1946 – Exploring the Impact of AI on the Software Engineering Industry with Vention’s Marc Karasu

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1:06With us right now, Mark Karasu. Mark, you are the Chief Marketing Officer of Vention. You're on the web at VentionTeams.com. Mark, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right. What does Vention do? So Vention is a leading software engineering company. It's global offices across 20 different countries and thousands of developers. We basically partner with startups all the way to Fortune 500 companies and help founders and business leaders dreams come true by building amazing products. Yeah, you do. I'm looking through your portfolio right now. It's pretty impressive. Would you mind maybe just sharing a little bit about some examples of work you do?

1:48I'm looking at, and to our friend that's listening, by the way, my recommendation is just go to VentionTeams.com so you can see exactly what we're talking about. But Mark, maybe you can illustrate as best you can with our words. Sure. Well, I mean, it is a range. And for the more startup, let's call them like seed stage, series A type companies, they're usually coming to us looking to help build an MVP product, maybe an app, build a front end website with the CMS component as well. For more established companies, of course, they could ask us to build a product as well. But they're often looking for staff augmentation or depth to their own internal teams, which we can plug in to their existing engineering teams and sort of help them and supercharge the things they're working on.

2:40So it is a range, depending on how big the company is, where they are in their funding and where they are in their product lifecycle. You know, I'll just say from my perspective, it can be really confusing and challenging to hire a developer. I think some of us don't know where to start. I think some of us have maybe gotten hit up or solicited a lot. And so therefore, it's just overwhelming. But would you mind maybe just share a little bit of a buyer's guide on how to hire a developer? Sure. And when I say developer, obviously the broader context of that. If you're in the market for a kind of service that Vention is offering, you need oftentimes more than just a body shop.

3:26You need creativity, innovation, partnership. And, you know, certainly Vention isn't the only service in the industry that will offer that. And some would argue that the category can be a bit commoditized, which I would agree with. what separates Vents and teams from maybe some other players in the category is really the partnership model that we employ. So, you know, you have to take it on faith. At this point, you'd have to check out our service to understand it better. But we really do aim to get to know the business and get to know the players that we partner with who ultimately hire us so that we understand their pain points, their goals, what they're trying to build and what their product roadmap looks like.

4:05And if they're not sure, we can also help them as well. So, you know, definitely there are a lot of players out there that are selling different kinds of services, but oftentimes those are very light or sort of top level, not really getting into the weeds of the business and how the revenue works. At the end of the day, we're successful, we think, if our clients are happy because they are making more revenue. It's not just products that work, It's products that are effective and that generate users engagement and ultimately revenue. Yeah. Mark, in your world, I'm certain that you've seen some trends.

4:42And I can't imagine how many of your clients or potential clients are sharing the two letters AI. And so tell me about what life has been like over the past, say, six months or so at Vention. Sure. Well, the emergence of AI over the last six months, and really we could even say 12 months, has certainly raised the topic of AI much more often. Twelve months ago, it was more of a novelty conversation. Now it's sort of like missing or egregiously absent if you don't speak to it in a conversation, meaning that it's a service that we have to offer. And it's an interesting service for us to offer because it's a two-sided coin.

5:29On one hand, we want to be able to build with AI and be able to be more efficient. On the other hand, someone might say, well, is AI going to put you out of business because AI can code? And the answer to that is it depends. We certainly don't put us out of business, at least not anytime soon. But we think there will always be a market for expertise, specialty, and human components. but using AI in many cases as a mathematician would use a calculator in order to be that much more effective and quick. So the answer to your question is certainly AI is a topic of interest. It's certainly a gating topic in a lot of conversations.

6:07Although I will say, and you've probably heard this too, a lot of people use the phrase, but don't really understand what it means for what they're asking for. It's sort of like a box they're checking. And we're aiming to sort of grow our proficiency and expertise. I mean, the whole market is changing, not just in our category, but everywhere. And I think the first step is acknowledging that this is a seismic change to the way business is done and then figuring out how to upskill your particular service, regardless of what category you're in. If someone is looking at hiring talent for, again, development, IT services, mobile app, those sorts of things, you have over 3 ,000 team members.

6:56I mean, I would say in some cases that likely gives you a bit of an unfair advantage compared to maybe a small shop. But how like I don't know if you're the best solution for everybody, but would you mind maybe talking about who Vention is just a really great fit for given your capabilities and access? And, you know, who might be better served by, you know, a different way of getting the job done? Sure. It's a good question. Every company likes to think they're good at everything, of course. Well, you have 3 ,000 people, so I hope you got the bases covered. Yes, and I think we do. And part of that is the way our talent is distributed geographically, which factors into pricing, needs, speed, efficiency, the geography of maybe partnering with a client in the UK who wants to have talent in their time zone, or North America that wants talent in Mexico.

7:55et cetera. So, you know, we do have part of the distribution based on geography to be able to serve a large part of the economy, the Western economy. You know, I think our sweet spot, I think our sweet spot initially had been startups. I mean, the company has been around 20 years and for the first, you know, eight, 10 years, let's call it, definitely working with smaller companies As we've gotten bigger, not in terms of people, but in terms of credibility and reputation, we've found many more, certainly Fortune 5000 companies and a few Fortune 500 companies, just to give you context, that have reached out needing the kind of help we offer.

8:38The name of the game really, though, is this concept of partnership and customization. What we offer and what we like to say is we offer engineering peace of mind. And what does engineering peace of mind mean? it means you're not going to get fired when you hire us. You're not going to have to do the job twice. It's not going to take twice as long as you think. You know, whenever anyone buys anything, and certainly in a SaaS-based business or a technology business, you don't want to buy a service or a product and look bad to your boss or your founder or your board. One of the things we bring that we think is unique is incredibly extensive track record of success working with lots of companies.

9:19So this in different categories. So this idea of engineering peace of mind is really a differentiator that we lean into in our marketing and in our messaging, because we think it's a differentiator and something that's very hard for others in our category to say. Yeah. Can you share just a little bit about Vention's history and how you've grown to the size that you have? I know you've been serving as the CMO for just over a year and a half, and congratulations on that. But where does Vention come from? Well, so actually, Vention is a rebranded name. It was under a different name for the first 18, 19 years.

9:56So we did a rebrand about a year ago to Vention. There's no point telling you the old name because we're not known by it anymore. But the idea behind Vention as a name is really leaning into this idea, pretty obviously, I guess, but the idea of invention, innovation, being on the cutting edge. And we thought it was a memorable, interesting way to speak in the time that we're in. That was even the way I had started to emerge. This was sort of before AI was where it is today. We hope and think that the name still fits really nicely into this sort of new AI paradigm. And the idea really is to sort of better position ourselves for the future, with this name change and rebrand, which, you know, builds on everything we had done, but hopefully in a more memorable and interesting way.

10:45In terms of, you know, the story of the business, you know, this is a true founder-led storyline, you know, two guys basically in a room with a couple computers 20 years ago, figuring out how they were going to serve this industry and what they're doing and had some success. I don't think they probably, to be honest, necessarily envisioned getting this big into this point back then, because when you're two people in a garage or in an office or whatever, you know, you're just trying to get through the day, the week, and the month. And they had success after success after success, good salespeople, good product.

11:21And then the vision began to take shape and slowly scaling the business. So, you know, I think we all probably agree there's really no such thing as an overnight success story. In our case, it's a 20-year path to that success story. and to where the business is today. And it's really just predicated and built on relationships, customer service, and good product delivery. Yeah. And it looks as though you have a number of key partnerships. You're kind of talking about that network. And obviously, I think that's led to Vention's dominance in the market. But from a growth perspective, where is Vention going?

12:01Well, I think as the economy has been tough for everybody over the last, let's say, 18 months, plus the Silicon Valley Bank implosion about a year ago, certainly didn't help the startup ecosystem. them, interest rates and VC money, I wouldn't say drying up, but being harder to come by, I would say it's reasonable to suggest the startup community in general has felt a lot of pressure on fundraising and, you know, their ability to stay solvent over a period of time while they're raising funds. So that has created, you know, that runway reality has created a pressure, I think, for any business that serves or works with startups.

12:42While we had already been working with larger businesses and we still love working with startups, I think the reality of the macro economy suggests that it's important for us and others in our category to go upstream further and with more established companies that are maybe a little bit more immune or protected from temporary swings in the market or frustrates. I mean, I think definitely a tough business climate out there, no matter what size business you are. But the answer to your question is we're definitely looking to build more partnerships with larger, more mature companies, not at the expense of startups, but to just have further diversification.

13:26Yeah. To our friend that's listening, and maybe they're doing some research on Vention, and they've come across this podcast, now they've listened to our conversation. Where does the customer journey usually go from here? after an engagement with us or before? No, no, they're just now learning about Vention. They're searching for this topic and now they're like, do I talk to somebody? Yeah, so I mean, if you're listening to our conversation in my voice and this is something that piques your interest and you think, oh boy, I would really love to augment my development team or I would love to build that MVP or I've just received a Series B funding and we need to grow five times as fast.

14:05You should go to VentionTeams.com and contact us. It's easy, of course, and we will get in touch with you usually within a business day, depending on where you are in the time of day, with one of our business development software experts who will do what I would call not exactly a consultation, but an alignment with you to understand your needs, your growth, what success looks like. And of course, talk budget and reality of staffing and, you know, the size of team and begin to shape up a customized scope of work for you to consider. We, you know, have flexibility in how we work with companies as we do work with companies of all size.

14:47But ultimately, that first step does start with you, the business owner, to recognize the need you have and that you need that you require, you know, extra incremental help, whether it's for short term or to augment your existing team. And you need expertise. And that's where we partner and do that input process. I will note that we also have a promotion we're running right now. Not to sound too promo-y, but we're excited about this. We've started an incubator. And part of that is we are taking submissions. These would probably be smaller companies who are looking to build their MVP and will be picking a winner from the submissions over the next period of time.

15:30and all the information on our website. And that winning company would get a significant amount of our expertise for free as the winner of development expertise to help bring their product or service into reality. So if you're a little short on funds or you haven't reached that series A or even seed yet, do feel free to reach out to us and enter the contest on our incubator, our incubator contest on venture.com. It's certainly worth it because you may be the winner. This is a US only promotion, I should note, for US-based businesses, but we're hoping that we can help some founders dreams come true through that promotion.

16:11Yeah, very exciting. Again, that's inventionteams.com. And then I found to it, I was looking at the newsroom and that's where I see, again, about the invention incubator for startups. Very, very exciting. Mark Karasu, thank you so much. Again, you're the chief marketing officer at Vention. Again, the website, VentionTeams.com. Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me.

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