Welcome back to our Meet the Team series! We use this space to introduce readers, customers, and potential Spiffers to the faces behind the Spiff brand. We know we’re nothing without our team and believe it’s important to get to know each of our teammates as human beings that exist both inside and outside the workplace.
So, without further ado, let’s meet the team!
Taylor Montero, Sales Operations Analyst
Taylor has always had a strong interest in innovative technology. He is passionate about the influence it has in our everyday lives. Taylor excels when he dives deep into data and can produce positive changes that have a valuable impact. In his free time, Taylor enjoys being outdoors (when the Midwest weather allows it.) His ideal Saturday would be starting with a round of golf, then boating on the lake and finishing it off by grilling burgers and brats for dinner. Taylor resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his wife and two dogs, Zeus and Theodore.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Miran Saric, Customer Community Manager
Miran was born in Bosnia, formerly Yugoslavia, and immigrated to frigid Bismarck, North Dakota in 1996. With years of experience in community building and growth, he’s excited to put together a thriving and engaging space for Spiff customers to learn, share knowledge, and network. A graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Miran lives with his wife Anna, one year old triplets (Luka, Mila, and Adrian), and cat Maya in north St. Paul, MN and loves nothing more than to get out in nature with family as much as possible.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Vincent Cifelli, Solutions Engineer
Vinny grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago and started in the tech space unexpectedly after college. He soon discovered he had a passion for technology and software! Vinny can often be found socializing with new friends or walking the streets of Old Town Chicago looking for new restaurants/parks to explore. Vinny also loves all dogs, but especially his grumpy beagle/german shepherd mix who may be a smidge overweight, but they’re working on that.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Mo Rogers, Enterprise Account Executive
Mo loves solving big problems for his customers. Coming to Spiff from the cybersecurity space, Mo thrives in complex and fast-paced situations. Mo loves all things outdoors. From rock climbing and mountaineering to kayaking and rafting, being outside with family and friends is what recharges Mo’s batteries.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Billy Rogers, Enterprise Account Executive
Billy was born and raised in Utah. He comes from a large family and is one of 16 kids (13 boys and 3 girls). Because of that, Billy says he is a very competitive person. He grew up playing a lot of team sports, later moving to extreme sports in snowboarding and wakeboarding.
These days, Billy spends time golfing, hunting, and fishing. He is married and has four kids that keep him very busy. Billy has been in sales/sales management his entire career and previously spent five years at Capshare.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Adam Pasternak, Assistant Controller
Adam has held a number of different accounting positions at a number of different companies, and has always loved the startup world. He appreciates the opportunity to use his skills and knowledge to help a company grow, and to truly make a difference. He likes taking walks and being outside, though isn’t out nearly enough. Living in NY or NJ his whole life, he looks forward to making it out to visit Utah one day. Adam appreciates good food, but will eat almost anything. He’s very excited for this next chapter, and to be joining the Spiff family. Adam loves helping when he can, and can’t wait to hit the ground running.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Mike Portela, Client Success Manager
Mike is a CSM at Spiff with nearly a decade of experience engaging with clients. Mike recently married the kindest and silliest woman who he met after they both had knee surgeries from Jiu Jitsu injuries. Mike has run over a dozen marathons in different states on his goal to do one in all 50. After every race, Mike has a tradition of trying every city’s best steakhouse. When he’s home, you can usually find Mike in front of a fire grilling most days.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Chuck Reigrut, Enterprise Account Executive
Chuck was born and raised in Youngstown Ohio. He comes from a large family that includes 4 younger brothers, an older sister, as well as 41 first cousins. He has been married for 17 years and has 2 teenage sons. In his spare time Chuck enjoys hiking, fishing, and cooking/grilling with his sons, nephews and brothers. He has spent the last 15 years in sales and sales management mostly in the K-12 Ed Tech space (multiple years in a start-up environment). He has a passion for helping clients solve problems by utilizing technology to make their lives easier.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Meg Summer, Director of Customer Success Management
Meg Summer started her career in New York City in sales and quickly learned that nurturing client relationships was her passion. She made the decision to embark on a career in Customer Success and throughout her journey has done just about every tactical role possible with accounts ranging from training, implementing, driving adoption, expansion and retention. Powerful products that allow clients to be successful are extremely motivating.
Meg has expanded her career to leadership, coaching and mentoring top performing individuals. As her career has expanded, so has her personal life. She currently is living in Pennsylvania with her husband and two daughters Dylan (5) and Bryn (2). When not at work she can be found playing tennis, working on house projects and during the summer months at the beach. She is always down for an adventure and loves trying new foods or activities.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Drew McGuire, Solutions Engineer
Drew grew up on Long Island, in New York. After spending some time in Japan, he moved to Idaho to attend school where he studied Psychology. Drew then worked on a Master’s Degree in Speech-Language Pathology and worked in that field until an opportunity came up to move into the tech world. While working for tech companies, Drew took great interest in learning the tech stack in detail and finding the best ways to serve the customers. Drew enjoys working out, playing in softball leagues, and spending time with his family.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Patrick Shea, Mid-Market Account Executive
Patrick grew up outside of Boston, MA. Connecting with people and helping them solve their problems led Pat into Sales. Patrick is a huge fan of his dog Ziggy, hockey, and traveling with his Wife. Pat lives outside of Boston still!
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Elton Cheng, Technical Support Engineer
Elton was born in New York, but moved to New Jersey later on. Meeting new friends along the way, he picked up sports, which became a hobby of his until this day. Now, you can find him lifting weights at the gym, rock climbing, or snowboarding (when it snows in New Jersey).
Coming from an IT Support background, he focuses on providing support to customers via chats and emails, but makes it his goal to ensure that a solution is delivered as quickly as possible. Curious by nature, he will take any steps required to help fix an issue.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Samu Eduardo Alvarez, Front End Engineer
Samu grew up in Valencia, Venezuela’s biggest industrial city. As a kid, Samu wanted to be a soccer player and a programmer, pursuing a career in the latter after graduating high school and falling in love with helping people through code. Samu and his wife moved to Guadalajara Mexico in 2018, being the first time they traveled outside of Venezuela. Samu enjoys having people over to eat Venezuelan food and play board games! Samu’s other interests are soccer, video games, swimming, biking and watching a tv series with his wife and cat on Sundays.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Avi Delman, Customer Success Operations Manager
Avi was born in Florida but grew up right outside of Boston, MA. During COVID and the shift to remote friendly work environments, he moved to Charleston, SC with his wife and two adorable dogs.
Prior to joining Spiff, Avi was the Operations Manager at the healthcare startup, connectRN. As an Operations Manager, he enjoys helping teams and colleagues hit their metrics–Avi’s goal is to support others hit their goals.
Avi is a big sports and pop culture fan. A die-hard Celtics fan and a huge Miami Dolphins fan (the worst decision of his life). Avi is also a big foodie and enjoys traveling and hiking with his wife and two dogs.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Andy Glaus, Manager of Technical Support
Andy has been captivated by computers and technology since he was 6 years old when his dad brought home their first family computer. This passion for technology turned into a career. He has mixed with lots of different people living in several states and serving as a missionary for 2 years in Brazil.
Andy appreciates the different points of view that people from other cultures and life experiences bring. He has a masters in MISM from BYU. Before coming to Spiff he ran the IT operations at Premier Employee Solutions for almost 11 years and watched the company grow from six branches to more than 70. He stays busy with his wife and seven kids. Andy loves BYU football, Star Wars, audio books, podcasts, and movies.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Jason Michael Christy, Account Executive
Jason grew up in a small town outside of Chicago, Illinois. From the day he could walk, he played soccer and competed for both schools and clubs. At the age of 11, he learned he loved sales, when he sold items from a catalog door-to-door and earned his first skateboard. Jason studied in Europe and has lived across the United States, which has cemented his passion for living/working/traveling around the world. Today, Jason puts his competitive spirit and gift for communication to work in tech sales.
Helping business identify and solve for weaknesses, inspires Jason. He lives outside of Charlotte, NC with his wife, Kesha and their Manchester Terrier mix…Miley. They spend their free time planning adventures, Sunday driving, cooking good food and watching the Arsenal Football Club.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Sarah Hughes, Senior Product Marketing Manager
Originally from upstate New York, Sarah lives just outside of Boston. Despite her origins, she is a diehard Celtics and Patriots fan. Starting her Product Marketing career at ZoomInfo, without truly knowing what it meant to be a product marketer, she quickly realized her ability to take technical jargon and turn it into a benefit focused story was a unique skill set. She also loved that being at the intersection of Product, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success gives the perfect opportunity for her to support cross-functional teams.
Fast forward 4 years and she’s loving Product Marketing just as much as she did on day 1! Since high school, Sarah has been a long distance runner. She’s completed five half marathons with sights on the elusive full marathon sometime in the future. She has two daughters that keep her busy outside of work and she enjoys live music with her husband, with Kings of Leon, Mumford & Sons, and Rebelution rounding out some of her top shows.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Christopher Knuth, Account Executive
Chris is originally from Michigan, but has been living in Chicago the past 15 years. He enjoys the fast paced lifestyle, and the amenities the city has to offer such as museums and restaurants. Chris has 15 years of sales experience helping companies reach new heights. In his free time, Chris enjoys biking and traveling.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Harshitha Konda, DevOps Engineer
Harshitha was born in India where she studied and lived until later in life. Harshitha moved to the USA for higher education and got her Master’s from Northeastern University, Boston. After graduating, she got her first full time job in Utah.
Since then, Harshitha has been working in DevOps, managing, patching, and building infrastructure. In her personal life, she loves watching movies. She is a classical dancer and is currently learning a dance form called Kathak.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Katherine Harkness, QA Manager
Katherine is from the Philippines and is based in Utah. She enjoys food, reading, jeeping and exploring the outdoors. She is a mom of two and has a small family business with her husband, The Jeep Guy, where they fix and build up jeeps for off-roading and rescue and restore old Jeeps for their Jeep Museum.
She graduated with Computer Science and is a QA professional & leader and Agile & Quality Advocate. She has been an advocate of many programs and groups that help encourage more women and minorities to get into Tech, help start or improve DEI/DIB in the workplace, help promote awareness, educate, and support different cultures and communities especially AAPI and LGBTQ+ and many more causes.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
John Lapio, Data Engineer
John was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina where he currently lives with his wife and two kids. After college, John worked to create 3d art in the video game industry for several years until he decided to switch careers and focus more on information technology and software development. During that transition John discovered he enjoyed learning about databases, how data is stored and retrieved, and lately how modern data pipelines are built which has led him to where he currently is– in the data engineering space. When he’s not working or taking care of his kids John is usually catching up on a backlog of movies, playing board games with friends, or hiking if the weather permits.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Final Thoughts
And there you have it, another edition of our Meet the Team series. If you haven’t caught our previous installments, you can check them out here:
- Meet the Spiff Team: Chapter One
- Meet the Spiff Team Chapter Two
- Meet the Spiff Team Chapter Three
- Meet the Spiff Team Chapter Four
We’ll see you next time!
About Spiff
Spiff is a new class of software that creates trust across organizations by delivering real-time automation of commission calculations and motivates teams to drive top-line growth. With a combination of an intuitive UI, real-time visibility, and seamless integrations into current systems, Spiff is the first choice among high-growth businesses. Spiff’s sales commission software enables finance and sales operations teams to self-manage complex incentive compensation plans and provides transparency for sales teams.
