This episode features an interview with Tony Rojas, President of Slalom, a consulting firm focused on technology, strategy, and business transformation. Slalom has organically grown to 8,500 team members in 40 markets and 8 build centers around the world. Prior to Slalom, Tony held several positions including President and Co-CEO at Corbis, a digital media startup by Bill Gates, and he began his career with Deloitte. In this interview, Tony talks about the future of the AI-driven enterprise, cloud-native storage, some ways to improve higher education, and much more.
This episode features an interview with Tony Rojas, President of Slalom, a consulting firm focused on technology, strategy, and business transformation. Slalom has organically grown to 8,500 team members in 40 markets and 8 build centers around the world. Prior to Slalom, Tony held several positions including President and Co-CEO at Corbis, a digital media startup by Bill Gates, and he began his career with Deloitte.
In this interview, Tony talks about the future of the AI-driven enterprise, cloud-native storage, some ways to improve higher education, and much more.
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Steve Hamm: [00:00:00] in your career, you made a transition from an accounting background into Corpus, the visual media company owned by bill page and later the slalom, which is primarily a tech consulting company. How do you think about the narrative arc of your career?
Tony Rojas: [00:00:15] Simply put I'm a builder since graduating graduated college had worked at three companies, Deloitte Corvus, and at Deloitte.
I'm very thankful. I learned my, what I call is my second language, the language of the County and find the efforts in a way it's just another language like French or German or Spanish. And. It was a good building block for me. And again, I'm very thankful at Corbus. We were on a quest that bill Gates to build the world's largest photo archive, uh, take like a visual Wikipedia and now slalom, uh, where I've been for a little over 15 years, it's a different quest build a multigenerational technology consulting firm.
It kind of has a heart and a brain purpose driven values led that whole arc. It's been about building. My dad was a plumber and I guess I'm just a different type of builder.
Steve Hamm: [00:01:14] Oh, that's a good answer at Corbis. You were the CEO and you re you reported directly
Tony Rojas: [00:01:20] to bill Gates.
Steve Hamm: [00:01:21] What was the most important leadership lesson you learned from him?
Tony Rojas: [00:01:27] Greatest skill is the art of listening. And I have to distinguish, there is a difference between listening to respond and listening, to learn, and I have to always practice it. Sometimes I'll want to jump on a question, then I'll cut off a person and he listened impeccably. His skills were world-class. And then when it came time to ask questions, He would laser IDN with the best questions that showed and reflected how he was learning and got us to the next level.
It was really quite astounding.
Steve Hamm: [00:02:03] He kept you on your toes. That's for sure. Now, 15 years ago you left Corbis and you joined slalom. I wanted to know why did you, why did you join slalom? What was it that attracted you friendship?
Tony Rojas: [00:02:16] I was drawn to som by Brad Jackson. Uh, one of the co founders who I'd known since my freshman year at Washington state university.
And I've stayed not only because of my friendship with Brad, but the friendship that I've built with. So many people at slalom that truly and deeply believe in our culture and, you know, making an impact, getting up in the morning and being excited about what you're going to do.
Steve Hamm: [00:02:41] How would you describe the company's culture?
Tony Rojas: [00:02:44] Our culture is one of focusing on learning, not knowing, going into something, kind of with the eyes to look at the world in kind of a new way. And the magic of Psalm what's been created here is everybody in the village contributes what they know. What their experiences are, but they do it in a way that everyone then can benefit.
Steve Hamm: [00:03:10] It's interesting. What you talked about about the learning part of the culture and seeing the world in a new way, because, you know, I think of some of the big management consulting firms that we're not talking tech consulting, but management consulting often they go into their clients with already kind of a framework.
But they, you know, this is how they see the world, and this is the way that it's almost like they take their client and mold the client to their framework. But it sounds like what you're saying is you go in with an open mind and really want to empathize and see the world through their eyes. Is that correct?
Tony Rojas: [00:03:47] Yes. The words that come to me are adaptability and humility. Adaptability for us to go into a particular client in an agnostic way. We're not bringing certain technology and to look at really what is it that they're trying to solve and ask those questions, those hard questions, because sometimes what they've asked us to solve, isn't exactly what they want solved and that adaptability, and to be able to sit in one of our, the best compliments that clients give us is when they sometimes forget that we're.
From outside their own company when they're in a meeting and they don't even realize they don't sit there and look at the person across the table and think slalom, they actually think, well, this person, or this team is part of my team. So that adaptability and the humility part is, you know, we're all on this journey together, whether it's technology or COVID-19.
And so to kind of coming out with an open mind that other people have great answers and to be able to accept those and weave them into what we offer.
Steve Hamm: [00:04:44] So, how do you divide up the executive tasks and responsibilities with your two cofounders? Uh, Brad Jackson and John Tobin.
Tony Rojas: [00:04:54] Uh, so, uh, Brad is your.
Entrepreneur. He creates the vision. He pushes us to help each other, and he's really focused and cares deeply. Brad cares deeply about each person loving their work life at slalom John's passion consultants, consultant he'd loves career development. You'd love thinking about the training that each consultant.
Could have to make them better. And he believes deeply in our core values and his favorite is do what's right. All is now I'm your Jack of all trades master of none. And I love strategy and operations. And in a normal day, I'm focused more on getting better than bigger.
Steve Hamm: [00:05:38] Well, let me tease that out a little bit.
So what do you mean by that?
Tony Rojas: [00:05:41] Yeah, so we're a privately held company focused on being multigenerational and we've been growing organically in double digits and our North of $1.8 billion of revenue. But to be honest, whether we're at 1.8 or 5 billion or 10 billion, My, my core job is actually how to improve our team's experience while they're out small.
So in response to COVID-19 so much of my job right now is communication explaining where we're at, what we're doing, how we're reacting, how we're providing support to each team and individual within the company. Now, with that said, we have aspirations like any firm to make a bigger impact. We're in four countries today.
We have 40 offices. We have 8,500 men and women, and, you know, we've, you know, a crystal ball looking out to 2030. We could be in as many as 15 to 20 countries by then. So we have to prepare for scale, but personally, I enjoy making the experience better. That's where I get most excited.
Steve Hamm: [00:06:54] So you're at about 40 cities.
You work with a wide array of companies, industry giants, to startups, all different industry verticals. What are the most powerful technology and business trends that you're seeing right now?
Tony Rojas: [00:07:08] Number one, priority is speed. Last fall. I was with a small group of leaders from across several companies led by Wharton university professor, and he took us on a personal tour across China, South Korea, Singapore, the speed.
At which innovation was happening in particular in those countries was breathtaking. And with the impact of COVID-19 on all of humanities, all countries and companies now, right. Learning how to adapt speed is so important right now. Just the number one business trend that we're seeing.
Steve Hamm: [00:07:45] So, are you talking about your clients and the speed with which they adopt new technologies?
Or are you also talking about the tech sector and the kind of innovations that it's bringing?
Tony Rojas: [00:07:57] Uh, in, in some ways, both when we were traveling through China, I, I very rarely saw anyone conducting commerce with a currency, uh, significant. Amount of transactions that we did or were done by people. I watch we're all mobile.
And then you come back to the U S and you see people using credit cards, cash, et cetera. And you see how fast that's occurred, you know, from just a decade ago, till now to see people using mobile at such a high. A percentage. Second is in startups. You know, I was impressed with the speed at which they're innovating new companies.
And I usually felt that the U S was, who were the best we innovate the fastest, you know, and I realized. There's a lot of competition out there and it's not just from in Asia. There's, there's a lot of competition globally. I
Steve Hamm: [00:08:56] mean, when I think about the changes that have come with with COVID-19, there are of course, many of them, but one that I think about is a change in the technology, which is the shift to cloud computing.
And my sense is, you know, that was a, that was a big or multiple multi-year shift that was happening very powerful. But my sense is that it's actually accelerating now and I wanted to find out from you, is that what you're seeing and if, and if it is, what's the cause of that. The
Tony Rojas: [00:09:28] migration to cloud has just in the last two to three years, we've been and on the journey for a little over a decade, we were an early partner with AWS, Microsoft Salesforce.
Yeah. And then when snowflake. A couple of years into their journey. And in the last two years, I think it was never about the technology being the inhibitor. It was the resistance to change. It was usually non technology related issues that were impeding change of migration to the cloud and a tipping point happened.
And it happened in different industries and different companies at different paces, but in general, about two to three years ago, that tipping point happened. And all of a sudden the flood Gates just opened up.
Steve Hamm: [00:10:24] Since the COVID-19 there yet another acceleration, because I would think a lot of companies want to, they don't want to, they don't want to spend capital and they can, they don't want to have to buy new computers.
They don't want to have to buy software, new networking equipment. So I would think the, the, the lure of. Doing more computing in the cloud and especially doing more data processing and data management of the cloud would be even more attractive today than it was three months ago. Are you seeing that
Tony Rojas: [00:10:57] that's three highest trends that we're seeing right now is collaboration tools, migration to cloud and data and analytics, getting the information to be able to make faster decisions back to my point of speed earlier.
Steve Hamm: [00:11:12] Now you, you talked about your Alliance with Amazon web services. I've read, you have worked with them to set up large centers for cloud migrations. That's relatively recent, correct?
Tony Rojas: [00:11:26] Yes. And December, 2019, we announced a partnership between slalom and AWS, where we would bring the best of AWS technology.
Slalom's consulting in particular around technology and the AWS ProServe team in an integrated offering where we could address things ranging from business strategy to data services, change management, to transformation services. And we found that. By doing so, uh, the other secret to the success of the launch center is that we're not doing work simply for the customer.
We're doing it with the customer. And that's important because when we leave them with the keys to the car, they, they have familiarity with what was done and they can drive it on their own. You
Steve Hamm: [00:12:24] mentioned snowflake a minute ago, and I believe the Slalom was one of Snowflake's first consulting partners.
Can you kind of take us back down memory lane a little bit there? Why did you see them as a good partner and what kind of things have you done together?
Tony Rojas: [00:12:41] The story of our partnership with snowflake begins in 2016 and like any good client story. I love it. When the roots lie in client demands. And as we were seeing across the industries, we were traveling, going into our different offices.
We'd ask our internal teams, you know, what are, what are some of their clients talking about? You know, what trends are out there and what partners and over and over, we kept on hearing about snowflake. And then we were like, okay, let's unpack that. What about snowflake? Well, it's their cloud native data warehouse solution.
Okay, great. What specifically? Well, it takes advantage of the separation of compute and storage. And so that's where the roots lie was really the demand from the clients. And we also had. At slalom relationships where the initial leadership team with that strong relationship and those clients' stories, it was a really easy decision for us to focus more of our attention on developing and expanding our partnership with snowflake.
Steve Hamm: [00:13:44] So what's a typical kind of engagement. I mean, is it usually your customers already have stuff like they want yet to work on some integrations or you send, this is their way, or they send business your way.
Tony Rojas: [00:13:59] Many times the clients already started on the platform when they've engaged slalom. However, when the decision on technology hasn't been made snowflake lends itself very well when helping clients do two things, building a culture of data and second modernizing their data platform to make more data accessible and available.
And that first item that's really, I think an opportunity for snowflake shine, where a client's really trying to build that culture and they don't look at it just as a tool. But they're on that journey themselves. Now, our clients appreciate the fact that we approach this agnostic and there are programs that we've developed.
One of them is called moonshot and it's in coordination with snowflake, AWS, and Tableau, and clients love this because they can see the clients partners working together to bring them a cohesive solution. And a message. And then to bring the best out versus the client, having to stitch that story together on their own.
And so we see these types of partnerships is actually being a strong benefit to customers that we mutually serve.
Steve Hamm: [00:15:18] Now, one of the strengths of snowflake is the, the way it enables. Their clients or their customers, your clients to share data with one another. So it's not one of the attractions of you. You said you have so many customers, you know, so many clients who, who already have self-like, is there kind of a natural kind of plugging in business partnerships with one another that just comes out of that, of that capability?
Tony Rojas: [00:15:43] Absolutely. Well, snowflake like makes it easier to provide a cloud native and cloud agnostic. Whether that's on the AWS Azure GCP. So it's scalable, it's secure agile data platform for animals workloads. You also mentioned the sharing. So snowflakes data marketplace makes it easier for the sharing and monetizing your data.
Or utilizing shared data from others. And then the data exchange makes it easier to securely share data outside the four walls of your business with your suppliers, customers, and employees. So, you know, the, the sharing of the information is, is very valuable as well as the protection of that same data.
Steve Hamm: [00:16:26] So one of Snowflake's core attractions, one of it's, one of its big marketing pitches to his customers is that the customers can get started right away, getting value out of snowflake, you know, um, you know, even with a credit card, they can, they can be on, they can be doing analytics. So what value added does a consulting company like slalom bring to the situation?
Why are you needed
Tony Rojas: [00:16:49] a picture is worth a thousand words. But you need the right keywords to find the picture, to tell a story of data can tell a thousand stories, but you need the right skills to tell the story. So often FOM has that deep technical expertise because of our work across industries, seeing how different firms are approaching similar issues with regard to data.
And my career has been about. Data given my, the language of finance and accounting. How do you give access to the data? How do you understand the data? How do you trust it? How do you govern it? How do you protect it? How do you surface it in the right way? And then ultimately use the data to make decisions.
And so while a client can absolutely flip on snowflake and work it, I believe that there's a way to even get a deeper value from those that have been working cross industry. Or within an industry, figure out how to bring the best dashboards and data visualizations, how to use machine learning and AI to help you understand the predictive value that you're sitting on right now.
And that's where I think slalom can make a difference and bring that added value to a client.
Steve Hamm: [00:18:05] Yeah. We talked briefly and ended a goal about launch centers. The thing you do with Amazon web services, but I know you also have these regional build centers where you work with customers. These are innovation hub, but what exactly goes on there?
And of course, what is, again, it's probably not a place Seymour, it's probably a practice, but if you could describe and contrast that with the launch centers, I think that'd be helpful.
Tony Rojas: [00:18:29] So our build centers. Are comprised of around 1300 technologists representing about 20% of our business with 40 markets worldwide.
We have eight build centers and a relatively newer. Offering is what we call slalom, build edge locations, where we have a small pot of team. And in some of our local markets where we don't have a full fledge build center, 95% of the time we're creating custom technology solutions. These are for enterprise.
Or mid-market clients where they want to solve a problem. And they want our team to sit side by side with them when we could do that, teaching them how to build in the same way. And now in a virtual world, we're creating velocity for them to get these major initiatives completed, accelerated faster than what they anticipated.
And then with the solution that they can then take on themselves out afterwards and operate.
Steve Hamm: [00:19:31] Now I know that you have a deep relationship with Washington state university. Where'd you graduated from you're a Washington grad. You're a long time trustee of the university foundation. And you're the chairman of the board of trustees.
Were you involved in two things? The foundation and the university trustees, or is it one
Tony Rojas: [00:19:50] Washington state university has a foundation that's been in existence for over 30 years and I was the chair of that organization. For several years and been on the honor to be a part of Washington state university since graduating.
Steve Hamm: [00:20:06] Are you still a trustee and the chairman of the board of trustees, or
Tony Rojas: [00:20:10] I am still as of today, I'm still a trustee and I have rolled off as the chair of the trustees.
Steve Hamm: [00:20:17] All right. So as. You know, someone deeply involved in the university of foundation and in raising money for the university, your city, you must do a lot of deep thinking about the future of public education of public higher education.
And I'm sure the culvert thing is, is raising nuclear questions about it. So what. W, what are you thinking is the future of public universities and especially what role can technology play in helping them be flexible and sustainable.
Tony Rojas: [00:20:51] All universities are not immune to the impacts of COVID-19 for private universities.
They're going to have to think carefully about how they distinguish themselves from other institutions. If you were going to an Ivy league school, but you now cannot actually physically attend that school, the caliber of your academic team and your online experience has to be worth the differential that you're going to pay.
To graduate from one of those schools versus let's say a larger public university in any state. Right? How do you differentiate? And so it's gotta be on that academic and on that virtual experience, if you can't be on premises and if you can be. At the actual university itself, those universities are not prepared to have that freshman class with a thousand people in that one big hall.
They're going to have to look at combination of students rotating into those classes or from their dorm or student living to join online. And so the access of technology for online learning. Plus the use of technology for the I'll call it the rotation and the scheduling of classes and facilities to support, um, the group and the nurturing of these men and women is, is paramount for public universities.
They'll also be faced with a significant financial challenge due to state funding with the drop in business drops revenue in income with the drop in revenue income, you're going to reduce how much is actually earmarked towards the different universities in the state of Washington. Those are they're particularly sensitive because under our constitution, K through 12 is protected public universities in the state of Washington are not.
And so with the drop off in revenue, it's going to impact how much money is available. On this next biennium, and that will be similar to public universities in other States too. Now, luckily Washington state had a headstart with its online program. They had pioneered an MBA program in us news and world reports ranks and in the top 25 online.
And so they had that backbone, not every university had that set up. And so they're in the process now really trying to focus on their technologies for online learning collaboration and other tools. Yeah,
Steve Hamm: [00:23:31] no, you could you look around with this code thing and you know, there are very few positives and there are some, there are a few positives, like we won't be, we won't be carrying cash around, but most of the things are really serious threats to.
Um, the way we live and, you know, but I think when I go back to a significant positive would be like what you say with, with the need for speed. And I also think that need for just understanding what's really happening and adapting to it quickly being resilient is going to be another value that people recognize.
And I think technology is going to play an important role in that as well.
Tony Rojas: [00:24:14] Aspect that you just triggered was in each state. There's a land grant institution in the state of Washington. The land grant is Washington state university. And then, uh, the 18 hundreds, Abraham Lincoln signed the bill was called the moral act.
And the moral act was really transformational at the time. Because up until that point, it was really with money that went to universities and the, the moral act basically say, listen, we're going to give a parcel land each state. To, to plant the seed of an institution, a university focused on the tree.
You mean of men and women in, in ways that are seen, were on scene at that time. And it was, it truly was transformational. It changed the nature of higher education. And I think there've been other catalysts. Over the decades. And the most recent one now is obviously going to be COVID-19. Every single institution is going to have to think, how do they best support their state and their constituency?
Steve Hamm: [00:25:13] Well, actually that may trigger something in me. I mean, what are positive from this is that it forces everybody to rethink the way they're doing things. And we all know how. Persistent legacies are and how difficult it is to get out of a rut. And sometimes the rut that you're in is, is this success rut.
You always done it in a certain way, and that it's very hard to think about changing that typically until somebody forces you to. But I think it will be interesting here to see if people really do think deeply about what they're doing and why they're doing them, and actually really give a tuneup to. A lot of the systems and processes that we're, that we're using modernizing, I guess would be the term.
Tony Rojas: [00:26:00] So the, the change in the universities has a bigger, personal impact for my wife and I we're sending our oldest daughter McKenna. Oh, with a little bit of a smile, a little bit of tears to wash this, the university this fall. And while it may not be the same experience that I had. When I was there because we lived in a covert, right.
I am excited Canada as well as many others. And to see what the woman she becomes after four years there. So I'm excited. She picked it. There might've been a little influence on my part, but I was really proud that day. She let us know just recently.
Steve Hamm: [00:26:36] Well, that's good. That's heartwarming. So I have one last question for you, and I want you to put on your visionary cap for a minute and look out five, 10 years, however long, makes sense, and tell us how you see the use of data and data
Tony Rojas: [00:26:56] as COVID-19 began to impact all of humanity. And the virus crossed the doorsteps of Washington state. Just right here outside of Seattle and a place called Kirkland was an epicenter at a local assisted living facility. And within sat week, we saw two examples. That's how data and data. Yeah. We're changing society.
One of them was at the university of Washington, lesser known Institute for health metrics and evaluation. And overnight you heard from our president, other world government institutions, health agencies, and the general public. We're quoting the Institute for health and metrics and evaluations stats on the virus.
That's at a university level. But what I found was really fascinating is a story that probably is only known in Seattle. I live in a place called Mercer isle. There was a 17 year old Mercer Island, high school students that my daughter needs. He was self-taught using the internet and he built a website to share information real time on coronavirus.
And his website was being seen by millions. And so when you ask the question, putting the, you know, looking ahead five years, I really do find there are the intersection like a Venn diagram, one circles, humanity. The second circle is data and technology. And the third circle is speed. I think that that is a trend that you're going to see in the next three years as evidenced by these two examples, I shared with you on the university of Washington, the 17 year old here, it was about humanity.
It was about data and technology. And it was about speed of getting that information out and overnight these two websites were being used by millions.
Steve Hamm: [00:28:55] Yeah. It goes to show the power of data sharing as well. Tony. I want to thank you so much for your time today. You know, your stories and insights about what you do with data and how you clients, a work with data has been really fascinating.
And I also feel like your, either your insights into higher education have been really amazing as well. And I, you know, there. Some scary things going on there. But I think that also there's a lot of hope. And, and the fact that you send your daughter to your Alma mater with a lot of hope for her future, I think it says a lot.
Tony Rojas: [00:29:31] Absolutely. My pleasure. I appreciate your questions. I look forward to opportunities someday in the future. If you're crossing through Seattle to meet then until then,
Steve Hamm: [00:29:42] good. Yeah, that'd be fantastic. We could meet in person someday and the old days, that seemed pretty simple, right?
Tony Rojas: [00:29:52] Well, until then, good health to you and your family.
Steve Hamm: [00:29:55] Thanks for the offer