Meet The Disruptors: Ted Julian of Flux On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ted Julian.

Ted Julian is the CEO and Founder of Flux, a code-first engineering intelligence platform that gives engineering leaders ground-truth visibility into how work actually happens across their codebases. A serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience at the intersection of cybersecurity and software, Ted has co-founded and scaled multiple category-defining companies to successful acquisitions, including Resilient Systems (acquired by IBM Security), Arbor Networks (acquired by Tektronix), and @stake (acquired by Symantec).

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I got started in tech during the .com bubble and saw a whole bunch of companies start up, grow like crazy, go public, and so on. I decided I knew the customer as well as they did, and I knew the market as well as they did, so why not try doing it myself? That instinct has led me to start four companies, and I’m still at it.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

Most functions of a business have an app. Sales has Salesforce. Marketing has HubSpot. Incredibly, engineering still doesn’t. The advent of AI creates both the opportunity and the urgency to solve that problem.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

At my first startup, I was running marketing, which I had never done before. We needed to create a data sheet, so I put something together with my small team and shared it with the CEO. He said, “Is this just a rough first draft?” Yeah, it wasn’t good. It taught me to acknowledge my own shortcomings and weaknesses, and to surround myself with people whose skills complement my own.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

One mentor is a well-known Boston area tech CEO I’ve known personally and professionally for decades. The lesson he taught me had to do with board meetings. Specifically, that it’s important to have a meeting with each of your investors before the board meeting, basically a preview of the board meeting. The purpose of this is to surface any issues at that time so they don’t come up as surprises in the meeting. I’ve done it before every board meeting since. No surprises in the room means you can focus on moving forward instead of managing reactions.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

Most startups fall into one of two categories: You are either making a new market or you are disrupting an existing market. The playbook for disrupting an existing market is to build a better mousetrap: faster, cheaper, more capable. You go to customers in that category and say, “Try my thing for free. It’s way better than the piece of junk you’ve been using. Once you see this for yourself, you’ll cancel your renewal and keep using us.”

What comes to mind about disruption not being so good has to do with first-mover advantage. This used to refer to the gap you could create between yourself and competitors by being first in the market. You build out your capabilities, you get a customer base, and so on. This creates a moat that distances you from your competitors.

These days, I think it’s better to be a fast follower than to be the original disruptor, because you learn from the mistakes of others as they’re going on their journey. You just focus on where they land and being better at that specific thing. You are spared the time and expense of the journey the initial entrant had to go through. I was on the wrong side of this at Resilient, when a competitor came in after we made the market. We had a more complete solution. But they were better at the one thing it had become clear customers were most interested in.

Can you please share 5 ideas one needs to shake up their industry? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

Often, industry shake-ups are related to a change in technology, but that’s not the only way. I’ve got three for you instead of five. All three I’ve either lived through myself or watched play out:

1. Build a better mousetrap. Often, disruptions in this category are related to a broader shift in the technology landscape. For example, right now this is obviously AI. AI-native companies are disrupting incumbents in their respective categories. Their AI-native approach allows them to be cheaper, faster, or more capable (often all three!) than the incumbents.

2. Segment the market. Another way to shake up a market is to focus on a segment of the market that incumbents either aren’t targeting, or struggle to effectively reach. For example, perhaps the existing players are focused on large enterprise customers. Your strategy could be to target smaller, mid-sized organizations with a product capability and pricing strategy better suited to their unique needs.

3. Sell through a different channel. Resellers and managed service providers that already have relationships with your target market can be a great option to shake up an industry if incumbents haven’t yet locked up these relationships. Often, this strategy is used in conjunction with #2. The reseller/managed service provider packages the product offering with the necessary services to offer the customer a complete solution that they’d struggle to fulfill on their own.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

I’ll let you know when I get there!

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

“Inspired” by Marty Cagan. It had a profound impact on how I think about building products customers love. On the one hand, its insights around focusing deeply on customer discovery — spending lots of time with customers to thoroughly understand their pain — seems obvious. Yet a surprising number of companies still mess this up today. They toil away in isolation building something they’re sure customers will be crazy about. But when they release it, the market shrugs and they wonder why. We did this at Flux with our customer Mike Garon at Cobalt. He was new to Cobalt when we started collaborating — there were lots of things we could have engaged on. But it became clear that proving the effectiveness of his AI transformation was the highest impact, lowest effort work. So that’s what we focused on. You can read all about it in the case study.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

How about three letters? GSD: Get Sh!t Done. All of the most consequential things in my life involved a consistent, high level of effort over an extended period of time. Embrace and celebrate this effort by yourself and those around you. Make the journey the reward.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Incorporate vigorous activity of some kind in your daily/weekly routine. Even better if this includes group activity like running the local 5K or regular group bike rides. The fitness and health benefits are well understood. But I think the impact on mental health and what these activities can do to build confidence are just as important. They spill over into your work and family life in ways that will surprise you.

How can our readers follow you online?

On LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedjulian/ or on the Flux blog at https://www.askflux.ai/blog/author/ted-julian/.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!