Arctir

Arctir's AI-enabled developer platform improves developer experience helping teams stay organized; breaking down the silo's that limit situational awareness

Founder & CEO

Kong Inc.

Responsible for all post sales departments from a hiring, budget and execution perspective. This includes CRE/Support, Education, Professional Services offerings, Account management and supporting analytics and operations functions.

During my tenure with Kong we've markedly increased our responsiveness and engagement with customers across a wide array of automation, personal touch points and traditional engagement models. This has resulted in decreased churn, increased expansion bookings & product usage, increased services bookings, increased NPS and more. 

This was accomplished despite the worldwide headwinds of COVID and the logistical challenges of the same. The worldwide CX team has gone from ~10 to ~75 under my leadership in the past two years with presence in nearly a dozen countries worldwide.

Vice President of Customer Experience

Heptio

Heptio was Acquired by VMware in December 2018.

Prior to the acquisition I was responsible for hiring and leading the training, pre-sales and delivery organizations which were responsible for driving the adoption of Kubernetes technologies within our customer's environments, which included numerous Fortune 10 accounts and Fortune 100 accounts worldwide.

After the acquisition of Heptio by VMware I jointly worked with the global PSO and Cloud Native Applications business unit to define and action the integration and strategy for Consulting and Education services around the emerging Kubernetes and Cloud Native space. Including role definitions, pricing, positioning, portfolio definition, operational integration and executive briefings with key VMware and DellEMC accounts.

We scaled the Practice to 100+ people in 10+ countries to execute on this strategy and help bring Kubernetes to market for VMware and its customers.

Head of Services

CoreOS

CoreOS was acquired by Red Hat in January 2018.

My main focus was building and leading our Field Engineering organization where we worked with our customers to jointly develop solutions to our customers technology adoption problems within the Distributed Systems and Cloud Native space. 

My organization achieved 100% positive feedback from customers in 2017, and we exceeded all of our targets from a financial perspective and have contributed to the overall product and sales strategies.

I also helped run the Customer Success organization, filling in as an interim leader for numerous departments and teams throughout my time with CoreOS. I helped recruit and on-board leaders for a number of departments including Support and Training.

Head of Field Engineering

Red Hat

Established the Consulting teams covering the Pacific Northwest and later Southwest regions. Responsible for all aspects of the Consulting business including bookings, margin and revenue, reporting, deal structure, hiring and mentoring of my team including delivery managers and consultants.

Territory Services Manager

Principal Architect

Senior Consultant

NexGen Data Systems, Inc.

Hired and managed the Systems and Datacenter practice. 

Provided technical input and oversight on large scale designs we provided to our customers including infrastructure and automation focusing on network element management, operating systems, configuration management, monitoring and reporting. 

Programs we supported included Tactical and mission critical elements for the Department of Defense and the US Navy.

Engineering Manager

Senior Unix Engineer

General systems administration and design. Helped deploy Puppet to replace legacy home-grown system based on CFEngine. Participated in a full datacenter refresh including networking, storage, compute and operational tooling revamp. Started storage standardization initiatives. Deployed numerous new solutions into the environment leveraging Open Source tooling and standards.

Senior Systems Administrator

Motricity

Systems Administrator

Linux Cluster Engineer

selfemployed

General Consultant & Entrepreneur 

I build and run high performance organizations. 

The first decade of my career was in technical roles and the last decade has been focused on the business side of the equation, both turning around struggling teams and building organizations from the ground up.

Friends of founders:

Pay for products - Make introductions - Post about them - Visit their website - Like a tweet - Open an email - Review the app - Suggest it to a potential customer - Wish them well.

Support comes in many forms, and often without money. Support your friends startups.

Paul L.

If your company has projects failing with GenAI or Platform Engineering you are likely biting off too much too fast. Downsize

Less is more in these cases

First mover can be an advantage, or it can mean you are lowing the operating costs for everyone else.

The inevitable competitors don't have to educate the market the way the trailblazer does. They can also avoid major bottlenecks and mistakes by just watching you and taking advantage of mistakes you made.

He's not wrong, but not entirely right either. We are much farther from AGI than people seem to think. Putting that aside lets unpack some reality:

- The AI tools and algorithms that exist today are already impacting every industry. I'd go so far as to say that every single business is at risk of getting upended if they don't take AI seriously.

- Money chases potential at a faster clip than many are comfortable with because the potential returns support doing so. This isn't the first and won't be the last hype cycle. In every cycle there are winners (coinbase, early crypto investors etc).

This is why negative types of headlines in 2022 about how things will never be the same were quickly dismissed. 

- Talent follows money. Why on earth would someone stay in a dying company or role if they could go work at Nvidia or OpenAI right now? That's not grifting if they are doing real work. 

This is like calling the early adopters and evangelists of cloud grifters. 

#startups #tech #software #artificialintelligence

ft.com • 4 min read

Huge AI funding leads to hype and ‘grifting’, warns DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis

Network of agents to network of agents through platforms is the way AI is going to move.

This is a natural evolution of how our systems are designed and consumed today, and will allow more granular control and growth tomorrow.

So a very smart play is to figure out first how to build an agent that has domain/niche expertise and accuracy and grow from there. 

This will also cycle from decentralized to centralized and back again. Generalist AI's will layer over the top of these platforms, leverage their interfaces and appear to provide more value to a user (breadth of knowledge) just like existing platforms. The underlying networks and platforms however will provide strong value in specific arenas and for specific tasks.

A longer read on this from NFX just dropped:

https://lnkd.in/gzmdKrkz

Its pure magic when things happen fast

Feedback, fix, transaction, food served in a restaurant etc - speed is a key part of great UX.

We've already gone past the era of AI protectionism and have entered into the era of AI FUD.

That was fast.

So many uncertainties here. It’s smart for IBM, but not sure how I’d view this as a customer or how they would reconcile the product portfolio

Taplio

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