Acquia

We have several focus episodes coming from this week's stories.

For another angle on control, watch episode three, the Webflow source and Acquia source discussion.

Similar names, different approaches to what you can access.

Find out what you're allowed to touch before the next demo says you're in control.

Joining us today is Brian House, Chief Executive Officer at Elastic Path.

Brian is an elite global enterprise executive and Harvard Business School MBA graduate with an extraordinary career bridging deep learning startups like Neural Magic, content management for giants like EMC Documentum, and open source pioneers like Acquia, where he served on the founding team and helped scale revenue past one seventy million dollars.

Intriguingly, he also spent eight years brewing beer professionally, bringing a master craftsman precision to software architecture and team building.

So before further ado, let's welcome this very special guest.

And so what I found was the people with the best relationships with our customers to ensure that an-annuity stream com- uh, continues and they renew as well the, with the best insight into the customer to grow the account, were actually the customer success managers, the people that work with them each and every day.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, when I was at Acquia, one of the challenges we were having is, is our cross sell, up sell revenue, which is, was continually missing the mark.

And the way we had it structured was the account managers or the customer success managers would identify opportunities in the accounts, but then give them to sales reps.

Webflow just announced an AI platform called Source, sourced by Webflow.

Acquia already has an AI platform called Acquia Source.

One gives agents access to your code, the other keeps the underlying code out of your hands.

It's like the Spider-Man pointy meme, except both Spider-Men are, they want a 12-month contract.

Like Jurassic Park, we've seen the tour, but we have not seen what happens when the power goes out and the jeeps stop in front of the T-Rex enclosure.

Boy, I hate being right all the time.

You know, if Source sounded familiar, like Acquia familiar, that's because Acquia's Drupal-powered Source predates this announcement.

Now, I'm no trademark attorney or even a regular attorney.

So that's a good reason.

However, Acquia specializes in Drupal and they have at least as much revenue as we have.

But wait, but wait, it's a 20th of the size of the market.

Yeah, but they're good at it and they specialize in it.

Uh, so you've certainly been there.

Uh, you were, you were a founding member at Acquia.

Uh, and you were-

That's right

You know, I had a, I had a great mentor early in my career when I was in the product marketing side and doing a lot of marketing.

He was like, "You know," I think he's like, "Based on your ambitions and what you seem interested in, you should be moving towards a CEO path, and the way to get there is to, um, is to own a sales number, particularly if you're gonna work in tech." And so I've, you know, we had that conversation driving from Munich to Prague after attending Oktoberfest, which was awesome, but we were hungover and all the rest.

Um, but then, you know, shortly thereafter, we created a, a new sales organization at Acquia called, um, the Global Account, uh, Program, Global Account Team, and, uh, and that was the beginning of my transition into sales and had a ton of success there.

And that was a really pivotal moment in my career because it sort of, you know, one of the things that happens to all of us is we sort of get sort of on a, on a railroad track, and then you just sort of go in that journey, and you don't-- It's hard to pivot out of that.