Austin Hay: belief

Transcript context

…At some levels there's maybe no difference. There's a lot of startups I would say are 30 people or less where you have a growth team and your growth acquisition person is using a CDP to send data to their ad network to run their ads because that's part of their job and maybe they are the MarTech person. And actually you find a lot of people who consider themselves MarTech professionals now having started in growth or user acquisition roles because they had to just use tools in order to get their jobs done. But what I would say is as a company grows and scales, it moves from being a community or village driven aspect of your products to being something that's centrally owned. If you're a startup, again, like 30 to 40 people, everybody might chip in to manage your CDP or use Amplitude or build a first party solution on top of those. It's a mixture of first and third party tools and engineering and product and marketing all work together on it. That doesn't scale though. As you cross a hundred to 200 people, somebody has to be responsible for knowing how data flows through tools, how it's worked, what's the schema. And that's not even considering procurement and legal stuff. You have infinite liability if you don't manage your contracts well. And so usually around I would call it a hundred to 150 people is the critical mass where you can't just have a village approach to systems and tools much like in the IT org, if it was a village approach to SSO businesses would be in a lot of danger. That's where you typically start to see the question of, all right, we need a systems and tools person. We need somebody to manage these systems and manage that platform. And there's a variety of ways it can go. I've seen it go just into pure product that's with a product operations org and a product ops person actually will manage a lot of third and first party tools. I've seen it go into the IT org, Walmart for example, at a really big scale. They had a MarProd function which was marketing products. It was product within the marketing function or product that was designed to serve marketing. And then of course you can have more traditional routes like you can have marketing technology as a single standalone unit or business technology as a standalone unit. Some of this depends too on whether the business is B2C versus B2B. Classically in a B2B business you see it in rev ops or some types of systems role because you have to serve not only users coming into your funnel, but then the businesses that you're serving afterwards. That's also where you typically see tools like Salesforce coming into play and more advanced CRMs. In a B2C business, your user funnel is actually really simple acquiring users and you're getting them into your product and then product is taking them over. There's no additional CRM, so usually your CDP is the source of truth and that's where you might actually see marketing technology fit in with growth a lot more. and then product is taking them over. There's no additional CRM, so usually your CDP is the source of truth and that's where you might actually see marketing technology fit in with growth a lot more. Just some examples like at Postmates, I worked for them for a long time as a consultant. Marketing technology was just part of growth. We had a director of growth even before that, Siqi Chen who's the CEO of runway, and I guess you were his first manager as I just learned, he was the first VP of growth and marketing technology was just part of growth and product owned that as a system. As a different example though, at Ramp we're big enough and we're a B2B company, but we have a B2C top of funnel where we try to acquire users and get them to fill out our application to get a credit card. We have a distinct revenue operations team that's broken into business technology and marketing technology. So, there's lots of flavors of how it can exist. I think that's kind of the interesting and fun part of Marketing Tech is that it's not just one single version of the world that you apply to many companies, there's like a million variations that I've seen and they all kind of look to solve the same problem. So, to make it even more specific and really simple for people to think about what someone in MarTech does, essentially it's using technology and tools to drive growth. Is that a simple way of thinking about this one specific roles?…

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