Kaseya’s Fred Voccola: Unorthodox, Unabashed and Unstoppable
… some very big announcements are coming in the near future.
When you interview Voccola, you immediately know he is not your typical buttoned-down corporate executive who has memorized a few bullet points from the corporate PowerPoint slide deck. And while we’re on the subject of executive style… Voccola made headlines earlier this year when, during an initial town hall with incoming Datto employees, he was quoted as saying, “I am not being a d…k.” That’s just Fred being himself. It’s a pretty common phrase when a few guys are hanging at the local sports bar, but a comment like that in a business setting tells you Voccola is a different type of leader. He’s a take-me-for-what-I-am type of manager which leads us to wonder where his comfort level is these days.
Enterprise Manager or Entrepreneur?
Is he more suited as an enterprise manager or entrepreneur? He threads that needle by saying his sweet spot is being the entrepreneurial leader in a large organization. That’s pretty good thinking on his feet
“The day I stop being entrepreneurial running a big company, I will suck,” Voccola said. “Being an entrepreneur means you start and run a small business. Being entrepreneurial means we are always disrupting, changing, looking for pivots, looking for ways to make our customers’ lives better. We claw and fight for the extra 1%. I love doing disruptive things.”
One of the industry’s largest MSP leaders describes Voccola this way. “He is very polished and a great communicator. He makes a big company feel small but at the same time he come across a bit opinionated. He is really able to accomplish his objective over, through and around people.”
Leadership and Grit
In a recent blog Voccola posted on leadership and what he describes as grit, he revealed this about himself: “People are driven by necessity — when I was younger, I know I was. In college, it was my dream to work on Wall Street. But that didn’t work out for me. I didn’t interview well and didn’t fit the stereotype of a ‘privileged’ Wall Street kid. That created necessity, so I started my first company in college and later sold it.”
When asked about that posting, Voccola, who studied finance and graduated from Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, said, “I guess, I wasn’t a privileged, pretty boy to get a job at one of those places. And I’m really glad I wasn’t, because I don’t think I would have done very well there. I think they probably would have fired me after three weeks.
“I guess I wasn’t smart enough to go work there. Who knows? But I think being as genuine or authentic is important in this day and age of this PC [politically correct] stuff. I think people are so sick and tired of that bullshit. It’s not real. If you strive to be liked by everyone, then you’re not being authentic, you’re being fake. If I’m doing something stupid, I want someone to be like, ‘Fred, you’re an idiot.’ I like people to be direct, show me the respect to be authentic to me. I couldn’t imagine finishing my career and looking back at it, and being like, oh, my God, I was a fake person for 30, 40 or 50 years. Yeah, that would suck.”
The Art of Listening
So, the real Fred Voccola just stood up.
And his legs must be pretty strong because he survived a potentially crippling ransomware attack in mid-2021 that put at risk thousands of MSP customers. Several months later he was publicly blasted by …
