We often think of startups as the manifestation of a dream—an entrepreneur has a vision, they leave their job and spend a couple of hard years scraping together the players and the product with the hopes of someday succeeding.
But startups can also be merely a vehicle to achieve a desired result. Large companies will found smaller companies to solve particular problems or advance an initiative. And in those cases, you probably don’t want to spend years putting a team together.
That’s why Chris Cera started his company, Arcweb, to offer other startups the teams they need to move quickly.
On this edition of UpTech Report, Chris discusses the various scenarios where outsourcing your startup team makes sense, and with the health industry being an active market for Arcweb, he explains how recent laws are opening up that sector for new opportunities.
More information: https://arcweb.co/
Chris Cera is the CEO of Arcweb Technologies, a diverse team of designers and software engineers who re-imagine digital products for their clients in the healthcare and financial industries.
Arcweb Technologies is a Certified B Corporation, and was once recognized as one of the top 25 fastest growing software companies in the United States by the Inc 500. Both Arcweb Technologies and Chris have received multiple awards over the years recognizing growth and innovation, and Chris was once recognized as “Small Business Person of the Year” by the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce.
Prior to Arcweb Technologies, Chris was the CTO and co-founder of Vuzit, a cloud document management software company that was acquired by Accusoft. Chris also co-founded Philly Startup Leaders, one of the city’s largest non-profit organizations dedicated to providing the region’s entrepreneurs with peer support, insights, and inspiration.
Chris has co-authored three awarded patents, numerous peer-reviewed publications, and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Drexel University. He resides in the Bella Vista neighborhood of Philadelphia with his wife, son, and daughter.
TRANSCRIPT
DISCLAIMER: Below is an AI generated transcript. There could be a few typos but it should be at least 90% accurate. Watch video or listen to the podcast for the full experience!
Chris Cera 0:00
There’s so much bias that we have inherent and especially as like entrepreneurs or product executives that you assume again, you’re going to nail it every time but there’s so much that data that you can collect that can inform your process
Alexander Ferguson 0:19
Welcome, everyone to UpTech Report this our applied tech series UpTech Report is sponsored by Tara Lee learn how to leverage the power of video at teraleap.io. Today, my guest, I’m joined by Chris Cera, who’s based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He’s a CEO of Arc web technologies. Welcome, Chris. Good to have you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you, that you guys have stayed on your website, you’re a digital design and development firm focused primarily on creating solutions for finance and healthcare sectors. Now, generally, folks who are on our series, we’re interviewing on the tech product side at SAS solution. But I’m intrigued to hear two pieces in our conversation today. One is, why would someone want to use an external team? When does it make sense for that? And if so, what is it like to work with you or another company like you. And then the other piece is we had talked earlier about this new Health Care Act is coming into play. So people who are building new technology or want to take advantage of this new act, it’s happening in healthcare. I’m excited to dive into that. But first, let’s let’s dig a little bit more. You mentioned those the two sectors that you focus primarily on right?
Chris Cera 1:29
That’s correct. Yeah, we specialize in engineering digital solutions for executives, building new businesses. So whether you’re spinning up a new company or launching a new product line, we work with innovators to rapidly deliver complex systems with proven high performing cross functional teams.
Alexander Ferguson 1:46
Gotcha. So those those who are give me some examples of some of the companies you’re working with, and when like where you come in and play a role. Sure.
Chris Cera 1:54
So we work with a lot of large companies, such as Capital One, Fidelity Investment, Yoli, Penn Medicine, we also work with a lot of early stage companies. So quip, quill health, which is the joint venture between Comcast and IBC. Control, unhealth, which is an early stage company that’s partnered with Jefferson health. So it’s a mix of both. And in a lot of cases, it tends to be a large fortune 500 that has spun out a new company or has co invested with another company.
Alexander Ferguson 2:22
Gotcha. What when, for an early stage company, does it make sense to hire though a CTO and have it in house?
Chris Cera 2:29
My general advice, and I was a CTO of an early stage company. So my general advice is that you, if you’re capable of building and managing an engineering and UX team and product management team, then you absolutely should do that. So that includes the CTO, there’s a lot of executives that don’t want anything to do with that, or they understand all of the risks that are associated with trying to build, manage and keep a team like that happy. And so they’re happy to outsource it.
Alexander Ferguson 2:58
What important was to work? Outsourcing, what’s a word of wisdom that one should keep in mind in particularly for someone, a leader who’s having to plan on building up new product and having to work with an external team? What’s a word of wisdom or lesson learned there?
Chris Cera 3:15
Yeah, goes go slow and go in stages. And don’t try to estimate the full cost of development and the ROI and all of that in just the first six to 12 months, you need a much longer horizon, if you’re going to take the risk and endeavor into building a brand new digital experience. What’s the
Alexander Ferguson 3:37
typical timeline, then what they should expect, if they want to build a new product,
Chris Cera 3:41
six to 24 months, I would say is, is is is a better timeframe, you know, and I know a lot of cases where we end up working in the six month timeframe to prove a lot of the technology risk or the market risk. But really, you need a couple of years and and a series of iterations that you’re going through of the UX, the experience with the customers feedback loops, whether you’re a b2b company or b2c company, how that feedback goes into the sales team, or how that feedback goes into the marketing team to improve your product and try to grow your customer base. So all of that just takes time. Most people assume that we’re just going to build it, we’re gonna nail it, we’re gonna nail everything the first shot, and there’s no extra breathing room for the iterations and the design times and redesign and refactoring that’s required to do all of that.
Alexander Ferguson 4:30
Actually just talking to CTO of another company, and he actually wished they had spent more time is just a stealth company two years, he actually said and just building the product, and it sounds like actually kind of lines up with what you’re recommending anyways, whether you’re building yourself, you’re hiring someone else to spend that one, two years to develop the product effectively.
Chris Cera 4:49
Sure. And I mean, there’s a lot of customer development that you can do before you even build and do hire software developers to actually build the experience. So we put on A lot of emphasis from our UX practice to create experiences that you can walk customers through before you build and do any of the engineering. And so on the b2c side, you can record users as they walk through experiences, you can ask them to audio dictate what they’re thinking, what they’re seeing as they’re going through the experience, and do focus groups and studies. And then for b2b companies, you can basically give demos that you can arm your your sales team with, and they can actually walk through legitimate sales processes of actually trying to sell essentially, this vaporware. So there’s so much that you can do before you even get into the actual building and the implementation and all of that should be done. And that’s under the guise of good customer development, lean lean practices, and a lot of what has been trending, I’d say over the last decade or so.
Alexander Ferguson 5:47
Because you’ve been around this company for nine coming up on 10 years ago, technology said, but you’ve been CTO for another seven, eight years previously. Was it was it right? Yeah. And that was acquired by
Chris Cera 6:01
Accu soft document management software company in Florida.
Alexander Ferguson 6:07
Gotcha. Now, over the years, I mentioned, product development and build building new software is continuing to evolve and change. So especially in today’s technology environment going forward, are there any insights that you can share? Someone says they’re planning on building a new product? How should they think about it, but in today’s environment,
Chris Cera 6:28
so there’s so much that you can do like I was saying, in terms of gathering evidence, collecting data, there’s so much bias that we have inherent and especially as like entrepreneurs or product executives, that you assume, again, you’re going to nail it every time but there’s so much that data that you can collect that can inform your process, just like any good market research will now there’s so much tooling available, that you can run all kinds of different tests out in the marketplace before you do really expensive implementation work. So I think so much of just good business. And good research is using the tools that we have today. And there’s still a lot of entrepreneurs that are building their businesses, I would say how we built businesses over a decade ago, they raised a finite amount of money. Everything’s got to work in that in that timeline in that budget, and there’s no sort of room outside of it. So it’s just a challenge.
Alexander Ferguson 7:26
Transitioning now to this, the Cures Act, and how that’s going to kind of change things. Obviously, you’re heavily invested in helping a lot of healthcare, product companies and tech companies. What first up what is the this Cures Act? And how is it changing things? Sure. So
Chris Cera 7:42
the 21st Century Cures Act was something passed in Congress years ago. And then it’s passed on to government agencies, which is the Office of the National Coordinator, OMC, and then Centers for Medicaid and Medicare CMS to write rules, they call them rules that are then implemented by industry. And so next year, it presently in July of 2021, begins the enforcement discretion for a very specific rule, which is called the patient access API, which all healthcare insurance companies, any private insurers need to make it through an API, all of the clinical data that they have all of the claims data that they have, and any encounter information that they have about your physician encounters. Anytime that you request it using third party applications. So for instance, Google and Apple already have digital health interfaces in their phones, they’re going to be able now to tap into your private insurers, let’s say you had three private insurance companies, because you switch jobs multiple times, or switch to your partner’s insurance company, you’ll be able to basically query all of them and get those get that information that they have into your phone. So this is really the first time that this information is going from the the space of HIPAA for the health insurance companies, which is governed through HIPAA legislation into now the Federal Trade Commission. So you’re going to see a lot of personal health information that’s now under the scope of ordinary Federal Trade Commission data, just like we have with our banking data, a lot of our e Commerce Data all falls into that jurisdiction. So this will be the first time that that’s happening for healthcare data. And so so much of it is is focused on bringing healthcare into the 21st century, and giving consumers a lot more choice around their data portability, transparency, and things like that.
Alexander Ferguson 9:35
How does this that affect both the consumer we talked a little bit about effectively, that means they should get access to their healthcare data easier. But from the tech side, that means those who want to build applications now should get API access to any potential data that consumers may have and be able to pull that feed in correctly.
Chris Cera 9:56
Correct. Yeah. So this will mostly impact on right away b2c companies that are offering that have offerings to the consumer. So we can easily see something that helps you choose an insurance plan based on the benefits that you presently have. And benefits that are presently available. The ability to shop, you know, live essentially is something that’s going to be enabled, there’s also going to be all all types of digital health and digital wellness companies that will be able to tap into this data. And then pharmaceutical companies and medical device companies, which are mostly regulated by the FDA would also have some ability to, to also request this data. And so it also has a whole interesting set of experiences that you can build for consumers based on that.
Alexander Ferguson 10:44
The the upsides of having this, it more, I guess, transparency, more data is everywhere. Everyone can access that. Did I get that? Would you say anything different to that as well? Yeah,
Chris Cera 10:55
patient transparency is a big a big part of it. So and, in essence, you can’t have any, these companies aren’t supposed to have any information about you without like being able to share it with you at some point as well. So that’s a big part of this. The the fact that I’m now a series of applications, so it’s not just going to be the large, the large tech companies like Google and Apple, this is this functionality is available, basically to the entire market. So we’re going to see all kinds of innovative solutions that we’ve never seen before. And ways that data gets mashed together in ways that that you haven’t been able to in the past. And in general, I think there’s a lot just in day to day life of ordinary consumers, when they have access to this information, that’s just going to benefit them right on the spot. And it’s not just going to be you, it’s also going to be caregivers, in the cases of families that take care of you. This is available to your caretaker in a family situation. So there’s there’s a lot of benefits from a transparency and just an overall consumer perspective.
Alexander Ferguson 11:56
And people don’t for those who are afraid, then the sunlight, everybody have access to all my data, it’s still permission based, right? So people can build applications connecting to the insurance companies with the API connection, but it still a consumer that says Hey, okay, now I will give you said tech product access to my data, but it’s still them giving the permission.
Chris Cera 12:18
Correct? Absolutely. So it’s using the HIPAA right of access, so your your personal right to access your medical records. And it’s a digital and electronic version of that. So you as a consumer, they’re going to display some warnings to you telling you that, you know, just be sure you know, who you’re trusting, you know, all of those types of questions, there’s a whole series of them almost like a nutrition label that is being deliberated. And there’s a group called the Karen Alliance, which is a private public and really open group organization that’s focused on the commercialization and the standards around patient identity, the protocols for accessing the information and a number of other things surrounding this area, they’re the leaders in this area. Are there
Alexander Ferguson 13:04
any downsides to this or any bad predictions that you can see.
Chris Cera 13:09
So just like other information, that’s that’s out there about you, whether it passwords that are compromised and things like that, there’s different attempts that can be made fraudulently, and that sort of thing. So I think we’re going to see more of that with healthcare information, as as an unfortunate side effect of this now being sort of loose in the market. And so I think that’ll have that’ll have negative downsides. But on the whole, I think, the, the positives far outweigh the negatives, and, and those exist in all of the other industries, whether it’s ecommerce, and banking today, and we seem to function, okay, as a society. So I don’t think this is gonna be any different.
Alexander Ferguson 13:48
I am excited with the concept of actually easily getting all this data, because like, right now, it’s like, the doctors haven’t that the insurance people have, but I want to have it and readily available, it sounds like this is gonna help the consumer in the end and give rise to a lot of cool new tech products. For those who have ideas.
Chris Cera 14:06
Absolutely. So actually, this year is an experiment, I requested my medical records from a major health system here locally in Philly, and I won’t name names, but I was sending on a CD. So the records were sent, you know, through us mail on a CD, and it’s just a browsable CD of this information with PDFs that have been like look, it’s it’s a it’s not electronic data. It’s not structured data, it’s it’s missing everything that you would expect in a in a modern system. So this is really bringing it into the current century.
Alexander Ferguson 14:40
Well, I really appreciate the this insight on on the Cures Act as well as some insight of when should you hire an external company when does make for a CTO? For those that do need some help? Definitely check out arc web technologies. Your website is arcweb.co, right arcweb.co
Chris Cera 14:57
Correct Yeah, or arcwebtech.com either of those works.
Alexander Ferguson 15:01
Got it. In today’s world, I have a couple domains but the right place and be able to get people there. Definitely check out Chris and Arc web technology. Thanks again for joining us and everyone. Make sure to go to UpTechReport.com to see the full interview if you’re listening to this on podcast be able to see more of bio and information and other great interviews again, our sponsor for today’s episode is TeraLeap. If your company wants to learn how to better leverage the power of video. To increase sales and marketing results, head over to TeraLeap.io. Learn about the new product customer stories. Thanks again everyone, and we’ll see you next time. That concludes the audio version of this episode. To see the original and more visit our UpTech Report YouTube channel. If you know a tech company we should interview you can nominate them at UpTech report.com or if you just prefer to listen, make sure you subscribe to this series on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcasting app.
