Faces of Optery is a series highlighting the people behind Optery’s mission to help individuals, families, and businesses take back control over exposed personal data.
Bringing an Engineer’s Mindset to Commercial Leadership: Meet Optery’s Chief Commercial Officer
In this story, Chief Commercial Officer and General Manager of Optery for Business Paul Mander shares how his experience in engineering, MarTech, and ad tech led him first to invest in Optery and later to join the company. He also discusses an early customer expansion that validated the potential of Optery for Business, the leadership principle that guides his work, and life outside work, from collecting wine to listening to old-school trance music.
Building Optery for Business
As Optery’s Chief Commercial Officer and General Manager of Optery for Business, Paul leads the go-to-market strategy and execution for the company’s business offering.
to day, he focuses on keeping those efforts effective and aligned with customer needs and the direction of the market.
Paul’s history with Optery began before he joined the company as an employee. He and CEO Lawrence Gentilello had worked together many years earlier, and when Lawrence first shared his idea for Optery, Paul saw its potential and became an investor.
“I was very excited and wrote a check,” Paul said.
Later, after Optery gained momentum with its consumer offering and was preparing to launch Optery for Business, Paul was looking for his next opportunity. He decided to deepen his commitment by joining the company to build and lead the new offering.
Paul was drawn both by the opportunity to work with Lawrence again and by his own experience with the personal data ecosystem. Through his previous work in MarTech and ad tech, he had seen how personal information is collected, shared, and made widely available across the internet, creating significant privacy and security risks.
At Optery, Paul saw an opportunity to address the personal data exposure problem far more comprehensively than had previously been possible.
“By removing all this exposed personal information from data broker sites, we’re doing something meaningfully good in the world and helping make individuals and organizations safer,” Paul said.
An Early Customer Validates the Vision
One moment that has stayed with Paul came during the earlier stages of Optery for Business, when a large, publicly traded social networking company signed up for the platform as a self-service customer.
The Optery team believed the company could benefit from broader coverage, but its immediate focus was on delivering exceptional results at its existing level of coverage. Eventually, the company approached Optery about expanding coverage across its entire organization, encompassing thousands of employees.
For Paul, the expansion represented much more than a major commercial win. A prominent company that nearly everyone knows was entrusting Optery with helping protect its employees and the organization itself.
“It was one of those moments when we realized, yes, we’ve got something here,” Paul said.
At the time, Optery for Business did not yet have a major enterprise customer. Seeing an organization adopt Optery across its entire workforce demonstrated that the platform was ready to support customers at that scale.
Optery now serves many more organizations like that one, but the early vote of confidence remains especially meaningful to Paul.
An Engineer at Heart
People who know Paul today as a commercial or sales leader may be surprised to learn that he has an engineering degree and still considers himself an engineer at heart.
That background shapes how he evaluates technology and makes purchasing decisions. When researching a vendor, Paul prefers to examine the facts and test the product himself rather than simply being sold to.
“I want to buy software like an engineer,” Paul said. “I want to test things out. I just want the facts.”
Although his work now centers on leading a commercial organization and talking with customers, the same mindset continues to influence his approach. He still enjoys a good technical challenge, even if solving those challenges directly is no longer the primary focus of his role.
Paul also believes technical knowledge is valuable for anyone working in the technology industry, regardless of their particular function.
“Technical skills are never a bad thing when you work in technology,” he said.
Removing Obstacles for His Team
One principle guides Paul’s work more than any other: a leader’s responsibility is to put the team in the best possible position to succeed.
“The question I ask myself is: How do I remove obstacles for my team?” Paul said. “How do I make sure my team is in a position where they can be as successful as possible?”
For Paul, continually asking those questions is the most important part of leading a team.
Practical Security Habits
Paul’s first recommendation for improving privacy and security is to use Optery to find and remove exposed personal information from data broker sites. This minimizes what potential attackers can know about you and helps prevent both cyber and physical threats.
Beyond personal data removal, he recommends enabling multi-factor authentication on critical accounts, particularly email and financial accounts.
He also recommends using a password manager, although he admits he was late to adopt one himself.
“Once you start using it, you’ll wonder why you didn’t use it before,” Paul said.
A password manager makes everyday life easier by removing the need to remember numerous complicated passwords. It also improves security by generating and storing strong, unique passwords for different accounts.
Password managers can also help protect against phishing by matching saved credentials to the correct website domain. If a login page is hosted on a spoofed domain, the password manager generally will not autofill the credentials, providing a warning that the site may be fraudulent.
Wine, Trance, and Life Outside Work
Wine is Paul’s biggest hobby. He collects, stores, and ages wine and has traveled to wine regions around the world, including Bordeaux, Burgundy, Napa, and Mendoza.
“If you ever want wine tips, I can talk for hours,” he said.
His favorite way to unwind is with a glass of wine, preferably from Bordeaux. If he had to choose one cuisine, he would select Italian.
Paul’s favorite television show is The Sopranos, followed by Mad Men and Game of Thrones, respectively. His favorite music is old-school trance from the late 1990s through the 2000s and early 2010s, with Tiësto, Armin van Buuren, Paul van Dyk, and Markus Schulz among his favorite artists.
Whether he is shaping the strategy for Optery for Business, helping a customer extend protection to thousands of employees, or removing obstacles for his team, Paul combines commercial leadership with an engineer’s preference for facts, testing, and practical solutions.
From investing in Optery early on to leading its commercial strategy today, Paul has remained committed to the same goal: making individuals and organizations safer by removing exposed personal data.
