The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway)

**Austin Hay** (0:00)
From 2010 to 2020, we had the golden years of deterministic matching, where it was very easy to run an ad and understand with precision who installed the app. Maybe you didn't know their name, but you actually would know their IDFN, you could tie that to their PII. You can't do that anymore. 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 money.
And so I'm paying a lot of attention to how marketers make decisions with probabilistic data because most of the work that I'm doing now is actually saying, well, given that we don't have determinist data about a person for certain audience or where somebody came from, how can I find other information that will create a model for 30% of the population? And we can use that to extrapolate to a hundred.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:52)
Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Austin Hay. Austin is one of the smartest people in the world on the field of Martech, aka Marketing Technology. He's advised companies like Notion, Airbnb, Walmart, Postmates, Robinhood, even Pete's Coffee and Mars on their Martech strategy and tactics. He's currently Head of Marketing Technology at Ramp. Before that, he was VP of Business Operations at Runway. Before that, he was VP of Growth at M Particle and the fourth employee at the Unicorn Branch Metrics. He's also a teacher at Reforge on this very topic of Martech. In our conversation, Austin explains what exactly is Martech, how it fits into your growth organization, when you need to hire a Martech person and what to look for plus his favorite interview questions, also his favorite tools, frameworks, team structures and emerging platforms that he's most excited about. This episode is for anyone who's responsible for growth and is curious about ways to optimize your approach and how marketing technology fits into that. Enjoy this episode with Austin Hay after a short word from our sponsors.
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Austin, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Austin Hay** (4:02)
Lenny, thank you so much for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:04)
We are going to get super nerdy today, and we're going to dive deep into the very cool field of Martech. How excited are you about us chatting about Martech?

**Austin Hay** (4:15)
I'm so excited because, you know, it seems like you might be one of the first people in product and growth to talk about Martech.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:21)
Wow, okay. That makes me even more excited. Yeah, it's something that I haven't fully understood, and so I'm excited to dig real deep.
So let's start with just the basics. What exactly is Martech, and then what does someone who is in Martech do?