Employee Spotlight: Q&A with Jacob Wallace, Data Portability Product Manager at Nasuni

Nasuni caught up with Jacob Wallace, Data Portability Product Manager, to talk about the evolution of his role at the company and how he helps customers embrace data movement with confidence.

Jacob’s career has been varied, dynamic, and impactful. He spent years working with global managed solutions providers, eventually moving to hyperconverged and cloud technologies with SimpliVity and Nutanix. Jacob joined Nasuni in 2018, where he played a pivotal role in the reinvention of the company’s Professional Services team before pivoting into product management. Today, he drives innovation in data mobility solutions and is committed to productizing the way to the next phase of Nasuni’s growth.

Can you identify the moment when your career in tech began?

My tech career started when I was a teenager. I passed my CompTIA A+ Certification when I was 17 and took as many technical classes as I could in high school. I competed in statewide computer competitions — failing the written tests but mastering the hands-on contests. My first paid job was recovering my French teacher’s TurboTax file, earning me an automatic A on my final exam and $25.

What a unique (and entrepreneurial) beginning! Do you remember when you first heard about Nasuni, and what attracted you to join?

I got a call from my former manager at SimpliVity, Chris Errato, who led Professional Services at Nasuni and said that I should consider coming over. That sparked my interest, but I wanted to do my due diligence first. So, I asked another former colleague, Rob Zinger, to break down what day-to-day life was like. I was listening out for where my place could be. I didn’t want to be just another number; I wanted to be able to make a difference.

At that time, Nasuni’s professional services offerings were going through a reinvention. Chris had created what he called “PS 2.0” a few months previously. The momentum was building, the new team was coming together, and that was very enticing for me. That’s why I like startups: you can get in there and show up and make a place for yourself. I felt confident that I could find that place at Nasuni.

I noticed that you started out in professional services and then moved into product. How has your career developed at Nasuni?

I enjoyed working in Professional Services because of the project work. I loved working closely with customers at the start of their Nasuni journey. I was busy, I had influence, and I was able to advance projects and train people. Then, at around the three-year mark, a position opened up for a Data Mobility Product Manager. When I saw that, I felt it was written for me. I went to Nick Burling, our current Senior Vice President of Product, and said, “I don’t have any product management experience, but I’ve been here for a while, I know the product in and out, and I have a passion for product management.” He took a chance and opened the door for me.

In your role today as a Data Portability Product Manager, what are your responsibilities?

Data mobility encompasses all the movement of your data while you are at Nasuni, so I look after anything connected to that. Firstly, it includes bringing data into Nasuni. One of the biggest hindrances to closing deals is that customers have to move their data. It is an emotional hurdle as much as a technical one, so it’s my job to reassure the customer by explaining that data movement is natural, and to convey the technicalities in a way that’s approachable. I maintain close relationships with our customer base because their data movement requirements do not end at the first migration. I’m always searching for new opportunities to help our customers get their data where it needs to be in ways that are both performant and safe.

What are the most common challenges that you solve on a day-to-day basis?

The day-to-day of my role is very dynamic. I help our internal teams manage their migration projects. I also connect with our customers to provide demos, feature deprives, and roadmap discussions — which I love!

One of the challenges I help solve is cloud-to-cloud movements. Nasuni’s backend cloud is very portable due to its architecture, so we designed an agnostic process that lets us move any customer’s cloud to any other cloud. That’s very powerful for customers because they want to be adaptable.

I also champion cloud resiliency. For many years, I thought that we should be more serious about cloud resiliency. And then last year, Google accidentally deleted a whole petabyte of a retirement fund. Just like that, their data was gone. Luckily, somebody in IT had made a second copy of the data and they were able to save the day. But that’s when the market started talking about how vulnerable cloud data is. It’s been nice to then meet the market with the products. When the timing is good, that’s when you strike.

Is there one particular project that you’ve worked on at Nasuni that you’re really proud of?

One project that I’ve overseen since its conception is Nasuni Now, our SMB migration proxy designed to get clients on Nasuni from day one. Migrations used to take a month or two to complete before you could start getting value out of your Nasuni subscription because we had to seed all the data in and then do an outage delta at the end. The cutover window was often a weekend with the business dataset offline for that period.

But Nasuni Now flips that around. We can do the cutover first without needing to seed the data first, also preventing the need to run a delta. Everything’s deployed and up and running, giving customers instant time to value. It’s a game changer. None of our competitors have it.

How important is cross-functional collaboration at Nasuni?

I have a philosophy that product management needs to have an all-access pass to talk to anybody. If we don’t know the financials of our business, or what Sales needs, what Marketing needs, what Legal needs, then we’re not doing our job. Perhaps most importantly, if product management isn’t talking to customers, we aren’t building what they want. Everything is cross-functional as it relates to product management.

What I love about product management is that people have problems, and we have solutions. Then, pure creativity manifests in between. It’s a beautiful thing because people come together to solve something and then we all get to walk away feeling good that we helped the customer.

Do you think there is such a thing as a typical Nasuni employee?

I work across the organization, so I get a good feel for everybody and there definitely is a persona — it’s an amalgamation of all my colleagues. It’s somebody who goes above and beyond for their customers. It’s someone who is very helpful and friendly, extremely technical, always willing to listen and be pragmatic and not to bring ego into it. This persona also has a warmth for their fellow coworkers and is optimistic about Nasuni’s future.

Nasuni is at a really interesting stage because you’re growing so quickly, but does scaling bring its own set of problems?

A scale problem is good when you want rapid growth — which we do. Right now, we’re a $1.2 billion valuated company and the question is: how do we continue our financial success without doubling our headcount? We all could dig in and work twice as hard, but we are a people-first organization and we’re not going to do that. So, in order for us to become much larger, we need to create solutions and productize things strategically rather than maintaining the status quo. A lot of software companies get stuck in maintenance mode, but you scale by getting into innovation mode. That’s absolutely thrilling to me.

Can you share something from your life outside of work to help us get to know you better?

I try to spend my time off disconnecting. As close and comfortable as I am with technology, I believe that intentional balance is key to life, so I constantly strive to meet the other end of that — which is to be bored. My husband and I take cruises, and I do not sign up for the internet package. I download 10 gigs worth of Wikipedia and some books, and that’s it. My mind loves that.

If you want to be part of the next chapter at Nasuni, explore our recent career opportunities here to see where you could make an impact too.