Hailing from Cork, the Rebel County of Ireland, Kieran O’Driscoll was born to go west. Growing up he learned to listen to his parents, work hard in school, and was interested in technology as far back as he can remember.
In primary school, as they say over in Ireland, he was the student who would help his teachers fix the one desktop in the school. Once he got exposure to computers he dove into resources like Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, going down a rabbit hole of books & videos on YouTube to better understand the technology industry and the businesses behind it.
Kieran went off to the University College Cork and majored in Computer Science. His studies took him to Boston, where he completed a 6 month internship at State Street, as part of his graduation studies. After completing his Masters in Business Information and Analytical Systems he returned to Boston on a J1visa to break into the technology industry.
While working nights at a bar in Charlestown, through a cross continental connection, he met Chris Lynch (AtScale’s CEO). Chris also has Irish roots. He started as a Business Development Representative with a Computer Science background and dove right in. Pulling from a unique background, he leveraged his technical knowledge to have targeted technical conversations with his prospects.
AtScale, an Enterprise software company focused on the Global 2000, is a tool agnostic semantic layer. They sit on top of large cloud data platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Snowflake, or Databricks. Their platform helps user groups manage governed access to cloud platforms and let analyst or operations teams access cloud data in a structured way (i.e. excel users) without leaving the cloud environment.
After his visa ran out amid the Covid crunch, Kieran returned to Ireland to work remotely for AtScale from Cork. Prospecting became more difficult and he looked for creative ways to generate pipeline for his team. Kieran reached out to AtScale’s partnership network to create joint go to market opportunities, figuring out ways to grow together and win more dual use cases.
He started telling the AtScale dual use case story to cloud partnership teams across EMEA and it began to catch on. The U.S. team took notice and they implemented the strategy company wide. A career in partnerships was born. Kieran moved over to the Business Development team and built out a pitch deck & talk track to help build out the collective partnership knowledge as a core pillar of their go to market strategy.
The culmination of Kieran’s work was Databricks announcing AtScale as their “Emerging Partner of the Year” at their Data + AI Summit conference this year. Kieran has also helped build partnerships with Snowflake & Google, written blogs with partners, and was recently invited to present at a conference in Toronto and helped host the inaugural Databricks Boston User Group. He’s continuing to grow his career in the cloud and to the world beyond!
GTM Creativity – Leveraging Partnership Networks
Kieran’s computer science background leads him to think in terms of systems and creative problem solving. Yes, you need to exert will. But having a program work for you is much better. He realized pretty early on that he wasn’t going to be the best on the phones. Slightly more reserved than the classic BDR, with a territory separated by borders and oceans, he needed to find a different way to hit his numbers.
First, Understand the Landscape
Kieran’s initial goal was to deeply understand his role, his team, and AtScale. He had to figure out how different lines of business worked cross functionally and how the company’s KPIs weaved together. He was a big picture thinker who needed to understand the nuts & bolts before he could implement a strategy.
Diagram Competition & Partnership Opportunities
Through this process he came to intimately understand AtScale’s partners & competitors. Kieran learned how companies deployed their strategies. He built a deck of AtScale’s partners, their relationships, and their different use cases. He diagramed their strengths and weaknesses so he could better see how partners complemented one another and what made each unique.
Establish Relationships & Execute on a Joint Strategy
He came to learn that people do business with people and extra effort is fundamentally critical to driving a business forward. How did Kieran build a partnership go to market strategy?
For each partner, their use cases & languages are slightly different. He would constantly update his competitive deck, get feedback from his partners, and check in with them monthly to receive feedback and make sure his information was accurate.
Once he did all the work to understand the joint value, his next tactic was to make sure it resonated with anyone that worked at partner companies. “You should be able to approach anyone on their sales team and the message should resonate right away. AtScale can do a,b,c to help you increase revenue with your accounts because of x,yz.”
Getting mindshare begins to generate pipeline organically. Kieran & his team use Crossbeam to share prospects with their partnership network and, when they encounter hurdles or bottlenecks, they know who to call as a trusted partner.
Most recently, there was a Fortune 50 company using one of their partner’s cloud data platforms. All of their data was integrated in the cloud, but their decision-makers were front-line business analysts who were not able to write SQL code or get access to their data without relying on IT. Enabling decision-makers to have self-service access to the data without it leaving the cloud using AtScale opens up entirely new use cases for that cloud partner. Now, non-technical users can access data in the cloud while generating significant consumption for the partner.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone – “whether it’s moving to the U.S. without a job or taking on a new role or responsibility, you’re better off taking that leap and figuring it out on the go because, while you might be uncomfortable, it can allow you to do your best work. Take every opportunity as it comes”
Finding Your Strengths & Weaknesses – “Be self aware of where your strengths are and where your weaknesses are. Double down on your strengths, play that. Work on your weaknesses too, but prioritize making use of your strengths”
There Are Many Ways to Skin a Cat – “When I joined AtScale, everyone was cold calling and hammering the phones. I wasn’t good at that but I was good at having technical conversations when I could get someone on a scheduled call. So I spent most of my day sending e-mails and doing research, sending a few thoughtful personally crafted e-mails to key people at key accounts to hit my KPIs”
Kieran is loving the network he’s building in Boston. He admits it does help open an additional door or two having an Irish accent in this emerald isle East Coast city. Kieran likes to say it’s “big data, small world”. Everyone in the big data world is all interconnected and he likes that it’s easy to get together with folks professionally, cheer for local sports teams, and explore life in Boston.
In the years ahead he’s focused on continuing to learn how all the Cloud Enterprise Software cogs in the wheel work together, learn more about product & marketing strategies, and take things as they come, living life and growing his career stateside.
If you want to learn more about Kieran, you can check him out on LinkedIn under “mr-hadoop”, frequenting some Boston watering holes or leading Enterprise cloud partnerships for AtScale. Thanks for sharing Kieran. Excited to see all of the partnerships & ecosystem development you accomplish in Boston and beyond these coming years!