to consider the circular economy and be purposeful in a meaningful dimension that has impact? Listen as our experts explore the importance of being purpose driven and making a positive contribution to our economies and our communities.
Partnerships between large corporations and startups can be advantageous for every company involved. These partnerships can uncover the latest technologies, deliver the best outcomes for customers and transform and modernize business. And the benefits to startups is the opportunity to learn from large, established organizations. But what is the impact for the global community?
While large corporations have a duty to corporate responsibility, startups may not think about their global impact in the earlier series of the business. But what if a partnership with a large corporation included encouragement and guidance and required a commitment to think about their global footprint? What if a startup had to consider the circular economy and be purposeful in a meaningful dimension that has impact?
Listen as our experts explore the importance of being purpose driven and making a positive contribution to our economies and our communities.
Featured experts
Sarah B. Nelson 00:00
Welcome to another episode of The Progress Report. I'm Sarah B. Nelson, Chief Design Officer for Kyndryl Vital, and I'm excited to have all of you here today because today we're gonna dive into a really powerful topic, which is the world of purpose driven entrepreneurship, innovation and the dynamics between corporate and startup partnerships. And then we're going to talk about how the choices that we make have impact on the global community. So my first guest is Taïg Khris, he is the CEO and Founder of Onoff Telecom. Hi, Taïg.
Taïg Khris 00:29
Hello, Sarah.
Sarah B. Nelson 00:29
And we have Warrick Cramer, who's our Global Director of Innovation Strategy here at Kyndryl.
Warrick Cramer 00:31
Hi, Sarah.
Sarah B. Nelson 00:32
So both of these folks are really interesting. So Taïg is really, I love the way he describes this - he's a challenger/dreamer who loves to follow his passion and dreams in different fields. So from sports to entrepreneurship. One thing that Taïg said to me was that he never sees walls or limits in his vision. He's always trying to find creative solutions to problems and is very mission-driven. And then Warrick is a really seasoned entrepreneur with more than 20 years of transformation and work in the digital transformation space. What I find really interesting about your work is that you've really remained dedicated to how you foster innovation and growth and startups, both at your sort of corporate work and just in the work that you do every day. So one of the things is there's really no denying the advantages of partnerships between large corporations and startups. We can uncover cutting edge technologies and deliver superior experiences for people and drive transformative change. You know, I'm curious about what our broader impact on the global community is going to be, so I really want to just go right into it. Warrick, why is it imperative for all businesses to be intentional about their purpose?
Warrick Cramer 01:44
You know, Sarah, it's a good question. I think the intention is really the core elements or the core foundation for building a very successful business. And without purpose, nothing else works. You talk to any entrepreneur, it's never about money. It's about getting up every day and building something that actually makes a difference in the world. So I think when it comes to purpose, that has to be the core of every single business. And the businesses that don't have it or don't focus on it enough, actually lose steam and eventually disappear. You know, when you look at big organizations as well, Sarah, over the years, if you just look at even just the stock exchanges, right? How many companies have come and gone off the stock exchanges over the years, how many actually remained? I think it's only like five or eight. It's not many. And it's organizations that just don't reinvent themselves. I think that's where it comes down to.
Sarah B. Nelson 02:35
Okay, so speaking of reinvention, Taïg, how do you integrate purpose into what you do?
Taïg Khris 02:41
I will say purpose is really deep in my blood in a way. Because even for my education, you know, my education and the way my parents gave me an education is really to follow your dream. And I think purpose and dream is very connected. If you don't dream in a way as a dream of a better world of some company or a product that will help people and so on. So, you know, it's extremely important for me and for every company to have purpose. And not just a word standing out on the company. A true vision that everyone in the company understands, follows and dreams for to go forward.
Warrick Cramer 03:20
A lot of organizations or even startups, for that matter, start with a great purpose, but then change midway. And that's where the pressures come in from. "I have to deliver quality results. I have to deliver yearly returns for our investors, etc., or venture capital firms, or whoever else is investing in the organizations." Whereas, when an organization has purpose and it's ingrained, it's long term. You'll have your ups and downs through the journey, but it's very important that you stay the course.
Taïg Khris 03:51
Any company in the world, they need to make money. But if you have a great vision and a great purpose there, you don't make money to just give millions to the investor. You make money to give the opportunity for the company to go bigger and better on their mission to be able to reinvest and share what they've built to more people. They are not working for making the investor richer, they're working to make the company have a better impact.
Sarah B. Nelson 04:21
So Warrick, I'm curious. One thing that I've seen you talk about is the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. I'd love for you to explain it. In fact, I'm going to ask for you to explain how that applies to the startups that you're working with and if you could also give a little context.
Warrick Cramer 04:36
Sure, Sarah. Well, I've been at Kyndryl just before the spin-off. When I came in, we looked at innovation and the whole purpose of what I was looking at was - how do we actually make a difference? How do we actually work with smaller organizations, bring them into Kyndryl, and make them successful and build a win-win model for everyone? I looked at the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the 17 sustainable goals that the UN had pulled out. And I looked and I thought, "You know what? Why can't I make it mandatory for every company that we work with and we bring in as the innovation partner that subscribe to one or more of these goals?" And so when I looked at that as a framework, I remember saying to a lot of the colleagues in Kyndryl when I starting off, "Guys, we're going to build this into our strategy. We're gonna build this into our selection criteria." And I think that mantra that we sort of inbuilt into the strategy and into everything that I do, Sarah, I think is really starting to shift the dial.
Sarah B. Nelson 05:30
So, I mean, both of you are very purpose driven. You're both about innovation. I guess, Taïg, what I'm curious about is your relationship. Do you work towards the United Nations Sustainability Goals? Or is it coming from a less formal place? For people who are listening, that's a 17 set of interconnected global goals that the UN is trying to achieve by 2030.
Taïg Khris 05:51
Of course, you know, you can be involved in every step of your company. And of course, we have different involvement, but I will say I am still at the beginning, in a way, of my adventure. And the first thing as every company, you first start in your room having an idea, then you start to create a small team, then start to build the product, find a market, and so on and then the company gets bigger. So now we are in a step where we have our market, we have a product, we are about 100 people in the company. We've raised money, we achieve profitability, we invent multiple patents in telecom, and have changed multiple things. So this is a great achievement until here. But still, the company is still very small. We are only making 20 million turnover until now. So, I will say I will focus more on a give back to the society in a second step. First, I need the company to get much bigger and get more power, I will say.
Sarah B. Nelson 06:51
It's like a process of discovery. So I think it's interesting that you can set an intention based on those sustainability goals, but you can also have this progressive reveal. Like you start from your heart, and then it starts to reveal how you might interact and what kind of impact you might have.
Taïg Khris 07:08
The way I work in my mind is to do things 100%. So I don't want to say, "Oh, yes, I am helping just for my personal ego." You understand what I mean? The way I work is to try to build as big of a company as possible. And once I have that, then I will have the power to really try to help and really try to change things.
Warrick Cramer 07:34
So one of the UN goals is around equality. And irrespective of that whole diversity elements, which I know Taïg has always, always done and even with the people that works in his organization. Even though you haven't defined it as a UNSDG goal, it's there embedded into your culture of your organization.
Taïg Khris 07:53
Also, in the mentality in the company, I tried to. Even if there are some people that have higher rank, I like that everybody is completely equal. And anyone in the company can come open the door of the CEO and say, "Well, I think you made a mistake there and challenge me." And at the end, the one who will be right is the one that will with arguments show that his idea is better. At the end is only the result. There is no ego of this person or this person has to be right, you know?
Sarah B. Nelson 08:27
It starts in your culture. The equality starts in your culture. Can you talk a little bit about how that then translates? Or, as part of your product, you're making a product that actually enables people to communicate. You're making phone numbers available for people. That could say if you're in India, you can have an equal conversation with somebody in New York where you feel like you're in the same location.
Taïg Khris 08:51
Yeah, it was like that. But I will say the vision was deeper than that. What I've realized is that in the telecom world, there were some things that makes completely no sense for the end user. You see, we were living in a world where everything is in the cloud. Your email is in the cloud, your file with Dropbox, your music with Spotify, your film with Netflix, everything is in the cloud. And your mobile number is blocked on the plastic SIM cards inside your phone. Okay, now, they invent like the eSIM, so things are changing a little bit. But 10 years ago, when I started Onoff, eSIM didn't exist. So first of all, I realized that all the big telecom companies in the world - they were reducing innovation. They were restraining the user experience for people for no reason. Probably to get more profit at the end. Because if you take away your SIM card, you don't have your number anymore. So I thought I will invent a new way to use mobile number. So I thought, why can't you just buy the number and use like an email address, basically, and connect that phone number to any connectivity. So I thought the same technique with the mobile number. So just creating an app that's generating a mobile number, but the long-term vision was not only to give numbers. I was seeing two worlds separately. The world of mobile application like WhatsApp that was giving an extremely user-friendly user experience actually, but that had some lag about technology. If you didn't have internet, you could not do it. And on the other side, you had the telecom world that had a very strong technology and very far from user experience. And my long term vision was to take those two worlds and connect it together.
Sarah B. Nelson 10:46
So Warrick I'm curious, because you spend a lot of time within large organizations. And so I'm curious about how that bridge happens between the innovation user experience of someone like Taïg's organization and the corporate enterprise.
Warrick Cramer 11:01
I think the ability to be able to work with new, smaller companies coming into the fold is actually really hard in a corporate context. It was really interesting, Sarah, because I read this morning while I was on the train and I found this quote and I thought, "Wow, this is going to be really fitting for our podcast today." And the quote says, "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write. But those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." And I listened to it and I thought, "Wow, this has just nailed it, right?" Because as a corporate organization, look how difficult it is to unlearn and relearn things to reinvent yourself. You're put into a particular category and that's a job you have to do, and that's it. So if you're in the accounts department, you're in operations, etc., how much opportunity do you generally have to be able to work across different functional areas? There's not many opportunities there. And that's not a bad thing, because in a big organization, you need that stability. And then here comes a startup, which all of a sudden, is dynamic, it's fast, and they can move things really quickly. If something's not working, guess what? They just put it in reverse and start all over again. All of a sudden, now you've got these two worlds that are colliding and working at very different speeds. So the challenge that you have for both parties, not for one or the other, is that you've got startups that typically, regardless of sizes, whether it's small or medium or large, or scaleups as we call them, but yet the expectations that they have to be able to move very quickly is very different. And they look at big corporates and go, "Guys, this makes so much sense. Why can't you change it? Change your process to make this work." So there's difficulty always to overcome. And I think with that quote, its the ability to unlearn and relearn consistently. And that's what's really important. And I think both parties, whether it's a big corporate or a startup just starting out, I think if you have that mindset, you can actually do things a lot faster and more efficiently and effectively within the organization. And that's hard to do. That's very, very hard to do.
Taïg Khris 13:04
I want to add as well to be flexible for innovation. That's the best security actually a big corporation can have for the future, because technology moves too fast. I mean, you can see when they launched ChatGPT, how in few months, every company started to use it. When you look back, we all forget that before Facebook, there was MySpace. And before Google, there was Yahoo, and so on. So what I want to say is that everything comes for the user experience, I believe, if you bring a product that has helped people better and made their life easier. And so for a big corporation, they have to understand that it's never anymore with technology in the pocket like it was for hundreds and hundreds of years. Now, their security is the possibility for them to be flexible and to be in front of the train of technology. They need always to have one step ahead in which direction it goes about innovation.
Warrick Cramer 14:13
If we look as individuals, just think about our daily lives. We turn on the radio, we turn on the TV, we get onto the Internet, we look at all our different sort of news feeds, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, or whatever you use. The geopolitics - the world is changing consistently. In our personal lives, all we have to do is just click on to one of those feeds and we see what's happening around us every single day. We all went through COVID. We all learned about the importance of supply chain or supply chain resiliency. We've all learned about sovereign now capability of us starting to insource manufacturing and that drain brain, so to speak, bringing it back in house, etc. So we're constantly bombarded with change. Change is all around us. And now, all of a sudden, we come to work and it can't stand still. We have to keep moving. And so that's where some of the challenges come looking at from a corporate perspective. That constant evolution of all the things that are happening around us in our personal lives. Bringing that in there and then adding value to an organization and driving it forward.
Sarah B. Nelson 15:15
You know, I've been reflecting a lot on me and obviously like everyone else, but a lot on what is now accessible and made visible to people. It's not that AI is a new thing, it's that they made an interface that people could actually see it in action in a way that works. Not like our friend Siri so much, but like an actual "you can see it and apply it". But I've been reflecting on how fast that's moving with the, what is it? The Chat GPT 4 plus? And which I'm on the waitlist for. But there's always been this idea that we talk about is that technology outpaces the ability of humans to change. We are still, in some ways, like these very primal people. It feels like this opening of accessible AI has accelerated that. The level of change I've seen in technology has never been at this pace. I'm really curious about what we need to do as humans to be able to keep up with that.
Warrick Cramer 16:13
The change that's happening so quickly around us is that it comes back to the fundamental elements of the purpose of why we're actually doing what we're doing. So it's lovely to have Chat GPT 4, etc. But what value is it adding to humanity? And now there's two sides of this coin too, by the way. You've got the good and you've got the bad, okay? And hopefully, we'll do more good than bad. However, we have to acknowledge that it does exist. So as technologists, our job every single day is to say, "Well, how do we actually take a product or an AI or whatever the new technology that's coming up, the next new thing coming up, and how do we actually do good with it? How do we protect humanity, the people that are vulnerable?" So whether it's kids, for example, I see some horrible stuff being used where you've got, nowadays, voice recordings, right? Where they can record my voice for five seconds and then give a call to one of my kids and say, "Hey Dad, I'm stuck somewhere. Can you come and pick me up? Or can you send me some money, etc.?" So that's where technology is actually used really badly. And that's where we have to, as technologists, try to find a way to circumvent that.
Taïg Khris 17:24
I agree. I agree. There is one thing that I want to add. My biggest fear is not so much about the technology itself. My biggest fear is more the people that are running it. If you look back years and years ago when they created television, at the beginning, it was more for, in a way, education to help people in an educational way. When you see now the television, they are selling us products with advertisement all the time. And they are putting on some television show just for us to view more and sell more advertisement. And when you see, for example, even on YouTube or any social network, the algorithm is not showing you the best interesting element for you. It's showing you what you are willing to click most. So if, for example, you like an alien, YouTube is going to show you a video of aliens all the time, because the algorithm is built to sell your product, not to make you a better human.
Warrick Cramer 18:32
It's funny because, with my kids, I say to them all the time, "When you do a Google search or any search on a news channel, take the position that whatever you're reading is actually fake. It's your job to disprove it." And it's really sad, really, really sad that I actually have to give them that sort of lesson in life that we can't actually trust anymore. Trust is actually gone. And I think to Taïg's point is that you've got these big organizations that are starting to dominate. But I'm hoping that the new generation will say, "Hey, that's enough." Push the politicians to put in the right policies and the right procedures to protect people, to protect humanity. And I'm hoping with that, and with the new generation as well coming through and the organizations for that matter, that trust is really, really important. The ones that actually can build trust are the ones that are going to succeed in my opinion.
Sarah B. Nelson 19:26
Warrick, I'm curious what advice you would share with large corporations who want to make meaningful partnerships with these purpose-driven startups. And on then the other side looking at the other side of the coin is, Taïg, what advice would you give to startups as they're honing their purpose?
Taïg Khris 19:41
Very, very simple for a corporation. So, to be honest, 100% honest, in their reason on why they do it. It doesn't have to be to pretend to get more money at the end for the investor and so on, blah, blah, blah. Because people see it. People feel it. No, it has to be a true desire. A true vision from all the leaders from the company. And it has to be shared with everyone and has to be proven in the act, with the profit the company makes, how it can give back and help. So this is extremely important. And for the people's side, everything is possible. No matter from which origin, education, or country you come from, you can become one of the future big leaders that may change the world. Have the opportunity to see things big. There are a lot of people that don't have the courage to see so big, but it is possible. So see things big and go for it.
Warrick Cramer 20:45
Sarah, so to answer your question, look, this is going to be a very, very odd answer, so I'm glad you're sitting down. But where I look at it is it starts with kindness. And I know it's really odd for me to say that, but you as a person, if you can actually do something that's actually quite nice for others and show kindness, it's how you shift the dial. The second part to that is thinking through your legacy. What do you actually want to leave behind? For me personally, if I can get up and come to work and just touch one person's life and make a difference, then you know what, I'm the richest person in the world. And so for me, if we can build that into corporate innovation and we can build that into startups, guess what? I think the world will look very, very differently. And I think the whole innovative narrative and the innovation narrative will change very quickly.
Sarah B. Nelson 21:35
What I really loved about our conversation today was provoking the thoughts about, "What is purpose?" Even if you're in an organization already. Where can you influence purpose? Because a lot of times the purpose gets lost, but it's there. So how can you elevate it? So whether you're in a startup, or whether you're in the enterprise, and sort of noticing when the conversation is about efficiency and about productivity to what purpose? And then I think that's really the anchor that all of us can have. When I do these activities, when I'm planning, to what purpose? What is really my strategy at the purpose level? That's what I would challenge all of you to think about. What is your purpose? What gets you up in the morning? And how can you bring that influence into the rest of your organization? I don't know about the folks listening, but I am incredibly inspired. And I'm also just gonna say, personally, this is the message I needed to hear today. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation.
Taïg Khris 22:36
Thank you. It was so cool to share. Definitely. Thank you, everyone.
Warrick Cramer 22:40
Thank you, Sarah, Taïg, it was a real honor. Thank you so much.
Sarah B. Nelson 22:44
Thank you. That's the end of the episode today. We'll be back in two weeks for another episode. So come join us. Make sure to subscribe. Share this with your colleagues and we'll talk with you next time.