This is the first post in our "Spotlight On" series where Accel Talent Partner, Peter Clarke, interviews different business leaders on what constitutes a great team-as well as tips on how to build, grow and effectively manage one. At Accel, we have the good fortune of working with world class entrepreneurs and operators everyday and in this series, we sit down with some of the great executives in our portfolio and network, to discuss the topics of people and leadership and share their insights and lessons learned.

We couldn't kick off the series with a more experienced and thoughtful leader-Dan Sturman. Dan was most recently SVP of Engineering at Cloudera (CLDR) where in addition to playing an integral role in building and supporting a number of sophisticated and complex engineering projects, he spent a significant amount of his time developing the management team both by growing from within and hiring for key talent. Prior to Cloudera, Dan spent more than 8 years in engineering leadership at Google, ultimately being promoted to VP.