Lessons Learned from Co-Founding Marketo and Engagio - with Jon Miller

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Jon Miller, co-founder of two industry changing marketing technology brand names, Marketo and Engagio. Today, we will be covering three main areas with Jon. One, the MarTech's evolution in Jon's journey across the MarTech landscape over the last 20 years, from Epiphany to Marketo to Engagio, now Demandbase. We'll discuss B2B marketing metrics that matter today and how those evolved over the years. And lastly, we'll talk about what it's like to see a company that you founded evolve even to the point of either selling the company or leaving the company. Jon, please take a moment to give our audience a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Jon Miller** (1:28)
Yeah, thanks for having me here. It's great to hang out and talk with another early marketing automation old timer. Yeah, so it's funny. I've somehow stumbled in to pretty much spending my entire career in marketing technology. I actually studied physics for my undergraduate degree and actually always thought I would go into physics as a career. I ended up getting accepted to MIT for a PhD program, but I wanted to just check out the whole business world before I committed to a life in academia. When I graduated, I deferred at MIT and I got a job at a management consulting company. It's interesting, I think because of my quantitative background, I ended up really working on a bunch of the really analytical projects which led me to actually get recruited into a boutique consulting firm called Exchange Partners. Exchange Partners is really specializing in what we would today call CRM, CRM Analytics. How do you understand customers and the value different customers bring to the table? What we realized at Exchange Partners, and again, this is like 1995, was that the world needed technology to support the kinds of recommendations we were making with the consulting. We ended up buying this old mainframe-based campaign management software solution, and then called it Exchange Applications, which then eventually was very successful selling this kind of analytical marketing software tool to run campaigns. It ended up eventually rebranding just as Exchange and went public, I think, in 1998, and arguably was one of the leading marketing technology platforms of come the late 90s, when you were hanging out in the industry.
I then left to go to grad school, business school, and when I was graduating, I ended up working at a company called Epiphany, which was kind of fortuitous. Epiphany was just entering into the campaign management, early marketing automation space. They already had built a strong analytics solution, but they were entering this new space. And frankly, the fact that I had even the loosest connection back to this exchange company was enough for them to take a chance and hire me. And so that's how I ended up working as a product manager at Epiphany, and Epiphany went on to be the number one marketing platform of the internet bubble. So kind of, you know, 1999 to early 2000s. That was a great experience. I spent seven years there, and we eventually sold Epiphany to a company called SSA Global in 2005 And that's when I hooked up with Phil Fernandez, who had been Epiphany's President Chief Operating Officer. And we both had a shared view that marketing technology, like Epiphany, was like super powerful. But the industry had always been held back because it was too hard to buy. It's too expensive. It was a capital investment, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to get up and running. And in 2005, Software as a Service was just becoming mainstream. And so Phil and I had the vision of a powerful marketing technology platform that could be as easy to buy for marketers as like Google AdWords. You know, they could just buy it with their existing program dollars and get up and running really quickly. And that's what led us to found Marketo in late 2005, early 2006 So Marketo was just a great example of kind of the right solution at the right time. It was right as Software as a Service was taking off. And it was right when the marketers were really realizing the need for better technology to help them capture leads, nurture the ones that weren't ready, work with sales, just the Internet and online buying created so much change in how people wanted to research and buy solutions. And Marketo had just the right solution at the right time for meeting kind of that broad need. So I spent nine years at Marketo. Great experience. Also, we had an IPO. But after nine years, it just felt a little big. We'll get to this more in a little bit. But it stopped really feeling like my baby and started just feeling like a place I was working. And I was craving for something else, kind of having that feeling of it sort of being my own thing again. And we'll talk more about this. But I saw the opportunity to build yet the next generation of marketing technologies driven by the rise of account-based marketing. So in 2015, I left Marketo finally and started Engagio. And we had a great run there, built one of the leading AVM platforms. But after five years, what I realized is just like the market was moving so fast. The vision of what I wanted to build was so huge that ultimately it made sense to combine Engagio with the largest player in our category, Demandbase, and that the combined solution would be the complete platform. So in June, we merged Engagio and Demandbase. And now here we are a couple of months later, and I am running product for Demandbase, and we're about to announce our integrated platform, which is exciting. That's kind of my journey through MarTech to get to where I am today.