On the eighth episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Gary Reiner, former CIO of General Electric and a current operating partner at General Atlantic, a global growth equity firm with over $79 billion of assets under management. While at GE, Gary was an executive leader for almost 20 years, and an early advocate for implementing SaaS applications during his 14 year tenure as CIO. Today, he sits on the board of several GA portfolio companies including Atera, Devo, Evisort, JumpCloud, Pymetrics, ThreatLocker, Vast Data, and Zoomin. In this conversation, Gary shares why he believes the best business process wins, his perspective on packaged solutions, and the meaning behind “lean before digitize”.

Quick hits from Gary:

On how technology and business processes need to work together: “Technology is there to support processes. We used to have a saying at GE, ‘lean before digitize.’ What that means is you need to do a ton of work improving the process before you roll out technology. We had actually looked at a lot of successes and failures within the work that we had done in IT at GE. And it was pretty much binary where if we had leaned processes first and then attached technology to it, it was successful. And if we had tried to just take the technology that was there and support an unimproved process, it was a failure all the time.”

On building software in-house or using a partner: “During my 20 years at GE, if you took the most proprietary thing that we did, it was developing the inside of an aircraft engine. It was the single most sophisticated thing requiring incredibly high IQ people doing very, very sophisticated things. And yet when you looked for software that they needed, in order to develop those engine parts, there were at least three different software solutions they could use. Someone who was more NIH would say, "We need to build this, because it's strategic to us." That's not the strategic part of it. The tool was not the strategic part. The strategic part was the knowledge of the engineers that were designing it, not the tool itself.”

Gary’s advice to startup SaaS founders: “If you're a startup building software to support processes, whether it's a selling process, manufacturing process, service process, make sure you understand what the best practices are in that case that you're supporting, so that when good customers are leaning their processes, they default to your solution.”

Recent book recommendation: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

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Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/ 

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser, Josh Meer and Emily Shaw.