A Q&A with Andrew Howland, CTO & Co-founder
Cornerstone AI is publishing a series of Q&As with team members to provide more information and context on their role at Cornerstone AI, as well as their professional background. This is the seventh post of the series. Visit our blog to see previous posts in the series.
Your background is in finance and research and, later, data science - can you tell me a little about why you chose to go into that field in the first place?
I studied economics and math in my undergrad program, and I really liked econ. At the time, I thought that was the direction I was going to follow in my career. I started off in the private sector, working in investment banking very briefly. I thought it would be a good educational experience, and then I realized it was a little bit more business and a little bit less theoretical economics. So fairly quickly, I made the switch over to the Federal Reserve, which was much more aligned with what I had imagined. Much like at most universities, we worked for economists who did their own personal research, and then instead of teaching they would do public policy research that supported the central bank's goals and objectives. That was the midst of the financial crisis in 2008-2009, so it was certainly an interesting time to be at the Federal Reserve. I really liked the work I was doing, so I continued my plans to pursue that path, and part of the typical pursuit of that path is getting a PhD in economics. So, while I was a research assistant at the Fed, I was taking some graduate level coursework in statistics and math, just to prepare for that econ PhD as I was thinking about applications.
It was around that same time that the term “data science” started to gain steam. One of the paths to data science is through statistics, so I thought that was interesting and considered it as a potential path. Simultaneously, I was also becoming a little bit less interested in pursuing a PhD in economics as I was seeing the work firsthand. It was still interesting work, but I started to appreciate that maybe it wasn't quite right for me. So I was getting the training on one hand in anticipation for econ, but I realized I could leverage that in this new path of data science that was emerging, deviating a bit off the path I had planned for myself. And then I think I got to the point at the Fed where I'd been there for a long time, and it was really compelling work, but I realized that to continue forward in the Fed, you really do need to have a PhD in economics – that is kind of what runs the whole institution. The Fed has been doing quantitative research for forever, but I was intrigued to see areas outside of an economics/policy/financial markets realm, and healthcare was another thing that interested me. I was casting a pretty broad net when I moved over to Medidata. I wasn't just looking at healthcare, but I happened to land there, thanks to a little bit of random chance.
What inspired you to co-found Cornerstone AI?
There were a couple of factors: I would say there was both a push and a pull. The “push” was that I had gotten to a spot at Medidata where I was senior enough that I had, perhaps, a broader perspective on the company. I had opinions about what we should invest our time and our resources in doing, and what we should not invest our time and resources in doing, but I also didn't have so much authority that I could influence that. I couldn't significantly determine a direction, left or right or up or down or whatever it might be. And I think an additional part of the push was that I was getting to the point where a lot of my time was spent talking about work that we might do or should do, or someone should do, but very little time executing it. I was starting to get frustrated by the feeling that we were spinning our wheels a lot.
On the “pull” side, at this point, I had worked with Mike for several years at Medidata before he moved on to Project Rōnin. We kept in touch; Mike was one of the most brilliant and kind people I'd ever worked for. I always knew that I’d want to work with Mike again. He had contacted me when he moved to Project Rōnin, and that wasn't quite the right move for me, but ultimately, he reached out with the idea of Cornerstone, and I think the initial spark was like, “Oh yeah, it'd be nice to work with Mike again.” The timing wasn't great, though – we had just had our second child a couple days before he called me initially, but we spent a good amount of time talking about what the idea was and what the business case for it might be. What I started to appreciate is that I was pretty excited about the idea of, basically, along with Mike and with our team that we've built, getting to call the shots.
The push out of Medidata was a little bit of frustration, feeling like I had this perspective and not being able to influence enough the direction that we were heading. And at a small business, like it or not, you get to determine, together with your teammates, all the direction – which very much satisfies that curiosity. Now, there are downsides to that, too, but I think I was at a point where I was ready to make that jump. So, there was the excitement of getting to work with some of the brightest people I'd ever worked with: Mike being the first and then, later, getting to bring others on board with us and work together to pursue the things that we thought were valuable, and were going to have an impact on the industry. That was a pretty compelling idea at the time, and continues to be.
On a day-to-day basis, what does your work look like? What drives you to continue the work each day?
There's a lot that goes into helping run a business, like getting new customers and supporting some of the necessary business functions. A lot of my time is spent in front of customers, especially talking to new potential customers as we're selling, pitching, and piloting our software. The initial pitch is where we get interest, and start to build a business case. The next step is doing a pilot where we're actively communicating what the software does, what our company can offer, how that relates to your needs, how it meets those needs, etc. And if all goes well, then we get into things like negotiating the actual terms of our contract, the legal paperwork, all of the process that is needed to actually get it over the line. So, I have a decent amount of work in that realm. Certainly, we have some relationships that, even though we've signed contracts and it's moving along, I'm still pretty involved in at least some of the day-to-day. That includes helping to manage the deployment of our software in their cloud, and making sure that stakeholders are aligned and balls aren't getting dropped. So that's one category of things I work on daily concerning our customers.
A second category of things is more related to the business functions. We’re hiring some new roles and others are leading that process, but I’m helping support that through interviews and through getting some of the process rolling. When we hire those people, we’ll have HR things to do like onboarding and all that jazz.
I'm also our Chief Security Officer. We handle a lot of very sensitive and costly data, and our customers keep a very close eye on our policies, procedures, and practices around data security. We have various forms of certifications, as well as other ones that we're pursuing, and there's a process involved with that, too.
What does the future hold for Cornerstone AI?
We were talking about this at our team dinner last night, and I think the idea of Cornerstone that many of us find most compelling is that we get to work with really bright people who are also really kind, and we enjoy working as a team. We get to build the things that we think are impactful – so really, what I want to still be doing in five years is the exact same thing. I think the goal is to continue to do that, to grow as we do that, and that means bringing on more bright people and figuring out the next set of problems, both in terms of the new things we're going to build as solutions for our customers, and also the practical realities of growing a business, like doing all of the security and the hiring and HR and the finance and scaling things up. Each new step requires new sets of skills, new sets of specialties, new people. I would say underlying all of that, we want to keep building excellent things for our customers and attracting the best people that we can to do it so that we are individually and collectively enriched and learning in the process. I think that's the guiding principle; our North Star, if you will.
What are you most proud of in your professional and/or personal life?
At the moment, Cornerstone ranks pretty highly on there. It permeates a lot of the professional and personal spheres for me, in practice, as it’s both a demanding and a rewarding thing. What I'm most proud of is we're really a tiny team. We're fewer than 10 people, and the fact that we've been able to build the software that we have, find the people at these large organizations, and then pursue them and convince them of their need of us and take that to the point where we have some truly meaningful commercial relationships... all of that is the culmination of years of work, and it's definitely the hardest thing I've ever done.
A lot of us came from big companies where, if they wanted to build a ‘startup’ within the company, they got some people, they gave them some funding, and they put them on the side. You're given a lot of resources to start with in that case: financial, but also connections with the industry because the company already has those. But we've basically had to get those from scratch. So, I'm certainly very proud of this team, which had one specific skill set – we're a very technical team – but we’ve taken on many new skills. We've jumped into really uncertain and uncomfortable places and built something out of nothing, which still kind of astounds me, so I'm certainly proud of that.
But I'm especially proud of the way that we have built the company. We have a team that is largely in the early stages of starting their families. In the last two years, we’ve had three babies born from our team members. We also just heard from another one of the guys on our team that he and his wife are expecting. So, I think it's one thing to build a company, but it's another to do it in a way that it can be a part of people's lives without demanding all of their time or energy. We recognize that we are all people with very full lives, and we keep that in balance. It's not just the fact that we've been able to create this company from nothing. It's the way that we've done it, in building for a future company that we all want to continue to be a part of. I think that's the most exciting part.
What are you passionate about outside of work?
A big part of my life is my wife and my two kids – we have a seven-year-old and a four-year-old – and all stages of having kids are fun, but both of them are rambunctious and like to get outside. We’re heading into winter now, and I’m really excited to do some skiing with both of them.
When I do have time for personal hobbies, I really enjoy woodworking and building things. I guess maybe building a company is fun in that way, too. Whether it's out of wood or working on a piece of land to shape it in certain ways, it's nice to work with things in the physical world as well as building software, so I really enjoy doing that. And then when I have time, and when the waves are good, I really enjoy surfing. It's nice to get in the water and let all of this wash away for a minute and just have the energy of the waves and hopefully a warm, sunny day.