Storytelling and Relationship-Building in Tech with Colleen Coll

Colleen Coll, Account Executive at The Duckbill Group, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss her journey of breaking into tech and why it’s so important to make your presence known. Colleen explains how she wound up working for The Duckbill Group after taking the initiative to go and meet Corey at a networking event, and what motivates her to take risks and do things that might feel intimidating in order to advance her career. Colleen and Corey also discuss the power of influencer marketing, as well as the focus The Duckbill Group has on setting a high standard for employee onboarding and culture.
About ColleenColleen Coll is a native of Pittsburgh and wannabe tech geek working in tech media sales, events, writing and marketing. She’s an advocate for women and underrepresented communities in tech and is extremely proud of her efforts to learn coding languages and engage and connect diversity in the open source circle! When she’s not geeking out and traveling the globe (and virtually) producing/ hosting tech podcasts and livestreams, she enjoys trips to local wineries, binging sci-fi, and hosting bolognese dinner parties.
Links Referenced: Twitter: https://twitter.com/colleencoll LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-coll-b971505/ Last Week in AWS sponsorship form: https://lastweekinaws.com/sponsorship
Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Human-scale teams use Tailscale to build trusted networks. Tailscale Funnel is a great way to share a local service with your team for collaboration, testing, and experimentation.  Funnel securely exposes your dev environment at a stable URL, complete with auto-provisioned TLS certificates. Use it from the command line or the new VS Code extensions. In a few keystrokes, you can securely expose a local port to the internet, right from the IDE.I did this in a talk I gave at Tailscale Up, their first inaugural developer conference. I used it to present my slides and only revealed that that’s what I was doing at the end of it. It’s awesome, it works! Check it out!Their free plan now includes 3 users & 100 devices. Try it at snark.cloud/tailscalescream 
Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. Every once in a while, I like to do a bit of a behind-the-scenes episode where I talk to one of the people here at The Duckbill Group that makes the whole thing run. Because I’ve got to be honest, there’s a certain audience and public perception that everyone on our team's page more or less just sits around and claps as I do all the work. And that’s not true, at least, you know, 80% of the time. My guest today is a relatively new hire here at Duckbill. Colleen Coll is our account executive in media here at The Duckbill Group. Colleen, thank you for joining me, both in an employment sense and on the podcast.
Colleen: [laugh]. Thanks for having me, Corey. This is an honor and privilege [laugh].
Corey: You say that now we’ll see how you feel by the end of this conversation. There’s always that. So, I find when you’re trying to tell a story, one of the best places to begin is the beginning. And we look at people in the space who are doing things that are aspirational or admirable and we have this tendency to believe th