Meet the Team: Will Lewis
Tell us a little bit about yourself, background, and role. How did you land here?
My name is Will Lewis, and I’m a Sales Engineer here at Trestle. I started my professional life with my own small tutoring business, which I eventually sold off before heading back to school to finish my degree. I tutored just about every academic subject, but test prep like ACT, SAT, and AP exams made up most of the business. To this day, it makes me a dangerous trivia partner, especially on anything world or U.S. history.
I went back and finished up at the University of Washington, where I studied Chemistry and International Studies. From there, I got my start in the identity space at Ekata, where I came in on the commercial side as an account manager. The parts of that job I gravitated toward most were the technical ones. I really enjoyed thinking through how to iterate on the product, running data tests with customers, and working on the solutioning. As an account manager, you’re not really the point person on any of that; you’re on a team alongside an account executive and a sales engineer. The more I did it, the more I realized the sales engineering piece was the part I actually found most interesting.
After Ekata, I spent about a year at a carbon removal startup doing more technical work, such as designing the soil sampling plans we used to measure carbon capture out in the field. It’s been a varied path, but it all eventually pointed me back toward identity and the work I’m doing now.
What does your daily routine look like?
My mornings are usually packed with customer calls. We’ve got a lot of international customers, so it’s pretty common to start the day with an early call. I spend most of the morning that way. Then I save my afternoons for focus work, whether that’s data testing or working on product features. That rhythm is more or less how I break up the day.
What excites you most about Trestle?
Identity management is one of those spaces that’s always going to be needed, and there’s always some new iteration of it waiting to be built. What excites me most is being part of a small team that gets to build genuinely net-new products and have a real impact on how they take shape.
A big reason I took this role is that I get to work on the product side, not just the sales side. At a larger company, I had plenty of ideas about product direction and strategic focus, but it wasn’t easy to actually put them into practice. Here, I can. We’re working in a similar space, but the difference is that when I have an idea, there’s a real path to making it real.
What Trestle value do you relate to most?
Figure It Out. It’s the one that feels most relevant on any given day. It goes hand in hand with working at a small company. There are multiple hats to wear at any given moment, and you don’t always have a playbook in front of you. You just have to figure it out. We thrive in ambiguity.
What’s one surprising thing that helps you do your best work?
It comes down to a pretty simple philosophy: I take pride in my work, and I don’t want to put bad things out into the world. That matters even more in the identity space, where you carry a lot of responsibility and you’re handling people’s personal information every single day. Building products that make interactions run smoother and make the world a little safer without ever putting identity data at risk is the highest priority for me, and that sense of responsibility is what keeps my standards high.
What’s a topic you could give a 5-minute impromptu talk about?
The importance of wild spaces. A few years back I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail (2,600 miles from Mexico to Canada), and it’s one of those shared experiences where, if I overhear someone else mention it, I immediately want to compare notes. Like, what year did you hike, what did you see, what was it like? Being able to disconnect and spend months in genuinely remote places is something I think is deeply valuable.
And if wild spaces aren’t your thing, I can always fall back on my tutoring years and talk your ear off about world or U.S. history.
