Meet Delaware’s IT Sherpa

For centuries, adventurers who have dared climb the slopes of Mount Everest have sought the guidance of the Sherpa people, world-renowned for their knowledge of the mountain terrain.
The majority of Sherpas dwell at the foot of Mount Everest. Except for a handful of non-Nepalese IT Sherpas living right here in Delaware, led by head Sherpa Greg Gurev.
“Internally, we view ourselves as Sherpas. Sherpa engineer, Sherpa president, that’s the culture we want to establish,” said Gurev, who founded MySherpa in Wilmington in 2001. “In a lot of service industries, the service gets forgotten. I always emphasize that we’re on your expedition. We want you to be successful. I think a lot of tech people that aren’t good ‘people people’ don’t get that. They think it’s about the technology.”

The cloud is a lot like walking into the clouds of Mount Everest — you're just going it alone.

Just like Sherpas are there to help climbers scale Mount Everest, Gurev said MySherpa is there to help clients scale the network and technology obstacles that litter the path to doing plain ol’ good business.
One of the most common misconceptions about IT security? According to Gurev, it’s that the cloud will solve all of our problems.
“You throw a little bit of money at this nondescript cloud, and you can turn your server room into a wine closet. People actually believe the marketing hype,” he said. The reality, Gurev said, is a much more stark than that. “The cloud is a lot like walking into the clouds of Mount Everest — you’re just going it alone.”
Running his own IT management shop wasn’t always in plan for Gurev. Why did he take the entrepreneurial route?
“Necessity is the mother of all invention,” he chuckled. “I got let go of where I was working — which is good for everyone to experience because if you ever have to fire somebody, it’s nice to know how it feels.”
Except, instead of bringing a book of business to the table to help get his new business on its feet, Gurev had nothing.
“I started from zero. I didn’t have any customers and no real experience in this industry other than managing IT vendors,” he said. “In reality, it was probably a pretty treacherous trek, but we made it.”
Made it indeed. Seven years after launching MySherpa, Gurev was selected to sit on the board of the Technology Forum of Delaware (known back then as Digital Delaware). By 2008, he was president of the forum, stepping down in August of last year. In September of last year, MySherpa was awarded the elusive Superstar in Business award from the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce.