Vaclav's Curriculum Vitae

My name is Václav VESELÝ, call me [ˈvaːtslaf], born 1983 in Prague, Czechia. Father of 3 sons Štěpán (*2011), Ondřej (*2014) & Adam (*2016). See my LinkedIn profile. Follow my Mastodon 🐘 profile. Contact me via email. I am native Czech and I speak English and Spanish.

Introduction

Here you will find the achievements that define my professional skills and personality. This is where I keep track of the skills I have and continue to develop to add value to my work and personal life. Why such a long / web form? Because I am a multi-layered character that cannot be described by a simple list, although I am easy going and friendly.

I am writing it down for you, me, my family and anyone interested in using my services. Thank you for your patience 🙏

Professional summary

As you can see from this article, I am organised. I am passionate about digging deep into topics that involve the connection of people & technology. In general, I can say that I am good at connecting people and technology. When someone says it is too complicated and tends to give up, I grab the opportunity and do not give up until I get results. Especially if I learn something new in the process.

All along my journey I have accumulated over 20 years of experience in architecture, operations, management and sales of Information and Communication Technology (ICT / IT). I am naturally extroverted, communicative, willing to motivate, manage, be managed and give a free smile or hug 🤗 when needed. I excel in analytical thinking with attention to detail. I am disciplined and have a natural work & life ethic.

In a nutshell, I position myself as a perfectly balanced blend of Technology Architect & Sales Engineer, Systems / Business Analyst with the goal-oriented behaviour and human networks of a Head of Technical Sales & Delivery. I tend to drift naturally from pure technical sales to touching the bare metal oriented roles where possible. Slowly changing my colour from the usual Windows computer black on white background to the terminal green on black background. Being a white to red hat.

Hard skills

Systems engineering

I use web services, microservices, CI/CD pipelines & open-source software and hardware where possible. Mostly based on Linux Debian distribution, with Docker, docker-compose or Kubernetes with some Drone CI or GitLab CI/CD on top to manage my DigitalOcean cloud deployments and self-managed local AMD, ARM or RISC-V based servers, routers & IoT devices like Raspberry Pi, Gateworks, PC Engines, several Rockchip’s / Radxa’s like Firefly Station M2, Rock 3A, Rock PI 4A, etc. I also have some non-Linux devices like RISC-V Bouffalo Lab BL602. Obviously all of the above is managed from Linux terminal mostly via secure shell / SSH or even UART.

I am proficient at networking, DNS, Traefik reverse proxy, Let’s Encrypt, NGINX and Apache HTTP Server. I am familiar designing REST APIs based on PostgREST, RESTHEART and many others.

On the above described setup I host almost all of services like this blog, web of our family company ICTOI, Mastodon social-network instance named Potla.ch, family domain vesely.us, Joplin, Gitea, Gotify, NTFY, PhotoPrism, Plausible, Miniflux, Node-RED and many other Docker containers.

I know the basics and have used so far Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, Salesforce Platform but I prefer to have a complete overview and management over the platforms preferring self-managed PaaS as cloud is just someone else’s computers – hyper-scaled.

Software development

I deeply understand the underlining principles of software development, but I went a step further. I develop software myself. I always encapsulate documentation and make source-code replicable build environments & Docker based Containerized Applications. I host and use my own Git version control system server based on Gitea and I use self-hosted Drone CI instance for CI/CD. I spend most of my programming time writing, server side JavaScript, Google Apps Script and shell scripts.

I use Node-RED as rapid development platform and data orchestration tool where reasonable and needed. I can decode and deliver basic HTML, CSS and most of the modern languages. Although I do NOT consider myself as full-time programmer I am pretty proficient in writing code although I sometimes inspire my code by Stack_Overflow.

Networking

Most of my networking experience involves Linux-based routers and firewalls. I frequently use Mikrotik RouterOS, FreshTomato, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Yocto Project, pfSense devices and I also run Debian based distro as router / WiFi access point on Gateworks. I maintain several Wireguard network links in addition to some Tailscale meshes. There is still a little OpenVPN too. I am slowly discovering Kea DHCP.

Data processing

I am an expert on Google Sheets, including many of the Google APIs, Google Apps Script. I can do some intermediate operations on SQL/NoSQL databases like PostgreSQL/MongoDB. The most I like querying data via REST API, pipe to jq and orchestrate with tools like Node-RED.

Soft skills

Natural team lead

So far I directly managed smaller teams of ~5 people for more than 5 years with outstanding results. I haven’t had an opportunity to directly manage larger teams, nevertheless the project teams I was part of were lot of the times more than 20 people. I worked at startups with 5–10 people and at corporations with tenths of thousands employees. I consider myself a charismatic and natural leader. I am the third child of my generation in our family, that naturally needed to live with a high portion of politics and win–win decisions. In my own family we have three sons that also need an intensive management and leadership. Even-though not practicing my natural team lead skills I grow them following many leadership sources. I am looking forward to meet the opportunity and transform into reality my natural team lead skills as I presume leadership follows the amount of grey hair on my head.

Analytical thinking

I tend to “deep dive” into topics and analyze them thoroughly. On everyday basis I self educate myself reading or watching through various ICT / IT, technical, political and even spiritual sources from my RSS feed reader, social media, podcasts and YouTube. Base on that I have a very broad and comprehensive understanding of issues that helps me to analyze them and quickly find a suitable solution. To be able to make decisions quickly and effectively, I choose sources I follow carefully not to overload my attention with the everyday ballast.

Technical Sales & Sales Engineering

I am in Technical Sales & Sales Engineering for more than 12 years. I have been part of huge, worldwide and long Technical Sales opportunities converted to deals involving technologies from Google, Salesforce, Microsoft and many others. I have been analyzing, consulting, selling & delivering (cloud) software and/or hardware for more than a decade and I am familiar with almost all the aspect of the technical sales and delivery.

I have been actively using BANT, SPIN, Challenger Sales, MEDDIC and many other techniques of Solution Sales. But finally what works the most is steadily growing trust and build the sales on trust. Trust takes time, but it bears fruit.

Languages

Spoken

Based on Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment ⁹ where B1 means Threshold or intermediate to C1 meaning Effective operational proficiency or advanced

To summarize and explain the ratings. I have worked for multiple years on a day-to-day basis in English. I have managed to consult & sell to clients worldwide in English. Being Czech, not living for a longer period in English speaking countries, I consider my level of English as almost perfect. In Spanish I can manage the basic conversation, I can discuss even more difficult topics, but as the conversation flows I tend to get tired and loose words and traction. So in Spanish there is definitely a place for improvement in spoken and the most in written.

Computer Languages, Programming and Technology Concepts

Capable to actively produce code

JavaScript, Google Apps Script, Shell / Bash, Dockerfile, docker-compose, PlantUML, SQL, HTML, CSS, XML, Markdown and many others

Being able to read and patch

JavaScript, Python, C & C++, PHP, LaTeX and many more

Work experience and achievement

Auditor / Stöger & Partner

Web: Auditor, Period: March 2023 – present, Places: Prague, Czechia, Contract type: Project based / contractor via ICTOI, Roles & responsibilities: CTO | Digitalization Specialist #Audit #Accounting #Taxes #Digitalization

1. Reduced the cost of new servers by almost 20%, while maintaining the same RTO, RPO and uptime, simply by optimising the required compute power, scope of delivery and redefining the utilisation range for the next 7 years of the server’s life.
2. Fully managed, self-hosted NextCloud instance with 600+ active users, across 200+ active clients (as of 01/2024) handling highly available and critical business data.

Mosaic

Short description: Mosaic is a 360° camera hardware and services company based in Prague, Czech Republic. Passionate about building new tools to document the world in ever-increasing quality, frequency, and resolution. Mosaic is the only company in the world building a camera specifically for ground-level mapping and imaging at scale, with available services combining our hardware, logistics know-how, and delivery of data in one integrated package.
Period: November 2022 – January 2023
Places: Prague, Czechia, mostly remote role
Contract type: Project based / contractor via my own company ICTOI

Roles and responsibilities at Mosaic

• Sales Engineer
• Documentation Specialist

Key achievements at Mosaic

1. Streamlined the HubSpot CRM process for lead capture via homepage form, Zapier to HubSpot integration for more automated and organized inbound lead processing.
2. Consolidated, rewrite and restructuralize more than 30 mostly Google Documents, Spreadsheets & Presentations covering completely Mosaic technical documentation.
   • Moving from WYSIWIG document approach to online, self-contained, auto-build, GIT revision controlled, Markdown based with rich media files and interactive 360° panoramas.
   • Deploying it online on a well documented VPS infrastructure as a code (IaC) stack of Debian Linux, Docker, Traefik, Drone CI, MkDocs, Material for MkDocs & NGINX.
   • Creating a high valuable online asset for technical personnel, generating and supporting sales. Ready to serve almost 3 300 unique visitors a day (as of 01/2023).
   • 📎 Mosaic Documentation

TrustSoft Cloud

Short description: TrustSoft is a team of highly skilled Cloud Architects offering rock solid solutions for any type of business creating stable and secure infrastructure and providing top DevOps services to make journey to cloud easy and swift
Period: December 2021 – September 2022
Places: Prague, Czechia, mostly remote role
Contract type: Project based / contractor via my own company ICTOI

Roles and responsibilities at TrustSoft

• Senior Consultant, Business & IT Analyst
• Project Manager

Key achievements at TrustSoft

1. Managed a team of 5 DevOps Engineers to deliver a scale up project of Atlassian Jira service used by approximately 30 000 users in a world largest pharma company from single node on Amazon EC2 to a multi-node / high-availability architecture using Amazon Web Services (ALB, AMI, ASG, EFS, RDS, S3, SG-ALB, SG-EC2, SG-RDS, VPC, Aurora), SonarQube, JFrog Artifactory, Atlassian Jira, Confluence & Crowd, HashiCorp Terraform, Gruntwork.io Terragrunt, Jenkins / CloudBees, Ansible & Vault, Docker & docker-compose, Git & BitBucket
2. The key goals were to reach Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 8 hours and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 8 hours and deliver high availability, fail-over, performance increase, instant scalability, rolling upgrades & disaster recovery by:
   • Distributing the traffic between multiple Jira nodes
   • Upgrading to latest the Jira Enterprise version
   • Using Terraform for the infrastructure setup
   • Switching to Aurora DB

Simple Hardware

Short description: Simple Hardware provide smart IoT solutions at exceptional price by combining software and hardware with outstanding sales and technical support, leveraging the worldwide distributor partner network to offer customer tailored offers ranging from hardware, IoT platform to comprehensive ready-made solutions
Period: February 2019 – September 2021
Places: Prague, Czechia / travels around the globe to South Africa, UEA, Japan, Mexico, Taiwan, Singapore, Germany, etc.
Contract type: Contractor via my own company ICTOI
Slogan: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” – Alan Kay

Roles and responsibilities at Simple Hardware

• Head of IT / Chief Information Officer (CIO)
• Head of Device Production Process
• Business Development Manager setting up the Sigfox partner network in more than 60 countries up to date
• Co-owner

Key achievements at Simple Hardware

1. Co-management, development and execution of the growth of product portfolio from 1 to 8 products with hundreds of product variants

   • 📎 Simple Hardware Product line (as of 11/2021)

2. Co-development and management of a parallelized hardware & software production line capable of delivering hundreds of products a day on multiple product lines with central credentials management database that produced more than 53 860 devices as of 08/2021

3. Negotiation of device sales, IoT project implementation & project rollout, presentations and sales event public speeches, business development that helped to push opportunities to the later stages for the following clients: Česká spořitelna, Direct pojišťovna, Kyocera Communication Systems (KCCS), Japan and many more.

4. Directly sold and/or directly helped in a team to increase the number of B2B partners from 0 to 419 (as of 05/2020) in more than 60 countries around the globe in less than 2 years

   • 📎 Number of Deals per Country (as of 05/2020)

5. Prepared and updated sales and marketing presentation that have been used in sales process for key clients and channel partners all over the globe

   • 📎 Simple Hardware – Company Introduction & Product Portfolio

6. Co-management and execution of the successful Simple Hardware seed funding campaign via Fundlift platform for 6M CZK (~265k USD) extended to 200% of the original target to 12M CZK (~530k USD) funded by 323 investors

   • 📎 Fundlift Seed Funding Campaign Page

7. Deployed and managed product & services documentation and knowledge base on a stack of Linux, Docker, Traefik, MkDocs, Material for MkDocs

   • 📎 Product & Services Documentation and Knowledge Base

8. Created and managed to deploy and run into production a highly structural, modular & versioned manufacturing documentation based on Markdown & Pandoc to PDF generators for 4 products with tenths of product variants

SimpleCell Networks / HELIOT Europe

Short description: Sigfox LPWAN operator for Czechia as SimpleCell Networks / sigfox.cz and after consolidation as HELIOT Group the largest Sigfox 0G solution provider for the Internet of Things (IoT) in Europe
Period: February 2017 – February 2019
Places: Prague, Czechia / Lausanne, Switzerland
Contract type: Contractor via my own company ICTOI
Slogan: “12B ought to be enough for anybody” – most probably not Bill Gates

Roles and responsibilities at SimpleCell

• Business Development Manager setting up the Sigfox LPWAN network Czech market presence
• Head of Sales (CSO)

Key achievements at SimpleCell

1. Negotiation of subscription, implementation & change management contracts, presentations and sales event public speeches, business development that helped to push opportunities to the later stages for the following clients: Česká spořitelna, Direct pojišťovna, SECURITAS Direct, EY, VEKRA, Stabilplastik, innogy Energie, T-Mobile Czech, ČEZ ICT Services, IoT.water, ČD - Telematika, CleverFarm, COMET SYSTEM, UNIS, Etnetera AppSatori, GORDIC, AIMTEC, eMan, Sensoneo, Protronix, ELKO EP, ADASTRA etc.

2. Achieved directly or with help of managed sales team (as of 11/2018):

   Value	Metrics
   32 356	activated Sigfox devices including free orders
   14 600	activated Sigfox paying devices
   471	unique contracts / customers
   65	large / committed volume customers under >2 year long term contract
   8.3 million CZK (~366k USD)	committed volume on subscriptions
   4.2 million CZK (~186k USD)	commitment fee sum on subscriptions
   3.6 million CZK (~160k USD)	activation revenue sum on active subscriptions

3. Co-organized and significantly contributed to the invitation process, marketing and direct sales on the Sigfox World IoT Expo 2017 in Prague on the 26th & 27th of September 2017

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Polska

Short description: Founded 2005, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Customer Technologies Polska (former Outbox Group) was #1 go to Partner in CRM, Customer Experience and Marketing Automation with more than 250 completed CRM projects, 250 experts on board being the major EMEA Salesforce Platinum Cloud Alliance Partner
Period: November 2014 – January 2017
Places: Prague, Czechia / Warsaw, Poland
Contract type: Contractor via my own company ICTOI

Roles and responsibilities at PwC

• Business Development Manager setting up the Salesforce cloud platinum partner Czech market presence
• Setting up the sales pipeline, first projects, the local delivery team, the local offices and market presence
• Developer / coder of web pages and landing / micro-pages

Key achievements at PwC

1. Negotiation of subscription, implementation & change management contracts, presentations and sales event public speeches, business development that helped to push opportunities to the later stages in the sales pipeline for the following clients: LINET, Equa Bank, DameJidlo.cz, PSN, YSoft, CZC, IT Talents, Favorit, MICOS, Zetor, KRUK, Trenkwalder Group, IZOMAT etc.

2. Signature of commercial contracts and delivery for the following clients: Edwards Lifesciences Czech, Veolia Energie ČR, Muziker, IT Talents, TIPSPORT, TIPSPORT, České překlady, Fichtner, IPEX, etc.

3. Setting up the office for 5 people in The Dancing House

4. Hiring core Czech Salesforce projects consulting & delivery team consisting of:

   • Martin HUMPOLEC
   • Temple HOFF
   • Lukas RAZIM

5. Analysis, consulting, design and development of the subsidiary landing page and event micro-pages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, NodeJS, Heroku) formerly on outboxgroup.cz then on pwc-crm.cz

   • 📎 outboxgroup.cz page at Internet Archive

6. Reached turn-over point for the subsidiary in 48 months with 4 people on board and physical offices

Netmail

Short description: Netmail (now Revolgy) Premier Enterprise Partner of Google in Czech Republic and holder of Google EMEA Special Contribution Award 2013
Period: May 2013 – December 2014
Places: Prague, Czechia
Contract type: Contractor as freelancer

Roles and responsibilities at Netmail

• Sales Manager selling Google Workspace cloud (former Google Apps for Business / GSuite)
• Sales Engineer managing technical implementations of Google Workspace
• Developer of applications and scripts on Google Apps Script (JavaScript)
• Lecturer providing lectures on the Google Apps Script APIs

Key achievements at Netmail

1. Directly sold and/or directly helped in a team that increased a number of unique sold domains of Google Workspace from 140 on 5/2013 to 390 on 7/2014 and a number of sold subscriptions from 5 000 on the May 2013 to 20 300 on the July 2014
2. Introduced and conducted new Google Apps Script Training service that contributed 7 900 USD to revenue in less than 2 quarters of year 2014
3. Prepared and maintained see–think–do driven sales and marketing presentation templates that have been used in sales process for key clients and served as personalized offers by all sales representatives within Netmail
4. Directly presented in more than 30 board member meetings / wide C-level audience presentations for the biggest Czech companies
5. Trained more than 140 participants in Google Apps Script and Google Spreadsheets for top Czech companies like: Česká spořitelna, Veolia, Copy General, Economia, BTL, etc.
6. Negotiation of subscription, implementation & change management contracts, product and application development that helped to acquire or deliver products and services to the following clients: Česká spořitelna, Kofola, CZC, H1, Donauchem, ANNONCE, Wine Food Market, FG Forrest, Centrum Holdings, etc.
7. Managed sales with a LinkedIn social selling approach which helped me to build a strong base of LinkedIn connections

Realized Projects and Deliveries

• Analysis, consulting, design and development of NodeJS based web page for ICTOI:

  • 📎 ictoi.com page at Internet Archive

• Project for connected insurance / insurtech for Direct echo (in Czech)

  • 📎 Projekt Čidla Direct echo (in Czech)

• Project for Securitas Czech Republic

  • 📎 Projekt Dohledové centrum Securitas (in Czech)

• Tool for complex pricing, quotation & price calculation with TCO for SimpleCell (Sigfox Czech)

  • 📎 Sigfox RPG Calculator for TCO

• Tool for complex analysis of Sigfox messages delivery ratio by device type for Ernst & Young (EY) Czech Republic and Prague 2 Municipal District for underground waste containers

  • 📎 EY P2 Delivery Analysis

• Complete organization, marketing and execution of the Salesforce event Zkušenosti českých zákazníků s využitím Salesforce on the 19.1.2016 in ERBIA - AUREOLE for more than 70 attendees

  • 📎 Zkušenosti českých zákazníků s využitím Salesforce video footage (in Czech)

• Organization of alumni program on my alma mater Unicorn University (former Unicorn College)

  • 📎 CRM jako součást podnikového IT konkrétně Salesforce.com v praxi (in Czech)

• Analysis, consulting, design and development of internal mail merge tool with URL click analysis for e-mail sales correspondence in Google Spreadsheet and Google Apps Script (JavaScript) for Netmail

  • 📎 Send URL Analytics Emails

• Analysis, consulting, design and development of internal Google Workspace vs. Legacy TCO/ROI Calculator for Netmail

  • 📎 Calculator of average ICT costs Google Workspace / Legacy per user for SME in Czech

• Analysis, consulting, design and development of highly integrated Google Apps Script based mainly on Google Drive API that automatically takes ownership on all files of folder structure for domain admin on Google Drive without any user interaction for Sales House CZ

  • 📎 Google Apps Script Transfer Ownership of Google Drive Files via Service Account and Impersonate

• Consulting and training of Google Apps Script for Česká spořitelna, Veolia, Copy General, Economia

  • 📎 Google Apps Script Training in Czech

• Analysis, consulting, design and development of internal subscription billing system BillGoo to organize and narrow order and billing processes of micro and SMB clients from 100% manual work to full one click automation for more than 350 active clients per month. Heavy use of API and XML data consolidation from Google Reseller Invoices, Google Apps Reseller Admin Panel, Salesforce, and Abra G2 in Google Spreadsheet and Google Apps Script (JavaScript) for Netmail

• Design and development of Ubiquiti Networks mFi Power Socket Data Push to Google Spreadsheet for own use

  • 📎 Ubiquiti Networks mFi Power Socket Data

• Expert assessment of 20 EU Integrated Operational Program (IOP) medical care IT/ICT projects delivered between 09/2011 and 12/2013 in total length of 208 hours for The Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic (MZČR)

• Consulting and analysis of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system accounting modules & SAP connector for ČEDOK

• Consulting, analysis and project management of payment gate module integrating major Czech and Slovak payment gateways: GP Webpay, E-commerce 3-D Secure (ProxyPay), AGMO ePlatba, PaySec, MojePlatba, mPeníze, ePlatby VÚB, TatraPay, Sporopay

• Consulting, analysis and development of smart spreadsheet for hospital data consolidation and substitutes of prescription medicines in Google Spreadsheet and Google Apps Script for A PHARM ČR