We are thrilled to welcome our new Vice President of Revenue, Josh Epstein.
Josh brings more than 20 years of enterprise customer and sales experience, as well as success building and scaling sales teams and strategic partnerships across Global 2000 brands.
Josh is excited to lead the sales and customer success teams to enable customers to share their data with any partner they choose without the cost and lost time associated with building and maintaining legacy systems. For new services built on Vendia Share, this means they can get to market much faster and without worrying about data privacy or compliance from day one.
About Josh
In addition to two decades worth of sales and customer service experience, Josh has also dedicated time to building go-to-market teams from scratch. His success also includes leading teams to define new markets by disrupting legacy infrastructure, security, and operations vendors.
Most recently, Josh built and ran the global accounts team at HashiCorp to help the company’s largest, most complex customers move to a multi-cloud, multi-platform world using HashiCorp. While at HashiCorp, Josh helped scale the company’s growth during a critical time for the business by prioritizing the customers’ success and helping to mature HashiCorp’s customer-facing teams.
What drew you to Vendia?
It was a combination of things.
The first time I heard Shruthi and Tim’s origin story, I was compelled to learn more about the untapped opportunities that DLT provides. Add multi-cloud and Serverless, and the nerd in me was inspired.
I was talking to a few interesting companies, but I could not stop thinking about how big a change Vendia’s approach could make in the way we interact with our suppliers and partners — and the cost savings that could come from it. Once I dug deeper and realized Vendia could also help with data privacy and provide companies with GDPR compliance from day one, I was hooked. … And let’s be honest, getting to work with Shruthi and Tim and this team is really what did it for me.
Why are you passionate about enabling multi-party data sharing for large enterprise companies?
It’s more about helping companies solve hard problems.
Today, the world requires us to be more thoughtful about where and how we spend money — so these old-school, complex, expensive relationships are not viable anymore. There is a huge opportunity to help companies figure out how to securely automate their external relationships. The problem is bigger than one company can solve, and so it will be important for us to find partners that want to work with us. I am convinced that Vendia will be an important part of this sea change. But the clouds, service providers, and others will play a critical role, so we need to build with the ecosystem in mind.
What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I have a few things that I lean on when thinking about where to go and what to do next:
My dad introduced me to the Peter Principle, which basically says that people eventually get promoted to their level of incompetence. This reminds me to continue learning and not get complacent. It also reminds me not to be afraid of not having all the answers before I start something.
The other one that comes to mind is something I learned at HashiCorp, and that is that you need to surround yourself with people who are better than you, so you are always being challenged. My team at HashiCorp was world-class and challenged me every day. I see the talent at Vendia in the same way and look forward to being challenged to up my game every day.
Any book recommendations?
The books that I carry with me in my work bag and reference all the time are The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon, Angela Duckworth’s Grit, and Frank Slootman’s Amp It Up.
What do you like to do in your free time?
Honestly, my favorite thing to do these days is drive my kids to school in the morning; it’s the most time I get to spend with them during the week. When I was off these past few months, I did a lot of walking, hanging with my wife and my new(ish) dog, and trying to get back into shape. Other than that, it’s reading, puzzles, and watching sports. I am a huge Michigan fan (Go Blue!) and 49ers fan!
Want to join us, too?
We are thrilled to have Josh join Vendia’s leadership team. If you’re interested in working with a team of kind humans solving hard, interesting, and important problems, check out our current opportunities.