From Wall Street to Michael Jackson: WINR’s CTO, Scott Lawrence, shares some of his career highlights

Our CTO, Scott Lawrence, has spent four decades in the IT industry working in many sectors across the world. While almost everything else around him has changed, one thing has remained the same: his approach.

“For almost 40 years I’ve worked across diverse industries, none of which I’m an expert in. From day one, my approach has been taking ideas from incredibly creative visionaries and delivering complex technological solutions that generate a material impact on the business, or in some cases, an entire industry. I take direction from the people at the coalface of an industry – be it finance, music or identity verification – because they are the ones that know it inside out. They tell me what the business needs, and I make it happen (or tell them it’s not possible!). Over the years, this approach has made for a very interesting journey…”

The WINR of Wall Street

“Being recruited fresh out of university years ago for a job on Wall Street meant I didn’t follow the same career path as many of my fellow students. It was 1985 and a lot of graduates headed straight to the big tech companies, such as IBM. But rather than be in the thick of the tech industry, I wanted to help companies innovate by using technology.

It was the era of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sony Discman, while in the enterprise world, availability of state-of-the-art personal computers was changing the game. It was all about speed: computerised trading programs and developing financial products. It’s fair to say Wall Street offered a very *ahem* unique lifestyle for a freshly graduated tech-head in the 80’s!”

“How does this internet-thing work?”

“Just a few years later, in the early nineties, CBS Records was sold to Sony for $2 billion. I had industry connections at Sony from my student days and was headhunted to jump ship from finance to music. The team there was tackling a huge greenfield project: taking technology out of CBS Records and starting up a new company within the Sony family, called Sony Music Entertainment. It was a whole new world compared to finance.

Having adapted to the explosive impact of personal computers during my time on Wall Street, something even bigger was on the horizon as I began my tenure at Sony: the internet. Everyone had heard of the internet and wanted to know be amongst the first to leverage it, so I became part of the team that launched Sony Music Entertainment, and all its amazing artists, onto the world wide web.”

Michael Jackson on instant messenger

“Moving from finance to music, meant conversations went from risk-averse and serious to innovative and creative; they wanted to know everything they could do with this money-making machine called the internet.

I remember Michael Jackson coming in and we set up three ISPs to run at the same time so he could answer questions from his fans over messenger services like AOL and MSN. We were also tasked to set up a website called BruceSpringsteen.com. Overnight, the singer, who had been signed to CBS Records since 1972, suddenly had an online identity and it was completely in the hands of the record label. In the early days, things were happening so fast I’m not sure the artists really understood what was going on, but it was one of the most pivotal moments to be working in IT in the music industry for a generation.”

Innovation doesn’t always equal efficient

“In 1997, I left New York City and moved to London where I joined Sony Music Europe. By this point it was clear that, despite the company making huge leaps in innovation, it wasn’t always using the technology efficiently. For instance, every region had its own webmaster, setting up individual artist websites from scratch and significantly duplicating efforts. Similarly, physical demo CDs were being sent around the world via courier services, wasting time and money. There must have been smarter ways of working and I was tasked to find them.

I helped build a centralised management system to streamline website creation in various regions and developed a solution to enable demo CDs to be digitally transmitted to every office around the world at the push of a button. I can’t even begin to imagine the time and money these two solutions saved the business.”

Finding opportunity in diversity

“After living in London for three years, I grew tired of the long winters and moved to Sydney in the early 00s. I completed my MBA and consulted on several projects before meeting WINR founders, Marcelo and Malcolm in 2014. Joining them at Cohort was my first foray into lead gen, but as with Wall Street and Sony, I listened to the industry experts and developed a unique system which helped grow gross revenue from $5 million to $25 million over a three-year period. Working with the duo for the last 10 years hasn’t been boring – or predictable. Challenges have included implementing SaaS call centre software, developing a multi-country identity verification service and achieving ISO 27001 certification, the world’s leading standard for information security management, cybersecurity and data protection.

Rather than working in tech, I made the decision early on in my career to work with tech. This gave me the freedom to experience so many industries, work with smart people and witness the impact of tech advances first-hand. It’s not all been plain sailing, and over the years some of the ‘visions’ I’ve been tasked to bring to life have really just been crazy ideas!

So, after 40 years I’ve mastered how to balance a can-do attitude with being a realist and believe anything is possible – unless I say it can’t be done.”