“5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became CEO of Kinetica,” With Paul Appleby

…I wouldn’t give them advice so much as respect and trust. I respect the people on my team to decide how to do their jobs well and to use me as a sounding board. And I trust them to determine how they will structure their team, their territory, and their time. The latitude that comes from that respect and trust ultimately acts as a bulwark against burn out.

As part of my series about the leadership lessons of accomplished business leaders, I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Appleby.

Paul is CEO as well as a board member of Kinetica in San Francisco, a startup that analyzes billions of data points continuously to make dynamic business decisions. Paul has successfully built and led global teams across the United States, Asia, and Australia, as President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at BMC Software, EVP of Global Sales at Salesforce, CRO at C3 IoT, Managing Director of EMEA and APJ for Travelex, and in senior executive positions in the Asia Pacific region at both Oracle and Siebel Corporation. Earlier in his career, Paul was CEO of Gocorp and Director of Financial Services and Telecommunications for SAP.

Paul is a passionate advocate for design thinking and project-based learning who regularly writes and speaks about how to prepare society for a post-industrial future driven by artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. He serves on Forbes Tech Council and the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and is an advisor to corporations and nonprofits in the United States and Asia. Paul is also an avid cycler, surfer, and skier, depending on the season.

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us the story about what brought you to this specific career path?

It was the late 1980s, and the idea of mobile computing did not exist yet. We were beginning to have discussions around the concept of diverged versus converged devices and the idea of uniting mobility and computing. An advisor came to me and…