Pluralsight

But back to your question, I did the podcast, like the first episode, many, many years ago, but then I stopped.

And then, you know, concentrated on writing books and doing, you know, doing classes for LinkedIn Learning, Pluralsight, and also Internet Network Expert at the time, and also doing a full-time job, right? So I kind of stopped, but I actually owned the restarting of Network Automation Nerds to NAV.

I don't know if I told you guys this, but...

I don't know.

That's where we actually first met, an online learning platform that has helped reshape cloud computing education.

For that, nearly 4 million people across 4,000 organizations used the product before it was acquired by Pluralsight in 2021.

His story's fantastic.

The work he's doing continues to amaze.

That's pretty slick.

By the way, on that, if you want to write more robust scripts to customize things on websites, such as if you're a Pluralsight author that needs to hide their username or subscription IDs in Azure, first of all, there's an extension for that.

Second of all, you can use Tamper Monkey, which is a browser extension that lets you write user scripts.

And so you can customize stuff if you want to go hardcore on that.

And I think it did just come from having owned a business and think through a different lens, perhaps.

And at this time, you know, my first, I could say, big next step was joining Pluralsight.

And so when I joined Pluralsight, you know, this is a company at the time, 50 million-ish in ARR, a lot of that with individual subscribers.

And Aaron Scottard said, we need someone to come in and be a hunter, an enterprise new logo hunter.

And that was my first role.

And so just getting to see again the importance now of recutting territories and everything that goes into the scenes and planning and capacity and headcount.

So that was, you know, a lot of my background, kind of where I grew up into the space.

And then I'd say I got a massive steroid booster shot when after Pluralsight, I went to Amazon Web Services and I was head of digital sales for the training and certification org.

No, I think that was the first year with CppCon because I we actually I kind of got lucky.

I was doing a Pluralsight course back then.

And of course, the course was from Kate Gregory.

And so, you know, and then we needed a consulting firm.

And then in 2015, he and his brother Ryan started A Cloud Guru from their bedrooms, teaching engineers how to work in the cloud right as every customer company on earth decided it just had to move there.

Six and a half years later, a cloud guru had 600 staff, around $150 million in revenue, and it sold to Pluralsight

for just over $2 billion.

Not bad.