Humans of Martech

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Guta Tolmasquim, CEO at Purple Metrics.

Summary: Brand measurement often feels like a polite performance nobody fully believes, and Guta learned this firsthand moving from performance marketing spreadsheets to startup rebrands that showed clear sales bumps everyone could feel. She kept seeing blind spots, like a bank’s soccer sponsorship that quietly cut churn or old LinkedIn pages driving conversions no one tracked. When she built Purple Metrics, she refused to pretend algorithms could explain everything, designing tools that encourage gradual shifts over sudden uphe...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Chris O'Neill, CEO at GrowthLoop.

Summary: Chris explains how leading marketing teams are deploying swarms of AI agents to automate campaign workflows with speed and precision. By assigning agents to tasks like segmentation, testing, and feedback collection, marketers build fast-moving loops that adapt in real time. Chris also breaks down how reinforcement learning helps avoid a sea of sameness by letting campaigns evolve mid-flight based on live data. To support velocity without sacrificing control, top teams are running red team drills, assigning clear data ow...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Rajeev Nair, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Lifesight.

Summary: Rajeev believes measurement only works when it’s unified or multi-modal, a stack that blends multi-touch attribution, incrementality, media mix modeling and causal AI, each used for the decision it fits. At Lifesight, that means using causal machine learning to surface hidden experiments in messy historical data and designing geo tests that reveal what actually drives lift. Attribution alone can’t tell you what changed outcomes. Rajeev’s team moved past dashboards and built a system...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Hope Barrett, Sr Director of Product Management, Martech at SoundCloud.

Summary: In twelve weeks, Hope led a full messaging stack rebuild with just three people. They cut 200 legacy campaigns down to what mattered, partnered with MoEngage for execution, and shifted messaging into the product org. Now, SoundCloud ships notifications like features that are part of a core product. Governance is clean, data runs through BigQuery, and audiences sync everywhere. The migration was wild and fast, but incredibly meticulous and the ultimate gain was making th...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Joshua Kanter, Co-Founder & Chief Data & Analytics Officer at ConvertML.

Summary: Joshua spent the earliest parts of his career buried in SQL, only to watch companies hand out dashboards and call it strategy. Teams skim charts to confirm hunches while ignoring what the data actually says. He believes access means nothing without translation. You need people who can turn vague business prompts into clear, interpretable answers. He built ConvertML to guide those decisions. GenAI only raises the stakes. Without structure and fluency, it becomes easier to...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Samia Syed, Director of Growth Marketing at Dropbox.

Summary: Samia Syed treats martech like hiring. If it costs more than a headcount, it needs to prove it belongs. She scopes the problem first, tests tools on real data, and talks to people who’ve lived with them not just vendor reps. Then she tracks usage and outcomes from day one. If adoption stalls or no one owns it, the tool dies. She once watched a high-performing platform get orphaned after a reorg. Great tech does...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Ankur Kothari, Adtech and Martech Consultant who’s worked with big tech names and finance/consulting firms like Salesforce, JPMorgan and McKinsey.

The views and opinions expressed by Ankur in this episode are his own and do not necessarily reflect the official position of his employer.

Summary: Ankur explains how most AI personalization flops cause teams ignore the basics. He helped a brand recover millions just by making the customer journey actually make sense, not by faking it with names in emails. It’s...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Kim Hacker, Head of Business Ops at Arrows.

Summary: Tool audits miss the mess. If you’re trying to consolidate without talking to your team, you’re probably breaking workflows that were barely holding together. The best ops folks already know this: they’re in the room early, protecting momentum, not patching broken rollouts. Real adoption spreads through peer trust, not playbooks. And the people thriving right now are the generalists automating small tasks, spotting hidden friction, and connecting dots across sales, CX, and product...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Keith Jones, Head of GTM Systems at OpenAI.

Also just a quick disclaimer that Keith is joining the podcast as Keith the technologist and human, not the employee at OpenAI. The views and opinions he expresses in this episode are his own and do not represent OpenAI.

Summary: The best martech buying process isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a cognitive extraction exercise.
Keith Jones asks stakeholders to write what they want, say it out loud, and then feeds both into GPT to...

Summary: Elena has done what most startup marketers only guess at; made it through multiple acquisitions and now leads global integrated marketing at Visa. In this episode, she breaks down what actually changes when you go from scrappy lead gen to enterprise brand building, why most martech tools don’t survive security reviews, and how leadership without authority is the skill that really matters. We get into messy tech migrations, broken attribution dreams, and why picking up the phone still beats Slack. If you’ve ever wondered why your startup playbook stops working at scale, this conversation spells it out...

What’s up folks, today we’re diving into the AI talent crunch and exploring which marketing roles have the strongest staying power and which are most likely to be replaced by AI.

Summary: Shit is changing fast. Don’t wait for someone to guide you. Navigate this transition by focusing on judgment tasks while letting AI handle predictions. At risk are campaign operators, generic content creators, and report-pulling analysts. Set to thrive are resident AI implementation experts who select worthy tools, data orchestrators connecting proprietary data to AI, product/customer marketers with genuine empathy, ethics guardians preven...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Moni Oloyede, Founder at MO Martech.

Summary: Your buyers can't remember why they bought from you, our brains physically can't store that information correctly. But we've built elaborate attribution systems pretending otherwise. Moni helps us understand why we need to stop crediting random touchpoints and start measuring how effectively each content piece performs its specific job in moving people through your funnel. We also cover why not all marketing activities need to drive revenue, why you shouldn’t ditch ideas just because you can’t trac...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Constantine Yurevich, CEO and Co-Founder at SegmentStream.

Summary: Multi-touch attribution is a beautifully crafted illusion we all pretend to believe in while knowing deep down it's flawed. The work is mysterious, but is it important? The big ad platforms sell us sophisticated solutions they don't even trust for their own internal decisions. Is it time we accept marketing causation is a thing we can’t measure? Visitor behavior scoring is a really interesting alternative or extra ingredient to consider. Often thought of as a tool...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Ashley Faus, Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian.

Summary: Marketing frameworks often fail because they ignore how humans actually behave. People don't follow neat, linear paths; they explore, double back, and leap ahead based on genuine interests. Drawing from her diverse experience across corporate communications and lifecycle leadership, Ashley exposes how artificial walls between marketing functions create dysfunction while offering a solution: an integrated ecosystem where audience insights, compelling content, and strategic distribution flow continuously between teams. Her approach identifies truly predictive behaviors and me...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Ruari Baker, Co-Founder and CEO of Allegrow.

Summary: Your fancy AI personalization messaging strategy doesn’t mean anything if you don’t also have a strategy for email deliverability. Ruari busts long-standing myths about HTML vs plain text, why open rates died with Apple's 2021 privacy changes, and why the spam complaints visible in your marketing platform represent a fraction of reality. You'll walk away with 3 deliverability tactics that will help you reach the inbox and stay there: implement multi-subdomains to isolate high-risk traffic, adopt contac...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Danielle Balestra, Director of Marketing Technology and Operations at Goodwin.

Summary: Marketing operations power organizational change through deep system understanding. Danielle reveals how strategic operators transform corporate landscapes by mapping intricate human networks, turning complex bureaucracies into adaptive innovation platforms. Her approach reconstructs marketing from a tactical function into a critical strategic driver, where understanding organizational dynamics becomes the primary method of creating meaningful business transformation.

About Danielle

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Rich Waldron, Co-founder and CEO at Tray.ai.

Summary: Marketing ops folks stand at a crossroads where iPaaS platforms and AI agents are colliding in crazy ways. Rich pulls back the curtain on what happens when workflows become agent "skills": Imagine your carefully built automations transformed into autonomous assistants that diagnose tech issues, provision applications, and manage complex Salesforce campaigns without manual intervention. Your marketing stack could suddenly act like a "junior admin" on demand, while you focus on strategy. The explosion of AI fe...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Angela Rueda, Director of Business Martech at Meta.

Summary: Angela walked into Meta's engineering-first culture, discovering a sprawling mess of DIY custom martech solutions, and leading the organization through a fundamental mindset shift about build vs. buy decisions. She brings us through the technical and emotional journey of aligning more than 150 stakeholders ultimately forcing them to embrace a hybrid build-and-buy approach during a pivotal merger. Angela shares an honest look at what it means to lead big changes at a company like Meta, showing wh...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Mac Reddin, Founder and CEO of Commsor.

Summary: Mac treks through the Jurassic wilderness of modern sales, where outbound campaigns cannibalize themselves while AI-powered sequences are degrading response quality by the day. Real marketing power flows through human networks, forward-thinking companies are transforming their SDR teams into relationship architects who measure success through network depth and authentic engagement. Be the team that does better. Your competitive edge lives in human connections that no algorithm can replicate, requiring a complete rethinking of how we incentivize an...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Ana Mourão, CRM, Customer Data and CDP Advisor.

About Ana

Martech Leaders Must Become Systems Architects

In theory, we a...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jeffrey Lee, Lifecycle Marketing Technical Lead at Calm.

About Jeff

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Sandy Mangat, Head of Marketing at Pocus.

Summary: AI and outbound prospecting has flooded our inboxes with poorly personalized, irrelevant, and frankly lame template attempts at human connection. But some teams are seeing the light… the purple light. Sandy takes us inside the dimly lit fortune telling parlor of Pocus where we gaze into the swirling galaxies of the crystal ball of modern sales. We travel through visions of product-led sales, network referrals, signal correlation and AI agents all swirling together to fill pipelines.

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Chris Golec, Founder & CEO at Channel99.

Summary: The Godfather of ABM takes us through his humble beginnings in Detroit's industrial trenches to category creation and entrepreneurial expeditions. His journey spans building magnetic company cultures, cracking the code on remote work, sharing candid hiring wisdom, and transforming marketing failures into fuel for growth. Now building Channel99, he's rewriting attribution with a touch of AI engineering, predicting marketing ROI, using a white box approach.

About Chris

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Meg Gowell, Director of Growth Marketing at Typeform.

Summary: Marketing leadership in 2025 is a wild time. After years of learning martech and technical concepts to become a full stack marketer, you finally land that dream director gig... only to watch your hard-earned tech skills collect dust while you drown in meetings. Megan helps us see the way forward. She takes us on a ride that covers marketing measurement, experimentation and building brand momentum, all while having tons of fun. We get into how data wa...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with the lads from We're not marketers.

Summary: When did everyone on LinkedIn suddenly become a GTM expert? The misfits from ‘We're Not Marketers’ dive into this chaos, explaining why Go-to-Market strategy has become the most misused term in marketing. They share product marketing stories about rigid product launches, cross-functional chaos, and small test groups. They open up about their love and admiration for marketing operations folks, similar cross functional translators between tech and marketing and how martech can support message testing. We explore the debate...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Sundar Swaminathan, author of the experiMENTAL newsletter and part time Marketing and Data science advisor?

Summary: After leading Uber's Marketing Data Science teams, Sundar shares insights that work for both tech giants and startups. Beyond uncovering that Meta ads generated zero incremental value (saving $30 million annually), they mastered measuring brand impact through geo testing and predicting LTV through first-week behaviors. Small companies can adapt these methods through strategic A/B testing and simplified attribution models, even with limited sample sizes. Building data science teams th...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Sarah Krasnik Bedell, Director, Growth Marketing at Prefect.

Summary: What happens when a data engineer with an obsession for truth-testing crashes into marketing's sacred cows? Sarah's journey from code to campaigns unfolds like a detective story, where she picks apart marketing myths and rebuilds them with an engineer's precision. Her fresh take transforms marketing tools from black boxes into purposeful instruments, while her approach to AI echoes "Limitless" - it's not about letting machines take the wheel, but supercharging human creativity. Whether you're wrestling wi...

What’s up everyone, welcome to our first episode of 2025 – today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Austin Hay, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Clarify and Martech Teacher at Reforge.

Summary: Something extraordinary is brewing in the world of martech. In the near future, Austin thinks AI agents will turn into an omniscient digital butler, anticipating your needs with uncanny precision while vanishing into the background of your workday. But the real revolution unfolds in the seemingly mundane machinery of marketing operations, where innovative companies are transforming their spaghetti mess of data pipes and platforms into some...

What’s up everyone, today is our last episode of the year and if you paid attention to the intro, I’m excited to officially welcome Darrell Alfonso as the newest co-host of the podcast!

Summary: The Humans of Martech enters an exciting new chapter with Darrell Alfonso joining as co-host, bringing fresh energy and insights to the show. As a long-time listener and new dad, Darrell offers relatable stories of juggling work, family, and community while sharing bold predictions like the shift to warehouse-native architectures in martech, which promise to streamline data operations for enterprises. With AI p...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Kacie Jenkins, SVP Marketing at Sendoso.

Summary: Marketing isn’t about cramming creativity into a spreadsheet, and Kacie’s journey proves it. She took on last-touch attribution, broke free from narrow metrics, and built a system that told the whole story, one where sales and marketing actually worked together. It wasn’t flashy; it was months of unsexy foundational work that led to record-breaking results. Kacie’s advice is to stop obsessing over proving your worth with perfect data. Focus on collaboration, long-term strategies, and buildi...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Stephen Stouffer, Director of Automation Solutions at Tray.ai and the first ever returning guest. We had Stephen on earlier in the year in episode 112 where we unpacked the practical wonders of combining AI tools with iPaaS solutions. 

Summary: AI can transform your marketing without overwhelming you. Start with one use case. Watch the results, and go from there. You don’t need to master data science to add AI value, but you need to be willing to experiment, keep what works...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Nataly Kelly, CMO at Zappi.

Summary: Global expansion is a wild process that connects brands to the unique vibe of each market, it’s not just creating a website or translating content. Every market brings its own needs, from how audiences navigate sites to what resonates visually and emotionally. Moving into international territories means showing up prepared, with a localization strategy that’s flexible and has a ton of local insight. Marketing Ops and RevOps both play a key role in localization as a strate...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jim Williams, CMO at Uptempo.

Summary: Forget version control spreadsheets and stale budgets, Jim’s take on marketing planning is about putting purpose behind every dollar. Instead of throwing darts at a board, focus on creating a blueprint that connects goals to actual business impact. For him, goals shouldn’t be handed down from the top like a royal decree but hammered out together with practitioners so they’re ambitious… but you know, grounded in reality. Marketing Ops pros are the unsung heroes, bringing sanity to...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Barbara Galiza, Growth and Marketing Analytics Consultant.

Summary: Attribution is a bit like navigating Amsterdam’s canals: mesmerizing but full of hidden turns that don’t always make sense. You don’t need to chart every twist—just focus on finding the direction that moves you forward. Instead of obsessing over every click, use attribution like a compass, not a GPS. Multi-touch attribution (MTA) gives you some of the story, but often misses those quiet yet powerful nudges that drive real decisions. Layering in rule-based...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Steven Aldrich, Co-CEO and Co-Founder at Ragnarok NYC.

Summary: Like the aftermath of Ragnarök according to Norse mythology, the martech world is emerging stronger, more focused, and ripe with potential. Rather than being overwhelmed by the chaos, marketers should use this time to rethink how to evaluate technology choices through the lens of business value. Prioritize platforms that drive real-world impact and avoid getting lured by features that blaze brightly for a moment, only to be swallowed by the tide of irrelevance.

A...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Danny Lambert, Director of Marketing Operations at dbt Labs.

Summary: Marketers often feel like they're battling a dragon when it comes to integrating data. We’re overwhelmed by technical jargon, stuck with outdated methods, and facing roadblocks from data teams. Danny walks us through his journey of cautiously entering the data world and the role dbt can play for marketing teams. By learning just enough SQL, knowing what tools you need to get started with and leaning on dbt’s tools, you can start small...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Lourenço Mello, Product Marketing Lead at Snowflake.

Summary: Lourenço drops us straight into the gravity well of martech, where Snowflake’s latest report pulls in the tools that really matter, letting the fluff float away. It’s all about data gravity, bringing the applications to the data instead of wasting energy shuttling data around. This shift is redefining what’s possible, streamlining operations, and giving marketers a new superpower to harness the forces of AI and analytics. With composability blurring boundaries and AI breakin...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Rutger Katz, GTM Operations Consultant.

Summary: Rutger helps us cut through the fluff of Lean methodology in marketing and how to spot when process gets in the way of efficiency. His advice is to cut out the waste—whether in your process, your tech stack, or how you measure success. Focus on what drives conversions, keep your systems lean, and use simple structures to maintain speed without sacrificing alignment. We also tackle tech debt and how a top-layer AI interface could simplify the case for...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jared DeLuca, Director of Operations at Appcues.

Summary: Jared takes us inside the mad but amazing world of martech at Appcues – the top product adoption SaaS on the planet. We cover his transition from demand gen to ops, how he’s integrated demo bookings within the product using RevenueHero, the difference between ops and revops. We also cover a ton of ground on AI topics for marketers like machine learning lifecycle management, how to QA AI-driven messages and how to leverage AI to uncover increm...

What’s up everyone, today I have the pleasure of sitting down with Ron Jacobson, Co-founder and CEO of Rockerbox

Summary: Multi-touch attribution doesn’t tell you what really caused a conversion or revenue, it’s a credit distribution system. It’s still a useful guidepost in understanding where your efforts are making an impact. Incrementality testing, on the other hand, digs deeper—helping you pinpoint what’s really driving results by answering, "What would’ve happened without this campaign?" But to get there, it’s not about finding the perfect model, it’s about asking the right questions. D...