Interview with Mr. William Gordon

Date of interview:

9/29/17

Interview:

We began by discussing Mr.Gordon’s background and his experience in the technology industry. Mr.Gordon was the President responsible for Business Development, Sales, Revenue, and Market Strategy at Electronic Data Systems, where he was on the cutting edge of technology working with enterprise solutions and led the department from $0 to $325 Million in revenue. He was later the Chief Procurement Officer at Accenture, where he established and managed strategic partnerships and alliances and built the firm's global supply chain practice. Later Mr.Gordon went on to be the CEO responsible for Business Development, Sales, Revenue, Market Strategy, Strategic Partnerships at TechSys Inc., where he focused on outsourcing services to India and built plans to get the telecommunication grid in India. Mr.Gordon then became the President responsible for Sales, Revenue, Product Development, Customer Experience, Market Strategy at Miracom Network, where he worked with cutting edge cloud printing services and led developments in Software as a Service (SaaS) and negotiated acquisitions with Dell, IBM, and Xerox. Afterwards, Mr.Gordon became the CTO, SVP Cloud Services responsible for building the global Cloud practice, Sales, Revenue at Xerox, where he built their cloud practice securing major clients like Nike, Mcdonald's, and Disney. He was then later at Michaels as the Executive responsible for Strategy, Governance, Security, Capital Planning & Finance, where he helped rebuild Michaels systems after their major hack. He then became the CIO Enterprise Solutions responsible for Business Development, Sales, Revenue, and Strategy at NetApp, a Fortune 500 computer storage and data solutions. He is now the Senior Principal Advisor for TXYSAI, LLC.

Apart from working at all those companies, Mr.Gordon was has also been the CEO of Creative Corporate Change, LLC since 2000. He was also on the Board of Directors for the Cyber Future Foundation, and is currently on the board of nDvision, and Excel English Institute. Throughout the whole time Mr.Gordon was explaining his background he mentioned the biggest thing that I could take away from his experience was to not be afraid of risks. He narrated about how he sent a letter to the chairman and vice-chairman at his first company about an idea he had which was rejected by his manager, and his manager’s manager, and how he risked being fired for not following the chain of command - but he ended up being able to start his own department to pursue that idea.

A trend that I noticed about Mr.Gordon’s experience was that he was always on the cutting edge of technology, from enterprise applications to cloud systems. He mentioned that in order to successfully propose a solution or product is to predict what technology could become extremely useful 12-18 months down the road, as if you try providing something for right now you would be competing against everyone else and you may be behind in the game as others may have started earlier. Continuing on this topic we discussed where he believed technology was heading; he mentioned Augmented Intelligence, IoTs, and modified reality.

Overall, talking to Mr.Gordon was an invaluable learning opportunity , as I was able to learn about where technology was, is, and will be. Mr.Gordon taught me important techniques about how to assess my solution or product and other things related to entrepreneurship as well as left me with an important message - “Don’t be afraid of the risk.”

Images

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