---
title: "No room for regrets in your career "
type: "BlogPosting"
language: "en-US"
url: "https://www.commvault.com/blogs/no-room-for-regrets-in-your-career"
date: "2022-07-21T21:02:32-04:00"
modified: "2025-09-08T17:36:35-04:00"
description: "Get to know David Ngo and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he couldn’t miss out on that would change his career."
image: "https://www.commvault.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/david-ngo-blog_.jpg"
authors:
  - name: "David Ngo"
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  - name: "No room for regrets in your career"
---

# No room for regrets in your career 

I joined Commvault fresh out of school and at the height of the dot.com boom in 1998. While I had other offers in hand, I liked the people I met during the rigorous interview process and was drawn to an opportunity to cut my teeth on something that would move the needle and bring real value for our customers.

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Opportunities like this don’t come around often. For me, it was the right decision.

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Jump ahead twenty years to when our new CEO Sanjay Mirchandani saw the opportunity to transform Commvault into a software and SaaS data management company. I couldn’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. After all, how many times do you get to start with a clean sheet of paper and launch something that would transform both your company and your career?

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No matter how it turned out, not taking this chance would have been a huge regret.

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No regrets were necessary. Sanjay gave me and a small, stealth startup team a big goal, a little funding, and permission to break the mold to develop the best backup-as-a-service offering available. We had to be agile – make decisions, see it through, fail fast, and readjust. Together, we launched our [Metallic software-as-a-service](https://metallic.io/) offering on-time later that year. And just six quarters later, it became a $50M business for Commvault.

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For my career, this was the push I was looking for. It wasn’t engineering for engineering’s sake. We were designing a product that was tailored to the end-to-end customer experience – from trial to onboarding to purchase to support to renewal. We had to look at it from the outside in, working cross-functionally, and with customers and partners to plan for the entire user journey.

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It was an amazing and incredibly rewarding challenge. However, opportunities like this are rare and can be a little risky because you’re stepping into the unknown. So I thought I’d share my advice to help you seize your next career opportunity:

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1. **Get uncomfortable.** Look outside your role and even your chosen function for new opportunities. And know, a little bit of “imposter syndrome” is good – It means you are expanding, growing, and pushing your boundaries.
2. **Look from the outside in.** Take time to understand your stakeholders’ perspective and expectations. Not just about the product itself, but the broader customer experience – how it is priced, where can it be purchased, and how they will pay for it.
3. **Don’t fall in love with your ideas.** Great ideas can come from anywhere and anyone, especially working cross-functionally. And when you are moving fast, your ideas often have a shelf life. So be open, flexible, and agile.
4. **Overcommunicate.** Time is not a luxury in technology. Communications is critical to align people, functions, and the field to work better and faster. Don’t skip this step.
5. **Bend it – don’t break it.** In a role like this, it is common to ask why something it done a certain way. Look for opportunities to make a product or process better, but don’t break it (or the person behind it).

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I’m fortunate. I joined a company that inspired me to look for new opportunities and empowered me to pursue them. And, in many respects, I am just getting started as CTO of our Metallic business – a ride I’m more than ready for. If you haven’t already found that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, my advice to you in your career is to leave no room for regrets.