GET TO KNOW overusing buzz words . We ’ re losing trust with our buyers and the community .
How do you deal with stress and unwind outside the office ?
I was at a conference where someone said what do you think of DevSecOps ? When I look at other industries around us , you never hear a dentist say , I practice dentistry , podiatry and heart surgery . It ’ s disconcerting .
One thing I ’ m excited about outside of buzzwords is the fact that more and more companies are looking less at generating data , and more at how to connect the dots between the data they already have . To answer complex questions better and faster . I think we are at the dawn of an interesting and exciting moment .
Another thing close to my heart is edge compute – doing everything possible to reduce latency between the end-user and the tech they use . . . Anything that makes the Internet faster and better is cool .
I am jealous of what my kids and grandkids will have at their fingertips .
Family . Cooking . Traveling . Although traveling is stressful these days .
If you could go back and change one career decision , what would it be ?
The only thing I wish I could have done differently in my career is getting an MBA when I was younger . It would have taught me a lot of important concepts that would have remained useful today , which I had to learn the hard way .
What do you currently identify as the major areas of investment in your industry ?
We are at the beginning of massive data lake warehouses – all the data from business , observability and other sources will live in one place so that people can triangulate better and answer questions better and faster – we are starting to see this among our customers .
What changes to your job role have you seen in the last year and how do you see these developing in the next 12 months ?
Over the last 12 months and across the pandemic as a whole , we ’ ve transitioned to being a fully distributed remote-first organization . In which you need to double down your efforts on instilling a shared culture and making sure that people stay aligned with a common thread and focus . That has been the biggest change .
The other major change is as a CEO , you ’ re asked to weigh in more and more on social issues and that can be a difficult line to tread .
What advice would you offer somebody aspiring to obtain a C-level position in your industry ?
Focus on showing versus telling what you can do , meaning that what we are interested in seeing is how someone has done something as opposed to just saying you ’ ve done it . Additionally , make sure you can show you are well rounded and can understand not only your functional department but how you manage horizontally and work with peers across the organization . That ’ s extremely important at the C level . Those cross departmental interconnects are very important and along with successfully running your own department , are ultimately what makes a great C level person . p
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