Expand Your Curiosity: Build, Own, and Maintain Relevance with Milin Desai (1/3)

How curious do you think you are at work? Take a second to rate yourself. After today’s conversation with guest Milin Desai, you’re going to want to dial that curiosity up a notch.

Milin is currently the CEO of Sentry, and one of the keys to his success from the very beginning was allowing the scope of his curiosity to expand over time…beyond specific projects and even beyond his job role. Perhaps without realizing it, Milin was doing the work to build and maintain professional relevance.

Listen closely in episode 349 as we follow Milin from his early days as a computer science student through roles as a QA tester and software developer all the way into technical marketing. You’ll hear advice for expanding your own curiosity inside your current company, ways you can provide value to a mentor, and an empathetic approach to customer conversations that can help you build relevance and develop a strong reputation.

Original Recording Date: 09-29-2025

Topics – Meet Milin Desai, A Unique Trait, Internships and Job Interviews, Curiosity and the Importance of Control, Mentorship as a Stream of Active Conversations, Beyond the Scope, Becoming Relevant in Something Different

2:40 – Meet Milin Desai

• Milin Desai is currently the CEO of Sentry.
  • Sentry helps teams find where code is broken in production and helps them fix it fast, and with AI, fixing it faster is greatly accelerated.

3:15 – A Unique Trait

• Around 7th or 8th grade Milin recognized how much he enjoyed math and science in school. Milin had an affinity for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).
• Milin cites his dad, a mechanical and electrical engineer, as a big influence. Going into 10th grade, Milin thought he would pursue mechanical engineering.
• Milin’s cousin Rajiv (who had worked for NASA) would come visit and began showing Milin some of the work he was doing. This is the point at which “everything changed” for Milin, and he decided to pursue computer engineering / computer science.
  • Milin also tells us he built hundreds of websites in India during the time of dial up modems.
• Milin pursued an undergraduate degree at a school in Mumbai, but his family knew he wanted to come to the United States.
  • Milin came to the United States in 1999 and attended USC (University of Southern California) to purse a master’s degree.
  • The potential for opportunity and the vastness of the United States captivated Milin.
• Did Milin ever ask Rajiv what he should study, or did he naturally gravitate toward those areas?
  • Rajiv would have conversations with Milina and show him the work he was doing.
  • Milin started working for Rajiv while pursuing his undergraduate degree. He was building websites for companies in India.
  • The building of the websites was interesting to Milin, but he was also doing the selling part. Milin had to make a pitch to companies explaining what a website could do for them, share the price, and collect the check if they said yes.
  • “Not only did he influence me in kind of figuring out…this is where the opportunity is and inspire me…but he also went on to tell me that I have a unique trait where I can talk business tech selling, and I know the technology part. And I can bridge the two worlds. He was one of the early people to recommend that in the long run I may want to think about the business side or…the entrepreneurship side of things when it comes to tech, not just the programming or the systems side of things. And he in fact felt my combo made me more relevant…in that lane versus just staying a programmer.” – Milin Desai
  • Rajiv gave Milin these cues early on in addition to inspiring him to do the work.
  • As people who work in sales engineering today, John and Nick agree that the combination of technology and business value is very valuable.

7:49 – Internships and Job Interviews

• Milin began working for Veritas after he finished his master’s program as an entry-level software engineer.
  • Pursuing an advanced degree can give you the chance to pursue internships, and Milin had a family friend working at Veritas who introduced him to the hiring manager for a quality assurance (or QA) internship.
  • After successfully getting the internship at Veritas, Milin was doing QA for software-defined storage volume management.
  • Milin’s work during the internship led to a full-time offer from Veritas upon his graduation.
  • “The first break is always hard, by the way, to get. I see it even to this day with folks coming out of school. Not everyone…lands in the perfect opportunity right away, and the d