Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional
John White | Nick Korte
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Field Awareness: The Facets of Hypergrowth and a Principal’s Body of Work with Daniel Paluszek (3/3)
Imagine getting 45 minutes to describe and defend the quantifiable impact of your body of work as an individual contributor accumulated over multiple years. It’s your job to convince a panel that you have what it takes to help solve the company’s biggest problems. Could you do it? Our guest Daniel Paluszek has done it successfully at 2 different technology companies to become a Global Field Principal. Much of his success in these roles is attributed to a “culmination of exposure” over the course of his career and the support of both family and managers. This week in episode 339, we begin with the story of Daniel’s move to a hypergrowth startup and learn what it was like to run his own business as the company grew and changed. When an unexpected opportunity to join VMware arose, Daniel transferred his learnings to focus on business growth for service provider partners. We also talk about the reasons Daniel pursued the role of Global Field Principal, the responsibilities of that role, and why he continues to find it interesting. After listening to this episode, we might all think differently about the importance of building a body of work. Have you been building yours? It’s not too late to begin or keep going. Original Recording Date: 06-11-2025 Daniel Paluszek is a Principal Partner Technology Strategist at ServiceNow. If you missed parts 1 or 2 of our discussion with Daniel, check out Episode 337 – Finding Drive: The Parallels of Mentoring and Technology Partnerships with Daniel Paluszek (1/3) and Episode 338 – Steady Build: Broadening Exposure and the Priceless Perspective of People Management with Daniel Paluszek (2/3) Topics – Leaping into Hypergrowth, A Culmination of Exposure, Pursuit of Principal and the Responsibility of Execution 3:06 – Leaping into Hypergrowth What did the next job transition over to SimpliVity look like? It seemed like this was a conscious move toward an up-and-coming startup and a new technology wave at the same time. Daniel says it was a conscious choice to move to Simplivity. While Cisco was somewhere that felt like home, Daniel was given the opportunity to join Simplivity when it was a startup. The industry was moving from 3-tier architectures with virtualization to hyperconvergence (a convergence of storage, compute, and networking in a single form factor that scaled out linearly). It was an exciting time for the industry as a whole, especially for virtualization. Daniel knew some of the people who had joined Simplivity. “I’ve never done a startup before, a hypergrowth company…. There were about 100-150 people when I joined. In that first year, I think we tripled the company in size…. It was something that was just an incredible experience.” – Daniel Paluszek Daniel was a pre-sales Solution Architect at SimpliVity working with both customers and partners in the southeast United States (Floride and Alabama). At Simplivity Daniel learned the skill of building your own business. He and his sales rep (also a great mentor to him) worked as one logical unit partnered together to build business. They were aligned on the priorities and focus areas. “Sometimes you have to take that leap of faith and try something that’s completely unknown. I was leaving a tried-and-true company…Cisco Systems is an incredible company…going to a startup that I had no idea where this was going to go…. Why wouldn’t I do this? There’s nothing but upside to try this and get the experience of a startup. And so, that’s what I did.” – Daniel Paluszek Daniel calls his time at Simplivity some of the most impactful years of his career. It felt like Daniel was able to fit the same amount of learning from Cisco (5 years) into 2 years at Simplivity. Daniel had to learn many functions we might think of as being outside the role of pre-sales like marketing (running campaigns, planning customer events, etc.). There wasn’t a lot of field awareness of what hyperconvergence was, so part of the job was taking time to educate customers and partners. “So, every day was about how do we not only simplify the messaging but focus on the business problems, the challenges, and how we’re directly solving those for all industries and customers. And we had to wear all these different hats.” – Daniel Paluszek “If there was any nugget of wisdom…everybody should do an up and coming fast growth company and just understand all the different roles needed and working together on building something…building a company.” – Daniel Paluszek Daniel worked on a small team and built incredible, lasting relationships with others along the path of building something extraordinary and special. He really enjoyed the period of time before SimpliVity was acquired by HPE – a great time with great people and great technology. While a role we take may change over time as a company changes, hypergrowth startups can change quickly. For example, a role may not look the same in 3-6 months. What are some of the other ways Daniel’s role changed as the startup grew that he did not expect? Daniel says you had to learn adaptability very quickly. When the company is in hypergrowth mode, you do what it takes to get things accomplished even if it seems outside of your specific role (support, product management, etc.). This requires people who will collaborate well to execute on the overall goal. As a company grows, its internal organizations grow too, and you begin to have dedicated people to perform specific roles / job functions. “The one thing that wasn’t evident to me coming from a large manufacturer / vendor was you had to do everything under the sun, and you had to wear 27 different hats. I was willing to do that…. In the early stages, my sales rep and I were doing all of that, and as the company grew, we had pre-defined people. We had a marketing person, and we had a sales development representative….” – Daniel Paluszek, describing life inside a hypergrowth startup Running your own business in this case meant hosting marketing events. That involved getting funding, coordinating with a restaurant / venue to build a menu, track event registrations, coordinating speakers for the event, and tracking follow up conversations with event attendees based on interest in the topic and products. “Sometimes you’ve just gotta do things that you may not like that are just part of getting the job done right and getting it done successfully in the interest of your company and your end customer. And sometimes you just have to get it done. I think there’s a delicate balance. In large organizations, we have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Sometimes you’ve just gotta break that glass and figure it out after the fact, but if you’re doing in the best interest of your customers and your organization, I’ve never seen anything negative come out of that because you’re serving and bringing value to your stake holders at the end of the day.” – Daniel Paluszek From what Nick sees, Daniel has a pattern of trying new things to gain experience and learn when he feels it is something that will make him better, even if he’s not sure how it will make him better at the time. Then that post-processing Daniel has inside him will kick in so he can use the experience later. 12:17 – A Culmination of Exposure Did Daniel decide to move on from startup life because he was tired of it, or was it because of a new opportunity? Daniel’s career had been shaped by VMware from a young age to this point in time, and he was given the opportunity to work there. But this was not something he planned. When HPE (HP Enterprise) announced their intent to acquire SimpliVity, Daniel had intended to stay and see what happened. A friend from Cisco mentioned to Daniel that the VMware partner group was looking for technical pre-sales engineers, and this friend thought Daniel would be a good fit. “Two weeks later I accepted an offer from VMware in the partner group…. I went with my gut, and I said, ‘I’m going to take this offer…and see where it goes.’” – Daniel Paluszek, after being open to an unexpected opportunity Daniel was leaving right around the time the HPE acquisition of SimpliVity was closing. Choosing to take the role at VMware was a very difficult decision. The hiring manager at VMware encouraged Daniel to do what was best for him and his family. To this point, Daniel had accumulated a wide range of experience: Working with VMware technology as a customer His professional services background The focus at Cisco on the datacenter and building cloud architectures Being a part of SimpliVity and focusing on hyperconvergence “I just had this culmination of exposure and depth of experience that I was able to utilize in a role core to what I had built in the past.” – Daniel Paluszek Daniel tells us he worked for VMware for about 5-6 years focusing on service provider partners and eventually became a field principal architect. Daniel and his team members supported global cloud providers that were providing infrastructure or platform as service to their customers based on VMware architectures. Daniel worked to make these cloud providers successful with architectures that supported either a shared multi-tenant cloud or dedicated private cloud environment. During this time Daniel found an appetite for blogging. The VMware technical community was very active in this area, and it was interesting to Daniel. Once Daniel began writing blogs, he realized it could be used as a medium to answer some of the questions multiple cloud providers were asking. Through blogging, Daniel could break down new complex topics into digestible material. Daniel was writing for his own personal blog and also for the VMware corporate blog and accumulated 100-150 blog articles across both sites by the time he left VMware. Daniel eventually took down his blog site because
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