Bridging Business & IT

Meet your hosts, Dave and Dan, a father and son team interviewing experts from around the IT ecosystem. Dave’s a serial entrepreneur, CIO, board member, author, speaker and advisor with a lifetime of frontline tech industry experience. He wants things to work—perfectly! His son and cohost Dan, is Head of Sales for PlanetScale (a Silicon Valley software company). He wants to get things done—now! While they certainly have their differences, they’re both driven to understand what business customers need so they can deliver the best possible solution. That’s why these two have joined forces (along with a lot of industry heavyweights) to help resolve the biggest challenge in business technology: How to successfully bridge the gap between what a business needs and how its IT department and vendors address that need. This podcast is for those in the trenches, for professionals with hands-on experience who are striving to overcome the multitude of challenges standing between them and the successful deployment of technology to advance business objectives. Each episode is filled not only with humor and sarcasm, but with tricks of the trade and lessons learned. Connect with their stories, experiences, shortcomings, failures, and successes. Let them be your guide on this unvarnished, irreverent and entertaining look at business and IT. Subscribe, listen, and laugh while getting a true appreciation for the fact that in your day to day tech challenges, you’re not alone and solutions are out there.

Contributors

Host

Dan Burrill

Dan's spent his entire career in technology and software sales. He's climbed the ranks from front line sales rep at Honeywell, to Director of Inbound at Box, to Regional VP of Enterprise and Strategic Account Sales at Twillio. He's now VP Head of Sales at PlanetScale, Inc.

One of the biggest things Dan's learned over his career is that no vendor can deliver what their customer needs if they don't fully understand what that need is. A good salesperson should be there to solve your problem, not to sell you something. When you solve one problem, you get invited back to solve the next. Customers tell their friends and you get asked to help them too. If you sell something that doesn't work, nobody talks to you again.

Understanding customer needs and bridging the gap between the business, internal IT and external tech vendors is why Dan joined Dave to launch this podcast. Dan has dual Bachelors degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dburrill/

Host

Dave Burrill

Dave is a senior technology executive (President, COO, CIO), entrepreneur, author, speaker, board director & advisor. He’s been a management team member of three successful tech companies taking each from co-founding or early stage, through multiple financing rounds, and rapid revenue growth to either IPO or acquisition. He’s a trusted advisor and C-Suite peer with the experience to bridge disciplines from finance and operations to IT. He has over 35 years of technology project management experience leading multi-discipline, multi-region teams that successfully completed projects for clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 50.

Dave is a former PWC Consultant and CPA, member of the PMI and Scrum Alliance, a PMP and CSM. He pursued his PhD in Organization & Systems Design at the University of Southern California where he also earned his MBA. He holds bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Psychology from the University of California, Irvine.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburrill/