James Davies

And so I got assigned to a project at the State Department, and the State Department had just purchased Kinetic Data.

And I was the lucky consultant that got to pick up this new technology and run with it.

And they certainly have lots of inefficient processes.

And we just had a great run.

I was, again, I was working for an implementation, like a consulting company that was implementing at state.

It was a wildly successful implementation.

And when that project wrapped up, the company gave me a call and they said, hey, you're on the East Coast and we do quite a bit of government work.

We're in the Twin Cities and we need someone on the East Coast.

Would you be a consultant for us?

And I gladly accepted it.

I love the culture of the company.

I got to interface with their support team quite a bit.

So yeah, worked as a consultant, kind of when customers would purchase our software, it would help to implement it and roll it out and make sure that it was successful.

Quickly got involved with our sales team as a sales engineer.

And as many of your listeners know, sales engineers are at the tip of the spear, doing proof of concepts, proof of values, showing off the technology.

Our organization, I could tell, was very much a founder-led organization with founder-led sales, founder-led engineering.

And I noticed quickly that we needed to make a shift and get voice of customer into the product.

We didn't have a product manager at the time.

After being a consultant for a while, Dool had it as a sales engineer.

They asked me to...