The most recent Bentley Research Colloquium focused on Big Data and a broad range of issues and topics surrounding the topic. This series highlights some of the issues examined or suggested by colloquium presenters.
I’m in a business dominated by white guys with bad comb overs, blue blazers, and Ivy League degrees. Men with family lines that date back to the Mayflower. Men who expect you to play their game and follow their rules. The good ol’ boys.
That’s not me. People call me many things: intense, a maverick, outrageous, the bad boy of the Boston tech community. What I know is that I don’t play the game. I don’t follow the rules because there are no rules. You can do whatever you decide to do!
There are people out there with a lot to offer, but they’re not told they can succeed — or, even worse, that it’s not possible because they’re a girl, they’re black, they’re gay, they’re poor, or they don’t have a genius IQ. And it’s all bullshit.
Don’t accept anybody’s definition of you but your own.
If you decide to become an accountant, an engineer, a physicist, or an entrepreneur in the tech industry, no matter what you decide to do, you need one fundamental skill for success and even survival.
You have to sell yourself, you have to sell your ideas, and you have to sell a personal brand. I started work at age 7 as a newspaper boy. I learned more about selling by having that paper route than I did from any job or educational experience I’ve had since. It’s something you learn with practice, and once you do, you don’t forget it.
To build a successful personal brand, you need to demonstrably articulate what you do, what you’ve done and how you did it. It’s not about talking and making noise and creating buzz. It’s about having something to offer and saying that well.
It’s about walking around a room of 200 strangers and introducing yourself, as in, “Hi. My name is Chris Lynch. I’m a partner at FKA. This is what I do. This is what I’ve done. Who are you? What do you do?” Somehow you have to engage like that and the more uncomfortable it is for you, the more important it is for you to do it.
In 2012, I co-founded hack/reduce with the support of the Massachusetts Big Data Initiative to cultivate a community of Big Data experts in Boston. We’re bringing together venture capitalists and young entrepreneurs. We’re creating a platform for engagement.
I want the Boston tech industry to thrive. In the mid-’80s, Boston was the place to be. Jobs were being created at Wang, Digital, Data General, etc. But the venture market fell asleep, and when people graduated and wanted to do interesting things, they moved to Silicon Valley.
Now I’ve hit the twilight of my career, and I want to leave Boston the way I found it. We need to leverage our assets. We have 35 universities in 10 square miles. The density of the student population here is without peer anywhere in the world. We have a lineage of technology because of the academic population. We have more than a quarter of a million advance-degree computer scientists and mathematicians in Greater New England.
I want to attract and engage industry veterans with the young people in the venture and tech community. I’ve committed myself to doing that over the next decade. I’m three years down in my mission to develop 10 great companies.
Come out and be a part of it. Get involved with one of the hack/reduce Scholars at 12 universities in the Boston area — Babson College, Bentley University, Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Harvard University, MIT, Northeastern University, Tufts University, UMass Boston, UMass Lowell, and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Shanon Kumar, a Tufts University student who leads the program, organizes meetups and talks on subjects such as Big Data opportunities, web scraping, data visualization, data science, cyber security and more. The program draws students away from the comfort of their campus to learn what it’s like in the real world of venture and technology. It creates teams of people with a diversity of experience — socioeconomic, racial, academic.
We’ve attracted people from all over the country and the world. We have people coming from Northern Ireland, from Eastern Europe, from Washington D.C, from San Antonio. They’re moving here to be part of this network, which is exactly what we expected to happen.
If you’re content to be an academic, then staying in that environment is perfectly reasonable. But if you want to apply your learning to a pursuit, you have to engage in it early enough to provide context to your education.
You are always welcome at hack/reduce, which lives in the historic Kendall Boiler and Tank Company building at 275 Third Street in Kendall Square. Come surf the Net, hang out, and meet people who have ideas about changing the world and creating a billion-dollar business.
You’ll see tables and chairs and people who are just coding and working and talking. It’s a public space with millions in resources — you’ll have access to industry veterans for help with business problems and public sector workers for help with issues involving state and local governments.
I encourage you to show up at one of our meetups and find two or three people you don’t know and introduce yourself and engage them in some way. That will be the essence of what you may do in the future.
There are few things of significance in the history of the world that have been accomplished alone. If you’re going to do something special, it’s likely going to involve you teaming up with a group of like-minded individuals and the only thing you may have in common is your vision.
You need to be able to communicate, and develop relationships with others in order to work effectively with them. You need to have some level of emotional intelligence. There are people who never develop it. If they are super talented, they make an impact anyway — but nowhere near the level of impact they could have had.
Put yourself out there. As I said in a commencement speech at Bentley University, the difference between successful people and everyone else is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of strength, it’s a lack of will. Embrace risk. Don’t be afraid to fail.
I’ve been offered multiple positions in Silicon Valley. I’ve made the conscious choice to stay here. Success is not about your possessions or how much money you make. It’s about how you live your life. It’s about who you love and what you love to do.
This is the place and these are the people and this is the work that matter to me.
Bentley alumnus Chris Lynch '91 MBA, D.Com.Sc. Hon.’11, is a partner at FKA. He is the former CEO of Vertica Systems, which he led from late-stage startup to the number-one-ranked Big Data company in the market and its acquisition by HP. Before that he was an executive at four successful early-stage startups that were acquired by public companies.
At FKA, he focuses on big data and disruptive infrastructure. He’s led investments in companies such as Hadapt, Nutonian, Threat Stack, and Sqrrl. He shares his thoughts at appetitefordisruption.com.