An Interview with Brandon Snyder, new VP of Sales at Spitfyre

I had the chance to sit down with Brandon Snyder, Spitfyre’s new VP of Sales to have a candid conversation about his background, what convinced him to come on board, challenges he sees ahead and his goals for building out the sales department here at Spitfyre. Below is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length.

Brandon, we’re so glad you’re on board! First of all, what brought you to Spitfyre?

It's a culmination of things, but really it was based off of a relationship that had been built over the last five years. I worked with Haleh (Kendell, CEO of Spitfyre; previously VP of Operations at Concourse) and Glen (Kendell, Principal Engineer and Co-Founder of Spitfyre; previously CEO of Concourse) in the VAR space.. I was their account manager for the VAR that I worked at out of the Seattle area. Over time, I sold them a lot of their hardware, infrastructure, backup, storage, things of that nature and just built the relationship organically. They approached me regarding joining the Spitfyre team, which was an honor. It was a big leap of faith because I was leaving a good book of business, a good job. But I've been thrilled that I've done so.

What convinced you that Spitfyre was going to be something you wanted to bet your career on?

Well, to be honest with you, and not to toot Glen and Haleh's horn too much, but I have always had a crazy amount of respect for both of them. I think they're both extremely intelligent. I even remember telling my wife years back that if the opportunity arised I would invest in them because I believe in them so much.

Lo and behold, when they asked me to be a part of Spitfyre, I saw it as my way of being able to invest my time, my effort, who I am, just fully put everything into Spitfyre and what it has become. I believe in them. I've always believed in them. This is an opportunity to hit the ground running with something new and build something that is truly remarkable.

Can you tell us about your background? One of the cool things about this company is that its hires are largely based on character and potential, and we all come from really varied backgrounds.

Yeah, my path is unique. I played professional baseball for a period of time. And I was fascinated with the craft beer industry. Living in the Northwest, it was so vibrant, there were breweries everywhere and I was passionate about that industry. While in the offseason I decided, okay, what's a way that I can get my foot in the door? And the way to get in the door was literally to be a busser at a brewery and I chose one of the oldest breweries in the Portland area, Widmer Brewing. I knew the owners came in for lunch multiple times a week and that was going to be my opportunity to introduce myself. I was a professional baseball player that was cleaning dishes in the off season. And it was humbling. But my work ethic has always been good. I've always been proud of that. My father always taught me to work hard and things will come to fruition. And so I did just that.

I retired from baseball a couple years later and ended up working for Anheuser-Busch as an account manager, I was always grinding to try to get myself to the next level.

After a few years in the craft beer industry, I realized making a good salary was quite difficult. I found a job at Grand Canyon University as a college counselor working remotely in the nursing sector. I recruited students for online enrollment and it was a great job. I had a phenomenal manager that I worked for and I truly believed in the education GCU provided.

While I was working there, one of my mentors from the University of Portland where I played baseball at, reached out to me to connect. I noticed the life he had built for himself in the tech industry so I kept bugging him trying to get more of his time. As a few years went by he finally said, all right, let's go grab lunch. Then about six months later I received a call and it was him wanting me to come join his team.

So I made that leap of faith, and I went and worked for him at a VAR doing inside sales. At the time I felt like I took a step backwards, however I realized that in order to get in the tech industry, this was the route I needed to take.

A couple years after that a recruiter for a VAR called IVOXY Consulting reached out to me, They had an outside Account Manager riole available and thought my background was a good fit. This happened to be the VAR working with Concourse Hosting.. I saw that as my opportunity to finally get to the position that my mentor was in. And so I took that and did that for about five years. And that's where I built the relationship with Haleh and Glen at Concourse. And the rest was history. Here I am now at Spitfyre.

It sounds like your background has given you a comprehensive understanding of leadership and sales, a real strength coming to Spitfyre, a company that's small but growing rapidly, where you have been tasked to build out a sales team.

Once I graduated with my bachelor's and I went on to play for the Angels organization, I told my wife, I'm never going to go back to school again. But she convinced me to take advantage of employee benefits while working for the university, and thanks to her guidance I got my Masters in leadership while at Grand Canyon University..

When I played baseball, I took on a team captain style of role. I just always gravitated towards that team atmosphere and when there was an issue, putting our heads together, solving it, moving past it always seemed like the right course of action. When this opportunity came about at Spitfyre, I knew it was a chance for me to expand my career in the direction that I originally wanted to in leadership.

So what about baseball? How does your background playing baseball help you in your sales role?

You know, that's a great question. I think with baseball I met a lot of different personalities and a lot of different people. As a team leader, you have to be willing to hear your teammates and understand that not everyone is the same. I took on a coaching role when I retired from baseball for my old high school, and I realized that a good coach is one that understands that peoples personalities are different therefore not everyone could be coached the same. I was going to have to find a way to coach in a way that was best for that individual person.

Baseball gave me that chance to learn more about myself while at the same time competing at a really high level where it was stressful. In pro ball, I was a closer and a closer is somebody who comes in in very stressful situations. Although it was taxing mentally, I seemed to thrive in those situations and I feel like I can correlate a lot of my professional career in sales to my career as a ball player.

I'm a former professional musician and wannabe athlete. My sister was an outstanding athlete. And I'm a parent of athletes now. So I think sports and performance in general are really good preparation for a lot of things in life.

Yeah, you learn how to win and most importantly, you learn how to lose. And I think you can learn a lot about yourself when you lose and over when you win. I think people have done extraordinary things in life just by learning from their failures.

Oh yeah, we’ve got to pick ourselves up and move on, so for sure. So what have you been up to so far at Spitfyre? What has your time been spent doing?

Time has been spent in many leadership and go-to-market meetings to understand Spitfyre and how we want to position it. Focus on hitting the ground running strategically with current customers and figuring out what avenues or verticals we want to go after moving forward. I’ve been working with current customers to get opportunities and projects completed, as well as getting Spitfyre’s new managed data offering off the ground.

Can you talk about what Spitfyre has to offer for potential customers? What are things that you're excited to bring to your own book of business, our current clients, and anyone in the future?

Yeah, I think as technology is evolving and as we know, it will always forever evolve. We are seeing a massive emphasis on data. Organizations are trying to get a grip and understanding of their data and making sure that it is clean and usable. With the introduction of AI and how advanced AI is now days, subjecting your data to it poses a potential risk. Spitfyre is giving organizations the comfort knowing that you can use AI while trusting that your data is a single source of truth.

I think a single source of truth is one of my favorite things that Spitfyre provides. Many organizations truly don’t know how clean or accurate their data really is. And so being the company that can take that on as a fully managed service and provide those outcomes lets them have that single source of truth. From there they can trust their analytics and reporting. Spitfyre allows organizations to be able to use their AI agents effectively. That understanding, I think, is a big direction that the technology landscape is going.

I know you've had a soft lunch at the SIM charity golf event in Portland and you've been meeting with your own contacts as well as current clients of Spitfyre. What reactions have you seen to the new Spitfyre data offering so far?

So far, it's been great. At surface level, the brand, the logo, name, everything, I think is very enticing.

So far, my contacts in the industry have been very interested to learn more. I think them hearing that we are open source, open formatted, is intriguing. I think nowadays in technology, you get a lot of vendors that really trap customers in. And we're trying not to be that. I think what's exciting is that Spitfyre is built from an organization that worked with vendors across the board and found themselves dealing with their own issues of feeling “vendor trapped” which ultimately led them to create a company that provided transparency and put a big emphasis on the “no vendor lock-in" model.

What are some questions that you've gotten? Good questions, some sticky, deep questions on Spitfyre.

Yeah, I think some of the good ones would be: Are you a data lakehouse? Do you deal a lot with unstructured data? How is AI incorporated? Is Spitfyre just for companies that currently have an AI practice.

Although there are aspects to Spitfyre that operate like a data lake house, we are not solely that. Out the gate we prefer to work primarily with structured data; however, we could see unstructured data practices being incorporated as we develop. We work with organizations that have AI practices and ones that don’t. If you're an organization that's not currently adopting AI practices, then that's fine. Spitfire works in a great way to give you analytics and reporting. I'd say those are kind of the biggest questions that I've gotten so far.

What are some events that Spitfiyre is going to have a presence at in the upcoming months?

The biggest one that I'm really excited about is coming up here on the 26th and 27th of October, the CDAO conference, out in Boston, which is a data governance themed conference. It's a little bit smaller, but there's going to be a lot of C-suite individuals from large organizations that are going to be there speaking specifically on data governance which is a big aspect of Spitfyre.

We have a great Cloudflare conference that's coming up in October as well, which is going to be good for us to attend. We are a service provider for Cloudflare, and we're going to lean pretty heavy into Cloudflare moving forward. So that'll be a great event for us. In November we will be attending the PASS conference, which is well known, looking forward to that.

What I'm most excited about, to be honest with you, is getting some Lunch and Learns scheduled for this fall. I think it gives IT leaders the opportunity to come have a meal or beverage on us while learning new technology. And I think you build a lot of good meaningful relationships that way.

So that leads into my last question for you: you will be leading a sales team. Do you have a future vision for what you want to build out, or is it too early to fairly ask that question?

I think right now, we have a team of very bright individuals that I think not only could sell but are technically sound as well. I want to expand that team, grow territories, and hire a sales engineer here very soon. That's a big target goal of mine. That individual will be by my side, somebody who's passionate about the product and willing to speak to the masses on it, like myself.

Did I miss anything? Is there anything else you want to say?

I do want to point out; the sales team couldn't do what they do without one other department. Sales and marketing work hand in hand. I feel like both departments have their own strengths, and both strengths put together just make the organization even stronger.

Thank you, Brandon. I look forward to working closely with you at Spitfyre!