Wendy Steinle - CMO, Vertafore
Adobe's Digital Experience business roughly doubled from $1.63 billion in 2016 to $3.2 billion in 2019, and Wendy Steinle defined and operationalized the global enterprise go-to-market strategy behind a significant part of that growth. She also set the vision for Adobe.com's enterprise web experience, defining product requirements and a data-driven operating model that drove 38% more organic traffic and 42% more engagement in eleven months. Degreed hired her as CMO in 2021, where she rebuilt the marketing team and lifted new marketing-sourced pipeline 51% on 20% less budget inside six months. Domo followed. There she redefined company messaging and brand identity, improved upper-funnel efficiency 33%, hit every key enterprise target, and launched Domo Central, a unified customer learning and engagement hub that Forrester named its 2024 B2B Program of the Year for Customer Engagement. Vertafore made her CMO in May 2025, marketing software to the insurance industry. Steinle sums up her approach as "for real people, by real people."
Missy Altergott - SVP Marketing, Zayo Group
Missy Altergott spent a year as interim chief of staff for marketing and communications at The Children's Hospital in Denver, running all external marketing and PR for a nonprofit as a member of its executive team. That sat between two agency chapters. At McClain Finlon she was director of client services, reporting to the CEO and leading the agency's largest billing account, Qwest, for five years. At Monigle Associates, the country's largest independent brand consultancy, she directed the marketing communications and advertising disciplines with CenturyLink as her primary client. Her career started as an account director at Deutsch in Los Angeles. In-house work came in 2012 at Level 3, now Lumen Technologies, where she spent five and a half years as VP of global corporate marketing covering brand, campaigns, content, social, mobile, and the executive briefing center. Eight years at Spectrum Business in New York followed, building B2B go-to-market strategy for enterprise growth. Zayo Group brought her back to Colorado in March 2026 to lead marketing and communications for a digital infrastructure provider serving hyperscalers, carriers, and public sector customers.
Carly Gomez - CMO, Crocs
Sixteen years at Vans gave Carly Gomez an education in one brand. As VP of marketing for the Americas she built and led a team of more than 80 people across brand management, channel marketing, membership, media, creative, and social impact, using customer insights and marketing mix modeling to steer strategy. She served as interim chief marketing officer for three months in 2022, then took on a global and Americas role covering marketing, brand management, direct-to-consumer, and social media. Her work there reset the brand foundation and identity and established Vans' first global DTC team, along with the playbook behind it. Fabletics hired her as SVP of brand marketing in 2024 and promoted her to CMO, where her remit covered brand marketing, e-commerce, and the company's growing scrubs business. Crocs made her chief marketing officer in August 2025. Nearly twenty years in, her focus is brand growth, consumer connection, and cultural relevance.
Brenna Davis - VP of Marketing, Boost Mobile
Getting McDonald's coffee onto grocery shelves was Brenna Davis's job at Kraft Heinz. She managed the McCafe joint venture, a program spanning more than 60 people internally and externally, delivering hundreds of millions in annual revenue against a budget in the tens of millions. She also ran e-commerce for all Kraft Heinz coffee brands, launching the company's first comprehensive e-commerce marketing program, and restructured Gevalia.com from a single vendor to a multi-vendor model that cut operating expense 72.5% a year. Aday came next, and she spent six years there across three titles. As VP of marketing she launched the outfit repeater campaign that Fast Company named its Most Innovative Retail Design of 2021, then grew revenue while cutting budget, lifted blended return on ad spend more than 80%, and improved the lifetime value to acquisition cost ratio 55%. As CMO she delivered the company's first profitable year. Boost Mobile hired her in January 2026 to lead an 80-person team across brand, creative, media, and product marketing, with a mandate to move the brand from functional utility to cultural mainstay. She describes her mix as big-brand polish and startup grit.
Kate Savelli - CMO, Smashburger
Supply chain is where Kate Savelli started. She spent nearly three years as a supply chain manager at Darden in Orlando before moving into brand work at Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, where she handled CRM and experiential partnerships including a NASCAR deal with Richard Childress Racing. That route taught her to see brands from the inside out rather than from the brief down. Bagel Brands hired her in 2021 as a senior brand manager, where she launched updated positioning around Einstein Bros.' authentic New York style heritage and built the brand's first loyalty program. Promoted to director of brand and performance marketing, she drove the engine behind a growth chapter that took the chain from one new store opening a year to more than fifty. Smashburger named her chief marketing officer in May 2026, and her stated focus is closing the gap between the brand's quality credentials and public awareness of them. Twenty years in restaurants sit behind that. Savelli also advises on marketing at CU Denver and lists her weakness as spelling.
Steve Kerdock - SVP & CMO, Arrow Electronics
Steve Kerdock got his start marketing Las Vegas vacation packages. At America West Airlines Vacations he redesigned the vacation site, lifting revenue 30%. Sage Software then kept him eight and a half years running advertising, electronic marketing, search, and web design for North America across two divisions and 21 products, where he raised search rankings 425% to 500% within a year of starting the program. Avnet recruited him in 2008 to build a digital presence and e-commerce marketing from nothing. He stayed nearly fifteen years. Overall e-commerce sales grew tenfold, and he increased online marketing budgets tenfold by building the ROI cases himself. Later, as VP of digital marketing, he led a centralized internal agency that completed more than 800 projects and saved an estimated $6 million a year against previous external agency spend. As VP of marketing for a $5 billion region he oversaw a team that generated more than $2.5 billion in pipeline. Arrow Electronics made him senior vice president and chief marketing officer in March 2023.
Meghan Brito - SVP Marketing, AdCellerant
National events for the Arabian Horse Association were Meghan Brito's first professional role, a three-year stretch running competitive horse shows. Marketing came next at Long View Systems, where she moved from team lead to marketing coordinator, then at PLAYTIME, then as senior marketing manager at Adtaxi, the digital advertising arm where she spent three and a half years. AdCellerant hired her as VP of marketing in January 2019 and promoted her to senior vice president in late 2021. Nearly eight years with the Denver adtech company now sit behind her, covering brand narrative, marketing automation, digital channels, and demand generation for a business whose product is other companies' advertising. Her stated focus is the pipeline: using analytics and storytelling to connect brands with audiences and scale marketing operations behind it.
Manny Rodriguez - Chief Marketing, Experience & Customer Officer, UCHealth
Every major Denver sports franchise carries a UCHealth sponsorship, and Manny Rodriguez built them: the Broncos, Rockies, Nuggets, Avalanche, and Mammoth. Pharmaceuticals came first. He spent nine years at Schering-Plough, then director of marketing roles at Abbott and Bristol Myers Squibb, then senior product director at Forest Labs. Energy followed at Reliant and NRG, where as VP of sponsorships, events, and charitable giving he helped build one of the largest sponsorship portfolios in the industry. Santander Bank then hired him as SVP of marketing to build and launch its new US brand. UCHealth brought him in as chief marketing officer in June 2015 and has widened the job twice since, first adding experience and then customer, giving him brand, marketing, advertising, sponsorships, public relations, and patient experience across a health system spanning community hospitals and the region's top academic medical center. Rodriguez served nine years as Denver chapter president of the CMO Club and co-chaired the city's 2026 World Cup bid committee. He chairs the Colorado Rapids Youth Soccer Club, sits on the board of Elevations Credit Union as vice chair, and speaks publicly to raise awareness and funds for leukemia research.
Phil Walsh - CMO, EPAM Systems
Phil Walsh repositioned Turing from a talent cloud into something else entirely. Over nearly three years as CMO he moved the company's narrative from transactional staff augmentation to an AI infrastructure and data research accelerator serving the leading AI labs and Fortune 500 generative AI programs. Press coverage rose roughly tenfold in 2025, and the company closed a $111 million Series E at a $2.2 billion valuation. Healthcare came before that. At AKASA, which automates healthcare revenue cycle workflows, he built a team of more than 20 marketers and six BDRs, launched a complete new website four months after being hired, doubled unaided brand recognition, and tripled digital engagement. His earlier career included nearly five years at Cognizant, where he led global teams in product marketing, client programs, and partner marketing, and negotiated large international sponsorship deals. EPAM Systems named him chief marketing officer in March 2026. Twenty-five years in, his experience spans IT, AI, healthcare, pharma, and medical devices across more than 40 countries.
Micha Hershman - CMO, JumpCloud
Micha Hershman owns a krav maga studio and teaches the classes himself. His day job is the $100 million to $500 million ARR scale-up journey, which he describes as turning fragmented go-to-market functions into revenue engines. Eventbrite gave him four years and the foundation. He built its demand generation team from scratch across paid media, social, content, campaign operations, ABM, and field marketing, drove a tenfold increase in awareness and consideration content, and delivered a seventeenfold year-over-year rise in marketing last-touch pipeline while the business grew past $220 million and a $1.2 billion valuation. He also established the company's first account-based marketing function and its first global sales enablement content operation. Envoy hired him to run marketing and brand design for three years, then Heap made him CMO before Contentsquare acquired it. JumpCloud named him chief marketing officer in February 2024. His current preoccupation is what he calls agentic go-to-market, built on the view that AI supplies scale while humans supply taste.
Why They Keep Landing Here
Look at where these ten worked before and the map is national. Costa Mesa, Orlando, Phoenix, Chicago, Boston, Lehi, the Bay Area, New York. Denver got them in the second or third act, once they had already run a global brand team, built an e-commerce channel from zero, or taken a company through repositioning. The city offers what that stage of a career wants: serious companies, less friction, and in several cases the option to keep the job while living where you want to live. The work itself has not gotten any easier. What changed is where these marketers decided to do it.