Austin Hay
Austin Hay is currently Head of Marketing Technology at Ramp and was previously the VP of Business Operations at Runway, the VP of Growth at mParticle, and the fourth employee at the unicorn Branch Metrics. In 2022 he sold his online course, the Marketing Technology Academy, to Reforge, where he now teaches Martech and has a program launching in the fall. He’s consulted on Martech and growth for companies including Notion, Airbnb, Robinhood, Postmates, Walmart, JPMorgan Chase, and many others.
Launch & Go-to-Market Skills
The transition from a shared 'village approach' to a dedicated MarTech role typically occurs when a company reaches 100–150 people and system complexity exceeds the capacity of growth generalists.
"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 S..."
Scalable data stacks leverage a 'build and buy' strategy where third-party SaaS provides the foundation and internal engineering builds the custom logic required for competitive advantage.
"Everybody thinks that marketing technology is just the third party tools, but actually it's designing, architecting and building that stuff on top of your third party tools. That's how you actually ha..."
As deterministic tracking fades due to privacy changes, modern attribution must rely on probabilistic modeling that extrapolates behavior from a representative sample of your audience.
"So, what that means is these ad networks are becoming more complex, sophisticated, and interesting, right at the same time that it's harder for marketers to really understand how they're spending mone..."
MarTech should report to the Growth or Product org in B2C companies where the user funnel is the primary focus, whereas B2B companies should house it within Revenue Operations to manage complex CRM and post-funnel needs.
"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 afterwar..."
Planning & Prioritization Skills
High-velocity teams avoid the binary choice of building or buying by using SaaS for core functionality and building proprietary layers for the remaining specialized needs.
"That's how you actually have a lot of velocity is thinking about not just build versus buy. It's build and buy now. So, you buy the tool to get 90% of the way there and then you build the cool thing o..."