From his early days in machine-vision to his expertise in business intelligence: A profile of an illustrious career in data.
In the early 2000s, while most companies were still questioning the value of data, Michael Kravec was designing plant-floor data collection solutions to improve manufacturing processes. One such solution, utilizing SQL Server and VBA code, saved one company $15 million in unnecessary costs for a “more sophisticated” tool. The tool Mr. Kravec developed ran successfully for years.
The other half of Mr. Kravec’s career is in Sales Engineering, GTM Strategy, and Technical Leadership. In this role, he has added multiple Fortune 50 and 500 logos to the businesses he worked in, authored numerous technical whitepapers and software scalability papers, and secured and guided strategic partnerships. Mr. Kravec is also an established speaker and has created and delivered dozens of content presentations, often to crowds of over 1,000 people.
Early career—from machine vision to data
Mr. Kravec’s career began by working on machine vision solutions when the technology was still in its early phase.
“The tech was quite rudimentary at the time,” he recalls. “You had to have an arsenal of knowledge and tools to do anything with it, but what you could do with it wasn’t possible anywhere else.”
Mr. Kravec described those days as the “mad scientist” days where individual engineers built their own cache of tools and tricks themselves. The priority was to make solutions practical and get them to work. He tells a humorous story of a red laser projector built to discern between two different profiles. The laser used a red lens that didn’t work, so he used a red lens he got out of a Cap’n Crunch cereal box, which ended up providing far better results!
Ten years of working in this field led him to what would become a lifelong passion—data. Specifically, how using the correct data can lead to improved efficiencies. “I was working on a pharmaceutical plant floor, accumulating data and logging it. These were the grandfather systems of what’s become IoT today.” The systems were called SCADA systems—Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, a collection of hardware and software elements used to monitor industrial processes. Kravec worked on several of these, including systems from power plants, food processing plants, sewage treatment facilities, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and others.
Mr. Kravec helped create transactional systems that facilitated data-driven decisions on the plant floor. He also began digging into data warehousing and more advanced data topics like data warehousing.
He recognized the value of having massive amounts of data and helping customers analyze it—an insight still considered revolutionary at the time.
Data was the new kid on the block.
“Anyone who pushes new tech is putting their reputation on the line. If you buy a known system and it breaks, it’s the system’s fault. If you sell something disruptive and it doesn’t work, it’s your fault,” he recalls.
Despite the risks of pursuing this revolutionary new technology, Mr. Kravec saw clearly the direct correlation between good data and revenue opportunities for a business.
The shift to Sales Engineering
Mr. Kravec’s career progressed naturally from data acquisition to business intelligence and then to machine learning. His insight into how data would become the Next Big Thing proved correct, making him one of the few people at the time who had accumulated immense experience in this new sector.
A sales engineer is a technical expert who supports the sales team by understanding customer needs, designing tailored solutions, and demonstrating how the company’s products or services meet those needs. They bridge the gap between sales and technical teams, ensuring a smooth transition from prospecting to implementation, while helping to drive successful sales outcomes.
At the time, data and analytics were the disruptive tech, and Mr. Kravec’s experience made him the perfect candidate for building strong sales engineering teams that had a deep understanding of this new tech they were selling.
The talent team at the business analytics and software provider Tableau recognized his experience and promptly recruited him. At Tableau, Mr. Kravec was instrumental in growing revenue from $13 million to $850 million as their Strategic Sales Consultant, currently known as a Field CTO.
Other achievements at Tableau included:
- Closing the technical sale for hundreds of accounts in the SMB, enterprise, and government sectors.
- Developing and executing effective sales strategies for a highly disruptive product.
- Aiding in growing the sales consultant team from five to 150.
- Saving the company over $1 million in capital expenses through data-driven means.
This last point of saving Tableau $1 million was a feat that merits an entire article on its own about data. The feat is exemplary of Mr. Kravec’s unique ability to think with data. By redefining the data parameters of the capital expenditure, Mr. Kravec was able to get the team to recognize immediately that the expenditure was unnecessary.
“How you define the problem can prevent you from finding a solution,” Mr. Kravec says. “Reframing a solution so that you can easily explain it is just as important.” This philosophy aligns with BlueYeti’s principles—that focusing on business problems, value, and simplicity, is the way to be most effective.
After Tableau, Mr. Kravec then took up a position at data giant Snowflake Computing, followed by contributions at other venture-backed startups in the data and analytics ecosystem where he continued to prove his worth as an expert GTM strategist.
Mr. Kravec was also a founding member of a Sales Engineering Center of Excellence at Alteryx, chartered to improve technical, commercial, and situational skills in the Sales Engineering team. He helped grow that CoE from two to 20 members in two years.
The move to BlueYeti
Mr. Kravec’s decades of experience and well-honed perspective of the industry make him an invaluable asset to BlueYeti.
Although companies now recognize the value of data, many are still struggling to find business use cases for the latest trend in data—agentic AI.
Mr. Kravec draws a similarity between the current agentic AI ecosystem and the early days of DIY business intelligence solutions: The ecosystem is currently rich in domain expertise but requires guidance in the data itself.
“Fred and I have worked together on and off for nearly 15 years. We talked a lot about the inception of BlueYeti and the ideals that the company would be founded on: business value and simplicity.” Mr. Kravec recalls. ” After meeting Marcelo and Raul, it didn’t take long for me to want to join in at a founding level. For me it is the trifecta of a great company – incredible people, technology and market potential.”
BlueYeti’s Center of Excellence intends to fill that gap and provide the data-driven guidance necessary to ensure businesses find real business use cases for agentic AI. That starts with high-quality data.
In keeping with the core philosophy at BlueYeti, Mr. Kravec was to help companies understand that the data being fed into agentic AI solutions must be curated and orderly for this new technology to be of maximum use. That might mean different things to different companies, and BlueYeti’s team specializes in discovering that meaning precisely for each business it works with.
BlueYeti’s founders have all had renowned careers in the data sector. Mr. Kravec’s experience and ability to explain data is an essential part of conveying the value of BlueYeti’s services in a world where using the wrong data could derail one of the greatest technologies to emerge in our lifetimes.
BlueYeti is proud to have someone with such an illustrious career and a deep passion for data as Mr. Kravec on its team.
