Rich Robinson

So I'm the CTO and operating partner for Platform Partners, which is a private equity firm in Houston, Texas that focuses on the small mid-market. And we're usually the first money in to a founder situation. And I hope those companies understand what digital means for them and how to move the needle.

No, we're generally focused on one company's valuing them on EBITDA. So these are companies, even though they're small to mid-market, they've been around generally. And usually the founder's looking for someone that'll help them take them to the next level or they're thinking about their legacy.

And so we have quite a few firms that have been around a while that we've invested in.

Yeah. And we're industry agnostic, right? So, you know, I'll spend my time with a company that makes software for payroll systems. But then we also have companies in the funeral home space or in glass manufacturing. So it's quite a variety.

That's true.

So I've been in Austin since 2011.

So I'm a native West Virginian, but I'm the Texan that got here as fast as I could. So I fell in love with Texas when I was stationed at Ford Hood in the Army back in 1997.

And that's where I met my wife. So I'm a West Virginian. She's a Philadelphia girl. But we fell in love with Texas.

Went away after the Army and came back down to join this fast growing startup called Bizarre Voice in 2011 that was talking about going public and growing like a weed. And so that brought us back down. And we've been here ever since.

It was great. Brett, Heather Bruner,

you know, that whole crew at that time, it was really just an amazing collection of talent.

And I probably learned more in the two and a half years that I was with Bizarre Voice than I have in any other period of my career.

Amazing culture.

Absolutely.

The pressure is immense to stay up on what's going on right now. It's really the anxiety for folks in my position right now. One, it's like this amazing wave. Like I started my career in the Internet boom. So I've seen this movie before to a degree, but not at this level, not this phase of my career. And so keeping up is a full time job.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, well, what would I know that you haven't already seen? I think there's been just in the last few months. There's been even a greater acceleration in software development to adopt a genteck tools. I think it went from, you know, this vibe coding, you know, can we do a prototype type thing to this awakening? I think Claude code is currently where everybody's focusing on. But whether you're using that or Codex or Replit, there's a ton of these tools. But I think they've advanced to the point where people are saying, like, wait a minute, like, this isn't just a rapid prototyping tool. This changes our whole software development lifecycle.

And we can now instead of focusing on how do we prioritize the roadmap, we can effectively build whatever we need to build. And that's changing the what kind of the dynamics and the math behind how you think about staffing and what you actually build. And so at least on my radar, that has changed since the new year. And I'm seeing in my companies that we always have the companies that are on the front foot. They've been using these tools for the last year. Now, every company I have that has a software component is starting and like going headlong into this. So I think, you know, it's it's time for everybody to adopt.

Well, I think that the importance of having product leadership and engineering leadership that truly understand the business problems and are very good at articulating what are the outcomes we want, what are the problems we're trying to solve and the outcomes we want. That's always been key to great development. But now it's super critical because that's the input that you put into these machines that then churn out whatever it is that you're building. And so I think this premium on an architect's mind and engineer's mind, that is going to be the premium. I think that coding,

you know, taking tickets and producing that code, that's the area where that is really being disruptive. And the folks that took a lot of joy from that, I think, are under a lot of stress right now because that's something they're going to be giving up and their jobs are going to change.

There are people, not me, but there are people that love to code.

Well, and I think that's my caution to business leaders who are rightfully excited that we can build this now, and I'm like, "Oh, you can build this now," but understand that all software breaks.

And the easy part, now it's even more true, the easy part is the build. And you launch this, and now you have users, and you have bugs, and you have cyber holes, and you have user feedback. So, great, your product manager or your head of a department can build what they want. If you're exposing that to your customers,

is that their full-time job now to live with that? And so I think that while the tools are extremely capable, you have to think about it through the whole lifecycle, and really the lifecycle starts when you launch the software. It doesn't stop. And so look, if you're building a project management tool that you're going to use yourself, go for it. Vibecode that stuff. But if you're going to build something for customers, you need to be thinking about not just how you scale it and secure it, but how do you maintain it.

And I see agents moving that direction too.

I think that in your paradigm or your framework where you're talking about complexity, I think if you include within that the guardrails, and also the culture of your company, if that's part of the context that goes into the complexity for your agents, that starts to give them what they need to be able to answer some of the questions that come out of what we just talked about.

Yeah, I'm following this O16G. Have you seen this? Outcome engineering? You got to check out this website. So they have this manifesto for outcome engineering. And so one of the phrases they have in there is they say like, look, it's no longer can we build it.

Thinking about, well, how do we prioritize this versus the other things we might build? What's the value? It's should we build it? And I know you could say we always should have been asking ourselves, should we build it? But really, the engineering team has been focused managing that backlog. And now it's truly like, should we build this thing? Because you could build a Swiss Army knife, and a Swiss Army knife is not good at any one thing. It has all these different features and functions, but you can really just put out a lot of slop. And so you got to think about that. Now, I think refactoring, though, on the counter argument, refactoring and taking things out has never been easier as well. So it's I think anybody who says they know exactly how this is working is suffering from some Dunning Kruger effect right now. So just trying to keep up with it.

It's O 16 G Outcome Engineering.

I can't remember if it's dot org or dot com. But yeah, it's like the new manifesto for agentic engineering.

Yeah.

Well, I do. I do think in my position, you know, making sure that I can give advice to our companies on in this time, how should you think about this? How can you actually adopt this in a way that is beneficial to your company, the cliche of moving the needle, but doing it in a safe way? I think that things are moving so fast that I kind of fall back on the tools that you have for any digital transformation, which is starting with, do you understand your business where you have an issue and where it's a bottleneck for you? Right. Where are you spending more money or it's inefficient or it's just hard and really understanding how you would want to tackle a problem. And then there you can really get into, okay, if that's the area that if we could solve this, we could really change our business. Then you start to think about, well, do we have data in this area? What tools might we select? Do we have the talent to go after that? But what I'm worried about is there's such a rush towards this because of the potential value that we have the shiny object syndrome coming again. The question, the maddening question, the most CTOs that I'm involved with are how are you using AI? That's like asking a carpenter, how are you using Hammer? Instead of what are you building for your business? How is AI benefiting you? And that's maybe implied in that question, but it's use the shiny object. I can use the shiny object in a lot of ways, but are you using it the correct way? And so for me, I have the great opportunity and also the challenge of thinking about how do you do that across multiple businesses and multiple industries at different scale.

So it's a good job if you have attention deficit syndrome.

That's a challenged industry anyway.

I haven't really thought deeply about that, but I tell you that I don't think the biggest impact is on American engineers. I think that folks that are near shorting, off shorting, that had these code factories, that's where generally if you were near shorting, off shorting, there's a lot of different paradigms for that. But usually you had a product manager sitting here in Alston or your head engineer, your CTO sitting here in Alston. And they were defining what you want to go build and then they dispatched that to be worked on offshore. That's what's at risk. It's the non-contextual go do a thing. I think that's going to be under a ton of pressure. I think that thinking of owning the roadmap, owning the architecture, true engineering, like I'll date myself. But I got my engineering degree back when the coders were in comp side. They weren't even in the engineering building. You were over here in coding. Now, certainly there's a lot of computer scientists that are true engineers, but that engineering thinking, systems thinking, that is in demand. And so I think that people are going to need to hire more of those people. I mean, we've been talking all about how you code and that's great if you're a software company, but most of our companies aren't software companies. But they need to be thinking about in their operations. If you have people that are consuming content, creating content, doing workflows, which is, I don't know, 90% of every company out there, you need to be thinking about how you use these agentic workflow packages or things like Cloud Co-Work. And what I think that means is you're going to need a business analyst slash type of technology minded person embedded in these non-technical groups who's helping to understand like, this is how we re-engineer our workflows. This is how we use these tools to do things better. So I think there's this concept of AI engineer that's coming up in two ways. One, like embedded in the business to just help the business do things better. And another is in the development teams themselves. It's kind of like when DevOps first became a thing. And you had a DevOps engineer that was just advising the team on this is how we deploy our code. This is how we maintain our code. This is how we're going to understand if we're operating. You have an engineer that's deciding for the team, which tools do we use and what phase? What are we using to build our specs? Are we using the code? What are we using to test with? Keeping up with that and making sure that the team is all using the tools in the right way. They're not even coding. Right? And so I think that that's a new skill set that's going to start to be hired. And I think that has to happen where the business is. So if that business is here in America, that person's here in America.

Context has always been king.

The AI and the agents are shining a spotlight on this, right? Because if you don't have that context, you produce slop quickly. If you have that context, you change the game. But it's really just shining a light on what's always been true. Companies that have people that have context win.

Well, it's kind of two thoughts that come to mind when you say that. One is there is kind of a DNA, a talent thing of people that can see pattern recognition, can kind of abstract and understand across functions. So I think you want to hire for that propensity. But then I think back, we were talking about Bizarre Voice, right? And one of the amazing experiences at Bizarre Voice, for those of us who went through it, was your onboarding process. And you would come in and you would spend time... Before you ever set at your desk to go do the thing you were hired to do, you would spend time in every department. You would be on sales calls. You would be on customer care calls. Whatever you were doing to just learn the business, learn the history of the business. Why was it founded? What is our culture? It wasn't just posters. But you take all this time to just understand what's going on all around you. This situational awareness is what we called it in the army, right? You have your mission, but you need to know what the guys to the left and right of you are doing. So you have situational awareness. And so I think hiring the right people, taking the time to have these people that are going to be operating the machine to really understand that context. And then you need to document that. You document that context and then you can feed that as context into your agents. And again, all of that was valuable pre-AI.

But now it's like, it's necessary.

But the good news is they just have to take their notes. You do it in whatever you want. And then you say, dear Claude, dear Gemini, turn this into a markdown file.

They do it. You look at it. Yeah, that's not exactly right. So the wonderful thing that's helped me is it's helped me turn my crazy ADHD thinking into consumable output for other people. So I think that it's this crazy loop of agent and person.

Yeah.

And you know, a line that I'm still in, I forget who said it at my Alston CTO club that I'm part of. But we were talking about like this whole thing of product managers and architects are feeding this machine and what makes them great. And it's taste. Right. So you talk about context, but it's also this taste of being able to to understand like, yes, this is what our customers or our users are going to want. Or yes, this this feels right. This is what our company should produce because it is, you know, it is in line with with how we want to present ourselves. You know, if you break it out of coding and start talking about marketing, I don't think you can tell the agent you could teach the agent taste. You can give them context on what good taste looks like. But I think having people that can give that input and then say, yes, that's a good result. I don't see that ending anytime soon. That's a human job.

there's a bit of, you know, taste. How do you describe it to another person? Like, you know, it's like it's so I think there's a bit of subjectivity to that. That's hard to put in a markdown document for AI. And so so there. And then it changes. Like what was in good taste in 2011 when I was here, you know, to do a bizarre voice is is very different in modern culture today. Right. So I think that's an ever changing situation. And I think humans have to have their finger on the pulse of that.

You have to empathize for your agents to think about it. How can they do their job if they don't have all the context?

Just just the company better. Yeah.

So so Platform Partners is a private equity firm based out of Houston that services the small to mid market. And we invest in companies across all industries. We're usually the first money into a founder situation where the founder is really looking to grow that business or thinking about their legacy.

Well, as in all things, stereotypes come from grains of truth. I would say that one of the things that we believe makes us different is although we are a private equity firm, we're a perpetual fund,

which means that we can invest as if we're going to own that that company, that asset forever.

And we have companies that we've owned 10, 11, 12 years. Generally, when we do sell a company, it's because the founder, the management team wants to have a transition event. Whereas in most private equity, you're on the clock. You've bought a company on a round that you've raised and you've got three to five years to get that company to a place where you can sell it. And so I think the founders of Platform actually founded Platform because they came from that world. They said we work with these wonderful people, these amazing companies and look at the success they have after we were forced to let them go. And so we think and we hope that makes us a little different.

So the way I think about it is it doesn't make us smarter, but it lets us make smarter decisions.

We actively right now have 20. We usually add one to two a year, low volume, really focused on that personal relationship. Most of our companies are in the Texas Triangle area, but we do have companies all over the U.S.

Absolutely.

We do look for those synergies.

But generally we're just looking for amazing founders and teams that are looking to bring on capital to move ahead. And that's the trigger for us. And when we have companies that could complement each other, I think that's just a benefit.