I run marketing organizations at companies where the ambition has outpaced the infrastructure — brand, product marketing, demand generation, communications, and when the org calls for it, commercial sales alongside them. A decade at Smartsheet, including five years running sales, shapes how I run marketing now.
Elementum added something different. I spent it in the middle of the SaaSpocalypse — the shift from legacy enterprise software to AI-native systems — close enough to see what AI actually delivers at scale inside some of the largest companies in the world, rather than what it promises in a deck. And with a marketing team of two, I had to find out how much of the work AI could carry itself: in the go-to-market motion, and in what the two of us could finish in a day. The answer was more than I expected, and it is not a lesson I would want to have learned secondhand.
Ten years at Smartsheet
I arrived in 2014 to build demand generation, took on the commercial sales organization in 2016, and returned to marketing as CMO in 2021. Demand generation stayed mine the whole way through.
The middle job is the one that shaped the rest. Running 400+ people in sales for five years, through an IPO, taught me what marketing looks like from the other side of the table, and which pipeline arguments are real. When I came back as CMO I never had to guess whether a number would survive the forecast call.
The resume carries the figures. What it does not show is that some of the best work of that decade — Sponsor X, the McLaren program that handed our sponsorship inventory to STEM nonprofits — came from asking what an asset made possible rather than what we could extract from it.
Before and since
I led CRM consulting teams at Onyx Software for nine years, then spent nine more running an international fly-fishing lodge business I built to profitability on content and inbound demand. I learned demand generation by needing it to make payroll. Since Smartsheet I have been CMO at Conga and then at Elementum.
Outside the work
I sit on the board of Ambassador Software, I advise Elementum AI, and I am a limited partner at Stage 2 Capital. I studied Computer Science at Dartmouth.
I live in Seattle with my wife Angela, our four kids and our two dogs. I spend a lot of time outside and I still fish.