This tech exec sharpened his hustle by working in his family's restaurant for 13 years by Dylan Love on Jul 31, 2018, 2:41 PM Advertisement
 - John Zanni cites his experience of working his way up through the restaurant business as crucial to developing people skills he still uses today.
- Zanni's post-restaurant tech career spans 16 years as a general manager for Microsoft, four years with virtualization company Parallels, and he now approaches his fourth year with data backup company Acronis.
- Before that, he managed his family-owned French restaurant in Newbury Park, California.
Before holding leadership roles at multinational technology companies, John Zanni managed his family-owned French restaurant, Les Rendezvous in Newbury Park, California. He began as a lowly dishwasher. "My family has been in the restaurant business for generations, and my father always believed you have to start from the bottom and work your way up," Zanni said. Joining his family at work upon finishing high school, his 13-year food service tour of duty saw him go from washing dishes, to preparing food, to cooking food. He eventually managed the entire operation. He cites this experience as endowing him with people skills that are invaluable in his tech career today. He ultimately left the restaurant business in pursuit of a physics degree and technology career. He says the social skills and event management carry over most directly, but "It's really about the ability to interact with all different types of people and understand their interests," he said. Zanni's post-restaurant tech career spans 16 years as a general manager for Microsoft, four years with virtualization company Parallels, and he now approaches his fourth year with data backup company Acronis. As President of Acronis, Zanni facilitates the relationships that keep Acronis's market share and revenues alive. He leans on his hard-won black belt in people skills to do it, first understanding what an organization needs before selling anything to them. This tactic echoes Zanni's years at Les Rendezvous, where 25% of all the food the restaurant sold was ordered off-menu. "[Many orders were completely] unique, so you have to adapt to each one and give them what they want," he said. "It makes people feel good when you do something special for them." Zanni also made a point of individually asking his restaurant customers if they were enjoying their meals. If the answer was less than an enthusiastic yes, he would dig deeper and find a way to solve the problem. "You never want anyone leaving unhappy," he says. "It affects your reputation." Running a restaurant also imbued Zanni with a common business sense. He understands what motivates small and medium enterprises because he used to lead one himself. Unsurprisingly, his philosophy here remains very people-oriented: "It's about acquiring and retaining customers, the technology is secondary." Zanni is most recently a new Swiss resident in the canton of Schaffhausen, having relocated from Boston in January. The move puts him in the same town as a new Acronis headquarters 30 minutes outside Zurich, and it comes while Acronis increasingly touts its "Swiss-Singaporean" identity. The company maintains large corporate presences in both countries, whose geographies are valuable for their politically neutral governments and high qualities of life for employees living there. (Acronis co-founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov proudly holds a Singaporean passport.) Otherwise happy with his European move, Zanni expressed playful frustration at his newly restricted streaming media rights. "Some American media doesn't have licensing rights in Switzerland, so your favorite show might be geo-locked from your device," he said, bemoaning the loss of his beloved "Westworld" from his viewing diet. In the meantime, Zanni seems bound to weather ahead from his new Swiss geography, thinking in the context of the customer and harnessing the power of relationships to get Acronis through good and bad alike. Even though he's solving problems more complicated than dirty dishes, it's clear that Zanni's extensive restaurant experience is major asset to him in the technology business today.
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