Mark Cranney (LinkedIn | Twitter) has been training for success for his entire life. He’s taken the same approach to all his ventures – from the football field to managing market development at Andreesen Horowitz. “Anything that I’ve done, I want to be really good at. I grew up in a large family farm in Idaho, family business. We had a system for success and grew up in an athletic background. I mean, there was a system. There’s an offense, a defense. There’s special teams. There’s an attention to detail. I really applied that.”
Now, as the Chief Operating Officer of SignalFx, the only real-time cloud monitoring platform for infrastructure, microservices, and applications – he’s bringing his winning mentality to the forefront, and he shared a bit of his process with us at The Mission Daily.
He committed to greatness right off the bat. Mark didn’t just stumble into sales and try and scrape a living out of it. He went in to win. “When I decided to go into sales, right after school, I was going to be a pro. If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right, and I’m going to learn everything I need to know about it, and get extremely competent. When you get that confidence, competence, you’re going to have the conviction and the courage to do the right things. If you’re going to be good and/or great, you need to knuckle down and study, practice, drill, rehearse, and get good at it.”
He aligned with the winning pieces. “Going back to the sports analogies, particularly on building a championship team, you need an offense, defense, and special teams, at least from a football standpoint. When I joined one of the buckets was there: they had the foundation on a platform of a great product. The market is massive. There’s this big market, there’s logs, there’s metrics, there’s this APM market. And then there are the other pieces: timing, what’s going on in that market from an architectural shift standpoint. When they founded the company, it was early. And over time the market started to come to them. So product, market, timing; all that was fitting. And then the fourth bucket is the team. You put those four together, particularly with that timing piece in there, and that’s where it gets really exciting. And every day that goes by, right now…you see it in the market. We see it with our prospects and our customers. What’s happening in this move to cloud, not only to cloud people moving to public cloud and/or private cloud and/or hybrid multi-cloud – but all the layers on top of that, all the adoption of OS’s, all the microservices type architectures, moving from a monolith to a microservices type architecture. And then the ephemerality that’s being adopted inside the adoption of containers or for bursty workloads, things like serverless functions as a service. It’s super exciting from a timing standpoint, and it doesn’t happen that often where you have all these waves. There’s like four or five big ones going on and I think we’ve really nailed the solution and the architecture that’s really going to be future proof for a long, long time.”
They are picky about how they build their team. When asked how they recruit for their team, Mark is clear that he’s very selective. For him, it goes deeper than a great resume. “I like to go a little earlier in the career and kind of find out what makes them tick, and what are their more character type issues and success themes. Things like courage and focus and discipline. Their charisma or what do they have, what have they overcome in their life… a lot of these things tell you how people are wired. What kinds of things have they overcome early in life as well as throughout their entire career and where they are from a life stage standpoint. Just because somebody was successful a few years ago with XYZ company doesn’t give you the whole picture.”
To catch the whole interview with Mark, listen to our podcast here.
