Having started my career in early stage startups, focused on B2B offerings for the Financial Services and Telecommunications sectors in London, I was given the opportunity to take on a short-term advisory engagement for a group of investors in Dubai, and jumped at the opportunity. After completing the engagement, I was fortunate enough to find a Project Management role at National Bank of Dubai (NBD) shortly before their merger with Emirates Bank. Post-merger, I took on the role of consolidating the IT Service Management systems and practices, giving me exposure to ITIL and ultimately BMC. BMC gave me exposure to Value-based Enterprise Sales and the opportunity to take on Programme Management roles with some of their largest customers globally. Including the likes of the BBC and Capgemini, two of BMC’s first customers for their new SaaS offering, Remedy OnDemand. Having worked closely with BMC’s Business Value Consulting and Sales teams, I was engaged in defining and rolling out a new Value Realisation process, bringing me closer to the Sales teams and opening the door to my career in sales. My first Sales role was with Informatica where I helped contribute towards growing the Professional Services practice in the UK and Ireland, as well as gaining my first exposure to the Data domain. Not wanting to leave the Data domain but keen to get back into earlier stage companies, I took on an expanded role at a late stage Data Security startup, Protegrity. I learnt and grew a lot during my time at Protegrity, leading to me ultimately moving into Product Sales, relocating to Singapore and taking on the APAC General Manager role. Being given the opportunity to grow the team from the first employee in the region was a career defining milestone that I owe a lot to the team at Protegrity for and opened the door to the opportunity to join another late stage startup, DataRobot.DataRobot was expanding their value proposition to focus on delivering a full end-to-end Enterprise AI platform so needed someone to drive adoption of the new messaging into the sales team in Asia and accelerate growth across the region. Having seen the team grow into one of the best performing regions globally, my takeaways from my career to date are that I thrive under uncertainty, love a complex value proposition, take pleasure in seeing customers unlock value from technology and above all love watching hugely talented people join the team and unlock their potential. Thanks to everyone that has helped shape my career over the past 20+ years. Here’s to the next 20!