Careering into Clouds with Niki Acosta – Episode 76

Niki Acosta is bubbling with passion and bursting with OpenStack enthusiasm. These facts are familiar. What may be more surprising is how she navigates the world of job opportunities. Her flexibility to work within the business and voracious need to consume new information keeps her ahead of the Evangelist pack.

We discuss:

• Niki Acosta, Cloud Evangelist at Cisco
• Evangelist titles before they were cool
• Breaking into “Cloud” as a career
• The job that presents itself
• How she Joined Rackspace in Sales
• Staying excited by the speed of change
• Mentorship
• OpenStack as a breakout moment
• How do you find a mentor
• How people persons selects there own (get to know everybody)
• Informal Mentorship
• Working as a quota carrying nerd
• How Evangelism is the fun part of the sale
• Life continuing in your career — getting married, having kids
• KPIs and metrics
• More business happens due to social influence
• Help sales people scale with social
• Flaky title is okay as long as you’re connected to the business
• Learning is on you – YouTube, Podcasts, Twitter searches
• Are Evangelists born or made?
• Word of mouth marketers better tell great stories
• Serious knowledge — expertise — is part of Evangelism
• Can you survive on just passion?
• Looking at things with a critical — even a skeptical — eye
• Huge shoutout to Hubspot
• Career path growth
• Teslas as cool technology (and the 0 to 60 videos)
• Follow your passion and the job will follow
• “I think I want to be an evangelist”
  “Then go do the f-ing work!”
• Laura Dunn’s interview of Niki Acosta

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