Hiring

Avinash, along with co-founder Manish Garg, founded Skan to bring transparency to business processes so organizations can automate and improve. DTC led the Series B investment in the company. We sat with Avinash to learn more about the Skan and how his approach to founding his second company is — or maybe is not — different than the first time around.

Why This, Why Now

Over the last 25, 30 years, we’ve built many, many systems to help run our businesses. The challenge is that often, over time, the business intent behind those systems has diverged from the actual processes running on the ground. That creates a lot of opacity in how an organization truly runs.

Why does this matter? That study that found 70% of digital transformation efforts fail — that’s a lot of organizations spending big amounts of money for something that doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work? Because of the opacity around how things get done. A transformation leader might want to optimize a business process. But if you don’t understand your starting point, how are you going to optimize?

Up until now, the only tools available to solve this problem involved either a fleet of business analysts or a deep backend integration which gives you a snapshot of committed states of work already completed. But what you don’t see is that 10 different people might have used 10 different mechanisms to move from A to B.

Here’s the second challenge: when you ask people how a business process works, they often give the process they’re supposed to be doing, not what they do. Humans have a level of abstraction beyond which they cannot describe what they’re doing.