About Paul

I've spent two decades building customer functions inside high-growth companies

Most CX advice is aspirational. Mine is operational — I've developed the playbook by engaging with thousands of customers. I’ve solved the toughest problems — overloaded support teams, very demanding large customers, channel conflict, dysfunctional tension between Sales and Customer Success, and churn risk due to outages and product issues.

I launched my Advisory Services practice because the part of the work I love most is the early, messy stretch — when a team knows something is off but can't quite name it. That's where I'm most useful: helping leaders see the system they're inside of, and rebuilding the parts that are quietly costing them.

I started at McKinsey & Company, learning how to focus on key levers to improve business performance. I worked side by side with some of the brightest minds in the world, developing strategic solutions for CEOs of major corporations.

For the next two decades I built and ran customer functions inside companies you've heard of. Director of Global Solutions & Services at LinkedIn, where we grew bookings from $400M to $1B+ and I built a global field organization of 200+ professionals. VP of Customer Success at Nutanix, where we hit 132% net expansion at 97% gross retention. SVP of Customer Success at Flexential, where I ran Customer Success, Support and Implementation: we lifted NRR by sixteen points. Earlier I led sales and enterprise channels at Google, was a Customer Success Director at Gainsight, and ran the enterprise business unit at BrightEdge. The thing all those roles taught me is that customer success isn't just a discipline — it's a load-bearing wall, and most companies don't realize how much of the building rests on it.

I built and led the dedicated Customer Success consulting practice at Vista Consulting Group — the in-house consulting arm of Vista Equity Partners ($107B AUM). Working across the portfolio gave me something I hadn't gotten as a single-company operator: a comparative view. The same five or six failure patterns kept showing up — at the marketing automation leader, the performance management vendor, the insurance-agency software company, the compliance vendor, the education-technology vendor. Different industries, same key levers.

I'm based in Palo Alto, work remotely with selective travel, and take on a small number of clients at a time so the work stays sharp. MBA from Tuck at Dartmouth College (graduated with Distinction; Edward Tuck Scholar — top 10% of class), BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley.