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The Builder Who Keeps Showing Up to Empty Rooms
There is a particular kind of professional who gets handed a job description that says "build this" - and does. Not redesign, not refactor, not optimize. Build. From a blank org chart, blank process docs, blank everything. Emily Garza has done this more than once - and the pattern is starting to look less like luck and more like a method.
At Fastly, she arrived to launch a function that didn't yet have walls. She built both the Sales Enablement and Customer Success organizations from scratch, taking the CS team from a single player-coach role to 30+ people spread across time zones. Annual recurring revenue climbed from $60 million to over $300 million. The Net Promoter Score held above 60 the entire time. That's the kind of number that turns skeptics into believers.
She did something similar at Proton.ai, where she joined in early 2022 as Vice President of Customer Success. And then again at Unit21, the San Francisco-based AI risk infrastructure platform trusted by financial institutions including Intuit, Chime, and Sallie Mae. There, she leads all post-sale customer functions as Head of Customer Engagement - the person standing between the customer's confusion and the platform's potential.
Unit21's mission is serious. The platform helps over 200 banks, fintechs, and payment companies detect fraud, run AML transaction monitoring, and file Suspicious Activity Reports. The stakes are regulatory. The competition is relentless - fraud tactics evolve faster than most compliance teams can respond. Garza's job is to make sure customers aren't just using the product, but trusting it, growing with it, and coming back to it.
Before any of this, she spent more than 12 years at AT&T. Sales. Account management. Leadership. Professional development. It's the kind of career stint that teaches you how large organizations actually move, and where the levers are. Then she pivoted to cloud infrastructure at Fastly - a different speed, a different culture, a different definition of urgency. That contrast gave her a perspective most CS executives don't have: she knows what "slow" feels like, which is why she's obsessed with making things faster.
She reduced Unit21's customer onboarding timeline from five months to two. The method: document every step, find every bottleneck, consult ERP experts, build reusable frameworks. Less heroic than it sounds. More disciplined than most companies manage. The insight driving it is simple but hard to execute: onboarding and implementation are not the same thing. Implementation is technical. Onboarding is everything else - the stakeholder alignment, the change management, the training that makes people actually use what they paid for.
On that distinction, Garza is precise: "Implementation focuses on technical integration, while onboarding encompasses implementation plus stakeholder management, change management, and training to ensure effective tool adoption." It sounds like a vocabulary lesson. It's actually a strategic argument for where CS organizations should spend their attention.