Zinier

The company

Field service, made to flow.

Zinier builds an intelligent field service platform: the scheduling, dispatch, and routing that keep technicians moving and infrastructure running. It is the kind of software most people never see and everyone depends on, the invisible layer between a service request and a person showing up with the right part.

I joined in San Francisco in 2020, on the heels of a $90M Series C led by ICONIQ Capital with Tiger Global, Accel, and Founders Fund along for the ride, at the exact moment when a young company that had raised big had to learn to operate like it.

The challenge

A rocket ship that needed re-plumbing mid-flight.

Raising $90M and operating like a company worth that trust are two different achievements, and the second one cannot be wired. When I arrived, Zinier had the capital, the market, and the ambition; what it needed was a turnaround in how it executed. Growth had outrun the machinery underneath it, and the fixes could not be sequenced politely one at a time: strategy, go-to-market, and product all needed attention at once, while customers kept calling and technicians kept driving.

That is what made it the right kind of hard. A turnaround inside a well-funded scale-up is not about survival; it is about closing the gap between what a company is and what its cap table says it should be.

My part

Two years, four workstreams.

My two years there were really two jobs wearing four hats. The scannable version:

• The turnaround: side by side with the founder and the CEO, defining the strategy and developing the execution plan
• The change agent role: stepping into whichever function a plan needed hands in, and carrying the change through
• The go-to-market review: the entire motion, from how deals were sourced to how customers were kept
• The product chapter: as Director of Product, pushing Zinier from a collection of features toward a true platform, with a strong mobile offering at its core, because field service lives or dies in a technician's pocket

What I learned

The operator's education.

Consulting teaches you to find the answer; operating teaches you that the answer is maybe a fifth of the job. The rest is change management with real people, real incentives, and a real Monday morning: getting a sales team to run a new motion, getting engineering and field operations to trust the same roadmap, making the plan survive contact with the quarter.

I also learned to move between altitudes without losing the thread: the spreadsheet view in the morning, the roadmap view in the afternoon, and a customer escalation in between. That range, ops to product to strategy and back, became the way I work.

What it set up

The chapter before Pod.

Two years operating inside someone else's scale-up, moving between the spreadsheet view and the roadmap view, was the ops-to-product education that made founding Pod possible.