Welcome back to another episode of “Is That How It Happened?” — the show where we dig into the stories behind the people, the paths, and the pivotal moments that shape careers and lives.

Today, I’m excited to welcome Fadel Hamed, Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Cloudian. With decades of experience leading customer-focused teams in the tech space, Fadel brings a unique blend of strategic insight, operational excellence, and human-centered leadership.

In this conversation, we dive into the core of what customer success really means — not just in theory, but in practice. Fadel shares his journey from the early days of his career to becoming a trusted voice in enterprise technology, and the lessons he's learned about building lasting relationships, scaling global teams, and navigating the ever-evolving demands of customers in the data-driven world.

Whether you’re in tech, leadership, or just curious how great customer experiences are crafted and maintained — you’re going to want to hear this.

Let’s get into it.

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Some people collect titles. Mike McGhee, Senior Vice President at eplus, collects relationships — and after four decades in the technology channel, the return on that investment speaks for itself.

In this episode, Van sits down with one of the people who helped shape his own career in technology, a Richmond, Virginia native who has been attending the same church since 1971, still golfs with his high school crew from Freeman, and will tell you without hesitation that faith, family, and friends come before everything else — including the job.

But don't let the warmth fool you. This is a guy who helped build Slate Technology into a powerhouse Mid-Atlantic VAR, navigated a Cisco layoff on the eve of 9/11 from a hotel room in San Diego, guided the acquisition of Slate by eplus, and is now overseeing multiple regions — from Southern Virginia deep into Texas — with the same philosophy he's carried his whole career: surround yourself with people smarter than you, never burn a bridge, and always leave it better than you found it.

Mike and Van go deep on what it actually means to build a career on relationships rather than resumes, why "who you know" gets you the seat at the table to show "what you know," and how the lesson of a father's dinner bell echoing across a Richmond neighborhood still shapes how Mike thinks about presence, accountability, and showing up.

They also get into where AI is really landing with customers right now — and why the honest answer is "all over the map" — before wrapping with the story of a first date involving stuffed grape leaves that Mike's wife has apparently never forgiven him for.

If you work in technology sales, if you're early in your career and trying to figure out how the game is actually played, or if you just want to spend 45 minutes with someone who has genuinely lived what he preaches, this one is for you.

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In this episode of Is That How It Happened?, The Vanimal sits down with Jim O’Brien, Senior Business Development Manager at TalentCraft, where he helps high-growth companies at the intersection of cloud data, AI, and deep tech find the people who actually make transformation happen. We get into how AI infrastructure teams really scale, why great recruiting is more about human signal than hype, and what Jim is seeing on the front lines of hiring in AI, quantum, and next‑gen tech.

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