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Comment by matthewaveryusa | Hacker News Reader

He's going to be used as the heavy-hitter salesman that goes around and says "I see you're using Oracle, I know Oracle, trust me when I say GCP will meet your needs" and he'll have tremendous credibility saying that.

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That's a reason to bring on an Account Executive, not leadership for the whole department. I doubt he'll be on sales calls.

The CEO is the most important salesperson. Meeting customers is 50% of the job.

For a small startup, yes. I could totally be wrong here, but I doubt that GCP will operate on that model.

Not to be rude, but yes you are totally wrong here. Meeting with customers is 50% or more of the time commitment for a world-class enterprise-sales-company CEO.

Other companies are huge contracts, and simply won't sign on without that level of dedication. They demand it, and the CEO's give it.

It's just as important at a bigger company. CEOs end up traveling more as the company gets larger, mainly to meet customers, and it's especially critical if the customers are also big companies.

CEOs and CTOs are often involved when working with a very large business. CTOs often end up giving presentations to the top brass about security and technological advantage. If you are high enough to have major influence on the product, you will end up doing sales.

We are an early GCP enterprise customer and Diane has met us numerous times. A class act.

Can you share anything more about this? I'd love to hear it. I think you shared the most relevant experience of any post so far.

Depends who the customer is. If you're trying to grab another Spotify, you absolutely put your department leadership on the sales call.

That's great and all, and I'm sure he'll be very successful at that, but what if he also tries to develop some products?

That's not what someone in his role is expected to be doing. He may support, or defund, certain initiatives, but he won't be the "originator" of anything major.

The better question is, "But what type of people will he gravitate towards hiring to develop some products?"

Except he's a deeply technical product guy with 20 years experience managing the development of the worlds most profitable database.

Its funny that Hacker News hates on Oracle, but their database is far ahead of the competition in a highly competitive market. Say what you want about their other products (that are indeed terrible), but that core database gets them billions in revenue for a reason.

Just a small correction. He was the applications VP. That's business software such as Fusion / EBiz. He wasn't responsible for the database.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Applications

False, at the time that Kurian left he was head of all product development reporting directly to Larry Ellison.

he'll have tremendous credibility saying that

Why? A salesman says whatever he’s paid to say. Tomorrow he could move again and be flogging IBM’s joke of a cloud.

A good salesman knows keeping credibility is more important than keeping a job. I quit my position as a sales engineer when the company asked me to lie about the product's capabilities.

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