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John Fernandez is SVP at Datasite, with a track record as GTM leader at Glia, ContentWise, and Diligent, having scaled teams through IPOs, acquisitions, and $1.4B in equity events. At Glia, John pioneered revenue marketing’s impact, driving 71% of pipeline and 60% of new business revenue from marketing. Connect with him for real-world GTM lessons, scaling playbooks, and unique frameworks for aligning marketing with revenue.
Discussed in this Episode:
- How to architect a B2B marketing org that is truly accountable for pipeline and revenue, not just “influence”
- Aligning product, content, and campaign teams to ONE goal: pipeline creation (culture, incentives, and operations)
- The “Value Chain” framework for mapping marketing’s full-stack impact across the GTM engine
- John’s “4 Whats” Framework for operationalizing measurement: what’s working, what’s not, what’s new, what’s next
- What’s broken about attribution today and why multi-touch measurement is often a red herring
- The shift from SEO to GEO: How generative AI is re-writing digital discoverability and B2B content strategy
- AI in marketing without losing authenticity: human-in-the-loop, voice, and trust factors you need to watch
- Why more Martech isn’t the answer (and the tech stack crisis facing GTM teams)
- Deep problem understanding as a GTM superpower (what chess can teach SaaS leaders about winning)
- Key moves for founders and GTM leaders facing today’s attention and signal problem
Highlights:
0:00 – Why “brand” only gets you a fraction of a second — pipeline accountability is the real differentiator
1:10 – Introducing John Fernandez: leading GTM, IPOs, and billion-dollar revenue journeys
2:20 – “Value Chain” Framework: Connecting product marketing, content, campaigns, and brand to revenue
4:00 – Operationalizing revenue focus: how to embed pipeline creation in marketing culture
6:50 – Generalists vs. Specialists: why you must know what good looks like, even if you can’t do it all
8:45 – Data and measurement: how to turn attribution data into real change (and why numbers build trust)
10:30 – The “4 Whats”: John’s cheat code for quarterly measurement and executive/board reporting
13:00 – Attribution traps: multi-touch is effort, not efficacy — what most marketers miss about the buyer journey
16:30 – Seeing the full buyer journey: why marketers must think like mini-CROs
19:40 – Sales cycles in 2025: stakeholder depth, ABM, and mapping the committee
23:30 – Scaling from Seed to growth: how product-market fit made Glia’s revenue marketing model possible
27:15 – The realistic limits of marketing-originated pipeline (and why org context matters)
29:00 – GTM targeting: creating a full-funnel flywheel with content, outbound, partner, and ecosystem tactics
33:00 – Career inflection points: when to get off the rocket ship, and how to empower new GTM leaders
36:15 – AI’s impact today: outsourcing the bottom 10% of your job, and where human creativity still wins
38:30 – Getting AI to work for YOU (not replace you): voice, tone, prompt engineering, and hands-on frameworks
41:10 – The coming “slop detection” skill — why authenticity is the next frontier in AI-driven content
45:20 – AI, data, and privacy: why you can’t yet automate everything (and what’s next for secure use cases)
48:00 – Revenue marketing in 2025: is anything working? SEO vs. GEO, the zero-click world, and email’s collapse
53:00 – Channel mix reality: In-person events, brand touchpoints, and the fraction-of-a-second rule
57:00 – Widely held beliefs that are wrong: “More tech is better” and the myth of martech as a solve-all
59:30 – Tech is just a tool, people and programs drive impact
1:02:00 – Where to find John and how to reach out for more GTM insights
Guest Speaker Links (John Fernandez):
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfernandez/
- Datasite: https://www.datasite.com/
Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
- Newsletter: https://substack.com/@sophiebuonassisi
Thanks to Our Sponsor – Pursuit
The best talent isn’t actively job hunting. Pursuit helps companies hire elite go-to-market talent on a non-retainer basis. As a key GTMfund partner, they equip sales and marketing teams with top performers.
If you’re hiring for sales or marketing roles, reach out to Pursuit at pursuitsalessolutions.com/gtm or message a GTMfund team member.
Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):
- Website: https://gtmnow.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: /@gtm_now
- The GTM Podcast (on all major directories): https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
The GTMnow Podcast:
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly show featuring the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Each episode gets beneath the surface to reveal the real go-to-market strategies, frameworks, and career moves that shape iconic B2B companies from Seed through Series B and beyond.
GTM 156 Episode Transcript
John Fernandez (00:00.398)
Brand’s gonna give you an extra fraction of a second before that person deletes your email. Headline’s a bit of a cheat code, because it gets very, very close to revenue. The SEO in email or the areas that are decreasing, GEO is obviously coming very heavily. Well, it’s because they have a very easy to understand number. As coming after jobs, it’s not coming over the top part of your job, it’s coming after the bottom part of your job. It’s so easy to measure sales.
Sophie Buonassisi (00:48.386)
Before we dive in, a quick word on hiring. It’s a weird market out there right now, but finding top go-to-market talent is still one of the biggest levers for growth. At GTM Fund, we’ve made over 2,000 Canada intros and placed hundreds of eight players. One of our go-to recruiting partners is Pursuit. They specialize in sales and marketing talent, and they do it without a retainer. We work with them closely across many roles. If you’re hiring, go to pursuitsalessolutions.com forward slash GTM, that’ll be in the show notes, or paying someone from the GTM Fund team. We’ll get you connected.
This episode breaks down how to build a marketing organization that’s accountable to pipeline and revenue. You’ll learn how to align product
content and campaign functions around a shared revenue goal and how to map marketing contributions across a full value chain. Currently SVP of Datasite and formerly a go-to-market leader at Glia, content-wise diligent, John has led teams through IPO’s, acquisitions, and over a billion dollar in equity events. At Glia, he drove 71 % of pipeline and 60 % of new business revenue. John also shares how to operationalize measurements with his 4Watts framework, what’s broken with attribution, why GO is replacing SEO, and how to use AI without losing signal or authenticity.
He also shares some parallels between chess and go-to-market, like how the best players win by knowing when to break their rules. Sometimes the winning move is trading the queen, not protecting her. All right, let’s get into it. John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Absolutely. We’re going to deep dive on revenue marketing. So I have to ask, to get started, how do you even define revenue marketing? And how is it different than a traditional brand and demand gen functions?
always get to get very, very theoretical at first. So you have revenue marketing, even if you didn’t know it. But for me, there’s a concept that’s really, really helpful that we use a lot, especially with GLIA, was this concept of value chain. Every company has a value chain. So you think of it traditionally as your marketing team then goes on to sales, then goes on to CS, then goes on to product. And you’re supported by a lot of functions. So think about
Speaker 2 (02:46.9)
know, IT, HR, finance, legal, all sort of support the overall value chain. And that is sort of the overall construct of a company. Well, marketing has that as well. So, you know, marketing organization, traditionally you have your product marketing org, first and foremost, obviously get a product to market, messaging, positioning, all of those great pragmatic marketing framework stuff. You then have your content marketing team. You know, they’re educating and build trust in creating that content. And then you have the revenue marketing team.
which are the campaigns, channel owners, their job is to take that content marketing based off of product marketing to go out into the field and obviously find folks and turn into pipeline and obviously revenue for the business. then marketing, know, is traditionally supported by brand, corporate communications, marketing operations, and everything else that you need. And so, you when I was saying I’m a revenue marketer is one is I come from a channel owner, I was a digital marketer to start and I have that bias.
But now that I’ve sort of grown and progressed in my career, for me, it’s about, you know, what is the primary function and culture and rallying cry of that marketing team, knowing we have all of those things to do. You know, so for me, the marketing team, yes, you may be in product marketing or content marketing or brand and design and stuff like that, but like we all get together to create pipeline. And that’s sort of like the thing I want to exude in the culture.
you know, more so than everything else. And obviously, brain’s really important. And know, Cropcoms is really important and product marketing is very important. But what is that kind of that rallying cry? And that’s always, no one is better or different. It’s just, that’s the way I’m wired and the way that I find is very, very strong. We all need to be revenue marketers to some extent. have every function isn’t traditionally in revenue marketing, but that’s sort of how I’ve defined it and said,
you know, whether it’s ownership of revenue marketing or marketing in its entirety, that that’s sort of the main focus for me as a marketer and the teams that I manage is, we’re here to create pipeline and for the business. that can be very, that could be a very, very challenging statement to many orgs. And for other orgs, like, yeah, that’s what we do all day, right? So it just depends on how you’re structured and how you go about things. Yeah, that makes sense. I’m sure you get it.
Speaker 2 (05:10.2)
quite a variety of reactions to that. How do you really permeate that culture around, we’re all here to do the same thing, even if our database is different? It is a challenge. And there are some functions where it’s a little bit more anathema. You always think of the Don Draper quote. I sell products, right? Don Draper was a marketer, but at the end of the day, he sells things.
You know, for me, maybe it’s part of my background, the first 10 years of my career were in B2C. You know, and that is, the phrase I always use is it’s like picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. It’s really, really tough. You’re spending a thousand dollars to make a thousand and five. And it’s, you know, very technically, we’re like, you have to be very operationally strong and it really gets in this, we’re here to make money. And I certainly saw when I first made the move into B2B in 2009, that was not the culture.
And that was certainly not the culture of the marketing organization I was in. was certainly the culture of the sales organization I was in. There was always a story I liked telling. It was my second week in B2B at all. And so I owned, I my title was something like Senior Manager of Online Marketing. So I just like, I owned the website and digital channels. You know, I got all my data together. I remember seeing the whole, the marketing team come in and start presenting about like a trade show they did.
talking something about MQLs and they walked out of the room and it was kind of silence. And then someone noticed me in the room and they were like, what do you do? And I started telling them about digital marketing and how they make money. And they actually started laughing at me because that was not their wiring of what a marketing organization was. Our marketing was very brand forward, very product marketing forward. Again, that’s not better or worse, but doesn’t really.
doesn’t resonate with a sales org as much as I’m gonna give you money. And they were pretty skeptical about it and rightfully so because that was always kind of the bias and it’s like, it’s not either or it’s both, right? And how do we take a great brand and how do we take great product marketing and how do we turn that to give you good pipeline is important. It’s the thing I was saying about marketing is marketing is too many things today. No one person is good at all of them. If you say you are, you’re just lying.
Speaker 2 (07:30.708)
And it’s it’s not, it’s not physically possible. The word, like the word has almost ceased to mean something in the sense of there’s so many, what type of marketing are you? What’s function and marketing are you? What skills do you use? There’s so many and just sort of saying it’s one thing and you are one thing. Like knowing where you’re strong is what’s important. Knowing where your weak is what’s important. Say like, I’m going to do what I do really well. You don’t want me creating content. You sure as heck don’t want me creating graphics or vision. It’s like.
You want me out of that stuff. You don’t want me in product marketing. Do I know what good looks like? Yes. I think that’s really, really important to be a well-rounded marketers to know, well, except knowing how to produce sort of every single thing in the factory. That’s just, that’s beyond any human’s capability right now. That’s such an important note, especially as conversations go around more of a generalist approach where yes, you can be a generalist, but it’s less about going deep.
It’s more about actually understanding what good looks like.
And look, sometimes you need to be, right? I’ve been a marketing team of one or two. And I’ve been writing blog posts and doing everything I can to set up a trade show booth and stuff like that. We all have to pitch in where we can, but there’s a difference between being able to do it at a functional, passable level and being great at it. Obviously, we should all aspire to greatness. We should all aspire to.
you know, a really high level in everything we do. I think that that’s, that’s something I try to exude sort of everything I do. hmm. Tom, I love this conversation already because I myself, you’re, speaking to that persona of, know, a singular marketer that is covering events to content and so forth. So super interesting. Have you been leveraging more data attribution data to permeate that culture that you were talking about? We’re all here to drive revenue.
Speaker 2 (09:32.898)
Hey sales team, hey other teams, here’s how we align around that. Here’s the data behind. For example, I Chili Piper or a couple other companies too have run exercises just to test it where they kill all brand spend. And then they watch their conversion rates dip and lower and leverage that to really prove out the value of marketing.
Speaker 2 (09:54.638)
There’s a lot to unpack there. So one is, like to think about a very, very fundamental thing is why are we measuring? And so I think a lot of people don’t think about this that well, or don’t have the time to or don’t have the opportunity to. We should be measuring to understand there’s a big, I call it kind of a four what’s rubric, which is what’s working, what’s not, what’s new, what’s next.
And you know, I think of that as that, that was a structure, for example, that I’ve used with boards and said, I’m going to show you one slide says here’s stuff that’s working. Cause I better have stuff that’s working. Otherwise I’m, you know, really not doing my job. I should have stuff stuff that’s not working. If I don’t have things that are failing in some way, shape or form, then that means I’m not trying hard enough. I’m not experimenting. I don’t have that sort of culture of, you know, trying to figure out what works for us to, to.
to the heart of your question. I should always have things that are new, right? And ideally a quarter from now or a month from now, I’ve got those things in, you know, what’s working and what’s not. And then obviously what’s next is I should ask some things I really want to get to, but don’t have the ability to in the near term, right? And ideally those things sort of move up. And if you develop a really good discipline of that every quarter, that’s a cheat code. Being able to go to a, manager, your executive team, your board and say,
I’m going to do X, Y, Z. I expect it to produce A, B, C. I’m going to tell you what happens regardless and tell you what I learned. And maybe the stuff that’s not working, I tweak. And maybe it’s just like, no, this is just a bad idea. I’m just not going to do it anymore. If you can show, if you use that discipline, that really builds trust. But to get back to it at the end of the day, you should be measuring to understand what’s working and what’s not. Again, we are
We’re giving a very, very, very, very simple structure in business. Company gives us money, whether it’s our salary, whether it’s the tech we have, whether it’s the people we work with, whether it’s the program spend, to produce a return. We should be doing as much measurement as possible to figure out how do we get the best return for this dollar, euro, pound currency it is. And think about it sort of ruthlessly from that perspective. Obviously,
Speaker 2 (12:19.138)
There’s a lot of other things of why we measure. Obviously, we don’t just need to market our companies, we need to market ourselves and our functions internally. Hey, we’re doing good things. We want to use numbers to do that. Numbers are why people care, right? They need to have, what’s the measurable value of what you do? Obviously, is a revenue marketer, pipeline’s bit of a cheat code, because it gets very, very close to revenue.
Sales is easy, right? It’s the reason why we always go crazy over, the sales guys run everything. Well, it’s because they have a very easy to understand number. What they do in sales directly relates to revenue, directly relates to the growth of the company. It’s so easy to measure sales, but it’s very hard to manage from that perspective. Marketing’s flipped. It’s the hardest to measure. You can measure a billion things and still not have a very good answer.
It then makes it sort of the easiest to manage. You everybody loves going up to a marketer and making, you know, polite suggestions as how they could be doing marketing better that like would never work in any other function, but we get those all the time in marketing. But it’s for that sort of reason of like, it’s not as, it’s hard to get your head around sort of what matters, right? And so the biggest part of measurement is to figure out like, what’s going to matter, right? Is it funnel health? it?
that promoter score, know, the answer is it’s all of it. You should be measuring as much as you can, but then figuring out what’s important, what’s a leading indicator, what’s going to predict in the future, that’s very often where the magic happens. think, you know, I think one of the worst things that’s happened to marketers, you know, in the past decade or so has been the idea that the answer is so.
Right? You know, the idea that, we’re just going to give you, I mean, multi-touch attribution might be a rabbit hole I’m falling into in this conversation, like, you know, multi-touch is really, really important, but it’s really better at measuring effort than efficacy. And what I mean by that is, you know, multi-touch measures what you see. There’s a really strong statement I made once. It was actually at a marketing attribution.
Speaker 2 (14:36.533)
company’s event and I got on stage and I said the majority of you all should be fired for cause for fraud and you don’t know it yet and The way I would always unpack it is I would say I bet you I know what your best performing piece of content is and I bet you you don’t And it’s this is our typical SAS party track, but and they would always go. What do you mean? It’s like, oh, you don’t you don’t know my content
And I would say, it’s your MSA and statement of work. And they’d go, and I’d be like, you weren’t interested in attribution. You were interested in marketing attribution. Right? So I think of my buyer journey and I think of all the content they touch. The MSA and SOW is actually important, but we’re marketers and we’re thinking about our stuff only. And we’re not thinking about all the content they’re seeing on the journey. And so, you know, that’s just a
It’s a little simple example of how we need to think of the entirety of the buyer journey. Yes, we are responsible for, it could be up until MQL handoff, not to use that phrase too much. It could be at meeting handoff, right? You can be handing them off in various different ways. It could be a very, very PLG system where humans really don’t get involved until much, much later in their journey. But at the end of the day, you need to look at the whole thing to make sense of it.
And you need to understand what is that buyer? What are they thinking about at every stage in this process? They don’t care about just the marketing part. They care about when the seller gets involved, they care about when the BDRs or SDRs or whatever you want to call that function gets involved. care about customer success. And so you have to have this wide view of what’s everything that went into this buyer journey. Not just my emails, but the seller’s emails.
customer success as emails, you’re looking at customer marketing, what’s, what is the sum total of their experience that can include their QBR calls they have with executives, executive touch points they might have, you know, yes, we think about them when they happen at conferences, but do we think about them when they happen when our sellers are on the road or our execs are on the road? No. And you have to become very, you have to sort of like break down your own function and say, I’m not thinking about this as a market.
Speaker 2 (16:59.854)
I’m thinking about this as a business person across, as a guru market person, which I feel like we seem to be getting towards, right? It’s a whole CRO conversation, but like think of yourself as a mini CRO, right? Think of yourself as like, what are they seeing? What are they doing? What is working? What is adding value? At the end of the day, if I step back for a second, the other day you really want your buyers to do three things. One is why should I pick your category? Two is why within that category,
Why should I pick you? And the third one, think the one that’s killing everybody today is why should I pick you now versus waiting a year or two years or three years when you’re going to be even cooler than you are today, right? I have to say, I stopped figuring out for example, right? And so at the end of the day, everything you’re doing is trying to do that, right? Your marketing team, your sales team, you know, obviously once you’re a customer, the conversation’s a little bit different of how can we get you to get the most value out of this?
How do we get that as quickly as possible? How does that lead to, you know, both the GRN and RR tracks of one, making sure you stay in business with us and get more of this, but then like, are the other things I can sell you? How else can I help build on the journey that we’ve already established, right? At the end of the day, that’s all that you’re trying to answer. You need to measure everything. Now, yes, we are not responsible for sales tactics or trading, things like that.
That’s fine. We need to be aware of them. We understand what they are. And so you go back to like measurement. Well, the answer is you need to measure everything you can. I think the challenge from marketers today is they found that data is borderline infinite if you let it. Right. And it’s really transforming as to what’s the insight. I don’t want data anymore. In fact, I think there’s been a bit of a data backlash, I think rightfully so, because I think we’re throwing a lot of, you know,
I can throw more Tableau workbooks at anybody than anybody else who’s listening to this podcast, but that doesn’t help me do my job better. Being able to figure out what is business value? How do we set our, you know, with even OKR structure, how do we set our goals in a way that we’re ideally doing the right things? Right? And so, know, is it about getting more meetings for our sellers and more pipeline? Absolutely. Is it getting more people into our database?
Speaker 2 (19:26.638)
Probably this right is it is it finding more accounts in our in our TAM and better identifying our TAM, right? He’s getting a better message to break through to certain personas. The answer is it’s all of it. What’s really important is that you have the data framework of understanding I know my ICP very well on a firmographic basis and I could do my cuts appropriately right whether they’re industry cuts size cuts geographic cuts, whatever they whatever matters to your go-to-market regime
And then who are the people that matter? Especially since buying has changed so dramatically. You 10 years ago, I used to buy alone as a director with no problems. I’m now at the SVP stage of my life. It’s harder for me to buy stuff as an SVP today than it was 10 years ago as a director, regardless of company size. And that’s just because there’s a plethora of technology that there’s way too much, which is its own conversation.
There’s a huge focus on what is the value for this? What is the human impact of this technology solution? What is the impact of the program spend or people spend? And so people have realized that, especially now we’re not in that zero interest rate environment, we were for a long time. is, what is the value? What is the dollar return you’re going to get? And so we have to think very broadly.
about who is consuming our stuff. It’s not just the end user. It may very well be go to their website, see their executive team. They may all be in that call. You might have a demo where your entire exec team is on the first demo and you’re like, what’s going on here? That’s just how companies buy today. And that’s going to evolve, you know, I think certainly with AI and the like, but it’s definitely something you’re seeing in the marketplace, regardless of who you are today.
And it really has to inform, like your marketing has to understand that. And it’s not just like, we just have a really good message to this one guy and he’s going to buy it. Like there was a time that worked, but it hasn’t been that way for a while. Interesting. Yeah. Much more alignment between the buying committee on the other side.
Speaker 2 (21:44.75)
Yeah, mean, also, also depends on mapping that out, right? I mean, it’s, you know, why people talk a lot about ABM is you have to dive really deep into understanding that company, what makes a tick, right? Who’s, who’s playing, you know, you could have a sales cycle where you have 20 people involved. You know, good year, you if you have a sales team that does really good job of building out the contact roles in Salesforce or whatever this year, I’m going to you know, you will see some sales that are like,
They’re not million dollar sales and they’ll have 25 people. And it’s like, you know, which one of these matter? Oh, you’d sell it. So they all sort of, you know, pretty much any one of those can be doing it’s like really, it’s like, look at it. And as someone who’s an executive, like I’ve had marketing initiatives torpedoed by other functions that had nothing to do with marketing because they’re competing for the same resources at the end of the day.
Right. And so, you know, our sellers experience the same thing. And so you have to be really, really conscious of that and really understand that it’s it’s that depth. The deeper you can get into a problem, the more meaningful work you can get. think that’s really one of the things I think good market leaders are struggling with in 2025 is it’s very easy to be, you know, across 50 different projects, moving them all.
You know, an intraday? That’s not…
That’s not going to get it done. Yeah. That makes progress. That’s great. But like, you need to really understand the problem deeply, really solve it. What’s that unique value you can add and unlock it. That is really an approach that I think we’re struggling with just with attention span. It’s supposed to go with it and everything that’s getting thrown at us. But really the person who can deep or deeply understand the problem is going to win. And that happens in sales.
Speaker 2 (23:42.284)
Right. The company that’s going to win is going to be the one that, yes, being first helps having the best product helps. But the one that really most deeply understands the people and has influenced them the most and has the most poll, that’s going to win. And everything else is is a bonus. But the deeper ones always win. And that’s why there’s a lot of value. Yes. Why, know, OK, maybe sellers aren’t getting paid, but, you know, AI engineers are getting paid by trying people today. But like.
That’s why they get the big bucks and very often rightfully so. As marketers, we tend to forget that and not understand that. I think that that’s having a lot of empathy and understanding for everybody’s position is really, important, even if your position is different. Absolutely. That almost extends, mean, it does, to the entire organization of whatever company has the deepest understanding of a customer.
Speaker 2 (24:38.382)
And that’s never not been the case, I feel. But it’s, it’s, you know, there maybe were a few cheat codes back in the day. You know, was harder to find competition. People didn’t know or people prided on relationships. But, you know, it’s really depth of understanding the problem that’s going to Definitely. And John, if I just give a little bit of summary of your background in a way.
You let GLIA through some incredible growth, know, through the series B, C, D to over a billion dollar valuation. And in that time achieve, you know, over 37X revenue growth, employee growth, customer growth, all the things. But what really fascinated me is that over 71 % of new business pipeline and 60 % of new business revenue came from revenue marketing. And those are really compelling numbers.
that a lot of organizations would want to replicate. But of course, as you called out earlier, there’s context to everything. So when and who would you say revenue marketing is a fit for?
It’s a tough question. I GLEO was an amazing, amazing experience. was a very, it’s one, there’s been a lot of folks that have been talking about, I’ll go into career coaching for a second of like, you know, really one of the most important life skills I’ve found has been picking companies while picking CEOs, while picking leasurers. You know, and something I realized about myself is,
I am not a marketer who can sell ice cubes to penguins in Antarctica. I’m going to sell ice cubes to people on the beach in Miami, or I think Phoenix was 107 degrees yesterday. like, you know, selling ice cubes there. For me, it’s all about product market fit. There are a lot of companies that are selling, you know, aspirational products. And by the way, some of the best products in the world started off aspirational. I’m someone who
Speaker 2 (26:50.19)
I can’t, I don’t know how to do that. That’s not a skill I have. I’m very impressed by the people who have those skills. I don’t have them. I’m much more like, hi, this is an iPhone. It’s really good. It works. What was neat about Glia was we were at that stage of the product as early as we were, which was very, very rare. It was kind of incredible of how, you know, was day one and I got a demo.
2018 and you’re talking about a company that was like, you know, single digit million dollars, you know, a couple dozen customers, but had a very real product that demoed incredibly well, that had a real need for a step back that provide, you know, we call digital customer service solutions to banks, credit unions, insurance companies. And so you think of you you log into your bank website, you know, what do you see?
to talk to an agent or AI and get information in a very easy way. And obviously you could do that on a bunch of different channels, whether it’s text, audio, video, or a combination of all three. And that’s been a process that’s been very miserable for lot of folks and very frustrating, in what’s, know, when you’re dealing with your bank, it’s like, you’re not doing that for fun. You’re doing that for a reason, right? And that reason could be very, very serious, right? So it’s a high pressure conversation.
and you want to work, it was like, oh my God, this is a product that like really works. And what we were able to do was really figure out, product works. We have really deep understanding of the ideal customer profile. We can actually brute force this into a list. Like we know who, can find out who all the banks are. We can find out who all the credit unions are. It is a finite universe. And so we know who to go after.
And now we’re just gonna go after them systematically, Let’s understand all of the roles, what do they do? And for me, it’s about really understanding what is every potential touch point you have with that persona, right? So you think of like, you know, I’ll think about it even more simply. We think of search engine marketing. It’s what is that person type when they go into Google when they’re thinking about this problem?
Speaker 2 (29:11.79)
Right? Is it a category name? You hope it would be a brand name? Again, it on your industry and where you are. Like you may be in a spot where they’re just typing in problems. Right? One of those keywords that becomes your keyword set that informs your content marketing strategy, informs your messaging strategy, which informs your search engine marketing strategy. And basically we were able to build this engine that said, we don’t think they go digitally. We’re to have our BDR team in their email box, LinkedIn box.
voice mailbox as much as we can. We know what trade shows and events they go to. We’re going to be at all of those. We know what partners they work with. We’re going to develop a whole ecosystem around them. And we’re just going to get in front of them every single time we have support. And we took it a few steps further in our regime, which was your sales process is really, really tough because it’s very technical. You’re talking about,
with Ted.
Speaker 2 (30:09.972)
security very, very heavily because you’re talking about banks. Your credit use is financial. That means everybody in the universe is trying to hack it. So there’s a lot of implementation. There’s a lot of legacy tech to integrate to. So we said like, sales, we’re going to start you off at the meeting. We’re not going to worry you about lead quality. We’re not going to worry you. like, hey, here’s the list of companies. You want to talk to these guys? Yep, we’re good. We’ve got our territory. Let’s go. And so that became a really, really
flywheel of great product. It makes it very, very easy, by the way, that you create that, you know, why category, why glial, why now? was very, very easy to ask that construct and very easy to explain it. And obviously very easy to achieve that growth. Not every industry is like that. Right now, at data site, we sell virtual data rooms. Marketing could never lead 40 % of pipeline if we wanted to.
Like that’s just not the regime. It’s very heavy relationship based. It’s, you know, that’s just the model we’re in. And so when it works, it’s beautiful. It’s really neat. But you might be in a situation where actually the majority of stuff is going to come from your sellers who have Rolodexes or maybe you’re a big channel play or maybe you’re, know, obviously, you know, a number like 60 is sort of 60 and 70 is sort of like a
It’s not even a stable number exactly in the sense of a lot of regimes are below that. A lot of regimes are above that, right? Your true PLG digital first guys, they’re more like 90 % coming from your marketing organ, stuff like that. So it’s kind of a little bit of an in-between to have a true enterprise five, six, seven figure regime where marketing plays a huge part. But
that was the right solution in the go-to-market for us and what we did. At least that doesn’t make it better or worse, but it meant that we needed a bit more of a revenue marketing focus where we are to get us there. Obviously, as you start to grow, well, now it becomes a lot more about, well, your customer marketing becomes actually a lot more important. Your ecosystem and partner marketing becomes important, especially as the ecosystem around your technologies becomes important.
Speaker 2 (32:28.622)
It’s never it’s never one answer for very long. It’ll very often change You also were the market forces, right? You know, what are the competitive landscapes? You know, who are you competing against now? That’s something that can evolve significantly and so You know, think that all comes into What the right answer was but this we have this really neat, you know six-year trajectory of You know going from I think we’re like just two dozen employees or something like that to like a few hundred
all over the world and sort of seeing that and being on that trajectory is tough. I’ve been really fortunate to have three runs of five years. People don’t have those and around that time, by the way, like you probably should start going. Like as much as I want to stay at was like every idea I’ve ever had GLIA has. Like I’m not coming up with brand new ideas.
you we’ve got capable folks, you’ve brought them in, there people that are getting corroded multiple times. It’s like, you start to realize, you know, you’re not, your role changes as well, right? And so, you know, a lot of it’s like, hey, what’s my next challenge? How do I actually get out of the way and make the people that I brought in, you know, get us home because they’re really there. How do we help a new leader become successful and not have the old leader kind of in the way? And so there’s a lot of stuff there, you know, that we to be sensitive about. so,
It was a great run and you don’t get a lot of things that work that well in this business. so being able to be a part of either one of those is pretty neat and a pretty cool honor. Absolutely. I’ve heard you refer to it as jumping off the rocket ship. So you know when it’s that inflection point to jump off and really dive into it. And it’s tough and it’s tough. It’s really, really hard because the other rocket ship line is,
You don’t complain about what seat you have on a rocket ship. And so part of it’s like, really just want to hang out. And, you know, and obviously like, especially just because the story is not completed, right? You know, you want to be part of it through an acquisition or, you know, whatever, you know, or IPO or whatever, you know, will happen in Glien’s future. You kind of want to be there for that. Obviously there’s some practical financial reasons to be there for that as well, which are important, but sometimes it’s just not, you know, you’re only going to have a finite amount of things.
Speaker 2 (34:54.19)
I’ve been doing this for 26 years. Like, you know, I’m starting to realize there’s not, there’s probably more of my career behind me than ahead of me at this point. And, you know, I think it’s just, you know, when is the right time? And, you know, you see it in sports a lot too. It’s like, see the people that leave a year too early versus a year too late. I feel like you want to be the guy who leaves a year too early, leaves them wanting a little bit more, but it’s tough to do.
in practice, was able to swing something that I think was sort of right by everybody and had a lot of help there. It was certainly a neat run. Yeah, tough to predict, but certainly better to be willing than leave late, as we can see in many sports players as a good analogy. Look, life was fantastic with a time machine. And we don’t, mean, we just, if you have one, can lend me something great, but like,
I’ve never met anybody who’s taken me up on that offer, you just have to make the best guess with the information you have at the time. Well, if you receive a shipment in the mail. Nice. Okay, great. So AI has been incredibly transformative. Where are you seeing the most impact, either in your marketing specifically within the organization or life, and the greater organization as a whole? Yeah, I mean, guess that’s…
It wouldn’t be a conversation in 2025 where we did not touch on this in some way shape or form a couple thoughts I have one is There’s a market leader named Andy Joel’s who’s Really wonderful person really impactful. What are the CMO leaders? Pavilion and then a big fan of his and he’s someone who even prior to AI was always telling people to outsource the bottom 10 % of your job
And that was something he would tell people five years ago. And I always thought that was such a great mantra. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s personally become very into AI for that reason. I think that mindset is really important, especially since there’s this whole universe of AI is coming after jobs. Well, it’s coming over the top part of your job. It’s coming off the bottom part of your job.
Speaker 2 (37:16.458)
the less you’re at the bottom part of your job, the better and happier you’re going to be. And I’ve been lucky that I’ve been at both data site and GLIA that have both been very AI in the product. And a good example of that actually is that at GLIA, there’s a lot of usage of chat bots and AI for banking use cases. Asking an AI bot, what’s my balance? That’s a perfectly wonderful use of AI. AI is not going to mess it up.
And by the way, don’t want to waste a trained human’s time on that. so, know, somebody like, what is the right financial product for my family? That’s a very deep, complicated question that you want humans with training and understanding and empathy to do. I think marketing is kind of the same way, right? Which is how, you know, you use a lot of the answers to the bottom 10 % of my job. Actually, I think now it’s probably more than 10 % for myself and a lot of people.
A lot of it is also that understanding of what is your skills as a human being? I’ve always found on the writing perspective that I’m better at editing than creating. Like a blank page really kills me. So you’re using AI to get to, you’ve already got an outline and you get a rough draft. It’s not going to be great, but now I can get started, one, a little bit further along that funnel and get there.
If you haven’t connected your platform to your personal email copy from a voice and tone perspective, by the way, that’s a miss for sure. Because I’ve realized that I have a very, I think everybody’s unique speaking sound. think certainly mine is unique in terms of, it’s like a fingerprint for me. And so I want to sound like.
me I don’t want it to sound like AI I want it to
Speaker 2 (39:07.798)
be a tool. I believe so much in human connection that it’s not about like just, I’m going to give you AI slop. Take me through that, John. What does that look like? like somebody wants to connect their personal email to copy. You can, so like you can actually connect it in the backend of like integrate my Gmail to it. What I’ve gotten very good is like, you know, what are the prompts that I use? And so a lot of it’ll be like, you know, okay, I want to do this. I have this, here’s my personas.
Here’s a bullet points of my thinking, but then I’ll sort of tell you, can use chat GPD a lot. It’s like, one is please make sure you’re using my voice and tone from the emails you have. You know, there’s always be, you know, I feel like this is the one that gets everyone these days is the use of dashes and semi-colons is almost the AI giveaway. My apologies to anybody who uses those two things regularly, but it’s like.
I feel if someone was tracking semicolon and dash usage, they would just see it exponentially going up. So we’ll give it the structure and say, here’s my outline. Here’s what I kind of want to say.
do it to me and let’s iterate, right? And I don’t see how that’s any different than the blank email draft, where I just have something sort of like ping against, right? We always run drafts by other people when we’re writing other things. Like this is just a way to do that that we’ve always had. I think that’s very, very different than, and I have people, I know people who do this, who are just like, can you respond to this emails? That I think is what bugs people more.
For me, it’s like, here’s an outline, and this is the rough structures of it. Then by the way, you might get it back and go, no, actually, there’s a few points I want to make. So it’s being in that process of what find is, and the thing I find is faster than creating, that writer’s block is a very real thing for me. And again, I’m thinking really about writing in this, but I find that that’s super helpful. There’s also a lot of stuff for an AI where
Speaker 2 (41:18.894)
you know, synthesize this for me. Right. And now there are people that do that as a lazy way so they don’t have to do hurt. But as one who is like a like, are the key points here? Right. That’s something that’s often a good check of I read it myself. I think I know what I got of it. What do you what do you see when you look at this? Right. And so, you know, it’s a very long way to way of saying.
You know, I think the strongest case of AI is where it is doing work alongside you and not just doing work for you. It makes you better, meaningfully faster and meaningfully more productive, but it doesn’t sort of compromise your own existence, right? You know, and I think what people are afraid of is like, this AI could replace me. Well, if you’re just saying respond to this email, then your AI could replace. You know, it’s like, you have to provide value to your AI. What I think people have started to…
What I think is the big challenge is an AI with almost no strategic input can now produce something that is like not bad.
And I think that’s the fallacy folks are getting into, which is they’re having a not bad response. Right? And, you look, one of the things my kids love doing this is they will say,
you know, give me a picture of what a green poodle would look like. This is genuinely something I’ve thrown into it. Like, and they find it hysterically funny. Like, put the put the green poodle on a spaceship. Okay. It can do that. Like they can do some fun, crazy stuff. But how does it do real work for you? Right? You know, would you would you call that a real artistic work of, you know, I want to run a green poodle company and want a great logo.
Speaker 2 (43:12.364)
I wouldn’t stop there. And you can see it. I think something is really, important. I think one of the most important skills for us is going to be that, I’ll call it slop detection. You know, and I see it with my kids, you know, there’s one set of videos that’s coming up a lot of like, it’s all AI. And it’s like, you know, cats making stew and cats buying lettuce. It’s just like, it’s just, it’s fun. And the kids love it. But
If you’ve had some experience with AI, you’ll start to see like, wait, the dogs had different types of hats on before, or they’ll be eating and the food will just go from the side of their face and disappear. You could pick up those AI artifacts. And what’s going to start happening is people are starting to, there are a of who can’t develop those skills right now. And I think that’s something that I’m actually genuinely concerned about. And it’s not a B2B marketing thing, but I’m concerned about those things in like…
politics in bigger areas of the world is like, you and you see what’s going viral on Facebook and you’re like, that’s clearly AI, what the heck? But I think a big detector we’re gonna have is, was there human thought in here or not? And it’s not going to be clear as day, it’s not gonna just be an dash, it’s gonna be this felt artificial. This tasted a bit off, I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it, but it sounds wrong.
and, and I, and I think very, very strongly, like, you know, it’s all about authenticity, right? You know, just, you know, do you have a point of view? Do people feel it? Does it feel like it resonates? Does it feel like it comes from an actual human authenticity to me is sort of everything in marketing these days. And, AI could be a tool to actually getting deeper authenticity, but with care. And so,
I think that that’s an area where it’s going to be really neat. I will admit the coolest things I want to do with AI.
Speaker 2 (45:20.046)
because I, well, I mean, think of it like, I’d love to point it at like, our data. If I did that, I’d get fired. Like, I mean, that’s I mean, that’s part of the reason why I like, like, I love it to crunch, like, I’d love it to solve really hard problems. You really can’t put most AI, I’m like, yes, I know there’s some AI companies that will have mine in the firewall, but like, I’m still not super comfortable putting it against PII.
and stuff like that. I do think what’s gonna be interesting is how do the use cases that I would not touch today, like writing an email is fine, right? Helping write a social post is fine. But like, at my ICP. Look, if people are working on this today, which is, looking at my ICP, what are some look-alikes? What are you seeing in my ICP? Here’s what I thought my personas was.
Look at every single email on every single call and every single deal and tell me how right. Like some of those things can be really cool. And I don’t know if I’m in the minority or majority on this, but like, feel very importantly, I’m not going to, and this is all the time I’ve been with. I’m not putting confidential, competitive, personal, if I will information into this. Like I’m just not doing that with any AI system today.
I think you’d be a fool to do so. But it’s gonna be able to answer some pretty neat questions. The question is how can we develop these things that are not going to, now they’ve just ingested your whole company’s data. And that’s something I worry that people are doing that. mean, I just worry about writ large and I just don’t know.
I do feel like there’s a whole universe where the security is going to be, know, people dumped something into chat GPT or something else. And now in its database, it has like passwords and social security numbers and like, made such fear that that I would never those things. Cause yeah, I’d love to train it at, you’re trying to solve some very deep problems. I don’t think they’re there yet from,
Speaker 2 (47:40.366)
from a security and usability perspective, so I never would. But there’s probably gonna be a time where I will. And that’s the stuff that I would love to, you know, look at every single lead that I’ve got, Predictive scoring, right? So there’s a lot of these AI use cases that are existing today, a lot of companies being built around it that are quite neat. But I think like, I don’t want everything to be a you have to buy a $100,000 solution to do it, because that’s not scalable either for.
You know, one question I think they need to stuff for the things where you bounce around and ask a bunch of things. So I think AI is not there yet, but it’s going to be getting there really, really quickly. And you think of data analysis and data insights as more and more important, like crown family jewels stuff gets into these systems. It’s going to start giving some, some interesting things that by the way, like can be wrong. AI will still make stuff up. You know, go back to chess for a second.
If you try to play a game of chess against it, it will cheat. It will make you legal moves. It will invent a piece on a square that was not there before. There’s some actors from chess play, some chess content creators who’ve done some really neat work on it. like, it will go do crazy things. And so you have to really have a trust but verify approach with it. But it’s really interesting that these…
These things are starting to be able to do meaningfully work and be meaningfully helpful for us. And really all you can do is just you have to be fluid in it because this is going to be the language of folks over the next 25 years. End of story. People are not wrong when they say that. I think the universe is not going to go the way the majority of people think it will. That’s a cop out because I have no idea which way it will actually go. But it often will go when I’m expected in surprising ways.
Yeah, absolutely. A raise we can’t even imagine now. And John, this has been fantastic. I’ve got last two questions, always the same. First, what is working right now in revenue marketing?
Speaker 2 (49:48.146)
So, there’s a few answers to that. One is like, I think everything is worse. I think it is true that some things are working more well. I think some things are working less well. There are two really big shifts that I think are happening that I think are bugging folks. One is this whole move from SEO
you know, to GEO a lot of the sort of zero click results, right? And someone who’s launched a search engine, I understand why search engines want you to not leave the search engine and stay within their universe. the whole Google has changed fundamentally. And that is a big part, if not the majority of a lot of businesses out there. And so that has been a catastrophic
impact to some folks has been a great opportunity to others. And it’s sort of like, I would say, I will say unfairly in terms of who gets, you know, what there because I think some of it’s like, it’s just hard to predict. The Gen. AI engines need to see you. You need to think of the Gen. AI engines the way as an old school search engine marketer from 20 years ago, when we thought about, you know, Google and Yahoo and Bing and Ask Jeeves and all those other ones.
that we’re out there, it’s kind of the same way with the AI engines, right? Some AI engines are looking very heavily at Wikipedia. Some AI engines are looking very heavily at Reddit. Some AI engines are looking very heavily at what they’re indexing. And so there’s going to be a huge, there is a huge way in terms of findability for your company, for your brand, whatever you do on a daily basis to become visible is changing. User behavior is changing.
They’re not going to Google and typing in all of their questions anymore. They’re doing it in chat GPT now. Now, I would say it’s a little too early to call old school SEO dead. That behavior has been very ingrained for more than a generation. It’s going to be there, but you’ve got to now worry about this whole other thing too. And so I think the companies that have done well have made a point of how do we get ahead of this? Now that we get visibility to it, it’s a black box to a lot of people right now in GM.
Speaker 2 (52:07.822)
I know there’s some very interesting companies that are trying to start solving that, but it’s gonna be a very interesting cat and mouse game, right? You we’re gonna wanna start effectively gaming the Gen.AI engines, and the Gen.AI engines are not gonna wanna let us game them. It’s the whole same thing with Google, just this is a different one, and this is a much more complex engine. You know, maybe a little less predictable, so it’s gonna be really, really interesting. The second, I think, AI impacts this one too, is that emails suffer.
Email suffering really in two different dimensions. I think people need to understand that these two things are very, very different, very real, but they may be impacting the same metrics. One is it costs $0 to attack somebody via email. And after $0, like $0.00001 cents. It costs nothing. And what’s happened is that email has been weaponized and I’m sure you get the fake
PayPal, Geek Squad invoices all the time. We get the phishing attempts. think of like, and the reality is they’re probably like, you your email provider probably blocks 99.999 % of them and still like a bunch get through. And what’s happening is especially in the thing of financial services, those companies are getting phished and attacked all the time. You know, we have customers, have this real, this is actually one of our biggest challenges that GLIA was, even for our customers, they would just default blacklist everybody.
They were so targeted by folks in email that they were like, we’re only whitelisting our customers and our approved vendors. You are the only people that can email us. Everything else goes into, you know, some bit. And so that’s one thing that’s really going on in email that I think it’s embarrassing. We haven’t figured out how solve it. I think it’s a sort of a shame and a failure of both tech and
governments to protect people in email. And I think it’s genuinely polluting the channel. I we’re seeing it too with phones, right? I mean, how likely spam calls do you get on your phone nowadays? And so one that has hurt email. The other is like, look, there’s a lot of AI slop hitting your email boxes. The volume of emails is increasing. So it is much harder to stand out, right?
Speaker 2 (54:35.778)
You know, I still look at two principles. One is you need to be everywhere where your prospect is. So, you know, how are you in their email, voicemail, LinkedIn, at their physical events, talking to the thought leaders, you look up to, such a great phrase we used at GLIA, was a lot of people when we first rebranded to GLIA would say, what is a Gila? They wouldn’t pronounce it right. And we wanted to take people’s minds, have to go from what is a Gila to, yeah, I know those guys.
And by the way, that gets your emails open more. That gets people responding to your BDRs. That gets people coming up to your booth. They see you every, yeah, yeah, okay. I know that name. Right? It’s why the phishing emails come from like names you recognize and brands you recognize. Right? It like, you know, it’s, you know, going back to our very early part, like it’s why brand is really important. Brand’s going to give you an extra fraction of a second before that person deletes your email.
and they may choose to read it for that reason. Right? And so, you know, one is you got to make sure, you know, give every opportunity for them just to raise their hands and be there. The second is like, you got to have that right message at the right time. You have to make sure when they do open that email, which by the way is going to happen less and less, when they do that search term, that’s going to happen less and less, that they see you and they’re compelled to click.
You know, and a lot of it goes out, know, nobody cares what I do, but if I can help make their job more successful, I’ve got a friend for life. That’s something I’ve always believed very strongly, you know, regardless of what I’ve done. So like the answer is everything is working. If you’re doing it right, the efficacy of it is changing. And certainly SEO and email are the areas that are decreasing. GEO is obviously, you know, coming very heavily. We’re talking obviously there’s a big, you know, and
you and I have met at these types of things, in-person events, right? You can’t replicate that. Will we see, there seems to be a track towards more of that. Will T &E budgets support it? I think that’s a little bit TBD, but where those events are and where those people in your personas are gonna be there, you wanna be there. Regardless of, it can always be more better, cheaper, faster. That’s something I’ve realized. The question is just how am I making that an ROI positive channel?
Speaker 2 (57:03.406)
and getting the most out of it, what can I do to get better every single day? And that other stuff actually becomes just noise if you adopt. That’s great advice. What if we flip that on its head a little bit? What’s one widely held belief that revenue leaders hold that you believe is bullshit or no longer serving us?
Speaker 2 (57:27.764)
I’m very anti-techno. I think the belief that more tech is better.
I don’t, I think that very rough cut is not true. A few things on that, Look, tech is a tool. It is good to have as many tools as possible. Yes, more tools make us better. AI is a tool, a very complex tool, but like at the end of the day, we sell to humans. Now, I mean, who knows? Who the heck knows where we’re going?
But we sell to humans, we sell to people. And you think of like, why do I have an iPhone here and not a BlackBerry? I remember like that was the moment where I felt I made it in my career was when I had my BlackBerry. But why? Because BlackBerry was thinking I have the CEO. Steve Jobs was like that human is a person. And he wants to have pictures of his kids and…
Speaker 2 (59:00.142)
it may become our most powerful tool. It’s certainly our most complex tool, but it’s just a tool. But you see this like, anytime you say something is better than something, to me, you’re a clown. Or you’re just being provocative, or maybe else. Right? know, it’s like, know, something I’ve learned in the 26 years of doing this is like, personas are different, industries are very different, humans will still always be humans. Now we may start valuing things differently, but anytime I see like, oh, you know, you’ve got…
PLG is better than enterprise.
for your company, that may be true, but you should be considering it. You know, it’s, it’s just this whole, what people have yet to realize. And it’s kind of frustrating because we’re on like the 20th iteration of this is in every year for the past two decades, there’s been something new that you have to do. And there’s always a crowd that says, is going to stop doing everything else. By the way, email was one of those once upon a time.
Marketing automation was one of those once upon a time. ABM platforms was that once upon a time. Now the answer is just have to do all of it. Social media is gonna be everything. No, we just add social to what we did before. And maybe some things may be deprecated, but actually very, very few things are. There aren’t that people who are thrilled with a lot of their tech stack right now. And it’s a huge tax to have one of everything. And most companies can’t afford to do that. It’s probably just not a great use of.
Again, I go back to ROI positive marketing. It’s a great way to kill your ROI if you’re spending a ton of money on tech. You’ll see a ton of people to implement that tech and manage that tech and get the most out of it. And so I really think there’s a tech crisis for tech market leaders today. And I don’t know how it’s going to shake out. You know, is the tech stack we have just going to keep limping along the way it has for
Speaker 2 (01:00:56.782)
two decades, maybe, but maybe AI is going to be the company that solves AI. And obviously some of them are legacy players in the space, but if the companies that sort of solve AI, they sort of reformat what the tech stack looks like for folks moving forward. And I think in the interim, it’s like, put the tech where you need it, where it adds a ton of value. But apart from that, like humans are going to differentiate you. Doing more programs is going to differentiate you.
focus there and we’ll see whether I’m right or wrong on that one. I think it’s a common theme that we hear too in general is at the end of the day, tech is a tool. So it really is about the people, the programs that you’re pushing in a way your go to market optionality has increased immensely. So we’ve added layers and the evolution, there’s so many different paths now. And so it almost makes, I mean, our, you know, our thesis, but
that thesis around go-to-market being your moat more impactful because suddenly there’s all these different paths that you can take or different, you know, pawns that you can move on the test table. Yeah, and by all means, the solution to bad tech isn’t no tech, it’s good tech. And I just think there’s a lot of bad tech out there and I think there’s just a lot of, I think the ecosystem has not done folks favors and part of it was look, it was the environment, right? It was…
You know, marketers were getting huge budgets and spending like crazy and like that was never healthy when it’s there. But, you know, what is the best? Again, it goes very simple. What is the best use for this dollar? Tech’s got to produce a heck of a return to make it beat great people and great programs. And so if you’re in one of those worlds where it’s like that, that’s
That’s just going to be the reality for a Absolutely. And John, this has been absolutely fantastic. Appreciate all your insights. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch? John Fernandez. I am a John Fernandez. I’m not the John Fernandez. There are other John Fernandez’s, but I’m on LinkedIn. I’m Jay Fernandez on Twitter. I’m the guy with the rocket ship in front of his name on LinkedIn. I have found that that is actually helpful.
Speaker 2 (01:03:18.594)
You will know who’s a robot if you have an emoji in front of your name because they will put the robot the emoji into their emails to you so you can know who’s bonding you versus who sent you manual. But John Fernandez obviously been at data cycle. He could definitely hold a bunch of other places. Chess as well was probably pretty easy to find with the John Fernandez rubric. Brilliant. We’ll drop it in the show notes and the rocket ship suitable with your experience building and growing rocket ships.
Thank you for your time, John. Thank Sophie, thank you so much for having me. Our pleasure. Thank you. Have a great rest of the day.
