Larry Augustin
Chairman & CEO, Brief
Larry founded VA Linux Systems and led SugarCRM for a decade. He writes on category formation, the cost of context blindness, and the economics of executive work.
Background
Larry Augustin has spent thirty years inside the software-category shifts of his time. He founded VA Linux Systems during the rise of open source. He led SugarCRM for a decade as the company built one of the first credible commercial-open-source businesses. He has watched a category get named, and watched founders fail to name one, from inside the room.
What he writes
Larry writes on four themes across the Papers.
The first is category formation. Executive Intelligence is not a feature inside an existing tool. It is a category with a responsibility no existing category owns: whether the executive's decisions, commitments, and goals carry through. He makes the case for why that category was missing, and why it is buildable now.
The second is context blindness. The condition has a name, a mechanism, and a cost. Larry quantifies what it costs and explains why thirty years of productivity software left it in place.
The third is the economics of executive delegation. There is a consistent gap between what a leader sets in motion and what actually lands. He traces where that gap comes from and what it takes to close it.
The fourth is the evolution of executive work. The executive operator class has changed over fifteen years. The rise of the Chief of Staff, the velocity of decisions, the breadth of relationships a senior leader now carries. Larry argues that Executive Intelligence is the next system of record for how that work gets done.