René Gubančok is Chief Strategy Officer at HARDWARIO, where for the past three years he has shaped how the company works with system integrators and channel partners: what ships from the catalog, what gets built to order, and where the line between the two belongs.

He came to the role from eleven years at Jablotron, the Czech wireless security manufacturer, from 2005 to 2016, where he moved through export sales and business development to Director of Sales. He built and ran the export business across more than 70 countries, opened distribution channels from scratch in markets with no prior presence, and sat in on product decisions rather than waiting for finished products to sell.

Between Jablotron and HARDWARIO he founded and ran startups of his own. Carrying the product risk and the customer relationship himself gave him the view from the other side of the table, where most of this conference's audience sits.

He holds an MBA from DePaul University in Chicago and an engineering degree from the University of Žilina. Before Jablotron he spent four years in California with Sentry Alarm Systems of America, first in finance and later designing burglar, fire and CCTV installations, which is where the hardware started.

He speaks Slovak, Czech, English and Russian.

At The Things Conference he presents Three Ways to Ship, on the routes from a signed order to hardware in the field, and what each one costs in time, in margin, and in who owns the customer.