Kimberly Storin - CMO, Zoom
Mergers and acquisitions taught Kimberly Storin to read a business before telling its story. She came up through M&A consulting with more than 30 acquisitions, three large turnarounds, and a divestiture behind her, then built Dell's first M&A communications framework, working across six acquisitions and contributing to $443 million in post-acquisition revenue from the Compellent integration alone. AMD brought her in to consolidate worldwide marketing and reverse declining brand consideration scores. At IBM she turned around a roughly $3 billion server and software division, delivered seven consecutive quarters of revenue growth, created the AI infrastructure category, and helped integrate Red Hat. Zayo Group then had her build a marketing and communications organization from scratch for a $2.5 billion ARR business, where marketing-influenced revenue grew from zero to $3 million in three years. Zoom named her CMO in April 2025, where she leads global marketing and external communications, including the company's first brand campaign. Storin chaired the Austin Community Foundation's Women's Fund for seven years and has been running since middle school.
Heather Rubash - CMO, Brinqa
Political communications came first for Heather Rubash. She spent nearly four years writing releases and running media relations for a political organization before moving into product marketing at Ameriprise Financial and then brand and communications at Sovos Compliance, where she built a company-wide intranet across eight offices in three regions. Total Expert was her first head of marketing role. She grew the team from four to 30 and helped drive a fivefold revenue increase over three years, with marketing contributing 50% to 60% of closed-won new logos per quarter. NetSPI kept her five and a half years, and she rose from director to CMO. There she scaled the team from two people to 25, led go-to-market for three acquisitions and four SaaS product launches, grew LinkedIn followers from 3,000 to 45,000, and lifted analyst mentions from two reports in 2022 to 14 in 2023. Brinqa hired her as CMO in August 2025.
Emily Harnish - CMO, Commerce
Two IT companies became one $4 billion business under Emily Harnish's rebrand. As CMO of Pellera Technologies, she led the renaming and merger of Converge Technology Solutions and Mainline Systems, and founded partnerships with Madison Square Garden and Tony Stewart Racing. Her career started at Dell, where she managed a $10 million annual budget for the public channel and developed a $400 million sales campaign that lifted server sales 60%. T-Mobile then gave her nearly five years, where she drove 3X growth in the business segment in 18 months, launched a founding sponsorship of the iCONIC Series with Inc. and CNBC, and built the Whiteboard Wednesdays influencer program with Marcus Lemonis. Microsoft, Qualtrics, and CivicPlus followed. Harnish became CMO of Commerce, the company formerly known as BigCommerce, in August 2026.
Kerrie Jordan - CMO, Epicor
Kerrie Jordan spent six years running product management before taking the marketing job. She joined Epicor in 2017 as a senior product marketing manager, moved into product management in 2019, and rose to group vice president, shipping the company's SaaS architecture on Azure, its identity provider and security suite, low-code application and automation studios, an embedded virtual agent, a business intelligence platform, and a CPQ solution with 3D visualization. That work came after nearly nine years at Oracle, where she led product marketing for its product lifecycle management suite and, earlier, served as a customer success manager building reference programs. She became CMO of Epicor in August 2025. Jordan hosts the company's Manufacturing the Future podcast and speaks regularly on cloud transformation. Her first job was processing MBA applications at Santa Clara University.
Wendy Wu - CMO, SailPoint
Government was Wendy Wu's entry point into technology marketing. She spent six years at Microsoft in market research, government product marketing, and physician practices marketing, then joined Google to grow its federal, state, and local government business. Seven years at Google took her from government marketing to head of Google Cloud Platform marketing for the Americas, where she founded the field marketing team, and then to head of global marketing programs for Google Cloud. Box hired her as VP of marketing in 2018. SailPoint made her CMO in 2021. Her expertise spans vertical industries including government, health, media and entertainment, and financial services, and her functional background covers product management, field, brand, digital, and strategy.
Matt Mason - CMO, KUNGFU.AI
Matt Mason started as a pirate radio DJ in London. At 23 he became founding editor-in-chief of RWD, growing it from a 5,000-copy niche title into the UK's largest music magazine by circulation, reaching more than six million people a month. His book The Pirate's Dilemma was published in ten countries and became the first title in Amazon's history to top both the economics and rap bestseller lists at once. Fast Company named him number 11 on its 100 Most Creative People in Business list. BitTorrent then gave him three and a half years, where he grew the user base to 175 million monthly users, launched BitTorrent Bundle, signed 30,000 publishers, and ran a billboard campaign that generated 1,000 press articles for less than half the cost of buying those impressions. He was Kraken's first CMO, built a marketing P&L delivering 200% ROI in under a year, ran Sony Pictures' innovation lab, and was employee number one at a ConsenSys-backed NFT studio whose Damien Hirst launch did more than $20 million in primary sales in 24 hours. Mason joined KUNGFU.AI as CMO in August 2026.
Suzin Wold - CMO, Recurly
At Qlik, Suzin Wold consolidated a 1,150-page website into 145 pages. She also doubled lead generation while cutting cost per lead by more than half, all inside the existing budget, and sourced over 75% of global inbound leads. Bazaarvoice then made her head of marketing, reporting to the CEO. Her SMB go-to-market strategy there produced a 300% increase in MQL-to-closed-won conversion and a 27% lift in average deal size, alongside a brand revitalization with new positioning and a redesigned logo. Sama gave her three years as CMO, where she led a full rebrand and re-architected the account-based marketing strategy on 6sense, redefining ideal customer profiles and segmentation for a 60% increase in prospect engagement on a flat budget. Rithum followed. Wold became CMO of Recurly in February 2026.
Neela Pal - CMO, Bumble
Six years at Procter & Gamble as a brand manager, then five at McKinsey as an engagement manager. Neela Pal built an unusual foundation before the agency world. Arnold Worldwide kept her nearly a decade, where she rose from SVP of business strategy to managing partner and global director of brand and business strategy. The move in-house came in 2014 at TripAdvisor, where she spent six years as VP and head of marketing. Roblox then hired her as VP and head of brand for three and a half years, covering the platform's period of explosive growth among younger users. Bumble brought her on in December 2024 as VP and head of global marketing, promoted her to SVP within four months, and named her CMO in September 2025.
John Yarbrough - CMO, AlertMedia
John Yarbrough has been promoted four times at the same company. He joined AlertMedia in 2020 as senior director of marketing communications, moved to VP of content and communications, then SVP of corporate marketing with accountability for web, creative, content, demand generation, and corporate communications, and became CMO in May 2026. Public relations is where he started. At BigCommerce he spent four and a half years, rising from PR manager to director of communications and serving as the global communications lead through multiple funding rounds and the company's pivot to mid-market and enterprise brands. Lifesize then hired him to run brand, communications, content, creative, and web marketing, supporting the company through its sale to Marlin Equity Partners. His specialties include executive coaching and spokesperson training.
Jordan Slabaugh - CMO, LeanDNA
Reporting to Scott McNealy, the Sun Microsystems co-founder, was Jordan Slabaugh's first executive marketing job. At Wayin she launched a corporate PR program that increased press coverage more than 150%, with placements in WIRED, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and tripled the company's inclusion in analyst research through a program built alongside the VP of strategy. She also led the rebrand when Wayin merged with EngageSciences and created the company's first sales playbook. Edelman then brought her in to lead its digital group practice across the southeastern US, covering performance marketing, influencer marketing, and creative brand activations. Bloomfire promoted her from VP of marketing to CMO. Slabaugh has led marketing at LeanDNA since August 2023, where the focus is intelligent supply chain execution.
The Rebuild Specialists
Read these careers closely and a specific skill keeps surfacing: walking into a company at an awkward moment and constructing what should already be there. A marketing team of two. No communications function. Two merged companies with no shared name. A category that has no label yet. Austin collects people who do that work, partly because so many of its companies are at the stage where it is needed. The measure they all report back is the same, though. Pipeline, conversion, revenue, and deal size, delivered while the building goes up around them.