Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
SADA’s ISV & Marketplace Leader Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®
Software is eating the world, and the capital markets fueling the growth are taking notice of the power of ecosystems. My next guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering® is no stranger to this world of ecosystems. Adam Massey joins this episode for a unique conversation, given his role leading ecosystem strategy at Google and now leading ISV strategy at a top Google Partner, SADA. In this episode, you’ll learn how SADA taps into the power of Ecosystems to drive their greatest results.
In Adam’s words
Adam Massey is a 22-year enterprise software veteran with a career that spans large companies such as Oracle, Interwoven, and Google and several high-growth startups and co-founding a company. Adam spent 12 years at Google Cloud, where he originally joined to help launch the Google Workspace enterprise business in 2007 and played a pivotal role in growing it to a market-leading, multi-billion dollar business. Along the way, he played key leadership roles in both Sales and Alliances and built the Google Cloud channel and partner business from the ground up.
What You’ll Learn
- His career journey at Google and the path to Sada (3:03)
- The evolution of Ecosystems to fuel the growth? (5:47)
- Building practice and process around its trusted advisor status (11:13)
- Allan Adler’s Capital Markets Quote and the shifts (14:27)
- Why Marketplaces? (18:07)
- Fundamental Principles of Partnership (20:40)
- Partners that didn’t get it right with Google (24:19)
- Spark that got him on this path (26:15)
- Final advice for partners (29:38)
I hope you enjoy and learn from this amazing business leader as much as I enjoyed welcoming him to Ultimate Guide to Partnering®.
Quote From This Episode
“really focus on what your business objectives are as a company, not from a partnership perspective, but what are the like the sea level or you comparatives you have as a company, and think about how ecosystem can create force multipliers around those imperatives start there, and the more strategic alignment you have, and you can look at your ecosystem as a strategic way to create leverage and growth, acceleration and success for your customers. That is where to focus. And that will enable you to ensure that you’ve got really, really good alignment with what’s most important for you as a business and your ecosystem development. And I think that will make your roadmap extremely clear. “
Other Recent Episodes Featuring Google
140 – One Google Executive Applies 10X Mindset to Improve Healthcare Outcomes with Andria McGonigle
126 – Hyper-Focus as a Growth Imperative to High-Performance Partnering with Tony Safoian of SADA.
107 – One Leader’s Focus, Taking Partnerships to the Next Level at Google.
97 – Focused Growth Investments, Google Premier Partners SADA’S Pioneering Alliance Program.
64 – Twenty Years, Leadership in Big and Meaningful Ways, with Tony Safoian, CEO of SADA.
Links from this Episode
Our Sponsors
Resources
- Subscribe: Apple, Spotify, Google, Audible, CastBox, Stitcher, Player FM most other platforms.
- Rate & Review – please, this helps more listeners find us!
- Drop a line vincem@ultimate-partnerships.com.
We are so excited to welcome Athletic Greens as our latest sponsor. My daily ritual has included a “green drink” supplement for over 20 years ago. AG1 is packed with 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens. If you’d like to join me, give AG1 a try. Athletic Greens is giving away a free one-year supply of Vitamin D and Five Travel Packs with every new purchase. Check them out at athleticgreens.com/vincem
PartnerTap is the Founding Sponsor of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. PartnerTap is the only Partner Ecosystem Platform designed for the Enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align Channel Teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine.
Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Typos
Ultimate Guide to Partnering – Adam Masseyv3
Mon, 8/15 2:58PM • 31:30
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
partner, customer, ecosystem, google, isv, partnerships, business, isvs, opportunities, marketplace, drive, cloud, solutions, sada, organizations, big, build, trend, technology, shift
SPEAKERS
Announcer, Adam Massey, Vince Menzione
Adam Massey 00:00
really focus on what your business objectives are as a company not like from a partnership perspective. But what are the C level or logic imperatives you have as a company and think about how ecosystem can create force multipliers around those imperatives.
Announcer 00:16
Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering in this podcast Vince Menzione. A proven industry sales and partner executive brings together technology leaders to discuss transformational trends and to deconstruct successful strategies to thrive and survive in the rapid age of cloud transformation. And now, your host, Vince Menzione.
Vince Menzione 00:39
Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering where technology leaders come to optimize results through successful partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and my mission is to help leaders like you unlock the leadership principles and learnings of the best in the business to get partnerships right, optimize for success and deliver your greatest results. Software is eating the world and the capital markets fueling the growth are taking notice of the power of ecosystems. My next guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering is no stranger to this world of ecosystems. Adam Massey joins this episode for a unique conversation, given his roles leading ecosystem strategy at Google and now leading ISP strategy at a top Google Partner sada. I hope you enjoy this stimulating conversation on hyperscalers ecosystems in Google as much as I enjoyed welcoming Adam Massey. Before we dive into the interview, I’m happy to announce that partner tap has become a founding sponsor of ultimate guide to partnering partner tap is the only partner ecosystem platform designed for the enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align channel teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine. Adam, welcome to the podcast.
Adam Massey 02:11
Thank you, Vince, I appreciate it. I’m excited to be here.
Vince Menzione 02:14
I am so excited to welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering for what I hope to be a stimulating conversation on hyperscalers ecosystems and Google. So welcome.
Adam Massey 02:27
Thank you. I feel like this is a podcast I’ve wanted to do for a really long time. So I’m excited to be here.
Vince Menzione 02:34
So you had a stellar career in tech, you spent 12 years at Google that’s like a lifetime in sales and partner roles. And recently joined Sada, a organization that we all know and love Tony Savoy has been a guest on this podcast five time are now on Ultimate Guide to partner. And sada is a rocket ship in this space. Can you tell our listeners more about you your background, and this new role at Sada,
Adam Massey 03:03
I joined Google in 2007. My claim to fame was I was the first enterprise business guy at the time figuring out how to launch Google Apps, which of course, is now Google workspace, and a huge business. But back in those days, SAS was still pretty new, especially in the context of email and productivity. So I had the fun job of joining Google to go convince large enterprises that they should move their email off of on premise exchange into Google’s data centers, which at the time was not super popular because everybody thought we were an advertising company, or we’re going to read their email and advertise to them and or a consumer company, it was so fun to go build that business and challenge the traditional email approaches like IBM and Microsoft. And that kicked off my career a couple of years in our VP of Sales approached me and asked me to help build out the channel for Google Enterprise. And that was really where my career forked, and I started to get more into channel and ecosystem development. And I felt at that time, I didn’t really know what I was doing. And I think it’s partly because Google was this really interesting tech SAS company, trying to build a channel. And at the time channels, were still, I think, cast more in the old mold. And so we were trying to figure out what his channel look like with a SaaS business that you’re trying to build. And so it was a super fun run. I stayed at Google for many more years, and various different ecosystem leadership roles across GCP, globally. And then I ultimately took on the ISV ecosystem as my last gig at Google. For me events. That was the piece like, I was sitting here looking at Google, as a challenger in the cloud space, certainly to AWS and Microsoft. And the big glaring thing to me was like, we have to build ISV ecosystem. And I know this will be a theme in our talk today. I just got really passionate about it. And at the time, it was being done ad hoc by product leaders across Google Cloud. And so that was something I got very passionate about was proactively going out and seeking technology partnerships to integrate With run on Google Cloud and go to market with us, that leads me to my new role at Sada, where Tony asked me to come on board and help really build out this global function around scaling ISV and marketplace sales within Sada, which I’m extremely excited about.
Vince Menzione 05:16
And we were talking about there’s 185,000, SAS software companies, right, so this whole ISV ecosystem is just growing exponentially. I think our friend Jay McBain says it’s going to be at about a million. By the end of the decade. I used to call partner to partner back in the Microsoft days, but this recognition that it really is multiple organizations coming together to solve for a customer per client need. And you can’t do it alone. And these organizations need help and you help them scale.
Adam Massey 05:47
I think that’s one of the big evolutions like partnering and channel is certainly not a new concept. A lot of early tech companies depended on that as a route to market for the final mile for the customer for implementation. But as you’re alluding to, it was very technology company partner to go implement or integrate. I think what we’re seeing now is a shift to really more of the true ecosystem component where business outcomes are not enabled by a single technology. They’re enabled by multiple technologies. Some are inherently integrated, but many are not they have to run on a cloud, virtually and a platform. There’s so many different facets to how to enable the customer outcome, which is really the ultimate goal and especially at Sada, we are passionate about customer experience, customer value customer outcomes. And so we’re viewing this really as it’s like this canvas, where you can paint with lots of different technologies, services and managed services to make your customer highly successful. And those customers, by the way, are running a million miles an hour. So that’s where the value creation really is.
Vince Menzione 06:54
So sada has been a five time Google partner the year so you got to see them on the other side of the journey now coming over here, and they’ve grown substantially right, and they’re incredible growth, they’re a rocket ship, I was hoping you could take us a little deeper as to the importance of the role to fuel the growth.
Adam Massey 07:14
So I’ve worked with sada for a long time, I think Tony and I first started working together in 2007, or 2008, when I was at Google. So this very much feels in many ways, like I’m coming home or full circle. One of the things about my role as VP of ISV. And marketplace sales is the idea that or the acknowledgement that as we are forming relationships with large customers or customers of all sizes, really and helping them to migrate to the cloud, modernize on the cloud, drive business transformations on the cloud, we are all in on GCP. They are our cloud partner. But the outcomes on GCP that our customers are trying to drive often go beyond the portfolio of services that Google has to offer more and more again, coming back to that concept around business outcomes. We arrive in this position of a trusted advisor with our customer, we’ve helped them migrate to the cloud or do incredible things initially, often that first motion is around probably more infrastructure or an application like workspace. And then they start looking to us as their partner. And they’re an adviser to start talking about what are different areas where they’re trying to modernize your drive outcomes. Examples would be cybersecurity as one or data and analytics or infrastructure modernization in those areas. We’re not saying hey, here’s a bunch of products, we’re saying what are you trying to accomplish, and then helping them knit together this suite of technologies to make that happen. And so we’re in this position already bringing partners into that conversation as part of the solution to the customers challenge they’re trying to solve for my role is really just a formalization of that and an acknowledgement of the opportunity a and also be just being proactive. Instead of being reactive. And being proactive and creating multi technology solutions that meet our customers needs, we see a huge opportunity to drive growth. Yes, we’ve grown a ton since we’ve doubled down on Google as our cloud partner, we believe that the ISV ecosystem opportunity could potentially double our business because the opportunity in the addressable market is so big, being focused on Google also brings with it a very frothy, exciting ecosystem that we want to drive solutions around, monetize, create services for and ultimately make our customers successful.
Vince Menzione 09:25
You build out your own ecosystem, which is astounding, you’re the trusted adviser to the customer. And we talk about the seats at the table, the digitization of tech, and how buyers are going through the journey differently now than they did five or 10 years ago. And they’re relying on the people that they trust and you’re one of the trusted.
Adam Massey 09:45
We take that very seriously when a customer makes a large multi year commitment to Google Cloud with us as their partner in many cases, that’s their biggest single point of spend outside of human capital. It’s really important to be We partnered around that and helping them to from everything from like financial optimization to think about how to use that commitment as wisely as possible and optimize costs based on business outcomes, but also to think about customer success and new opportunities and ensure that they de risk that commitment by finding really, really healthy growth on the cloud. So we’re in that position, we take very seriously, and we focus on value creation. But that in itself puts us in a position to have this bird’s eye view where we can identify emerging opportunities for ecosystem partners and bring them into the conversation, there’s very much a crawl, walk run, right, we’ll start to identify patterns of business problems we can solve with partner technologies that will form commercial partnerships, we’ll get those implemented. And then from there, you get in a position where you can start to build manage services, and professional services and practices around either these solutions or even specific partnerships. And that’s where it gets like really exciting. So it’s
Vince Menzione 10:56
not just about taking an ISV solution and reselling it, you’re building a practice around it in a deployment practice a consultative approach to going after the customer stitching all together the solutions, providing all the services, maybe managed services and the like, around those solutions. Correct.
Adam Massey 11:13
If you’re just providing a transaction, you’re gonna get disintermediated. Eventually, we’ve seen that in history, if you’re not thinking from the customer’s perspective of what is valuable. And also from the ISVs perspective, you’re going to, you’re going to be short sighted, and you’re going to miss and so when we look at it from those two perspectives, it points very much to a roadmap of increased levels of engagement management services, because a the customers looking to reduce complexity. And frankly, the ISVs they like customer, they like lead gen and opportunity or customer acquisition. But if beyond that, there’s not some meat on the bone around, how do we help them drive healthy adoption and growth, I think you’ll get challenged down the road. So that’s how we look at it, we try to put ourselves in our partner shoes in our customers shoes.
Vince Menzione 11:58
And so how do you also act as a conduit? Because you’ve got a fairly significant organization, now, you’re interfacing with Google’s significant enterprise selling organization, you’re touching all of these customer touch points. And then you’re also working across all of your partners, organizations and touch points. What does that look like?
Adam Massey 12:18
Frankly, it’s pretty nascent right now. So we’re building this out. What I’m doing in the initial phase is I’m building a team, very, very specific ISV partner of specialists, sellers in every region. We’ve been doing this for a while, but it was a little bit more opportunistic and reactive. So our regional sales leadership and account execs were already identifying connection points there. But by staffing up a team of specialists in every region, it enables a like really specific accountability to the business and to our partners, be the ability to be actively looking for opportunities based on our partners use cases, ideal customer profiles, key pain points and things that they solve in our existing customer base, which is 1000s of customers, and also actively partnering on with our field teams on weekly forecast and listening for opportunities, that puts us in a position to be very purposeful about looking for opportunities and bringing in the right partners. What I think that looks like as we grow and develop is, it’s not valuable to show up to a customer with the logo slide of 100 logos and go hey, what do you need, I’m very much driving towards this concept of almost like a solutions catalog or solutions pillars so that we can say Saad is very good at customer acquisition. But then as that customers working through the lifecycle with Google, and they get on the platform, and they’re seeing initial successes, being in a position to go in and have really an advisory conversation around cybersecurity as an example. And in that conversation, do discovery and learn about challenges and pain points that are a fit for not only Google services, but also ISV partner solutions as well. And so that I think is how it has to evolve, it has to be done centric, and very discovery centric. And then also a little bit further out, you start to interlock things like our customer engineering, and solution architectures team and our professional services organization. And there’s incredible opportunities to start to, like really combine all these things in a way that drives immense customer value. We’re in the crawl, walk, run. So we’re in the crawl phase right now where I’m trying to get the baseline coverage and some sales discipline in place. But I’m tightly partnered with like our pro serve leaders and our sales leaders around this mission. And I’m excited to evolve very rapidly because the business is moving fast. We’re at
Vince Menzione 14:27
a seminal point, I believe, post pandemic, the acceleration of everything that we’ve seen these last few years, and a good friend and podcast guest Alan Adler, who has been really vocal, have been several people has been really vocal about ecosystems. Recently, he was quoted as saying capital markets are taking notice of the power of ecosystems, Andreessen Horowitz Bessemer Venture Partners, specifically leaning in toward ecosystem driven pipelines and ecosystem dominant business practices, which was a big change from just a couple of years ago. In terms of how organizations thought about go to market, the C suite can run, but it cannot hide partner ecosystems are the future. And companies that don’t go to ecosystems together lose. What do you think about that comment? And what are you seeing in terms of the shifts towards eco.
Adam Massey 15:17
So I love that quote, I certainly took notice. And I agree with it. And I’ve seen I stay try to stay close to the some of the VC community. And I’m seeing some of the investments there. And more and more ecosystem driven companies, both that are ecosystem oriented and their business as well as frankly, building solutions, right around ecosystem enablement. I think the big shift from my mind, like partnering isn’t new. But what I’m seeing is the big shift, that’s the step change is going from channel to ecosystem. And those are two different things. The thing that is so powerful right now, the trends we are seeing of customers more and more and more wanting to use the Cloud Platform commitments they’re making and marketplace as a way to simplify and unify more and more of their enterprise purchases. And this is not a Google specific thing. I think it’s a trend we’re seeing across all the major hyperscalers. But with Google, in particular, a lot of customers are starting to say, hey, like I have existing spent, I want to move over to the marketplace to connect and simplify my billing and consume my bigger cloud commitment, new purchases, I want to prioritize and look for opportunities to buy solutions that integrate with and consume my cloud commitments. And so it’s a really interesting sort of shifting gravity in the way that companies are looking at enterprise software procurement, provisioning, integration, and it’s creating like really interesting economic opportunities for partners who play into that really, really well. It’s very new, though, right. So like, as I go out and talk to ISVs, most ISPs have no concept of a indirect sales model or program in a Cloud Marketplace, like we are breaking ground on that with almost everybody right now. And even the hyper scalars are figuring out how to productize this and enable partners like sada to be able to create composite marketplace offerings that include multiple ISVs plus services, make no mistake, we will be getting there very, very quickly, the markets going this way. And it kind of makes sense. It’s sort of like these customers have are making huge commitments to cloud because it’s where they run their network, their storage, their compute, it’s where they run their business. And it makes a lot of sense to consolidate purchases, and billing and consumption around some of those models. So that in itself is creating a really interesting addressable business opportunity. And I agree with Alan, I think the partners are the ISVs, who see that trend and make the right moves to position for taking advantage of that early are going to see immense benefits from it, I find it extremely exciting. And I literally had been watching this trend like a couple years ago, nobody bought like enterprise software on the marketplace, they would test drive and do trials there. And eventually they would go to a direct agreement that’s shifting dramatically. And we’re seeing like seven, even eight figure deals sometimes go down on these cloud marketplaces now. So it’s really, really cool to see.
Vince Menzione 18:07
Yeah, you bring up several key points here, right, this whole move to shift to marketplace is still early days. But everyone is new Microsoft put a stake in the ground when they lowered their fees, Microsoft, Amazon, Google all allowing you to buy off of your commit, right? So putting incentives for customers, and they want to keep you on the platform, they want to start driving the right activity around the marketplaces. And then marketplaces, I think, also take a lot of the friction out of what we do today, right? And what we’ve been doing the past ISVs, there’s a very manual process for a custom solution or bespoke solution or even a SaaS solution, then you layer in another partner, a customer and you try to put this all together. It’s labor intensive, it’s complex and marketplaces, they streamline a lot of this and they become a flywheel to this whole ecosystem concept that you discuss.
Adam Massey 18:59
Yep. They really do. I think it’s also it’s hard, right? Because there are a lot of people who have seen their fair share of kind of like Barney partnership agreements done, where there’s big announcements, but not a lot of teeth in it don’t see a lot of traction from it. So this is where I also get kind of excited about this, because the execution model on some of these marketplace partnering frameworks are really tangible, like you can really execute together. There’s a bunch of tips I have on I think, how to do that well and how not to but definitely seeing a shift. I think it’s sparking, I think this ecosystem trend that you highlighted is happening anyway. But I think this marketplace thing is one element of it that’s accelerating that trend, and very material ways.
Vince Menzione 19:44
I’m so excited to welcome athletic greens as the latest sponsor, to ultimate guide to partnering friends who know me well know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for over 20 years now. And it is made all the difference to my health and well being about five years ago I added athletic greens and now their product ag one has become my go to green drink supplement ag one is packed with 75, high quality vitamins, minerals, Whole Foods source superfoods, probiotics and antigens. If you’d like to give ag one a try athletic greens is giving away a free one year supply of vitamin D, and five travel packs with every new purchase, check them out at athletic greens.com forward slash Vince Am I talk about a set of operating principles around what makes successful partnerships great partnerships, mindset, executive commitment, maniacal focus and agility are some of those key aspects. And I look at some of these ISV organizations. And I say they have some work to do here. But I do believe that the shift we’re seeing is starting to change the mindset in some of these organizations. And when I think about mindset, executive commitment, maniacal focus and agility as those key principles, I also think about sada quite a bit as embodying many of these great partnering principles, what principles do you believe, are fundamental to tech organizations looking to drive their own successful ecosystems?
Adam Massey 21:20
The first one I’ll highlight, which I’m really hot on at the moment, it’s kind of tactical, but I think it’s so critical, which is just having ownership and accountability for a partnership. If it’s somebody’s second or third job, it’s not going to get focus. And I think that’s true on both sides of the partnership. So having really good ownership and accountability is key. The other one that is a little bit more macro and focus is the partnership has to make sense, right? If it’s not clear what the benefit and the value is on both sides of the equation A and B to your customers are that tends to you see that sometimes, right? You see, partners get together with great hopes, but it requires strange and unnatural acts to go to market together, those are likely not going to fit as well. I’m not saying there’s not room for creative partnerships. But alignment is really key have a common success metric that you’re driving for together that matters to both businesses, and that’s going to be key. So those are the two that I’m pretty highly focused on right now. When you start talking about like, hey, gives and gets with a partner, you need to be able to operationalize that and have somebody accountable for executing it. And a lot of like, that sounds so basic, right? I know it does, but it’s so often missed. And then you have these cadence calls with no updates, and eventually it fizzles out. So that’s the kind of stuff I think is it’s easy to avoid, but you got to be willing to invest.
Vince Menzione 22:36
You are so speaking my language, I talk about having a shared vision for what better together is what the partnerships going to drive. I love what you said about the Barney conversation, right? We come together and we all love each other. But we walk away, nothing happens. I talk about those meetings all the time on what you said about that is ownership. And I call that maniacal focus, like who is the person or people that have the accountability? What is it exactly used? You used OKRs at Google, Google was early to OKRs. What are the objectives and key results? Like how what are we going to drive against this? And we need to have the focus and deliberate set of actions that we’re monitoring and measuring? Are we green, yellow, or red? On those objectives?
Adam Massey 23:19
Yeah, one of the things I do a lot when I’m talking to partners, and they go, right, what should we do first together, one of those things I will focus on is let’s find 10 customers, let’s really have a clear ideal customer profile, a clear use case for trying to solve for or implement, let’s go find 10. Really, really surgically focused. And maybe we win one of those, and then you’ve got to win together. And then that you can get like the next order of magnitude going and get momentum built and all that it’s hard when like you’re broad and loose, and let’s go get 100 opportunities. Okay, well, that’s actually really hard to hold anybody accountable to.
Vince Menzione 23:52
So we know what success looks like, because we’ve seen it at SATA. You’ve seen it at Google. And we talked about this ownership and accountability. It’s got to be the people ought to be assigned to it. I think that’s also the investment. And SATA has invested considerably in building out your role other roles within the organization to drive this. But what about organizations that didn’t get it? Right? You had a purview for 12 years at Google? What do you wish you had said to those organizations that didn’t get it? Right?
Adam Massey 24:19
I think they know. Like sometimes no is very powerful. Like any big company, right? There are partnerships we invested a lot of time and resources into that didn’t net out like anything like any opportunity, being disciplined about qualification, and ensuring that you’re both in it for the right reasons back to the operating principles, honestly, events, sometimes just the timing is not right. And you have to move on and focus. I hear about this all the time in sales organizations, right where you hear about a rep who’s struggling not because that rep doesn’t have the right activity or whatever. It’s because they’re focusing on the wrong customers. Were a little bit shift in the ICP and they can see massive success and I think there’s a similar trend around partnerships. You got to be disciplined, you got to be scrutinizing and you got to qualify. And I think that is sometimes hard to say no, but it really benefits both parties.
Vince Menzione 25:04
And it’s okay to triage every once in a while, right within your own ecosystem, you need to prune out the partnerships that aren’t working the way you wanted them to. And I still believe there’s an 8020 rule here, as there is in most other business principles around partnerships, sad for our listeners, many learning to build out ecosystems for the first time, what words of advice would you give to them
Adam Massey 25:26
really focus on what your business objectives are as a company not like from a partnership perspective, but what are the like the sea level or you comparatives you have as a company, and think about how ecosystem can create force multipliers around those imperatives start there, and the more strategic alignment you have, and you can look at your ecosystem as a strategic way to create leverage and growth, acceleration and success for your customers. That is where to focus. And that will enable you to ensure that you’ve got really, really good alignment with what’s most important for you as a business and your ecosystem development. And I think that will make your roadmap extremely clear.
Vince Menzione 26:04
I love your advice here. Adam, as you might know, I’m fascinated with the career journey. Was there a spark or pivot that got you to this spot in your career?
Adam Massey 26:15
I think there’s two one was when my old VP of sales of tip the hat to him right now Michael lock came to me and asked me to take on this ecosystem. First role I had, I had no idea what I was getting into, I had no idea what I was doing. But I jumped at the opportunity. And that was one big pivot. And there were points along the way where it was really hard. And I think I questioned that career for Should I have stayed in the direct sales leadership path or not. But long term, I think it’s enabled really, just really fun jobs and working with interesting people on interesting things. And it’s been good, I’d say the second spark was kind of late in my Google career, when I proactively decided that I wanted to go take on the ISV part of Google Cloud Platform or Google Cloud ecosystem efforts is fundamental understanding that a cloud hyperscale cloud is really like a big operating system. And operating systems are only so useful, without great software that runs really well on them. And the ability to reach more customer use cases and consumption and all that. That was the second spark. And that’s probably still where my passion really lies is this concept of hyperscale cloud platforms and software ecosystems, and the multitude of technical and business opportunities that creates
Vince Menzione 27:27
such a big opportunity for everyone in this space? Was there a best piece of advice along that path?
Adam Massey 27:34
Honestly, if I were to give myself advice, or anyone coming up, it’s do hard things. You learned so much along the way. And when I look back at the periods of my career, where I’ve seen the most incredible growth, it’s usually when I’m struggling and doing really hard things or trying to figure out or like a good example of the you’re in a job that hadn’t existed before, and you’re trying to build something. Those are places where you can just really write the playbook and grow so much. And growth doesn’t come from easy fun times growth comes from the hard time. So there’s points in your career where I think you really need to lean into that and not be afraid of
Vince Menzione 28:07
it. So Adam, let’s have a little bit of fun. You’re going away for a long trip, long business trip. And you can only take five songs on your playlist, you’ve got a very limited device, you might have an old Microsoft Zune device, and you only can record five songs on your playlist. What five songs would you select for this playlist and why?
Adam Massey 28:28
Alright, so I’m gonna have I’m gonna I’m gonna give you a different answer. I’m gonna give you five artists because there’s I’m just like such a music fan and I love such a diverse set of music. So I would say Lil Wayne is the first one. I would say Tyler Childers is the second one. There’s this amazing EDM house music DJ in Berlin named Jennifer Cardini. She’d be my third one. Probably go Chris Stapleton is a fourth and then maybe like Red House Painters for now go Barney bear for my fifth. So very diverse. I love it all. But I love like, it’s not so much about the genre of music fans. It’s like the ones that give you that emotional feeling and are just so good. So I’m all over the place. But I think it’s fun. I love the fact that we’re all
Vince Menzione 29:11
over the place. This is quite a selection of music you’d be taking
Adam Massey 29:15
with you. I just drove across the country with my daughter and she liked some of it and really hated a lot of it as well. So I got definitely feel old at points in that. Well, that
Vince Menzione 29:23
sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah,
Adam Massey 29:25
no, it’s it’s awesome. Love music, but I love discussing it to Adam.
Vince Menzione 29:29
I so enjoyed our conversation today, or listeners Any final thoughts on optimizing for their success during this time?
Adam Massey 29:38
First of all, I had a great time as well. Thank you for having me. Such an honor. I would say for anyone out there we are entering. We’re in a period of kind of economic uncertainty and there’s gonna be some tough times likely ahead, but those tough times create amazing opportunities. So I would just say well, we’re thinking it’s SATA is focused on the customer. The customer is your Northstar. Put yourself in your customers shoes, and figure out how to like, out innovate and out, optimize your competition with that focus on the customer. Big opportunities always arise from challenging times like this if you focus on the right things,
Vince Menzione 30:12
the customer is the North Star. Great advice, Adam. Thank you again for joining Ultimate Guide to partner fans. Thank you. As with each of my episodes, I appreciate your support. Please subscribe on your favorite platform, like comment, tell your friends about Ultimate Guide to partnering and where they can find us and I’d love your feedback. Please like the podcast and provide comments or reach out to me and Vince Menzione are on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also like and follow Ultimate Guide to partnering on our Facebook page, or drop me a line at Vince M at ultimate dash partnerships.com This episode of the podcast is sponsored by partner tap the partner ecosystem platform most trusted by enterprise, drive more revenue with your partners and learn more at partner tap.com.
Announcer 31:06
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online and Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partnering. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering