Joe Burton.

Burton grew up in rural Southern Ohio. His father, uncles, and a roster of cousins ran a small construction operation that laid asphalt and built retaining walls. He likes telling the story because it explains a habit he still has: he watches what people actually do before he trusts what they say they want.

In 1990 he started as a software engineer, in the era when that title carried the weight of someone who genuinely understood the machine. He spent the early part of his career building scanning systems for grocery stores. The work was unglamorous and so were the customers, which turned out to be the most important professional gift he ever received.

There is a story he repeats, from that period, about delivering software that did exactly what the requirements document specified. A major customer reported back that his team had "broken everything." His CEO refused to argue with the customer. Instead, the CEO sent him to spend five days in stores, watching pricing coordinators tag shelves, cashiers fight the scanner, and inventory managers reconcile the day. He has called it the best training of his entire career. The lesson was simple and crushing: customers describe their needs in the language of their last bad day, not in the language of a feature spec.

In 2001 his company was acquired into Cisco. He stayed for the better part of a decade, eventually serving as Chief Technology Officer of Unified Communications. That stretch put him in the room for one of the larger architectural arguments of the early 2000s: how would voice, video, and presence collapse into the same network. He shipped the answers Cisco bet on.

In 2011 he left for Plantronics, the headset company most people associate with call centers and the polite squawk of a receptionist. He arrived as CTO, was promoted to Chief Commercial Officer, and in October 2016 took the CEO seat. In March 2019, Plantronics and Polycom finished their merger and renamed themselves Poly. Burton was the CEO who carried that flag.

He stepped down from Poly in February 2020. The timing was unfortunate and the world had bigger problems within weeks. He used the gap to advise. McKinsey took him on as a Senior Advisor. ACCO Brands added him to its board. In January 2021 the Telesign board hired him as CEO of a company built around customer identity and engagement, the unglamorous plumbing that decides whether your two-factor code actually arrives.

Then, in the autumn of 2023, Reputation called. He took the job and moved to San Ramon. The thesis was not hard to articulate: every enterprise in the world is now running on a feedback loop that includes a public review rail, and most of them are running it badly. If you have ever booked a hotel by reading one-star reviews until you decide whether the hot tub story is a fluke, you have used a tool Reputation sells to the people running the hotel.

What is interesting about Burton is not the resume. It is what stays constant inside the resume. He keeps choosing companies that look like infrastructure from the outside and customer experience problems on the inside. Cisco UC. Plantronics. Telesign. Reputation. Different verticals, identical shape.

He is also one of a small group of Bay Area technology CEOs whose education credential is a Bachelor of Science from Excelsior University, a school designed for working adults rather than for legacy admissions committees. He later completed the Stanford Executive Program and the Directors' Consortium at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The order of those credentials matters. He earned the engineer's degree first, by working, and went back for the boardroom degree later, by running things.