Adam Famularo Transcript
Clint Betts
Adam, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about WorkFusion, and your ideas on leadership, and how you got to the position you're in now as CEO of WorkFusion. I'm fascinated actually by WorkFusion. You're at the forefront of what everybody in business is talking about, which is AI, and you're creating these digital workers. Tell us how it works, and how you came upon these solutions that you've come up with.
Adam Famularo
Perfect, Clint. And first, thanks for having me as well. This is terrific being part of your podcast and tell a little bit about our story. So, I'll start out with WorkFusion. I joined WorkFusion about two and a half years ago after I sold my last software company that I built. This one really intrigued me as they had this brilliant AI technology industry-leading IDP or intelligent document processing technology. They just didn't have it all figured out, really the go-to-market and how they were positioning the technology landed. So, when I came on board, I spent six months just talking to customers and understanding the most successful use cases. What we found was the ones that were performing the best with our technology are ones that took our technology and really treated it as part of their organization. That was really the difference maker.
So for us, we took that and went with it. What we did was we formulated the strategy that we call digital workers, which are these AI workers. We gave them names and faces, we gave them just specific job roles that they're performing in sanctions screening and KYC, AML so specifically around governance and regulatory issues with banks. Really stopping the bad guys is really the driving force of our company. We launched it in February 2nd, 2022, and we've been flying ever since. The Russia-Ukraine War broke out February 24th, so that was a definite large instigator as there was more work to be done than people to do the work. And it's just been growing ever since.
ChatGPT came on the scene shortly thereafter and fueled everybody's expectations of what AI can be. And the beauty of our software is we're already in the market, and we're already performing within these banks, so it was very easy for our customers to be able to stand up in front of their boards and go, "We're actually using AI already, and here's how we're doing it, and here's the positive impacts it can have on our company. A little bit of right time, right place as well as really listening to our customers to develop what they needed to solve a growing issue for themselves.
Clint Betts
And you have the domain Work.AI. What a great domain.
Adam Famularo
We do. That was one of my buys very early on.
Clint Betts
Well done.
Adam Famularo
Of course, I'm in a room with lights that flip off when I'm not moving.
Clint Betts
[inaudible 00:03:13].
Adam Famularo
Sorry about that. So, for us, Work.AI fit directly into ... The notion of WorkFusion, right, is fusing the traditional workforce with an AI workforce; that's WorkFusion. And then for us, Work.AI was the next logical transition for us that showcases our overall platform that we could bring to customers. The Work.AI platform is a no-code development platform that allows you to build any type of digital worker in any industry. Now, we as a company are laser-focused on financial crimes, but I'm forming partnerships with companies like Epic and Emphasis that are going to be able to build their own digital workers for specific industry use.
Clint Betts
I imagine that's how you scale and ... As a company ri,ght now, you're laser-focused and entirely focused on the financial industry, but the technology that you've built here, I imagine, and just like you just said, that is already doing, can be used in any industry.
Adam Famularo
That's exactly right. We have some customers ready today in insurance and healthcare that use our software already. They built all their own custom digital workers. For my part, my job is to productize, right? My job is to be able to make it easier for customers to adopt our technology, to reduce the time to value, right? That's where I'm coming from. And that's why we built our out-of-the-box digital workers. But any specific customer can build anything that they desire using our IDP technology with our AI machine learning algorithms. Any job form that has to do with reading and deciphering any document, and then putting some an AI algorithm on top of it that can then perform the work on behalf of humans.
Clint Betts
What all goes into building one of your AI workers? I see you have Evelyn, and Tara, and Kendrick. They have names and it's incredible. And they each have their own very specific role in what they do. What all goes into building them?
Adam Famularo
So, the biggest component is the machine learning algorithm that we need to train to do the work. For us, the ones that are packaged up, these are hiring a worker that's been trained for the last three, four, five years. Those are trained algorithms that we were able to take from our customers that we have today, compile them together as best practices, and then bring it out to the marketplace. We also have something called human-in-the-loop technology that ties in with the humans in the workforce and continues to improve that machine-learning model on an ongoing basis. Then, on the side, we've built this great WorkFusion network, which allows Tara, for example, that might be working in one bank, to talk to Tara, that's working at another bank, and also improve model to model improvements from one bank to the next. We have this-
Clint Betts
That's fascinating. They can communicate with each other through that network. And they know everything that the other person can tell them and what the other person can do.
Adam Famularo
Yeah. What's really important is that we don't share any unique customer data from one bank to another, but what can do is we can share model improvements. And that makes a big difference for Evelyn's and Tara's learning and their ability to learn faster from bank to bank. Our banks, we usually have them sign up for, they opt into that program. And if they decide not to opt in for that program, we just do new releases at ... We have one coming up at the end of March where we'll be updating Tara, and Evelyn, and then providing a new machine learning model that companies can adopt.
Clint Betts
Given the vast array of things that AI can do, and the technology that you're dealing with, and the use cases that I bet you get approached on every day, how do you decide where to focus your product team and your product development?
Adam Famularo
I would tell you, Clint, that was the hardest thing to do at the beginning because we were everywhere. We were across industry, we were across use cases. Being a smaller company, you can't do everything, and you really need to laser-focus the company. And that's what we did. So by focusing just on financial crimes, focusing on sanctions screening, and KYC, and really stopping the bad actors out there, that wound up being the core pivot for the company that we can all rally around as an organization and keep that business focused. From the rest of the business, that's where our partnerships come in place, right? It's easier for us to set up partners in other industries so that they can go after those industries still leveraging our technology set.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you?
Adam Famularo
A typical day for me. When I'm in the US, I'm ... And I'm in my home area, which is New York, I usually wake up fairly early, somewhere between 5:30 and six. I'll get a little bit of exercise in before I start my routine getting ... Helping out with getting the kids to school, and then I'll usually be on a train to the city by 7:15, 7:20, or so.
I'll spend a working day in the city, which will probably include a breakfast meeting with a customer, a bunch of meetings in between, a lunch meeting with somebody else, and then a whole bunch of other meetings, internal, external. I try not to do dinners when I'm home. Every now and then, I'll do a dinner meeting, but I'll usually try to get home for dinner with the family to have a little bit of balance. And then start over the next day. When I travel, and I do a lot of travel, especially travel abroad, that's usually when I'll do ... I'll also work in dinner meetings a heck of a lot more, I'll use even more of my working time. That's a day in the life.
Clint Betts
What had you come back and do it again? I mean, you had a very successful exit it sounds like with your previous company, erwin. What had you come back and do it all over again?
Adam Famularo
So, for me, this is what I truly love doing: building businesses in between and actually some at the same time as Erwin and before. I also am an angel investor in startups. I have just under ten companies that I'm invested in, and I help work and build those businesses as well. For me, I love to own and operate my own business at the same time. I still have plenty of fuel in the tank for me to charge forward and run full-time. For me, this was the most logical transition for me to get into something. One of the big success points that we had with Erwin was our ability to automate the gathering collection of data. I loved automation and AI. I knew that was the next logical transition. This was a little bit sooner than I was planning on coming back in. When the right thing is right there, and you see it, you just know it, Clint. I knew this was the right fit for me at the right time.
Clint Betts
How have you figured out the work-from-home, hybrid work, everybody in the office, that whole debate that's going on everywhere, in every company in the world?
Adam Famularo
And I wish I could say I've landed it. I don't know if anybody's really landed it. I think it is specific to each company. Look, there's an interesting component for me and my organization which is we service financial services companies. For the most part, financial services companies have come back full-time. That's made it a little bit easier to get people in the office because we're always out with our customers so it is driving teams back into the office. I'm not a person to mandate it that's not my thing. Me as a leader, what I figure is I'll lead by example. So I'm here; as you can see, I'm in the office today. I'm here at least four to five days a week when I'm not traveling, so I'm here all the time. And I figure if I'm here, that will drive and promote others to come in the office as well.
And then other little things that we've done to make it even more friendly like the ... Our team got into playing darts so we installed a dart board. We set up a nice lounge area where people could feel a little bit more comfortable talking and socializing together. We moved to a really cool office space that has a couple thousand square feet of outdoor patio space that overlooks Bryant Park and Times Square.
Clint Betts
Oh, wow.
Adam Famularo
Yeah, we made it really appealing for people to come back. The building that we're in is also building a huge amenity center, including a gym. I feel like these little things add up to drive people to come back. When I built offices outside of New York, like the office in India, the office in Ireland, and our office in Poland, that also ... When you're starting up new offices and setting the expectations towards the beginning, most people being in the office still tend to be there more often than not.
Clint Betts
What have you learned about leadership in your career? Because a lot of what you just talked about is leadership. You've mentioned leading by example. But what have you learned? What makes a great leader?
Adam Famularo
That is a deep, deep question. I would say that every leader is a little different as well. It's really based upon the environment that you're in and what you need to be able to bring to the equation. One thing I learned very early on when I was ... Went to HBS, and I had Bill George as a professor for a period of time ... He wrote a great book called True North. I'm not sure if you've ever read that one, but it's all about every leader is different. Every leader will be successful on their own merit and their own right by being who they are and bringing out who they are in their style. Don't try to be somebody else.
Jack Welch was a specific leader of time, fit, purpose for that company and organization, but if you plugged him into Apple, that wouldn't have worked. Apple would've blown up and never been what it is today. Steve Jobs was the perfect fit for Apple at that specific point in time. Leadership is something inherently in a person. And I do feel like it needs to be who that person is at that point in time with the right company that's needed at that point in time.
Clint Betts
How do you define culture within WorkFusion?
Adam Famularo
Oh, culture. Culture is what really defines the company, right? It defines who we are and our expectations of how we perform in the marketplace. First and foremost, everything that I've done with erwin I carried over also to WorkFusion. And I always put customers really the heart of everything, right? Customer-first is my first cultural core value, that I drive everybody to. Outside of customer first ... I'm doing that when I'm building products, when I am looking at how I'm supporting my customers. I'm looking at it at how I set up my go-to-market. Everything is about keeping them front and center in what you build and how you build it. That's number one.
From there, it then goes in on having a nice positive employee set where I set up an environment where our employees feel like they can learn and grow. They won't be reprimanded for trying new things. If you try new things, I'm good if you fail. Fail fast, learn from it, and move on. I highly encourage that. I'm very big on learning and education. And I truly believe for you to learn ... It's not just learning from your successes, but you actually learn more from your failures. I actually do encourage that. I encourage people to try new things, drive new change, and be ... It's okay to fail. I'm not going to fire you for failing. Try to push us to a better, more positive place in the marketplace.
From there, innovation is a big part, especially being a technology company. I joke, the only thing ... The only group that I don't want innovating is finance because I got to ... finance needs to follow rules and regulations that are there. Outside of finance, I want everybody innovating, it's not just my technology group. My sales team needs to do things differently, my marketing team needs to do things differently, my support organization. I'm always about driving new innovation into the marketplace.
And then I bring it all together, right? I celebrate it. Right? Each quarter, we get together. And yes, I review how we did financially, how we did against the KPIs that we set as a company, but my most favorite part is recognizing the core value awards. So what I enable is every single individual contributor in the company can recognize another individual contributor for performing towards the core values that we set. It's great because I get to read all these great stories of people recognizing people across departments. And then I give a small award out to probably about eight to 10 people per quarter for doing what we expect them to do and really showcasing those core values.
Clint Betts
I know this one might be a bit of an odd question given the state of the world, but who's an example of a leader that you admire?
Adam Famularo
Oh, boy. I've admired so many leaders as I was growing up into this business. It probably started as early as my father ... Watching my father build and develop small businesses. And be able to take away his ability to do it all with a smile and make people feel good about purchasing from him and working with him. And then from there, as I got into the software industry, I had so many great leaders around me. I had a brilliant CEO, John Swainson. I had a COO named Mike Christensen. I had an amazing CRO named George Fisher. Some really talented people that I was able to pick off some of their real positive attributes, and hopefully be able to put some of that to work myself.
And then during my time at HBS, I also was able to learn from some just amazing humans from John Cotter to Clay Christensen. Marco Iansiti, who I actually was able ... Lucky enough to recruit into my board of this company. I've got Geoffrey Moore as another great board member. I don't know if you know who he is but he wrote Crossing the Chasm back in the day.
Clint Betts
Yes.
Adam Famularo
I've been lucky enough to surround myself with great leaders over the years.
Clint Betts
What did you learn? You said a name there that's a hero of mine, Clayton Christensen, who is probably most known for writing Innovator's Dilemma, but my favorite book of his is How will You Measure Your Life? What did you learn from Clayton? He's now since passed away, unfortunately. What did you learn from him?
Adam Famularo
Oh, man. Innovator's Dilemma, of course, is his golden book. But he was the one that really got me on the you have to disrupt yourself. You can't wait for somebody else to disrupt you in the marketplace, but you always have to be looking at how you can do things better. And look, it's ended up in one of my core values that I've carried along with me around innovation everywhere. That is core to Clay's teachings. That has definitely got me. I mean, even when we were successful, and we were flying with Erwin, we were still looking at ways that competitors could beat us and fine-tune our business. And we're doing the same thing here and now.
Clint Betts
I have another question for you. Is there a moment where you failed or maybe didn't lead ... Live up to whatever expectation you'd set for yourself in business or in your career or as a leader that became a catalyst to you changing or understanding something different about what it means to be a leader?
Adam Famularo
Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, failures need to be part of who you are, right? You can't run away from them; you can't hide from them. I've had plenty of small failures; I've even had some big ones. One that pops to memory was probably during my time at CA Technologies. I was a general manager running cloud computing back in 2010, and we had this really big technology idea that would've been completely revolutionary at the time. It was about how you package up applications to run in cloud environments. And nobody was doing it; it would've been something that we would've been the first at.
What I took for granted was the politics that you also have to play when you're at a large company. I took this idea with a small group of people, formulated the cornerstones of the technology, started marching forward as fast as we could, and then I wound up getting knocked off by a couple of other general managers that had their view of how they could do it with the technology that they already had in hand. And it wound up being some interesting battles I had within the company. I did not win those battles, I wound up losing those battles. And it was one of the reasons why I finally said enough at large companies and moved on out of that atmosphere. That was definitely a very memorable loss for me.
Clint Betts
There's elections in all sorts of countries currently. This year is going to be a big election in the United States, obviously. I wonder how much time you're thinking about things that are happening outside of your company. It seems like CEOs have to do that more and more, right? And thinking about the macroeconomic environment, and just the general society, and the way it's changing, and the rapid change, and all that type of stuff. What are your thoughts on that? One, you having to think about that more as a leader, and two, just what is your general take on the macroeconomic environment out there?
Adam Famularo
It's a very deep question, Clint. My last company, we didn't have to do that as much; we were just laser-focused at business at hand. I will tell you, my first awakening here was ... I mentioned I launched my new technology stack. I was literally on board for what six months, February 2nd, 2022? But we came up with the digital workers and launched them in the marketplace. I'm sure you know on February 24th, you had a Russia-Ukraine war breakout. What that meant for us was that we had 65% of our personnel, at that point, in Belarus and Ukraine. That was a really big hit. What I started talking about was employee first mentality, which was everything went on hold, everything else stopped, and we were about how do we care for our people, right? How do we ensure that we get our people to safe environments? We literally became travel agents for getting people out of Belarus and Ukraine and into safer countries. And taking care of their families, their pets, their friends. Literally, anybody that they were associated with.
And that went on for a couple of months until we stabilized the people and the employees. And then, of course, the customers were immediately stable, with the employees being stabilized. And then building out centers in other locations like Ireland and India. So, that macro-environmental issue really impacted us. And definitely challenged us as a company and me as a leader to ensure that we were there to help people first, and realize that everything else will come afterwards. And everything worked out, thankfully. And now we're a stronger business from it. We're not in any of those regions. We have a much more stable environment for our customers to be able to grow with us.
But those macroeconomic climates, you have the conflict between Israel and Hamas, you have the elections, as you said, you have the inflation challenges. You have all of these other challenges that you, as a leader, need to spend time knowing, understanding, following. I don't cross the line and preach; I don't go there. I don't try to tell people my thoughts or my feelings. I try to stay as neutral as I possibly can across the board. I spend most of my time just working through what those impacts are to our business and what, if anything, do I need to do to safeguard against them. Always with customer still at first in hand, right? Which is what do I need to do to build this environment where my customers will prosper no matter what happens to the business around us.
Clint Betts
I'm curious: what had you choose Ireland and India?
Adam Famularo
India was a place that I've built in three other companies before, so specifically Hyderabad, I know really well. Whenever you're going to build any development center that's outside of your direct purview, it's important about, to me, the leaders first. I always hire the leaders first, like the heads of HR, the heads of engineering, the heads of services, whoever the primary leaders are that are going to be the day-to-day representation of you in that market. And for me, in Hyderabad, I had those people. I know who they are; they've worked for me in the past. I was very easy able to pull them into my company, set them up, give them the resources that they need to build and develop out that business. We went from zero to 100 people in literally 90 days. And it's a very strong now function of our company.
Ireland was a new one for me. I didn't have a development organization in Ireland before, but my head of engineering and product management he had a really strong leader that worked for him in the past. I was able to meet him, I got ... Built confidence in him, and then I said, "Okay, we're going to go all in with you." The Irish government is absolutely fantastic. They were able to help me get set up, we set up our office there, and then we were able to build out our first 30 to 40 people, specifically around engineering. And they were absolutely terrific. We were even able to move some of our Belarusian resources into Ireland as well. So that helped the learning curve, get up to speed faster on our technology.
Clint Betts
We end every interview with the same question, and that is at CEO.com; we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. And I wonder, when you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Adam Famularo
Oh, I couldn't agree more to that. I love giving chances to others. That's one of my proudest moments. My CMO retired from here, and I was able to promote head of marketing to be the next CMO and be able to watch her learn and grow into that role. Did the same thing with our new head of support. That's a big part of who I am as a person is developing others around us. For me, I had multiple opportunities of learning and growth along my journey.
My first one was probably when I took over my first large selling function. So, I grew up in sales; I started as a telesales person and grew up in multiple sales roles until I finally got this big VP role. That was my first big move into leadership and management. And then, from there, my second big leap was when my CEO and COO sponsored me to go back to HBS, you heard me talk about my experience there. And when I came back from HBS, they had the confidence in me to give me my first general manager's role. That was a big deal for me. I was, at that point, the youngest GM in CA's history, and I was able to turn around this big business unit, which that was my first big success as a GM.
I saw that CA was trying to divest some business assets, and I partnered up with a private equity firm, and they believed in me to go out there and actually put the money out there to buy those assets. And then I joined full-time as the founder slash CEO. And we built this into a very large data governance software company that you referenced earlier called Erwin. That all started with a vision that I had for this business. They gave me the opportunity to go out there and be a CEO and make something, and I did, thankfully. Returned the whole fund to the private equity firm and everything's been written thereafter. It's a great question and it's a core attribute to who I am now. It's about giving back to others. It's whether people that I've invested in their firms and now I'm helping groom them as CEOs, or other people around me that work for me that hopefully, I'm putting them in a better place for their ... Whatever's next for them in their career.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Adam, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Seriously, this has been fantastic.
Adam Famularo
You got it, Clint. It was a pleasure getting to know you. I'm looking forward to hearing the podcast and hopefully spending some time with you again soon.
Clint Betts
I hope so, too. Thank you so much, Adam.