Episode 84: Business Development and Customer Success for Emerging Technologies with Taimur Rashid

Show Notes(02:27) Taimur reflected on his education studying Computer Science at UT Austin in the early 2000s.(06:26) Taimur recalled his first job working as a quality assurance engineer at Vignette.(08:47) Taimur went through his time with Oracle / Siebel, where he transitioned from a purely technical engineering-focused role to more customer-facing functions.(13:44) Taimur reflected on his proudest accomplishments at Oracle.(18:23) Taimur recalled dropping out of studying at the Stanford Center of Professional Development and moving to Seattle to work for Amazon Web Services.(20:35) Taimur provided insights on attributes of exceptional sales talent, given his time as an enterprise sales manager in his first two years at AWS.(23:55) Taimur shared anecdotes of successful product launches and their market expansion strategies while leading business development for AWS's database and compute services.(28:33) Taimur discussed instituting the culture of customer obsession and operational excellence into his teams - while leading the incubation, market development, and technical go-to-market strategy and execution for the AWS Platform across infrastructure, data, developer services, and emerging technologies.(33:14) Taimur talked about his decision to join Microsoft to lead the Worldwide Customer Success function for their Azure Data Platform, Analytics, and AI business.(36:24) Taimur unpacked his talk called “Enabling Customer Success through Evolutionary Architectures.”(43:07) Taimur compared the BizOps culture between Azure and AWS.(46:29) Taimur discussed his decision to onboard Redis as their Chief Business Development Officer.(50:07) Taimur went over the data challenges with operational ML, the emerging data architecture of feature stores, and the powerful capabilities of Redis as a solution.(55:58) Taimur unpacked key ideas in his talk "First Principles in Building A Real-Time AI Platform."(01:01:52) Taimur hinted at Redis' product vision of "caching for ML data."(01:05:21) Taimur gave advice for a smart, driven operator who wants to explore angel investing.(01:10:17) Taimur described the evolution of tech leadership, strategic business development, and customer success strategies in the past two decades.(01:15:29) Taimur shared three books that have greatly influenced his life.(01:16:48) Closing segment.Taimur's Contact InfoLinkedInTwitterRedis ProfileRedis' ResourcesWebsiteRedis Open Source | Redis Enterprise Software | Redis Enterprise CloudRedis AILinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube"Redis Labs Becomes Redis" (Aug 2021)Mentioned ContentPeopleAndy Jassy (CEO of Amazon)Melanie Perkins (CEO of Canva)Jeff Lawson (CEO of Twilio)Books"Man's Search For Meaning" (by Viktor Frankl)"Thinking In Systems" (by Donella Meadows)"A Treasury of Rumi" (by Muhammad Isa Waley and Rumi)"Start With Why" (by Simon Sinek)Talks"First Principles in Building A Real-Time AI Platform" (March 2021)"Redis as an Online Feature Store" (April 2021)"Redis as an online feature store, Redis Labs" (May 2021)About the show

Datacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.

Datacast is produced and edited by James Le. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

Subscribe by searching for Datacast wherever you get podcasts or click one of the links below:

If you’re new, see the podcast homepage for the most recent episodes to listen to, or browse the full guest list.

Datacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.

Datacast is produced and edited by James Le. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Subscribe by searching for Datacast wherever you get podcasts, or click one of the links below:

If you’re new, see the podcast homepage for the most recent episodes to listen to, or browse the full guest list.