Tom Furphy

The Agile Innovation Series focuses on the need for organizations to constantly evolve and innovate with an agile mindset to remain viable in today’s dynamic world. Throughout the series accelerate360’s Trey Holder explores the current business environment through interviews with leaders in a variety of fields. This month, Holder caught up with Tom Furphy, chief executive officer and managing director of Consumer Equity Partners, a venture capital and venture development firm.

Here are some of the highlights from the discussion:

HOLDER: How did you get started in the e-commerce and venture capital spaces?

FURPHY: The first chapter of my career was spent in retail leadership at Wegmans. Then, building on my grocery experience and entrepreneurial spirit, I went out to Silicon Valley, where I raised capital to build and sell a company. From there I ended up at Amazon, where I led Consumables and AmazonFresh in the early days of its CPG business. I’ve been in Seattle ever since, running a venture firm focused on e-commerce and commerce-related companies.

HOLDER: What are three traits you think an organization must possess to have an agile culture?

FURPHY: The first is trust. When you innovate, you take your teams to uncomfortable places and you want to get there with people you trust. Organizations should build a pervasive culture of trust that is fostered by transparency and accountability. You can trust each other if the facts are on the table and both parties are accountable for their actions.

Next, you must have a restless customer obsession. Focus on your end customer and what you want your company to be for that customer. This mindset really helps orient companies and helps them be ready to ­innovate.

The last trait is decisiveness. Once you’ve decided on an innovation, go do it! Don’t mess around. Go do it. Test it and measure it. Don’t be afraid to pivot and/or kill it if it’s not working. Just be decisive. Being indecisive slows things down, eroding and impeding the process.

HOLDER: Can you give an example of a company that has an agile culture?

FURPHY: Generally, tech-focused companies, like Amazon, have agile cultures, but this trait is not exclusive to one industry. Alibaba is extremely agile in the way it expands its consumer offerings through a culture of experimentation and innovation. A common thread of companies that do it right is adding complementary services that work well together.

HOLDER: As a leader, what keeps you up at night?

FURPHY: We’re in a particularly nasty inflationary environment right now, which can make it difficult to balance all of the needs of customers, investors and teams. Even with the best technology, it can be hard to balance innovating for the customer while also delivering earnings. It can also be challenging to get customers to adopt and to scale what you’re offering. It’s easy to experiment but harder to scale. These combined conditions put a great deal of stress on teams. As a leader, you really need to be in tune with your team and their needs.

HOLDER: What are you up to now?

FURPHY: I spend most of my time working on Replenium, an Auto-Replenishment Platform that brings the science and capabilities of next-generation shopping through seamless integration into a retailer’s or brand’s e-commerce system. Retail formats like grocery, mass, chain drug and club have not been super conducive to traditional product subscriptions, yet that’s where we buy most of our stuff. We’ve developed a capability that basically takes generative AI and other forms of machine learning and software to enable automation that provides an AI-generated shopping list at your local retailer that shops for itself, creates orders on its own, and gives you a chance to review it, pay for it and schedule the delivery.

Watch the full interview here: YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/yQBB2VDvGjc

This transcript was lightly edited for brevity for Chain Drug Review.