Bootstrapping A 130 Million VAR In The Midwest: Ahead CEO Dan Adamany (Part 1)

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Dan Adamany is the founder and CEO of Ahead, a leader in cloud computing. Prior to Ahead, Daniel played a pivotal role in EMC’s rise to prominence, winning several national awards for leadership and performance. Daniel is also involved in several entrepreneurial ventures within various industries, including real estate, hospitality, and entertainment. He has a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Sramana: Dan, let’s begin by tracing the steps of your journey. Where were you grow up?

Dan Adamany: I grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We were on the east side of Green Bay, so I had mid-sized schools to attend. My mother was a dietitian and my father owned a restaurant. I had some visibility into entrepreneurship through them. From the time I was five, my mother ran her own business as an interior designer. She made a big career change, but she still does that today.

Sramana: Where did you go to school and what did you study?

Dan Adamany: I went to college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and my undergraduate degree is in mechanical engineering. When I was in school engineering students did co-ops or internships. I did internships for Ford in their rapid prototyping area. It was autoCAD design and real engineering stuff. There was very little human interaction, and I did not enjoy it. My next co-op was with Siemens in their power generation division working with sales teams. I loved it. When I graduated, I ended up taking a job in sales with IBM.

Sramana: Was that based out of Wisconsin?

Dan Adamany: I was based out of Chicago. They hired new recruits out of school into training programs. It was a six-month program that was a corporate acclimation. We did some cold calling and etiquette lessons. After six months, they sent you off to different areas of the country and the company. Some went to service and others to severs. I was deployed into the storage business in Chicago.

After six months of training, I took a job selling a product layer in the storage business. I did that for about a year and a half. EMC was rising to prominence throughout the 1990s, so I left IBM and went to work for them in 1999, also in Chicago.

Sramana: It sounds like that was the genesis of entrepreneurship for you. What was going on in your head through the EMC process?

Dan Adamany: I left IBM, which was a large, structured company and went to EMC which had 2,000 employees. It was a very entrepreneurial environment. They threw you out on the street and you had to make stuff happen. If you did well you were compensated well, if you didn’t then you were not there very long. I was fortunate to have some competitive accounts so I had a good couple of years at EMC. They put me into management, and then the dot-com bust happened. I ended up moving from a district manager role to a global account manager role. I took over their financial services globally. That was a great experience for me because I did not travel that much as a kid, so I was able to travel and see how business was done internationally. I did that for four years. I then picked up some fairly large local accounts.

I was with EMC for eight years. Over time they grew and acquired a lot of companies. As a company grows, more processes come in place and things get more rigid. Opportunity to make money became more scarce. In 2007 I decided to leave. When I was at IBM, I noticed that IBM made channels, and many ex-IMBers were very successful leaving and going to those channels. I saw EMC grow but they were still a direct company. I felt EMC needed to do the channel business as well, so I decided to get out and found Ahead in January of 2007.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Bootstrapping A 130 Million VAR In The Midwest: Ahead CEO Dan Adamany
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