San Francisco Bay Area
Richard is a serial builder and operations guru, having headed up strategic functions at leading Cloud & Big Data companies such as PTC, Genesys, MuleSoft, Adobe, and MongoDB. He built from scratch numerous fee-based B2B customer service units. His deep operations experience ranges across legal, corporate ops, treasury/finance, IT, and customer success. Richard also is a passionate nonprofit board member, frequent public speaker, award-winning innovator, and long-time global frequent flier. He received his BS Mechanical Engineering and MBA degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.
Our mission is to help sales and marketing teams gain a competitive edge by providing deep insights into their target audience. Our AI driven solutions empower businesses to make conversations relevant, drive engagement, and ultimately increase revenue.
Volunteer part-time sales and management role with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that promotes sharing of the latest technology education best practices. Head of Membership Sales (July 2024 to June 2025) • New role designing plan for increasing paid memberships. • KPIs include individual and corporation member counts, annual membership revenues, renewal rate. Treasurer (April 2020 to June 2024) • All aspects of charity financials including planning, accounting, reporting, expenses, revenues, taxes. • Corporate operations such as entity establishment, legal review, contracts, insurance, etc.
Built new fee-based training function. Designed innovative offerings, implemented systems & processes, hired & coached 12, grew sales from $4M to 6M in year 1. Continuously released innovative and exciting offerings to gain mindshare: • Game changing skills testing system overcame resistance to purchase by identifying skill gaps. • Rapidly released content on hot topics via crowdsourcing and gen AI. • Designed “Precision Learning” offering for 50+ students, with learning paths personalized by student. Multifaceted plan grew training sales by 50% ($4M to $6M) in yr 1: • Clever messaging alignment with certification & free self-study drove free-to-fee conversion. Introduced training subscriptions, increased prices. • Supported field account execs by implementing attractive commissions, arming with quote estimators and proof points, assigning Training Managers with strong sales background, and frequent enablement. • Sold custom large programs, including one for $700k. Elegant systems & processes achieved scale, service level, and instrumentation: • Significant investment in BI, integrations, and dashboards for KPI reporting. Time to produce comprehensive metrics reduced to just hours. • Streamlined student experience via integrations between LMS, SFDC, testing SW, and badging system. Built expert team dedicated to training: • Recruited 11 hires in year 1 to build new team across 6 countries, specializing in sales (2), operations (3), curriculum (2), teaching (5). • Achieved 96% team Culture Amp Engagement survey score.
Extensive free & fee courses and world-class certification dramatically impacted partner enablement and customer success. Expanded course portfolio to offer a range of price points & formats: • Rapidly-developed video courses, innovative community-developed library, and new premium subscription. • Built SME network to broaden portfolio and incorporate more best practices. Built a certification program that turned Partners into major asset: • Designed 8 high-stakes, scenario-based exams. 6,000 certified in 3 yrs. • Turned certification into self-funding business, with $1.1M exam sales in yr 2. • Management loved that we ended partner screwups requiring PS free work. Built a Community SME network with stunning results: • By including our best partners in Certification & Training Advisory Boards, they differentiated themselves, got key info faster, and charged higher rates. • We doubled our offerings and strengthened the perception of their value. Improved sales and margin significantly in 2 yrs: • Worked w/ Finance to improve rep commission, created easy-to-sell packages, and contracted training partners. • Doubled revenue, including $1M sales of new subscription and $1.1M certification. Hit aggressive margin goal in 2 years. For my last year, I ran a strategic consulting project for Adobe Legal: • Overhauled business metrics collection and reporting systems, resulting in additional metrics and reassignment of the work to coordinators. Recognized by General Counsel as “gold standard” for extracting business insights. • Provided leadership data-driven staffing & workload models through new activity tracking system and staffing algorithms. New data pinpointed enablement needs and staffing red spots and forecasted required staffing.
Built a world class Training & Certification department that BOTH offered massive scale free courses AND sold $MM in services (>$5M USD my year 3). Built respected certification program and industry-leading curriculum: • Achieved 10,000 certified developers in 2-1/2 years. Trained 10,000+ students per year by my third year. Survey scores averaged 4.4+/5. • Created 17 days of heavily used curriculum featuring radical “instructor-guided walkthrough” model. • Won highly competitive CEdMA Innovation Award for automated course that trained 1000s with community support and unprecedented completion rates. Grew education sales at dramatic rates: • 73% annual average sales growth over 4 years, despite mass free program. • Gained dedicated Marketing person after multiple impactful campaigns. • Free training generated leads resulting in ~$2M per year of license sales. • Collaborated with Channel and CEO on “train 10,000 developers in India” initiative, including automated training delivery and T-shirt fulfillment. Hired & developed an amazing team: • Hired 19 direct + 6 full-time contractors + many other part-time contractors. • Promoted 5 managers and nurtured culture of extreme high standards. • Utilized global Zendesk queue to distribute workload, track interactions, and offer first response SLA.