Talking About AI in the Loop with Garry Polmateer of Red Argyle!

**Christopher Penn** (0:07)
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

**John Wall** (0:15)
Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I'm John Wall. Today, this is a special episode. This is really interesting because I realized that I have known Garry Polmateer for over a decade, probably going on like 20 years now. And I've really failed in my friendship because Marketing Over Coffee kind of exists for me to have conversations with all my friends. But the problem is, you're a short drive away and we both love barbecue. So whenever I want to talk to Garry, I'm just like, let's go get some barbecue. And we do.
And but as a result, I've never had you on, which is insane because I was digging back. We had actually, you guys had built a marketo connector or something for me.
I think back at AccuRev even. So it was at maybe 2005 or 2007, like something like that. So anyways, this is all inside baseball. We have to kind of set this up the way it should be set up. Garry is the CEO of Red Argyle. He's doing some of the most forward looking stuff as far as AI, agent force, cybersecurity, and headless Salesforce. Garry, thanks for joining us. I'm glad to finally have you on here.

**Garry Polmateer** (1:19)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I mean, I definitely enjoy barbecue as well, but it's good to be on the show.

**John Wall** (1:25)
Yeah, yeah, to get in. All right. And so for people that don't know, you are founder CEO of Red Argyle. Tell us about Red Argyle and what made you to start your own business, go down the entrepreneurial path.

**Garry Polmateer** (1:36)
Well, I got to give props where props are due. My partner, Tom Petros, actually founded Red Argyle. And then I'm what I call the second dancer. I joined him about six months later. Do you remember that sociology video? Totally, yes. So I was the second guy that came out and started dancing. Tom created this vision for the business and it was impossible for me to deny, like, okay, that sounds like a really exciting adventure.
Joined forces with him in 2011 and we've been off to the races ever since.

**John Wall** (2:05)
Right. Okay. And I'll include a link in the show notes to the second follower, which is a very important concept. And that was Derek Sivers of CD Baby, who vanished to New Zealand because he's made millions of dollars and doesn't have to do anything anymore.
But back up a little bit more to how did you get into Salesforce? And in fact, I know that you have a degree in fine arts. So like what happened? How did you go from artist to ending up in the Salesforce ecosystem?

**Garry Polmateer** (2:29)
Yeah, I finished my sculpture degree in 2003 to pay my way through school. I got this job as a network administrator.
I was doing SQL databases and managing data transformations and all this for a labor union.
And then I had this fork in the road. I was like, I can go be broke and scrape for food and maybe have a shot at making some money, or I can follow this tech career. And so I took the tech path because I'm a little bit pragmatic. And yeah, so I kind of started there. I got into nonprofit work for quite a while. And then I got hired by a nonprofit consulting company, and their founder had just got back from this little show called Dreamforce in 2008 And it was right when they announced the force.com platform. And they said, Hey, Gary, I know we hired you to do, it was Ektron content management BA. But how about why don't you go join our Salesforce team that we're going to start? And I thought it over and it was an immediate, heck yes, to let's go do Salesforce. Because it was, I saw the power of the platform even back in 2008 I knew it was game changing technology. So that got me to Salesforce. But I still do a lot of art on the side and long term passion, like I'll never stop making things. Tech's been a great career though.

**John Wall** (3:54)
That's super cool. So yeah, you were in fact, you were the inaugural class of MVPs when they originally put that program together, right? I mean, you've been and is that program still running or what's going on with that?

**Garry Polmateer** (4:07)
Yeah, we were a very tight little knit little Twitter community was kind of the core fabric of all the original Salesforce MVPs. We were very active on Twitter. You know, again, there were there were about 15 of us in that first class that got minted by Salesforce. And it was a real huge honor, I think, because you're friends with Mike, and Mike was one of the also an inaugural, and that's kind of how we all got mixed up eventually.