Sam Radocchia was the keynote speaker this spring at the Upstate Capital Association conference in Rochester. Radocchia, a 2011 Colgate University graduate, delivered a talk entitled "Blockchain Beyond Finance" and told business leaders how converging technologies will re-invent some of their everyday practices.
In her case, Radocchia's company, Chronicled, uses blockchain and Internet of Things technologies to improve how supply chains operate.
Radocchia has founded three companies and is in the early stages of a fourth. She co-founded Chronicled with Ryan Orr, Maurizio Greco, and Dave Aho in 2014. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, and has offices in New York, where Radocchia is based, and in Kiev, Ukraine. The company has 30 employees and a similar number of contract workers.
Please explain Chronicled's technologies for a regular business audience.
Blockchain is the underlying technology of the crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum that have come into public attention. Blockchain was proposed in 2009 by an individual or a group of individuals named Satoshi Nakamoto.
The idea was to create an immutable digital ledger that is distributed where consensus is reached in a decentralized manner. It gives a group of people or companies a shared truth in the form of a bit of data or information.
IoT - the Internet of Things - is a broader concept. I like to think of it as the exponential increase of sensors in everyday objects, devices, and things. It could be sensors to track the heat or humidity or velocity of a shipment that's going through a supply chain to be able to prove it was stored at the right temperature, was not dropped, and so on.
Broadly, it's the concept of the sensorization of everything.
How would you advise business leaders to prepare for these technologies?
The best advice I've given is to get involved early. At this point, the technology is an inevitability.
It's a wonderful opportunity to re-architect the ways in which we interoperate or exchange data. It's like re-architecting the Internet. If you're new to it, begin educating yourself and individuals in your company. Take it a step further and run a pilot.
Tell me about early entrepreneurial influences.
I grew up as the child of a family business that scaled into a large retail chain. From a young age, I grew up seeing my dad (Stephen Radocchia) run and grow that business, playing around in the office and playing hide-and-seek in the warehouse. I had roles as a child, even, doing customer service and things like that.
Namco provided the entrepreneurial influence in my life.
I started my first company, Stunable, as an undergraduate at Colgate.
That company started as an online personal shopper. It was a recommendation engine that recommended clothing to you. We had something like 700 attributes that could define clothing, material, or fits, or inseam, and all of these parameters.
We ended up building a pretty powerful recommendation algorithm. At the time, it was hard to monetize something like that with affiliate links to other websites. I sought to be able to allow users to check out on one website without redirecting to multiple websites. Essentially, it was building a back-end system to integrate all the inventory systems of apparel companies - something like Amazon has.
What about early leadership roles?
I wasn't super involved - I played sports and things like that. I always had a strong drive for theater, so I actually went to Oxford University while I was still in high school to do a theater program.
I continued that at Colgate, where I got into directing. I created a program in Hamilton to involve senior citizens to participate in plays. That was kind of where I noticed a drive toward leadership. I always gravitated toward directing a play as opposed to acting in it.
I noticed my strong suit was being able to work with people and identify their strengths and weaknesses and passions and desires and build a team. It was funny - I had been thinking about starting a theater company at Colgate when I started the tech company.
I find a lot of creative approaches to running companies that I learned from theater.
What advice would you give a person to be an effective leader?
For me, my strongest driver as a leader is emotional intelligence - EQ over IQ. But you need to combine emotional intelligence with logic and with the ability to determine what's driving or motivating an employee or driving or motivating a customer.
A leader fosters an environment where it's safe to take risks - both for yourself and for employees. A leader recognizes and takes calculated risks for a company but also makes sure that the people who are working and collaborating in that company feel safe to do so. They need to feel safe to work creatively, push boundaries, and things like that.
Develop your gut instincts. This kind of goes along the lines of emotional intelligence. I've started three companies and I'm spinning my fourth out of Chronicled. In the first year or couple of years, a lot of decisions are not made based off of large data sets. It's based off of your gut instincts and intuition. Becoming comfortable with the unknown or unfamiliar is important in developing the gut instinct.
A leader is persistent and steadfast.
Follow your passions as a leader. Make sure you're carrying your values and living your values. I think the best way for people to align with your vision is having a vision, first and foremost for yourself, and then sticking to it and living it and sharing positive energy. It'll foster that in other people.
I really value foresight. My dad always joked and called life this infinite game of chess. Not necessarily in the strategic level of seeing five steps ahead, but in being able to foster an environment where people can come to their own conclusions and create their own infinite set of ideas.
Piggybacking on that, the most effective leaders are humble. It's better to have people think that something is their own idea than going around purporting that it is your own. I value that quality in leaders.
I value patience and collaboration as opposed to a top-down fear-based approach.
What attributes do you see in poor leadership or exhibited by bosses you wouldn't want to work for?
Close-mindedness on a level where it's detrimental in terms of diversity and inclusivity and diversity of ideas. It's important as a leader to have a vision, so you don't have a company that's all over the place, but at the same time, there needs to be balance so that it's not authoritarian.
I think single-mindedness and arrogance are some of the most difficult things I've seen in poor leadership. Poor leaders think their ideas are the only way.
What should a leader do to spark innovation in their company?
Again, foster an open and collaborative environment where risk taking in a safe way is encouraged.
We started that early on at Chronicled by creating essentially a de facto R&D department, which we called the IoT & Blockchain Laboratory. In the lab, employees, like our engineers, were encouraged to do a lot of different side projects and things like that. As one example, that's how we ended up building an access-control system for drones that were delivering packages. We ended up building a vending machine that could give you a Coca-Cola based off of your cell phone and a blockchain crypto-currency.
So, foster and make space for innovation. It's hard to foster innovation if you don't make space or schedule it. In engineering, we follow a process called Agile development. Basically, you create tasks and then assign points to them, and every week you have a planning called sprint planning. Take all of the tasks and put them in.
Free time or time for innovation are kind of baked in to that system. We can still follow the process. You get to pick a task and get to do something that was your own side project.
What does it take to think like an entrepreneur?
The biggest shift as an entrepreneur is: Just do. Versus contemplating.
Momentum and movement are key for an entrepreneur. You're not going to know a lot of things if you're truly innovating or blazing trails or going where people haven't gone before. The only thing you can do is start going. If you're thinking about starting a company and you haven't already done it, that's the key shift.
You're early in your career, so what are things you'd like to learn to prepare yourself to be a better leader?
I expect to maintain lifetime goals of self-improvement and learning.
I am excited to continue to scale my company and learn the processes and leadership skills as the company scales from 50 to 100 and then 100 to 500 over the next couple of years.
I'm very excited to experience and learn from that change.
I'm excited to learn about working with large enterprises and the complexities of the organizational structures and working with individuals within very large companies.
And then, for myself, because I am stronger on the intuition, emotional intelligence, and creativity side, I continue to work on the strategic, logical, numbers side of things.
Do you see differences required in leadership or in leadership styles between early-stage startups and more mature companies with a greater number of employees? What changes in leadership as a company scales?
There's an external perception that there should be different styles of leadership. I think the style should remain the same. The differences are in terms of implementing processes.
As the company scales, you want to implement more and more processes so that you don't have to figure everything out in a bespoke manner and people's relationships become more automated. That's where the change is, not necessarily in leadership.
As the company scales from paying hands-on attention with individuals, leadership is more focused on how to maintain the core values and culture that you established early on. You need to figure out how to scale that.
The weekly "CNY Conversation" features Q&A interviews about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. To suggest a leader for a Conversation, contact Stan Linhorst at StanLinhorst@gmail.com. Last week featured Sheena Solomon, who runs the Nourishing Tomorrow's Leaders program. Early experiences in her life taught her about the value of perseverance, being consistent and persistence.