Hello, World! Why I’m At Nuon
Mark Milligan, VP of Revenue, shares his views on the BYOC market opportunity, the culture fit, Nuon's customer momentum and his plans to accelerate revenue at Nuon.
Mark Milligan
VP of Revenue
Culture Fit
I met Jon Morehouse, the founder and CEO of Nuon, over Zoom last year. After a couple of calls, we both remarked that we shared similar but complimentary traits. Jon is the Nuon founder, super technical and with a proven founder-led sales mindset. I am a seller at heart with wins and battle stories across the enterprise, but have a Comp Sci degree and still very technical, all of which have served me, my companies, revenue teams, and customers well. From late 2024 through early 2025, Jon and I would do check-in Zooms updating me on closing the Series A round and opening the San Francisco office in South Park, a tech center of gravity in SoMa.
About Me
Ok, my last company was a DevOps startup called Coder where I grew ARR from 0 to multi-million in 3+ years across enterprises from 2 of the largest banks, several hedge funds, government agencies, and many of the Big Tech leaders including some of the Magnificent 7, and all with the weirdness of the pandemic and the dips of the economy and enterprise buying cycles.
I'm unique in that I've held revenue positions at multiple startups and also some massive companies like IBM, SAP/Sybase, and my first job, in the management training program at Price Waterhouse Management Consulting. I attribute a lot of my complex deal execution skills to my time at IBM, where I was a software account executive on some of the world's largest companies, where I interacted closely with CTO, CIO, and key IT leadership and understand how these companies acquire software. I also co-founded an enterprise mobile software startup and sold it to a publicly-traded software company during the dot com bust - I consider that a very unique feat. I have years of startup and big company experience in enterprise sales with open source, sales-led and product-led growth.
Compliment that with a very technical bent from a Comp Sci degree and being technically curious since childhood. For example, I write random apps in Python, Go, and Rust, and before that Rails and Java, deploy stuff in Terraform, know Kubernetes pretty well and run a cluster on my Mac M3, make container images from Dockerfiles, and can proficiently use the big 3 cloud providers' consoles. I'm probably one of the few VPs of Revenue with an active GitHub account - feel free to check out sharkymark's repositories.
I reside in Austin, Texas - but have lived in Virginia, Maryland, New York City and Boston. Currently, I'm enjoying spending a lot of my time in SF with Jon and the team and being near such a large volume of software vendors, one of our Ideal Customer Profiles. In person time is so much better than remote work for me.
Leadership
Jon and I both see ourselves as leaders but also individual contributors. I’ve noticed over my career, even at massive technology companies, great leaders dive in to do things to move the needle. e.g., join sales calls even early ones that are not qualified. Write up or review customer contract redlines. Update incorrect documentation. Write blog posts. Learn the product well enough to speak credibly to technical economic buyers and decision-makers. Otherwise, you’re like rest of the sheep who delegate and hope someone else will do it. Startups don’t have that luxury and high-performing companies of any size use it as a super power to get things done and take the lead.
The Market Opportunity
In my software sales career, I’ve witnessed first hand the tension between software vendors and their customers around SaaS and self-hosted software. Self-hosted software requires the customer to have internal skills to learn, install and manage the software. That is time and money, both of which are expenses and not driving top-line revenue or profit. SaaS provides convenience for both vendor and customer, but introduces the risk of customer data in a vendor’s cloud. The Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) market, which Nuon leads with its BYOC platform, gives the best of both worlds to customers and vendors. Convenience, ease of management, with security assurances.
Nuon’s Momentum
Fast forward to 2025, Nuon landed additional impressive logos and it was time to bring on a leader like me to both do the work of making these customers successful but lay out just enough process for how enterprise sales is done, build a team, close new customers, establish partnerships and ensure all customers are getting the value out of their Nuon investment.
Our customer base came from early adopters reading one of the Nuon blog posts about BYOC. Replaying some of the customer calls or reading the shared Slack channels show these customer thought leaders clearly expressing in their own words the challenges they face deploying their vendor software for customers and driving revenue growth. Then a second order effect has taken hold. We see the vendors, who are our customers, migrating their customers over to the Nuon platform. It is a magical thing to witness on checkpoint calls or in Slack when they update us about their next customers they moved to Nuon.
The Right Time
Nuon’s progress and traction are indicators that Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is a transformational trend in technology within enterprises. JPMorganChase recently included BYOC in their top global IT trends of 2025 report. Reviewing software vendor websites of all sizes, you will notice a long tail of deployment options. It’s indicative of vendors providing alternatives to only SaaS or self-hosted, but what’s missing is an off-the-shelf platform like Nuon to automate BYOC and let vendors stick to their core competency, writing software and not rolling their own DevOps and BYOC platform. Sometimes when something is ripe for innovation and a better way, customers resort to home-spun solutions that look messy but struggle to support a myriad of use cases like deployment options in this case.
Customers are also deploying multi-cloud strategies for risk mitigation and keeping the cloud providers honest. A vendor should not be going down the rabbit hole of multi-cloud support and instead leverage a BYOC vendor like Nuon to figure this out and even better support the cloud providers over time. In fact, some vendors resort to supporting one or a limited set of cloud providers for ease of support and cost control.
Conversely, Nuon does not prescribe to a philosophy of run your application anywhere. BYOC vendors who claim this are making opinions and compromises and you should be wary of their approach. As the acronym implies, BYOC is about Clouds, customer Clouds in particular, and Nuon is laser focused on making our platform provide an easy-to-manage security contract between the vendor and its customers, to securely and safely operate software in their clouds.
Infrastructure as Code in and of itself is not the cure to BYOC. Yes, some Terraform or name your IaC tooling can do the under-the-hood provisioning of application components, but what is missing is a packaged platform with a built-in durable execution engine, a higher-level of abstraction and configuration structure, a CLI, an intuitive dashboard user interface, logging and state management of everything that goes on when configuring and installing vendor applications with Nuon into customers' cloud accounts. That is a new software category. We call it BYOC. Nuon is the standard.
My Role & Impact
As mentioned before, the DNA of any Nuon team member and leader is to lead by example and do the ground-level blocking and tackling that drives outcomes for not only customers but also across the company functions like Revenue, Marketing, Engineering, Customer Success and Support.
What's Not Going To Happen
I'll keep it short, but no sports analogies, elaborate sales stage charts, or steak dinners with prospects. Technology sales has evolved. Most potential customers know everything about your product before they ask to speak with you. Nuon will dial to hiring team mates who add value not noise when prospects and customers engage.
Just Enough Process
In the near-term, I spend a lot of my time individually knocking out items like basic revenue system infrastructure to capturing any inbound communication like a Demo request or Nuon Trial request, to reframing product documentation and Changelogs to be frequently updated. It also involves using the product and testing it frequently - for the Engineering team to iterate with.
Over time, this is understanding, communicating and prioritizing customer needs to engineering and product management. Hands down, this is a critical skill for sellers, sales engineers and customer success managers to master - since engineering writing a product in vacuum is not a good outcome. In the time I've been at Nuon, the internal Slack discussions and standup meetings where we discuss and prioritize items - are priceless and productive.
I also believe the Nuon platform needs to come to life with actual application configurations so recently started a blog post series where our team builds App Configs for vendor software - to literally show the world how software can be installed and maintained with Nuon. If you are a reputable vendor reading this and want to be considered as part of this blog post series, tell us more.
The Network and Experimentation
I am already engaging previous prospects and customers from my career, where I'm seen as a trusted advisor. I view these less as sales calls but an opportunity to get ground truth feedback on the BYOC market and Nuon's feature set. So a product feedback loop of sorts. And hopefully some of these will progress to trials and happy customers. It is also an opportunity to experiment and explore new Ideal Customer Profiles and Market Segments for Nuon.
Targeting
And then the preparation and persistence of identifying target accounts, looking up and communicating with decision-makers, and doing it methodically and daily. That is what real Revenue teammates do, and if they don't want to, they are not a fit for a startup and in my eyes, any company.
What is not moving the needle or as I would say Playing Office - is creating a Sales Stage chart, over-engineering a sales deck, over customizing a CRM, documenting process - the list goes on. We all know it, when we see it.
Empathy
I believe empathy drives my revenue philosophy where I want everyone at Nuon to feel what it is like to be a prospect or customer of Nuon, from first website visit to conducting a trial, to asking questions in the Slack community, to going into production and rolling their customer installs onto Nuon.
Mid-term and Beyond
Mid-term and beyond is about leveraging assets we have built - from customer-facing (deck, documentation, blog posts) to onboarding (FAQ, CRM hygiene, enablement) to ramp the new members of the Revenue team so they can be productive as quickly as possible. I’ve remarked about this on the Revenue section of my personal website, but venture-backed startups require a different set of processes and people to be successful and productive. Once your product is popular and everyone wants it, it’s more about speed and shall I say order taking where you want a team enabled to move leads quickly down the sales funnel to close. Any seller who conflates order taking with their over achievement is not being truthful and taking credit for something they did not entirely contribute to.
Top of Funnel
A lot of my energy is being spent on marketing and building top-of-funnel which primarily means partnering with Jon to author and recommend people at Nuon to write content like blog posts. It also involves getting Jon in front of tech reporters and conferences to continue branding Nuon as the BYOC leader. In fact, most of the CRM process setup I’ve put in place already is about creating a system of record for all inbound and outbound touch points, so that Nuon can run analytics and easily slice and dice to market with social media and email.
Our Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) include primarily software vendors and enterprises who want to use vendor software in a BYOC way or who are globally massive and serve software to distributed departments and who need easier-to-manage multi-cloud and multi-environment application deployment and maintenance.
Market Segments
In the weeks and months to come, you will see additional messaging and content on the Nuon website that are receptive to the ICPs but also Target Market Segments which are high propensity adopters of Nuon like software vendors in categories such as Database, AI, Managed Service Providers (MCP), Observability and many more.
Business Development Representatives and Account Executives will be assigned to specific accounts in these Target Market Segments to discover leadership contacts with Job Titles who are decision-makers or economic buyers of products like Nuon - and then secure meetings to learn about the benefits of Nuon.
Customer Success
But I would argue most important at this stage and for years to come - is putting the attention to detail in Customer Success and Support. This is not a matter of investing in a bunch of tools, but more about learning best practices both from our collective previous experiences and also what is unique to Nuon. For example, at Nuon, we use Nuon to install Nuon’s control plane into vendors’ public clouds, which is then used to install their software into their customers’ cloud. I can’t think of a better proof point that Nuon’s software is used to power Nuon control plan installations - we call this dog fooding - but it requires an attention to detail to ensure our cloud delivery, incident tracking, and patch and release management is as crisp and documented as it can be.
Another example are the docs. One of the first things I did was to form an initiative to cleanse the docs to be current with the product, including a working example App Config repository. Going forward, everyone at Nuon will update the docs quickly so that customers and prospects in a trial can self-help. Evaluators expect nothing less and appreciate vendors who value their time investigating their products.
We are also stepping up the Q&A in the Slack community and encourage all trial users to pop in there and ask away. As we see repeated questions and answers, we will populate an FAQ section in the docs for quick Cmd/Ctrl+F search.
Partnerships
Nuon cannot do it alone so another aspect of scaling Revenue is to broaden the lens to convince larger technology, cloud and services providers to partner with Nuon to expand their offerings while providing incentives for both parties to invest in these relationships. Customers expect a partner ecosystem. It mitigates risk and exponentially establishes leverage for Nuon to capitalize on the market opportunity in front of us. If you want to discuss partnering, please fill out the form.
Investor Community
At some point, Nuon will secure additional financing so I view all of this as a portfolio of capacity (staffing) plans, process, forecasting and campaigns to drive revenue - that new investors require in due diligence. Jon will pull me in as needed to communicate this market and revenue vision to investors as well.
Thoughtful Team Building
Nuon is my tenth startup. A couple patterns around hiring are: 1. Not everyone is a good fit for a startup. 2. Success somewhere else, even at a startup, does not guarantee success at another startup.
A corollary to 1 is not everyone knows they are a bad fit and some people have the wrong reasons to join a startup like hit it big, get rich, soak in the perks and benefits. People who thrive at startups don’t even feel like they are working; they are adding value, problem solving and having fun.
I find the best persona fit for startups in both Revenue and other departments, have traits of an Operator, which is a military Special Forces term for personnel like Navy SEALs, Delta Force - who are really good at doing multiple things. Operators are inspiring since they can do many things, and cost-effective, since you don’t have to hire as many people. Oh, and customers love Operators - they feel they are in good hands. Nuon has lots of Operators and I witness it first hand on customer calls.
The opposite of Operators are Specialists. There’s a place for Specialists but not really at this stage of a startup. In general, you outsource if you need a Specialist versus a full-time hire but there will be a time for them as we accelerate growth and after later funding rounds.
So with these principles in mind, Nuon will be seeking Operators in Revenue functions over the next few months. We will not rush a hire, but rather take a page out of the Netflix playbook of Hire Slow, Fire Fast, and the Keeper Test where if a member of the team was thinking of leaving, would you fight hard to keep them? I prefer to have choices than pick from a limited pool or a specific person, and under a short time period.
Conclusion
The opportunity in front of Nuon is unlimited - being the de facto standard of Bring Your Own Cloud for thousands of software vendors and even more enterprises who want the convenience of SaaS with the data sovereignty and security of self-hosted software.
I look at this journey pragmatically with knocking out tasks and goals, one day, one week at a time. Little wins, happy customers, just enough process to rapidly onboard the next team member, and create a Revenue culture of helping customers and winning. Both are not mutually exclusive.
There will be challenges, every day. But I’m a problem solver as are the team at Nuon, so as problem solvers know, it’s only fun when you’re solving problems. If it was easy, it would be boring and no fun.
So with that, follow us on LinkedIn or X, keep checking the Changelog for new features, and be bold - as a prospect to start a Trial or tell us about your company’s application deployment challenges. If you think you have revenue skills to contribute to Nuon’s success, stay tuned for job descriptions or reach out to me on LinkedIn.