Kris Poria, the CEO and co-founder of EarlyBirds, is a successful and high-achieving executive who has coupled a passion for knowledge with a commitment to improving company functioning throughout his career.
Kris has worked in a variety of sectors throughout the world and has both technical and business talents. He must use all of his abilities, including commercial, technical, product management, and customer interaction, as well as marketing and sales, to make EarlyBirds a success. EarlyBirds assists companies in becoming self-learning and accelerating and scaling their innovation capabilities and capacity.
Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between World’s Leaders and Kris Poria:
Brief our audience about your journey as a tech leader. What challenges did you have to face to get where you are today?
I was good at mathematics from primary school itself, but when I joined an English-medium school, I struggled to understand English. On the other hand, I was doing great at the Algebra class, showing my logical capabilities directly related to future technology roles. I started my first business in ICT education but sold my shares to pursue a career as a software engineer, working in various roles across three continents: Asia, Europe, and North America before settling in Australia. I worked in various industries, including running my own business in media and education, before jumping back to assist large product and system integrators such as Fujitsu, Oracle, Unisys, and Here Technologies in engaging key markets and customers, along with completing my MBA from Macquarie Graduate School of Management.
I had experience of engaging with large customers, from sales to delivering various projects and products. When I was working on a large customer transformation program, I realised a gap to connect early adopters (organizations looking for innovations and disruptive solutions) with innovators (startups, scaleups, and mature organizations), and this is where the EarlyBirds idea was born. I was then joined by Jeff Penrose as co-founder, and we launched EarlyBirds.io platform in September 2019.
Describe EarlyBirds offerings that address the needs of your customers.
EarlyBirds assists organisations to become self-learning organizations. To become a self-learning organization, it needs to continuously improve all business functions (not only IT); resolve business and technical challenges as quickly as possible; and take advantage of disruptive innovations, including new business processes and models.
To deliver to the above vision, EarlyBirds offers three key capabilities –
The Challenger Program – Assist organizations to solve their one business or technical challenge at a time but quickly without spending months.
The Explorer Program – Assist organizations to run continuous innovation across all business functions.
The Open Innovation Ecosystem – EarlyBirds platform where customers can search, curate and partner with over 4 million innovators and relevant subject matter experts. Platform also allows stakeholders to collaborate and create a full organizational innovation pipeline.
What are the challenges you and your team at EarlyBirds come across in your day-to-day operations?
The EarlyBirds team is tracking three key areas: 1. Customer engagement and customer success.2. the product roadmap; and 3. the finances. Managing and balancing these on a day-to-day basis is one of the key challenges for me and my team.
What people, what books, what life factors have influenced and impacted you?
My life is influenced by many people, including my family, customers, and people from both business and spiritual backgrounds. I have been a keen reader of technical, business, and spiritual books and learn something new nearly every day.
Describe in detail the values and the work culture that drive EarlyBirds.
The values and the work culture at EarlyBirds are centred around its purpose and delivering value to the three key stakeholders—early adopters, innovators, and subject matter experts (SMEs).
The Purpose of EarlyBirds is to engage society in actionable innovation.
For Early Adopter organisations – EarlyBirds helps them to become self-learning organisations through: continuous improvement across all business functions; resolving business and technical challenges quickly; and exploring disruptive business models, solutions, and innovations.
For Innovator Organisations – EarlyBirds helps them engage with early adopter customers and partners to adopt their solutions and products, creating a revenue pipeline.
For Subject Matter Experts -EarlyBirds provides them with a flexible contract, its business framework, assisted programs, training, and platform to solve challenges and accelerate innovation for a wide range of customers.
Where do you envision yourself being in the long run, and what are your future goals for EarlyBirds?
EarlyBirds would become the global leader in solving wicked problems and a leader in helping organisations become self-learning organizations.
What would be your advice to budding tech leaders?
Bring your passion, vision, and skills together to solve customer challenges. It is important to balance activities and time to make sure you are engaging with your customers, appropriately building a product roadmap and have financials to support your ongoing business.
