The following interview is a conversation we had with Gary Hoberman,CEO & Founder of Unqork, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $400 Million Raised to Pioneer the Codeless as a Service (CaaS) Category
Gary Hoberman
Thanks for having me on, Brett. Pleasure to be here.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before starting Unqork, you had a really impressive career. You had titles such as managing Director at Citibank, executive Vice President, and co CIO at MetLife. So let’s start there in 2017. When you started to Unqork, what was going on inside your mind? And what was it like to make that transition from corporate life to startup land?
Gary Hoberman
Yeah, I always view technology as magical. It’s a skill, it’s an art form, programming, as we call it, as a language. And you have to be skilled in that language. And communicating with a machine to do things is magical when it works, when it doesn’t work. We’re all frustrated, as everyone is, but the reality is I jumped right on Wall Street after college to build trading systems and platforms to change the world. And that was my goal when I left the corporate world. After 25 years managing 10,000 engineers and spending over a billion a year and influencing 9 billion a year of technology spend, I left the world because what I had seen of that magic was disappearing. And what I mean by that, Brett, is 80% of my budget was spent keeping the lights on, just keeping things running. And we talk about that, and we call that legacy.
Gary Hoberman
And then 20% was spent in building these amazing new systems and features. We were featured in Fortune and Forbes, and were the new face in MetLife of insurance in City. We were changing the world, and it was amazing what we could do. The reality had seen was the second one of those new systems went live. It was referred to as Legacy, and it was immediately viewed as out of date, hard to change. Here’s the technical debt you just introduced into your environment, and suddenly that 80% became 81% and crept up higher. And you’re left with less and less money to drive innovation and change for your shareholders and your customers. And you’re really left with just supporting this. You could picture the rug, everything’s going under the rug, and the rug is getting higher, and there is no stop to this. Brett the large software vendors that we’d meet with, they didn’t see a problem.
Gary Hoberman
They were making a fortune. The smaller companies, they were making a fortune. The strategic integrators were making a fortune. The reality was the companies themselves were suffering. And it was a miserable place to be, where you’d be going into board meetings and presenting on red, yellows, greens and how projects are doing, when in reality, the value was never achieved and the value couldn’t be achieved. And the business knew what they needed and technology was doing what they thought was best, but it was limited by the technology and tools available at the time. And I left that world to basically bring in a whole new idea to fix it.
Brett
And just from a personal psychology perspective, what was that transition like for you? And what was it like talking with your family and colleagues and friends? Did people think you had lost your mind jumping into this startup? Or did everyone just get it?
Gary Hoberman
So it’s really funny. So it’s a great question. And so I used to be part of what was called the Global CIO Board, and it was the global Chief Information Officers for the Fortune 50. Companies would get together once a quarter. And I remember sharing with that board over lunch that I’m leaving this world I’ve been in for five years and leaving this community to come back as a software vendor. And what they said to me, Brett, which every morning I wake up, I hear their voice. They said to me, we will be there for you, but how will you not become evil? And it was fascinating, that evil construct. And I know I’m not going to name the companies that they’re thinking of, there’s a few, but there are a few companies which are more like organized crime than providing value. And it’s fascinating to see how that thought now.
Gary Hoberman
So from that perspective, that was my community and my peers, and they were there for us when we first created the company. And they could share stories how outside of that, I like to say I jumped out of the C suite and the corporate jet into zone five of United, where literally I was trying to carry on a bag. And they said, you can’t bring a carry on. You don’t have that. And so, used up all the points. We got turned down by 300 investors. The whole midas list went through. And the benefit of being a global CIO was you had the network. You could reach into the largest VCs and private equity and get the meetings. And the feedback that I heard back from them was, you’re too old. I was 44. And they’re like, you should have had three startups by now. Exit at 44.
Gary Hoberman
If you worked one year in the corporate world, you’re institutionalized. There is no way you could create a company in BCO. Kind of like Shawshank Redemption. I’m picturing what he’s carving, his initials in the top. And the other feedback was the idea would never work. It’s too difficult to change this picture. The players of Microsoft and Google and Amazon, that’s who you’d be competing against. And platform sells hard and every aspect. And what I did was I lived this. I mean, there’s no one better to know how to fix something than living through the nightmare every day. And it meant that I believed enough to self fund the idea. And what that meant was I went back to being an engineer. So I was communicating with machines since the fifth grade. I would go home to my dad’s business, walk home at lunch in fifth grade, and go program IBM punch card machines and Deck Made and Fortran and Pascal and TRS 80, and all these machines, vic twenty S, and Commodore sixty four S and it was amazing.
Gary Hoberman
And I’ve been doing that, so I never stopped doing that. I never stopped. I view programming a language as a skill, and I always did it for fun, even when I was managing 10,000 people. So to me, self funding meant my CTO, and I basically went back to our engineering days, and we had to create the first version of Lungark, and we coded it, and we did it from that point forward. We had five clients within six months. Say, I’ve been dreaming of that. That’s the vision we’ve been looking for. And we had revenue within six months of creating a business. And our second year in business, we had significant revenue, millions in revenue for the second year. We actually had revenue prior to funding, which is such a unique concept in the VC world. And what that meant was were in a position to pick who we wanted to have as investors.
Gary Hoberman
Who do we want on our board? Who’s going to help drive the company forward? And it’s incredible, like the board, that we have the observers, we have the investors. Goldman Sachs, Leto series A, capital G, Leto series B, and BlackRock Leto series C are the tier one investors that you’d want to be with you in this journey.
Brett
And that’s not very common, right? For Goldman Sachs to be involved at.
Gary Hoberman
The Series A level, it was fascinating. So we started discussions there with their technology team, and one of the top technologists said, this is the single greatest technology they’ve ever seen. Wow. And the next call was from the funding team, and the funding team said, we’ll help you. And they’ve been amazing partners for us, reference for us. They’re live as clients for us, of course, they help us push the limits. So, Brett, early on, you could imagine we’re storing data for customers, which means we’re storing PII data, privacy data, and it meant going through Goldman Sachs entire review process to store data. And there are many CRM players who couldn’t get through it. And yet we not only got through it, but they helped us build the controls, such that when went to the next bank, it was done. We already had those controls in place when went through Federal FedRAMP certification, which is 700 different control points they check.
Gary Hoberman
We went out with flying colors because we are, and I would say this, the most secure software in the world because of the way we designed the software and what’s built into it. And with that said, it’s because of the help of our customers and how they actually help us think through this.
Brett
And one thing I’d love to unpack there, and I think our audience would be mad at me if I didn’t. So you had mentioned that there are vendors who operate like organized crime. Obviously we don’t want to name those vendors and give away anything that can show who they are. But can you expand on that just a little bit?
Gary Hoberman
So I would say in general, software companies continue to, when you think about renegotiating contracts, they continue to try to add value to their CIOs and their technology teams. And CIOs want to basically present the world a vision of how they’re reducing costs, increasing efficiency operations, automation, driving more. And a lot of the contracts that I’ve seen the big players come back with is more along the lines of we’ll package more up and we’ll give it to you at just a slightly higher cost. But the reality is if you ever did a mark to market and this would be an exercise bread, I would love to see the results of I would love every single technology supported company, every single enterprise in the world. The Fortune 2000, let’s just say Global 2000. I would love them to basically do a mark to market on every technology investment they made so far and say how much are we spending?
Gary Hoberman
What’s the value we got out of it? How many licenses used? How many licenses are not used? Is it worth the value we’re paying for? Because what I’ve seen is I’ve seen deals where like, we’ll give you 10,000 licenses of this software and it could be a ERP, it could be CRM, could be a platform, file platform. And the reality is maybe 1000 are used at the end of the day and you might have paid a bread of price point for the 10,000, but the reality is you’d be much better off at the list price of 1000 than the better price at 10,000. And I think that’s done over and over again. The reality is Brett, what I’ve learned after 25 years in corporate world was companies measure themselves on time and on budget. They never question the value. So on time and on budget means you went to a furniture store, you saw the couch, you liked it, the color is good, the size looks good, the price is what you’re going to pay for and the delivery will hopefully be when they say it is.
Gary Hoberman
So on time and on budget. But it gets into your house and it’s the wrong fabric, it’s the wrong size, it doesn’t fit in the elevator. And the reality is you don’t get the value from the purchase. And the onvalue is what we have to measure in technology going forward. And that’s where Unqork and the company we created has changed the way software has been created and rain, that’s fascinating.
Brett
Now, before we dive deeper into the company, a couple of questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and entrepreneur. First one is, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Gary Hoberman
So overall, I would have to say Steve Jobs. And it’s the moment in time where he reentered Apple the company he outbuild and basically threw on the wall and said, we’re going to only focus on four products. Forget all these other things we’re doing here. Let’s be amazing and great at four products. Let’s talk about what those are and get the focus area and the results are a trillion dollar company. And I think that vision and that drive and his ability to create, I like the concept of a distortion field for others to believe in. Where he’s going is inspirational in many ways, and that would be overall. Now, I think each of us should have leaders for different purposes. So Jamie Diamond, me and I’ve worked with Jamie both in 1996 with Smith Barney all the way through his role. Now JPMorgan Chase, he is as an inspirational leader, one of the best execution leaders I’ve ever seen.
Gary Hoberman
And then when I think about CEOs who have been with us on this journey and helped support us, dave from MongoDB has been there since day one. From advice to helping us, giving us free MongoDB usage, to the beginning to help us get started and to being through this journey to combine go to market organizations where they’re helping us sell on Quark, even to their client base.
Brett
Do you think Jamie Dimon is going to run for president? I keep seeing rumors about this.
Gary Hoberman
He has my vote if he does. Politics is something I’m very careful to talk about, and especially these days. But it would be nice to have someone competent running, for sure.
Brett
Yeah, we try to steer away from anything political on this show just to be safe. So let’s move on from that one and let’s talk about books. Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you? And this can be one of the classic business books, but what our audience and what I personally find really interesting are the personal books that influenced and shaped how you view the world and how you think and how you operate. So are there any personal books that come to mind?
Gary Hoberman
I love behavioral psychology books. I love the idea of understanding how crazy we all are in some ways and predictable in that. So there’s many books out there. Think fast and swell. Predictable, rationale. I mean, they’re all amazing books. I happen to like a more easy read, which is Barking Up the Wrong Tree. And I just think it’s a read about what I like most about it is understanding the metrics that are important to each of us and focusing on that and being able to define those in ways that achieve happiness. Could you imagine, I was a C suite exec and I was miserable in what I was doing because every single day was fighting fires and keeping things running instead of building new and driving change. And it’s figuring out where your path is. And each morning I wake up now, it’s an incredible morning.
Gary Hoberman
It’s going to be a brand new day to change the world through on cork and as a startup. And my team feels that same excitement the hundreds of employees do. That’s an amazing place to be able to create roles, create jobs, create opportunities and give back. So to me, Barking Up the Wrong Tree would definitely be one of the books I’d recommend. Nice.
Brett
I’ll check that out. I haven’t read that. And as you were interacting with people at that very high level of the corporate world, did you find many happy people? Was there anyone that seemed happy or did everyone seem generally not super happy with life?
Gary Hoberman
I would say they were happy. So to me, it all depends the concept of what are your metrics? I used to have 15 people’s names on my whiteboard who wanted to run me over with a truck. And if the list was lower than 15, I wasn’t doing my role, which is trying to change the company. And I truly believe our most important role, every single employee’s most important role, is to try to eliminate the job you’re sitting in today. And it’s a very unique theory, right? And I lived this. That’s how I got to where I am today. It was basically every single time I was giving an opportunity, I tried to figure out how do I eliminate that role? Brett. I started building trading systems right on Wall Street for New York foreign exchange. I was consulting with four different programming languages and Smith Barney and CBS Radio Broadcasting and New York Foreign Exchange and other companies.
Gary Hoberman
And it was exciting. And then when I joined Bankers Trust and I was 22 years old and they said, hey, we want you to build this money transfer screen and system, c plus screen, talking to a sidebase database, and it’s running on Windows 3.1 for those who remember what this was like. And so I looked at this and I said, God, this is easy. And if I do this well, they’re going to ask me to do another one and another one, and pretty soon it’s going to be kind of boring. And so what I did was instead of building that screen. I created an application that generated the screen and the database, and it was a code generator. And I could tell you, like, right now, if you look at some of the low code tools out there in the category I don’t think should ever exist.
Gary Hoberman
Most of those are code generators. And I built the first version of that in 1994. And within six months, every transaction in the private bank of Bankers Trust was going through this system. I created every single trade, every equity, fixed income, and it changed the way they did business. And what I learned very quickly was I was able to eliminate my job. Like, that’s what I was able to do. And I got a promotion, and actually not just got a promotion, but was then brought into a different company, smith Barney, as a leadership role. And in 96, I was 23 years old, leading a team that was double my age driving wealth management systems. And I started teaching at NYU for fun. Seven years I taught at NYU programming just to kind of keep relevant. And to me, like that goal of always trying to eliminate what you’re currently in, there’s always something bigger and better out there, and you got to define it for yourself.
Gary Hoberman
Otherwise you’re in a position which you’re going to constantly try to prevent change to protect your job. And that’s not who we are. That’s not what life should be about.
Brett
Where did that philosophy come from? Is that something that your parents taught you when you were younger, or did you just develop that on your own?
Gary Hoberman
It’s interesting. I would say it’s a combination. So my father created his own publishing business, and I got to see him run this day in and day out, the highs, the lows, and he ran that for 35, 40 years until he passed away. My brother is an entrepreneur, went out on his own. My sister entrepreneur, went out on their own. So I guess I’ve always been in that space where take control, drive. Every one of them started in the corporate world. Every one of them started with the big corporate job and moved from there. And I think you need to see what and experience what you’re good at and find it and what you could learn. I definitely defined this clearer when I was at Citigroup, and I watched the stock that I had an average value of $65 a share go down to during the financial crisis.
Gary Hoberman
And it was amazing to see how much inefficiency we had within the company. And were able to shave off billions of dollars through expense going from 400,000 employees down to 250,000 or so. And to me, even in the COVID pandemic environment were in, we always said, remote work will never work. Everyone tried to prove every way possible, it’s not effective, yet we did it, and it’s still effective for most roles in most companies. Let’s say. So it’s interesting to see, when you take excuses out, how much you could change the world and what people do. And I truly believe the clients we work with are the bold ones. They’re the ones that see they want to focus on providing better experiences for their customers, providing better value for their shareholders. And no one’s considering, like, how do I stay in the role I’m in for the next 40, 50 years?
Gary Hoberman
That should never be a case.
Brett
Now, let’s talk about the product and just the company in general. So I feel like in the interview, or the start of the interview, we touched on the origin story there a little bit, but can you just give us a high level description of the company and the different products that you have?
Gary Hoberman
So Unqork? And we name the company specifically on Quark. It’s UN qork, because first off, we want to basically help Unqork or unlock what’s great in the companies we help and drive change with. There are amazing clients and companies we work with and we help unleash what’s great about them. And Oncork.com was available, but was $500,000, so the queue basically became 1495. And GoDaddy, it’s all about value, and that’s what we are. So it was a lot easier decision. And it’s amazing because it switched the queue in the UN position. People are like, you’re so innovative, you switched the queue in the U. I didn’t even know we did that. But that’s okay. And so the company itself, what we’re driving is what we call codeless as the service, and codeless being the specific term. And what I mean by that is I’ve attempted to use throughout my career every way possible to move faster, better and cheaper.
Gary Hoberman
So the example I gave you before in Bankers Trust, I created a code generation platform, which was amazing. However, it took seven engineers to replace me to support it. Not even change it, just support it. But what you realize very quickly is generating more code is a bad thing, it’s not a good thing. And then I attempted to use I created five platforms at Citigroup. I have seven patents issued within Wall Street that are still in production today. And all these patents and platforms were all about how do you drive faster, better and cheaper for your business? And the end state is each of the platforms moves further and further away from coding a step at a time. And when we talk about unfork and codeless as a service, specifically, what we’re talking about is something very unique. And I think Brett, I love what Generational AI and Chat GPT have done for us.
Gary Hoberman
I think it’s incredible what it’s showing. What they’re talking about and what they’re showing you is understanding and generation of language. And it’s specifically language. Now, you could think about language in terms of speaking language, english, French, Japanese, great. You could think of it in terms of ancient languages and ancient Greek and languages that are now legacy or technical debt, let’s call them. And the same holds true in programming. So when we think about programming a computer or creating software, we call it code. But the reality is, there is someone that’s writing a language. Java c plus. Net, C sharp, it doesn’t matter what it is. Cobalt assembler, clipper 87, it really doesn’t matter what the language is. They’re writing a language, and there’s hundreds of languages and hundreds of languages that are now default, like they’re defunct, I should say. They’re out their legacy.
Gary Hoberman
And the reality is, when you write a language or speak a language, there’s a subjectivity to this in which if I wrote a function, you might critique it, you might be able to do it more efficient, better. Every 50 lines that I write a language, there’s one defect in production. How many security vulnerabilities are introduced every time you write that language? Tons. But then even more importantly, there’s the communication of what the business needs and wants into English in a Word document. So we’re transcribing a need or a want of software into a document to describe it, to hand it off to technology. Technology has to interpret that, understand it. If it’s well written, hopefully it is probably not. And then technology then in turn has to write it into a different language computer, which then goes back to the business to see if they did it right.
Gary Hoberman
And this cycle used to be handled by methodologies, software development, lifecycle, waterfall, agile, what they all do, and you can look at the data, they all result in 90% of the initiatives failing to deliver the value set out to be 90%. You’re better off opening a restaurant in New York City than starting an enterprise software project today at any company. And so when you think about that, what we looked to do with Encork was change the way that software was written. And what I mean by that is we eliminated the language, eliminated the code completely. You described the software in data. Data rules the world. And if you ever think about data is normally the output of a programming language or the input to a programming language. In our world, data is the language. It replaces the programming language completely. It becomes the unified way that the business and technology on the same technology could speak the same language, which is data.
Gary Hoberman
There’s no more interpretation, there’s no more trying to understand intentions and intent and read. It’s basically pure data. And giving you the easiest example, you can go to Chat GPT today and say, hey, Chat GPT, give me a field. It’s a first name field, and I want an HTML form to capture it. And it’s required, and a maximum length is 20 characters. And it’s really efficient. It understands what you need. It says, okay, great, you want this? I got it. It then creates code and it says, okay, here’s HTML code, there’s an input box. It’s max length is 20, it’s required attribute is true. And then it creates JavaScript and says, okay, now you have to handle that error if it’s more than 20, if it’s empty and you write JavaScript, that’s great, that’s the front end. But where are you going to store the data?
Gary Hoberman
So you go to the back end, you go to the database and you say, okay, I’ve got to create a field. And the field is first name, it’s variable length. It’s a max 20 characters. It’s required to not null. And then that’s great, that’s the field. But what happens if you try to insert it? Well, let’s capture the error through a start procedure or trigger it. That’s great, we got that. But then we go to the middle tier. We got to now code that in Java or code it in a different language. And the reality is, for the simplest field, you’ve probably generated two to 300 lines of code to implement that one field. So first off, think about technical debt. Okay, great. HTML Five goes to HTML Six. Maybe Angular is used or React is used. It’s already end of life. Angular is end of life.
Gary Hoberman
Let’s move it to something else. Oh, the database is going to get an update. It’s also end of life. We have to migrate to a new database, no longer supported. The middle tier has to go to an update. All of that is chaos. But in reality, that’s how every single software is created. Today in the world, 24 million engineers are doing what I just described to you. And what we see is pretty simple. You could describe data. I’ve got a text field, the name is first name. The max length is 20 required equals true, and everything is done to you at this point. No code generation, no code allowed inside. And in reality, you now have a mobile app. You have an HTML app for a call center or for the user itself at home on an tablet, and you’ve got an API that you could call.
Gary Hoberman
And data won’t be allowed in unless it meets that criteria and you’re done. And the world around it could change. So the database is going to go end of life. That’s on quark’s responsibility. We have to update the database. The beauty of not generating code in a codeless world and the beauty of not allowing you to inject code in a codeless world is simple. It means all clients using on Quark are on the same codeless engine. You’re on the same version of software. Which means for the first time, if Goldman Sachs Pen tests on Quark, they’re pen testing everyone’s software. The next day someone will do a Pen test, hire ethical hackers, vulnerability assessment, maybe there’s a performance test, done. Low test, done. Functional test, done. The reality is, every single customer inside their own secure bubble. Where they even hold their own encryption key is doing their own functional testing, security testing, performance testing, and they’re all benefiting each other for the first time ever.
Gary Hoberman
And that’s the amazing part of what we’ve enabled with on Clark and Gary.
Brett
If we look at no code in general, it seems like that idea has gained a lot of traction. I think there’s some people who still knock it and talk about it as hype if you just look online, but overall, it seems like there’s a real movement around it. But I’m guessing that wasn’t the case in 2017. So when you started talking about this idea of no code back then, what type of pushback did you see and how were you treated and viewed in the industry as a whole as you were pushing this idea into the market?
Gary Hoberman
Yeah, we definitely embraced the concept early on of no code, and there was no one else but us. So when you think about the spectrum of technology, there were no code solutions to build websites, Wix, et cetera. Squarepace. Great. Got it. There were no code solutions to build spreadsheets, Excel. And then on the other side of the spectrum is code. And in the middle somewhere is this low code solutions which generate code or allow you to inject legacy code, all through language, all through a programming language. And the reality was, were the first. And what we did was we didn’t focus on building this horizontal platform. We focused on helping customers solve real problems. So tell us where technology has failed you, and we’ll prove to you how our no code platform enables you to drive value and solve that. And that’s how we built, which meant to us tier one customers, tier one problems, and we’re able to solve the most complex needs, which meant that our platform, the technology itself, the engine, how to be capable of building trading systems, building the most complex software without code that no one’s done before.
Gary Hoberman
So to us, when we called it no code, there was no one else. We were the only enterprise, no code. The challenge we’ve had is that the categories themselves have kind of been blurred. So, low code, no code. And the reality is, there’s only one no code player, which is us in the enterprise. Everyone else is low code, and even the word code. And that’s what we’re getting away from. Codeless as a service to us, is a layer in the infrastructure. It’s not a tool. So, Brett, all these concepts and applications and what the research group show, they’re all tools. They’re all a tool. New tool belt to do a workflow or to do a UI, or to do an integration. They’re all tools. We kind of view the world differently in that there’s a layer been missing above the cloud, an infrastructure layer called codeless.
Gary Hoberman
And that layer is an engine. It’s cloud agnostic. So runs on any cloud provider you can use Amazon, Google or Microsoft today easily and switch between with a click of a button. It’s able to provide you a fixed price per year instead of a variable cost, which scares a lot of CIOs from the cloud because you don’t know about those runaway costs or how are they going to go by being cloud agnostic. It means that if a cloud provider raises prices, you have no impact and it protects you from technical debt. And that’s this layer, the layer is on Quirk. It’s not no code, low code. I don’t believe that category should even exist in my opinion, Brett, there are package software who included configuration as part of their software. That’s not low code, no code. In my experience, I’ve attempted to use everyone in the low code no code category.
Gary Hoberman
You can imagine, we spent 9 billion a year at City and the reality is you wound up with a bastardized solution that was highly customized, that couldn’t be upgraded, and it was not reusable across any other team in the company. And it was immediately, the second it went live, it was Legacy 100%. You’re not only dependent on the vendor, but now you’re locked into a legacy platform. You can’t change with security vulnerability risks, with performance risks, all something which you have no ability to impact or change. You would have been better off writing the code from scratch to begin with than using those other low code tools today.
Brett
And I’d love to talk about some decisions that were made early on. So just from the outside, it seems like you made a very conscious decision to really evangelize and be an advocate for this no code idea. As I was preparing for this interview, I found probably more podcasts than I’ve seen for any other guests. I see that you do your own podcast. I see that you’re on general shows like Pomps Podcast. I enjoyed that. So on your end, was that something you really decided early on of, hey, I’m going to go out and be an evangelist for this, or is that something that you just accidentally kind of started doing over time?
Gary Hoberman
It’s interesting. So when I left Wall Street, I was at City for 16 years. Managing director there. And a former colleague called me up and said, need some help at this other Fortune 50 company, MetLife. And I left Wall Street to go to MetLife in 2012. And I learned the business. I spent the first six months learning everything about the company and the business and challenges. And what I learned very quickly was where technology could help. And early on, I remember going to the first conference to speak about how MetLife was going to leapfrog the competition. And I was speaking to the competition and were going to outline how would we do this with technology’s enabler. And we did. And to me it’s interesting to democratize what we’re doing requires speaking about it and believing it and showing it and being able to be the advocate for your own product, use your own product.
Gary Hoberman
I could still, Brett, in front of a client. If I’m in a client meeting for the first time, second time, I still will build software in front of them using Cork. That’s how we basically got to where we are. We would say, hey Brett, you’re my client, you’re a bank, you’re a Silicon Valley bank. Interesting. What do you want to build? Do you want to build an interest rate check system of balance and controls? And we’ve done that, not for them, but for others, do you want to build? And so when you think about that, it’s always, let’s talk about the capabilities of the platform, but to me, it is about being visible and being out there to share it, because there is nothing like us. So think about replacing a programming language like Java with data. No one’s ever even tried it before us, no one’s ever attempted that.
Gary Hoberman
And you have to be bold with your vision and bold with execution, which we’ve done really well in order to do that. And so to me, that is part of this. I am such a believer in our technology, Brett, that I created the first Unqork Incubator as well, outside of Unqork, which is Incubating, democratizing healthcare business and democratizing legal business. And it’s driving game changing role in equity and inclusion and diversity. And it’s using Just Encore as a platform and it’s amazing to see what you built. So back to how I started. The magic of technology for me is now back. I could confidently tell you, I could vision what technology should be and build it instantly using on Cork without ever leaving a single technical debt trail behind me. No legacy. And we’ve also created the world, which is the destination for cloud migration.
Gary Hoberman
So you could think about cloud migration as lift and shift, which is a horrible term, or I’m going to refactor it to the cloud. The reality of cloud migration is, what are you looking to get benefits from? Are you looking to be more secure? Are you looking to be more scalable, reduced costs? And these are all the things that should go into your ROI. The reality of cloud migration is no one should be in a data center business but the large players. There’s no company in which your data center is strategic for them. In the long run, that should be a bar that’s very low and everyone’s above it already. And it’s not where you put your investment strategy with cloud migration. And that’s what really inspired this. It obstructed away the hardware. You shouldn’t know where you run. We obstruct away the software and you shouldn’t know what technology is behind the scenes.
Gary Hoberman
You shouldn’t know what language you can even think of. Language again, that’s the view of the world. And to me it is. You have to be bold with the vision, bold with execution. And our values are exactly that throughout the company. That’s how employees feel as well.
Brett
And how do the developers feel about this at the big banks that you’re working with? If they see Gary walking in the door with a few other team members, do they just start shaking and say, there goes my job? Or how do developers perceive it?
Gary Hoberman
It’s a great question. So first off, what the technology enables, which is brand new in concept, is what we call business led it. And what I mean by that is the business is always technically leading technology. Just if you sit in the seat where I sat as a CIO, the business is always driving. Here’s the products we’re going to launch us here. Here’s changes we need to do for regulatory purposes. Here’s the drive in operations for efficiency. They’re prioritizing these investments in strategy. And technology is executing. And in the best worlds, technology is driving those decisions. They’re helping the business come to those conclusions and driving those and owning those. In those worlds where technology is the driver, they bring us in first. So I could think about the first clients with On Quark were the ones where technology were visionaries themselves. And what they basically said, Brett, was technology wants a platform to deliver faster for their business because the reality is code isn’t doing it.
Gary Hoberman
It’s difficult to code. And in reality, the platforms that they’re seeing aren’t doing it. And their goal is to deliver business value and that’s it. And this is a way to do it. So their engineers could focus on what’s truly critical for their programming skills, which is not what Encorc does. So if we could do 90% of what they’re doing today, we free up those engineers to focus on algorithms that we never even dreamed of before, which is amazing, that’s how I view the world. But the reality is, business led it is very different. Business led it to us means it’s a technology in which the business could build with it together, instead of translating a business requirement into a Word document to be interpreted by an engineer into code. Together the technology and the business could describe what they need in data using our drag and drop visual tool.
Gary Hoberman
And technology as a result, could enable business through Unqork to create software. Maybe they own the UI, maybe they own the business roles. Maybe they own the workflow and the way the handoffs are done, while technology could do what they do best, which is own the hardcore integrations, own the data, own the security and the administration. The CIOs love On Quark because they could own the control plane for the first time. They could see performance, they could see security, they could see reusability, they could understand deployments versioning of software. Rollback one click. Rollback one click. Compare who changed what in an environment. These are things technology doesn’t even have today that they get to on Cork. So to me, it’s around enabling the business to move faster, driving innovation, driving optimization, driving migrations, enabling technology discovery better, and enabling boats to achieve what they’ve been missing for the last 30 years, which is getting the value from technology that they’re making their investments in.
Brett
And Gary, what do you think you got right and the rest of the team there at Unqork? What did you get right? How did you rise above the noise? Because as I’m sure you know and everyone listening knows, startups are hard. It’s not easy to build a startup and get the level of success that you’re at. So what did you get right in this journey?
Gary Hoberman
Do you think it’s fascinating? So we’ve always viewed the customer as how do we actually drive the value to that customer? As a North Star, how do you actually succeed? So in the beginning, Brett, we had nothing but a letter of intent from Fortune 100 companies saying, we love the vision. You don’t have a product yet. If you build the product and if the product solves our needs, we will pay you revenue. That’s it. And what it meant was we had to take on not just the risk of building the software, building the platform behind the scenes, but using it to configure it for our customers needs. When one of the largest software companies in the world spent seven years building something unfound, we committed it to doing it in seven weeks using On Quark, and a platform didn’t even exist yet. So being bold, being optimistic, definitely got right.
Gary Hoberman
Those are the values that each employee in On Quark exhibits those being diverse. And diversity to me, isn’t specifically about a demographic. It’s about diversity of thought. There is no one on my executive team that thinks like anyone else on my executive team. They come from different backgrounds, they contribute. You don’t want two people in your team that are similar in any way, shape or form. And that, to me, is something that we put as one of our core values in diversity early on. And we got that right from a go to market point of view. We enable companies and we sit down with them and say, let’s talk about the best place to apply on Cork. So it’s not the solution for everything. We’re not going to be your low frequency training system. We’re not going to run your Monte Carlo simulations. We’re not going to be your data model or data warehouse.
Gary Hoberman
We’ll feed it and we’ll report on it. We’ll be your tool to execute the simulations that you’ve created and the models you’ve created machine learning. So we know what we’re good at and not good at. What we are good at is about 90% of what technologists create today. So $1 trillion is spent every year, and 90% of that we are really good at. And that’s what we focus on. And to me, that’s strategy, it’s prioritization, it’s understanding the good. Brett when COVID hit, weren’t in public sector. We weren’t in states and local governments and municipalities. And we felt, through our New York City approach, we felt we could help and give back. And so we entered public sector in COVID, and we delivered 2 million food orders to senior citizens in New York City, collected $200 million for donations through Encore. We were the COVID tracking system for Washington, DC, new York City, and 13 cities and states.
Gary Hoberman
And we disbursed the rent relief for Chicago. And the mayor of Chicago talked about us on TV. And when I look at the value technology could achieve, the magic it could achieve once you could free it. That’s the best part of what we did. And that’s the inspiration. And when you think about focus, it enabled us to then focus on the federal government, where Cult and Human Services is now a customer of ours and has been sponsoring our FedRAMP certification and use. Of course, the federal government has now opened up. So to me, it’s about strategy, focus, and most importantly, the employees of Encore are the most incredible team you could ever dream of. I’ve worked with 400,000 people at City and 70,000 at MetLife. And when I think about the 400 plus employees at Encore and how they are effective and drive, it’s just amazing every day to see what they can use the platform to do and their belief in the customer and supporting their customers.
Gary Hoberman
Amazing.
Brett
And, Gary, last question. Since I know we’re up on time here, let’s zoom out into the future. Let’s do three to five years from today. What’s the company look like?
Gary Hoberman
So codeless is a service is ubiquitous across the industry. It is the way you describe software using data makes programming language look like Ancient Greek. So Java becomes Ancient Greek. Net becomes Ancient Greek. No concept of cloud specific software embedded on Quark in everywhere. So encork today could run in Microsoft Office and Active cards. It could run in Google Workspace and Google Lamp. It can work in Slack native in Slack. We are the ubiquitous engine built into every browser, every device, every virtual network, every single device. And it’s used most importantly to solve problems such that when I walk into a doctor’s office, I’m not handed a clipboard and a pen when I apply for a license in my city or state, maybe a dog license. It’s not a form that’s faxed and PDF. Dan and I think, Brett, that’s where I come back to one last story I would share.
Gary Hoberman
Early on in our journey through our network, were able to have CEOs invite us to their roundtables and initiate brainstorm sessions with them and share technology, what we see. And there was one multinational financial service company where the CEO and the technology team invited us to speak. And I just in a room, a roundtable room with about 30 executives from their company. We just had the slide up and unqorked, and we just did our introductions of who myself was and my CTO and my CRO. And we got a question, and we’re like, oh, okay. Question. The chief architect asked, do you guys use blockchain? And this was years ago, and the answer was, no, we don’t use Blockchain. We are being trusted through the way we encrypt and secure data. And it’s your encryption key. We can’t see your data such that to store the most confidential Pi data in every country, such that we don’t need the overhead or risk that blockchain brings.
Gary Hoberman
However, we do integrate with blockchain. And there are cyber companies using Encorc today as their platform. And then I’m like, great question. And then another hand comes up. We haven’t even said who we are. And the next question was from the CIO. And they go, okay, what happens to Unqork when the mouse goes away and the screen goes away and the keyboard goes away? And again, years ago. And I said, you mean like siri or Alexa? And they go, yeah, exactly. And I said, we already work with this. That’s just an integration point to us. It works. Your app doesn’t even need to change. It could run in there perfectly. And, Fred, I do what we always do, and I say, Boy, I’m excited for this conversation. Your question is so advanced, and I got to ask, where do you think we could help you?
Gary Hoberman
What’s your biggest problem today in technology? And the CEO goes, can you eliminate the fax machines? And we said what? He goes, the entire business is run off paper and fax machines. Nothing’s technical, nothing’s digital. That’s how it’s run today. And so the disconnect between the fads and the value you get from technology is so great. And to me, what I’m excited about three to five years from now is technology is actually delivering the value it should have done for the last 30 years. And every single CEO is looking at their technology leader as their partner in building this and driving what the art of the possible is, instead of looking at them as a service provider the way they do today. And that’s it. Docs machines are gone. Actually, in three to five years, my hope would be you enter the data only once ever.
Gary Hoberman
And what I mean by that is, if you’re getting married in New York City right now, on Cork is the system of record. We married, like 38,000 people the other year. And the data that you enter into a marriage certificate is such that it’s enough to open up a joint bank account, apply the insurance changes to add a life insurance beneficiary, add a dependent on your tax return, think about all of the downstream impacts if we could connect systems to where they’re supposed to be connected today. And what it would mean is you only enter data once in your life and it should be able to be reused everywhere else. Back to the data concept.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Gary, unfortunately, we are up on time here. I’d love to keep you on and ask you another 20 or 30 questions, but it’s a Monday and I know the world’s on fire, so I won’t hold you for any longer. Before we wrap up, if people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go?
Gary Hoberman
Definitely On Corp.com is a destination to go to. Follow the company on LinkedIn. Follow me on LinkedIn. Connect to me on LinkedIn. We do as mentioned, Brett. We do some amazing LinkedIn lives. We have some CEOs of the biggest tech companies coming on just in the next few weeks. I think I’m doing. The next one is going to be me talking to Chat GPT, which should be a lot of fun, but awesome. And thank you again for the opportunity here, Brett, and appreciate being on your show.
Brett
Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story, the company’s story, and really talk about everything that you’re building. This is a really fun, behind the scenes look at a company that I know everyone in tech really looks up to and admire. So thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Gary Hoberman
Thank you, Brett, thanks again.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Gary Hoberman
You time close.
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