Since our founding in November 2011, we’ve grown from a team of 8 to a company of more than 40 people working out of two offices along the east coast. In fact, just last week, we added four new members to our rapidly expanding team, including Bart Hacking, as our CFO.

Bart has been a member of the New York tech community for the last 8 years (basically since before there was a true New York tech community) and was most recently VP of Finance at Clickable, acquired by Syncapse Corp. last year. You can read more about Bart’s professional background here.

To gain a better understanding of his take on the New York tech community, why he joined BetterCloud and what he’s looking forward to, I sat down with Bart to ask some hard hitting questions.

Gail: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, something I wouldn’t learn from reading your bio?

Bart: My wife and I live in New Jersey with our two young daughters (ages 4 and 2) – I love fatherhood. I grew up fly fishing with my father and love to play the guitar…though I’m not very good at it. I also know how to drive a Zamboni, more on that later.

Gail: How did you get into New York’s startup scene?

Bart: Well apart from an internship I had in Boston, I’ve only ever worked in New York and I’ve almost exclusively worked at startups. I actually studied History and Political Science in college, but after my Junior year, I realized that wasn’t for me.

To help figure out what I was really passionate about, I found a Business Management training program at Chelsea Piers (that’s where I learned to drive a Zamboni). During the program, we had to focus on all areas of running a business and that’s when I decided I wanted to work at a startup, where you really have the opportunity to contribute in all areas.

Next, it was onto business school where I focused on Entrepreneurship. There, I met the few students not looking to go into banking or consulting and was introduced to my first startup job at
Monitor110. In 2008, I joined Clickable.

Gail: What are your thoughts on the New York tech scene? How has it changed?

Bart: I’ve been involved with the New York tech scene for the past 8 years and I’d say over the last 3 it has really taken off. It’s an incredibly exciting time to build a company in New York and there seems to be more and more growth all the time.

I think the thing I love most about New York’s tech scene (and the city in general) is the diversity – not only culturally, but in terms of ideas and skill sets. You have a huge melting pot of the best and brightest and I think in general the tech scene here is extremely egalitarian – the best ideas win.

There’s also a huge concentration of capital and customers in New York. There’s a lot of money to fund good ideas and a lot of customers to support them. For those reasons, it’s not surprising that New York has become a hub for technology and I expect it to be on par with Silicon Valley very soon.

Gail: What made you want to join BetterCloud?

Bart: With every company I’ve worked for, the checklist of requirements I have seems to grow and BetterCloud fit the bill. My background has pretty much always been in enterprise, B2B tech and I spent a lot of time working with Google while at Clickable. From a professional standpoint, that’s why I was interested in BetterCloud.

But David Politis [BetterCloud’s CEO] and the rest of the team really sold me. David and I seem to share a lot of the same philosophies, which aren’t necessarily mainstream. Plus BetterCloud’s commitment to its customers is something really unique. A lot of companies say they are customer centric, all the while trying to squeeze every last cent out of their customers. But, I really found that BetterCloud was legitimately interested in their customers and because of this many FlashPanel users have become advocates for the product and company.

Gail: So you survived your first week, did you find anything you weren’t expecting?

Bart: The team has truly blown me away, even more than I expected. BetterCloud is made up of people that have really deep expertise in their respective areas and when all these skills are combined, the result is incredible. There are also areas of the business that are much further along than I had originally anticipated, which is always a nice surprise.

In terms of the company culture, though, it’s what I expected (startup hoodie included). People are given a lot of responsibility and free reign and as a result they bring incredible ideas to the table. There’s also a lot of snacks…which could potentially be my undoing. Overall, its a group of people who want to work hard and have fun, which I think is a winning combination.

Gail: Was it a hard adjustment moving to Google Apps?

Bart: We used Google Apps at Clickable so I’m very comfortable with the suite. When it comes to the cloud in general, I got on the bandwagon very early after a somewhat devastating hard drive crash. I have everything (business and personal) in Google, Dropbox or Evernote, so I can effectively throw my computer out the window without worrying about losing my data (though I won’t be testing that out any time soon).

Gail: Favorite FlashPanel feature?

Bart: Definitely the Deprovisioning Workflow. Of course, I’m hoping I never have to use it, but I know it can be very difficult to manage the task of deleting an employee’s account and I can totally see how this workflow would make that ten times easier.

Gail: What about BetterCloud has you most excited for the future?

Bart: Our product [FlashPanel] is industry and mostly size agnostic. It’s a tool geared towards businesses that are partially or fully operating in the cloud and it’s really enabling companies to make the most of cloud technology. It’s exciting to be a part of this IT revolution.

Gail: We have a bi weekly delivery from Fresh Direct, anything you plan to add to our order?

Bart: Really strong coffee (I’ve been trying to cut back, but I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon) and Sriracha, lots of Sriracha.

To learn more about career opportunities at BetterCloud, please visit our careers page.