Tell us about yourself and what you currently do.
My career doesn’t follow a straight line, and I think that’s the most honest thing I can say about it. Financial services, medical devices, and now deep inside one of the most interesting technology companies I’ve come across. If there’s a thread running through all of it, it’s this: I’ve always been drawn to situations where the stakes are real, the sale is consultative, and the buyer genuinely needs someone who will do the work to understand their world before opening their mouth.
Right now I serve as EVP of Growth at The Code Registry, based out of Philadelphia. We’re building something that I think will eventually be considered obvious in hindsight — the world’s only non-LLM code intelligence platform that lets business leaders actually see inside their own software. Not through their development team’s interpretation of it. Not through a consultant’s PowerPoint. Through an objective, plain-English view of what’s really in there: the security vulnerabilities, the technical debt, what it would cost to rebuild, whether the code being shipped is actually production-ready. It’s a problem hiding in plain sight, and we’re the ones solving it.
What first attracted you to business development and sales?
Early on in my career, I noticed that the moments I was most switched on were the ones involving people, not spreadsheets. Understanding what a client actually needed, finding the connection between that need and a real solution, earning the trust that made someone pick up the phone when you called. That pull was hard to ignore.
What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was how much discipline the craft requires. Learning how to earn someone’s attention before you’ve earned the right to ask for their business. That repetition built something in me that no classroom could. Sales is one of the few professions where your feedback loop is immediate and brutally honest. You either moved the needle or you didn’t. I’ve always respected that.
What have been your greatest career successes?
I built a medical sales territory from the ground up in one of the most competitive environments in the country. Chairman’s Club. Rookie of the Year. The 100 Order Club two years running. Those aren’t just trophies on a shelf. They came from showing up every day, building genuine relationships with physicians, physical therapists, and orthopedic specialists, and out-preparing everyone else in the field. The market doesn’t reward effort, it rewards results, and I learned what it actually takes to produce them consistently.
But the wins I think about most aren’t the ones with an award attached. They’re the moments where I changed how someone understood a product or a market. Where I found the language that made something complicated feel clear and urgent. That’s the skill I’m most proud of, and it’s the one I use most at The Code Registry every single day.
Tell us about your work at The Code Registry
Here’s the problem in simple terms. Software is now one of the most valuable assets a business owns. And yet if you ask most CEOs, board members, or investors what’s actually inside their codebase, the honest answer is they have no idea. They’re relying on trust. They’re hoping their development team is telling them the whole story. In most cases, nobody is lying to them. But nobody is giving them the full picture either.
The Code Registry changes that
We’re the world’s only non-LLM code intelligence platform, which matters more than it might sound. We’re not guessing. We’re not inferring. We’re delivering precise, deterministic analysis of what’s actually in your codebase. We’ve analyzed over three billion lines of code, detected more than 672,000 security vulnerabilities in real-world production codebases, and identified over 97,000 outdated dependencies that represent active risk. And we surface all of it in plain English, independently of the development team, in a format that a CEO or an investor can actually act on.
My job is to get that story in front of the people who need it most, <a href="https://jordangazette.com/national-water-carrier-offers-jordan-a-chance-to-build-a-homegrown-water-workforce-experts-say/”>build the commercial infrastructure to scale it, and develop the partnerships that extend our reach into new markets. It’s some of the most energizing work I’ve done, because the product is genuinely solving something real and the market need is enormous.
In your current role as EVP of Growth, what strategic initiatives have you implemented to increase growth?
The first thing I focused on was segment clarity. The Code Registry serves very different buyers, and each of them needs to hear a different version of the same truth. A CEO of a funded startup has different fears than a CFO managing vendor accountability, or an M&A advisor running due diligence on a software-heavy acquisition target. Generic messaging doesn’t cut it when the buyer’s pain is this specific. So we got precise about who we’re talking to and why the problem matters to them in particular.
The second push has been around our partner ecosystem
Our Ambassador and Affiliate Partner programs are critical. The most credible person to bring The Code Registry into a boardroom is often already sitting in that boardroom — IP lawyers, consulting firms, M&A advisors, systems integrators. We’ve built commercial structures that make it genuinely attractive for those partners to represent us, and that channel is growing fast.
Third is friction removal. You can get started on The Code Registry in under ten minutes. No lengthy implementations, no dependency on your development team. That simplicity is itself a commercial weapon, and I lean into it constantly.
How has your sales philosophy evolved over the years?
When I started out, I was very focused on the close. Hit the number, move to the next. That’s not wrong as a foundation, but it’s incomplete as a philosophy.
What I’ve come to believe is that the best commercial relationships are the ones that compound. The customer who stays, expands, and sends others your way is worth twenty times the one-time close. And to build that kind of relationship, you have to care more about their outcome than your commission. You have to be willing to tell someone when your solution isn’t right for them. You have to qualify harder and promise less and deliver more.
That shift changes everything downstream. It changes how you prospect, how you pitch, how you handle objections, how you work with customers after the contract is signed. And paradoxically, you close more because trust becomes your primary commercial advantage in a market where everyone is pitching.
What is your leadership philosophy?
I believe the job of a leader is to make clarity and trust available to everyone on the team. Clarity about what we’re trying to achieve and why. Trust that if they bring me a problem, I’ll engage with it honestly rather than shoot the messenger.
I also believe accountability and blame are completely different things
If we miss a number, I want to understand why with the same dispassion I’d bring to a science experiment. What did we learn? What do we change? The culture I try to build is one where people aren’t afraid to surface bad news early, because early is when you can still do something about it.
How do you develop future leaders within your teams?
Intentionally and early. I look for curiosity and resilience more than polish. Someone who asks the right questions about why something works, not just how to execute it, has a ceiling far above someone who just follows the playbook perfectly.
I give people scope that slightly exceeds their current comfort level and then stay close without micromanaging. And I coach explicitly. I don’t form private opinions about someone’s performance and keep them to myself. I tell people exactly what I see, what’s working, what isn’t, and what I’d do differently. That directness, delivered with genuine care for the person’s growth, is the most valuable thing I can offer someone early in their career.
How do you build a high-performance sales culture?
Culture is built by what you reward and what you tolerate. Full stop.
In a high-performance sales culture, you reward preparation, honesty about the pipeline, creative problem-solving, and genuine care for the customer. You do not tolerate happy ears or the habit of blaming external factors for internal shortcomings.
Beyond that, the single greatest accelerant for sales culture is belief. When your team genuinely believes that what they’re selling matters, they stop selling and start evangelizing. At The Code Registry that’s not hard to manufacture. When a CEO opens their first platform report and sees, for the first time, exactly what’s inside their codebase, the reaction is almost always the same: “I had no idea. Why didn’t I know this sooner?” When your salespeople see that reaction regularly, motivation takes care of itself.
How has your entrepreneurial mindset contributed to your success?
I treat every commercial situation as a problem to be solved, not a script to be followed. What are the real constraints here? Where is the leverage? What’s the version of this that nobody else has tried yet?
That mindset is especially useful at The Code Registry because we’re not selling into an established category. We’re creating one. There’s no proven playbook for bringing code intelligence to the boardroom. You have to be willing to experiment, to adjust, and to hold conviction in the direction even when the specific path is unclear. People who need a fully paved road before they’ll move don’t thrive in that environment. I do.
What are your current and future goals in your current role?
In the near term, scaling multiple channels simultaneously
Direct enterprise sales, our partner and ambassador network, and a frictionless self-serve motion for smaller businesses who want to get started immediately. We have a product that works and a market that’s clearly hungry. The goal right now is disciplined acceleration across all three.
Further out, I want The Code Registry to become the globally recognized standard for code intelligence. The same way you wouldn’t acquire a company without a financial audit, I want it to be inconceivable to invest in, acquire, or govern a software-dependent business without a Code Registry report. That’s the category we’re building, and it’s a large one.
What other projects are you currently involved in?
The Code Registry sits within a bigger story called The Code Company, which brings The Code Registry and The Code Factory together under one roof.
The Code Registry is the intelligence layer
It gives founders, CEOs, CFOs, investors, and boards a real-time view of their code with reporting that makes software risk legible at board level. The Code Factory is the execution arm — a specialist development and transformation partner that takes what The Code Registry surfaces and puts it into motion. The flywheel is straightforward: intelligence surfaces risk and opportunity, the Factory remediates and builds, and The Code Registry independently verifies the output. Know. Fix. Verify. A complete closed loop, built for the AI-first era of software. Getting that full picture in front of the right audiences is something I’m deeply invested in right now.
How do you see the industry growing and transforming over the next decade?
AI is producing code faster than humans can review it. That’s not a prediction anymore, it’s the current reality. And speed without visibility is risk accumulation at scale. The demand for independent, non-LLM code intelligence will grow dramatically as a result. Businesses are starting to understand that LLM-based tools are powerful for generation but unreliable for verification. You can’t use the same technology that wrote the code to tell you whether the code is safe. That’s where we sit, and it’s a position that becomes more valuable, not less, as AI-generated code proliferates.
At the same time, software is increasingly recognized as a balance sheet asset, not just an operational cost. Boards and regulators are starting to ask questions about software quality and security that weren’t being asked five years ago. Over the next decade, code intelligence becomes as standard a business practice as financial reporting. Not optional. Expected.
What do you think will be the biggest changes in sales and business development over the next five years?
The buyers are getting smarter and more skeptical, and the professionals who thrive will be the ones who match that sophistication. Generic outreach and oversold solutions are becoming increasingly punished in the market. What wins is genuine expertise, real honesty about what a product can and can’t do, and the ability to build trust faster than your competitors.
AI will reshape the mechanics of selling significantly — prospecting, data enrichment, personalization at scale. But I think the effect will be to raise the premium on authentic human judgment and real advisory relationships at the high end of the market, not reduce it. The table stakes go up. The differentiator stays human.
What is next for you?
Continued growth at The Code Registry and The Code Company
The opportunity is real and the timing is right, and I want to be central to what gets built here over the next few years. Beyond that, I’ll keep looking for opportunities to support founders and businesses doing genuinely important work. That’s been a constant throughout my career and I don’t see it changing.
What legacy would you like to leave as a business leader?
I want to be known as someone who made the people around him better. Not just commercially, but as professionals and as thinkers. The deals close, the numbers get hit, the companies grow or they don’t. What lasts is the impact on the individuals who were part of those journeys.
On a broader level, I hope the work at The Code Registry contributes to a world where business leaders have genuine visibility into the software they depend on. Technology has enormous power to create value. The more clearly leaders can see and understand that power, without relying on blind trust, the better the outcomes for everyone.
Where can readers connect with you?
LinkedIn is the best place to find me. I’m always open to conversations with founders, investors, and technology leaders thinking seriously about software as a business asset.
You can also go straight to thecoderegistry.com and get started for free. If you’ve ever wondered whether your code is as healthy as you hope it is, the answer is probably more interesting than you expect.
Nick Giorno is EVP of Growth at The Code Registry, part of The Code Company — the world’s only non-LLM code intelligence platform, helping CEOs, investors, CTOs, and boards know, verify, value, and fix their code.
