Show NotesFrom Age 7 to MSP Owner: Simon Robert’s IT Journey

Simon Robert’s IT career started earlier than most, at just 7 years old, he was already fixing computers his father brought home. Now, as President of Novbox in Las Vegas, Simon runs a managed service provider that helps businesses stay secure and operational.

In this episode, Simon shares the honest reality of running an IT business. He talks about the stress of being a “one-man army” for years, why admitting “I don’t know” actually builds more trust than pretending to be an expert, and how communication saves client relationships when things go wrong.

Episode Highlights:

The One-Man Army Problem

Honest Communication Wins

Break/Fix vs MSP Model

IT Specialization Reality

The Vegas Tech Community

Key Takeaways:

About Simon Robert:

Listen to learn how honest communication, genuine relationships, and knowing when to ask for help can transform your career – whether you’re running your own business or working in corporate IT.

Simon Robert: Hey, nice to see you in person again.

Manuel Martinez: Again.

Simon Robert: It’s so nice. I was so happy, you know, remember a couple of months ago, we chat a little bit on LinkedIn. And I said, hey, do you want to smoke a cigar with me? Yes, of course. You agree directly. I was like, this is so nice to have the possibility to have a platform like LinkedIn that we can connect and after that do something in person. That’s amazing. And thank you very much for the invitation to your podcast.

Manuel Martinez: Yeah, of course. And I was glad that you kind of reached out because one of the things that you’ve done and I’ll be honest, I’ve started to do it a little bit more too is when I see people and I interact and I see that they’re locally in Vegas, I do a lot of what you do. I’m like, oh, I see you’re in Vegas. It’d be great to meet up for, you know, hey, maybe you want to do a coffee or do a lunch or to kind of grow my IT community outside of the people that I normally work with, which is also outside. So thank you.

Simon Robert: Yeah. And you know, like we’re a little city. People thinks that Vegas is very, very a large city, but it’s not L.A., you know, we’re about one million people here. So that’s pretty nice to connect with other people in IT. So that’s amazing. So I’m doing that too. So each time I’m connecting with somebody in the IT, I want to go take a beer with me. Yes, of course. So that’s nice. So it gave us the opportunity to connect and build our IT network in Vegas.

Manuel Martinez: Yeah, definitely. And then also do things again, it doesn’t, I think one of the things that people think is, you know, it has to be just IT related, right? Like, I mean, we talked a little bit about IT, but it was really just kind of getting to know more about you, you know, what you’re doing, you know, like you were very passionate about cigars and I, you know, I’ve had a couple here and there, but it was, you know, kind of you teaching me and you know, the people that you have outside in that kind of ecosystem, which is really cool.

Simon Robert: That was nice. I’m part of that cigar club and every Wednesday night we smoke a different cigar. So that’s pretty cool. And it forced us to connect, you know, instead of being in our backyards alone smoking the cigar we’re smoking together, it’s like a family. So I appreciate that. So I’m very happy that you have the chance to experience that.

Manuel Martinez: What I do with all my guests is if you don’t mind kind of telling me a little bit about where you grew up and then eventually kind of what sparked your interest in technology.

Simon Robert: So I grew up in the Repentigny. This is a city in Quebec. So it’s very not so far away from Montreal. It’s a southern city and it’s very special because a lot of people don’t know about Quebec. It’s a French province of Canada. So like, let’s say like 70 or 80% of people speaks French and sometimes they only speaks French. They don’t speak English. So it’s like being in Paris, but like in North America. So I grew up there in my city. Everybody was speaking French. So we’re like, it was so special. Like the first time I went to Montreal, Montreal, it’s more bilingual. I will say there’s a part of the eastern part of Montreal speaks French and the western part will speak more, more English. So I was like very amazed of, wow, there’s people speaking another language even in my, in my province. And I start working in IT. I’ll say my passion start when I was maybe like six, seven years old because of my father. My father was bringing the computers of his clients. So it was not working directly in IT, but there was some computers that were broken and my father were helping his customer by bringing back the computer trying to repair. So I was observing what he was doing. And after that, that was nice because a couple of times he said, oh, that computer is broken. There was nothing to do. You can keep it, Simon. So I was using my screwdriver, removing all the parts, trying to repair, trying to fix the issue. And most of the time I was able to fix the issue, like using a spare part from another computer, making sure that they were compatible. And then voila, I was able to repair computers at seven years old. And after that, my father was so amazed because he didn’t have to do the repairs. He said, hey, Simon, I got something for you.

Manuel Martinez: Keeps you busy.

Simon Robert: Yeah, exactly. So he was happy. He was doing business and he was doing like, he didn’t have to do the repairs. I was doing it for free. So he was happy with that. And there’s a good thing with that because I was not like so near to my father because my father was like more like, I’ve been like that. I don’t say to my kids, I love them. You know, it was like more cold. Because I was working with him, repairing the computers, I had the opportunity to have a lot of time with him. So that’s pretty cool because I’m sure that if I didn’t have the patience for IT or for computers, I will not be as near to my father that I am right now.

Manuel Martinez: So then would you say that kind of your, because you mentioned it before, right? With the cigars and with the bonding with people, do you think that technology, and I’ve seen a little bit of kind of what you do and the connections that you have, is that something that you think probably, I know at seven years old, you weren’t thinking like, oh, this is a way for also for ...

Show NotesTechnical skills land you the job. People skills determine everything that comes next.

Yvette Durazo brings conflict resolution expertise to Silicon Valley tech companies. As a professional mediator and coach, she helps technical professionals navigate the transition into leadership roles. She teaches at universities and works with companies to build conflict intelligence throughout their organizations.

This episode tackles a gap most bootcamps and certifications ignore. You can master Python, ace the PM certification, and still struggle when team dynamics turn difficult. Yvette explains why project managers need influence skills nobody warned them about, how unresolved conflict creates measurable health costs, and why companies should budget for these skillsets differently.

Episode Highlights:

Yvette shares her experience teaching conflict resolution in project management certificate programs. The programs teach scheduling, budgeting, and timeline management. They rarely prepare students for influencing stakeholders across the organization. That gap creates real problems when projects involve multiple departments.

The conversation moves into conflict health. Yvette describes how prolonged workplace stress affects cortisone levels, cognitive function, and physical wellbeing. Employees operating in constant fight-or-flight mode can’t access creativity or innovation. Companies lose productivity and face increased absenteeism.

You’ll hear why Yvette advocates for moving conflict resolution training from learning and development budgets into risk management. The training gets cut first when budgets tighten if leadership sees it as optional development. Treating it as risk mitigation changes the conversation.

The episode closes with Yvette’s perspective on “bringing your whole self to work.” She suggests companies would benefit more from supporting employees to bring their healthy selves to work instead.

Key Takeaways:

About This Week’s Guest:

Resources Mentioned:

Subscribe to Career Downloads:

#CareerDownloads #ConflictResolution #TechLeadership #CareerDevelopment

Yvette Durazo: Thank you, Manuel, for inviting me to your podcast and inviting me to interact with your audience and be able to be part of this movement that you’re doing in educating people and helping to build their careers.

Manuel Martinez: Right. And thank you again for kind of coming on. And I know that we had a couple of conversations prior to this, and I think it’s important because I don’t know how much of this type of information. And again, just trying to share with others, you know, we talk about soft skills and technical skills, and those are important. But I think things like this, like conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, and there are people that, you know, starting out in their career, they’re like, okay, well, I want to be a software developer, I want to be a project manager. But at some point, you, even if you’re not a direct manager leader, you’re going to lead smaller teams. So understanding how to resolve conflict. I know that this would have been something that I can think of a number of situations where it would have helped me to kind of have some of that information instead of trying to learn it on the fly or after the fact.

Yvette Durago: Yeah, you’re right. A lot of the people are in the tech industry. They go out and learn a field of work that it is, you know, very hard skills, right? Very intellectually in hard skills. But there are parts in the process of their career that they go in, for example, into project management, because they know that somehow they will be working with teams, or they perhaps going to getting an MBA thinking that, you know, their career trajectory will lead them into become, you know, leaders, managers, and going up the ladder in the organization. And the more that you go up the ladder in the organization, one of the things that is going to be something that is going to happen and it’s common is the fact that you’re going to be working more with people, right? And it is interesting that when people going through the trajectory of learning more about project management and they go through a certificate process, little do they realize that project management leads to having to learn how to influence people. People that are working in your entire company, that you’re not directly managing or supervising yet because you’re responsible for a particular project, you have to learn how to influence these individuals that come to your team. And believe it or not, the project management certificate program back in the days when I started, you know, teaching courses in conflict resolution, I realized that project managers were not very well taught about conflict resolution. The book that is the project management book, the what is the PMP book, I think it’s called, there was only one or two pages in conflict resolution. And it is interesting that it’s a field work that you need to deal with teams, with people. Eventually I think that they realized the project management institute where I used to give a lot of my workshops, they realized that the skill is very much needed. And eventually they start upping up and bringing more people skills into this work. So in reality, what tends to happen as people grow up in their career, that is going to be the tendency, having to learn these people skills. And LinkedIn recently did a research study into what are the skill gaps that they continue to see that it’s missing in the workplace. And out of those 15 that they ended up researching, the number one skill missing was AI, right? Because right now, in the world that we are, AI is the most important. The second one was communication, conflict resolution, how to negotiate with people. So we see through the research throughout these past 15 years that conflict resolution and being able to have those difficult conversations with people, be able to resolve human conflict has been in all of these research studies in the skill gaps that is mostly needed in the organization. And the more we progress into life, we see that it’s a key skill. It’s not what they used to call it a soft skill anymore. It is one of those essential skills that is mostly needed.

Manuel Martinez: And I know we’re going to start getting into that, so I want to save that for a little bit later in the conversation. But if you don’t mind, tell me a little bit about where you grew up and then eventually led you down this path towards your career.

Yvette Durazo: Sure. I was born and raised in San Diego, California. I was very lucky to be born in a border town in where I had the opportunity to be able to commingle with the two different cultures, you know, Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego. My father used to own a company in the other side of the border and that was kind of like playground as a child because I was the youngest of seven and I used to always be with my dad because it was fascinating to be around his business and playing to be the accountant, playing to help him out in the workplace. That was my playground. And I grew up in the other side in San Diego, going to school since I was in Kinder all the way until now, right? Because of the fact that I was raised in a bi-national border, it always caught my attention, the ability to be able to understand different cultures. In San Diego, not only you have a predominant am...

Show Notes

What happens when you combine curiosity, willingness to take chances, and genuine interest in people? You get Bob Leek’s career story – a journey from a small town in North Carolina to becoming CIO of Clark County, Nevada.

Bob didn’t start with a master plan. He got an accounting degree, landed in retail finance, and complained about IT systems so much they moved him to technology. His path through retail (Egghead), pet healthcare (Banfield), Kaiser Permanente, and public sector roles taught him that relationships matter more than transactions, and that saying yes to opportunities often matters more than having all the credentials.

Now leading technology for one of America’s largest counties – serving 2.3 million residents and 40 million annual visitors – Bob brings an approachable leadership style that breaks down the intimidation factor many feel around executive titles. He’s proof that you don’t need to have it all figured out from day one.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

The conversation covers his progression through retail technology, pet healthcare (Banfield), Kaiser Permanente, and Multnomah County before making the jump to Clark County. Bob explains what it means to manage technology infrastructure for millions of people while maintaining his commitment to accessibility and relationship-building.

You’ll hear about his philosophy on networking (hint: it’s not about collecting business cards), why he asks questions without worrying about looking uninformed, and how curiosity has been his career accelerator. Bob also opens up about being a “professional extrovert and social introvert” and what that means for how he shows up in his role.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

ABOUT THE GUEST:

CONNECT WITH BOB:

SUBSCRIBE & CONNECT:

Join our community on the social platforms:

TranscriptionManuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode, I basically hit the refresh button and bring on a different guest to learn more about their background and their experiences, to really uncover any actionable advice that we can provide to you as you’re managing your own career. So I’m very excited today that I have with me Bob Leek. So he is the CIO for Clark County. For those of you that aren’t aware, and I’m sure Bob will bring us up to speed, but Clark County is one of the largest counties in the nation. So, you know, I’m interested to kind of get into how he eventually landed into that role and a lot of the things that he’s doing to kind of better not only, you know, his organization, but the community as a whole. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Bob.

Bob: Thanks for having me here.

Manuel: I appreciate you, you know, taking the time to kind of go through and share your experiences. So you and I have had conversations, you know, outside of here. And I think one of the big things, and I think the reason that I’m excited to have you on here and kind of share your story is a lot of times people see a name or they see a title and they’re like, oh, Bob Leek, a CIO, or oh, a Rishma, our, you know, they see these titles and they think it’s almost intimidating to them. And one of the things that I’ve been fortunate enough is I know you all outside of here and I don’t have kind of that, okay, he’s a CIO, he’s a person, but now I want to give you the opportunity to kind of show that and show people like, okay, he’s just a regular person. So when I come across Bob at an event, which, you know, I’ve come across and, you know, we’ve seen each other at a lot of these, but to come and say, hey, I can come and say hi and, you know, and kind of introduce themselves.

Bob: Yeah, please do that. I’m a professional extrovert, I’m a social introvert. So I relish the opportunity for people to come up and talk with me. I love engaging with people.

Manuel: So if you kind of start off, if you can tell us, you know, where you grew up and then eventually what got you interested in kind of pursuing technology.

Bob: Yeah, so it’s an interesting story. So I was four years old when we moved to the United States. I was born in the Netherlands. My dad worked for a flower bulb export company and they decided that there was an opportunity to move some of their operations to the United States. And so he came home one day and said, we’re gonna move to North Carolina. And not just anywhere in North Carolina, but Mount Airy, North Carolina, which is Andy Griffith’s hometown. So that’s gonna be familiar to a lot of people from the Andy Griffith Show, right? It was in color when I was there. It wasn’t black and white, but growing up in a town with 20,000 people, what you saw in the Andy Griffith Show with Mayberry, that’s what I grew up in. A couple of stoplights, a very close knit community. I grew up in the early 70s, mid to late 70s, the formative years, playing Little League Baseball and playing soccer and being involved in the church and all the things that you could imagine in small town America. And it was a great place to grow up. I learned English from a good friend of mine, James. I lived in the neighborhood with me. He literally took me around and said, that’s a rock. That’s a squirrel. That’s a tree. So I learned English through Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, all of that, that was in that era. And so it was really formative to me to grow up in a small American community like that and really put a set of values and principles in place for me that I still carry forward to today. So my dad then had a second big influence on my life. In 1987, I was gonna be a senior in high school. I was gonna graduate second in the class. My good friend, Todd, was gonna graduate first. It’s the first time in the history of that high school that two boys were gonna graduate at the top of their class. My dad came home and said, guess what? We’re moving to Atlanta, Georgia. We’re moving to Lawrenceville. At that time, it was Gwinnett County, fastest growing county in the country for like five years. We were a family that moved into a neighborhood that had 70 homes in it. We were the second family that moved in. Within six months, the entire neighborhood was full of people. I went from a high school with 300 kids in it to a graduating class with 500 kids in it. And so culture shock, right? Giant high school, 2400 kids in a high school, six-story high school, big athletics, a 6A school. Here I was coming from this really small environment into this giant environment. And I walked in the door and I was second in the class in terms of academics. That caused some backlash from the people that had been going to school there for their entire lives, right? So took some AP classes, small-knit community, tanked my senior year. Just totally said, you know what? I’m not gonna be part of disrupting that group, that culture, those close-knit high school folks. And several of them became really good friends. So I tanked my senior year. I went from second in the class of 500 to fifth. And so, you know, I think I had a B, maybe two. And so it’s, again, another formulative time in my life in having been disrupted from moving from the Netherlands to the United States, then moving from small town to gigantic town. And that’s really formed the core of what I’ve done. Went to college in the North Georgia mountains, private school, got an accounting degree, worked for a couple of companies in Atlanta, met my wife, now my wife. We’ve been married 30 years next year in Buckhead. That’ll be familiar to many people. Met ...

Show Notes

Episode Summary:

She arrived in the US from Ukraine at 20 with law school dreams. No resources to make it happen. No network. No connections.

She took whatever jobs paid bills. Call centers. Customer service. The work most people see as stepping stones, she turned into skill-building.

That’s where she discovered she loved talking to people and solving problems. More importantly, she was good at it.

Today she consults with pre-funding stage startups on sales operations. She helps technical founders who built genius products but struggle to sell them.

Her career philosophy is simple: take shots you’re not ready for. Apply when you meet 60% of requirements. Ask questions that might sound stupid. Build expertise through curiosity.

This conversation unpacks her immigration journey, multiple career pivots, working through language barriers, and why she tells everyone to stop waiting until they feel prepared.

Key Takeaways:

Curiosity beats credentials. She built her expertise by sitting through engineering demos, joining product calls, and asking endless questions. When she talks to customers, she can articulate value in ways others can’t because she did the work to deeply understand the business.

The confidence gap is real and costly. Men typically apply when they meet 60% of job requirements. Women wait for 100%. The difference? Men who apply get hired. If you don’t take the shot, you already have a no.

Following through separates average from excellent. Tell someone you’ll look something up and actually do it. Your credibility lives or dies on this one habit.

Listen to the full episode to hear Vika’s complete story and get her unfiltered advice on making career moves before you feel prepared.

#CareerDownloads #SalesConsulting #CareerChange #TechCareers #StartupLife #ImmigrantStory

TranscriptionManuel Martinez: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez, and again, this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about their background and their experiences, to help you uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So I’m excited for today’s guests. So today I have with me Vika Nevmevakova, and we met at a networking event. We got to talking, I learned a little bit more about kind of what she’s currently doing, some of the things that she’s done in the past, found it very interesting and intriguing. So looking forward to learning more about, you know, some of those experiences. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Vika.

Vika: Thank you for having me, I’m so excited to be here.

Manuel Martinez: I appreciate you coming on and, you know, being willing to kind of share your experiences. I know we kind of had a little touch point ahead of time. So really looking forward to learning more about it.

Vika: Me too, let’s do it.

Manuel Martinez: So if you don’t mind to start off, can you tell us what your current role is and just a summary of some of the roles and responsibilities?

Vika: Sure, so currently I’m doing consulting, mostly around sales, sales operations, for smaller startups, usually pre-funding stage startups, because that’s where they need help most and aren’t at the stage yet where they can hire a big team or set up processes or even platforms and applications, because a lot of times they’re costly. So I try to come in and help them first of all, develop a strategy, understand what their selling goal is, what they’re trying to get to that year, that month, that quarter, and then provide them with the tools, do the research based on what budget they have available and set them up with prospecting platforms, CRM systems, and something to track revenue once it starts coming in, help with just looking over their webpage to see how a customer might perceive it. A lot of times, software is built by, you know, a super technical person, usually genius, that developed something from a good idea and they’re very technical and they, not necessarily, are very good at perception in terms of how the market might see it. Obviously their product is great. They may have sold it already, maybe like to smaller customers, maybe individual licenses, but a lot of times I just wanna come in and see what a potential prospect would see when they look at the page, like pricing, features, what the value is, are they communicating the value? Because a lot of times they’ll list all the features, but not necessarily connecting the whole picture so that the prospect might look at it and be like, okay, well, that looks cool, but like what problem does it solve for me? So I usually try to come in and say, we need to articulate it for them so that it’s easy. Once they get on the website, they’re like, ah, okay, that’s gonna help me fix XYZ. And that’s how you generate sales.

Manuel Martinez: And I’m excited to kind of dig into your journey and understand how you were able to kind of develop those skills to be able to now put those into practice to help these businesses.

Vika: Yeah.

Manuel Martinez: So now if you don’t mind, tell me a little bit more about kind of where you grew up and then eventually kind of what led you into eventually getting into technology.

Vika: So I was born and raised in Ukraine, moved to the States when I was almost 20 years old, just a few months shy of that. And been plotting that move since I was 12. When you’re 12, people just look at you like, yeah, okay, right. You don’t have the knowledge about the country, you don’t have much money, how are you gonna make it happen? And I began working in high school, the last few years of high school, and then I actually started at a telemarketing role. In its unmarketing role. At a company that was founded by a Dutch businessman and they sold security systems for homes. Now in Kharkiv, which is the city I grew up in, a lot of people live in apartment buildings or condos, and there’s not much single family homes, so it’s a lot of apartments, right? And we had to set appointments for field reps to go out and sell them the systems in their home. The trick to that, or I guess the fun fact, was that back then, and it’s hard to imagine living in the States of course, Ukraine or in general was not, telemarketing in general was not popular in Ukraine just yet. I think in my city at least, and this is the second largest city in Ukraine, they, I think they might have been the first ones to do that. So imagine you’re trying to do your job and call these people, and they’re not familiar with the concept of telemarketing. So they answer their phone and there was a stranger on the phone, and you try to tell them about this security system, how great it is, and then you’re like, okay, so what is a good time for us to come out to your home and provide you with an estimate and hear about your needs to make sure that your apartment is covered? They’re like, wait, what? You’re not coming tomorrow. How do you know my address? Where’d you get my name? So even though in the States some people ask that, right? But people usually know, like there’s lists and all that stuff. But we were pretty much the first ones in the city to try to educate the public on this is the thing. We get your information from some sort of a list and we’re not the bad guys, we just wanna actually help you out. It was a legitimate company for sure. And as we try to sell that, I would get a paper list. Go down the list, name, phone number, all that, and set appointments. So that was pretty much my first, very first introduction into sales. And I never thought I was gonna end up in sales after that. It was a difficult, very difficult job. Lots of rejection, lots of screaming on the phone at me. But yeah, then I moved to the US and started going to community college at night.

Manuel Martinez: So I did...

Show Notes

Jazmin Diaz’s career story dismantles the myth that you need perfect credentials to succeed in technology. Her path from middle school administrative assistant to Chief of Staff at a cybersecurity company demonstrates how curiosity, authenticity, and strategic relationship-building can accelerate professional growth.

Episode Highlights:

Jazmin shares her unique background growing up between two cultures – born in California, raised in Mexico until age nine, then returning to relearn English and navigate American educational systems. This experience shaped her ability to connect with others facing similar challenges, particularly at-risk students during her time working in education.

The conversation reveals practical strategies for career transitions, including how she researched transferable skills, leveraged informational interviews, and ultimately secured her first tech role through networking rather than traditional applications. Her willingness to start as a receptionist – despite years of experience – proved essential for getting her foot in the door.

Key Takeaways:

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Our Guest: Jazmin Diaz is available for speaking engagements, workshops, and coaching through Flourish Learning and Development. Her book is available in both English and Spanish editions.

About Career Downloads: Each episode features professionals sharing real experiences, setbacks, and breakthroughs to help you manage your own career with greater success. Host Manuel Martinez brings conversations that go beyond surface-level advice to uncover actionable insights you can apply immediately.

TranscriptionManuel Martinez: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about their background and their experiences, to really uncover how they’ve managed their career over time with the ultimate goal to help you uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So I’m really excited for today’s episode. This has really been eight, almost nine months in the making. So for those of you who are aware, back in December, I had Cynthia Hara on and a mutual contact of my current guest and Cynthia’s kind of got in contact with me, put me in contact with Jazmin Diaz is who I have on. We’ve had a number of conversations since that time trying to work out, so she’s not local to Las Vegas, just trying to find out logistically how this would work out. And I’m really excited because apart from the alignment of what she’s currently doing, what she’s done, kind of what the podcast is, in between that time, she has also become an author and she’s written a book, both in English and in Spanish, again, around career and professional development and personal development. So I’m really excited and this is gonna be a great one. So with that, I will go ahead and introduce Jazmin Diaz.

Jazmin Diaz: Thank you so much for having me, Manny. Really glad to be here with you finally.

Manuel Martinez: Finally, right. I mean, it’s interesting that when Sal kind of put us in contact, it took us a little while. We’d look back and it’s almost nine months that this has gone on and I think it happened at this moment for a reason, right? Because it gave you the chance, we didn’t know at a time when we first met, but that you were gonna be writing a book.

Jazmin Diaz: Right, right. Yeah, no, I think things happen when they’re supposed to and I very much agree for this instance specifically. So since you and I spoke, yeah, was able to get the English version out of my book, “Ignite Your Growth”, in March of 2025 and the Spanish version “Enciende Tu Crecimento” literally just launched earlier this week on August 20th.

Manuel Martinez: Right. So for those that may not be aware of who you are, if you don’t mind just telling us kind of what your current role is and some of the responsibilities associated with that.

Jazmin Diaz: Sure, sure. So I’m currently working in the tech space in a cybersecurity company in the capacity of a chief of staff role for the global customer services team. Our headquarters are located in San Francisco. And in addition to that, I run my own company. So I am CEO and founder of Flourish Learning and Development. And it’s really a company that’s dedicated towards helping individuals unlock their potential, whether it’s through coaching, through speaking engagements or workshops, and now leveraging the book as well as a tool. So I do that as well on the side. And a mother of four children and never a dull moment in my life. So grateful and blessed and a lot to juggle all the time.

Manuel Martinez: Oh, I bet. I know that we’ve had similar conversations, having family and career as much as we say at times, like, oh, we’re able to separate them. I mean, they intertwine.

Jazmin Diaz: They do, absolutely.

Manuel Martinez: So now if you don’t mind kind of going back a little bit and telling me about where you grew up and then eventually kind of– we’ll get into it because you didn’t get into technology right away into the tech industry, but just kind of what kind of started your career. We’ll go that route.

Jazmin Diaz: Yeah, so I’ll take it back to somewhat the beginning. So I was born in California, a city called Mountain View. And I was a product of a teenage mom, a teenage mother. And so I was raised by her and my grandparents. So early on in my life, we moved to Mexico, to a town called Degollado, Jalisco. And I grew up there for the first nine years of my life. So I was attending school regularly, living, breathing the culture every day, which I love, and just traditions and family values, community, learn how to read, write, speak, fluent Spanish during those years. And then my grandparents made the decision to come back to California. So moved back to California around the age of nine, got into the school system here, which was really challenging for me, because I had pretty much lost my English. I remember while I was being raised in Mexico, one of my aunts would send me videos of Care Bears, Rainbow Bright, Brady Bunch, different shows to try to kind of keep that English in my speaking abilities. And while it helped, it wasn’t enough. When we came back, I was in ESL classes. So English as a second language, how to relearn everything, the systems, the norms, cultural nuances that were different. And for a nine-year-old, I remember struggling to navigate a lot of that stuff. And so thankfully, it turned out pretty well. I was able to manage and finish high school. And then my husband and I, we were 18 when we got married. And by no means was there any roadmap or plan of, these are our goals. This is what we’re going to do by this date or anything like that. We just knew we wanted to be together and raise a family. And so, yeah, fast forward. We got married. We had children. And I was working at a local middle school in our neighborhood. And it was really a wonderful job for a lot of reasons. So I worked in the office as a admin assistant, school operations. And it was quite fulfilling because I didn’t just order supplies or help with attendance and budget management and all those things. I was able to intentionally create space to have conversations with the students. These were middle school kids. And they were kids who were labeled at risk. And what I mean by that is kids that are typically growing up in neighborhoods where it’s rough. It’s the hood or gang activity, single moms, parents working multiple jobs, perhaps not attended to as much as other children. So for me, these were really opportunities in my day to day to have conversations with these kids to try to change their stories, outlooks, perspectives, based on what I had experienced as also being labeled at risk at one point in my life. So that job, in addition to allowing me to connect with these young people and make a positive impact, it also gave me the flexibility that I needed as a mom to spend time with the kids. And what I mean by that is that the schedule was summers off, holiday, recess, winter break, spring break. As much as I would have loved to be a stay-at-home mom to be with my kids full time, this was the next best thing. It allowed us to be financially stable, to give them all the things that we wish we would have experienced or had– after school activities, sports, travel, whatever that was. That was definitely something that was top of mind and a priority for my husband and I both. So that job was amazing. It was great. It was fulfilling, impact, purpose, all the things when you think about the ideal job. However, me being me, there was a point where I knew I wanted more and I knew that I was capable of more. And I referenced not having a roadmap or a five-year plan. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do. It was just finish high school and we’ll go from there. So when our kids were older–

Manuel Martinez: A...

Show Notes

Episode Highlights:

Rishma’s career trajectory breaks conventional wisdom about climbing corporate ladders. Starting as a junior programmer debugging code for IBM, she discovered her true calling lay in making technology invisible to end users. Her public sector experience spans water utilities, police departments, and now aviation – each role teaching her how technology should serve humanity, not the other way around.

Key Takeaways:

Resources Mentioned:

About Rishma Khimji:

Connect with Our Guest:

Next Steps: Ready to accelerate your tech career? Subscribe to Career Downloads for weekly episodes featuring leaders who’ve navigated unconventional paths to success. Each conversation delivers actionable insights you can implement immediately.

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about their experiences and their background, to really help uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So I’m excited for today’s guest. I have with me Rishma Khimji and I have crossed paths with her close up, I’ve come close to crossing paths with her a few times. She’s worked on the public sector and when I used to work at VMware, covering public sector. So that’s kind of when I first became aware of her. I’ve seen a lot of what she’s done since that time. So I’m really excited to kind of get to know more about her and how she’s kind of continued to navigate her career. So with that, I’ll introduce Rishma.

Rishma: Hi.

Manuel: Hi, I appreciate you coming on and again, being willing to share your experiences.

Rishma: No, absolutely, happy to be here. So, I know we haven’t always crossed paths face to face but there’s always been an intersection of acquaintances for us. And so I’m very excited to be here because those friends that have already been on this podcast have spoken very highly of you and so I feel very honored to be here. So thank you.

Manuel: Thank you, I appreciate that. So if you don’t mind kind of telling people a little bit more about what your current role is and kind of some of the responsibilities that you have to manage.

Rishma: Sure, so I’m the first chief information technology officer for the Harry Reid International Airport, more so the Clark County Department of Aviation. We are a system of five airports. So we have the major airport, which is the Harry Reid Airport. And then we have four general aviation airports. Those are our non-commercial airports. So like the Henderson Executive Airport, the North Las Vegas Airport, Overton and Jean. And so we have these great airport systems that allow all of our guests and visitors come into Vegas. And the fun thing about it is I manage all of the technology that surrounds the passenger experience and the airline airport relationship. So I make sure that the planes are able to come in and the planes are able to go out, that our guests have a easy and seamless experience while they’re at the airport. But my team, which is a fabulous team, I couldn’t do, in fact, I don’t do much. They do all the hard work. And I appreciate them so much for that because I have such a smart and dedicated team. But we manage over 60 systems that pull the guests from the curb to the gate and the gate to the curb. So everything, once you walk into the airport, actually, even on the roadway into the airport, is somehow managed or has a technical component which we have to maintain, support, and do all the good things for. So it’s a really large job. My job is really starting to focus around the strategic implementation of technology because you might have heard we’re gonna actually open a second commercial airport, the Southern Nevada Supplemental Airport. It’s gonna be 20 miles south of us. But it’s actually gonna be an extension of the Harry Reid International Airport. So right now we have Terminal 1, D-Gates, and Terminal 3. We’re going to rename Terminal 3 into Terminal 2, and then down south of us will be Terminal 3. So just by that naming convention, we can see that we’re gonna have one very large airport system just in two very distinct locations, making it a very unique makeup of an airport. And so in order for us to get there, we are going to start using our commercial airport, the Harry Reid International Airport, as an innovative test bed for a lot of the solution building we wanna do once we come across that very unique setup that we’re gonna have in about 10 to 12-ish years. And so that’s very exciting.

Manuel: That is, and again, I think that’s one of the great things that I enjoy about this is, even though I think I have an idea of kind of what your role is, and each guest will kind of give us additional information. Like me being a local to Las Vegas was not aware that you are in charge of, or that they oversee and they’re all connected all these different airports.

Rishma: Right

Manuel: And then this one, it’s not gonna be a different airport, it’s gonna be an extension. So I’m sure there’s, it’s gonna be easy, right? There’s no challenges with something 20 miles away. (both laughing) Fantastic. So now, if you wouldn’t mind, what I’d like to do is kind of get to know a little bit more about you and just what, kind of where you grew up, and then eventually what got you interested in technology and eventually got you started in your career.

Manuel: Sure, so it’s kind of a long story. This is my ninth city. I come from a family of migrants. And so I think just travel and finding home is in our blood, and finding home is really where the love is, not necessarily where the house is, right? So my parents are from East Africa. They traversed over the ocean, landed in Canada, and actually met in Canada, got married there. And then, coming from East Africa, my mom being from Uganda, my dad being from Tanzania, the landscape is very different than it is in Canada, right? So they go through their first winter and they’re like, “Where in the hell am I?” Right? After a few years, my dad had an opportunity to kind of engage in some business ventures with his brothers, and they traveled south from Calgary, came into the States, reached Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was like, “Okay, this is somewhat reminiscent of home.” And that’s where we all moved. So I grew up in a community of about 150 to 200 people that are either centered around us through familiar relationships or through generational relationships, right? So these are people that my dad or my mom or my uncles have known, previous generation, like their parents knew each other, their grandparents, right? It’s like this whole thing. So I come from a very networked community. But with that also came opportunities for my dad and my mom to kind of venture out and see what else was available. And so in this cooperation with his brothers, right, we moved to different cities, looking for the right mix of work and family life. My parents, workaholics, but I mean, if you think about it, those immigrants that come in are always looking for the better opportunities for their children, not necessarily themselves, right? So they center themselves around being very, very strong workhorses, if I can use that term, but my parents worked their butts off. And so we moved a lot. And then once I graduated from college, I had already been to four or five cities by then, but then I moved to New York City all on my own, got a job at IBM, 9-11 happened, moved back to Albuquerque. And then from there, just started building my career a little bit more and more and more, got a job in Reno, so moved to Reno, then to San Francisco and out here. So nine cities later, I’ve figured out some of what I want to do with my life. I don’t think I’ll ever figure out where that pinnacle will be, but it’s been an adventure nonetheless. I don’t see challenges as negatives. They’re opportunities where you can either figure out which direction you wanna go in, a big propo...

Show Notes

Episode Overview

Angie Cosca’s career journey challenges every assumption about traditional tech career paths. Starting with no formal computer science education, she taught herself HTML using Notepad, worked her way up through help desk support, and eventually became CIO of a major healthcare organization – all while staying with the same company for 23 years.

Her story demonstrates the power of curiosity, relationship-building, and continuous learning in creating a successful technology career.

Key Takeaways

On Career Development:

On Leadership:

On Healthcare IT:

Guest Background

Angie Cosca serves as Chief Information Officer at Steinberg Diagnostic Medical Imaging (SDMI), where she oversees IT infrastructure, compliance, and security for 12 locations serving 550+ employees. The organization processes approximately 500,000 diagnostic studies annually, including MRIs, CTs, X-rays, and ultrasounds.

Beyond her corporate role, Angie is President of ISSA Las Vegas and dedicates extensive time to mentoring through IT Works, a 16-week intensive program helping disadvantaged students transition into technology careers.

Resources Mentioned

Episode Highlights

Connect with Angie

TranscriptionManuel Martinez: Welcome everyone. My name is Manuel Martinez, and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode, I basically hit the refresh button and bring on a different guest to learn more about their background and their experiences, to really help uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. I’m excited for today’s episode because I have with me Angie Cosca, and she is a CIO here in, for the medical industry within Las Vegas. So again, I’m very excited to kind of understand her journey, where she kind of started and eventually how she ended up in her role. So with that, I’ll introduce Angie. Hi Angie.

Angie Cosca: Hi, thank you for having me, Manuel.

Manuel Martinez: I appreciate you coming on and being open to kind of sharing your experiences.

Angie Cosca: I’m excited.

Manuel Martinez: So if you don’t mind, can you just kind of tell us what your current role is and just some of the roles and responsibilities that you fulfill on a daily basis for the most part?

Angie Cosca: Sure. So I am currently the Chief Information Officer for Steinberg Diagnostic Medical Imaging. For some of the audiences that know what this is, it’s a radiology center. We have 12 locations here, and we handle about half a million studies a year. And the studies are your MRIs, your CTs, your X-rays, ultrasounds, a whole gamut of diagnostic images itself. So, and we also have over 550 employees as well. We have here with 12 locations. My main responsibilities really is the IT infrastructure, compliance and security. So as you can tell, I fight every day because you have operations and security, but I do manage the servers, the networks, computers, even the applications, we support all of that. At the same time, we also make sure that we are complying with PCI, HIPAA, and then security as well. I am also in charge of the physical security of the organization as well. Yeah, so a lot.

Manuel Martinez: Yes, it sounds like it keeps you busy.

Angie Cosca: It does, it does, yeah.

Manuel Martinez: So if you don’t mind now, kind of tell me a little bit about kind of where you grew up and then eventually what got you kind of interested or involved in technology.

Angie Cosca: Yeah, so I was born in the Philippines, but I grew up in Guam. So I’m not sure if you know where Guam is. It’s a little island of nowhere, pretty much, yeah. But for the most part, that’s where I grew up, all the way up through my early adulthood there. But I didn’t get into computers until college, which is the early 90s. I am completely aging myself now.

Manuel Martinez: We’re around the same age, so don’t worry about it.

Angie Cosca: Okay, so in the early 90s, I went into college during the freshman year. I wasn’t really touching computers until I was required to do it for word processing and stuff like that. But I wasn’t really interested in computers until the internet boomed at that time in Guam. The fact that you can go to the library and search the national libraries in the United States instead of just what’s in Guam, that was amazing because there’s so much information now that you can get. And then I think the IRC also boomed at that time. So just being in the middle of nowhere and being able to talk to people in the US or internationally, I was talking to people from the Netherlands and Spain. That was just very intriguing to me at that time. And I knew at that time when the internet boomed, it was like computers, the way to go. So I learned everything about computers then. I started building my own BBBs, playing Doom. Those are like my favorite past times is playing Doom with my friends. And instead of being on the phone for hours, I’m on the computer for hours, either it’s IRC or playing Doom and stuff like that. So that’s how my career started or at least how it piqued my interest in IT. I don’t remember how I met my previous boss then, but I was offered a job to do a website for Guam. It was a really huge website. We’ve never really had websites and because the internet just started. So it was a website for a huge telecommunications company. It’s similar to what AT&T is here to Guam. So it’s what everybody uses them for cell phones, telephones and all those services and stuff like that. So I was part of that team that actually built this website. So I learned how to code. I had to look at HTML coding, just looking at all the websites. Then they’re all basic websites that I’m researching, but I learned how to do everything through Notepad. Not fun.

Manuel Martinez: No.

Angie Cosca: But I knew I wanted to do some kind of web design work. So I went ahead and accepted the job. So I did my research, looked at every websites and just figured it out myself. Okay, how do you do websites? Okay, you need to do the heading here, blah, blah, blah. You need to have to do images here. And then I also decided, okay, I need to do graphic design too. If we’re gonna do a website, we’re gonna have to have good graphics. So I learned graphics myself too. All of these are self-taught. They didn’t really have really good books or online books at that time. So I taught myself that. I started sitting down with graphic students at the college at that time, the university in Guam. I sat down with them and I said, show me how to do some things. How do you blur this? How do you make this better, bigger? So I did all that and learned it all myself with Photoshop. Photoshop was easier then.

Manuel Martinez: Right.

Angie Cosca: Yeah.

Manuel Martinez: It wasn’t so complicated back then.

Angie Cosca: No, not like now. Yeah, but so yeah, it’s really self-taught because there’s not much resources then. But I loved it and I knew it was for me after I realized that I spent three days, no sleep, and I just wanted to get things done. And I was so happy to see the fruits of my labor after that. So that’s what got me into computers for sure, yeah.

Manuel Martinez: And when you were in college, what did you think you were gonna study at the time?

Angie Cosca: Oh, I was one of the students that had no idea what we were gonna do.

Manuel Martinez: Okay.

Angie Cosca: Yeah, as a Filipina, my mom always thinks I’m gonna be a doctor or a nurse.

Manuel Martinez: Right.

Angie Cosca: I hated biology.

Manuel Martinez: You’re like this is not for me.

Angie Cosca: It wasn’t for me, but that was like the standard for Filipinos there. You have to be either, but I knew it wasn’t what my future would be. So I just like, okay, I’m...

Show Notes

In this episode, Manuel Martinez interviews Dr. Doreen Galli, Chief of Research at TBW Advisors, about her remarkable career journey through the technology industry. Dr. Galli shares candid insights about her path from academic overachiever to holding senior executive roles at companies like IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, and DHL.

Guest Background: Dr. Doreen Galli is currently Chief of Research at TBW Advisors, a media company and industry analyst firm. She has held CIO and CTO positions at Fortune 10 companies and was a platform architect for Microsoft Azure. Her career spans operations, consulting, and advisory roles across multiple industries including telecommunications, logistics, and cloud computing.

Episode Highlights:

Dr. Galli opens up about completing a triple major in college while being an All-American athlete and working multiple tutoring jobs. She explains how she convinced her registrar to allow course overloads by presenting a detailed plan and backup strategies.

The conversation covers her time as the first postdoc at IBM’s Center for Advanced Studies, where she worked alongside technology legends like Paul Larson (father of SQL) and learned to navigate complex technical integrations under extreme pressure.

She shares practical strategies for time management, including Benjamin Franklin’s time blocking method that she still uses today. Dr. Galli explains how scheduling everything – including relaxation time – creates more flexibility rather than rigidity.

The discussion reveals the realities of working in technology, including how to handle the inevitable layoffs and reorganizations that come with change management roles. Dr. Galli emphasizes that business decisions aren’t personal and shares strategies for protecting your professional brand.

Key Takeaways:

Resources Mentioned:

This episode offers valuable insights for anyone looking to advance their technology career, handle workplace challenges professionally, or develop stronger leadership and communication skills.

TranscriptionManuel Martinez: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their career and the way that they’ve been able to manage it over time, to really uncover any lessons or ideas that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I’m pretty excited. I have with me Dr. Doreen Galli. We met at Toastmasters and the conversation has gone well. She had talked a little bit about some of the work that she has done, looked at her profile on LinkedIn. It’s very extensive. We’ve had some conversations since then. There’s no way we’re gonna be able to cover everything she’s done, but there are gonna be a lot of key lessons just in the short time that we’ve talked that I think are gonna be really insightful and important to cover. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Dr. Doreen.

Doreen Galli: Hi, nice to see you. How are you doing?

Manuel Martinez: I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for asking. How about yourself?

Doreen Galli: Good, thanks for having me. Looking forward, hope it’ll help some people.

Manuel Martinez: And that’s ultimately the goal. So if you don’t mind, just as we get started, if you can just tell us what your current role is and just a summary of the roles and responsibilities and then we’ll kind of get in more depth later on.

Doreen Galli: Okay, sure. I’m the chief of research at TBW Advisors. It’s a media company, member of the press and industry analyst. We publish conference whispers and whisper reports along with some other document types as well, but those are the heavy ones we drive out of conferences here in Vegas. The exciting part is there’s many aspects to it. So one is, yes, I’m at the conferences and acting as a member of the press as well as a photojournalist. So I have my camera. I take full video of anything and everything I can and I see and I analyze that and that’s a whole video as well as a document and ask people questions based upon things that people wanna know from the experts at the conference. The other side of it is being an actual expert in technology is when I get to advise people. So it’s different than consulting. It’s more like, you know how you went to college and when you were writing your English paper and you’re like, okay, I gotta keep this GPA up. So I’m gonna stop by the English lab. They’re very good at this stuff. Let me just bounce it off of them, get their sanity check on it. They almost always gave you one or two points that just made it that much better, right? But then what happens when you get to the professional world, right? You’re head of data engineering at your company who around is more knowledgeable about data that you can say, can you give me a sanity check on this? I can’t know everything. I’m busy with my head down in all of this. I have no time to pick up my head to go to talk to all these people and go to all these events and find out about the newest, flashiest things that are going on. The difference is a lot of the big firms and one of which I was trained at, when they are helping people that do the same type of thing when they give advice is they’ve never been there. So like Stephen A. Smith at NAB on stage talked about how he’s the highest paid sports analyst, right? So instead of analyzing tech, he analyzes sports who was never a pro athlete. And that’s like a big thing because if you haven’t been there, done that. But what about technology? Isn’t it the same? Why are all these English majors helping these engineers? Their advice is very similar to chat GPT. It’s never had a team of a few thousand engineers. It’s never designed software. It’s never used an architecture, realized it, lived with it. It’s never done any of those things. And all of that context comes through in their advice. And that’s actually why I left one of the big firms is they were giving advice that was absolutely terrible. I would give them recordings of when people listened to the advice from someone who’s not been there because a vendor suggested it. And then I would tell them what happened and give them the recordings. It’s very common analysts record all of our insights because we’ll listen to it to pick up more nuances, how we can help the person next time. And they didn’t change their advice. This looked like giving the poor advice to people. So from my personal brain’s perspective, yeah, that’s something you always got to protect. No matter what it is, you got to protect your brand. Even in tough environments, you have to find a way to execute and deliver, have something when someone says, “What did you do when you were there?” Then you can say, “I did this.” Ideally, something they can figure out from the outside. So you would say, “This was before and this was after. Remember when this company made this change? Like at Microsoft, remember they had pair of regions. Now they have a data boundary. How did that happen? I designed it.”

Manuel Martinez: And that’s good to know that a lot of kind of what you’re doing, which is, I mean, I’m excited to get to that point. I know you and I have talked a little bit offline about it. So that’s going to be a fantastic conversation I have around that. So now I’m going to ask you if you don’t mind, kind of tell me a little bit more about where you grew up and then eventually kind of what led you down the path towards technology.

Doreen Galli: Yeah, absolutely. So I was a kid in the Chicago Verbs. Youngest of five grew up predominantly most to my childhood. We lived in a three bedroom apartment with seven people. All five of us had one bathroom. I had a lot of influence from my siblings in many ways in terms of I could read and write before I started kindergarten. And I became an All American Runner because I ran with my brother who was in high school when I was in second grade. So that had a lot of effect on me, but fundamentally, and my entry school was pretty much a waste of time. I was at an eighth grade level in second grade, but it was a private school. So they wanted to get all that tuition from my family all those years. And they wouldn’t double promote me. So I did a lot of sports.

Manuel Martinez: Interesting. Yeah. To kind of keep you busy and entertained.

Doreen Galli: So I had something in life that was interesting. Yeah, I read every book in the library more than two times in my elementary school. So there was like, I was trying to gobble up information like I do now with the conferences, but there was just only so much information to gobble. So, but there are sports at least.

Manuel Martinez: So, and that kind of leads into the question of, all right, so obviously it came easy for you at least elementary school. You know, you’re doing sports to kind of keep yourself entertained when eventually you did move on into assuming higher level courses or classes even. Is that something that, was it welcome because of the fact that, oh, now th...

Show Notes

Clinton Lee’s career journey reads like a masterclass in adaptability. What started as dreams of becoming a teacher transformed into a successful path through IT infrastructure, customer-side technical roles, and ultimately sales engineering leadership.

Currently serving as a Director of Sales Engineering, Clinton shares the pivotal moments that shaped his career, from his first encounter with VMware technology to learning how to overcome introversion in customer-facing roles.

Episode Highlights:

Early Career Foundation Clinton’s path began at a technical certification school where he learned Windows, Cisco networking, and foundational IT skills. His willingness to take on any challenge—from teaching classes to running cable—set the stage for future growth.

The VMware Turning Point Working at Toyota, Clinton witnessed his first vMotion demonstration while servers were being pinged. That “magical” moment sparked a passion for virtualization technology that would define his career trajectory.

Transitioning to Sales Engineering Despite initial reservations about sales roles, Clinton made the leap to VMware as a vSAN specialist. He candidly discusses the challenges of being an introvert in a customer-facing position and how he developed the energy and presence needed for success.

Leadership Lessons From individual contributor to team manager, Clinton shares insights about developing people, the importance of genuine relationships, and why helping others succeed became his driving motivation.

Key Takeaways for Listeners:

Guest Bio: Clinton Lee is a Director of Sales Engineering with extensive experience in virtualization technologies and team leadership. His career spans customer-side IT infrastructure, technical consulting, and vendor-side sales engineering across multiple industries.

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode, I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about their career and their experiences, to really understand what they’ve done to be able to kind of manage that career over time. So I’m pretty excited about my guest today. I have Clinton Lee. So he, I know I’ve talked about this in the past, about me working at VMware. He is a big part of kind of how that happened. So, you know, we’ll touch on that, ask him a couple of questions and, you know, get to learn more about his specific career path. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Clinton.

Clinton: Hey

Manuel: How’s it going?

Clinton: It’s awesome, it’s awesome to finally be on here, Manny.

Manuel: It’s been a while, so I know we kind of touched base a few times, you know, outside of the podcast. So I was pretty excited to, you know, have you on, talk about your journey and then just kind of that intersection of how we, you know, came across each other.

Clinton: Yeah, I’m super excited to do it for sure.

Manuel: So if you don’t mind, kind of tell us what your current role is and just a brief summary of some of your roles and responsibilities. And then eventually we’ll kind of work our way towards that.

Clinton: Yeah, so I mean, you’re, I mean, this is probably not going to be anything new for you or maybe some of your listeners, but I’m a director of sales engineering. So I manage SEs, you know, they’re called solution engineers, systems engineer, sales engineers, like all kinds of names for what’s basically the same function, which is the technical, you know, in the weeds counterpart to your salesperson at a tech company.

Manuel: And now if you can kind of tell us, you know, where you grew up and then kind of what was your first introduction into technology and then, you know, kind of work us towards your, you know, eventually career path.

Clinton: Yeah, so I’m born and raised in Southern California, like all around Southern California. Some people identify as like, I’m from this area. I’m from that area. I’m from all the areas. (laughing) My parents moved a lot, fortunately and unfortunately, from a very young age, I moved around a lot. And then, you know, it’s funny, I’ve seen people answer this question about technology, how they got into it, and they have these like really cool stories about like all this stuff that, where they, you know, they did this or they did that. I don’t have any of that, but I was a latchkey kid growing up, so I watched a lot of TV, I played a lot of video games, and those are the things I cared about. I watched a lot of movies and cartoons and whatever. Those are the things I cared about. And, you know, as I got older, and, you know, the internet started becoming more of a thing, and I just was like getting access to those things that were interesting to me, but doing them like online was what I wanted to do, right? So, you know, like I said, I played a bunch of video games. I grew up in the 80s, like Nintendo kid, and just like, I remember the first time I played like a game online, I was like, wow, this is like the future of gaming. And so I got to college, and I mean, I grew up, we had dial-up, right? I mean, we had like put the phone on the modem dial-up, you know what I mean? I don’t know if you remember that, that makes me feel old. And I got to college, and it was the first time I saw broadband, right? It was the first time I saw high-speed internet. Like I plugged my computer into the dorm. I didn’t even have an ethernet card yet. Like I still had the, I feel, there’s gonna be young people who listen to this, and they’re gonna be like, what is this guy even talking about, right? But like, I had to go to like Fry’s and buy the ethernet card, because my computer didn’t have one, because we didn’t have high-speed. So I had to buy one just so I can get onto the LAN at my dorm, and it like changed everything, right? Like ESPN, I don’t know, actually ESPN didn’t exist then, ESPN.com didn’t exist then, but like different message boards or whatever that at home would like load like super slow. Yeah. Like, you know, I got to college and it was like, boom, like those things would load like so fast. And I’m like, that’s what I wanna do. So yeah, I went and I started trying to figure out like, how do I do this? Like, what is this, number one? And you find out, oh, like that’s networking, like cool, I wanna do networking. How do I do it? And then I immediately found out like, not at my college. In fact, I was encouraged to like drop out or go to a different school, right? They didn’t have M.I.S. majors, they didn’t have anything like that.

Manuel: And at that college, so what was your original intention to go to school for? If you remember.

Clinton: I mean, I went, I started as an engineering major.

Manuel: Okay.

Clinton: So I graduated with an electrical engineering degree, but I went to college because I had to go to college. So I didn’t have a choice. And when I got there, I was like, well, and people, like I was always good at math and science when I was a little younger, maybe like sophomore, junior in high school, I wanted to be a teacher. And my parents were like, no. (laughing) My parents immigrated to this country a year before I was born and they just worked. Like I mentioned, I was a Latchkey kid, they were working all the time. And so when it came to like sending their kid, they didn’t have college degrees or anything like that, sending their kid to college, it was like a big thing. And so, very kind of stereotypical Asian parents, they were just like, no, like you’re not gonna be a teacher. We’re not spending all this money to send you to college to be a teacher or like, you gotta go do something that makes a lot of money. And so I was good at math, I was good at science. So I was like, I’ll do engineering.

Manuel: And you said that you eventually ended up completing that degree. And as part of that process, did you kind of start to do internships? Some people did internships, some people like me waited until they graduated and then decided, okay, I’m gonna start looking for jobs.

Clinton: Yeah, so once I found out that they really didn’t have any kind of major at my college, right? So there was no MIS at my school. And so I kind of resigned myself to be like, okay, I guess I’m just gonna be an engineer. What’s the closest thing to networking that we have at this school at UCLA? And they’re like, well, you know, you can do computer science. And I was like, I’m not doing computer science. It’s not who I am. And they were like, well, like in electrical engineering, they talk about like signals and signal processing and stuff like that. And so I was like, okay, I’ll go look into that. That’s how I switched from originally I was an aerospace engineer. And I was thinking about going to civil engineering, ended up in electrical because I thought that’s the closest, that’s gonna be my path to getting into networking. And so my internships were all electrical engineering internships, right? And I did manage to get one with, at the time it was McDonald Douglas, but it became Boeing, where like part of the internship was around like an internet working lab. Like that was really exciting to me. And like literally it was like two days of my summer internship. And so that didn’t work out. But it did make me realize like, I can’t do this for my career. Like I can’t do it, right? It just not what didn’t fit what I wanted to do. And so the i...

Show Notes

Jeramie Brown’s career journey proves there’s no single path to technology leadership success. Starting as a radio and television broadcaster in the Air Force, Jeramie spent 24 years learning storytelling, communication, and adaptability while gradually building technical expertise. Today, he serves as Chief Information Officer for a Nevada public agency and President of the Las Vegas AITP chapter.

This conversation explores how diverse backgrounds create stronger tech leaders. Jeramie shares his transition from analog broadcasting to digital technology, the leadership lessons learned through military service, and practical strategies for embracing change in fast-moving tech environments.

“Artificial intelligence is not a replacement for you or for anybody, it is an augmentation tool. It will help you do your job or do that task better, faster, more reliable.”

“I wanted to be the guy that they could go to and ask questions and I can help guide them to the right answers.”

“You have to find a way to convey the information in a story, right? Because that’s what people are gonna connect to.”

Career Downloads explores diverse paths to technology success. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and visit our website for full episode transcripts and resources.

#CareerDownloads #TechnologyCareers #ITLeadership #CareerAdvice

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode, I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest, to learn more about their background, their experiences, to really uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Jeramie Brown and I’m very excited, we met in a professional setting. He is in senior leadership, so I’m very excited to kind of uncover his path to that type of role and kind of what he’s learned along the way. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Jeramie. Hi Jeramie.

Jeramie: Hi Manuel.

Manuel: I appreciate you taking the time to come on and share your experiences.

Jeramie: Oh, I’m super excited to be here. I love things like this, like getting the opportunity to help people grow in their career and kind of figure out where they wanna go and like where they are now, where they wanna be and how to get there.

Manuel: Fantastic. This is the perfect place to do that. (both laughing) So if you don’t mind kind of telling us what your current role and responsibilities are, just a summary and we’ll eventually work that way as part of the conversation.

Jeramie: Sure. So I’m the chief of information technology in a public sector agency. And so what that really means is I drive the strategic direction for technology within my organization. I help different business units or divisions determine what their technology needs are gonna be. Like where are they right now? What are they looking at in the future? Help guide them along that path to develop a five year plan. Like where do they wanna be five years from now? What does that look like in their space? And every division is different, right? HR is gonna be different than financial management, which is gonna be different from a construction division or a design division. Like people that are designing buildings or highways or whatever, like their needs are gonna be different than the rest of the organization. So helping them to identify those needs and develop a plan to get from where they are now to where they wanna be, especially with the sheer speed at which technology is changing now, right? Trying to predict where they’re gonna be five years from now really takes some thought and some, no kidding, planning on how do we get to, how are we gonna incorporate these new tools into our existing processes? Because we have to. The companies that are producing software packages and anything really, they’re looking at how are we gonna embed AI into this tool? What benefit is it gonna provide to the customer? And so we need to start looking at those things now. And so that’s my goal is to, like that’s kind of my responsibilities. Of course we keep the lights on, we provide support for end user devices, phones, computers, laptops, all of that. And we have those plans, we still maintain servers and we do all of the IT stuff, right? But we do more than that, right? IT now is very much not only keeping the lights on but helping the organization plan for where their technology is gonna be in the future. So that’s kind of my responsibilities.

Manuel: Sounds like you don’t do too much, right? (both laughing) So now if you kind of take us a little bit farther back and kind of tell me where you grew up and eventually what was your first introduction to technology and kind of your career progression as that progressed.

Jeramie: So I grew up in a very small town in central Illinois. It’s called Williamsville. It’s about 10 miles north of Springfield, about four hours south of Chicago. Very small farming community, a thousand people, right? Growing up, Williamsville and a town next to us called Sherman combined in junior high and high school. My graduating class in high school was 76 people. So small. But my introduction to technology actually started in that small town. I was born in the 70s. Growing up in the 70s and early 80s, the first VCRs came out, right? And so learning to program that VCR, you have the joke about, my parents couldn’t program a VCR. My parents couldn’t program a VCR, right? That was brand new technology. And so learning how to do that really sparked that interest in technology. And then when I was in high school, we had a very small high school, right? But we had a computer class with Apple IIEs. And so I learned basic programming as a junior in high school on Apple IIEs. And it really excited me. Looking back, I always thought for years, I was a good student. And then when I started going to college, I had to pull my high school transcripts. And I was like, huh, maybe I wasn’t such a great student in high school. I should have focused more. But my computer classes, rock solid. Computers just make sense to me, right? Technology just makes sense to me. So it really got me excited. And unfortunately, I didn’t go into a technology career right away. I actually joined the Air Force when I was 18 or 17. I joined delayed enlistment. Went to basic training at 18. And I became a radio and television broadcaster. Like I was a broadcast journalist for 24 years. That’s what I did. But the interesting thing about that was, when I first started, everything was analog. So our audio was analog. It was reel to reel tapes. And I like, I had no kidding, would rock those reels back and forth to find a splice point, take a razor, cut the tape, find another splice point, take the razor, cut the tape, or cut the tape, and then tape it all together, right? And edit that way. That’s how we edited audio. And TV, it was all analog TV. We used Betamax. And like we had two machines, and you would set your in and out points, and it was all analog. And you’d record from one tape to another. And then those processes started changing. And we started introducing digital editing, right? The first digital editing I did was in audio. And we used a Mac computer. I don’t remember what the software was now. It was like, this was like in the early 90s. But we started editing on digital formats and learning how to do that. And all of the technology that’s associated with it, like it led to that. And then TV or video started adapting to that as well. And we moved from analog tapes to digital audio tapes or digital video tapes. But we’d still edit in an analog fashion. And then we started recording to computer, right? And you’d take your video and you’d dump it into the computer and then you’d edit that way. And then that moved into recording on the camera, onto a hard drive. And so you would just start editing directly on those. And so learning that technology along the way, and all of the backbone stuff for it, we had to, like nobody knew how to run those networks for audio and video editing. So we had to do it ourselves. We had some engineers that took care of that. And those of us that were broadcas...