"I am a serial Founder, CEO, CTO and entrepreneur with a passion for technology, entrepreneurship and commerce who loves challenging and inspiring company cultures and smart people."
With almost two decades of building commerce technology businesses behind him, Boris Lokschin is undoubtedly an expert in digital commerce and digital transformation. Boris was at the forefront of the cloudification and Open Source movements of the commerce tech industry and even offered software-as-a-service solutions before it even was a recognised industry term. He has a deep understanding of the diverse organizational, methodological and complex technological needs multinational corporations and traditional businesses face amid ongoing digitization developments. Boris sold both of his previous businesses, the last one to NASDAQ listed CGI Inc.
Boris is convinced by the vast potential of technology to enable companies to build digital transactional capabilities beyond the traditional thinking and transform businesses and whole industries. Since its founding in 2014, Spryker has empowered 150+ companies such as ALDI, Toyota, Siemens, HILTI or RICOH around B2B, Enterprise Marketplaces, IoT and Unified Commerce in more than 200 countries worldwide. Spryker received $130 million in recent Series C funding led by US investor TCV (AirBnB, Netflix) at the end of 2020 at a company valuation exceeding $500 million, which makes Spryker the fastest growing enterprise commerce software company worldwide.
International expansion needs to always be on your radar from the very beginning when building a tech start-up. When you reach the point where your business has clear potential of becoming a leader in your space, this exciting step is unavoidable. With all the unexpected turns businesses and markets can take, you can never be to prepared for it. That said, thorough planning and learning from the experiences of other leaders and businesses can be a great asset to those embarking on their expansion journey. Reach out to other founders, partners, investors or people you trust, ask for their advice, for best and worst practices. This will help you avoid common pitfalls.
The first and most important cornerstone is our focus on Outcome vs. Output oriented work, why this is important as a guiding principle and how it is different from other ways of working and measuring results. For knowledge workers, as we are in our industry, this is a fundamentally different approach, which is especially relevant in a high performance environment with rapid, international growth, ambitious targets and when hiring and working with “AAA players” (as we call our high potentials and best performers).
What sounds similar, makes all the difference. While output might be the number of sales calls you make, the number of marketing assets you produce per week, the quantity of product releases you ship – outcome is what you are actually thriving for.
Today I am happy to share the kickoff article for a series around our exciting new concept of work at Spryker which, together with our Director People and Culture, Elise Mueller, I will deep dive into every 1-2 weeks sharing more insights, reasoning and arguments about every piece of it.
We call it FLOW which stands for Flexible – Life – Oryx – Work. Flow was designed based on our learnings, observations, ideas and team requirements over the last couple of years, accelerated and brought to the next level during the current pandemic.
It might sound paradoxical but when looking for talent I don’t care about impressive track records and decades of industry experience.
What do I mean by that? Bringing in new team members with many years of experience is helpful but it is not the solution to Spryker’s challenge. We’re building an ambitious hyper growth technology business that doesn’t operate “the way we always did it”. The experience talents bring from previous work places might be helpful at first but it has an expiration date.
