How would you describe your role?
I would describe my role as helping to find new problems, new customers, or adjacent problems that Veilant’s solutions can help solve. That’s probably the simplest form of what I see us doing over here. We work in collaboration with Veilant’s delivery side, who is focused on expanding what we’re doing with existing customers. Additionally, I think part of BD’s role is working with CIO, bringing back what we’re seeing out in the market to help drive our product road map and prioritization.
How would you describe your leadership style?
I think it varies depending on the team. We have an extraordinary, experienced team here, very senior. Everyone brings just an extraordinary amount of experience and expertise in the Growth Team. So then, how do we best focus that? I give folks a lot of flexibility in how they accomplish their goals. A core part of this is taking my experience and understanding of the national security market, and then helping identify where we point towards out there and helping prioritize that.
What’s something new you’ve learned recently?
I just finished a Generative AI certificate with MIT. I haven’t done anything like that in a very long time, which is great. It gave shape and greater definition to many things that Veilant’s team is seeing and hearing about in the market. It was very helpful, and I think it will aid my collaboration with our data solutions and CIO, and think through how we can harness this technology to better serve our customers.
What’s something going on at Veilant that you’re excited to see grow or develop?
I’m excited to see the development of Veilant’s expansion into the broader Department of War and the Joint Force, and the greater recognition of the commercial data economy, ubiquitous data collection by these organizations. Ubiquitous data collection is part and parcel of the operating environment today that we all live in – it’s not just this niche issue, but a great vulnerability and risk. It’s part of how we operate, and Veilant has to be able to bring that insight and solutions there. So, it’s really this expansion towards a much larger set of the National Security and Department of War community that I’m excited about and what we focus most of our time on here.
How do we uniquely demonstrate value to our customers?
I think Veilant uniquely demonstrates value by recognizing the commercial world that we all live in and building solutions that are intended to operate within that reality. A lot of the technology community builds these very specific solutions that may be very hard to use and doesn’t conform to commercial user experiences we have all come to expect. One of the great things that Veilant does is “live off the land,” as the cyber world might call this. You’ll hear that in the cyber security, cyber threat world. We “live off the land” in the sense that we take what’s in the commercial infrastructure, software and hardware world, and we say – how do we bring that together while adding some of our own services to those to provide solutions that are safer, more private, and still easy to operate. We’re very focused on the user experience in the solutions. I think that is a critical difference differentiator in how we approach our problem set – the solutions we have available really have to be commercially-based solutions. Everyone today expects to have that consumer-like experience, and we build our solutions to meet those expectations, recognizing that that user behavior is an essential component in the adoption of our tools and we work hard to match that experience.
How would you describe Veilant’s culture?
Veilant’s culture is very mission-focused in a great way. Everyone here is very passionate and that makes it a great environment to be in. It is a team effort here. In my 18 months, one thing we’ve focused on is structuring the team to build a collaborative and supportive environment. The mission focus and team environment are the distinguishing factors here at Veilant.
What’s your superpower?
I think I am extraordinarily comfortable in ambiguity, and maybe that’s why coming into the new Growth side of Veilant was very comfortable for me. I was told to go find a problem, a new problem set, or a new set of mission customers that don’t know what they need, don’t know they have a problem yet, and if they do, they don’t know what the answer is, and to bridge our world to theirs. I think I’m very comfortable with that.
Another way I’ve also described this throughout my career is that my focus has been driving commercial insight methodology data into the mission space. I think I’ve been very good at being able to look at the analogs between their mission space and the commercial world, where a lot of people think these are separate. You can peel away the top layer, and they are organizations and systems, and they operate in very similar ways. Being able to make those analogies is something that I’ve focused on for most of my career.
