Let’s not hide the lead – does this statement resonate? (can find it and more detail here)

W​e’re out to change the way people build technology. Among data storage companies, we defy industry conventions, and by pairing our partners and customers with our ​elegantly​ simple solutions we hope to forever change expectations of what’s possible from a data storage company.

If that sounds familiar, you know what’s coming next. I’m excited to be joining Pure Storage starting Monday, February 25 as a Principal Systems Engineer, Southeast.

So let’s unpack that a bit – why the excitement?

Let’s start at more of an abstract level – Purpose, Mastery, and Autonomy. Have you watched the RSA video on motivation? If not, I highly recommend it – I’ll wait here until you’re done.

I won’t make the links to Purpose, Mastery, and Autonomy explicit but think you’ll see those themes throughout the more specific items below.

• Customer-facing – part of the presales team and customers are a focus. This takes me back to my roots – 7 years as a customer and 8 years in various technical presales roles. While building a Tech Marketing team at Rubrik over the last 2 years (an amazing experience), I spent some time last year in APAC meeting with customers – about 3 weeks in 5 countries. It reminded me how much I love working directly with customers and seeing how technology can impact their businesses and their lives (as it did mine as a customer).
  • Yes, I’ll be the “guy off the plane” regularly. Here’s to lots of ontime flights and not too many traffic jams.
• Business AND Technology – part of my job is to explore larger technical trends and sit at the intersection of business and technical discussions with customers. I’m pretty stoked that I get paid to do something I love doing period.
  • Example – last year I went to HashiConf on my own dime to sharpen up on Terraform, Vault, general next-gen IT Ops approachs in a world of private/public/hybrid cloud.
• Voice of the Customer – advocating for customer requests (data is better than anecdotes), delivering roadmaps, and even driving them internally. Having spent a good bit of time the last 2 years working with Product Management and Engineering teams, I have a huge amount of respect for what they do and the prioritization challenges they face.
• Stories – humans love stories. Telling stories at a micro and macro level is a lot of fun and even better when the underlying story arc is actually true (tongue firmly in cheek). As I’ve talked with Principal SE’s at Pure, I was excited to hear that coming up with higher level technical stories (links to my Tech Marketing skillset) is firmly part of the job.
• Learning – while there’s existing background in both presales soft skills and technology, I love to learn…and there’s a lot of technical depth I can dig my teeth into. I might have been watching/reading a good bit in the 2 weeks before I started. 😉
  • The phrase “humble expert” is one that has stuck with me over the years and is something I try to emulate.
• Team – part of a larger team where I both look forward to learning a LOT from those I work with but also helping and mentoring over time. Helping people succeed seriously motivates me – back to the concept of “it is more blessed to give than receive”. It truly is.
  • The number of people that I’ve worked with or met in the past (and think highly of) currently at Pure was quite amazing…looking forward to working with them again.
• Company – let’s zoom out a bit more. I’m hearing and seeing really good things about Pure culture from a sustainability standpoint as well as the continuing pace of technical innovation. Is Pure still a small startup? Nope…but what they’re doing is very cool (major announcements last week even) especially given the age and size of the company. That same size and maturity means the continuing innovation can have an even larger impact than before while still being very nimble competitively.

You might be wondering – “where’s the deep dive on Pure products and technology?”. I’ll definitely be blogging about that over time but felt like this post was long enough already. In the meantime, I can say that if I wasn’t onboard from that perspective joining Pure wouldn’t be an option – was fortunate to have multiple opportunities on the table but specifically chose Pure.

If you want to hear more (that’s definitely a summary), please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d love to catch up – Twitter and LinkedIn both work well.

Here we go!