Another day, another “Behind the Enc-urtain” with Dillon Carrico, our Commercial Associate who joined the Go-To-Market team almost 2 years ago. He joined as a founding BDR, back when our Sales team was a one-person team (Leo – our Head of Sales) and grew from sourcing new opportunities to also running deals himself, onboarding new members of the team, hosting events, running growth experiments, and serving as solutions engineer in customer demos.  Dillon’s day to day amongst various other things involves working with the next generation of Encord users – some of the world’s leading AI & ML teams building cutting-edge applications.

Our Commercial Associate team at Encord have a huge impact on which direction we head as a company – they have a huge influence on driving expansion in markets that could best benefit from our products and identifying use cases and products for our engineering team to focus on.  So let’s get the run down from Dillon himself!  

To kick things off, share with us one of your favourite Encord memories?

That’s a tough question. If I had to choose one, it would probably be my first GTM offsite in Notting Hill, London. I was in Week 2 at Encord, and it was a day packed with work-related and more personal activities that made it a great way to get to know everyone really quickly. 

We started out with a presentation from our co-founders and team leads about the current state of affairs in each of the GTM functions. I remember I was really impressed and surprised by how transparent everyone was and how eager to hear people’s perspectives and stories. I now realise that’s very much part of our culture – an open environment, where we are encouraged to share thoughts/ideas/feedback or suggestions – but that was something I found surprising (in a good way) at that point.

After that, the founder of one of our customers joined us for a fireside chat. Their company is one of the big Generative AI companies, so it was quite cool to see him right there and be able to ask questions and chat.
The day ended with some fun team building exercises, followed by a private dinner at a local gastropub.

What 3 words would you use to describe the Encord culture?

Ambitious, Customer-Centric and Collaborative. 

Whether you are from the Sales team, or the CS team or the Product team - we all function together like one well oiled machine.

There are many times where I’ve had a technical question about the product and I just walk over to the engineering or product team members and they are more than happy to answer them for me. We have also created an environment where one does not feel afraid to ask questions and no question is a silly question. This all boils down to all of us feeling a deep sense of purpose and connection to the vision and mission of the company.

What are you most looking forward to at Encord this year?

2024 has a lot of very exciting and major updates for us at Encord and the first thing that comes to my mind is our Series B funding. We are thrilled to continue building a world class data development product that is used by more than 150+ customers. It truly shows what 60 brilliant minds can achieve together. Cannot wait to see what the next phase of growth Encord has in store!

With the CS team listening closely to our customers' needs and our Product & Engineering team iterating quickly on what they want - we launched Encord Index, which helps to create high quality datasets to power AI models at a scale without compromising on speed or security.

Lastly, we’ve recently expanded to San Francisco, the AI Hub. Having joined Encord in the early stages of its GTM journey, I’m incredibly proud to see how far we’ve come so I’m looking forward to strengthening our presence there. I've already been to our SF office a few times - including to launch our first ever roundtable event, which brought together 30 customers, prospective customers, and investors and partners. It received awesome feedback from attendees, and the team have adopted it as a new demand gen motion all around Europe (Paris, Milan and Copenhagen), London and the US (NY and Boston).

If Encord was a cocktail/mocktail – what would it be and why?

It has to be the Negroni! It is Ulrik's cocktail of choice and will always find its way into every Encord social - whether it is the monthly social or an offsite.

What’s your favourite Encord Slack emoji and why?

The :dance_vibe: emoji is my favourite - it’s probably the one I use the most. It can be used to celebrate everything from closed won deals to lunch arrivals and it’s also very contagious in spreading good vibes.

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Dillon has been instrumental to Encord's growth and success, from strategizing how to identify our first customers, to improving and contributing to the building of 2 new AI products and to helping close some our biggest partners to date (and as a company, raising our Series B and opening a San Francisco office!). A big thank you to Dillon for all your work - we're so thankful to have you on the team!

See you at the next episode of “Behind the Enc-urtain”! And as always, you can find our careers page here😉