And Then I Went on Tour With Madonna: Eric Jao’s Adventures in Sales, Music, and Everything Else

Where to begin? Eric Jao is an account executive at threatER, a cybersecurity platform provider. He also teaches kids all over the country how to compose, play, and perform music. He’s a DJ and a musician; a businessman and an artist; and a dad.

“If you know my career path,” he says, “some of it’s been a very unconventional one to get to where I’m at right now. But I’m so happy right now because I feel like I found that perfect balance of getting what I want out of a career versus the balance that I have with my family.” Eric’s trajectory is coiling and eclectic. The sales portion isn’t always the first thing you see, but it’s there at almost every step of the journey.

So where does it begin? Probably in high school. “I wanted to become a DJ. That was the thing that I wanted to do.” DJ equipment is expensive, though, and 16-year-old Eric didn’t have the cash flow. He went to his parents with a proposal: a $3,000 loan that he would pay back over time. “They said no, obviously. They’re not gonna say yes, right?” By the beginning of 1991, though, six months later, Eric had convinced them that he could earn several hundred dollars every week by DJing parties after high school football games. “That’s where I would trace my roots back to sales,” says Eric, “but that’s not the path that I ended up taking—like really fully taking and embracing—until like thirty-something years later.”

THE DETOURS

After graduating, Eric attended the University of Virginia, where he continued working as a DJ at fraternity parties and other events while studying business. He also added another item to his artistic repertoire: acting. In college, he had tried it out, gotten some speaking parts, and done pretty well. When he graduated in 1997, he gave it a shot—“commercials, stuff like that.” He also went on a six-month tour performing Shakespeare for local schools.

Even though Eric decided acting was not his path, this skill served him well in his next occupation in sales. “I found myself as a network engineer during the boom of tech.” As everyone knows, though, the tech boom didn’t last forever. Pretty soon, his company was asking for layoff volunteers, which came with a decent severance package. “So I’m like, you know what? I’m gonna take another shot at myself.”

The shot wasn’t unfounded. All throughout his engineering career, Eric had been DJing every weekend, as well as entering DJ contests, including what he calls the Olympics of DJing. “I sucked at first, but then I got better and better and better.” Better is an understatement. Eric won first place in the entire country, and eventually second in the world. “You can find video of me,” he says. “I have hair.” (He doesn’t anymore.) In 2004, he left his engineering job by way of a voluntary layoff and became a full-time DJ. It would be twenty years before he reentered the traditional business world.

THE TOUR TOURS

In 2008, on a Monday night, Eric was playing a nightclub in Orlando. By now, his style of DJing had grown to include instrumental performances with which he would supplement the songs he played. At the club that night was a man who happened to have recently started working with Madonna as her music director. She’d asked him to find a DJ who would do well on tour with her. Eric was at the airport, in the security line, when he got the call. “Fast forward a couple of weeks, I found out that I got the gig with Madonna. We went on tour for almost two years.”  

By the end of the tour, Eric was a father. By the time he’d finished a solo residency in Vegas, he was a father of two. Yet again, things had changed for him. “I didn’t want to be leaving all the time, because I would miss all this stuff.”

The inspiration for his next gig was possibly the most organic. He was in his own living room, playing piano. His daughter and her friend were on a playdate in the next room. He asked them if they wanted to make a song. They were game. He started with the basics: Frozen. He brought up a video of “Let It Go” and asked the girls what they heard.

“Piano,” said his daughter.

“And we started listening more and more, started identifying things she was hearing, and we started making things together. They started hitting the pads, hitting the keyboards, and realizing that they were doing those things in real time, and I go, ‘Oh. We made a song in like twenty minutes. We made this sort of quick song together.’ And I was like, ‘Dude. That was so cool.’ I was like, ‘I want to teach kids.’”

So he did. He started a company, Mix Major. As he’d done with DJing, Eric sought out opportunities to share his expertise, mostly in the form of after-school programs. “We would make songs that sounded like music kids would actually listen to on the radio. They would write the lyrics, they would record their voices, they would make the bits and pieces of the song with guidance, and put this all together.” In 2018, Mix Major moved into a studio with ten laptops at ten workstations. It didn’t yield as much as Eric needed to be earning—he was still DJing to supplement—but it was the concretization of his dream, and it was going great until 2020. Like many during the pandemic, Eric pivoted to digital. Actually, he never un-pivoted. Mix Major is an online school serving students across North America (and one in Switzerland).

Eric also added a job that would earn him a paycheck while getting him home in time for dinner. A friend of his connected him to a position selling solar panels door-to-door. Eric learned how to cold-pitch his product. He re-immersed himself in the business world. By the time he was interested in going full time, he had refined his abilities in many different ways, in many different contexts, and in many different crafts.

One throughline that he’s identified in his journey is the blending of science and art. Engineering, piano, acting, DJing; they coexist, and they all excite him. It was his broadminded embrace of all of these parts of himself that helped drive him back to full-time sales. Today, he’s in cybersecurity, and he’s loving it. He says that a lot of the credit for getting him to his current position at threatER goes to Will Fuentes. “Granted, I had to prove myself to Will.” They’d been in touch for years. Will was impressed by the business and vision Eric had built with Mix Major. They met on occasion to catch up, to talk business.

What solidified Will’s confidence in Eric was Eric’s method of interview habits. He would sit down and run a full analysis of a company’s pain points, write out cold call scripts he might perform for that company if hired. Then, he tapped into his performance background. He used Loom to record custom video introductions that laid out what made him a good fit (as well as thank-you notes following an interview). Will took note of this innovative approach, and he put Eric in touch with threatER.

Every part of his skillset is still relevant. When reminiscing on his time acting, Eric said, “I learned that I could stand in front of an audience, and as long as I practiced, and I had prepared…I could do that thing, whatever that thing is, and perform in front of these people.” That thing is now selling cyber-intelligence solutions, but Eric’s dedication to practice and preparation still results in highly successful presentations.

Eric is currently an Account Executive at threatER, a cyber-threat enforcement and response solution provider. You can learn more about Eric here. Be sure to congratulate him while you’re there!