From starting a football newsletter as a teenager that led to an internship with the NFL, to pioneering e-commerce at The Walt Disney Company and leading Fandango and Shopzilla.com as CEO, Chuck Davis has great stories and valuable lessons to share.
Chuck Davis is the CEO & Chairman of Prodege, an internet and media company that is dedicated to “creating rewarding moments” for its members by rewarding them with more than $700 million in cash and free gift cards since inception.
Prodege is the parent company of consumer rewards platform Swagbucks and InboxDollars and cash-back shopping sites MyPoints and ShopAtHome which has awarded over $700 million to its members.
Hear more about Chuck’s journey on this video interview for tastytrade‘s “Bootstrapping in America” episode, hosted by Tom Sosnoff & Tony Battista.
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Chuck Davis is a Venture Partner at TCV. Prodege and tastytrade are TCV portfolio companies. Fandango was a TCV portfolio company.
The views and opinions expressed in the blog post above are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of TCMI, Inc. or its affiliates (“TCV”). This blog post is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any private fund managed or sponsored by TCV or any of the securities of any company discussed. The TCV portfolio companies identified above, if any, are not necessarily representative of all TCV investments, and no assumption should be made that the investments identified were or will be profitable. For a complete list of TCV investments, please visit www.tcv.com/all-companies/. For additional important disclaimers regarding this document, please see “Informational Purposes Only” in the Terms of Use for TCV’s website, available at http://www.tcv.com/terms-of-use/.
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Over dinner, Zillow CTO Dave Beitel spoke about how technology has transformed the real estate industry. Dave joined Zillow in 2005 and has seen the company grow, both organically and with 13 acquisitions in the last 12 years. Dave explained the importance of creating a strong culture across multiple locations and laying out paths to career development to motivate teams as organizations scale. He also provided advice on a common challenge that many growing companies face, particularly how to integrate offshore teams and make them an extension of existing efforts rather than adjacent resources. He also discussed with the group how to achieve success in scale with multiple office locations and different cultural identities.
League schools and state colleges. Build relationships with influential faculty. Introduce your brand to younger students, not just seniors. When they become interns, give them meat to work on, not crumbs – having an impact is what they value most. If they turn down an offer, wait 2-3 years and call again – they may not be having the impact they expected at that big company they chose. Retaining key talent has to be proactive. Sit people down and map out how they will develop themselves and increase their impact by staying with you. Give them management opportunities so they can imagine themselves as leaders. Don’t expect diversity to walk in the door — look for talented, highly motivated people who come from completely different fields such as law or the military. And finally, the 90 days after a new hire starts are more important than the 90 days spent hiring them. Set them up for quick wins, build in plenty of touch-points, and make sure they’re comfortable in the culture.
TCV EIR Jonathan Shottan, Manmeet Singh, Co-founder and CEO of Dataguise and Pablo Jensen, CTO of Sportradar pulled back the curtain on Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s new privacy laws. Simply put, GPDR is about What, Where and Why: What private data do you have? Where is private data stored? Why do you need to process that private data? Both the compliance challenge and market opportunity of the new regulations are huge and what unites them is the challenge of identifying the vulnerabilities. Many companies mistakenly believe they are compliant, because they encrypt and segregate various types of customer data physically or in the cloud; but when they bring data types together for analysis, they create “PII” – personally identifiable information. The new laws also require companies to delete data if customers demand it, but that’s likely to create havoc with legacy database applications built on relational technology. And how do you delete older data stored on physical media? Enter data masking, at production scale, to stand in for deletion and encryption. First movers — with enough IT spend on decoupling, segregating, and masking data — may even competitively enhance their brands as “more secure” than others.
After lunch, Ted Coons and Charles Beadnall, CTO of GoDaddy, delved into the transformation of GoDaddy’s culture, a process that started back in 2013. Engineers loved the company’s mission of providing small businesses with a home on the internet, but deterrents included fly-over geography, aging facilities and sensationalist marketing. With a new CEO – and marketing campaign – GoDaddy began recruiting heavily. The challenge was forming a new culture that welcomed both existing employees and a flood of new developers in ways that produced better products, faster. Charles employed a version of the 80/20 rule: if he could populate 20% of a department with more diverse people who modeled the right behaviors, they would tip over the rest. The company hired people based on referrals, recruited many female graduates from local universities and placed experienced diverse hires in senior IT roles. Charles also drew in Ph.D.s from MIT and spent time with teams around the globe to transform a culture while keeping the company focused on growth.
Matt Robinson led the day’s final session on securing the enterprise with Amir Ben-Efraim, co-founder and CEO of Menlo Security; Rob Fry, VP of Engineering at JASK; Robert West, Managing Director at Deloitte LLP; and Christian McCarrick, VP of Engineering at Auth0. Matt first asked the panel how CIOs and CTOs should differentiate among today’s legions of security providers. Recommendations included assessing your vulnerabilities so you’re asking the right questions, getting referrals from peers, and anticipating the inevitable consolidation among security providers. Not every company needs an industry giant – those companies were startups once, and today’s upstarts may have superior technology. The panel then discussed prioritizing among today’s proliferating threats. Getting governance in place is critical – if no one fully owns the security portfolio, priorities will be set for the wrong reasons. If the role falls to you as CTO or CIO, you must be (or become) a good storyteller to convey the threats to your company and build consensus on addressing them. It’s also vital to recognize that malware will get inside your systems, but it won’t be the end of the world if you’re prepared. Ultimately the biggest weakness of all security systems is the human element. Education and training are essential and need to be on the agenda regularly. In addition, Amir argued that companies should hold vendors to a higher standard, aiming to receive 100% efficacy to keep companies protected.
