Building a Startup Within a Startup: Staying Ahead by Operationalizing a Culture of Innovation
Summary
We all want to unlock innovation in our companies, and a powerful way to fuel your company’s innovation engine is by cultivating a “startup within a startup” culture! But how does this work? And how do you operationalize this culture into norms, behaviors, and habits to produce greater innovation? Naveen Kondapalli shares his perspective on staying ahead through a culture of innovation, how to build smaller teams with autonomy, how to spin up multiple products, quickly spin down bets that didn’t work, and validate your hypothesis in areas beyond your expertise. Plus how to navigate the innovator’s dilemma while not losing focus on the core business.
Speakers
Naveen is the Vice President of Product and Engineering at TetraScience, a Scientific Data Cloud company with a mission to accelerate scientific discovery, improve and extend human life. Before TetraScience, he spent almost 2 decades building observability products for various domains. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Engineering at AppDynamics which had a very successful exit. At AppD, he led a startup focussed on End-User Monitoring and Business Analytics. He had helped grow the business to 30x in revenue in partnership with the executive team. Naveen is passionate about working with data and unlocking valuable insights, lately, he has been experimenting with the application of AI / ML techniques to accelerate the outcomes. He is a certified USA swimming official and volunteers his time to officiating at the sanctioned meets when he is not wrangling with the data.
Tony is a VP of Engineering at Rippling, overseeing all aspects of the Rippling platform and building the products and capabilities that enables the compound startup. During his tenure at Rippling, he has helped scale the engineering org from 60 to 600+ and built the core platform and HR products from scratch. Prior to Rippling he was the founder and CTO of a YC-backed startup and had previously held various engineering positions within Periscope, TellApart, Twitter.
