What The CEO Wants From Marketing & The Future Of MarTech with Metadata CEO Gil Allouche

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This episode of the Exit 5 podcast.

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My guest on this episode of the Exit 5 podcast is Gil Alush, founder and CEO of Metadata. All right, Mr. Gil Alush, my friend. So great to have you. Before we dive in, some people have been giving me feedback lately that I just kind of dive into these things and I don't give people full context about the company and who you are and what you do. So maybe let's start this podcast today with who you are, what's Metadata? And then I'll go into all my questions and just as you can like give some background on like when you started the company, roughly stage, team size, all that stuff.

Okay, cool. Super happy to be here. It's nice to have this conversation recorded on the podcast. I feel like it's our usual conversation, but this time it's recorded.

I hope it will be a great episode. If it is that, if it is our usual conversation, then I hope it is.

That sounds good. My name is Gil Alush. I'm the founder and CEO of Metadata. Metadata. Well, originally I'm from Israel. I'm a software engineer in my background. I started coding when I was really young. I started my first business. I always like to say that I started my first illegitimate business of importing firecrackers from France as a kid and that's how my entrepreneurial spirit started. I moved to the US when I was 25 to do an MBA in Boston and spent about seven years there running marketing for a few B2B companies which got me excited about the Martech space and trying to solve what I think is one of the biggest problems in B2B, which is generating demand for B2B companies. And so as an engineer, I was a very different marketer than the usual. Definitely not like you, Mr. Don Draper. I was more of a quant, sitting down and calculating and experimenting campaigns. But it worked really well. I worked with three companies and all three of them exited. And the VP sales were always happy with the pipeline I built. And so I, I wanted to. To see if I can make myself a commodity and start a company that essentially does all this quantitative experimental work for companies. And that's kind of the inception for metadata. So I started it about six years ago with a big promise of building this operating system for the B2B marketer. But I had to start somewhere and survive for a while. So we concentrated on demand generation and rode this wave called ABM for a few years. The first three, four years was just building product. We actually rebuilt the product three times. So it didn't really work the first, second, third times. Thankfully, Emily and Olena, my VPs of engineering and product, actually knew how to build proper code. And that's what we did in the first three years. We had a lot of acquisition offers. We had something like 14 acquisition offers in our history. One of them became a great investment. And also a lot of amazing people joined the company since. So Olivier, who is our go to market lead, Clay, Jason, Mark, A lot of customers joined us as well. About 20 something customers already joined us since we started.

20 customers are now full time employees at Metadata.

Yeah.

Across all different teams.

Across all different teams. Customer success, VP of sales, go to market lead, our VP of marketing, our head of brand. Yeah. Is it worth the churn risk, you know, in short? Yes. I mean, we're not poaching them, but sometimes they're in a company for four or five years and it's a natural transition. And they like the people they work with. They're marketers and so they believe in the vision and they enjoy it. And it's amazing. You know, it's a great, great thing.

To have just to give people a rough sense of stage. About two months ago, you raised $40 million Series B. Right. And then. And just roughly how big is the team today?

Somewhat worth 150, but I don't think we're 150. I think we're something like 135. Okay.

Yeah, roughly 100. That's it gives good people a sense. Okay, great. Thanks for that. I was going to ask you this later, but you mentioned it early, so you said you're not the Don Draper. That's me. You're the quant guy. But I made a note because I wanted to. But how? I would say yes. However, I do see some marketing, historically from metadata that doesn't feel that way. And so you do. You seem to have given the team or. I don't know if it's your push or the team's push. Well, like, you do a lot of creative shit, I think. And so I don't think you're just a quant. Like, how do you balance those things? Because it must itch you deep inside to, like, want to quant all those things. But you do seem to have a mix of the creative and the quant.

Right? You're right that I am creative. But it is a fight. You know, it's. It's a battle. I think you remember when I even put on LinkedIn, this right brain, left brain. And like, you know, the right brain, you see people just smoking joints and having fun and, like, the loris spark, the left brain, it looks like 1984, like, pushing papers. So it's not exactly like that, but it is a battle. And I would say I hire people to complement where I think I lack. So, Jason, Mark, you know, they're a lot of fun, very colorful. They come up with all these things that I just honestly wouldn't. It's not really my style. I will come up with creative campaigns here and there, but I think I'm more inclined towards the numbers and reverse engineering everything and being methodical. That's kind of my nature.

Okay, so as CEO of a B2B SaaS company, what expectations do you have out of a marketing team today? Can you talk about some of the goals and guardrails and I guess playbook, if you have one. But how do you see the role of marketing as a CEO?

First and foremost, it's generating demand. That's how I see the role of a cmo. I think if you do everything wrong, but you can generate predictable demand economically for your sales team, and that sales team is able to close it into revenue. Boom. You've done that. You earned your seat at the table. You can fuck up, excuse my language, everything else, and you can earn your time to figure out how to do it. But if you do everything else and there is no demand, the company collapses. And so that's usually when VPs of marketing gets replaced within, like 18 months. So that's the first mandate, I would say. And once you prove that, as you grow, you can't stagnate even if you do something amazing, you can't just rely on that for years and years. You can rely it maybe for a year. And so I would say the second thing after that is telling the story of the company and creating the brand so that you don't have to pay for them or you don't have to invest dollar and get the demo back. But your company name becomes a synonym for the value that you're creating. In our example, it's generating demand. I would like Metadata to be one of the first three purchases together with HubSpot and Salesforce.

Oh, I like that. I like hearing things like that because I think that gives the marketing team and the company a framework and a strategy. And we talk so much about the story is the strategy. But when you say as the CEO of the company, I want metadata to be one of the first three products inside of a B2B SaaS company, then that kind of gives you guardrails for like, okay, well what things do we need to do in order to achieve that? And my guess is that's why you've kind of gone all in on this approach to creating this category and being the marketing operating system.

That's exactly right. I think it was last year two things happened that got me thinking, shit, this can be the reality. One is Jason did the first. Jason and Mark worked on the first conference and it was the first conference. The first customer conference I set up had I think 70 people, 60 people, and I was fairly happy with that. And then the first conference Jason did had like 2000 something attendees. So I was like, the fuck? How did that happen? That was insane. That proved to me that there is a lot of demand for what we're doing, for the education, for the value, for all the templates and all the stuff that was in the conference that really made me think, absolutely, there is demand for this category, for this whole idea. There is a lot of hunger for it. And the second one is that in the few years we only went to market with the product, we only had a GA product in the end of 2019. So it's been three years and change even less. And in those three years we have third time customer who brought us in like the head of B2B of Fialp, if I'm not mistaken. Matt Hamond, he brought us in for the third time customer. Right? Like the first week together with buying. I don't remember what else he bought. I think he bought HubSpot metadata and I don't remember the third one. And I thought that's Amazing that that's happening. And then now I want to replicate it times 20,000 you mentioned and everybody that's listening.

This is such an important point, but I can't hammer this home enough. So I'm just going to spit back what Gil said. As a CEO of a B2B SaaS company that raised $40 million has had a little bit of success so far, he cares about two things. Number one, pipeline. Number two, the story. And I can tell you, out of five, six, seven CEOs that I've known over the last probably 10 years, that is all they care about. And I think it's your job in marketing to manage up and push back against those things because it doesn't mean that the CEO is only going to talk about those two things. They're going to ask about the website and the color and the design and then this thing and then that thing. But I think that it's your job as a marketing leader to be the filter. And so I think it's really important to be able to have conversations about other things. But know that at the end of the day, if you got a lot of shit on your plate and you're trying to figure out what things you want to get in this month, this quarter, at the end of the day, when I'm having my one on one with the CEO, all he or she's going to care about is how's the pipeline? And is our story making progress in the, in the category or market that we're going after. And I think you need those frameworks because I think just so many B2B SaaS marketing teams are just like drowning in information. You got to be able to focus. And I think you have a really. Maybe it's because you're so direct, but I think you have a really good way of just stilling that down and saying like, yeah, forget the noise. These are the two things that I care the most about.

Yeah, maybe it's because I'm direct. Maybe it's because I think I have luck hiring really good people who get it. And you know, once you hire good people who get it, you let them do their thing. They do it better than I would do it. Right. I would not create the first conference with 44 and a half thousand registrants. It won't happen. I wouldn't even try to do it. I remember when Jason pushed to do this category change and started changing the name and I was uncomfortable with it because we're generating pipeline with the abm and I kind of told him like, look, if you really think it's that important, do it anyway. I don't really approve it, but if you think it's that important, just go with it and hopefully you'll be right. And he did. He was like, well, kind of gave me Scott oblige to do it, so I'm going to try it. And he did it and it worked really well. And I say today, you know, he did it on his own. It's not like it came from me. I didn't even prove it really. But he did a better job. He made a better decision that I would have made as a marketer, which is why he's the VP of marketing.

I mean, it's empowering to hear that though. It's just like that's the same way, like you're not going to do a financial audit of your own, of the company or you're not going to run the sales process. Like you have to bring in people that that's what they do and give them the guardrails. Can you talk about the revenue, how you think about the revenue function at metadata and the relationship between sales and marketing and basically how you get to the revenue number this quarter this year?

Oh man. The revenue goals are always such a psychological exercise. I'm sure my team probably regrets that I ever heard this, but maybe a year and a half, two years ago. So it took us about two and a half years to raise our A. Full disclosure, I raised the seed. Then I tried to raise, tried to raise the A, tried to raise the A. Market. Market is shit, you know, crowded space. What are you doing? In all the rejections you can, you can imagine in the world. Then the B, we got our first term sheet a few months after the A, but you know, then we waited for the right investor and so it was eventually six or seven months, which was amazing, you know, completely insane to me that the amounts and the time to raise. Why, why am I, why am I. Oh, I'm mentioning that because once you raise. I remember one of the investors I talked to invested in Outreach and he told me that half way through the year, Manny, Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach and one of, one of his investors, they were just chatting and said like, what if we just like double the sales goal this year in the middle of the year? And they said, yeah, fuck it, let's do it. And they did it. You know, they went back to the team and I can only imagine that meeting, how it went. And I have actually a good idea how it went because we did it Three times last year, in the middle of the year, I went to Jason in April was the first time. I said, hey, it looks like we're doing really great. We're generating pipeline. Jason and Olivier and Clay, you guys are closing it, so should we have a higher goal? And then we did this conversation again in June and again in, I think it was August. And eventually we got to 97% of the third time new goal. So you asked me, how do you make the number? You negotiate a goal, then you push for more, then you stretch everyone extra because that's your job. And then you reverse engineer the shit out of it. You basically guarantee the path to getting there. You need to have exactly the number that you're trying to get. Then you have a buffer, let's say 20% extra buffer, and then you put the entire path to getting there. How much pipeline do you need? How many demos? What's the asp, how many sales people do you have? Are they onboarded? How are you going to get the pipeline? How is it breaking down to paid, non paid, organic, so on and so forth? And then you test it, you test it month in, month out and see if there are any fluctuations. At least that's how we do it.

I've seen a similar approach. I don't know, there's obviously, I think you, once you get past 100 million in revenue, but I think planning becomes more of a like process that's done by finance and hr. Like it's much different. But I think especially at this stage, I think that approach makes a lot of sense. You have to do, I guess if you only do the bottoms up, like you need to do the bottom up model, like, what are the inputs today? Like, what can we get to with our stuff? And then you have to do the top. Where do we want to get? Because if you just do the bottoms up, you're just going to drag the spreadsheet and grow, you know, 7%. And I think you have to be able to calibrate both. And I think that it's the marketing team's job to sometimes, even though those things are crazy, say yes to the plan. Because most of the times it's like, it's not like if we don't quadruple revenue, you're all going to get fired. It's like, no. The point of setting big goals is because, like, you know, you talk about all the time, if you set a bigger goal and you miss, you're still going to be somewhere in a range that would have pushed you to get Past. And it seems like that's kind of like what you've lived through the last two years.

That's right. And why are we in a startup? We're in a startup because we can move fast and we can crunch five years or 10 years into one. Truly, that's what's happening. And so when you're able to crunch five years into one, if you can crunch six, if you can get to the same place and save a year for your life, you'll do it. And you have to do things that you've never done before to get there. And that's exactly why you're in a startup, because you're challenging yourself. I told the team, we'll get 50% of the knowledge that you have from your historical what you've done historically. 50%. That's 50% of the work. And the other 50% is to do things that you've never done before. Don't be afraid of missing, you know, don't, don't make fear based decision. Don't be afraid of like missing your mark and thinking that's like a stain on your, on your record. No, like aim significantly higher than what you've done and in the past and yeah, you get to 80% of it. That's still amazing.

Yeah. Okay, well, full disclosure, we've been, we've been working together for a while and I meant to say this before, but I love you, Gil, because of your. I mean, Gil's like since day one, he's like, any way I can help with DGMG or sponsor anything. Exit 5, whatever. I want to. Let me do it, let me do it, let me do it. And so like that's, I mean that's just been amazing. So. And I think that that goes back to like being a CEO who wants to say some, there's some opportunities that are, that are harder to quantify, but you just say, you know what, I have a gut feeling about this and, and I want to do it. And you've, and you've taken like chances on that. But I've, so I've been in, I say that to say that I've, I've seen conversations with you and the team where you give them a really big goal, but you almost say like, look, I would rather we go and try this, take a big swing and do at it and crash, burn and fail and then learn than like, let's set an event registration goal of a hundred people. Like, I'd rather see you set a goal of 500. And let's see if we can push ourselves to get there and, like, if we don't get it. And I think that, I think that that's really, like, liberating as a, as a marketing leader. I was lucky to have this with David at Drift and then later for a shorter time with Ben at Privy. But I think you have to have a CEO who's gonna push you to get there, but also, you know that it's not gonna be like your job is on the line. In this particular instance, if you set this big stretch goal, you'd rather see somebody take a big swing and try something and push to do something outside of the box.

I mean, that's what everyone wants to do. That's the dream of every person. Every person in this world always wants to reach to their dream and either make it or still, like, make it somewhere. Through that dream and reality conditions. You, you know, as an entrepreneur, you are very hopeful. You're dreaming about this goal. You don't think it's going to, at least personally, you know, on one hand, on one hand, I'm extremely optimistic. On the other hand, I'm fucking paranoid as hell. Like, I don't think anything is going to work out. So I'm assuming everything is going to crash and burn tomorrow. And that combination almost guarantees success time after time. Now, many times you fail, but out of the hundred times, it's enough that you succeeded five, ten times to reach some imaginable goal. Then the reality condition, you know, shit, this is possible. And then you tell the team, Instead of trying 2x, try 10x. And they're at first they're like, no, that's crazy. I'm just going to try 6x. And then they try 6x and they get 6x and they're like, shit, maybe I should have tried the 10x to begin with.

I also think it all comes back to what you said in the beginning, though. I think, like, I'm just trying to talk to the marketers out there who listen to this. Like, I think that you have to be able to hit the revenue goals early on and show the CEO. This is specifically like the marketing leaders who report to the CEO. Like, I think you have to show the CEO that you can drive this thing and you have to give them the confidence that you can push back. That's why it's important, what you said. Like, you got to be able to come in, have the revenue plan, pipeline's not an issue, then you can do those things. Like, I remember, like, as our relationship shifted over the time at Drift, With David, for example, like early days, it was very much like, junior guy, you're gonna do what I say, here's the plan. But as we start to get some wins, it's like, oh, okay, Dave might. And the team might know what we're doing. And so then you kind of earn the right to have more candid conversations and push back. But it's teams where I see that the marketing leader wants to do that, but they haven't really put any points on the board yet where that becomes a challenge. And so I do think, yeah.

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You might want to do the creative stuff, but Mike Volpe gave me amazing advice when I went to Privy. He was like, you can make all the changes in the world that you want. You can rebuild the marketing team, do everything from the beginning, but please, for the love of God, do not change the website in your first six months. Go and put some numbers on the board and then you can have the freedom to push the CEO and drive. But I think the CEO is looking for that out of marketing. It's like, look, you have a hundred other things going on. You're fundraising, you're hiring, you're in sales conversations, in technical conversations, in product conversations, in partnership conversations. You have to understand what's going on in the CEO's head and that they're not always thinking about marketing 24 7. And so you have to dry.

You have to be able to drive.

That a little bit and make those, make life easier and that helps make the conversations with the CEO more productive.

I completely agree. When you were visualizing this, earning those points on the board, I remember that moment with Jason where the company, not for the first time, almost died. We had, I don't know, I had like 17,000 in the bank account. I remember taking a loan just to pay half the payroll. It was a shit show. And I went to Jason, I told him, look, the budget we talked about is not there. You have a third of the budget that we discussed. And he's like, what about the goal? I was like, the goal is the same. And you could see his face when I said it. He was like, fuck, what did I sign up to? But after that initial shock, fast forward a few weeks, he got like a few quarters in, he got 400% of the goal with that third of the budget, time after time, month after month, for quarter in, quarter out. And that was the time I was like, shit, this guy, this is a person I'm going to work with. This is great. You know, Absolutely. I'M going to listen. And he has all the credit in the world to mess up and to do all kinds of things. Absolutely. Earn that credit.

I had the problem with is once I was given the budget, I didn't know how to spend it because we had done so much with, you know, we had raised a bunch of money, but, but we weren't spending a lot in marketing. Okay. We're talking about budget and I mean, obviously the market as we're recording this has just gone to absolute shit. And I'm sure you're feeling, you're feeling really good that you raised money two months ago. Put that, put that money in the bank. I talked to a bunch of founders who are like, take, just take the term sheet right now. But let's talk about like, for reality, for those listening out there, the next six months, there might be teams that are asked to cut back on budget. Like, have you started to think about, you don't have to tell people you're going to cut budget because I don't think you are. But what do you think is going to happen in the next six or so months from an operating standpoint and what does it mean for B2B marketers?

I am very transparent with my team. So they know exactly the style and they've been around for a while. So I'm not worried about saying anything.

I didn't know if you were going to do the better CEO and just do a zoom call and just lay off 900 people and call it a day. Outstanding leadership.

Absolutely. Not my style. No. You know, we have the muscle of being frugal because we had to wait. You know, one of the things I did not realize about the startup is that if you have a great idea, you know, a vision that's going to work, good luck waiting now patiently years for someone else to agree that it's a good idea. Sometimes it's three. In our case it was about four years. And in those four years you have to survive. So, yes, generate revenue and also not spend too much. So last year we had three profitable months. And that's because we are very economical. We have that muscle to be profitable if we need to. And so in metadata right now, if anything, I need to train the other muscle of spending to achieve dream goals. And that's what we're doing right now. And we have guardrails. If we don't, if we miss more than one quarter, we miss the mark, then we're going to cut back a little bit. But it's not about firing dozens of People, it's more about being a little bit more conservative because we're already fairly economical to begin with. So I'm less worried about that.

I love the way you put that. And I made a note because I'm going to do a separate podcast, a solo rant that I have on this later. But you said you use this line. We have the muscle of being frugal. And, man, I think that is so important. We used to have this discipline, like in marketing, where we would say, basically, anything you want to do before we're going to go and spend on it. You can probably do it with Google sheets and Zapier. And so we'd be like, the internal line was like, there's a Google sheet and a zap for that, which is like, prove it out. Like, let's do something small. Let's be scrappy, let's be frugal. And even when you do have the budget, like, everything doesn't have to be so polished. I think when you have that frugality muscle, I would actually much rather operate from that position than like, when you can hire an agency or a contractor.

Or whoever to do everything.

I do think you lose that. And so it's so important that that muscle doesn't atrophy, I guess.

I completely agree. Yesterday, I had a call with my VP of engineering, and she was telling me how she's negotiating this data set and what she got from it. And she's laughing. She's like, oh, I got to stop being so frugal, so cheap. I'm like, no, this is amazing. You just saved us when we don't even have to. You still have that muscle. That's amazing. Everyone looks at that because sometimes, especially in Silicon Valley, in this whole startup bubble, you fake it until you make it for a decade, if you have the cash to do it, you will basically never be profitable, never have a business model. And we just didn't have the luxury of having that. I'm not a serial entrepreneur who got $40 million series seed month after they have the presentation. Nothing like that. It was more like 60 rejections to get like 1 million. And so because of that, we had to, all of us, we had to figure out how to do this. And I was honestly impressed and surprised to see that people get that quickly. I remember, I think it was June 2020 where we had to all take a pay cut. We did have to let go, lay off a few people. We basically couldn't pay any vendors for a few months until we recuperated. People changed their commissions into equity. It was amazing to see how everyone gathered along and said, okay, this is the reality. We know what it is. We know what we need to do. And everyone did it. Didn't have to sit down and convince 101 to 30 people that we were back then.

My least favorite trend is B2B SaaS. Companies taking 20 grand and doing the Times Square, NASDAQ thing and everybody posting it on LinkedIn. I think if you can be the first to move in that space, like, I think that if you have the opportunity to do something first and get the rewards of being the early mover on a channel or on like a crazy tactic or stunt like that or whatever, then I think you should do it. Otherwise, I'm much more impressed by the teams that are doing like creative things with less because I think it is easy to go and solve some of those. Okay, I want to transition us to talk about Martech a little bit. You have some strong opinions on Martech. I would just love to tee that up and see where you go with it right now in May of 2022.

I do have a few opinions about MarTech. Man. MarTech. I love MarTech. Before I started the company, I got a lot of advice not to start a company because the shit show, it's such a mess. I mean, just the Lumascape. Scott Brinker, who comes up with the.

Yeah, Martech. When. When we were at. Yeah, when I was at Drift, it was the. It was initially the mar. It was like the. We were talking about. It's a Martech 5000. I looked at the other day. It's now, I think 9000. Yeah, nine, 10,000. Yeah. It's crazy.

It's insanity. Last YC, last Y Combinator batch had like 46 Martech companies there. So it's not going anywhere. You know, marketing, very creative people, super excited about it. It's ever expanding now. The trends are different. Like, one day, Martech is shit. No one wants to put a dollar into it. Currently, Martech is hot. People want to put a lot, a lot of investment into it. Super nice to see. But the shit show is still the shit show. So there are thousands and thousands of technologies, channels, data sources. You have all the. All this wealth of technology and opportunities, but people are overwhelmed by it. Mostly a marketer is trying to find this golden egg, this technology that's just going to generate magically all the pipeline for them or like a piece of technology or a channel. And in my time as a marketer, and I'm very technology oriented, Very numbers oriented. I was very comfortable with technology, but even I wasn't able to really utilize the technology properly because I ran out of time. It's a point and click solution that takes you half an hour to do one campaign or it's like a month of machine learning to get some scoring. And that sucks. That's not normal at all. And also the kind of tasks that you do as a marketer, you end up like at 2am in the morning. I, I know I say it like a lot, but this is true. It's like you wake up at 2am in the morning because you get some notification that some campaign is not working and you figure out that the UTN tag is not good. Then you have to start changing the shit in the middle of the night. You're nervous because some character is not working in the mapping. What the hell are you doing? That is absolutely not what you signed up when you went to marketing. That is an opportunity. That's a huge opportunity. That is hard. It's an uphill battle. But I think once you solve this problem, this messy space that has all these technologies and channel data, once you put something in the middle that makes sense of it and replaces the human from doing all those technical, repetitive, mundane tasks that no one wants to do to begin with, then you have this magical landscape of innovation. And suddenly now you can take advantage of all the technologies and the channels and the data and enjoy what you're doing because you're just orchestrating this play versus with a hammer and a nail, trying to get everything, all those repetitive tasks.

So do you think we've gone through like this wave of like, do you think the reason there's so many Martech companies, obviously there is a lot of competition, but a lot of competition. And a huge market often means that it's a huge market and there is proven budget out there. And so I think it is smart to go there. But there's kind of been like this. And I'm not like the SaaS expert, I'm just talking in words, but like it's kind of been like this. Everything. It's like an unbundling and now it's. Everything's being bundled back together again. It's like it just kind of goes in these waves of like point solutions and platforms. And I think I know you have an opinion on that.

Yeah, I'm trying not to curse.

You can curse. I put you. This is my podcast. You can curse.

Fuck that. It's terrible. It's really terrible. It's going back to the dark ages, you know, like when you had the SAP. No one likes those monster software, you know. And it's never great because when you're a company, when you're a small startup, you have to be extremely focused, right? That's the one thing you have to do. If you're not focused, you're dead immediately because you have to figure out what you're great at and just 10x on that. And when you're a big company, suddenly you're trying to consolidate everything and be the one stop shop for everything. And guess what happens then you become mediocre in the vast majority of the things that you do because there's no chance you can be good or great at tenting. You can be great one or two. And so yeah, there is this trend now of consolidating back and all the larger companies are trying to become your chat and your outreach. They try to have your drift and your outreach and your data and your marketo and your intent and all of it in one place by acquiring a lot of companies and technologies and then you end up with sheet software with not best of breed versus the opportunity that we have with all those 9, 10,000 technologies is to orchestrate those technologies and operate them more effectively, but still use the best technologies for what they do. Like chat and clear of the drift and the qualified. You know, there's the outreach and the sales lost. No one really remembers the other 20, you know, like someone does, but I don't. And so I prefer to let drift and qualified build the best chat and conversational marketing out there and let our system maximize the usage of it and make the best use out of these technologies versus trying to create a new chat. That is going to be terrible. You know, it's going to be like we're not going to maintain it and invest in it the same way drift and qualified does.

It's a very tough internal challenge to buy a lot of companies and then stitch all those things together. I think like if you look at maybe HubSpot and Salesforce, yes, they've made a bunch of acquisitions, but they've had a lot of those things from the beginning. And so I also think it's a little bit easier to grow that way from the beginning. And those companies were both started when I think you could be. HubSpot initially was like the all in one marketing platform. You have your website, you have your blog, you have your email, you have your social media and then you have your CRM. I think that makes sense, but it's a Different context now where there's so many tools out there. I've been a leader of marketing teams where the team is like, I'm like, hey, what should we be doing? Let's use technology to our advantage. Guillaume Caban, who, who we both know, and I think he's an investor in. In metadata. I think he's built a unbelievable. One of his secret advantages is he just was an early adopter to a lot of these products. And I think he created a huge advantage for himself because he's seeing all these new things, he's trying all these new products, and so he got to level up. And so there'd be times where I would like try to push the team and say, hey, what should we be doing? Are there new tech out there that we should be evaluating and using that to our advantage? And it can be paralyzing because they just come back and they're like, I don't know, there's 17,000 things. Let's go. Make sure we compare them all to each other and pick the right one. It's challenging from a buying standpoint, for.

Sure, it is challenging, but Guillaume is very technical. I remember meeting guillaume at the G2 conference, like a few years ago and we were laughing. He said, you started a company and I started a consultancy, but we're doing pretty much the same thing. You're trying to code everything that I do. And that's true. He used Zapier and Workato and spreadsheets and some code to automate the usage of many of these channels and technologies. And we built a piece of software that does the same thing so that you don't have to do it. You abstract the complexity of talking to 9,000 vendors and trying to figure out what's right for you. And now you have to wake up every morning and log in and use it to like, all that stuff needs to be gone. That's not the interesting. That's not where the value is.

Let's talk a little bit about what metadata actually does. Because I'm not even because you sponsor my stuff, but I'm just genuinely cursed. What have you built? I want people to hear. What have you built that has attracted 20 people to your company? I've talked to some of your customers. They take metadata with them to other companies when they leave. So let's talk a little bit more tactically about like the demand gen platform that you've built and the automation stuff that you're doing and why that's gotten some traction and maybe where you see that can go it goes back to basics.

We built a piece of software that generates pipeline consistently, predictably, and it's becoming more and more economical, essentially making your marketing team a profit unit. Our marketing team has been a profit unit for two and a half years or something like that. That is the value at the end of the day. Technology aside, how does it do it? It essentially combines two things. We have a data graph that allows you to run B2B targeting using filmographic, technographic and buyer intent across all channels. A channel that has historically been inaccessible for B2B marketer like Facebook, like TikTok, like Twitter, because they don't have the criteria like the seniority and job title. Now all of these channels are available to a B2B marketer. And then with metadata, you never ever have to log in again to any of those technologies or system. You never have to log into AdWords or Facebook or LinkedIn or display. You never have to do it. And instead of running one campaign in half an hour on native, you run a hundred campaigns in two minutes with a platform. That's the secret, that experimentation engine that runs all the execution for you and then monitors all the campaigns for you for three months until the deal is closed. That's the magic. And that's the reason companies buy metadata.

I wish I had metadata when I was like the first marketer at Drift, because I think that that is a huge hurdle. It's like either you are the solo marketer and I know a lot of people can relate to this, either you're kind of the solo marketer who has to do all the things content, paid, social partnerships, co marketing. And you're like, I can figure out AdWords. But then you're like, okay, I'm in AdWords. And I'm like, is that the wrong keyword? Oh my God, I just wasted seven grand. Because, you know, this was terrible and we have no conversions. And then you got to do the same for Facebook and then you got to do the same for LinkedIn. And so I think that either you're like that generalist who's like the market early stage marketing leader, or you have all the way up the spectrum, which is like at the early stage of a B2B SaaS company, you're not often going to hire someone to just own AdWords. And so then it becomes, okay, well then I got to go pay an agency. And it seems that like, no matter what you pay an agency, the minimum retainer for an agency to run your AdWords campaigns is going to be between 10 and 20 grand. And so all of a sudden like that, you're like, holy cow. And it doesn't, they can't do what it seems like you can do, which is like, you actually have this actual AI and machine learning that can do this at scale across thousands of pieces of creative.

And you know, the biggest thing is that there is no accountability. Sometimes you'll go, and you know, one of our, I just read a post from one of our recent hires. She came from an agency and she was telling the story how she thought she's signing up for an AE role in the agency. But actually day one she needed to run campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn and Google, which she's never done before. Just, okay, good luck. And guess what? She overspent. She like, you know, burned 7,000 here, 12,000 here. There's no accountability because the person running the campaigns is also the person telling you how well the campaign, what the campaigns went. So guess what?

Also you said something really important which is like, and they've never done it before. And so think about this. You're a startup trying to come into this market of 10,000 competitors and you're just like, here, someone who's never done this before, spend a bunch of money and go into these super crowded channels. LinkedIn super crowded Facebook, super crowded, YouTube, super crowded Google, super crowded. And let's go win. And you're going to make this up as you go. It's like, that is not a formula to be successful.

No, that's a hashtag, Failed, guaranteed. And there is no accountability. Like the idea that the same person who is doing the execution is also the same person giving you the report at the end of the month. It's out of whack. You're always going to get, you're going to get lies by definition because they have to keep their earn next month and next month. So they're going to give you all these vanity metrics, all these report that might be overwhelming as hell, just so that you're like, okay, great, looks like we're doing pretty well. It's something I can talk to the CEO about. And I remember we had a customer that the agency was working, was basically using metadata and they complained a few times that the system would cut the campaign and gladly. The AI is still, you can still reverse engineer decision making at our current stage. And so we could show why the campaign was stopped. And it's because the campaign was shit. It was about to burn like 20 grand and generate nothing. But it's a new mindset because now there's accountability. No one cares about all those vanity matrix on the way. At the end of the day, you spent 50k. Did you generate at least 50k or 200k of pipeline? Because if not, it's not a success.

Yeah, I mean it makes it pretty black and white if that's what you're going to use as the measurement for those channels. Okay, we're heading towards the end of wrapping up. I want to ask you this. I had this in my notes. It's a little bit of change of direction, but can you just talk about what do you talk to the board about as a CEO? Because I think presenting to the board, talking to the board is a myth to a lot of marketing leaders in there and out there. And so while I have a CEO on this podcast, I just would love to hear your perspective about what's important to the board, what you talk to them about. Because I think a lot of times the marketing person just doesn't really know what the board actually cares about. So I'd love to hear from your perspective.

Yeah. In all the boards. That's definitely one of my learnings throughout metadata to learn how to work with the board and how to understand that as a CEO, you're chairman of the board, but you really are a board member and you kind of living a double life where you have to look at the company and yourself objectively, which is not easy. The board cares about the direction of the company. They want to make sure that what you said will happen is happening or better. And so they really care about the KPIs. At the end of the day, that's how they invest. They don't know the sweat, blood and tears. They don't know the culture when they invest. They see the balance sheet, they see the P and L and they decide if this is a good business or not. So that's the first thing. It's just generating pipeline for a marketer earns their seat with the CEO. Getting the goals that you promised is going to get you the seat with the board. And then it's everything else. It's magic that is happening, like category creation. It's the culture of the company. And I actually, I like to bring in, in every board meeting I have a guest for my leadership team or, or someone who's done something exceptional and they get, you know, they be on the stage and get to chat and meet the board. But you know, yeah, these are board meeting, it's a two hour. I don't do it more than two hours. I think I'VE seen some shit show board meetings where it's just like, lie to each other and have this, like, crazy political conversation for four and a half hours. I've been in those board meetings and I swear that that will not be the case for metadata. We have fairly short, authentic, direct board meetings. You make some tough decisions. Every board meeting has to have a discussion, a real discussion about something that's meaningful, reach a decision and seal the meeting.

I like how you said, it's a discussion about what we said we were going to do and then how we did. And I think that's an important perspective and point of view for a lot of marketers. It's like, it's not just enough to be able to talk about, like, the goals and what you're doing. If you're going to be a marketing leader, you have to be able to articulate the strategy. Here's how we do marketing, here's why. Here's why we're doing what we're doing. Here's how this is going to evolve. And so I think that's like the next layer. If you're trying to grow into a leadership role in marketing. It's like, number one is you got to be able to deliver results. Number two is you got to be able to, like, actionably and actively communicate about those results and plans. But I think the third one is like, you got to be able to get off slack, get off zoom, and be able to sit in your desk, in your office and be like, here is how we do marketing at metadata. Here is how we do marketing at drift. This is our approach because there isn't a playbook. But you have to have a philosophy. And I think it's not just inputs and outputs that you're sharing with the board. You have to be able to articulate, like, what do we see the marketing function doing? And then how are we going to compete in this world?

That's accurate. You know, you said something. These are the swings that you were talking about before. This is you exactly that. Like canceling all of your meetings, getting a day where you have no meetings, going to the beach, smoking a big fat joint and sitting down and thinking about the crazy ideas that you could do that the dreams you always had when you were working a big company and you knew that no one is ever going to give you the shot to try. This is the place to go and try them. And if you succeed, amazing. You're a queen or a king. And if you fail, that's okay. Like, you failed quickly. Now you Move to the next one.

I think there's value in having to like create the plan even if you're going to fail and be like, I'm going to come up with this and here's what I think it's going to be. I saw this recently saw your VP of marketing Jason and director marketing Mark were like posted some picture at the top of some mountain hiking and they had a little two day kind of pow wow to talk about what are we doing and what's important.

Yep, they do that and that's beautiful. Jason does that with the entire team, takes them hiking. Everyone has their thing that they do to get out of the comfort zone and get out of the usual, all the busyness in your brain and clear it out and really think from a place of opportunity. Completely clear slate. And that is mandatory to do it because if you don't do it, that 50% of innovation of uncomfort zone is not going to happen.

Okay, is this true or false that.

One time you had to run outside during a CMO lunch in 2015 to update your LinkedIn profile you told a bunch of CMOs about your new company you founded. It didn't exist yet. And then during launch you updated your profile so it looked like Metadata was a real company. Is that a true story?

It's a true story. It's a. It shit. It was in Palo Alto. It was Bessemer Venture event. I was invited to speak to a bunch of CMOs. They were so excited that when they started asking me like, oh, how can we work with you on this? I was like, well, you know, it's great. I, you know, I have a company around that. And then yeah, in the break, in the like bio break, I just ran quickly to like, to the chair. It just changed to like stealth. I don't remember what I changed. And I also tried not to. You know, there's a, there's a checkbox that you can check and say do not update. Do not tell everyone about it.

And I fucked your network.

I fucked it up. And then everyone was like, congratulations, like, shit, this is now happening. You know, like you can't kind of run away from it. But that was great. You know, I got the first customer from there.

That's amazing. And wait, so did you make up the name Metadata like on the spot or you had already kind of had it and.

No, it was, it was stealth. It wasn't. I didn't even have a name. No, that night, that night I was, you know, GoDaddy.com two hours trying like a million combinations that of names that I thought would make sense. And then metadata IO was available.

I love it. All right, Gil, this was awesome. I hope people got. I know people will get two, three things about this. If you haven't already. Make sure you go and check out metadata. Metadata IO metadata IO. They are ardent supporters of Exit 5 and I really appreciate. And Gil, I just, I think you're. It's always great to talk and I hope now people will get a little bit more context about who you are and where you're coming from. So thanks for doing this and I appreciate you.

Thank you. I appreciate you too. And thank you for the partnership. I'm very lucky to work with you.

All right, Gil, I'll see you later, man. Thank you.

Have a good weekend. Cheers.

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