Tiki Bar with Joe Aurilia | Building RevOps discipline from construction sites to enterprise M&A

This Tiki Bar sits down with Joe Aurilia, SVP of Operations at Cyware, to trace an unconventional path: from carrying a tiny toolbox on high‑end home renovation sites at age five, to orchestrating AT&T/IBM enterprise migrations, to accidentally building a RevOps-first renewable energy company, and now running ops across funding rounds, compliance, and global teams. Joe’s story is about learning to operate under pressure, communicate clearly, and automate responsibly—without losing sight of the customer or the data you’re moving.

From a five-year-old on job sites to hands-on technologist

Joe’s earliest education was shadowing his dad through kitchens, baths, and high-end custom renovations. Being welcomed into a customer’s most personal space taught him two muscles that never left: earn trust under pressure (someone’s literally watching you cut the line straight) and learn how different people communicate. By high school, he could run work solo. Around the same time, a customer discarded an Apple IIe—Joe adopted it, maxed it out, and followed that curiosity into CS classes (C++ in high school) and a college track focused on building useful things over pure theory.

Enterprise rigor: AT&T, an IBM "trade," and migrations you cannot break

Joe’s first major landing pad: AT&T Labs. Day one was the classic big‑company moment—no computer for weeks—but once he was rolling, he worked in ordering workflow and delivery across legacy systems dating back decades. The job demanded near-religious project discipline: communicating change, mapping risk, and integrating apps spanning mainframes to modern services.

Then came the twist: overnight, his team became IBM employees serving AT&T. Same desk, new badge, two management layers, and new processes. That period coincided with M&A reintegration work—merging always-on systems where "failure isn’t an option" isn’t a slogan, it’s your job. Joe’s team ran multi-layer testing (pairwise, integration, UAT) and a massive data center migration: hundreds of integrations, terabytes of data, dozens of databases, and a weekend cutover planned literally down to minutes (how long to tar, ship, unzip). People slept at the office; the move worked; the platform came out stronger. The lasting lesson: if you do enterprise change right, it looks boring from the outside—and that’s the point.

Starting from zero: renewable energy and a RevOps company by accident

After years in telco and consulting, Joe made the “pivot” people always ask about: co-founding a renewable energy business. He did the unglamorous prep—built the financial model until the math penciled, then built the company. Over ~8 years, they expanded into three states, covered ~800 local areas, worked residential, commercial, and nonprofit segments, and partnered with 300+ organizations and finance providers. Quality installs, integrity in proposals, and obsessive math were nonnegotiable.

Here’s the kicker: without calling it RevOps (the term wasn’t common), they architected the business around Salesforce. Joe became a Salesforce architect and piped everything through it—call centers, data mapping, contracts, quoting, analysis—automating end-to-end to scale without ballooning headcount. The other big personal leap was learning the sales motion firsthand. He did door-to-door, he did million‑dollar deals, and he learned why commission structures matter and how experienced sellers really move a conversation. Marrying that sales reality to operational automation changed how he built systems thereafter.

Cyware: operating through funding rounds and bringing compliance into RevOps

Post-renewables, Joe joined Cyware as the first US employee. The company had a 50-person India team, an MVP, and $3M seed—then COVID hit. Over the next stretch, the team executed through three funding rounds (A, B, C). For Joe, due diligence became a useful stress test—like a company physical—forcing clarity on people, process, and technology so future strategic moves don’t stall. He owned soup‑to‑nuts operations: hiring, IT procurement, RevOps, legal, and more.

What he’s pushing now in RevOps circles isn’t the shiny thing—it’s the necessary thing: privacy, compliance, and risk. Automation has been happening for decades; AI just accelerates it. Revenue teams often hold more granular customer/process data than finance does. That makes change control, ownership, permissions, documentation, and recovery paths part of the RevOps job. Keep automating—just know exactly which data you’re touching, where it flows, and how you’ll answer hard questions before something breaks.

Management arc, MBA muscle, and the real job at the top

At AT&T/IBM, leadership was deeply technical—dates, functions, sprints. As responsibility widened, management became more comprehensive: marketing, staffing, funding, taxes, compliance—and the human side of hiring, performance, and exits. Joe’s MBA (Technology Management at Stevens, nights/weekends) trained for exactly this: as an executive, you won’t know everything, so learn how to ask the right questions to make a sound decision and keep the org moving.

Two takeaways to steal

• Network earlier and wider. Different disciplines, geographies, and roles seed ideas your brain will retrieve when a real problem hits.
• Sometimes the best “content” is none. Put the laptop down, walk an hour, come back with a cleaner slate.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGcnQbpo2Pc

Joe’s throughline isn’t a straight line. It’s a repeated pattern: get close to the customer, learn the system end‑to‑end, build what scales, and respect the risk. Whether you’re moving a terabyte, a sales process, or an entire company, that mindset holds.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGcnQbpo2Pc