Episode 88: Sales Engineering and Future of Work with Evan Cummack

Show Notes(02:00) Evan shared his upbringing, born and raised in a small coastal town on New Zealand’s North Island and later studied Software Engineering and Business.(03:55) Evan recalled working as a software solution architect at NEC Corporation back in New Zealand.(06:17) Evan talked about his decision to join Twilio in 2011 as one of the company’s early employees right after its Series B financing.(08:40) Evan shared his perspectives on joining startups and big companies as a new grad.(13:01) Evan provided insights on attributes of exceptional sales engineers, given his time building the first iteration of Twilio’s global pre-sales team.(17:30) Evan unpacked the evolution of his career at Twilio — working as a product manager, a director of product & engineering, and a general manager of IoT & wireless.(22:51) Evan dissected Twilio’s unique “middle-out” sales strategy, which has hugely impacted the company’s incredible growth from Series B through to IPO and beyond.(29:03) Evan went over the untapped opportunity being enabled by new cellular IoT technologies.(33:25) Evan explained his decision to embark on a new journey as the CEO of Fin.com after a decade at Twilio.(37:26) Evan talked about the need for workflow automation and how Fin’s product features are built to address that.(40:35) Evan went over Fin’s remote performance optimization capabilities that help teams thrive in a remote-first environment.(42:56) Evan shared valuable hiring lessons to attract the right leaders who are excited about Fin’s mission.(45:38) Evan shared the hurdles his team has to go through while finding early customers for Fin (as it pivoted to building a SaaS product).(48:02) Evan talked about the qualities of Jeff Lawson that made him such a great CEO.(50:41) Closing segment.Evan’s Contact InfoTwitterLinkedInFin’s ResourcesWebsiteLinkedInTwitter“Fin.com Raises $20M from Coatue” (Sep 2021)“Customers Operations Benchmarks for 2022” (Nov 2021)“Fin’s new Experiments Product Enables CX teams to Confidently Deliver Business Process Changes that Maximize Business Impact” (Dec 2021)Mentioned ContentPeopleJack DorseyBret TaylorPaul BuchheitBook“Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams” (by Matt Blumberg)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.