Brandon Fahey made me laugh after DevCon with his comment: "Somehow Andrew Cesario won the hack." The funny thing is, when I first read it, I wasn't entirely sure how to take it.
Earlier this year, I walked away from a role, a team, and a career chapter that had defined much of my professional life for nearly seven years. I had been talking openly about semi-retirement, spending time with family, traveling, and exploring what the next chapter might look like doing advisory work.
I wasn't even planning to attend DevCon until Austin Niehaus and I started talking seriously about partnering together. His enthusiasm and intellectual curiosity are genuinely contagious. Somewhere along the way, it shifted from whether I was attending DevCon to what we might build if we did. At that point, it was on.
None of what followed would have happened without an incredible team.
Austin's expertise and ability to collaborate — bringing strong ideas without being attached to them, listening, adapting, creating momentum — was central to everything. Wendy Kirk was our free safety, quietly filling every gap and turning ideas into deliverables before anyone else realized they needed to. And Krishna Gutta and Bala Veeramachaneni from Lyft ? They showed up with everything they had. No ego. No posturing. Just skill, hard work, trust, and momentum.
The team quickly cranked out the Extend application and agent framework, building the foundation of the solution. That gave me the freedom to dive into Data Cloud, a capability I'd been increasingly curious about but hadn't yet had the opportunity to explore deeply. The hackathon gave us an opportunity to do exactly that: explore something new, figure it out together, and turn it into something powerful. But the code is only part of the story.
The teams that win are the teams that can clearly articulate a problem, explain why it matters, and demonstrate the value of their solution. Last December, Workday hosted a dedicated pitch track at their Orchestrate Hackathon, and it fundamentally shaped how we approached our presentation. The lesson was surprisingly simple: start with the problem, agitate its impact, and explain the value of the solution for customers. Everything else is secondary. A special shoutout to Samantha Ruscica from Workday , who helped me fine tune our pitch during the event.
But what happened in that room for me was the product of a longer story. Over the last seven years I built and led a global technology team — projects big and small, internal initiatives, client-facing transformations. Somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of myself as a technologist who led people and started thinking of myself as a leader who happened to understand technology.
That shift didn't happen on its own. I hired a leadership coach while I was still at Workday who helped me look at my role and myself differently. He started me on a path toward a different kind of work. I've spent a lot of time on that work. Thanks to my travels in India and Bali, I've developed a daily yoga practice, learned meditation, completed Isha Foundation's Inner Engineering course, spent time in Auroville sitting quietly in the Matrimandir, and attended Mahashivaratri in Coimbatore.
Life-changing moments, one degree at a time. Experiences that prepared me for moments I didn't even know were coming. None of this was a plan to become a better consultant or a better hackathon participant. I was simply trying to find a better way of moving through the world. Since leaving Huron, I've shifted into a different way of living. Two to four hours of focused work. Mondays off. Being present for family. Time in the forest. Continuing the yoga and meditation. Not as a reward for productivity, but as the foundation of it.
What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was how much that shift was changing the way I showed up. The pace was different, and so was my mindset. I found myself feeling more present, more joyful, less reactive, and less attached to outcomes. There was a greater sense of trust in the process and less need to control every variable. I wasn't trying to optimize for any of that. It was simply a byproduct of living differently.
A couple of hours into the hackathon, it became increasingly clear our original direction wasn't right. We'd already invested time and built pieces of it. Instead of pressing on, we stopped and asked a different question.
Should we throw it away and start over?
The team looked at me to make the call. What stands out in my memory isn't the decision itself. It's how calm and clear everything felt. I don't think I would have reacted that way two years ago. Instead of defending what we'd already built, there was just calm clarity — the only thing that mattered was finding the best solution. Krishna and Bala had a great idea. Everyone around the table knew it, so we pivoted.
Looking back, that moment may have been the most important decision we made all weekend. Not because I had the answer, but because I was able to create space for the answer to emerge and recognize it when it did.
For much of my career, I thought leadership was about experience, expertise, and finding the answer. Those things matter, but increasingly I think leadership is about something simpler. It's about enabling other people to become successful. It's about creating an environment where great people can do their best work, contribute their best ideas, and accomplish more together than any one person could accomplish alone.