Striveworks President Paul Brinkley: MLOps, Growth & Catching the Right Wave

Paul Brinkley has had a diverse career. From doctoral studies on neural networks in the ’90s to senior roles with communications companies, investment firms, and the Pentagon, he has made it a mission to leverage changing state-of-the-art technology to level up business, communication, and human interaction. 

Brinkley recently joined Striveworks as president. We sat down with him to get his thoughts on the company’s recent recognition in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500^TM, Striveworks’ unique approach to machine learning operations (MLOps), and where the company is headed over the next five years.

Striveworks just made the Deloitte Technology Fast 500^TM, a ranking of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America. What do you think has driven such rapid growth?

The Deloitte recognition, like any recognition from our customer base and the markets we’re talking to, is indicative of where Striveworks is and the reasons I’ve come here. It's indicative of how this company is approaching MLOps, which is unique. 

It's born of our background, coming out of the financial sector—the high-speed trading universe that the founders operated in. So, I’m not surprised that we’re hitting real momentum now in terms of growth. The work that’s been done in support of the defense establishment, particularly special operations, has been remarkable, and we’re seeing a broad range of interest across industries.

We're coming out of one of the most inflated, frothy periods in venture investment in history, where the gap between what you say you can do and what you can do has been very, very wide. Striveworks is a company that is doing things that are exceeding what we even say publicly, in terms of capability. 

At the end of the day, that’s what makes a successful business. It’s not what you can say. It’s not what you can spin. It’s not what you can put in a PowerPoint deck. It’s what you can do. And this is a doing company. 

You came on as president of Striveworks in July, while co-founder Jim Rebesco continues on as CEO. What does being president mean to you? How does your role differ from Jim’s?

My early career involved doctoral-level studies in neural networks back in the ‘90s, when the mathematics were pretty well understood, but the processing power greatly limited the things you could do. For me, this is a full circle opportunity to get involved in something that I was very active in early in my career. 

Aside from that, though, what we have in this firm is a remarkable founding team—Jim Rebesco, obviously, but also Eric Korman, Tony Mangianello, that core group. This is always the thing that happens with a company: You get a core group of brilliant people who are really visionary and have set a path forward, and when the company starts to grow, people get brought in—and a lot of times that’s fraught with risk. I’ve known Jim and Tony for over four years. They’re close friends of mine. The opportunity to come here and help these guys build this company, make it scalable, take it to the next level—to manifest the vision against multiple markets, multiple technology challenges—was compelling. It’s also essentially important that there’s no disruption among the remarkably capable team.

So, Jim is the CEO. He’s the founder. He’s the visionary. He’s the essential piece. For me, it’s unthinkable to have him taken out of that role. He’s the linchpin here. Because I know him and we work well together, my coming in and taking the reins of running the enterprise from a pure business perspective, while he continues to set the strategic vision and the technology vision for the firm along with Eric Korman—that’s the right model to ensure we achieve our objectives and don’t do something disruptive. 

It’s already starting to pay off for all of us, and I’m having a good time. It gets me back to technology that I used to be very fluent in, so getting close to that again is a lot of fun too. 

It’s interesting that you’re trying to avoid disruption. Often, technology companies focus a lot on disrupting things. 

When I say disruption, I mean when you get tech visionaries who have incredible brilliance in terms of how they see the world evolving, and businesses get launched, and then the financial aspects of growing the business overwhelm the vision that drove it in the first place. That’s where things can really get broken. 

When I say not to be disruptive, I mean to come in and be accretive in terms of value without disrupting the magic that makes the place special in the first place. 

You have a lot of experience building teams across both the private and public sectors. In your experience, what would you say effective teams have in common?

To me, the success of an enterprise today is about aligning every person in the organization with where value gets created for customers.

In the defense space, missions have life or death consequences. That’s as important as anything can get, right? If you’re delivering value to that mission, every person in the organization—I don’t care if they’re pushing a broom at the end of the day cleaning the office—everyone should have a sense of why the work they’re doing is important to the ability of the organization to deliver on that mission. When you can create that linkage, you unleash urgency, you unleash passion, people feel like the work they’re doing is consequential. 

Sure, everybody works, everybody wants to make money, but it’s deeper than that. In every person and in every team, there’s a desire to know that the work they’re doing is of consequence. It has importance.

We had an amazing meeting yesterday involving medical imaging—the ability to leverage artificial intelligence and MLOps to massively improve the most state-of-the-art MRI scanners to rapidly detect cancer cells, or to detect plaques in your arteries. That’s a pretty important mission. Consequential missions are always motivational, right? People need to feel that the work they’re doing is having that kind of impact. 

If you can create those linkages, so everybody sees that showing up, that being passionate in your work means being effective and consequential to a customer, that’s where you really unleash the ability of an organization to surpass its competition. You can feel that here. 

If the next five years is a chapter in Striveworks history, what’s it about?

We're already seeing it. Every organization that’s successful—every great company that exists today—in its early stages had something compelling in terms of a product or a service or a technology, and they got a little lucky. 

I’ll use a surfing analogy—I used to play around with a surfboard when I lived in California. They teach you when you're surfing, one of the most important things is just sitting there, watching the horizon, picking the wave. “Which wave am I going to ride?” That's what makes you a surfer. There's an art to that and there's some luck. Getting a good wave can be the difference between having a good ride or not having a ride at all, and there's luck in that.

Because of the really amazing work Striveworks has done, we've caught a really good wave at a time when we had the right tech at the right time with the right vision, it was unique, and no one else was thinking this way. That’s a really exciting thing, because every great company has that moment. 

Now, it’s about harnessing those successes and entering a broader set of markets. They’re now open to us because we can walk in and say, “There's a hundred other companies saying they do what we do, but really have never done it before. Not only have we done it, but we’ve done it in some of the most difficult circumstances you can imagine, and we've been very successful.” That's a very different conversation. 

If we do our jobs, and we're successful in what we're being paid to do, we’re going to see the company expand into both commercial sectors and broader defense sectors that we wouldn't have been able to get into had we not had that good wave, right? I think that's what you'll see over the next two, three, four, five years. 

Want to know more about Striveworks and our ability to make machine learning operations successful, even in the most difficult scenarios? Schedule a demo today.