Ben Williams: preference

Transcript context

…Before we get into all of that, I'd love to spend just a minute on your background. So, you're currently VP product at Snyk, and I'm curious how you got to that role and just some of the other wonderful things you've done in your career along the way there. I'll try to keep it reasonably short. My education is in computer science, graduated from the University of Manchester back in the late '90s. I'd already landed as a job as a developer, but ended up having a bunch of other interesting offers, one of which was to join a small startup building requirements management tooling for product and engineering folks. This was all pre-Agile, but that whole space of developer tooling, engineering tooling, it was something I just felt naturally drawn to and it's where I've really specialized through my whole career. I actually joined that company as a solutions engineer, so lots of demos and so on. I was really close to the product team, but also speaking with customers every day which as is quite common I think was my path into products there. Several years and a few acquisitions later, I find myself in IBM with the Rational software developer tooling group. I was leading parts of the product strategy there and a bunch of initiatives. I actually, I learned a ton of useful stuff there, but also that I had a strong preference for working in smaller, fast-growing orgs verse 350,000 people [inaudible 00:06:55]. After an interesting unexpected interlude, leading a DevOps transformation at a fintech and some consulting and advising, I then joined CloudBees. They're a DevOps startup with an open-core model. I was leading product design and growth there. Stayed with them for three years through several raises and a period of really fast growth before finally joining Snyk to build out our growth organization and lead our developer experience initiatives. I have a broad remit at Snyk now than just the growth org, but yeah, that's how it started. Awesome. To give folks a sense of just how successful and big Snyk has gotten, one is just what does Snyk do, we haven't even talked about that yet, and then two, just some stats about the scale of the company and the business at this point.…

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