diverse my background has been.

Angel Mehta: Do you ever feel that you’re lacking in any areas as CEO? What part of the job do you feel least comfortable with?

Greg Burnell: Well, until you actually start a company, you really don’t know. I think until you sit in the chair, I don’t believe you realize how hard it is or what the opportunities are. I will tell you that venture capital is its own animal, if you will. So understanding the venture capital markets and how you navigate those and make the right decisions for your company, bring the right people into your company, put the right people on the board, I think those are experiences that you need to do several times before you really get a high degree of confidence, I’m like everybody in the world, I have my own shortcomings. Time management is always a challenge for a CEO and keeping your priorities in front of you and it’s a daily challenge to try to keep yourself focused. But I work on those things like I hope everybody in my organization does. And I think those are fundamental skill sets that we constantly improve upon as we go through our careers.

Angel Mehta: What was the genesis for 6th Sense Analytics?

Greg Burnell: I’ve spent a lot of time in my career on application development…the infrastructure surrounding software projects. And my Co-Founder and I sat down and the conversation that really became the impetus for creating 6th Sense Analytics was: What is the largest challenge that no one seems willing to take on? And we came to the conclusion that visibility and understanding the dynamics of a software engineering process is still a very nascent thing. People don’t really know how software is built – it’s so complex. That was the ‘why’ behind 6th Sense.

Angel Mehta: What part of your job do you dislike the most?

Greg Burnell: I think when you’re CEO and you care about the people you work with, you always want better for everybody. You want everyone’s performance to be better; you want the company to be more successful. I think I’m probably more humanistic than some people in that I take things very, not necessarily, personally, but I take them to heart and I want the best for everyone at 6th Sense Analytics. I take my obligations and responsibilities very seriously. As CEO, I am not just responsible for the company, but also for the people that choose to come and work here and put their careers in our hands. I both dislike and embrace this responsibility because it’s what I wanted. But it’s what keeps me up at night and is what challenges me to do the very best I can on a daily basis to ensure that I’m not letting anyone down and that I’m doing the things that I should do to help everyone achieve their individual goals.

Angel Mehta: Have you found that the IT Department is becoming more or less relevant, let’s say over the last five to seven years in the buying process for software?

Greg Burnell: Well, not necessarily less relevant, particularly for us. I mean, ultimately someone that owns the success of a piece of software, that person is key in the buying process. To that extent, I think that we’re intimately involved with both the business user and the technology user. The information that we hope to bring to light really serves both constituencies. Ultimately, software development is all about three things: On time, on budget and meets the needs of the user. So, in serving those three goals, the final one is always that the application in fact does what it’s supposed to do. So as a software solution for software development teams, we need to make sure that we’re aligned all these goals. In deployment, in the day-to-day utilization of the technology, certainly the engineering teams and the product management teams are the ones that are...consumers are large, but ultimately what it comes down to is strategically making decisions – what stays and what goes, what gets built, what software projects go offshore, what stays onshore – all of the dynamics of the business that happen financially is the software. At 6th Sense, we believe we play a very strategic role in all those positions.