Imagine getting 45 minutes to describe and defend the quantifiable impact of your body of work as an individual contributor accumulated over multiple years. It’s your job to convince a panel that you have what it takes to help solve the company’s biggest problems. Could you do it?

Our guest Daniel Paluszek has done it successfully at 2 different technology companies to become a Global Field Principal. Much of his success in these roles is attributed to a “culmination of exposure” over the course of his career and the support of both family and managers. This week in episode 339, we begin with the story of Daniel’s move to a hypergrowth startup and learn what it was like to run his own business as the company grew and changed. When an unexpected opportunity to join VMware arose, Daniel transferred his learnings to focus on business growth for service provider partners.

We also talk about the reasons Daniel pursued the role of Global Field Principal, the responsibilities of that role, and why he continues to find it interesting. After listening to this episode, we might all think differently about the importance of building a body of work. Have you been building yours? It’s not too late to begin or keep going.

Original Recording Date: 06-11-2025

Daniel Paluszek is a Principal Partner Technology Strategist at ServiceNow. If you missed parts 1 or 2 of our discussion with Daniel, check out Episode 337 – Finding Drive: The Parallels of Mentoring and Technology Partnerships with Daniel Paluszek (1/3) and Episode 338 – Steady Build: Broadening Exposure and the Priceless Perspective of People Management with Daniel Paluszek (2/3)

Topics – Leaping into Hypergrowth, A Culmination of Exposure, Pursuit of Principal and the Responsibility of Execution

3:06 – Leaping into Hypergrowth

• What did the next job transition over to SimpliVity look like? It seemed like this was a conscious move toward an up-and-coming startup and a new technology wave at the same time.
  • Daniel says it was a conscious choice to move to Simplivity.
  • While Cisco was somewhere that felt like home, Daniel was given the opportunity to join Simplivity when it was a startup.
    • The industry was moving from 3-tier architectures with virtualization to hyperconvergence (a convergence of storage, compute, and networking in a single form factor that scaled out linearly). It was an exciting time for the industry as a whole, especially for virtualization.
  • Daniel knew some of the people who had joined Simplivity.
    • “I’ve never done a startup before, a hypergrowth company…. There were about 100-150 people when I joined. In that first year, I think we tripled the company in size…. It was something that was just an incredible experience.” – Daniel Paluszek
    • Daniel was a pre-sales Solution Architect at SimpliVity working with both customers and partners in the southeast United States (Floride and Alabama).
  • At Simplivity Daniel learned the skill of building your own business.
    • He and his sales rep (also a great mentor to him) worked as one logical unit partnered together to build business. They were aligned on the priorities and focus areas.
  • “Sometimes you have to take that leap of faith and try something that’s completely unknown. I was leaving a tried-and-true company…Cisco Systems is an incredible company…going to a startup that I had no idea where this was going to go…. Why wouldn’t I do this? There’s nothing but upside to try this and get the exp

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    Published on 1 month ago