This post is based on an interview with Jay Marwaha, Founder and CEO of SYNTASA. It is part of our series of interviews of OODA Network members. Our objective with these interviews is to provide actionable information of interest to the community, including insights that can help with your own career progression. We also really like highlighting some of the great people that make our continued research and reporting possible.  For the full series see: OODA Expert Network Bio Series.

Career Progression:   Jay grew up in India and got his BS in Computer Science from the University of London.  He continued his education at the University of Maryland, obtaining a MS in Computer Science and then an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.  Well-armed with education, Jay got a job with a Federally funded Technical Research Assistance Program (TARP) that studied consumer behaviors.   The U. S. Consumer Affairs Department wanted to understand how companies with excellent customer service were able to maintain satisfaction and loyalty.  Heck, we can all think of some Government Offices that could use some help here, especially in the 1990’s!!

Jay applied his computer skills to help improve the negative perception of “unresponsive government bureaucracies”.  He helped them apply best practices from Industry to improve the customer’s experience.  Eventually, commercial companies were also asking for TARP’s help, and TARP expanded outside the Federal sector.  They developed a software that could handle customer complaints and deployed it in large organizations and call centers.  When TARP was acquired by another large company in the late 1990’s, Jay moved to the American Express office in New York City to work on that large account.   Jay had an office on the 17^th floor of one of the twin towers.  On September 11^th, 2001, Jay had just exited the Tower enroute to a meeting.  He was picking up a coffee from the Dunkin Donuts across the street when the first plane hit. He lost a lot of friends that day, and the experience reshaped his life, taking a huge emotional toll and refocusing his efforts on solutions that would directly assist the Department of Defense and our war effort.

Jay tried to join the government directly, but the backlog for clearances in 2002 was significant.  One of the agencies asked him to take on a high-priority project on the side, promising this would help fast-track his clearance. Jay formed Absolute Business Solutions Corporation as a platform to help Federal Government with projects that needed to be accomplished ASAP, and his successes grew to include big data analytics, cyber security and intelligence analysis.

Working with huge amounts of data became more and more important.  He discovered multiple software tools to help do analytics, but he felt they were missing out somehow.  They weren’t getting meaningful results.  Jay leveraged opensource tools and cloud computing to create something powerful that could analyze petabytes of data in the batch mode to get actionable information from it.

Jay saw that agencies were capturing lots of “behavioral” data about their customers:  what applications they were using and how they behaved in them – every mouse click.  But it was so much data!  They had a hard time storing and analyzing it.  And even if they could, it was very costly!  Jay knew it was a rich source of important information that could be extremely helpful, but there was a huge gap between what they “collected” and what they “knew”.   Jay created SYNTASA to help solve these problems for the commercial sector.

SYNTASA analyzes customer behavior so they can understand the customers “intent” – what are the challenges the customer had on their website, why did they back out, did they come back?   This behavioral data  (clickstream data), is very messy when it is collected.  SYNTASA cleanses and structures the data and then uses big-data and cloud technologies to analyze it.  It’s so fast they can actually “score” the customer in real time to help provide a response action that will turn a casual visitor into a buyer.  Now we understand how our browsing behavior sometimes ends up in an unexpected purchase!!

Surprises:  Jay developed SYNTASA as an application with a focus on commercial sector, based on the skills he learned working with Federal Agencies.  He was surprised to see how much attention SYNTASA got from the Intelligence Community.  He had come full circle!

Technologies you are watching:  Jay keeps tabs on artificial intelligence and machine learning.  He can see the power of AI/ML in all the applications today and how the customers are interacting with them.  “There is a lot of negative sentiment about AI and ML” Jay says.  “But I see the opposite.  Human beings are very resilient to economic and technology shocks.  We adapt ourselves and we become better. Machines will help us do faster analytics and we can make better decisions.”

Technology threats you are interested in:  Jay sees technology is an enabler, not a threat.  It’s the “bad people’ using the technologies that are the threats.

Advice for Decision Makers:  Jay advises leaders to take more risks.  “Many companies use large big-box solutions because they feel safer” Jay says.  “Leaders should take a risk on smaller more innovative solutions – they will be more agile and responsive to the companies needs.”

Views on Thought Leaders:  Jay follows ADOBE leader Shantanu Narayen for his insight and forward thinking.  “He’s a brilliant man who turned a company from a desktop software company to an enterprise company.” Jay says.

Quick Hits:

• Podcast Recommendation:   Jay spends a lot of time in traffic, so he’s recommending a PODCAST:   Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn    https://mastersofscale.com/
• Favorite piece of content on OODAloop: Jay enjoys the OODA posts updating him on cyber security issues.
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaymarwahasyntasa/