Juan José de La Torre, CEO of Raven, is one of the world voices of digital transformation. The former IBM executive returned to Chile in 2019, joined the ranks of Virtus Partners and last February began the digital branch of the consultancy, which changed its name and is committed to being the main global digital disruption boutique.
Juan José de La Torre, CEO of Raven, is one of the world voices of digital transformation. The former IBM executive returned to Chile in 2019, joined the ranks of Virtus Partners and last February began the digital branch of the consultancy, which changed its name and is committed to being the main global digital disruption boutique.
The company, an expert in senior management consulting, was looking for an expert in digital issues. Obviously, looking to the future and, without knowing what was coming with the pandemic and the prompt digitization of companies, they were preparing for it. The first approach was at lunch. De La Torre learned that they were present and that they were making inquiries, looking for a specialist. "But I was in another one," he recalls. Then came a meeting and "it was a perfect match." If he had to return to Chile, he says, it had to be something "that would get me off the plane" and that would leave him well located in the country, while at the same time, he could take care of his family problems.
"The idea was to go back and spend more time with my mother, but also for my children to spend their days with their grandmother...", he recalls, and it was at that moment, in March 2019 - he had been at IBM up to a month ago -, who returned to Chile as a Virtus partner. There the family expanded, but other labor challenges also began: the national reality, at least in digitization, disruption, and innovation, was very different from that experienced abroad, where companies are constantly one step ahead. He pauses and smiles slightly, with a look of surprise. “And my first impression was… 'I screwed up,'” he recalls with a laugh.
Disrupt or be disrupted
De La Torre's experience with startups, digitalization, and innovation dates back to the late 90s. At that time, when he was in his last year at the UAI in Viña del Mar and during the times of the initial internet boom, he created his first initiative: I-Education Holdings, an education startup that had different products -including MiClase and ElAula-, and which was a partner of the Government of Chile during the term of former President Ricardo Lagos. Later it evolved to software for classes in schools and the central offices became in the United States. He left the company in the year 2000.
At that time, as "backpacking" with his girlfriend and current wife, they decided to leave for Spain. “And because of those startup events and so on, they offered me to stay as a consultant and I took it with the plan to stay for a few months, but it turned into twenty years,” he recalls with a laugh. This is how he spent part of those years between South Korea, Japan, and the United States, among other countries.
In Europe, he then raised his second startup, SCM-Medialab, specialized in guerrilla marketing, and which was the first in Spain to do marketing with videos and which he also later sold, with the idea of doing an MBA at Insead -with faculties in Singapore and France-. He returned to Dubai, where they had previously moved with his wife in 2008, and joined a consultancy, always linked to digital transformation. And he then expanded his repertoire.
He traveled with innovation and development projects through the Middle East and Africa and passed through Sudan, the Ivory Coast, and other West African countries. “There was, then, a whole period of knowing and seeing that there are a lot of interesting things in other places, and that the vision we have in Chile of culture and the world is very different from what is outside,” he says. There himself he formed his then third startup, Imaginalab, which focused on digital strategies, which he set up in Dubai and was later acquired by a Middle Eastern conglomerate.
Since then, it has been inserted into the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. Today he is on the board of eleven incubators and accelerators around the world, from Silicon Valley to Palestine -in the only one present in the country-, he has mentored more than 200 startups and invested in 14. In addition, he is certified as a European Angel Investor, by the European Commission. So, when he decides to invest, a matching is made to his "funding". “I was pretty much involved in that investment circle…and the entrepreneurs were replaced when my real kids came along,” he quips.
Jota jota, as they call him in his office and he can be heard from one side to the other, in a striped shirt and red pants, he stops and says hello. He makes a sign and his wife enters with his youngest daughter. They greet each other, talk for a few minutes and spend some time with the minor. Picking up, he explains that while in Dubai he joined IBM, but the requirement was to be 90% traveling on a plane. His partner, with whom he has been married since 2004, then decided to devote himself to motherhood.
Local reality
First of all, De La Torre warns that having spent 20 years outside of Chile has given him a greater baggage with respect to the global industry. That makes him a little more critical of the local market. “I see the glass as half full, but it is hard for me to understand why, with all the opportunities and potential we have, we are not leaders in Latin America in terms of disruption or transformation, nor why there are more Ravens in Chile,” he says.
The first months in Chile, he says, were very difficult, "knocking on many doors and talking to many people." “We had to realize that this experience, which for me was natural and an obvious conversation, in other markets like this required a lot of evangelization,” he recalls. They began to assert themselves with projects. The first pivot, then, came when the social outbreak occurred. “But the damage that was caused to infrastructure caused many of our customers to shift their budgets from innovation and development to repair. We had to think that if Chile was no longer the market, we had to change the original plan”, he recalls.
He took a plane and went on a three-country tour. The result was that by January 2020 they had projects in Peru, Mexico and Colombia. Then came Covid-19. “There all the investments went to zero, because nobody knew what would happen. And there was a second pivot to think about how we turned what we were doing into products that were easy to sell and not have more consulting conversations, ”he recalls.
Quietly, he assumes, Raven began to form . Although Virtus had different consulting areas, they all walked under the same name. They ended 2020 with about 25 people on their team and entered 2021 that they ended with twice as many, and having executed more than 40 projects in 30 months. And with tripling or quadrupling income every year, he says. They worked in Peru with El Comercio , in Mexico with Invex , with Santander in Spain - "the first time that Spain contracted Chile", he says -, and at a national level with CMPC , COCHA and Cemento Melón, among others. Basically, the role of the digital branch of the consultancy is to be the best partner for the different firms on their way to disrupting and accelerating their businesses. As they say, they deliver end-to-end solutions that go from the idea of the project to its execution, dealing with design, user experience, technology and data.
With all the projects they currently manage, De La Torre says that the team is not enough to gauge what they are doing. “What we do is support organizations on the path to disruption, how to create disruptive businesses and how to accelerate those disruption processes, and we don't want to bill more or have the most people, but rather to make the most entertaining and challenging disruption projects”, assumes the executive.
The disruption of companies
There are three processes, says De La Torre. The first starts with digitization, "and that is where a large part of the organizations are today." The second is transformation, which has to do with the reinvention of processes. And the third point is disruption. “It has to do with identifying business opportunities, not in the core business: it is the re-understanding of the assets and that can lead us to identify new opportunities, which come with new models”, sums up the engineer. Then he exemplifies. “If this were a means of communication, one of its most valuable assets is credibility. What else can I do and invent with that credibility?” He questions.
Take the case of Raven itself as a brand spun off from another, in light of the needs in the market and the credibility of the company. "We are the disruptor of Virtus and we are eating our own medicine," he says. There are two positions in the ecosystem: disrupt or be disrupted. “This entails making companies understand that it is a constant process, not something that goes hand in hand with a project, and it is a change in mentality: it will not last 18 months, but rather something forever”, says the CEO of Raven.
It is always necessary to be in constant evolution and change, he says, because just as the needs of the clients are raised and they are solved, they themselves evolve. "If not, let's look at how Chile has evolved in the last three years... Since I came back, the changes have been tremendous," he reiterates. Given this, you have to be "with the antennas constantly listening", adapting and evolving. “And that is very different from the traditional model, in which a company decides what product to launch, it is manufactured and put on the market, bombarded with marketing. That, versus understanding the client and creating the product that matches it: on the one hand we have a less humble position, in which I think I know what the client wants, and on the other we do it with him at the center”, he develops.
National examples
When I returned to Chile, since I came once or twice a year, I had the image of a country that was developing a lot and growing. "But I found myself with a very conservative business class, reluctant to innovate and generate disruption and transformation, with an uncompetitive market and a dichotomy," says the executive, explaining that at the national level there are the fundamental elements to be leading in digital transformation and technology adoption.
"But both at the business and government levels are still digitizing, and we remain focused on taking the same process and improving it digitally, and not taking big bets on transforming processes and doing different things," he says.
Of course, Juan José de La Torre says that among the firms that are always attentive to the consumer and are an example is SKY Airlines . “They really have to put themselves in the customer's shoes and be there, and you can see the president there, where the potatoes burn and you can see that,” he says. He also mentions NotCo and Betterly , among others. “They have found interesting value propositions, which they have been able to package, structure, and make scalable,” he says, adding MATCH later. “It's quite interesting, with much bigger potential and they're just scratching the surface,” he proposes.
Then, in the industrial area, "which is seen further away", it is often a pioneer in these issues and advances more than the consumer-oriented area, which is what one thinks is first or closest. The products, yes, must be allowed to evolve -just as the needs of customers are constantly changing-.
"One of the big problems of corporations is that they want to solve everything at once and when they do something new, and even something disruptive, they want to have everything ready and in the end there are two alternatives: evolve what you have or get into new things," he says, and digital transformation is getting into new things by leveraging who you are and what you have done," he says. And digital disruption has to do with starting new things by leveraging “who you are and what you have done”, what you know and the assets you have, and with that “going to play in someone else's field with a different way of playing”, which will help evolve what you have.
Today Raven has 90% of its work outside of Chile, and they already have offices in Berlin, Madrid, Mexico, Bogotá and Santiago, with the idea that the local office is the headquarters. “Our commitment is to do it from Chile to the world, and we see a great opportunity and it is up to us to take advantage of it and take it forward”, closes De La Torre.