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Austin Hay
2x Co-Founder | Martech and Operations Expert
2x co-founder that has successfully exited two small businesses. I specialize in Marketing Technology, but have broad experience in Business Operations & Go-To-Market with an emphasis on strategy, technology, process, and operations.
>> Former VP Business Operations at Runway
>> Former VP Growth at mParticle
>> Engineering at Stanford, USC | MBA at Wharton
Here to help Series A-D companies in Martech and Operations in a fractional capacity.
Current Head of Martech at Ramp & Martech Expert at Reforge.
Work
Best Practices for Driving Projects to Completion at Ramp
https://artifacts.reforge.com/artifacts/guide-to-driving-projects-to-completion-at-rampThis guide captures best practices and team norms around productivity. By setting expectations and giving clear guidance around what "good" looks like, this artifact has helped me improve my team's performance and has been adopted by teams across Ramp.
Team Expectations, Operating Norms, and Team Organization for Martech at Ramp
https://artifacts.reforge.com/artifacts/team-expectations-and-operating-norms-doc-at-rampI created this document to articulate expectations, ownership, and processes for a complex team that formed from a reorg.
Technical Strategy Planning Doc at Ramp
https://artifacts.reforge.com/artifacts/technical-strategy-planning-doc-at-rampI prepared this doc when defining Ramp's martech systems strategy. This artifact demonstrates how to drive alignment around a complex technical initiative and will be useful to PMs leading large infrastructure or tech debt projects.
Ad Platform Conversion Optimization Project at Ramp
https://artifacts.reforge.com/artifacts/ad-platform-conversion-optimization-project-at-rampSee how I planned and implemented a complex technical project to improve Ramp's paid ad efficiency.
Data Investigation Template
https://artifacts.reforge.com/artifacts/data-investigation-template-at-rampI created this template to bring structure to metrics investigations and codify best practices around solving data problems
Experience
Ramp
Head of Marketing Technology
May 2022 - Present
Ramp is the first and only corporate card that helps companies spend less. Ramp delivers high limit corporate cards with 1.5% cashback, automated savings, expense management controls and more than $175,000 in sign-up offers designed to help you grow your business. Ramp was built with innovative companies in mind, with the help of 200+ founders and finance teams from the fastest growing companies, who are demanding more than just another rewards program. Ramp is backed by Founders Fund, Coatue, BoxGroup, Conversion Capital, Soma Capital, Backend Capital, along with over 50 leading startup founders and active angels.
- Coach & Player: Reported into CMO as the technical lead for Marketing. Served as key executive peer to heads of Growth, Data, Rev Ops, Legal, Infra, Privacy, Growth Eng, and BizTech. Managed a small team of high caliber martech operators. Got my hands dirty working with and coaching incredible rising talent across the org.
- Advanced Systems: Designed and drove in-house S2S system to optimize paid ads, reduce CAC, boost ROAS, measure incrementality and capture full funnel attribution. This system ... • Supported capturing 63% of all MQLs in FY22. • Contributed to 33.5%of SQLs, $600M+ in pipeline, and ultimately $40M+ in CW dollar value.
- Admin: Workspace, budgetary and technical owner for complete martech system. Tools in scope included Segment, Amplitude, Hubspot, Madkudu, Clearbit, Mutiny, Qualified, User Evidence, Intellum, Workato, Hightouch, Ad Networks (FB, Bing, Google), Google Tag Manager, Data Grail.
- Data Privacy: Lead our efforts in Data Privacy with Legal including implementation of Datagrail and in house tooling to manage DSRs.
- System Management: Drove & resolved multiple systems investigations including Segment identity issues, lost opportunity MQL issues, email lifecycle drops, and along the way instrumented net new telemetry to consistently improve our ability to detect and respond to systems issues. Collectively, solving these system fires helped save the business nearly $3M in lost opportunity pipeline.
- System Cleanup: Executed a full stack audit and cleanup including contract, pricing, permissions, SSO, data hygiene, implementation, access controls and more. Contract renewals and renegotiations helped us save roughly $1M within first 8 months.
- Systems Vision: Developed and evangelized a systems vision to decouple hubspot, develope async enrichment, improve routing, migrate workflows to Workato, reduce 3P lead scoring reliance, more resilient identity profile, better web tooling and instrumentation, alert monitoring and anomaly detection.
Reforge
Partner & Program Creator
Jan 2022 - Present
The world’s leading career development platform for top-tier professionals in tech.
- Sold the Marketing Technology Academy to Reforge in 2022: https://www.reforge.com/blog/2022/2/2/marketing-technology-academy
- Designed and created the new Marketing Technology program at Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/courses/marketing-technology
HBE Ventures
General Manager
Jan 2017 - Present
HBE is a small partnership that I use to incubate new ideas, advise and invest. I primarily advise and consult in Marketing Technology. I also strategically invest in businesses in enterprise sales and martech. Investments include: Searcheye, Cure, Vestaboard, Ashby, Hightouch, Zurp, Siqi Chen's Private Fund, Customer.io, Partnered (acquired by Crossbeam), Grain, Mercury, mParticle.
- Clients include ... Michael's (2023), Robinhood (2023), Krisp.ai (2022 2023), Notion (2022), JP Morgan Chase (2021), Circle, (2021), Warby Parker (2021), Postmates (2017 - 2021), Plushcare (2020), Cloudsynth (2020), Mars (2020), Walmart (2017 - 2020), Peet's Coffee (2018), Turner (2017 - 2018), Jet.com (2017 - 2018), Soulcycle (2018), Foursquare (2017), Airbnb (2017), Strava (2017).
Runway
VP Business Operations
Sep 2021 - May 2022
Runway is a SaaS product that helps you and your team understand your business so you can make better decisions together. Unlike other financial software, Runway is designed to be a consumer-grade product for normal people who aren't accountants, and is fast, intuitive, and social. Runway reinvents how business financials are presented through modern design and engineering. By bringing clarity, power, and speed to financial data, we help every team become more aligned on the entire business so they can collaborate to make better decisions, faster. Backed by A16Z and Initialized Capital.
- Go-to-Market: Built and managed our early Customer Experience team, including sourcing design partners, driving new product learnings, and providing a white-glove experience interacting with Runway's platform and team.
- Business Tech & Operations: Kept the trains running in all aspects of business operations, sourcing, integrating, and administrating business-critical functions, processes and tools, including Rippling, Checkr, Ashby, Lever, Gem, G-Suite, Docusign, Slack, Zapier, Notion, Threads, Height, Sendoso, Goody, Swag Up. This encompassed vendor and employee onboarding, employee management, remote-work synchronization, among other purposes.
- Fundraising: Supported executive team in closing additional rounds of capital, including diligence and post-close data locker workstreams.
- Culture: Drove our company offsites, cultural assessments, compensation & performance review cycles, hiring plans, quarterly planning processes, and monthly financial reviews.
- Executive Support: Supported our CEO and executive team as a pseudo Chief of Staff, helping keep the executive team organized, meet regularly and deliver against our quarterly goal planning process.
- Customer Infrastructure: Built our early customer pipeline and funnel (both process & tools), which include Salesforce, Hightouch, Gong, Zapier, Segment, Amplitude, Branch, Typeform, Calendly.
mParticle
SVP Growth
Apr 2018 - Mar 2020
mParticle makes it easy to holistically manage customer data along the entire product and customer lifecycle. Teams across companies like Restaurant Brands International, NBCUniversal, JetBlue, Venmo, and Airbnb use mParticle to deliver great customer experiences and accelerate growth by solving the foundational challenges that impede success at scale. mParticle announced a $150M fundraise in October 2021 led by Permira on the heels of strong growth and product innovation. Founded in 2013, mParticle is headquartered in New York City with employees around the globe.
- I ran Growth at mParticle after I sold the majority IP and consulting contracts from my own consulting practice. We helped customers choose, implement and leverage marketing technology.
- I sold my consultancy to mParticle and joined their leadership team: https://www.mparticle.com/blog/mp-growth-practice/
Branch
4th Employee, Go-to-Market
Feb 2015 - Mar 2017
At Branch, we’re transforming how brands and users interact across digital platforms. Our mobile marketing and deep linking solutions are trusted to deliver seamless experiences that increase ROI, decrease wasted spend, and eliminate siloed attribution. By integrating Branch technology into core marketing channels including apps, web, email, social media, search, and paid ads, leading brands are driving higher-value conversions than ever before. We power mobile links, attribution, and measurement for more than 3 billion monthly users and have been selected by over 100,000 apps since 2014, including Adobe, BuzzFeed, Yelp, and many more, and are working on exciting new ways to improve discovery in the mobile ecosystem. Branch has raised more than $667M from investors such as NEA, Founders Fund, and Playground Ventures and is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA and with offices around the globe.
- Fourth employee hired. Worked across Sales, Marketing, and Product as company grew to over 110 employees through Series A, B and C funding rounds.