Innovation in Presales

Summary

In this Hewlett Packard Labs podcast, host Jordan Nanos, Principal Machine Learning Architect at HPE, shares insights into his role in pre-sales, focusing on AI-powered applications. He discusses the evolution of sales, the importance of technical expertise, and his work with customers across various industries. Nanos also highlights the significance of understanding customer needs, the impact of generative AI, and the future of sales with a focus on global thinking and industry expertise. He emphasizes the value of hands-on experience with HPE technology and shares his approach to innovation in sales, drawing from his diverse experiences in different geographies.

Takeaways

• 🧑‍💻 Jordan Nanos, a principal Machine Learning architect at HPE, focuses on AI-powered applications and works closely with customers globally to understand their technology needs.
• 🌐 As part of the global sales organization, Jordan's role involves both direct customer interaction and collaboration with internal teams, reflecting a balance between customer service and internal coordination.
• 📈 The sales and pre-sales landscape at HPE has evolved, with a reduction in the number of salespeople and a shift towards more technical expertise and industry-specific knowledge.
• 🏢 Jordan's customer base spans various sizes and industries, with a particular focus on regulated sectors like financial services, healthcare, and government agencies due to their stringent compliance needs.
• 🔧 Jordan's role involves keeping abreast of technological advancements and translating customer feedback into actionable insights for product development, bridging the gap between customer needs and technical solutions.
• 📊 Success for Jordan is measured not only by direct sales figures but also by indirect indicators such as product trials, demo requests, and customer engagement, highlighting a holistic approach to sales success.
• 🔮 Looking ahead, Jordan anticipates a continued emphasis on technical expertise and industry knowledge, as well as the importance of thinking globally and transferring skills across industries.
• 💡 Innovation in sales, as exemplified by Jordan, involves going beyond traditional processes to meet customer needs, such as facilitating quick technology adoption through creative solutions.
• 📚 Jordan's personal growth and success are rooted in his ability to learn, teach, and compete, values that he encourages in others and that have been shaped by his diverse experiences.
• 🌟 HPE's commitment to the broader good is reflected in the sales process, as Jordan helps customers use technology to achieve their missions, whether in disaster prevention or providing services to the unbanked.

Q & A

What is Jordan Nanos' role at HPE?

Jordan Nanos is a principal Machine Learning architect at HPE, working with customers globally on their AI-powered applications using HPE technology. He is part of the global sales organization, focusing on pre-sales, which involves helping customers understand HPE's technology and designing architectures that include it.

How has the sales and pre-sales landscape evolved at HPE according to Jordan?

Jordan mentions that there are fewer salespeople now compared to when he started, and there's a greater focus on technical expertise. Customers now demand a more detailed understanding of their business. Additionally, the sales teams are more focused on industry verticals, getting to know specific customers within an industry.

What types of customers does Jordan Nanos typically work with?

Jordan works with customers who are innovating with machine learning and using HPE's technology. His focus is on regulated industries, such as financial services, healthcare, and federal government agencies, which have strict regulatory and compliance requirements.

How does Jordan Nanos collaborate with product managers, developers, and researchers at HPE?

Jordan spends about half his time with customers and the other half with HPE employees, including product managers and developers. He helps customers understand new technology and brings customer feedback to the HPE team to inform product development.

What is an example of a recent shift in customer focus that Jordan has observed?

Jordan has noticed a shift from customers focusing on buying GPU servers for training language models to a focus on inference, which means getting business value from the models they've created.

Can you provide an example of how Jordan measures success in his role?

Jordan measures success through indicators such as the number of people agreeing to trial the product, view a demo, or provide feedback. He also considers the ratio of people seeking a second meeting, wanting to learn more, or expressing interest in purchasing.

What does Jordan see as the future of sales and pre-sales at HPE?

Jordan anticipates a continued emphasis on technical expertise and industry vertical knowledge. He also highlights the importance of thinking globally and transferring skills across industries, as many customers in different geographies face similar challenges.

How does Jordan define innovation in the context of sales?

Innovation in sales, according to Jordan, involves going above and beyond for customers, focusing on their needs, and anticipating what they will ask for next. He gives an example of an innovative approach where he and a partner quickly set up a small server cluster for a customer to help them get started with new technology.

What is Jordan's perspective on the relationship between sales and open source?

Jordan views open source as beneficial because it allows more people to learn about and use HPE's technology, leading to better feedback and product improvement. He emphasizes the role of professional services in providing support for those who may not have the time to learn open source technologies.

How does Jordan Nanos approach working with standards in his role?

Jordan differentiates between hardware and software standards. He sees hardware standards like PCIe or OCP as beneficial for component manufacturers, while software standards can sometimes be seen as slow but are necessary for the development of AI technologies that move quickly.

What advice does Jordan have for early career professionals in sales?

Jordan advises early career professionals to prioritize learning and seek out industry knowledge on their own, rather than waiting for others to teach them. He emphasizes the importance of making learning a priority amidst the daily demands of a sales role.

Outlines

00:00

😀 Introduction to Jordan Nanos and HPE Sales

Jordan Nanos, a principal machine learning architect from HPE Global Sales Technology Office, is introduced as the guest in the Hewlett Packard Labs podcast. Jordan discusses his role in pre-sales, focusing on technical sales and helping customers understand and implement HPE technology. He shares his background, starting from HP's Mississauga office in Canada to his current residence in Squamish, and his transition into working with AI-powered applications globally. The conversation highlights the evolution of sales at HPE, moving from relationship-based selling to a more technical and industry-focused approach.

05:01

🔍 Exploring Jordan's Customer Interactions and Sales Trends

In this segment, Jordan elaborates on his interactions with customers, emphasizing the shift in focus from GPU server purchases for training language models to inference-based business applications. He discusses the rapid pace of generative AI and the importance of understanding customer needs to develop relevant software features. Jordan also shares an example of a machine learning inference software in beta, tailored for customers with large language model inference needs. He encourages technical staff to engage with HPE's technology and stresses the importance of hands-on experience.

10:03

📊 Measuring Success and Future of Sales at HPE

Jordan explains how success in his role is measured through various indicators such as product trials, demo views, and customer feedback, rather than direct revenue. He anticipates the future of sales to involve increasingly technical expertise and a focus on industry verticals. Jordan also highlights the importance of thinking globally and sharing learnings across geographies and industries. He emphasizes the need for sales to adapt to the fast-paced advancements in AI and generative AI technologies.

15:05

💡 Innovation in Sales and Jordan's Proudest Moments

The discussion turns to innovation in sales, where Jordan shares an example of an innovative approach to customer service, involving a quick and unconventional setup of a GPU server cluster. He also talks about developing a retrieval augmented generation application, initially created for a customer to interact with product documentation. This application was later adapted for internal use at HPE, showcasing the practical application of customer-focused innovation. Jordan expresses pride in these achievements and the ability to contribute to both customer and internal needs.

20:06

🌐 Open Source, Standards, and Broader Impact in Sales

Jordan reflects on the relationship between sales and open source, emphasizing the importance of community feedback and support services. He differentiates between hardware and software standards, acknowledging the influence of hardware standards like OCP on technology development. Regarding software standards, he admits they can be slow but are necessary for guiding industry practices. He also discusses the gratifying aspects of his career, which include learning, teaching, and winning in the competitive sales environment. Jordan highlights how HPE's sales efforts contribute to the broader good by supporting customers in their missions to innovate and improve various sectors.

25:07

📚 Career Advice, Reading Interests, and Cultural Insights

In the final paragraph, Jordan offers career advice for early professionals, stressing the importance of self-learning and making education a priority. He shares his personal reading interests, recommending 'Small Data' by Martin Lindstrom for insights into sales and marketing, and mentioning his enjoyment of classic literature, including 'The Count of Monte Cristo' and works by Russian and Greek authors. Jordan also compares his experiences living in different countries, highlighting the multicultural nature of his upbringing in Toronto and the value of diverse experiences.

Keywords

💡Machine Learning Architect

A Machine Learning Architect is a professional who designs and oversees the implementation of machine learning systems. In the context of the video, Jordan Nanos, the guest, holds this title at HPE, where he works closely with customers to develop AI-powered applications using HPE technology. His role involves understanding customer needs and creating technical solutions that leverage machine learning.

💡Pre-sales

Pre-sales refers to the activities and support provided to potential customers before they make a purchase. In the video, Jordan explains that as a pre-sales engineer, he is one layer back from direct salespeople, focusing on helping customers understand HPE's technology and designing architectures that incorporate it. This role is crucial in the sales cycle as it bridges the gap between the customer's needs and the technical capabilities of the products.

💡Global Sales Organization

The Global Sales Organization at HPE implies a structure that operates across different regions and countries. Jordan mentions that he is part of this organization, which allows him to work with customers worldwide. This keyword highlights the international scope of HPE's sales efforts and the need for a diverse and adaptable sales force.

💡AI Powered Applications

AI Powered Applications are software solutions that utilize artificial intelligence to enhance their functionality. Throughout the script, Jordan discusses working with customers on such applications, emphasizing the integration of HPE technology in these advanced solutions. This keyword is central to the theme of leveraging AI for business innovation.

💡Technical Sales

Technical Sales involves sales professionals who possess deep technical knowledge about the products they sell. The video highlights that Jordan's role in technical sales is to provide expert advice and support to customers, helping them understand the technical aspects of HPE's offerings and how they can be applied to meet their business needs.

💡Industry Verticals

Industry Verticals refer to specific sectors or markets within an economy. In the context of the video, Jordan talks about focusing on regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and federal government agencies. These verticals often have unique requirements and compliance needs, making them a specialized area of focus for sales and product development.

💡Generative AI

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, such as text, images, or audio, based on existing data. The video discusses a shift in customer focus from training to inference, which includes using generative AI for business applications. This keyword is significant as it indicates a trend in AI development and its growing importance in the market.

💡GPU Servers

GPU Servers are high-performance computing systems that use Graphics Processing Units to handle complex calculations, particularly useful for machine learning tasks. The script mentions a customer focus on buying GPU servers for training language models, which underscores the importance of such hardware in advancing AI capabilities.

💡Inference

Inference in AI refers to the process of deriving conclusions or making predictions based on learned data. Jordan discusses the shift in focus from training models to deploying them for inference, indicating a move towards practical application of AI models in real-world scenarios. This keyword is crucial for understanding the progression from research to practical implementation in AI.

💡Regulatory Requirements

Regulatory Requirements are the rules and guidelines set by governing bodies that organizations must adhere to. In the video, Jordan mentions that customers in regulated industries have strict regulatory and compliance requirements, which influence the type of technology and partnerships they seek. This keyword is important for understanding the compliance challenges faced by industries like finance and healthcare.

Highlights

Introduction of Jordan Nanos, Principal Machine Learning Architect from HPE Global Sales Technology Office.

Jordan's role involves working with customers globally on AI-powered applications using HPE technology.

Evolution of sales at HPE, moving from relationship-based selling to a more technical and industry-focused approach.

Jordan's focus on regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and federal government agencies.

The importance of understanding customers' technology needs and working with HPE's internal teams to meet those needs.

Shift in customer focus from GPU servers for training to inference for business value.

Development of HPE's machine learning inference software in beta to support large language models.

Encouragement for technical staff to use HPE's technology to better understand and innovate for customers.

Jordan's measurement of success through customer engagement, trials, and feedback for product development.

Sales and pre-sales trends emphasizing technical expertise and industry vertical knowledge.

The significance of global thinking and cross-industry skill transfer in the future of sales.

Innovation in sales through exceeding customer expectations and anticipating their future needs.

Example of innovative sales approach: Expediting a customer's access to a small GPU server cluster.

Development of a retrieval augmented generation application for chatting with PDFs and internal documentation.

Working with Scott Wiest and the synergy between their dynamic approaches to sales and technology.

Jordan's perspective on open source as a learning tool and its impact on HPE's technology development.

The role of standards in hardware and software development and their influence on HPE's technology.

The gratification Jordan finds in learning, teaching, and competing in his sales role.

Advice for early career professionals to prioritize learning and apply it to daily problem-solving.

Recommendation of books that influenced Jordan's understanding of sales, classic literature, and AI.

Comparison of living experiences in Canada, the U.S., and Greece, highlighting the value of multiculturalism.

Transcripts

Hello everyone.

Welcome to the next Hewlett Packard Labs podcast: From Research to Reality.

Today for the first time, we'll be talking about sales.

It's my great honor and pleasure to host Jordan Nanos; Hi Jordan;

who is the principal Machine

learning architect from HPE Global Sales Technology Office.

Welcome, Jordan.

Great to be here.

can you please introduce yourself and your career?

Yeah.

so my name is Jordan Nanos.

I work as a machine learning architect at HPE.

which means that I get to spend all my time,

working with customers, basically.

on their AI powered applications, when they're using HPE technology.

So I'm part of the global sales organization.

That means I get to work with customers all around the world.

and I guess by way of personal background, I'm Canadian.

I started with the company, where I grew up, near

Toronto in Canada, at our Mississauga office.

and I currently live in Western Canada, in a town called Squamish.

So, yeah, I, I get to work again

with customers all around the world and, focus on machine learning.

So you are the first salesperson on our podcast and our podcast,

and our podcast is named From Research to Reality,

we have a lot of people from research.

You are as far as you can go on reality where you sell.

So what does it mean?

What do you do?

Can you explain your role? Yeah.

So I work in the pre-sales organization at HPE, which means technical sales.

there are salespeople at the company who exclusively focus on customers.

They have quota, they make commissions.

They are selling, I'm one layer back from them

as a sales engineer or solution architect or just pre-sales,

which means that I focus on helping the customers understand our technology

and then work with them to design an architecture

that includes our technology and then eventually implement it.

So you have a lot of

experience here working at HPE.

And how has the sales and pre-sales evolved over the years?

Yeah.

So when I first started,

sales was in a bit of a transition.

there were a lot more salespeople.

now we have, less salespeople total.

So that's been a big change.

In addition, we have shifted focus.

I think at the time when I started,

a lot of people were selling based on relationships or history.

And now the demands from our customers is for people to be much more technical,

to understand their business and a lot, you know, more detailed way

and in the last roughly two years, we've seen that,

influence effects our sales organization,

where our sales teams are now very focused on industries.

So getting to know their specific customers in an industry.

Verticals, in other words.

So I've seen you in action you can't get more technical than you.

And even your title says that you are very technical.

But what type of customers do you work with?

You don’t necessarily have to go into details

as to who these are, but what type of what type of verticals?

What type of customer?

Small, big large enterprise?

Yeah, I think, so in an interesting way, just because, you know,

I work as part of the global sales organization

doesn't mean we only focus on big customers.

We certainly focus on, customers who are doing

interesting or novel or unique things with our technology.

And specifically, the focus that I have on AI means that, we're working with

people who are innovating with machine learning, using our, our technology.

I think the

biggest focus for industry verticals would be, regulated industries.

So I do a lot of work with, financial services,

with health care, and with federal government agencies.

these sorts of customers will have,

much more strict regulatory requirements or compliance requirements

and a lot of, intellectual property

sort of policies within their organization

that mean that they, they need a partner like us who's willing to,

you know, work with them wherever their applications and data are.

So that's working with customers.

But you don't only work with customers, you have the other side,

and so have product managers, developers, researchers.

How does that look like?

How do you work with them? Yeah.

so I would say I spend about half my time with customers

and half my time with HPE employees, others teammates.

the biggest thing that customers

are looking to understand from me is what's new in our technology.

And the biggest thing that our, you know, team

members are looking to understand is what customers want.

So making that connection is very fun for me

and a big part of my job.

I mean, what does this look like day to day?

a lot of conversations, a lot of phone calls, a lot of presentations,

but recently a lot of, building of demonstrations

of the trends with generative AI mean that everything is happening really fast.

And the faster that we can understand how customers are using our technology,

the better we can build new things for them.

especially when it comes to software features.

Can you give some example?

You already told me before.

I mean, I saw you, as I said, in action.

You you've done some demos for customers.

Yeah.

So I mean, last year there was a huge focus from,

customers on just buying GPU servers to train language models.

It seems that, like currently for the last few months,

everybody's been shifting focus from training to inference,

which means from doing research and experimentation

to trying to get business value from the models that they've created.

in our case, you know, we have technology

that's used for machine learning development and data management,

but we are currently developing technology for inference.

And one example is our machine learning

inference software, which is in beta, working with customers who are

who have inference requirements for large language models,

understanding exactly how they're going to use our software tool.

I mean, that's been a big thing that I've been working on recently.

Do you have any message for the technical people,

given that you are helping customers and

communicating back and forth?

Yeah, the biggest thing for for HPE, people who are technical,

I think is just using our technology.

Like I said, things are moving so fast that there's a lot of people

who,

have been caught up in like the, the rush

and haven't taken the time to, to step back and and use our technology.

Frankly.

log into a server, write some code, run it.

It's becoming easier and easier to actually do that.

And I just encourage people to get hands on and start using our technology again.

There's an old saying, use it or lose it.

Exactly.

So how do you measure success in your work?

I can understand the pure sales. It's based on.

You know how much money they bring.

Yeah, but do you get some indirect,

accounting for that, or how does it work in your case?

Yeah. sales.

It's pretty clear you have one key metric.

revenue.

in my case, I think there's a lot of,

indicators that there's revenue coming, which means things like,

how many people have agreed to trial the product

or how many people have agreed to view a demo or given feedback

that you need to add certain features or something like that?

those sorts of indicators that, you know what?

We went we hosted an event ten, 20 people

attended, 100 watched online,

whatever that is, whatever that number is,

you know, what's the ratio or the amount of people

that are looking for a second meeting who want to learn more

or want to do a trial, or want to purchase

a small amount with a larger amount coming later.

all of those things are indicators that we're doing something right,

that people are interested,

they're seeing value in the work that you're doing, that sort of thing.

To take analogy in basketball,

it's also small little things that players do in order to win the games.

Yeah.

So what we spoke about the past and you told us where we are now.

Can you turn to the future where is sales and presales going?

Yeah, I would say, more of the same in terms of the emphasis on people

getting more technical and having more industry vertical expertise.

so, I mean, in ways there's,

a trend that's just going to kind of continue over time.

I think the the biggest thing that I would say the future of sales

looks like is being able to work and think globally.

many of our customers that I, that I work with,

in other geographies, like in Europe, in Asia,

are dealing with the exact same things that people in the U.S.

are doing.

And, being able to take those learnings and share them, is really interesting.

The other thing is across industries.

So, prior to the big language model, craze right now

I did a lot of work on computer vision,

and it was always interesting to see how similar

a vision product project for quality

assurance in manufacturing was similar to,

you know, image analysis in a medical device, which is similar

to how people are analyzing video in a retail store.

Transferring skills across industries, I think, is also going

to be more important over time with language models

like everybody has data that they want to chat with.

You know, everybody writes code, these sorts of experiences

with generative AI, I think are going to be across industries,

across geographies, and we need to be able to contend with that over time.

So you mentioned a number of great the best practices: adoption,

using information from other areas, etc., across geography.

But how would you innovate something that no one has done before?

How? I mean, I know how to innovate.

Yeah.

In computer science.

But how do you innovate in sales?

Yeah.

So, I mean,

I think it's always just about going above and beyond for your customer.

focusing on them and the things that they, they, they're looking to do,

but also thinking about what they're going to be asking you for next.

So I'll give an example.

We had a, customer, a large retail company who was interested

in, you know, basically getting their first GPU server cluster started

and the size of the cluster they were looking to purchase

was measured in like millions of dollars and hundreds of GPUs.

But they want to get started small and get used to the technology.

So something I would consider innovative.

We, shipped three servers to,

a partners location guy named Jeff Gray at ACP.

He installed them in his data center.

I called him from an airport, on my phone.

Walked him through the install for our software.

He loaded on those servers, drove them in his truck to the customer's data center.

Got on the floor because he'd been there before.

He knew the customer, plugged it in.

And when the customer logged in for the first time, they said, oh, this is great.

I already have this software loaded up right?

And it just made everything a lot easier to get started instead of waiting weeks

for, you know, somebody to organize us to come and help them do an installation,

things like that.

So where's the innovation there?

I mean, Jeff putting servers in his truck, me

calling from an airport and trying to do an install over my phone.

Focus on the customers and trying to go above and beyond

for them is just the biggest thing that I think you can do in sales.

That that's amazing example.

really proud that we have people like you in our company.

Is this example that you are most proud of.

Did you have any other examples?

Yeah.

So that one maybe is more innovation around process.

I'm happy to share more examples.

So, one thing that we, we did

recently was build a retrieval augmented generation application.

and it actually, it was super interesting

to see how something that I originally developed for a customer,

which meant, chatting with PDFs, they had all sorts of,

documentation about their products that they wanted to, quickly learn about.

Imagine you hire somebody new and instead of giving them hundreds of pages

to read through to understand your product details,

they can kind of ask questions and get a response almost from the PDF.

we took this and applied this to a couple of things that HPE does.

our quick specs. So details about our servers.

I can now chat with documentation about our servers.

I can also use this for,

I showed a friend who works internally.

Sometimes we get very long emails, and there's

20, 30 back and forth things that are going in the chain.

And you want to know, is there anything for me to do?

I showed,

showed some of the guys on the performance engineering team here,

how to upload an email and quickly see.

Hey, my name's Jordan.

Is there anything for me to do in this thread?

So we're pretty proud of that.

And also just excited to build on it in the future.

And it's it's nice to see like the focus on a customer use case

suddenly get applied to us internally how we do our job day to day.

That's extremely exciting.

Sometimes I have problem reading PDF, let alone chatting with it,

so you can skip this question if you prefer.

I know that you happened to report to Scott Wiest, okay.

He's one of the most dynamic person I've ever seen.

Yeah. So how is it to work with him?

I mean, you are dynamic. He is dynamic.

Are you in synergy or are you just exploding all this dynamism?

I think mostly in synergy.

It's been great for Scott. yeah.

So Scott's really interesting because he's definitely a, player coach.

Like he leads from the front and he does,

the same job as me in many ways better than me in many ways.

And that's really exciting to just learn from.

kind of just by watching how he operates.

in my,

you know, career at HPE, prior to working for Scott,

I always had, managers who had either never done the job that I do

or were, it had been a long time since they did the job.

So when I had questions, I would go to teammates or others and,

and in many times I go to Scott.

the dynamism.

Yeah. I can't keep up with that guy who's I don't know where he sleeps.

So I, you know.

Yeah. it's been great, though.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is great to have not just manager, but mentor, you know.

Exactly. And do the things. Yeah.

so I you are in sales, so you are selling.

It appears to me that something open, like open

source is completely opposite from sales.

Yeah.

How does sales see open source?

You know, I understand the business model and all of that,

but what's your gut reaction?

So the best

saying that I know about open source is that open source is free.

If you have the time.

And I think that's great because a lot of our technology is open source here.

And the more people that spend time learning about our open source technology,

the more feedback that we get, the better our technology gets.

And in many cases, open source

technology is used for closed source products.

So a bigger community in the open source area

really influences how the closed source product is developed.

for me, the number one thing is just support.

Like not everybody has the time to learn how to use open source

and to be effective with it.

And that's where Professional Services, which HPE has a large business doing.

That's where it fits in.

Like you're selling people

who understand the open source technology and their time and their expertise.

I like your definition of open source, but

let's move now to the other end of spectrum standards.

Earlier you mentioned compliance regulations.

Do standards help with it or they make your life harder.

Or where how do you relate to standards?

Yeah.

standards are interesting. So standard.

I mean,

I think that there are

there's different ways to view this, an easy way to differentiate.

I think there's

a big difference between hardware standards and software standards in a way.

you think about things like a PCIe or OCP.

I mean, that's a that's a clear hardware standard that has benefited,

like component manufacturers, people who build GPUs

or accelerators, for example, storage drives, network cards.

Having an OCP standard is,

you know, quite interesting and influences our technology, things like that.

software

standards on the other side or the other way, I think

can in many cases, they'll get criticized for hindering things and being just slow.

And I think, honestly, there's some there's some truth to that.

But I come at this from the perspective of focusing on AI, where things move

incredibly quickly and publications are happening

overnight on archive.

Here's this new model. Go try it out.

That's very different than how, you know,

a telecommunications network standard gets developed or something like that.

Right?

What did you find most gratifying in your career?

so I like to say that,

I get to do three things in my role.

I get to learn.

I get to teach.

And I get to win.

I get to compete.

I'm not sure which of those three I prefer the most.

but I can tell you that I grew up playing a lot of sports.

I like competing and working in sales or in a sales organization.

Means that every day you're competing and there's a chance to win.

So you like winning.

But. Yeah.

Which sports did you do, by the way?

I grew up playing a lot of hockey and lacrosse.

Okay.

Why ask?

I mean, coming from Canada, but but if you would start all over again,

would you do it the same way or you do something differently?

That's interesting.

I don't like to think about that

too much because you end up,

just feeling regretful.

If you analyze too much.

but I do think there's perspective that I have

now that would influence decisions I made when I was younger.

Like what? To study in school.

how much time to spend on academics

versus on sports?

where to work in the summer?

I did between my first

and second year of school, I did some really hard landscaping.

And, you know, I learned a lot and that's beneficial.

But I don't know how much

I really needed to learn from that stuff.

So, I don't know.

No regrets.

Keep moving forward. Yeah.

Good.

You know, at HPE, we take pride that we do things for the broader good.

How does sales do things for the broader good?

Yeah.

well, we sell to everybody,

and there's a lot of our customers doing good things in the world.

you know, people use AI technology

to discover new medicine and therapeutics.

people use it to, provide banking services

to the unbanked all around the world.

People use it to connect people.

Telecommunications.

I was just working with a customer whose software provides,

like the early warning system for fires

and floods and, hurricanes and things like that. So,

I mean, when you're helping a customer adopt your technology and use it

and be effective with it, in many ways, you're helping them pursue their mission.

And I think that's the biggest thing.

I get to jump between many different missions every day.

some, you know, by different metrics could be considered,

more broadly good than others.

But, I think generally, like we are very much in service of our customers mission.

in a lot of ways.

The other thing is that HPE just gives a lot of opportunities to give back.

And, I think being in sales,

you have a lot of flexibility in terms of how you spend your time.

I don't have a,

I don't live near an HPE office, but when I'm here,

there's always, you know, events going on and opportunities to kind of contribute

and give back. And,

that's, that's a that's a great thing for sure.

Yeah.

Do you have any message for the early career path people

other than maybe not doing gardening during the summer?

Yeah, yeah.

It hurts your back later in life when you're skiing.

or mountain biking. so.

Yeah.

message for early folks in early career.

So the biggest thing that helped me over time was kind of learning for

myself from the industry, rather than waiting for people to teach me things.

And that's just the biggest advice I would give.

there was no, when you're in sales, especially, like,

there's always a fire going on every day, somebody needs something to get done.

And finding time to learn something new never works.

You need to make learning a priority, and then find time

to solve the problems of the day.

It's funny, I was going to ask you, what do you do in spare time?

But given what you just told me.

Do you even have a spare time? Do you ever read a book?

Can you recommend some?

I have, I do have spare time.

I do read books.

So, my favorite book.

If you want to understand

sales and marketing, is called Small Data by guy named Martin Lindstrom.

there's a big trend in the industry related to big data,

and Martin focuses on small data points.

he tells stories about spending over 300 days a year on the road,

living in people's houses to get an insight like,

hey, Lego blocks are getting too simple.

Kids want them to be more complex, and suddenly Legos business turns around.

So lots more things in that book that are super interesting and a fun read.

I love classic literature.

So, recently I've been reading,

Well, I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo.

Love Russian authors.

I love Greek authors. So I think that's,

you know, just an example.

Like read some old stuff too, not just the new things.

And then one thing about AI, A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett.

Fantastic book.

Is your interest in classic books related to your origin?

A little bit.

Yeah, my my dad's Greek.

his dad is very Greek.

being born in Greece, my dad born in Canada.

And so, yeah, the great Greek philosophers and,

they shops fables and things like that are

definitely influential.

and, you know, growing up with Greek people, you, you in your life,

you learn a little bit

about ego and hubris because they invented everything, right?

democracy, mathematics, philosophy.

Podcasts.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Lot of list goes on, for sure.

so I understand that you now live in Canada.

You told us multiple times, but I heard you also lived in US before.

And you.

I'm sure you visited your, ancestors in Greece.

Perhaps.

So how do you compare living in all these areas?

Yeah, I lived in, Alpharetta near Atlanta for nine months when I was a new hire.

part of the pre-sales.

New hire program.

great program that HPE has.

yeah.

So it's, it's I've lived, certainly in Canada for most of my life.

the U.S. is very different.

I think I'm most used to living, near Canadian people.

and so, Yeah,

both from living in from just traveling the world,

meeting customers and having them show you around, as opposed to having

a tour guide gives you a lot of insight on how people live day to day.

It's been fascinating.

I don't know if I can pick out,

like, obvious things to point out differences between Canada and the U.S.

I mean, you can point out political differences or economic

differences.

you know, the biggest thing that I'm proud of

from growing up in Toronto is that it's an incredibly multicultural place.

you know, all of my friends in high school

had some story about where their parents came from or their grandparents spoke.

Many of them spoke other languages.

A strange food that I got to try.

And I just encourage people to to do that because I find variety.

That's the spice of life, right?

That's great stuff.

Great things.

Thank you very much for joining us.

I hope everybody learned as much as I did during this short interview.

Thanks for having me.