Frank D’Souza
Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Recognize
If I look back over the 26 years at Cognizant – the core asset, the core strength, the source of almost everything that we did and all of the successes that we had – it was the culture. There was nothing more powerful than the culture.
Summary
This week, Alan was joined by Frank D’Souza, a pioneer in tech services in the digital age and thought leader in applying emerging technologies. Frank is the co-founder and managing partner of Recognize, a technology investment platform based in New York which closed its $1.3 billion maiden fund in 2022.
Before Recognize, Frank co-founded Cognizant Technology Solutions, the multinational technology services company. During his 26 years at the company, including 12 as CEO, Frank helped scale Cognizant to over 280,000 employees with more than $16 billion in revenue.
During this first part of a two-part conversation, Alan explores with Frank the technology entrepreneur’s global upbringing as the son of an Indian diplomat, early exposure to computers and programming, and journey from Carnegie Mellon MBA student to CEO of a leading technology services provider.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
Frank D’Souza is a technologist, investor, entrepreneur, tech services pioneer, and thought leader in applying emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, to create new business opportunities. He is co-founder and managing partner of Recognize, a technology investment platform. Leveraging his experience leading successful businesses, Frank helps Recognize portfolio companies grow purposefully and operate seamlessly. Prior to Recognize, Frank co-founded and served as CEO of Cognizant Technology Solutions, a global multinational technology services company. In his 26 years at the company, including 12 as CEO, Frank helped scale Cognizant to over 280,000 employees with more than $16 billion in revenue. Frank is regularly consulted by leaders, boards, and the media for his understanding of the human dimension of advanced technologies and their impact across industries. Through Recognize, Frank convenes the CEO Innovation Network, an invite-only group dedicated to mentoring and connecting the next generation of tech services chief executives.
Frank serves as chairman of the board of Ciklum, a leading custom product engineering company, and TORC, a specialized network of nearshore remote software developers. He also serves as a director of Blend360, a premier data science solutions provider, and MongoDB, a software company that offers a modern general-purpose database platform. Frank is a senior advisor to Banco Santander where he was instrumental in incubating its best-in-class digital payments solutions provider, PagoNxt. Frank previously served as a fellow of the World Economic Forum and chairman of its IT and Electronics Governors Community. He is a trustee and alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University and advisory board member of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He previously served as a board director of General Electric. Frank earned a BBA from the University of Macau and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business.
Episode Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
I'm joined today by a pioneer in tech services in the digital age, a thought leader in applying emerging technologies, and a true global leader. Frank D'Souza is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Recognize, a technology investment platform based in New York, which closed its maiden fund in 2022.
Before Recognize, Frank co-founded Cognizant Technology Solutions, the multinational technology services company. During his 26 years at the company, including 12 as CEO, Frank helped scale Cognizant to over 280,000 employees with more than $16 billion in revenue. Under his leadership, he transformed Cognizant from a 50-person team into a Fortune 200 company and industry leader.
Outside of Recognize, Frank regularly lends his expertise to companies, organizations, and educational institutions around the world. He is a trustee of Carnegie Mellon University, board member of MongoDB, adviser to Santander and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and former fellow of the World Economic Forum. Frank is a technologist, investor, and entrepreneur. And also I should confess a dear friend. I'm thrilled to have him with us today to explore his wide reaching career, his views on AI and other advanced technologies, and his reflections on leadership.
Frank, welcome to “Leadership Matters.” It is a pleasure to have you on, and I'm curious if I got all that right. Because I'm always with you concerned that I may have not gotten it all right, because there's so many wonderful ways to describe and things to say about you.
Frank D'Souza
Alan, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. And you were too generous with your introduction. Thank you.
Alan Fleischmann
Well I could have said so much more. Let's start with a little bit of your early life. You have had a very unique and global upbringing, upbringing, you are the son of an Indian diplomat, Placido D'Souza, tell us more about your mom and dad, and life around the house growing up.
Frank D'Souza
I was really lucky. My dad, as you said, was a diplomat, he joined the Indian Foreign Service, right around 1953, shortly after India became independent from the British, and he served as a career diplomat for 40 years. And he and my mom were our true North's in so many ways.
The two of them built a life around two things: the service of the country and their family. These were their two strong pillars. I had three siblings, and we traveled with my parents, everywhere, every three years in a new country, every three years, learning how to adapt. I've lived in 11 countries. I've been educated in Africa and Central America and the Caribbean, in India, in China and the United States. My parents took us everywhere; they put us in the local schools. They wanted us to really integrate and understand the local cultures, and, if that meant we had to adapt and learn, learn the languages, learn the new cultures, and obviously make new friends, well, then that's what it took. We learned to love the world and we learned to embrace change. It was a remarkable way to grow up.
Alan Fleischmann
It's so amazing to hear, 11 countries, and to think that you were actually in the local school system, not separated off within the diplomatic community. I think of you as a multiculturalist, as somebody who not only speaks multiple languages, but understands multiple cultures. Was that a great experience for you growing up? It obviously changed your worldview to who you are today, but I imagine it must have been difficult also, all that moving around, kind of like saying goodbye all the time, not just say hello.
Frank D'Souza
It was really rough doing it growing up. As you said, every three years, uprooting yourself, having to make new friends. The local schools were great, you got to meet people, but at the same time, my education is the series of discontinuous experiences and bits of knowledge that I learned because the curriculums are different in every country. There was no continuity.
But now, with the benefit of perspective, when I look back on it, I had an opportunity to see the world at a time when that was almost impossible for many, many people in the world.
I think we forget that even today, less than 4% of the world's population lives in a country outside of their country of birth. So even today, it's a relatively rare thing for people to travel outside of their home country. When I was growing up, it was incredibly rare, and so, that was just such a privilege, such an opportunity for me, and my siblings.
The ability to see the world, to learn how to change, to adapt to new cultures, to work across boundaries, these are all things that I would never have had a chance to experience otherwise. Not to mention, Alan, you know, just the skills I picked up along the way, the hard skills.
So I remember, as a 13 year old coming to New York City for the first time with my father, it was the dawn of the PC era, and that's when I taught myself how to program at the urging of my dad. In so many ways that one experience, that almost one random coincidence of being in New York at that moment in time, changed the entire trajectory of my life.
Alan Fleischmann
The skill set, you got, I mean, the idea of I mean, resilience is an overused word, but you must have, have curated, a sense of resilience and amazing curiosity. If you didn't already have [curiosity], it had to be curated within you as well as empathy, the understanding of different cultures, because you were right there.
Those are amazing skills to develop, even when you're born with it –which I suspect you are, and were– I imagined they were honed through those years as well.
Frank D'Souza
That's probably right. Although you know, when you're living it, you don't think of it that way you think of it as you know, making it through the next day, or making it through the next month, and trying to figure out how you're going to be liked at school and make friends and how you're gonna pass the exams or, you know, make it from one grade to the next.
And so you're thinking more about the day to day, but you're absolutely right, the thing I would probably emphasize most is this idea of empathy. This idea that, through all of that time, those places, those friends and those faces, you do get this sense that the world is a very uneven place. Even today, that continues to be true.
But also, interestingly, this idea that despite the unevenness of the world, at the end of the day, people are far more similar than they are different. We all wake up in the morning. We all want to make a better life for ourselves, for our families; we want to make a living; we want to leave the world a little bit better than when we came in. Those things are largely common across the world, and growing up and having the opportunity to experience that at a very young age, through the eyes of other people that were my age, classmates and other friends, was very powerful and very formative for me.
Alan Fleischmann
Were you in a certain high school that kind of stood at a certain interest? Did you find certain studies that you liked? Were there mentors along the way that kind of steered you in certain directions, especially in technology in business?
Frank D'Souza
As I said, when I was a middle schooler here in New York City. I came to New York in the seventh grade. My dad was a very, very voracious reader. I remember he cut out an article from the newspaper, handed it to me, and said, Look, Frank, here's this thing that this newspaper article is talking about; it's called a personal computer. I don't really understand what it is, but I have this sense from reading this article that it's important and is going to be important to the future of the world. You should try to understand more about what it is. And it turns out that right around that time.
Alan Fleischmann
That's wonderful. And, then you just stayed in touch for a long time?
Frank D'Souza
Unfortunately, I've lost touch with him. Maybe you'll hear this podcast and he'll or our days together and
Alan Fleischmann
The reunion will begin. So tell us about Carnegie Mellon, what made you decide Carnegie Mellon? It's such an extraordinary place. It makes such sense you would be there but I'm looking at it through the lens of where you are today. Tell me, how was that tough decision to come to the States to study and to get your MBA made? Why [Carnegie Mellon], and how did you decide?
Frank D'Souza
Coming back to the United States was not hard at all. I had fallen in love with New York. It was such a formative time for me, I knew I wanted to come back. After having spent almost five years in Hong Kong, I applied to Carnegie Mellon. And it was a very specific reason why I applied to Carnegie Mellon. Believe it or not, I came to Carnegie Mellon, over 30 years ago now to study artificial intelligence.
I had read a lot about the work of Ray Kurzweil, who is still a towering figure in the field of AI today. But in those days, Ray had been doing a lot of work with Stevie Wonder in the mid 1970s. He created a reading machine for people who were visually impaired, and essentially had a scanner and a text to speech synthesizer so that somebody could put a document down on the scanner, and it would read it to you. And I think the story goes that Stevie Wonder saw a demonstration or heard about this machine on the Today Show, and that began a long relationship between Ray Kurzweil and Stevie Wonder. And I think later on, Ray and Stevie collaborated on building this very famous synthesizer, the gay 250 keyboard, which was the first music synthesizer that could reproduce the sound of a grand piano accurately.
I had read about this. I had started to get some early appreciation of artificial intelligence through that work through the work of Ray Kurzweil, and CMU, by this point, had established themselves by far and away as one of the leading places in the world where artificial intelligence research was going on. And so that was what drew me to Carnegie Mellon. It's what drew me to Pittsburgh. I came without ever having visited the campus, but just based on the reputation. I met a few CMU alumni in Hong Kong and I knew I was going to love the place. I was thrilled when they actually gave me an offer of admission. I showed up in Pittsburgh in 1990. It was everything that I thought it was going to be and more.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell us a little bit more about that. What made it so special?
Frank D'Souza
Well, you know, when I first showed up, Alan, I knew it was a place that was doing incredible work in artificial intelligence.
Alan Fleischmann
It is something, by the way, that you've been working on in the area of AI since 1990. I mean, that's stunning, when you consider how present is in our minds [today], but honestly, you’ve heard about it for years, [even though] it was always way out in the future. In the last year [AI has entered] the consciousness of most, in your case, it's been in your consciousness now for several decades.
Frank D'Souza
Sometimes we forget, Alan. This happens with technologies, there's long periods of time when all technologies sort of just go along, at a relatively low pace of innovation, a relatively low pace of public awareness. And then these technologies tend to hit these moments, these points of inflection, as we've seen with artificial intelligence, really, in the last few years, when they really become mainstream.
But just to make that point, I remember in 1990, on the campus at Carnegie Mellon, there were already self-driving cars that were perhaps not very good compared to the cars we have today. But you know, in 1990, we were already thinking about how to make cars that drive themselves. And we think of that as a relatively recent phenomenon, but it's been in people's minds and in the research labs for a long, long time.
I came to Carnegie Mellon, expecting to find a world class school in computer science and engineering, of course, I came to the business school. But I think what I didn't really appreciate and have come to love about Carnegie Mellon, is the fact that it is such an interdisciplinary place. And it is such a broad set of academic disciplines. So not only do you have engineering and computer science, information systems, but you also have incredible schools of fine arts, an incredible School of Humanities and Social Sciences, you know, really leading edge thinking around public policy. CMU really, really encourages interdisciplinary research and interdisciplinary study. The idea of bringing expertise from various fields, to tackle incredibly complex problems.
You think about CMU as a working human computer interaction, which is dope, sort of blending computers, computer science, design, psychology, social sciences together to think about how to improve usability and functionality of computer interfaces. You think about robotics, which is, you know, kind of the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, computer science, of course, artificial intelligence. You think about, you know, energy in the environment, which is kind of a mix of engineering, public policy, architecture, business, all of these difficult problems, all of the great opportunities, perhaps always have been at the intersection of these traditional disciplines. And having this broad Canvas at Carnegie Mellon, where students and researchers can work in interdisciplinary ways is what is truly remarkable about the place.
Alan Fleischmann
You could have gone a more traditional, more geeky route of just technology and research. But, you went a different route. You went more the business side, bringing all acumen with you, but you I guess you before kindness that there was a period where you were in Dun and Bradstreet, right, so tell us a little bit of that. What made you decide why you were at Carnegie Mellon, you're gonna go into more business. And then obviously, I want to get into the, you know, the creation of kindness as well.
Frank D'Souza
I had a very, if you want to use your word, very geeky career up until coming to Carnegie Mellon. I was doing work in Hong Kong, the work we were doing was very low level coding, at the machine level in many cases, and so, the idea of coming to Carnegie Mellon was to round out, to broaden my perspective, and so I came to the business school. But I came to Carnegie Mellon because I still want to keep my fingers in the technology arena. It was the right balance for me.
When I graduated from Carnegie Mellon, from the business school, Dun and Bradstreet was very appealing to me because it had those elements of course. In those days, Dun and Bradstreet was one of the largest information services companies in the world. Dun and Bradstreet own some of the largest data sets across multiple industries in the world. Technology and information and data was the core business of Dun and Bradstreet. Because of that, the use of technology, all kinds of technology to deliver Dun and Bradstreet products and services was core. And so that drew me to the company, it was an opportunity for me to use both my technology background, but also my newly acquired MBA skills. The program in which Dun and Bradstreet hired me was this MBA development program, which was a terrific program. So all of that lined up. And it was almost a no brainer for me when I got the offer from Dun and Bradstreet that I would take it.
Alan Fleischmann
That's cool. And it was and it sounds like it was a great experience.
Frank D'Souza
It was a terrific experience. That was the genesis of Cognizant. So the story goes that I was hired by Dun and Bradstreet in this management development program, where they would sponsor, and hire a bunch of MBAs. We were sponsored by the CEO’s office. Every six months, they would send us on a new assignment for two years, so what we do for assignments is different from Bradstreet operating companies. At the end of each assignment, we had to call back to the CEOs office and give them our observations of what we had learned and seen. So after having done a couple of assignments– my first assignment was in Boston, my second assignment was actually in Frankfurt, Germany– I called back to the CEOs office.
I said to my boss, the woman who ran this program “you know, I've noticed in the last year that I've been at Dun and Bradstreet that we're building software, in all these expensive parts of the world, we've got a development shop in, in Manhattan, we've got a development shop in Paris, and Frankfurt and Chicago, and I think it'd be a good idea if we thought about building software in India. And she wrote it down, I assume, and we hung up the phone. A couple of days later, I got a call from the CEO’s office to say that the CEO of the company wanted to talk to me.
In those days, I was 20 something years old, and for the CEO of a company to call you, I thought I was gonna get fired or something. It took two days for that call to actually happen. And when he called me, Bob Wiseman, who turned out to be another one of those mentors for me over time, called and said, “Listen, Frank, I heard you had this idea that we should build software in India. I'd like your third assignment to be to go to India, and establish a delivery center Development Center for Dun and Bradstreet in India, so we can build software there.”
And I did that as my third assignment. And that little thing that we built was the genesis of Cognizant ,and that's the beans organization that eventually grew and became Cognizant Technology Solutions.
Alan Fleischmann
Were you and when you did that, was it a little bit like your day job? You're dealing with the day job working hard at Dun and Bradstreet and then coming up with this concept of the side or is it you know, pretty quick that you realize you had something here that I wanted to get going?
Frank D'Souza
It was the original organization that we set up. Setting it up was my full time job. It was my third assignment. We set it up as a subsidiary of Dun and Bradstreet in India, and we operated it for our customers, if you will. It was very much a full time focus.
What we realized, though, very quickly, maybe a year or two into the journey was that we had built something that had relevance far beyond the Dun and Bradstreet customer base. In fact, if we didn't do something, if we didn't expand our focus beyond the Dun and Bradstreet group of companies, we would, we would risk losing our great people and we would saturate our internal market. When you saturate your internal market, we worry that growth would slow. If growth slowed, we would not have the conditions to attract and retain great talent.
At that point, we went back to the CEO of Dun Bradstreet, Bob Wiseman, and we said, we made the case to him, that we should start to offer our services outside of the Dun and Bradstreet Group of Companies. And he fortunately agreed, and we did that. A few years later, having done that relatively successfully, we spun the company out of that in Bradstreet, first through a public offering, and then eventually through a full split off of the business. And that's that was the journey from which Cognizant went from being a fully owned subsidiary of that in Bradstreet to an independent publicly traded company.
Alan Fleischmann
And then you were on that journey. You were a co-founder, and then eventually became CEO 10 years later in 2007
Frank D'Souza
A little bit more than 10 years into it, yes, I became CEO in 2007. I did a whole bunch of things at the company before that. It was great. I had a chance to work. My two predecessor CEOs, I had a chance to work directly with them at Cognizant. They were again terrific. Both of them were terrific mentors for me, very different people, very different personalities, very different skills and capabilities. It taught me different things about running the business. I think it was closer to 12 or 13, if memory serves me correctly, to work directly for these two CEOs. It was almost a second MBA. In many ways, they say nothing really prepares you for the CEO job. But I think working directly for these two terrific human beings helped me to whatever extent possible be ready when I took the CEO job in 2007.
Alan Fleischmann
And what was the adjustment like for you, even though you were right there on the frontlines with them? It is a different job, being CEO, as you know. Was there an adjustment to when you actually took over the new responsibilities?
Frank D'Souza
Absolutely. The CEO job is incredibly unique. It's fair to say that, while you can do some things to prepare yourself for the job, once you're in the chair, it is a whole new experience. It's a very lonely experience. I think that's been said before of the CEO job. It's the first time in most people's careers where you have no peers in your job. Until you get to the CEO job, you always have peers that you can, you can relate to, you can speak to, you can perhaps compare yourself to, once you get to the CEO job, you have no peers in the organization. So that creates a situation where it is a lonely job. And so it becomes important to to take the steps to surround yourself with the right people and do the things that you have to do to be successful in that job.
Alan Fleischmann
Was it clear on that 10+ year journey that you were going to become CEO? When did it become evident to you that you were likely to become the CEO? Or is it one of those things where you divide and conquer, and you know that Frank you’re third up?
Frank D'Souza
Alan, it was never, it was never clear to me that I was going to be the CEO, that I was in line to be the CEO. I will say genuinely, that when the then Chairman of the board, John Klein, who was another great mentor of mine, came to me and said, the board was considering making me the CEO, my initial reaction, candidly, was Jonathan, I don't think I'm ready for this, you probably ought to go find somebody else.
But, to John's credit, and, –I'm grateful to him– John pushed me and said, “Look, we think you're ready, or that you're likely going to be ready. And you know, we'd like to develop you.” And so that was about a year. That [development] process, before I took the job.
But I really never thought about it. I spent most of that time just absorbing and learning and being happy with doing interesting work, and having new experiences and growing a business and growing a company. I considered it a real, not just a privilege, but just an incredible journey and an incredible learning opportunity. So I was focused on just doing a good job and making the company great, and not really thinking about, you know, the next career step for me at all.
Alan Fleischmann
During that period, before you became CEO, what would you say were some of the greatest achievements that you and, no man is an island, so your team, your colleagues created? And then obviously, when you're CEO, the same.
Frank D'Souza
There's so many things. And as you said, no man is an island. The team that we built was fantastic. Before I became CEO, and then certainly after, what stands out to me even today was the quality of the team, you know, that we assembled. And the people, we'll talk more about that.
Equally importantly, Alan, was the culture. We spent a lot of time curating an incredible culture: a culture of empowerment, a culture of entrepreneurship, a culture of intrinsic motivation, culture, through client centricity. We spent a lot of time on that, and when I look back on that, I think more tangibly about getting the company, transforming the company from something from a business that served, and that was an internal captive and internal shop to a business that could actually serve third party customers,
The process of building that engine of winning real third party customers, learning how to compete in the marketplace, and eventually, in some sense all of that culminating in a successful IPO in 1998, I think all of those were very essential. Those were key milestones, formative moments in the company's history.
Alan Fleischmann
When you actually went from being CEO, not being CEO, to becoming CEO, several of your colleagues that you had grown up with, all of a sudden reported to you. I'm curious how that transition took place. And then also, how did you build that kind of league of trust around you as well?
Frank D'Souza
You know, I would say a couple of things. I think all of us believed that –and certainly for me when I took the CEO job– the critical element, maybe the central element of success in our business, in the services business, as a new, relatively young CEO, for me was to surround myself with people that were much smarter than I was. I took real steps and made a real effort to do that.
What you realize when you do that is that– there’s this proverb that iron sharpens iron– I think when you do that, you make each other better every day. You're a team of really smart, driven, motivated people. There's no better feeling than looking back on the day, and [saying] I had a chance to work with incredibly smart people, people that are smarter than I am, to drive to some business outcome. That's a great feeling and a great sensation.
When I took the CEO job, there were a group of us that had been critical to running the business, the core leadership team. And I remember, as we were looking forward and planning the journey ahead, the company was just about a billion dollars in revenue; we just passed the billion dollar mark. And we said, “if we're going to take this into a two and a three and a $5 billion company, conventional wisdom is that there are management teams that are good for certain phases of a company's journey.”
There's this conventional wisdom that startup teams are great for the startup phase, but aren't necessarily great for the scale up phase, and so on and so forth. And, we wanted to be the team. And we kind of explicitly made agreement amongst ourselves that we wanted to try to break that paradigm. We said, “Why should that be the case?”
If we can consistently learn and adopt a growth mindset and constantly make sure that we're challenging our own comfort zones and our own blind spots, then we should be the team that can grow the business and stay with the business over the long term. In fact, that is what happened. The team that was there when I, when I took the CEO job largely stayed. Of course, we added to the team over time as the company grew, as we needed to bring in new skills and capabilities and so on, but the core team remained consistent.
Throughout my 12 years or so, as a CEO, there was a core group of people that really built and grew and grew with the organization and grew the organization [itself].
Alan Fleischmann
After 12 years as CEO, it cannot have been easy to move on from Cognizant in 2019. How did you know that it was time for your next chapter? And how was that received?
Frank D'Souza
It was just time. I had been at the company, 26 years. It had been 12 years in the CEO chair. I had been at Cognizant, from my mid 20s to my early 50s, and I said to myself, “it's time to write another chapter.”
I didn't know what that chapter would be. Stepping down was obviously bittersweet. It's very hard to step away from something that you've done for 26 years of your life.
Alan Fleischmann
I would argue in your case, hard because a big part of your legacy there was building a great culture, which is not an easy thing to do when you've got a nearly 300,000 person company. When people talk about you behind your back, they say you were your leader, who really did believe in creating a one of a kind culture, which had to be so hard to move on from.
Frank D'Souza
It was Alan, and, if I look back over the 26 years at Cognizant, the core asset, the core strength, the source of almost everything that we did, and all of the successes we had was the culture, there was nothing more powerful than the culture.
We made enormous efforts from the top down, from the bottom up, to protect the culture, to grow it, to cultivate it, to be explicit about it in so many different ways.
Just as a side note, you know, I have this model of heroes, rituals and legends, which is what we used to propagate the culture. We strongly believe that culture is demonstrated and propagated in an organization and maybe even in a nation through your heroes, your rituals and your legends. We were very careful about how we created heroes, how we built culture into our rituals, and the stories that we told around the company, about the culture. And through this framework of heroes, rituals and legends, we discovered, I think, a model of scaling culture.
Through all that rapid growth, just to put it into perspective, the last full year that I was [at Cognizant] was 2018, we hired 75,000 people in that one year. To be able to scale at that level, and yet preserve the culture was really one of the secret sauces of the company. It continues to be a weapon of any service organization; how do you build a really, truly strong culture that unifies and binds people together, so they do the right thing, without you having to tell them what the right thing to do is?
Alan Fleischmann
Amazing. And then you went from there to start with Charles Phillips and David Wasserman. And Charles has been on the show here as well, at Recognize, which is taking a lot of the best principles and know how that I think you and your colleagues got from being in leadership positions elsewhere, to create scale in another platform. You raised an extraordinary amount of interest, partnerships and capital, you've gotten amazing portfolio companies. But that's a whole different world. I mean, you're a CEO. I think of you as a CEO, I always will. But you're bringing those principles to the job of being a partner and co-founder of Recognize. I'm curious what those leadership principles are, and then obviously, why Recognize?
Frank D'Souza
Well, you know, Alan, I think that if you go back to the core of your question. As I look back on my time at Cognizant, there are a few things that stand out: the things that gave me the most joy, most pleasure. And I think it's the following.
It was this ability or the fact that we enabled others to have dramatic success. So during the time I was at Cognizant, I think our estimate is that about a million employees came through our doors. We had 200, and almost 300,000 employees when I left. But of course, with employee attrition and turnover, people coming in and out. I think over the 26 years I was there, about a million people came through our doors and in some senses. We created economic opportunities. We created other kinds of opportunities for those people.
We also created a tremendous program at Cognizant of giving back to the societies around the world, where the company operated, through our employee volunteering programs through our corporate social responsibility programs.
The last point I would add, in terms of enabling others to have success is the fact that we created the leaders of the future. If you look at today, there's at least a dozen Cognizant alumni that are CEOs of substantial businesses around the world. And so the first, sort of joy that I had was this idea of enabling others to have success.
Equally was this idea that you've touched on, which is the opportunity I had over the time at Cognizant to give back to the people and the institutions that helped me succeed. And that, whether that was through my service on the CMU board, whether it was through my other boards, or other nonprofit work that I did, this idea of giving back to people and institutions was very important to me.
And then, of course, I love the industry. I love technology services. I've built my career here. And so when we're thinking about that next chapter, I started with my longtime colleague from Cognizant Raj Mehta, and he left around the same time I did. The two of us had always said it would be lovely to write another chapter together. We didn't know exactly what that was, but it seemed logical to do something in the technology services space.
We wanted to have a platform where we could help build a new generation of winners. And when I say that, I mean, not just companies, but a new generation of leaders, and you generate a new generation of management teams in our industry. And so we then as we were starting to form ideas, I connected with David Wasserman. And then later, Charles Phillips, people who I had known through my career in different ways, for at least a decade each, maybe longer.
And this idea started to form of Recognize, which we think of as a technology investment platform that's entirely focused on building the next generation of technology services companies. And we think of it as a as a platform where we bring capital, we find talented entrepreneurs and founders who are looking to take their businesses to the next level, we focus only on technology services, businesses, and we bring them not just capital, but operating experience coaching, mentoring, our networks of connections in the industry, our experience, we're having run businesses like this, and we help them to grow, we help them to scale, we help them to differentiate their businesses, and through that make their businesses a little bit better.
We have nine investments at the moment. And, you know, we wake up, or at least I wake up every morning –I think all of us wake up every morning– thinking about the technology services industry.
For me personally, there's a little bit of satisfaction or a lot of satisfaction in watching our management teams take the baton in a sense, and run the next leg of the race.
Alan Fleischmann
People think of you as a true leader and pioneer in many ways around AI and machine learning. Clearly, helping CEOs and others in their companies fill the AI adoption gap is part of your life. I imagine it is one of the great privileges of having you as a partner at Recognize; you can help them both assess, develop and then implement AI across their businesses in ways that frankly, wouldn't have the same access.
Frank D'Souza
AI is a tremendous opportunity for service businesses. But it's also a technology that's going to force services businesses to change their business model in multiple ways. And so the opportunity to work with our portfolio companies, but then also work more broadly across other companies in my ecosystem, to think about AI adoption, frankly, has been one of the most interesting and fun experiences of the last couple of years.
As far as our companies are concerned, we tend to spend time with each one of them trying to understand how AI can be a business opportunity for them because all of their customers need to think about implementing AI. And so our services businesses are working with their customers on AI implementation and on being more efficient using AI. We help our businesses think about new revenue opportunities that are driven by artificial intelligence.
Equally, we're helping our portfolio companies think through how they themselves can run their businesses better and provide better solutions and services, using AI whether that's through tools like the so-called co-pilots that make developers more productive, whether it's other kinds of artificial intelligence in the back office, and other places. We spend a lot of time with our founders and our CEOs on the AI topic.
In the industry overall, as I think large enterprises start thinking –and have been thinking– about AI, there are a number of considerations that every big organization needs to really think through, perhaps more intensively than any other technology wave in the past, around ethics, around regulation, around the role that humans play in this new world of artificial intelligence, putting all of that together, not to mention the technology of AI itself, and the data foundations that make this particular technology wave uniquely interesting and uniquely special from an adoption standpoint.
Alan Fleischmann
Many of our listeners struggle with a lot of those issues, and they want to scale through AI and are trying to use AI as a tool to grow their businesses. You just said something really powerful: this idea of the role of the human in the age of AI and technology.
In the last minute or so can you just share a couple of your valuable principles of leadership that you would share? Through that lens, can you include certain values and virtues that you would probably say, irrespective of technology, the hard skills, the human skills, [are important to leadership] as well?
Frank D'Souza
Every technology, in its truest and purest form, has to augment the human experience. We use technology to make ourselves better and to make our work easier. AI is no different. We have to start with this idea of: how can we use AI to amplify human endeavor? To amplify the things that we do uniquely well, and, and to make human beings shine?
When I talk about AI adoption, I talk about putting humans at the center, that's the first thing I would say: always think human first, and how can we use a tool to make humans more efficient. Having said that, I think that given the nature of AI technology, particularly generative AI, this new breed of AI, this may be the most complicated human machine integration challenge that we've ever faced.
These new technologies, the generative AI technologies, feel, in many ways more human, than any other technology has ever felt in the past. And so we really need to think through the human effort at the change, being empathetic, as you said, figuring out the impact of these technologies on human beings, both the First Order impact in terms of leveraging AI to enhance human creativity and productivity, but then a whole host of second order impacts like making sure that the tool is seen as a positive augmentation tool, rather than some threat to job security.
A very interesting question is: what do you do when humans and machines disagree? How do you resolve conflicts like that? There's a whole host of those issues that need to be considered.
Just fostering a culture where AI is viewed more as a collaborator than a competitor is going to be critical. Making sure you align your AI initiatives with the goals of the humans build that trust in the technology as a means to unlock human potential. Those are some of the headlines, I would say, when we think about humans first.
Alan Fleischmann
I knew that we needed more than an hour talking about AI. So I feel like this is part one. I think we should do part two, where we actually spend an hour talking about AI for those CEOs and aspiring CEOs who are trying to adapt.
We get a lot of listeners wanting to understand what they have actually ahead of them both to be less fearful, to lean in more, but also, so they can think of the human dimensions that he would be priorities as we pointed out, and then scale.
You've been listening to leadership matters on Sirius XM Radio on Channel 132. And also at leadership matters show.com. I'm your host Alan Fleischmann. We've had an extraordinary hour with Frank D'Souza, who is both an amazing CEO himself. He's the co-founder of Recognize and the former CEO of cognizant. He is a leader in many boards and advisor to many across the globe, who are looking to understand how to adapt technology to advance civilization and to make us all better. I know, that's your goal. I hope others take it and run with it. Frank, it's been such a pleasure to have you on and let's do that part two, where we can focus on AI as well.
Frank D'Souza
Alan was a real pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show. I look forward to part two.