About SoothSawyer

This is a personal blog where I can share random thoughts around my favorite topics. This tends to be around tech, personal finance, insights from various data sets, etc.

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Quick Background

Who am I? Ryan. 🙂 I have been very lucky in my career because I have been fortunate enough to be able to dabble in (from oldest to newest):

IT automation
Database (MRP, contact management) programming
Software Engineering (driver, CLI, all the way up to the GUI level),
Managing global software engineering teams
Sales Engineering
Started a company that generated over $1M in revenue
Product Marketing
Advising $20M+ investment decisions into startups
Strategy roles for Enterprise Storage and the #1 NAND Flash company in the world

My Profession(s)

I am the type that wants to be challenged. It’s funny.. when I have interviewed for roles in the past, people like to try and label me by previous roles; they think I’m just a “marketing guy”. And ironically before that, when I was trying to move from Engineering into Sales, I heard that I was just an “engineering guy”. Who was right? 🙂

It’s really hard to open people to changing their 20-second judgment system (cognitive biases; fascinating topic to binge on and kind of sad how often I have seen this when interviewed; we are only human so it’s okay) so this is typically where I just bite my tongue. There is no one role that defines my interests or skill sets, so I’m a bit of an odd duck.

I have thoroughly enjoyed every role I’ve been in and would do any of them again. I strongly encourage others to not be defined by a title! Just enjoy your work and forget about title.

Right now, I appear to be obsessed with finding stories in data so you should expect to see a bunch of me analyzing data and spitting out a story around it.

How do I make a living?

I currently work for a hot new startup in the data protection space. However, this blog has nothing to do with my work there and they have not asked me, or encouraged me, to post any of the content here.

Photos

Oh, and here are some photos from my recent past that I whipped up real quick since people like photos.. right?

Presenting Keynote for Major NAND Supplier in front of 3,000 attendees at Flash Memory Summit in 2016

Presenting at Major NAND Supplier SSD Summit with 100’s of journalists in S. Korea, in 2016
Watch the video by clicking here

“In the zone” at Major NAND Supplier SSD Summit in S. Korea, in 2016

Pictured with George Kurian (Netapp CEO) in 2016

Driving a boat in Dubrovnik, Croatia, Summer 2017

Trying not to inhale too much smoke at the Snoop Dogg Performance at Pure Storage Accelerate in San Francisco, June 2017

Trying to have a serious conversation with a CIO at an EAB while wearing flower leis in Bali, Indonesia, 2018

What does SoothSawyer even mean?

If you are curious where the name of the site came from, someone had called me a soothsayer on some of my predictions around the NAND Flash Shortage (both 2013 and 2017 [predictions were made internally], and NAND Flash Oversupply in 2018/19, and to be honest I had no idea what it meant. Nor do I think I can predict the future; but I have been lucky with my guesses. 🙂

So.. I looked it up and thought it would be a unique blog site name since generic names are all taken. However, soothsayer.com was already registered (of course) so getting even more creative, I randomly thought of Tom Sawyer (don’t know why other than it looked like “sayer”). And Mark Twain was a writer/humorist and liked to write for the common folk. And I’d like to think of myself as a humorous writer and I tend to relate to common folk, so I went with it.

So, please keep in mind when I write a hyperbole or have some colorful commentary, take it as a way of lightening up otherwise boring topics (like data analysis or financial statement analysis).