Danish Khan

Advisor 🤝 and Investor 🚀

Early GitHub 🐙🐱 and Travis CI 🚜👷🏽‍♂️ employee

Check out my work history on LinkedIn

Email me any time 📥 or find me on Twitter 🐦

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Are you a devtools founder? Explore my services to learn how I can assist you.

Services

Leveraging my foundational experiences as the second sales engineering hire at Engine Yard, the third sales hire at GitHub, and the head of enterprise at Travis CI, I specialize in guiding tech companies through the complexities of engaging engineering organizations. My expertise lies not only in effectively reaching and persuading developers but also in navigating the broader landscape of technical decision-makers and influencers. This holistic approach ensures the development of robust sales strategies that resonate with every level of an engineering-focused organization.

Copilot

  • Strategically identify your first design partners to lay a robust foundation.
  • Help in fine-tuning messaging to resonate with potential design partners.
  • Be the guiding force in navigating the sales process, from initial contact to closing deals with design partners.

Fractional Head of Sales

  • Nuture the relationships with your early customers.
  • Define and refine your Ideal Customer Profile to target efforts effectively.
  • Develop and standardize a replicable sales-cycle process tailored to your unique market.

Building Your Founding Sales Team

  • Expert guidance on hiring and establishing efficient sales processes.
  • Assistance in identifying key roles essential for your team's success.
  • Comprehensive onboarding strategies to ensure your team members are equipped and aligned with your goals.

Interested in a speaker for your next conference? Watch some of my previous talks to see how I engage and inform audiences.

Talks

Everyone's in Sales

Whether you like it or not you are doing sales all the time. Convincing your boss to use a new tool, applying for a job, and getting a freelance contract all require selling. If you work for a product company even if you are a developer when you talk about your product you are selling. When people think of sales they immediately think of the sleazy car salesman stereotype, but that is a very negative view of sales. Sales doesn't have to be done that way. The fact is everyone is doing sales all the time. Being aware of that fact and spending some time to learn a bit about how to do sales the right way will help you talk about your product and convince your boss to try something new you think will be good for the team.

Sales is an important skill that everyone needs to know about. It can help someone with their career or product. Even being aware of the fact that you are selling something can help a conversation you are a part of.

Slides

Video

WebCamp Zagreb 2014

Tao of Documentation

Most developers hate having to do documentation, yet we complain about how tools and libraries we use lack documentation. So, the question is how do you get developers to write good documentation without having to feel like they are wasting their time. There are plenty of good documentation tools out there such as TomDoc, YarDoc, and RDoc. These tools are useful for creating documentation for tools, gems and varies open source projects and each one has it's unique way of making documentation easier for developers.

How do you manage documentation for a product? At Engine Yard we have our AppCloud product and having good external documentation for our customers is very important to us. We want to make sure they can easily understand how to use our product and be able to accomplish what they need. However, it has been difficult to get good documentation out quickly.

Slides

Ruby Community

Ruby is now almost two decades old. It has become a very mature language. The developers who have been using Ruby are a lot more experienced now. Our community has long since crossed the chasm and we are in the early majority stage. Even though we have many people who are well versed in the language we are again experiencing an influx of new developers.

I want to help those new developers feel comfortable enough to believe they can learn and become just as involved as the older developers. Also, I want to make sure that the older developers understand how they can help these new developers that are coming into our community. There are things we can do to make sure our community grows with great people and projects that are useful for everyone. I want the Ruby community to show the Open source community how we should be treating each other so that amazing things can be done.

Slides

Videos

  • Rubyfuza 2013
  • Scottish Ruby Conference 2012
  • Sapporo Ruby Kaigi 2012
  • Rails Israel 2012
  • Get your game on with GitHub

    Whether new to version control or just needing a thorough explanation of Git and GitHub, this talk will help you grasp the concepts of distributed version control and effectively begin using the GitHub suite of tools. You'll explore both Git concepts and typical GitHub workflows through practical demonstrations. We'll showcase our collaboration workflows, branching and merging, undoing mistakes. We'll also show you how you can host your web-based games on GitHub Pages.

    Video

    Game Developer Conference 2015

    Danish Khan GDC Talk

    Looking for compelling content for your newsletter? Browse through my previous posts to see the insights and value I can bring to your readers.

    Posts

    Technically Newsletter

  • What does Heroku do?
  • What does Postman do?
  • Engine Yard Blog

  • Engine Yard Documentation 2.0
  • Tao of Documentation
  • Cache Money: Why utilize caching
  • Resources for starting with Ruby on Rails
  • Getting setup for Ruby on Rails development
  • Announcing the Engine Yard Podcast
  • Engine Yard AppCloud in Chrome Web store
  • Terminitor: Hasta La Vista Redundant Commands
  • Seeking investment for your startup? Discover the types of companies I'm passionate about investing in.

    Investments

  • StackShare
  • Gumroad
  • Abbot (Shutdown)
  • Confidants
  • CoScreen (Acquired by Datadog)
  • Seam
  • Dashcam
  • Avy AI
  • Limitless AI
  • Yetto
  • Workbrew
  • Curmudgeon Ventures

  • Supermove
  • Madkudu
  • Gradio (Acquired by Hugging Face)
  • Offsight
  • Swantide
  • Shipyard
  • ReadySet
  • Reforge
  • Optic
  • Panobi
  • Subsalt