CTOcast # 4: Jacob Fine (Farata Systems, SuranceBay)
Introducing the fourth issue of a podcast about technologies, processes, infrastructure, and people in IT companies. Today, CTOcast hosts Jacob Fine, co-founder of Farata Systems and SuranceBay.
Listen to the podcast
About our interlocutor:
')
Jacob Fine was born in Kiev, since 1992 he has been living and working in the USA. In 2006, together with partners, he founded the company Farata Systems, which develops web applications for large companies, and also cooperates with outsourcing companies in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. He is the managing partner and co-founder of SuranceBay, a software development company for automating insurance agents.
Java Champion (2005), organizer of the Princeton Java Users Group. Author of books and numerous publications on software development issues, including Enterprise Web Development (co-author, 2014) and Java Programming 24-Hour Trainer (2011). Presenter podcast americhka.us.
Alexander Astapenko: Recently in the americhka.us podcast, you and your partners in Farata Systems discussed the future of outsourcing, where the market is heading, what you should do, and came to the conclusion that from the perspective point of view, it is more profitable and more interesting to work with Belarus. This is your position was. Your interlocutors, as I recall, were somewhat different. Let's try to look at the question of choosing an outsourcing partner from a slightly different angle. It is the manager of a financial company, say, on East Coast (approx. Ed. - East Coast of the USA), who is looking for performers for a specific project, on the one hand, and on the other, a start-up from Mountain View, who needs to quickly expand and hire a team . What strategy would you follow in both cases when choosing an outsourcing partner?
Jacob Fine: I would like to say at once that if I were a project manager in a financial company here on East Coast, then I simply would not have the freedom to choose. I would be forced to work with the company that was imposed on us as a partner for outsourcing. Most likely, it would be an Indian company. Well, not a 100 percent probability, but 75 percent, I guess.
Financial companies on the East Costa put in a very rigid framework. There is a certain long process by which some companies from other countries become outsourcing partners, the so-called vendors. There is a vendor list in large companies and a preferred vendor list. And financial managers are forced to work with people only from there. I know this not by hearsay, but by a specific example. One of the major financial companies chose a person here, in New York. He worked, a strong, competent guy, but then he had to leave. That is, not to leave us, but just to another project. They tried to replace him, interviewed 65 people from India, but could not find a replacement until the head of the financial company told the manager: “You stop this business, choose someone already, because otherwise you will lose your position”. Therefore, the decision is not taken correctly, and outsourcing, as a rule, is much more expensive than these large companies than it seems. The hourly rate seems attractive, but in fact the work is often not effective. But once again I say that these people, managers, are not able to change anything and are forced to pull like this.
If I were a start-up on West Coast (Ed. - West Coast USA) ... I don’t know why I should be on West Coast, because I am a startup on East Coast - we made a food startup SuranceBay. I would consider my money, of course, and would try to find a team that, for a certain amount of money, which, as a rule, is small, could do the most useful work. That is, we actually work this way. SuranceBay managed to put together a very good team, but we choose people, like, you know, pick cherries. Separately, one by one, and try to make sure that we do not have people who have ballast. And we have a great team, and, as you have rightly said, they are mainly Belarus, Ukraine, a very small percentage from Russia. If you are a start-up, then you should very carefully count the money and spend a lot of time finding people. And it is quite difficult for startups who are unknown, who do not know this market.
What am I doing? How are we so literate? Well, first of all, I publish a lot, record podcasts, travel to conferences, do trainings. He was with trainings in Moscow, Minsk and Ukraine. That is, we want to please programmers, because we have a small company. Let's say, why do you need to go to our company if, for example, you want to get into some large company, work for a large company? Thanks to this PR that I do, people trust us and come to us, they work for many years and they don’t go away. The second part, which we do, since we still cannot recruit all the people we want - we work with partners. I will not give you a name, but this is one of the largest outsourcing companies in Eastern Europe. We take a lot of people from there, and they also work with us for years. That is, people who are employees in large outsourcing companies for you, work for us.
Alexander Astapenko: Farata Systems appeared in 2006, that is, eight years have passed. How did it all begin and what did you get from the point of view of the team, customers?
Jacob Fine: First of all, I worked here for many years in America as an independent consultant and did not intend to go into any partnerships or companies. I was a good programmer and I was often offered: “Here, I have an idea! Let's do some startup. ” And I always tried to imagine that we already did it. Suppose you, Alexander, suggest that I make a game or a program. You have an idea, and I'm a good programmer. I immediately imagine that we made this game. Technically it can be done. And then what are we going to do with it? How will we sell it? What do we know about this business? Do we know how to sell? Can I knock on the door and say: "Buy, buy, buy." And, as a rule, I understood that it was useless. That is, I always asked myself the question: “We did it and then what?” And at that moment I immediately lost the desire to make some kind of partnership or develop my own products.
At that time, I conducted seminars on “Weekend With Experts”, where I invited famous people in the industry for the weekend and they conducted trainings on various topics. Two of my current partners, Viktor (approx. Ed. - Victor Rasputnis) and Anatoly (approx. Ed. - Anatoly Tartakovsky) flew to this training. At that time, they were engaged in JavaScript, and I mostly - Java. And they, and I did not see anything interesting in terms of GUI development. At the same time, Adobe bought Macromedia, where the Flex framework was developed. We thought it was a good potential, but then nobody knew about Flex, and we decided to write an article about Adobe Flex for the Java Developer's Journal. Also wrote on the blogs. And Adobe noticed us, because they really wanted their product, which they bought, this Flex, was known. And then it turned out that some people try it and even publish it in publications that are quite famous for programmers. They contacted us, paid us a trip to, I do not remember, in San Francisco, probably, after all. They invited not only us, but, in my opinion, 50 people from different places of the world. Adobe presented the product and we returned, continuing to write articles. And then I already suggested to the guys: “Let's write a book”. We were all working programmers, all consultants, that is, everyone earned good money. But they agreed. And they began to write a book and it became clear that there are few people in this market in terms of consulting, and I suggested making a company. They agreed, and we made the company in 2006. That's how it turned out. That is, if it were not for such a special situation, we probably would never have made this company. We did it, but continued to work for clients, that is, everyone earned money himself. Then they began to hire people, to conduct trainings different, we were invited. And so the consulting company develops.
Alexander Astapenko: What is Farata Systems now?
Jacob Fine: Two parallel lines appeared. Farata Systems already existed as a consulting company. By the way, Farata Systems differs from many consulting companies in that we have never had a sales specialist. We never knocked to anyone and said: "Take us to the project." We just wrote technical articles, books, went to conferences, spoke. That is, purely because of PR, then they called us and said that we needed people for such and such work and whether we could do it. At first we did it ourselves, then, naturally, we began to hire people. A couple of years ago, one of our clients said that they needed a specialist in e-commerce, javist, but we did nothing about e-commerce at that time. And there was a special e-commerce, with a special software. We took a strong javista, gave him a project, where he showed himself well, figured out. Then it took more, more. And so we developed this practice - the consultant who does e-commerce. At certain times, we had 25 people working only on this. This is how Farata develops.
But the important thing for me is that five years ago, quite accidentally, a man came out of the insurance company, or rather from the insurance industry, and said that he had ideas on how to make a product. As I said at the beginning, we all are very careful about ideas. How to sell? Technically there are no problems, we will do anything, but how to sell? And here again there was a special situation: he knew how to sell, but did not know how to do it. And he also had one investor, a man willing to pay, to invest in this development. Then we decided to take a risk, because the risk was not very big, because the money was still going to be invested by someone. And that's why we made the second company SuranceBay.
A year later, however, this investor said: “Well, guys, where is the money? I now invest and invest, and back how? ”We say to him:“ How? We just figured out! This is a very powerful, great product to make. ” He says: “No! I invest in you for a year, I want to see something real. ” And there was a question about what to do next. How to develop? Or leave everything, or you need to look for some other investors. And we found such a compromise: Farata earned some money on consulting, and we became investors in the second company. That is, we began to give a part of this money for development at SuranceBay. Thus, we have stood, stood, and now we are performing very well. 200,000 insurance agents today use our system, we are developing, tearing off a large chunk of the market from monopolists.
Alexander Astapenko: Which company, Farata Systems or SuranceBay, takes more time? And who is the technical leader in Farata Systems and SuranceBay?
Jacob Fine: With SuranceBay, simply. Anatoly, who is a very strong programmer, is a technical leader in SuranceBay.
As for Farata, our consultants mainly work for the client. Consultants are strong, we do not have juniors, so in many cases they are given a manager by the clients themselves. Sometimes we do management. If this is just a consultant working for a client, then he doesn’t need management, the client’s management gives. If we were asked to do a whole team, then some of us, partners, lead these projects. As a rule, it doesn’t take much time either, because the guys are strong and we rely on their good engineering background. In addition, we are engaged in training, of course. If you ask what my time is spent on, then, of course, the trainings take more. Trainings, writing some articles, here are books. And I don't do a lot of management.
Alexander Astapenko: It is logical to assume that people who come from Farata Systems are involved in the development of SuranceBay. And there is? Or are there people who are accepted from the side of the project?
Jacob Fine: From the side too, of course. The product employs 20--25 people, not counting customer support. Most of it is taken from the side, some people come from Farata.
We try not to lose good people. And if, say, a person worked as a consultant with someone on a Faratov project and the project ended, then we keep him and transfer him to the SuranceBay project. That is, we do not earn anything on an employee, we pay wages from our own pockets, but we keep him to be busy, because if another consulting project appears, we don’t lose this person. Therefore, it works well and successfully. Indeed, we hire specific individuals at SuranceBay, in particular, through large outsourcing companies with which we have been working for many years.
Pavel Pavlov: Was the SuranceBay project the most difficult in terms of technology? Or, after all, the projects that Farata Systems has to deal with are more complex in terms of technical implementation?
Jacob Fine: In fact, SuranceBay is also a complex project, and there are complex projects in financial companies.
If we take financial companies, then projects are complex when there is real work with the market, with the securities market. You see, if you are told to write the program “Hello, world!”, You will answer that everyone can do this with their left foot. Yes true. And then I will tell you: “And I want this program to work on the server, and that it answers“ Hello ”10,000 users per second.” And the program is incredibly complicated. Therefore, when we work for financial companies, when what is called real-time trading, then speed is the most important thing, as we say “Speed ​​is the King”. And because of this, products often become more complicated. How to make the architecture of the system to provide a huge number of transactions per second? And how to make sure that no transaction is lost? As you understand, people lose big money if there are mistakes. That is, in this regard, financial projects are complex. And every programmer who wants to make a serious career on East Coast should try to get into a financial project, a financial company. This, of course, should not be a HR project in a financial company, but something serious. I think it gives a jump in the career of a programmer who wants to get this jump, and not sleep in the furrow.
SuranceBay is also a complex system. We automate insurance business agencies that are between an agent who comes to sell insurance to you and large insurance companies that do not want to deal directly with an agent. That is, there are agencies between them, which we then automate.
When we decided to do SuranceBay five years ago, we were told about the upcoming conference in three months for insurance agents, where the main players of the industry gathered and where it would be nice to show something. And then we are neither a dream nor a spirit about the insurance industry. Three months later, however, we were at the conference and were already showing the product. He was, you know, like a minefield. That is, we knew how to go through it, so that nothing exploded. Well, imagine, two or three months the development of all something was going on.
Today, many clever ideas have been invested in the product. We managed to take 45% of the market from other companies. I have already said that 200,000 agents use our product. We removed a lot of paperwork, made pattern recognition, forms are driven into databases, electronic signatures are collected. Various questionnaires, and there are tons of them that a person must fill out before buying insurance, we have made clever. That is, depending on the answer to the previous questions, the following may not be asked. Found a lot of services that pull data about agents, about people, that is, half of the questions can not be asked, because the information is known. Some need to pay. For every question a dollar or two is paid, but we get a form filling.
Continuation of the text version of the podcast - in the coming days.
Listen to the podcast
About our interlocutor:')
Jacob Fine was born in Kiev, since 1992 he has been living and working in the USA. In 2006, together with partners, he founded the company Farata Systems, which develops web applications for large companies, and also cooperates with outsourcing companies in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. He is the managing partner and co-founder of SuranceBay, a software development company for automating insurance agents.
Java Champion (2005), organizer of the Princeton Java Users Group. Author of books and numerous publications on software development issues, including Enterprise Web Development (co-author, 2014) and Java Programming 24-Hour Trainer (2011). Presenter podcast americhka.us.
Text version of the podcast (1st part)
About outsourcing and startups
Alexander Astapenko: Recently in the americhka.us podcast, you and your partners in Farata Systems discussed the future of outsourcing, where the market is heading, what you should do, and came to the conclusion that from the perspective point of view, it is more profitable and more interesting to work with Belarus. This is your position was. Your interlocutors, as I recall, were somewhat different. Let's try to look at the question of choosing an outsourcing partner from a slightly different angle. It is the manager of a financial company, say, on East Coast (approx. Ed. - East Coast of the USA), who is looking for performers for a specific project, on the one hand, and on the other, a start-up from Mountain View, who needs to quickly expand and hire a team . What strategy would you follow in both cases when choosing an outsourcing partner?
Jacob Fine: I would like to say at once that if I were a project manager in a financial company here on East Coast, then I simply would not have the freedom to choose. I would be forced to work with the company that was imposed on us as a partner for outsourcing. Most likely, it would be an Indian company. Well, not a 100 percent probability, but 75 percent, I guess.
Financial companies on the East Costa put in a very rigid framework. There is a certain long process by which some companies from other countries become outsourcing partners, the so-called vendors. There is a vendor list in large companies and a preferred vendor list. And financial managers are forced to work with people only from there. I know this not by hearsay, but by a specific example. One of the major financial companies chose a person here, in New York. He worked, a strong, competent guy, but then he had to leave. That is, not to leave us, but just to another project. They tried to replace him, interviewed 65 people from India, but could not find a replacement until the head of the financial company told the manager: “You stop this business, choose someone already, because otherwise you will lose your position”. Therefore, the decision is not taken correctly, and outsourcing, as a rule, is much more expensive than these large companies than it seems. The hourly rate seems attractive, but in fact the work is often not effective. But once again I say that these people, managers, are not able to change anything and are forced to pull like this.
If I were a start-up on West Coast (Ed. - West Coast USA) ... I don’t know why I should be on West Coast, because I am a startup on East Coast - we made a food startup SuranceBay. I would consider my money, of course, and would try to find a team that, for a certain amount of money, which, as a rule, is small, could do the most useful work. That is, we actually work this way. SuranceBay managed to put together a very good team, but we choose people, like, you know, pick cherries. Separately, one by one, and try to make sure that we do not have people who have ballast. And we have a great team, and, as you have rightly said, they are mainly Belarus, Ukraine, a very small percentage from Russia. If you are a start-up, then you should very carefully count the money and spend a lot of time finding people. And it is quite difficult for startups who are unknown, who do not know this market.
What am I doing? How are we so literate? Well, first of all, I publish a lot, record podcasts, travel to conferences, do trainings. He was with trainings in Moscow, Minsk and Ukraine. That is, we want to please programmers, because we have a small company. Let's say, why do you need to go to our company if, for example, you want to get into some large company, work for a large company? Thanks to this PR that I do, people trust us and come to us, they work for many years and they don’t go away. The second part, which we do, since we still cannot recruit all the people we want - we work with partners. I will not give you a name, but this is one of the largest outsourcing companies in Eastern Europe. We take a lot of people from there, and they also work with us for years. That is, people who are employees in large outsourcing companies for you, work for us.
About Farata Systems and SuranceBay
Alexander Astapenko: Farata Systems appeared in 2006, that is, eight years have passed. How did it all begin and what did you get from the point of view of the team, customers?
Jacob Fine: First of all, I worked here for many years in America as an independent consultant and did not intend to go into any partnerships or companies. I was a good programmer and I was often offered: “Here, I have an idea! Let's do some startup. ” And I always tried to imagine that we already did it. Suppose you, Alexander, suggest that I make a game or a program. You have an idea, and I'm a good programmer. I immediately imagine that we made this game. Technically it can be done. And then what are we going to do with it? How will we sell it? What do we know about this business? Do we know how to sell? Can I knock on the door and say: "Buy, buy, buy." And, as a rule, I understood that it was useless. That is, I always asked myself the question: “We did it and then what?” And at that moment I immediately lost the desire to make some kind of partnership or develop my own products.
At that time, I conducted seminars on “Weekend With Experts”, where I invited famous people in the industry for the weekend and they conducted trainings on various topics. Two of my current partners, Viktor (approx. Ed. - Victor Rasputnis) and Anatoly (approx. Ed. - Anatoly Tartakovsky) flew to this training. At that time, they were engaged in JavaScript, and I mostly - Java. And they, and I did not see anything interesting in terms of GUI development. At the same time, Adobe bought Macromedia, where the Flex framework was developed. We thought it was a good potential, but then nobody knew about Flex, and we decided to write an article about Adobe Flex for the Java Developer's Journal. Also wrote on the blogs. And Adobe noticed us, because they really wanted their product, which they bought, this Flex, was known. And then it turned out that some people try it and even publish it in publications that are quite famous for programmers. They contacted us, paid us a trip to, I do not remember, in San Francisco, probably, after all. They invited not only us, but, in my opinion, 50 people from different places of the world. Adobe presented the product and we returned, continuing to write articles. And then I already suggested to the guys: “Let's write a book”. We were all working programmers, all consultants, that is, everyone earned good money. But they agreed. And they began to write a book and it became clear that there are few people in this market in terms of consulting, and I suggested making a company. They agreed, and we made the company in 2006. That's how it turned out. That is, if it were not for such a special situation, we probably would never have made this company. We did it, but continued to work for clients, that is, everyone earned money himself. Then they began to hire people, to conduct trainings different, we were invited. And so the consulting company develops.
Alexander Astapenko: What is Farata Systems now?
Jacob Fine: Two parallel lines appeared. Farata Systems already existed as a consulting company. By the way, Farata Systems differs from many consulting companies in that we have never had a sales specialist. We never knocked to anyone and said: "Take us to the project." We just wrote technical articles, books, went to conferences, spoke. That is, purely because of PR, then they called us and said that we needed people for such and such work and whether we could do it. At first we did it ourselves, then, naturally, we began to hire people. A couple of years ago, one of our clients said that they needed a specialist in e-commerce, javist, but we did nothing about e-commerce at that time. And there was a special e-commerce, with a special software. We took a strong javista, gave him a project, where he showed himself well, figured out. Then it took more, more. And so we developed this practice - the consultant who does e-commerce. At certain times, we had 25 people working only on this. This is how Farata develops.
But the important thing for me is that five years ago, quite accidentally, a man came out of the insurance company, or rather from the insurance industry, and said that he had ideas on how to make a product. As I said at the beginning, we all are very careful about ideas. How to sell? Technically there are no problems, we will do anything, but how to sell? And here again there was a special situation: he knew how to sell, but did not know how to do it. And he also had one investor, a man willing to pay, to invest in this development. Then we decided to take a risk, because the risk was not very big, because the money was still going to be invested by someone. And that's why we made the second company SuranceBay.
A year later, however, this investor said: “Well, guys, where is the money? I now invest and invest, and back how? ”We say to him:“ How? We just figured out! This is a very powerful, great product to make. ” He says: “No! I invest in you for a year, I want to see something real. ” And there was a question about what to do next. How to develop? Or leave everything, or you need to look for some other investors. And we found such a compromise: Farata earned some money on consulting, and we became investors in the second company. That is, we began to give a part of this money for development at SuranceBay. Thus, we have stood, stood, and now we are performing very well. 200,000 insurance agents today use our system, we are developing, tearing off a large chunk of the market from monopolists.
Alexander Astapenko: Which company, Farata Systems or SuranceBay, takes more time? And who is the technical leader in Farata Systems and SuranceBay?
Jacob Fine: With SuranceBay, simply. Anatoly, who is a very strong programmer, is a technical leader in SuranceBay.
As for Farata, our consultants mainly work for the client. Consultants are strong, we do not have juniors, so in many cases they are given a manager by the clients themselves. Sometimes we do management. If this is just a consultant working for a client, then he doesn’t need management, the client’s management gives. If we were asked to do a whole team, then some of us, partners, lead these projects. As a rule, it doesn’t take much time either, because the guys are strong and we rely on their good engineering background. In addition, we are engaged in training, of course. If you ask what my time is spent on, then, of course, the trainings take more. Trainings, writing some articles, here are books. And I don't do a lot of management.
Alexander Astapenko: It is logical to assume that people who come from Farata Systems are involved in the development of SuranceBay. And there is? Or are there people who are accepted from the side of the project?
Jacob Fine: From the side too, of course. The product employs 20--25 people, not counting customer support. Most of it is taken from the side, some people come from Farata.
We try not to lose good people. And if, say, a person worked as a consultant with someone on a Faratov project and the project ended, then we keep him and transfer him to the SuranceBay project. That is, we do not earn anything on an employee, we pay wages from our own pockets, but we keep him to be busy, because if another consulting project appears, we don’t lose this person. Therefore, it works well and successfully. Indeed, we hire specific individuals at SuranceBay, in particular, through large outsourcing companies with which we have been working for many years.
Pavel Pavlov: Was the SuranceBay project the most difficult in terms of technology? Or, after all, the projects that Farata Systems has to deal with are more complex in terms of technical implementation?
Jacob Fine: In fact, SuranceBay is also a complex project, and there are complex projects in financial companies.
If we take financial companies, then projects are complex when there is real work with the market, with the securities market. You see, if you are told to write the program “Hello, world!”, You will answer that everyone can do this with their left foot. Yes true. And then I will tell you: “And I want this program to work on the server, and that it answers“ Hello ”10,000 users per second.” And the program is incredibly complicated. Therefore, when we work for financial companies, when what is called real-time trading, then speed is the most important thing, as we say “Speed ​​is the King”. And because of this, products often become more complicated. How to make the architecture of the system to provide a huge number of transactions per second? And how to make sure that no transaction is lost? As you understand, people lose big money if there are mistakes. That is, in this regard, financial projects are complex. And every programmer who wants to make a serious career on East Coast should try to get into a financial project, a financial company. This, of course, should not be a HR project in a financial company, but something serious. I think it gives a jump in the career of a programmer who wants to get this jump, and not sleep in the furrow.
SuranceBay is also a complex system. We automate insurance business agencies that are between an agent who comes to sell insurance to you and large insurance companies that do not want to deal directly with an agent. That is, there are agencies between them, which we then automate.
When we decided to do SuranceBay five years ago, we were told about the upcoming conference in three months for insurance agents, where the main players of the industry gathered and where it would be nice to show something. And then we are neither a dream nor a spirit about the insurance industry. Three months later, however, we were at the conference and were already showing the product. He was, you know, like a minefield. That is, we knew how to go through it, so that nothing exploded. Well, imagine, two or three months the development of all something was going on.
Today, many clever ideas have been invested in the product. We managed to take 45% of the market from other companies. I have already said that 200,000 agents use our product. We removed a lot of paperwork, made pattern recognition, forms are driven into databases, electronic signatures are collected. Various questionnaires, and there are tons of them that a person must fill out before buying insurance, we have made clever. That is, depending on the answer to the previous questions, the following may not be asked. Found a lot of services that pull data about agents, about people, that is, half of the questions can not be asked, because the information is known. Some need to pay. For every question a dollar or two is paid, but we get a form filling.
Continuation of the text version of the podcast - in the coming days.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/249461/
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