Zach was 13 when a chef in Greenwich Village handed him a knife and asked him to mince a pile of pearl onions.
He was only in the kitchen because a family friend who imported food from Spain had taken him along on restaurant deliveries in New York City that summer, and had offered the chef a discount in exchange for letting the kid in. The chef watched him work, offered him a prep cook job on the spot, and by the end of the summer Zach was working the line.
From the line to a nonprofit
That apprenticeship carried him through high school and college. The only schools offering him real scholarship money were culinary programs, and he turned them down, because culinary school was meant to get you into the kitchens he was already working in. He went to a liberal arts school in North Carolina instead, and joined the very first cohort of its sustainable food systems degree.
After graduating he went back to New York and into restaurant management, and by early 2019 he was running a steakhouse. Then the pandemic wiped out the industry.
Since he was 11, whenever anyone asked Zach what he wanted to be, his answer had been the same: "I want to own a conglomerate." This is how he remembers that period:
"I had been convinced that I was a failure. Everyone said I was going to go far, that I'd get that conglomerate. Here I was, not even with my own business. And thank God I failed, because I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't."
With restaurants shut, he started a nonprofit that gave thousands of pounds of free food to New Yorkers, and ran it full time for a year without ever taking a salary.
A salesman doing five jobs
When they stayed shut, Zach took a tech sales job at a large enterprise reseller that carried more than 200 vendors, as part of the first cohort of its sales academy. He had to learn the whole portfolio at once - and he picked up so many certifications along the way that his resume had to link out to a separate document to list them all.
Startups noticed, and recruited him with the promise that he'd be an Account Executive on day one. What that actually meant at a startup was doing five jobs at the same time: partnerships, channel, engineering, supply chain and recruiting. His title still said sales, but he was already working as a technologist.
His next role was selling cybersecurity products to big banks, at a company that wasn't licensed to sell those products yet. So before he could close a single deal, Zach sourced and onboarded more than 40 cybersecurity vendors to build the portfolio himself.
"This is a 40-hour project"
Zach wanted to understand the technology he was selling properly, so he kept asking the subject matter experts around him to show him how to build a CI/CD pipeline. They kept brushing him off. It was a 40-hour project, they told him, and maybe in a few months they'd have time to explain some of it.
So what did he do? He found NextWork and worked through the full DevOps challenge on his own, and he didn't mention it to anyone. He waited until he was on a customer call with one of those same experts, and at the very end, he dropped the repo:
"And by the way, I made that pipeline. Here's the repo. Mic drop."
That same expert was impressed enough to refer Zach into his next role, and he works in cybersecurity today.
His advice for anyone just joining is about the people around you as much as the projects:
"You came to the right place, and you'll only get the most out of it if you inspire others. This space is free, and it only gets better the more people are here. Bring people in the same way that others brought me in, and you will gain exponentially more value from it."
He means it, too - he now runs his own Build & Brew group, where learners build projects together every week.
Zach, thank you for asking the question until you got the answer yourself, and for bringing so many other learners along with you.