Gary Colman

Trailblazer
DISC Type : DI

Director, Software Engineering at Cisco ThousandEyes

San Francisco Bay Area, United States

Overview

Gary Colman is an experienced Director of Engineering at Cisco ThousandEyes, managing global teams focused on infrastructure, performance, and sovereign cloud services. His career spans leadership roles at Discord, Adobe, LinkedIn, and Google, specializing in large-scale storage, SRE, and data infrastructure. People who have worked with him describe him as a technical, strategic, detailed, and innovative leader.

Based in the Boston area, Gary is actively engaged with the local tech community, showing a keen interest in Generative AI and attending meetups on the topic. He has a direct communication style and a passion for emerging technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP), knowledge graphs, and AI-driven payments.

He has a strict no-call policy for unsolicited vendor pitches and explicitly states that vendors who phone him without prior engagement may receive a curt response.

Personality Overview

Informal

Persuasive

Values Relationships

They respond better to a combination of speed and relationship.  They are more likely to be open to unproven but exciting technologies. They like to keep things under control.

Topics They Care About

Large-Scale Infrastructure
His career is defined by managing multi-exabyte storage, data warehouses, and grid infrastructure for companies like Google, Facebook, and Cisco.
NLP & Knowledge Graphs
He is actively hiring and posting about the need for senior engineers with deep expertise in NER, entity linking, and graph embeddings, indicating a key current focus.
Cloud Cost Efficiency
A core pillar of his current role and a past focus as a Senior Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, where he worked on exposing cost and utilization metrics.

Media Appearances

Gary has no verified media appearances

Work History

4-2024
Director, Software Engineering at Cisco ThousandEyes
1-2022 - 1-2024
Director Of Engineering at Discord
3-2019 - 1-2022
Director Of Engineering at Adobe
7-2017 - 12-2018
Senior Engineering Manager, Performance Engineering at LinkedIn
12-2015 - 6-2017
Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering at LinkedIn

Education

1993 - 1996
BSc from University of Cape Town
1981 - 1992
Education details unavailable from Herzlia School

More Information

Social Presence :

Prographics :

Exp : 10 Location : San Francisco Bay Area, United States Job Level : Mid-senior Designation : Director, Software Engineering at Cisco ThousandEyes
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Insights For Selling To Gary

During A Call Or A Meeting

DO's

  • Showcase existing customers and use case-studies to grab their attention
  • Help them visualize the impact of their decision
  • Display high self-confidence and expect them to have a strong personality.

DONT's

  • Don't make any commitments that you might not be able to fulfill
  • Don’t hesitate from asking questions or pushing them, but take a friendly approach
  • Do not look like someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about

When Cold Calling

When Writing An Email

While Negotiating & Closing

    The secret to closing fast with Gary is

  • Relationship and product conviction matter equally, followed by a sense of achievement.
  • Will you ever get a clear answer from Gary

  • If they are not convinced, they will say no albeit in a friendly manner.


Insights For Deal Planning

    How fast (or slow) will Gary move?

  • They can make decisions quickly if they develop trust in you and conviction in the product.
  • Can Gary take some risk or not?

  • They can take risks if necessary.

You And Gary

Personality Compatibility


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