From Classroom Dreams to Sales Engineering Leadership with Clinton Lee | Ep043

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. Manuel: And now if you can kind of tell us, you know, where you grew up and then kind of what was your first introduction into technology and then, you know, kind of work us towards your, you know, eventually career path. Clinton: Yeah, so I’m born and raised in Southern California, like all around Southern California. Some people identify as like, I’m from this area. I’m from that area. I’m from all the areas. (laughing) My parents moved a lot, fortunately and unfortunately, from a very young age, I moved around a lot. And then, you know, it’s funny, I’ve seen people answer this question about technology, how they got into it, and they have these like really cool stories about like all this stuff that, where they, you know, they did this or they did that. I don’t have any of that, but I was a latchkey kid growing up, so I watched a lot of TV, I played a lot of video games, and those are the things I cared about. I watched a lot of movies and cartoons and whatever. Those are the things I cared about. And, you know, as I got older, and, you know, the internet started becoming more of a thing, and I just was like getting access to those things that were interesting to me, but doing them like online was what I wanted to do, right? So, you know, like I said, I played a bunch of video games. I grew up in the 80s, like Nintendo kid, and just like, I remember the first time I played like a game online, I was like, wow, this is like the future of gaming. And so I got to college, and I mean, I grew up, we had dial-up, right? I mean, we had like put the phone on the modem dial-up, you know what I mean? I don’t know if you remember that, that makes me feel old. And I got to college, and it was the first time I saw broadband, right? It was the first time I saw high-speed internet. Like I plugged my computer into the dorm. I didn’t even have an ethernet card yet. Like I still had the, I feel, there’s gonna be young people who listen to this, and they’re gonna be like, what is this guy even talking about, right? But like, I had to go to like Fry’s and buy the ethernet card, because my computer didn’t have one, because we didn’t have high-speed. So I had to buy one just so I can get onto the LAN at my dorm, and it like changed everything, right? Like ESPN, I don’t know, actually ESPN didn’t exist then, ESPN.com didn’t exist then, but like different message boards or whatever that at home would like load like super slow. Yeah. Like, you know, I got to college and it was like, boom, like those things would load like so fast. And I’m like, that’s what I wanna do. So yeah, I went and I started trying to figure out like, how do I do this? Like, what is this, number one? And you find out, oh, like that’s networking, like cool, I wanna do networking. How do I do it? And then I immediately found out like, not at my college. In fact, I was encouraged to like drop out or go to a different school, right? They didn’t have M.I.S. majors, they didn’t have anything like that. Manuel: And at that college, so what was your original intention to go to school for? If you remember. Clinton: I mean, I went, I started as an engineering major. Manuel: Okay. Clinton: So I graduated with an electrical engineering degree, but I went to college because I had to go to college. So I didn’t have a choice. And when I got there, I was like, well, and people, like I was always good at math and science when I was a little younger, maybe like sophomore, junior in high school, I wanted to be a teacher. And my parents were like, no. (laughing) My parents immigrated to this country a year before I was born and they just worked. Like I mentioned, I was a Latchkey kid, they were working all the time. And so when it came to like sending their kid, they didn’t have college degrees or anything like that, sending their kid to college, it was like a big thing. And so, very kind of stereotypical Asian parents, they were just like, no, like you’re not gonna be a teacher. We’re not spending all this money to send you to college to be a teacher or like, you gotta go do something that makes a lot of money. And so I was good at math, I was good at science. So I was like, I’ll do engineering. Manuel: And you said that you eventually ended up completing that degree. And as part of that process, did you kind of start to do internships? Some people did internships, some people like me waited until they graduated and then decided, okay, I’m gonna start looking for jobs. Clinton: Yeah, so once I found out that they really didn’t have any kind of major at my college, right? So there was no MIS at my school. And so I kind of resigned myself to be like, okay, I guess I’m just gonna be an engineer. What’s the closest thing to networking that we have at this school at UCLA? And they’re like, well, you know, you can do computer science. And I was like, I’m not doing computer science. It’s not who I am. And they were like, well, like in electrical engineering, they talk about like signals and signal processing and stuff like that. And so I was like, okay, I’ll go look into that. That’s how I switched from originally I was an aerospace engineer. And I was thinking about going to civil engineering, ended up in electrical because I thought that’s the closest, that’s gonna be my path to getting into networking. And so my internships were all electrical engineering internships, right? And I did manage to get one with, at the time it was McDonald Douglas, but it became Boeing, where like part of the internship was around like an internet working lab. Like that was really exciting to me. And like literally it was like two days of my summer internship. And so that didn’t work out. But it did make me realize like, I can’t do this for my career. Like I can’t do it, right? It just not what didn’t fit what I wanted to do. And so the i...