My Last Week of a 15 Year Journey

It’s hard to believe that this day has come! After 15 years of creating, growing, and often reinventing Demandbase, this will be my last few days as an employee.  Props to Jennifer Ransom... the photo above is taken in front of our HQ "Journey" conference room ... appropriately named after my first concert.

I started Demandbase with a vision to use technology to transform the way companies’ market and sell to other businesses (aka B2B) and found so many other ways to make a positive impact on our community, our individual careers and the lives of so many others not remotely close to our circle of B2B marketers. We invested our time and technology to help non-profit orgs ranging in mission from supporting girl’s education in developing countries, to promoting the Challenged Athlete Foundation.  In 2015, we empowered nearly 1,000 loyal customers at our annual conference hosted in San Francisco's baseball stadium to pack 100,000 meals for Rise Against Hunger, all while wearing hair nets. I was tired of the intangible $1 donations for tweets at conferences vs. giving people an immediate opportunity to make a difference. But not only did we make an impact on hundreds of thousands of lives, it is these initiatives which brought our employee base closer together as people, as teams, and as a company to shape the culture that earned us the best places award in the Bay Area for 7 years in a row and a Glassdoor Top 10 ranking in the U.S. in 2016 (out of 500,000 companies).  Amazing!  

The company has been, and will continue to be, such a big part of my life. Over the 15 years, I raised two incredible kids, sadly lost two parents, hired 1,000 great people, congratulated dozens of employees on the birth of their children, and experienced so many talented people advance their career both inside and outside Demandbase. Really gratifying to see so many long timers develop into truly amazing leaders.  Also am excited to see the next generation of DB'ers coming in eager to take our company past the $200 million milestone in the quarters ahead.  Gabe Rogol came into the company as a sales director carrying a quota in 2013, and rose through the ranks to take the baton from me 7 years later as CEO. So thankful he had the job during the pandemic and even more thankful he was able to navigate a way to achieve record level, accelerated growth and profitability in 2020!

To the employees and investors in the company – Thank you!!  We spent so many wonderfully gratifying years innovating and being the first at everything we did.  Plenty of failures, but many more successes along the way.  We set out to define and own a category which we called account-based marketing (“ABM”). Seemed so obvious from day 1 back in 2006, but it took so much work, dedication and patience.  Today, ABM as a sector probably employs more than 100,000 people across the vendor, partner and customer ecosystems; and many of the world’s the largest and fastest growing companies now rely on Demandbase as their B2B marketing platform of choice.  

So what’s next for me? I’ll continue to support Demandbase as a Board member and also be advising a few other companies while I’ll explore and vet new opportunities.  May also be headed to the mountains. One thing is for sure, I won’t sit idle.   

I’ll close with one last sincere thank you to the customers, employees (past, present, and future), investors and partners that have enabled Demandbase to achieve its success.  It’s been an incredibly rewarding journey and wouldn’t have been possible without each and every one of you.  Go Demandbase!