The story of a startup built to disrupt an enterprise from the inside out
Chris Jackson explains how 175-year-old company Pearson built a tech startup within the enterprise with the aim of innovating the developer experience. Chris shares the journey from inception to B-round funding and explains how this startup is establishing the foundation of the company's future.
| Talk Title | The story of a startup built to disrupt an enterprise from the inside out |
| Speakers | Chris Jackson (Pearson) |
| Conference | O’Reilly Velocity Conference |
| Conf Tag | Build Resilient Distributed Systems |
| Location | London, United Kingdom |
| Date | October 18-20, 2017 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | |
Established businesses are being disrupted by digital natives, and the price of not executing is more existential than ever before. Chris Jackson explains how 175-year-old company Pearson built a tech startup within the enterprise—driving disruption internally before it happens via a third party that the company has no control over. The aim of the startup is innovating the developer experience. This project started like most startups. Two founders built a small team on a shoestring to establish a prototype and get the first few customers. From there, it has grown through two rounds of funding, where the team has had to educate and translate advanced technology concepts to traditional leaders and clearly detail the value the team provides. Today, it is the strategic cloud infrastructure platform for the entire company’s digital future, and the team is doing some of the most creative work with containers, Kubernetes, and open source technology in production for a global audience of customers—all with a multimillion pound budget and support from the C-suite to transform how the company delivers technology via a better developer experience. Chris shares the journey from inception to B-round funding and explains how this startup is establishing the foundation of the company’s future, exploring three key angles: people, technology, and culture. Along the way, Chris relates some hard-earned lessons about enabling DevOps, articulating your value to teams, and building internal products that are driven by a great developer experience.
