August 30, 2010 by Yuval Brisker
In the description about this blog it says that I will blog occasionally about what it’s like to lead a company that provides on-demand software…But I have never really written much about that aspect of my job.
Today I surfed by Fred Wilson’s blog, as I have done for 7 years and read a fascinating piece on “What a CEO Does…” and I could totally identify with this (as well as some of the comments made immediately after. So I would like to share this with the readers here. I think that reading it will give a good perspective on my job!
May 5, 2010 by Yuval Brisker
As creatures of habit and pattern – there are some patterns that we, people, recognize, but many that we don’t. And though these patterns may stand out to others, we ourselves may be oblivious of them. Maybe we are even in denial of them.
Why? A way of keeping us from being exposed to too much information, a protection mechanism from things we don’t want to know or just because we move around our world not always 100% aware of everything we do…
At the end of the day - it doesn’t really matter because the patterns are there and they can be harnessed for the greater good.
So when Irad and I started TOA Technologies with the goal of solving what is commonly referred to as ‘the cable guy problem’ (or customers waiting at-home from 12-4 or all day for some kind of appointment without knowing when it will actually happen) we thought that, if we could only identify those patterns and connect we could use them to help solve this daily but incredibly annoying and costly problem.
Our assumption was that even in the most dynamic environment – like a field operations environment – there will always be behavior or “performance patterns” that could pretty easily be recognized and documented, ultimately help better plan, schedule and manage the work-day of the many field service people out there. We thought that by identifying these performance patterns and building a mechanism to communicate them, we could help the companies be more predictive and respectful of everyone’s time. By being able to identify specific performance pattern of the specific people who provide the services or goods – we came to the conclusion that we could accurately predict when an appointment would happen and how long it would take. We could then offer up that information to all the stakeholders in the appointment – the planners, the managers and supervisor, the dispatchers but most importantly to the Customers.
Two weeks ago – after a long 6-year gestation period the US Patent Office finally recognized the uniqueness of our idea and the spefic combination of methodologies and technologies that we combined to solve this problem and awarded us a Patent Number 7,693,735 . The first of many.
I want to thank Irad here for the great work he did in steering this to completion. Though the concepts and the composition of the patent is/was ours jointly, the last two years of negotiations and execution was Irad’s alone. Thanks!
Since we got the patent I have been saying that I now know for sure that those who get a patent deserve a patent. Either because they were truly geniuses who came up with something completely and radically new or because they had the perseverance and the conviction to believe that what they had was unique and fought for it without compromise. In both cases the award is honestly due.
