Most people would describe my path as a jump from sales into software. I don't see it that way. I see three careers that taught me the same lesson from three different angles: the niche only shows up when you talk to the humans in it.
Enterprise sales and account management at Samsung, Panasonic, and Wrangler taught me how businesses actually buy — reading a market, building distributor-facing forecasts, and turning key accounts into long-term relationships. As Key Accounts Manager for Samsung Electronics I ran all business unit operations for an entire region and was the top out-station sales performer in 2014.
Curiosity pulled me out of sales entirely. Four years freelancing as a software developer and data scientist, then two years as a full-time Backend Developer at CodeVidia, building Laravel/PHP applications and REST APIs. This is where I earned the ability to sit in an engineering conversation as a peer, not a translator.
Project Manager at CodeVidia, then Technical Project Manager partnering directly with the founder of ClientWise to grow an MVP into a real LegalTech platform — while running my own practice, Haraya Solutions, helping other founders do the same. Today I lead Agile delivery at ACE FMS. Across all of it, the throughline has never been the ceremonies. It's been sitting with a founder and asking who this is really for.
I don't believe successful software starts with features.
It starts with finding a niche — and a niche only reveals itself through human creativity, not market data alone.
Whenever I work with a founder, I try to answer five questions before we talk about technology at all. Every one of them is really the same question, asked from a different angle: who is the actual human on the other side of this, and what do they need that no one else is giving them?
It's the combination — commercial experience, technical understanding, product discovery, and delivery leadership — that adds up to a founder partner.