The most impactful technology trends often start with infrastructure buildout. Starting my career in 1998 at Cisco at the height of the dot-com bubble, Cisco was laying down the internet infrastructure. While the dot-com bubble burst, it did lay the foundation for the next generation of infrastructure: cloud computing. This in turn paved the way to the SaaS revolution.
When I joined Twilio in 2011, it was in the early stages of the now macro trend of highly programmable infrastructure through APIs. Twilio gave developers the flexibility to build applications efficiently leveraging these new interfaces. Great companies like Stripe, Twilio, AWS all provide a developer-first approach with a consumption-based model focusing on developer productivity. The days of the “snazzy SaaS” sales rep, snapping their fingers attempting to discount a per seat license are over. As applications, infrastructure and our world become increasingly more complex, consumption based go-to-market models, leading with a technical enterprise sale will be key.
Now in 2021, as I contemplated joining Scale AI, it was clear that again we are in the beginning stages of a new macro trend of AI infrastructure. Similarly to before, there will be an infrastructure build out, followed by end-user applications. Scale is on a mission of making AI developers more productive. Starting with data annotation and highly accurate training data, their first product, Scale Image is market leading. Subsequently, Scale continued to innovate and released several products including Scale Text, Video, and Document all focused on solving problems for AI/machine learning engineers. With a consumption based model and a developer-led focus,I believe there are some great parallels between the AI macro-trends and the trends of the past.
Not to mention, after meeting and spending time with the team, it was clear to me that the company culture and leadership are aligned to me personally. The focus on diversity & inclusion, intelligence, transparency, while making decisions based on data gave me great comfort to know that I wasn’t just joining a hyper growth company, but also a once in a lifetime generational company that I could be proud to say I contributed to. As an early employee of Twilio, I had a similar opportunity to shape their history, and now as the Chief Revenue Officer for Scale, I get the opportunity once again to shape, mold and build Scale.
It wasn’t a hard decision to join Scale, the opportunity to build the next generation of infrastructure focused on machine-learning and AI, was a no brainer. I couldn’t be more excited about Scale, the opportunity, and bringing my collective experiences to lead their go-to-market organization.
If you’d like to join my team, you can find all our open roles on our careers page.