MuleSoft

That foundation runs throughout the rest of his career.

David has led people functions at MuleSoft, Velocity, Alteryx, Intercom, and now Illumio.

Also having held senior HR leadership roles at significant scale while at Salesforce.

So it's a pretty remarkable run of companies that David has been in where growth, product automation, and organizational change were not side topics, they were the focus.

And so we're all about this concept of speed and how we're gonna go faster.

And so thinking about what is the cycle time to be able to run these various processes, I know that the internal clients appreciate that, but the teams also like it.

They say, "Look, I can get through this work faster because," what we used to call at MuleSoft, donkey work, just the hard grind work.

And that was how MuleSoft came up with the name.

That's how they used to learn about new tech.

And I asked what the two most interesting companies were, and one was Okta, and one was MuleSoft.

So I went home, and I ended up getting an interview at both, and that's where I ended up meeting Adam, which was in my first interview at Okta, which is, like, circa 2012, 2013.

That experience was the proper way to, like, take this [laughs] like, the custom motto quote of, like, "Give me a spark and I'll make it a burning flame." That was the, what I think really elevated my game.

And speaking of strategic movements, welcome back.

We're tracking a major partnership announced today between F5 and MuleSoft, the Salesforce company.

The two have rolled out a native integration that embeds F5 AI guardrails directly into MuleSoft's agent fabric, which is now generally available and will be on display at Dreamforce next week in San Francisco.

Right.

And the architecture here is worth unpacking.

NVIDIA's Hugging Face Buy, TCS's 1-Gigawatt Hypervault, and revived regional M&A like Zetrix show value concentrating in compute, data center capacity, and on-the-ground footholds, so investors should re-weight toward chips, power land, and supply chain resilience.

Safety and runtime control are now procurement levers.

F5 plus MuleSoft's inline guardrails, Keysight's validation boom, and the model release frenzy mean enterprises will pay for auditability, governance, and dependable validation more than for incremental model novelty.

I feel bad for our Salesforce reps because they've been trying to sell us that MuleSoft and pinging me every day to get the next meeting.

If

you think of tokens as a proxy for intelligence, there's no lack of demand for intelligence and there never will be, right?

So this is, I was trying to fit.

I wanted to ask you, so have, I think you have to sign up for it to get preview access.

I don't know if it's GA yet, but so they were trying to sell you MuleSoft, but this is different.

Like they've never brought this up, right?

They've never brought this up, but then everything that one, the LinkedIn posts that you had sent me, I'm already doing in cloud.

So they decided to hire me as a senior associate and actually start working on deals and seeing companies.

And I was very fortunate because the fund I was in was an early investor in MuleSoft.

Evernote, and LendingClub.

So I kind of saw the first inning of SaaS with MuleSoft, LendingClub, that was very early in fintech, and Evernote was one of the first winners in mobile, right, and smartphones.

So I really had an opportunity to learn a lot from that and decided that Somewhere along the line in my career, I want to be able to do both.

I want to be able to build companies, but I also want to be able to support founders building companies.

That was like the first time that I was like, I want to go sell something more tactical.

I then started to talk to some of the Heroku and MuleSoft reps internally.

Those were the technical AEs.

And hearing their conversations lit a spark off a little bit.