Cloud Enthusiast | Disney Dad | AppDev | DevOps

Vaughn is the Chief Business Officer of Indexnine Technologies US. Bringing several years of B2B and B2C sales and business development management expertise to the company. With a record for building high-performing teams in the information technology and services industry. With a passion for AI, Custom AppDev, Product Engineering, and DevOps, Vaughn specializes in customer-centric sales and account management across all sectors. Through his deep understanding of client needs across levels and knowledge of next-gen tech, Vaughn quickly learns, leverages, and evolves demand generation processes to qualify opportunities and strategic target accounts. Prior to joining IndexNine, Vaughn was a Senior Director with Vention Solutions Inc and a District VP of Sales at LA Fitness. He's owned full sales cycles everywhere throughout his career. 

Whittier College Alumni (GO POETS!).

Incoming Dad rant 😡😵‍💫

I had a moment of crazy frustration doing my taxes the other day. Thankfully, it wasn’t about how  much we owed… it’s about how little actually comes back to parents who qualify for certain tax credits.

Backstory. At two years old we were concerned our oldest, now 6 (going on 16 😒), wasn't learning how to speak well. We were referred to the Stanford Behavioral unit by our amazing pediatrician. After a few sessions he was we were told our son has Autism. We saw it as a blessing and an opportunity for us to evolve as parents. 

Fast forward to today, he's thriving. Tons of time with the amazing "Mrs.Queen" Christine Woods, now he'll recite entire NatGeo shows if you let him. He's been absolutely thriving with an amazing teacher at his Montessori school, reads a few dog man books or a last kids on earth book in a sitting (blows my mind because my ADHD brain can't).

That said.... $15,600 a year for kid K education... Absolutely worth it!! 
Come tax season I was excited because I discovered there’s a dependent care child tax credit and his school qualified 😱

Then I ran the numbers... A $400 credit... 

$15,600 a year for care.
$400 back from Uncle Sam.

In what world does that math work for any family. Especially living in an area of the Bay that isn't as affluent. How on Earth is that supposed to help anything 😭

That might covee the fuel to get him to school for a half the year? Maybe some of his lunches.

We're so grateful he's thriving. We're grateful for that every single day. The program he’s in has been incredible for his development.
But it's a insane to me that more families wouldn't be able to get this kind of support for their kids because it's not financially sustainable. 

And I know I’m not alone in this.

It seems like a ton of the parents I've connected with on Linkedin agree that daycare/school is one of the biggest expenses we have, but the system acts like $800 is some kind of win. Is it a little dramatic to complain about childcare costs… Maybe... Atthe same time... Surprise, surprise, parents across the country are feeling the exact same squeeze. 😱

The worst part is I think there's no good answer. Just a bunch of us figuring it out month to month.
😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

That's the post... No CTA. No AI metaphor... 

If you read a the way here. You're a real one!😁

-Vaughn Soratos-

Vaughn is the Director of Sales, West at iTechArt, bringing several years of B2B and B2C sales and business development management expertise to the company. With a record for building high-performing teams in the information technology and services industry. With a passion for AppDev, cybersecurity, and DevOps, Vaughn specializes in customer-centric sales and account management across all sectors. Through his deep understanding of client needs across levels and knowledge of next-gen tech, Vaughn quickly learns, leverages, and evolves demand generation processes to qualify opportunities and strategic target accounts. Prior to joining iTechArt, Vaughn was District VP of Sales at LA Fitness and owned full sales cycles at SaaS analytics platform company, Sumo Logic.
Whittier College Alumni (GO POETS!).

Sales Leader | Team Builder | AI & Digital Transformation | Disney Dad x 2 | AI-Powered GTM Strategy | $20M+ Revenue Built |

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return”

I hope you all have an amazing Wednesday. 

The last few weeks have been a little tough. I think most sellers would agree that when your time comes to an end at a company there’s always a little bittersweet emotion. For me there was a lot of it, but also ton of learning too! 

I’m excited for the next adventure, more on that soon 😎 but also I'm taking a little time to get my mind, body, sleep, and spirit all aligned and moving in the right direction. 

For now, here's some plant updates 😁
Even in the Northern California "cold" and rain some of the garden is thriving. We have some sugar snap pea sprouts and the chives and rosemary are going ballistic. Little guy is excited to start planning the spring rotation. 

Oddly enough these two connect. In the bitter cold and rain of a career or job change. Whether by your choice or not, it can feel like a Herculean task to overcome. It did for me. My network here showed up in some amazing ways that I didn't realize would happen (at the time). There are amazing humans on this platform to lean on in hard times and to celebrate with during the good times. 

Like my garden there's always sunshine to take in. Even in between storms, take in as much as you can, you'll thrive even more once you've weathered the storm. 

✌🏼

PS. Watching my oldest sprint around the golf course from shot to shot having the time of his life is the best feeling. Even the wet grass and rain couldn't stop him from being the happy high energy version of himself. I'm going to try to take that energy and mindset approach for the next 40+ days. Wish me luck 🤣

Overtime for Gold!?!?!?? 
I can't!! 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😱

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
LETS GO TEAM USA!!!

I had an interesting conversation about AI powered engineering on a friend's post the other day. Oddly enough it was more engagement than my normal posts get 🤣 but it got me curious. 

It seems like there are some who really believe the traditional engineering flow is completely dead. 

PRD → design → "traditional SDLC"
(Whatever that means)

Personally, I agree the loop has been dramatically tightened! There's an ability to prototype, do deep user research, feedback to Design and Eng, and get really good code/features into prod. 
It's faster than ever!! 

I also pushed back a smidge: Software development fundamentals like PRDs, QA, code reviews, and especially security can't be an afterthought. And when I talk PRDs/Doc/Markdowns, I mean these things need to be really deep contextual pieces of information for the AI AND humans who are working on the system down the road.

Living in the Bay, it felt a little contrarian based on my feed.... Surprise, surprise the humans working with their hands on the keyboard on productions systems at scale AGREED. 😱

Imagine the tech guys agreeing with the non techy sales guy on process. It's a new world folks 😎😂

My favorite comment "Humans and AI need deep context and direction" and I'll add, "otherwise they can't effectively collaborate."

What I've seen: 
1) The speed that comes with Claude, Codex, Cursor, and all the latest models is intoxicating. 
2) Teams are shipping faster than ever. But speed without fundamentals creates technical debt that compounds quickly. Especially when you’re transforming legacy code that predates your entire engineering team.
3) Most teams don't know where to start with guardrails to prevent the tech debt proactively. 

Here's a free nugget to the vibe engineers, kluster.ai needs to be in your stack. Especially if you have legacy code that predates everyone on your Eng team. 

I've seen it analyze an entire GitHub repo in real time, checking what Cursor or Claude Code produces before it gets pushed. It catches the mistakes that even senior engineers could miss during review.

One team I worked with reduced code review time because KlusterAI was reviewing over 400,000 lines of code during the development process itself. Not after. During. It's wild to see coding tools talk to each other in real time 😵‍💫

The fundamentals still matter. 
Documentation still matters. 
Context matters 1000x more than it ever did. 

The difference today is we have tools that can bake those best practices directly into the AI’s workflow. It's an asynchronous eng teams dream IMO. 

If your team is shipping fast but worried about what’s getting lost in the speed, let’s talk. I’ve seen and helped teams dramatically improve both quality and velocity without sacrificing one for the other. And the better part, you don't have to pay an arm and a leg either. 

I'm excited to see what happens in the next 12 months!!

If you need to elevate your personal or business brand and content. Jillian Whitlow will give you the unfiltered non AI thoughts people are craving on this platform! It's time to level up your game. 

Plus, who wouldn't want to work with a phenomenal brand like Ink&Honey!

Writing Copy That Sticks | Founder + CEO @ Ink & Honey | LinkedIn Content + Strategy for Founders & Execs | Website Copy | Email Marketing | Maternal Health Enthusiast | Mom x 3 | Hot Sauce Connoisseur 🌶️

For most of my career, I've been a certified, top-notch people pleaser. Until recently, I'd always worked for someone, and I felt (for whatever reason) that if I wanted to get ahead, my best bet was making sure those someones never felt like I was challenging them.

When I went out on my own, I started out the same way — always defaulting to my clients' way of doing things and rarely offering my own opinion. Same with prospecting and selling. I'd look at a post here, for example, and think "Eh, well. They put it out there so they must think it's good enough, right?" 

Turns out, that's one way to guarantee yourself a hard time landing new clients. 

For the first six months or so of owning my business, I rarely bothered with cold outreach. When I did, I always leaned into (over)complimenting my prospect and eventually asking meekly if they might (?) possibly (?) maybe (?) need some support. It panned out a time or two, I guess, but I was mostly ignored.

Now, I lean in. If I see someone with a need in an area I can support, I tell them as much outright. Doesn't mean I'm rude or nasty in my approach, but I have stopped holding back. For example: I sent a connection request to a CEO earlier this week after seeing one of his posts and included a note: "Great insights on _____! Big fan of [COMPANY] so I'll be honest: your post about it reads like ChatGPT wrote it, undercutting your point. I help founders and execs write content that's authentic, rather than algorithmic. Happy to connect if that's interesting."

And you know what? He accepted, and I'm pursuing the conversation further. It seems my direct feedback + value prop was intriguing. 

It may be true that you attract more flies with honey, but at the end of the day, are flies really what you want?

This is very very true. Early on in the AI race we saw the big 4 raise alarms and try to lean into the new world. When you’re that big it’s hard to overcome years of SOPs that are rooted deep into every element of delivery.

Even mid-sized shops took longer to adopt AI and most still don’t know how to be as effective as possible when they’re implementing it into the SLDC with a client.

The dev partner is supposed to bring the expertise and the tooling to work in the client Env
This has been flipped on its head. 

I don’t think we’ll see clients asking for “3 python devs” anymore. Cursor, Claude Code, and the rest are going to force everyone to need to be Full Stack Architects, in terms of how they think. They will need to have have a really deep understanding of a a front end and backend language but also be able to pivot.

Gone are the days of companies hiring the difficult to work with code assassins for $300k.
In this era, soft skills will be the differentiator. Having to think deeply, lead teams, and mentor the next generation to understand complex architectures while having 8-12 agents do the work is coming.

For some startups in the Valley its already here!

If your partner can’t adapt… how do you expect them to help you keep up with your competition?

Building differently in the AI era

Every dev shop is suddenly AI-native. Overnight.

Same team. Same pricing model. New slide website/deck.

If you're pushing your dev partner to "use AI more" and nothing really changes - you're not crazy. 

It’s not an adoption problem. It’s not a capability problem. 

It's a business model problem.

More on that soon!

Global Field CTO. How can I help you on your way?

I didn't expect to spend my Sunday morning bawling over hockey, but here we are.

Don't drive drunk.

Celebrate folks loudly.

Support those that need it.

Love your people.

Find your own Hellebuyck to keep your  goal (but give him the damn MVP afterwards).

taplio

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