Building to success is one matter, but maintaining the level of innovation that brought you to that point is quite another. As years go by, the mark of a company’s success and continued staying power can be measured by obvious parameters: client growth and retention, hiring and of course revenue. But what are the more subtle changes that happen over the course of a startup’s lifetime that remain hidden from the public eye?
Central region Vice President of Engineering, Mike Barinek opened Pivotal Labs in Boulder in 2010, then after three years of steady growth he opened a branch in Denver 2013. Just like the company he’s growing, Barinek’s own role has evolved over time: Barinek went from developing software to developing business and talent for Pivotal Labs.
In just a few years, Pivotal Labs has navigated an ever-evolving tech landscape. First, there was the age of maintaining physical hardware servers for clients, followed by the move to maintain virtual machines and, today, Barinek said the Enterprise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has become the mainstay of the Pivotal Labs business model.
Pivotal Labs sits at the intersection of big data, enterprise Platform-as-a-Service and agile software development. All three pillars of their business work hand-in-hand in a beautiful
feedback loop of building, collecting data, and analyzing. In the era of lean development where everything is set in motion simultaneously this workflow becomes essential to efficient execution and delivery of projects.
These highly scalable, polyglot platforms (can be used with multiple technical languages) allow developers to deploy apps rapidly. Pivotal Labs has adapted well to this model, with clients often seeking Pivotal Labs for its expertise in agile development: “A lot of the success of Pivotal Labs is around the process. We’ll hire great people, but that process takes them to that A+ level.”
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The dynamic nature of the industry has changed the way Barinek builds company talent at Pivotal Labs. Before the primary emphasis was on “tech stacks,” or the coding chops of the job candidate. Now Barinek tells us he has shifted his focus: “The one thing I’m doing differently today when hiring is to identify cultural fit.”
The theory behind this is that while technical prowess can be easily ramped up, cultural aptitude cannot. This, as Barinek puts it, is part of “cracking the code on hiring” and this methodology is crucial to any startup looking to define the culture of their company.
Looking towards the future, Pivotal Labs plans to grow its design team in order to expedite the development process. “Design tends to get out in front of development,” Barinek said. “Lots of growth around design and product management.” An emphasis on user experience in the design process leads, ultimately, to a better product. This fits into Pivotal Lab’s larger strategy of “design inception,” or incorporating UX and persona into the product.
Barinek epitomizes a certain spirit that helped define Pivotal Labs and Colorado as such an ideal place to start a business, and that is how he and the folks at Pivotal Labs are so adamant about sharing their success for writing software. Even though Pivotal Labs has experienced explosive growth since its founding it still integrates seamlessly into the startup community; keep an eye out for Pivots out there at upcoming events like Built in Brews, tech talks, developer meetups (such as the Pivotal Tracker Tech Confluence meetup group), as well as at Galvanize.
