About — E5Bravo

I started as a Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense Specialist in a Marine Corps infantry battalion in 2003. In practice that job is teaching non-technical people a set of technical skills, so that if the worst imaginable thing happens, they can keep doing their jobs and finish the mission. That is still most of what I do.

I got out and joined Dimension Data just in time for the enterprise video revolution, back when Telepresence was going to change everything and, for a few years, sort of did. I ended up the global lead for the practice and deployed systems in fourteen countries. Later, at Orange, I was one of the authors of the first CCNA-Video exam, so I must have done something right.

Then a run of sales, consulting, and solution architect roles: Logicalis, Burwood, LogicMonitor, Rafay. I have sold collaboration, Kubernetes, observability, GPU-as-a-service, and a dozen things in between.

Here is what I actually learned in all of it.

I have sat in a lot of rooms where neither the people selling nor the people buying could name the real pain, or say what outcome we were supposed to be driving. Everyone was fluent. Nobody was clear. And the bill came due eighteen months later, when someone finally tried to use the thing.

Along the way I stopped imagining the software I always wanted and started writing it.

HOW I WORK

Four rules, and I will lose the deal before I break them.

You work with the person who builds it.

No account team, no junior handoff, no game of telephone. The person on the first call is the person writing the code, and the person who picks up when it breaks at 6am.

A human approves anything a customer sees.

Automate the fetching, the formatting, the routing, the drafting. The send stays a decision. I have never met an ops lead who wanted a bot emailing their customers unsupervised, and I am not going to be the first one to talk them into it.

If it is not worth automating, I will tell you before you pay me.

Plenty of workflows are twenty minutes a week and a spreadsheet. Automating those costs more than they do. I would rather lose the engagement than hand you something you will be resentfully maintaining a year from now.

You own it, and you understand it.

Your accounts, your keys, your repo. I walk you through how it works and why it is built that way, the same way I taught 1,200 Marines to work a piece of gear they never asked to learn. No black box. You can fire me and keep the work.

Twenty years selling it. The last two building it.

Four rules, and I will lose the deal before I break them.

You work with the person who builds it.

A human approves anything a customer sees.

If it is not worth automating, I will tell you before you pay me.

You own it, and you understand it.

Point me at your two.