Zachary

Zachary's story

Zach started working in restaurant kitchens at 13. One summer, a family friend who imported food from Spain offered to take him along on restaurant deliveries in New York City. One of the stops was a Spanish restaurant in Greenwich Village run by an award-winning chef. The importer offered the chef a discount in exchange for letting the kid into the kitchen. The chef handed Zach a knife, watched him mince a pile of pearl onions, and offered him a prep cook job on the spot. By the end of that summer, he was working the line.

That apprenticeship carried him through high school and college. When it came time to pick a university, the only schools offering him real scholarship money were culinary programs. He turned them down. Culinary school was meant to get you into the kitchens he was already working in, and the math didn’t make sense. He took a scholarship at a liberal arts school in North Carolina instead, and ended up in the inaugural cohort of their sustainable food systems degree, with religious studies as a minor.

When everything stopped

After graduation, Zach went back to New York and into restaurant management. He was running a steakhouse by early 2019. By the end of that year, the pandemic had wiped out the industry. Rather than wait it out, he started a nonprofit distributing thousands of pounds of free food to New Yorkers, and ran it full-time for a year without ever taking a salary.

This was the period Zach calls his biggest failure. Since the age of 11, when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he had answered “I want to own a conglomerate.” When the pandemic killed his restaurant career, he was convinced he had failed at the only thing he had ever said he wanted.

“I had been convinced that I was a failure. Everyone said I was going to go far, that I’d get that conglomerate. Here I was, not even with my own business. And thank God I failed, because I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t.”

The pivot into tech

Restaurants stayed shut, so Zach took a tech sales job. He knew how to talk to people and understood technology at a high level. The company he joined was a large enterprise reseller that carried over 200 vendors, and he was part of the very first cohort of their inaugural sales academy. Instead of learning one product, he had to learn an enormous portfolio at once. He racked up so many certifications during that stretch that when he went to update his resume, he had to hyperlink them to a separate document.

At the reseller, becoming the lead Account Executive on a Fortune 100 customer meant waiting your turn behind dozens of senior salespeople already assigned to that customer’s account team. Startups recruited Zach with a promise to skip the wait: come work for us and you can be an AE on day one. What they didn’t say out loud was that “Account Executive” at a startup meant doing five jobs at once: partnerships, channel, engineering, supply chain, recruiting. By title he was still in sales. In practice, he was already operating as a technologist.

His next role pushed him further in that direction. He was hired as an AE to sell cybersecurity products to big banks, except the company wasn’t actually licensed to sell those products yet. So before he could close a single deal, he had to source and onboard over 40 cybersecurity vendors to build out the portfolio himself. That work eventually brought him to his current company through an acquisition.

The pivotal moment

The NextWork story starts at the startup. Zach was pestering his subject matter experts to teach him how to build a CI/CD pipeline. They kept brushing him off. “Zach, this is a 40-hour project. I don’t have time. Maybe in a few months I can explain a few things to you.”

So he found NextWork, did the full CI/CD project path on his own, and said nothing about it. He waited until he was on a customer call with the same expert, and at the end, casually dropped the repo.

“And by the way, I made that pipeline. Here’s the repo. Mic drop.”

That same expert, rather than being annoyed, is the person who ended up referring him into the role he holds today.

Today

Zach is now an AI Subject Matter Expert at a major cybersecurity company, on the pre-sales team for their newest AI security products. He sits between product, marketing, engineering, sales, and leadership, helping bring brand new AI solutions to market. The product he covers is so new that part of his job is writing the documentation as he goes.

He’s still one of the few NextWork members with a portfolio from the early days, and he still treats GitHub the way other people treat social media: a steady scroll of new repos, with over 700 starred in the last six months.

“You came to the right place, and you’ll only get the most out of it if you inspire others. This space is free, and it only gets better the more people are here. Bring people in the same way that others brought me in, and you will gain exponentially more value from it.”