Collin Hadley

Cisco wants to become the most design-forward company in the world (second only to Apple). It’s not a brand people instinctively associate with design, so I sat down at Config with Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer, to ask him a few questions about how he’s making that happen. Three things that stood out from our conversation: 1. The people closest to the work should present it. When Jeetu started design reviews at Cisco, teams were presenting to their VP, then their SVP, then their SVP’s boss. It took six weeks for a design review to show up on his calendar, so he reworked the process. ICs started presenting directly to execs. That small change led to a shift in thinking that made great design the priority. People started obsessing over the details together. The result was a culture where everyone was expected to identify flaws and to make the product better. 2. Give people permission to care (and explore). Most product builders want to build amazing products. The problem is that large organizations snuff out that instinct. Jeetu and his team helped shift culture at Cisco by getting into the details and giving people at every level permission to do the same. That meant debating ideas openly and chasing the best answer instead of the fastest approval. They rewarded curiosity and craft over hierarchy and titles. People stopped optimizing for process and started focusing on building products customers love. 3. Enterprise should make people feel something, too.  Product builders often assume emotional design matters most in consumer products. Jeetu argued it's just as important in the enterprise. How a product makes you feel will make you choose it over another, and recommend it to others. Cisco obsesses over everything from software interfaces to the fabric on a conference room speaker. The goal is to make products that are functional and elicit a feeling. "Products that appeal to people emotionally sell more than products that don't." A huge thank you to Jeetu for joining me at Config last week. Link to the full talk in the comments!

The best SDRs I know aren't chasing just any quota... They want ownership. Creative control. A product worth talking about. And a manager who actually wants to build something. I'm scaling the GTM and sales development team at Solidus Labs - and I'm building it differently. 🚀 ⚡ Smart, signal-based outbound. AI-first workflows. Direct access to the exec team from day one - and a product that actually matters. We sit at the intersection of digital assets and traditional finance - helping our clients detect market manipulation and financial crime. This isn't a widget. This is infrastructure the financial world runs on. We work with clients like Kalshi as prediction markets go mainstream and regulators start paying close attention. This space is moving fast. We're not watching from the sidelines. No script. No cold calling marathons. Just real ownership and a seat at the table. High performers here get noticed and move fast. If that's you - drop a comment or DM me. 👇 #hiring #SDR #SalesDevelopment #fintech #sales #crypto #digitalassets #tradfi #compliance #predictivemarkets #GTM #outbound #AItools #salescareers #techjobs #startups #NewYork

Whew. We just hosted our first Brooklyn Product Design event for senior-level and above folks! Got to admit, when you're doing a new event for the first time, there are definitely a lot of nerves and stress. Especially since we decided to host the event during NY Tech Week! All of that nerve evaporated as soon as I joined this amazing group composed of designers, researchers, and developers as we chatted about what we're seeing as we navigate this state of change. It was raw, honest, and intimate. I left learning a lot from this fantastic group of individuals and grateful we could host everyone! An especially grateful thank you to the Solidus Labs team for hosting us! Big shout-outs to my co-organizers Collin Hadley and José Arias and the amazing folks that came out to have these conversations together: Yotam Arad, Ben Holmes, Arix King, Sandra Davila, Kexin Cha, Izhar Buendia, Emily Hsu, Julie Kruk, Alicia M., Van Bouzoukas, Nida Hameed, Saasha Gilkes, Brittany Guerrero!

Solidus is closing out a monumental year. We’ve 4x’d our revenue over the last two years, 3x’d our logos, achieved 120%+ NRR, and built a pipeline that’s locked and loaded to do it again — double next year. Those numbers point to one thing: resilience. When we founded Solidus in late 2018 / early 2019, none of us could have imagined the absolute curveballs that would be thrown our way. Three crypto winters — one of them a Siberia-like freeze after the mid-2022 meltdown. We had to pivot our GTM. Take a long-term view. Deploy a logo-acquisition strategy. We made a deliberate bet on the future of the crypto industry as a whole — that the logos we landed early, while small at the time, would grow with us. They did. Across our customer base, we’ve seen 500%+ growth within accounts. And then came challenges that dwarfed market cycles altogether. The war in Ukraine — where many of our team members are based. While managing a crypto slowdown we helped teammates relocate, find shelter, and protect their families. Then another war — in Israel — team members were called into reserve duty. And yet — nothing broke. Those who stepped away were immediately covered by those who stayed behind. R&D KPIs didn’t slip. Execution didn’t slow. As far as our clients were concerned — they didn’t even know our Ukrainian and Tel Aviv brothers and sisters were in the midst of war. This is resilience at the highest level. Solidus was navigating a crypto winter — and not one, but two wars. While much of the crypto industry was winding down, we held strong. We got disciplined with cash. We invested surgically. We grew logos. And quietly, we invested in the underlying tech we believed would become the connective tissue between TradFi and digital assets. By mid-2024, something shifted. TradFi firms — many not even active in crypto — started seeking us out. They wanted frontier tech and a different approach to market surveillance. Without a formal TradFi go-to-market, we felt the market pulling us in — all against the backdrop of a newly appointed pro-crypto administration that blurred the lines between crypto and TradFi. What we kept hearing: “Be our crypto and digital-asset sherpa — and by the way, we’re exhausted by our legacy fixed-income and equities surveillance ops. Can you help?” Institutions now want best-in-class infrastructure for their crypto trading ops — across spot, perps, stables, RWAs, and tokenized securities — spanning both off- and on-chain activity. What’s coming next is even bigger. We’re seeing the early emergence of on-chain capital markets. Issuance, distribution, and management all coming onchain. This is the largest opportunity ahead — and it fundamentally changes what market integrity means. Legacy surveillance stacks weren’t built for this world. Thank you to our clients — we wouldn’t be here without your trust. And thank you to our global team of Solidusians! What a year it’s been. See you in ’26.

Meet Solidus Labs' newest team member, Pepper!