On the lighter side of things , we ask the industry experts what makes them tick . . . .

The most memorable achievement in my career so far was when the original staff of 25 Mailgun employees got a check when we sold the majority of the stake of the company to Thoma Bravo . After years of hard work to get the company off the ground , it was nice to be able to reward the team responsible for our success so far .

What first made you think of a career in technology ?

I had always wanted to go to law school , but I worked at a small business intelligence company in college so tech was on my radar . Following college when I was looking for opportunities to stay in the San Antonio area , Rackspace kept popping up . At the time , Josh Odom , who would later become the CTO of Pathwire , was a good friend of mine and kept talking about the cloud and what he was doing there . Even once I entered tech , I always had the intention of going back to law school . After a while though , tech proved to be a lot more exciting and engaging than what a career in law would have provided me with .

What style of management philosophy do you employ with your current position ?

Hire great people , get out of their way . We need true specialists who can scale and people who are

at reinventing themselves . Josh and I used to be involved in everything , but as we grew , it became impossible . A few years ago , we realized we were only able to experience so much success because of the strong team we had .

One of our core values is ownership – team members must care too much to let things fail . This does not mean no one is allowed to make an error . In the event mistakes are made , we close the feedback loop and people become more autonomous over time .

How do you deal with stress and unwind outside the office ?

Anytime I am not spending time with my work family , I am spending time with my real family . Brazilian Jiu Jitzu also helps me forget about the stresses of work . After all , it ’ s hard to worry about your company when you are worrying about being choked and rolling around on the mat . I also try to read a lot whenever I can .

If you could go back and change one career decision what would it be ?

I do not have a lot of regrets when it comes to my career . The only one that I can identify is I might not have waited as long as I did to get into entrepreneurship .

A lot of my career was spent in sales , and I learned a lot in the process of building out significant sales teams . As a salesperson , you get used to putting it all

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