Episode Information Show Notes Clinton Lee’s career journey reads like a masterclass in adaptability. What started as dreams of becoming a teacher transformed into a successful path through IT infrastructure, customer-side technical roles, and ultimately sales engineering leadership. Currently serving as a Director of Sales Engineering, Clinton shares the pivotal moments that shaped his career, from his first encounter with VMware technology to learning how to overcome introversion in customer-facing roles. Episode Highlights: Early Career Foundation Clinton’s path began at a technical certification school where he learned Windows, Cisco networking, and foundational IT skills. His willingness to take on any challenge—from teaching classes to running cable—set the stage for future growth. The VMware Turning Point Working at Toyota, Clinton witnessed his first vMotion demonstration while servers were being pinged. That “magical” moment sparked a passion for virtualization technology that would define his career trajectory. Transitioning to Sales Engineering Despite initial reservations about sales roles, Clinton made the leap to VMware as a vSAN specialist. He candidly discusses the challenges of being an introvert in a customer-facing position and how he developed the energy and presence needed for success. Leadership Lessons From individual contributor to team manager, Clinton shares insights about developing people, the importance of genuine relationships, and why helping others succeed became his driving motivation. Key Takeaways for Listeners: Technical expertise alone isn’t enough—learn to solve business problems Network authentically and build genuine relationships Great mentors can change your career trajectory Feedback is a gift—always ask for it and act on it Leadership skills can be developed with intention and practice Guest Bio: Clinton Lee is a Director of Sales Engineering with extensive experience in virtualization technologies and team leadership. His career spans customer-side IT infrastructure, technical consulting, and vendor-side sales engineering across multiple industries. Transcription Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode, I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about their career and their experiences, to really understand what they’ve done to be able to kind of manage that career over time. So I’m pretty excited about my guest today. I have Clinton Lee. So he, I know I’ve talked about this in the past, about me working at VMware. He is a big part of kind of how that happened. So, you know, we’ll touch on that, ask him a couple of questions and, you know, get to learn more about his specific career path. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Clinton. Clinton: Hey Manuel: How’s it going? Clinton: It’s awesome, it’s awesome to finally be on here, Manny. Manuel: It’s been a while, so I know we kind of touched base a few times, you know, outside of the podcast. So I was pretty excited to, you know, have you on, talk about your journey and then just kind of that intersection of how we, you know, came across each other. Clinton: Yeah, I’m super excited to do it for sure. Manuel: So if you don’t mind, kind of tell us what your current role is and just a brief summary of some of your roles and responsibilities. And then eventually we’ll kind of work our way towards that. Clinton: Yeah, so I mean, you’re, I mean, this is probably not going to be anything new for you or maybe some of your listeners, but I’m a director of sales engineering. So I manage SEs, you know, they’re called solution engineers, systems engineer, sales engineers, like all kinds of names for what’s basically the same function, which is the technical, you know, in the weeds counterpart to your salesperson at a tech company.
